Mesmerizing Stranger

Chapter 8

Harm climbed on the rock behind Cate and stopped dead still. The harbor and town were nice enough, but no one would guess the view beyond the slope and into the trees.

The trek wasn’t long from the P.A.’s place. The splash of a silver waterfall was always in sight, tumbling over rocks and glistening off pines, but the sudden path leading to the shaded glen was like a step into a mystic paradise. Pools carpeted the rocky landscape, a half dozen or more. Warm, fragrant steam rose from each one. Ferns and pines caught the occasional ribbon of sunlight from above. Spears of light reflected on dripping ferns and moss, the magic interrupted only-only-by the raucous sound of men’s laughter.

A few other people were wandering around, but Ivan, Hans, Yale, Purdue and Arthur had staked out one sizable pool next to the waterfall. They whistled and hooted hellos the instant the newcomers were spotted. Cate, in spite of the bandage on her head, started laughing. “Well, if this isn’t a skinny-dipping paradise.”

Harm scowled. It was. The captain had advised the guys to bring bathing suits and towels, but that didn’t mean they had-and the drifts of steam floating above the water was hardly concealing. Worse yet, Cate pushed off her shoes and started tugging off her jacket.

“Wait a minute,” he said with alarm.

She shot him a grin. “Afraid I’m naked under this, handsome?”

That’s exactly what he was afraid of. She hadn’t done much yet to convince him that she wasn’t fearless to the point of foolhardy-not to mention that he didn’t want anyone seeing her naked but him.

A path of slippery, wet rocks led to the pool. Harm was never less than a step behind Cate, stripping as fast as she was, hustling to keep up with her. As she shimmied out of her pants, he saw with relief that she wore exercise shorts and a T-shirt. It was a long way from the neck-to-toe covering he wished she were wearing, but at least the essentials were shielded. And the guys, of course, were looking.

Before he could stop her-not that he could have-she’d edged over the rocks and into the pool. “Harm…” She reached back for his hand, which just happened to be right where she could reach it. He steadied her as she sank in, right up to her neck. She released a long, blissful sigh.

“Wow. This feels like total heaven and then some…especially on some of these bruises. I’m never leaving. Maybe someone can bring us food and drink up here.”

The guys started a steady round of joking, but the serenity of the place eventually quieted everyone. The ceiling of green pines, the warm springs, the impossibly fresh air seemed to melt everyone’s stress. Even Harm unwillingly started to relax. Cate’s nearness could have worn down a stone. Her knee kept brushing his, her shoulder, as if she were deliberately staying in touch with him, communicating underwater something private and real…

At least until she suddenly piped up with a question for the group. “Hey, you guys, while we’re all together, I want to hear some more about this cancer drug you all created.”

He figured he’d misheard her. Someone had pushed her from the top deck last night. She couldn’t possibly be thinking about baiting a bear.

“Seems crazy to talk about work on a gorgeous day like this,” Purdue said lazily.

“Especially when we’ve got a half-naked goddess among us,” Yale concurred.

Harm leveled his youngest employee with a razor-sharp stare, but Cate only chuckled. She leaned back, closed her eyes. “You’re right about the goddess, guys. But I lost my family so young. Maybe it wasn’t from cancer, but I relate to how awful it is to lose loved ones. How helpless you feel when you can’t do anything about it. Even how angry. And yet your team picked a couple of the toughest cancers…”

“That was Dougal’s doing. Harm’s uncle,” Arthur shared. “He lost his wife to cancer. That was his motivation.”

“And for the rest of us,” Purdue said, “it wouldn’t have been any fun to pick the easy cancers to work with.”

“There are easy cancers?”

“Not easy.” Yale was starting to rev up now. It was always hard for him to resist talking about his favorite subject. “Most people don’t have a reason to understand cancer-that it isn’t one illness or one thing. It’s a whole class of diseases. The only thing they have in common is that a bunch of cells suddenly grow out of control. The key answer is always why. We know environment and heredity are primary factors, but there’s more to it.”

Purdue picked up the thread. “Basically, there are four main kinds. Carcinomas are malignant tumors that grow from a base of epithelial cells. They’re the most common. They’re like-breast, prostate, lung, colon. Then there are sarcomas. Those are malignant tumors that grow from connective tissue.”

“Then there’s lymphoma and leukemia,” Yale interjected. “Essentially, those emanate from blood-forming cells. And then there are germ-cell tumors. Those come from totipotent cells…”

“Okay, okay. Overloading,” Cate said. “You’re getting too complicated for me. Just go back to one of the cancers you’re working on. Like pancreatic. What makes that one different?”

Even Arthur got into it now. “For one thing, it’s one of the toughest to cure. It’s also one of the worst killers. It’s just plain ugly.”

Cate nodded. “Now, you’re talking language I can understand. But what makes that cancer so hard to cure?”

“Three things,” Purdue said. “All about the cells. They’re tiny and they grow like weeds and they hide. Actually, it’s the hiding factor that’s always been the worst problem.”

“But you guys found an answer for that?”

“Exactly.” Yale leaned his head back. “It’s complicated. But to put it in basic terms, what we discovered was a chemical that turned on those sucker-small cells. They grow neon bright when exposed, even through dense tissue.”

Harm held his breath. None of them talked this way to outsiders, primarily because of security and privacy. And they shouldn’t. But Cate was somehow able to charm money from a beggar…and he hungered for the chance to hear how each of the men responded.

“So how’d you all find this formula where nobody else could?” Cate asked.

“Initially, it was Dougal’s breakthrough-Harm’s uncle. He didn’t have the formula pinned down, but he established the breakthrough idea. Then when he got ill, Purdue took over some of the lab work. Then me. Took a while before we were getting consistent results. Then we started the real trials.”

“Which was…when?”

“Over the last two years. The compound passed every damn test we could put it through. We have it. We hadit.” Purdue’s voice carried the whine of frustration. “The next step was final FDA approval, but there was no reason that would have been denied. We had all the legal grounds set up. It was ours. The company’s. We all had a stake in it. There was just a waiting period until the final stuff came through. There was no doubt in any of our minds that we had the real thing.”

Arthur said, “I’m roasting here. Think I’m getting out, wandering back toward the ship.”

The comment came out of the blue, stopped the discussion cold-and started an exodus. Simultaneously, the guys started to move, standing up, groaning when their flesh suddenly contacted cool-cold fresh air. Instead of joining the others, Cate leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Harm wasn’t about to budge without her. Immediately, though, he noticed that her perky questions and zesty smiles all faded once the men disappeared from sight. The clear water revealed her lithe, slim body. She wasn’t soft. Her calves were tight, molded from walking and exercise, her hips more bone than padding. A few sunbeams sneaked through the green canopy overhead, lighting on freckles and a skinny nose, on bare lips.

She looked nothing like any woman he’d ever loved.

But he looked at her, and wondered if he’d ever loved before.

“You wade right into trouble, don’t you?” he murmured.

“Yup. It was one of the things my foster mom taught me. Never avoid trouble if you can help it. It’s the old shark-in-the-water thing. If you don’t turn around and face it, you have no way of knowing if trouble’s on your tail.”

“Are you going to be able to make it back to the boat?”

“Maybe. In a bit.” She opened one eye. One sharp blue eye. “I’m not sick, Harm.”

“I know.”

“It just hurts. The bruise on the hip more than the head. But really, the rest of me is okay.”

“The rest of you is more than okay,” he corrected her.

There now. He got a smile. Softer than butter. Lustrous. But then it disappeared. “There’s a huge piece missing, Harm. Didn’t you hear it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your guys. Your problem. There’s this huge hole that doesn’t make sense. Everybody’s got a loyalty to this formula you all developed. Everybody values the team, what they were doing. Everybody could see success coming, personal and financial. There doesn’t seem to be a single visible gain for anyone to steal the formula, when everyone was already going to get rich, already going to get tons of lauds and credit. So what could possibly motivate the man to steal it?”

Harm was beginning to have his suspicions. But he still told Cate the frustrating truth. “I don’t know.”

“There has to be something we’re missing.”

“Yes.”

“It’s driving me nuts. Trying to figure it out.” She opened both her eyes then. “Maybe…Fiske died of natural causes. Maybe my fall was somehow accidental. Maybe things only look dire and dangerous and they really aren’t.” She frowned. “Harm, I totally realize this isn’t really my business or my problem. But I’m at least a fresh pair of eyes. And I didn’t know anyone before, so I can be objective. So I’m not trying to bug you, I really hoped I could bring something to your table, seriously help. Except…”

“Except that your mind’s spinning sideways?”

“Oh, man. You said it.”

“So how about if we see…if we can make your mind spin in a whole different way? A good way,” he promised. He valued everything she’d said, but it was too much. The more she hurtled into his problems, the deeper he hurtled into her character. He liked that foolhardy character of hers, but for a while, he wanted her to quit worrying. He wanted her to quit hurting.

He wanted to figure out how deep he was in with her.

He found out.

Damn fast, he found out.

Careful of her sore hip, even more careful of the lump on her head, he scooped her closer, using his arms as a cushion for her neck. And then he kissed her. Not softly. Not carefully. But with everything he had.

He took her mouth. Her tongue. Her breath.

A few other people had been enjoying the springs, but no one was in sight now. The only sounds were the splashing waterfalls, the whisper of leaves, the shallow intake of her breath, the beat of her heart…and his.

Somewhere, in the rush of water, the heat, the thick scent of pine, she turned liquid for him. Her limbs flowed over his, around his. Her lips turned slippery-soft, under his, with his.

An hour before, he thought she didn’t have enough clothes on. Now he realized she had way, way too many. Thankfully, they were soaked snug to her skin. It wasn’t as good as naked, but he could still feel her. Her bones, her small, lithe muscles, the cushion of breast and tummy.

She murmured…something in the language of music. A call, a whisper, a tune of longing.

Desire barreled through his pulse like a racehorse at the gate. He stroked the length of her tenderly, with precious care for where she could be sore or bruised…Yet still, he found nipple, found treasure beneath the waistband of her pants, hair that curled around his fingers, inviting him into her private nest.

She murmured again. This time the sound she made was more of a feline hiss. She stroked him too, but not with tenderness or care. Her fingers made prints, denting his back and shoulders, down his sides. Her hands, her mouth, enticed him to forget where they were, who they were, and when she suddenly twisted her full weight on top of him, he went down.

He surfaced almost immediately, sputtering, almost laughing…until he saw the reckless intent in her eyes. It was her turn to slide a hand down his torso, to dip into damp pants, to find the hot, hard core of him and squeeze. It wasn’t a nice squeeze. It wasn’t a sweet, shy squeeze. It was an I’m-gonna-have-you kind of squeeze.

“Cate. Think. You’re too sore,” he hissed.

“Oh, well,” she murmured.

“We’re in public.”

“I’m afraid that’s your problem. I told you not to start something the next time you didn’t intend to finish.” She was teasing. Until she wasn’t. Her hands suddenly framed his face. “Harm. I don’t know where we’re going. But I know darn well we’re moving.”

“You think you can count on me to say no?”

“I think I can count on you to come through for me. And I’m not sure if you know it. But you can trust me.”

That was the thing. Just the thing. He didn’t trust anyone, hadn’t in years, couldn’t remember if he ever had. Yet there was something in her, something different. And for the first time since hell froze over, he felt an unwilling yielding…a wanting to believe, a need to believe in trust again.

She spurred him all the more, because he knew she trusted no one, either.

It was exquisitely clear that she’d abandoned trust when the world crashed on her head as a child, and she’d never given life a chance to hurt her like that again. But she was giving that chance to him. Opening that damned scary door.

And suddenly he was kissing her again, the talking done, nothing else in his head or heart but her. Every instinct condensed into the most basic urge and surge-to take her. Own her. To be owned right back.

The water that had seemed so luxuriously sensual now felt constrictive. He couldn’t move fast in that liquid flow. Her clothes refused to easily peel off, and when he moved, they both seemed to embrace in a languid spin where she ended up under water, then he did, both of them laughing…then not.

He wanted her. Right then. Now. Yesterday. And once he plunged inside her, he wasn’t letting her go. Maybe ever.

“Yes,” she said, in a whisper that roared in his ears.

He was there. At the nest of her, the crest of her, in a tangle of legs and clothes and heat and fire. Ready to plunge. When he heard voices from below the hill. “Harm! Cate! Harm! Hurry! Something’s wrong with the captain! Where are you two?”

Darn hard to run when her head hurt and her side hurt and most of all, her heart hurt. Harm would have been deep inside her. Two seconds. That was all it would have taken. He was right there…and so was she, emotionally and physically and mentally, when she’d heard Arthur’s frantic cry, then Yale and Purdue.

She’d locked eyes helplessly with Harm for all of a millisecond. Then they’d both surged from the water, gasped from the cold, grabbed clothes and started chugging down the hill. Harm kept waiting for her, trying to help her.

“Harm, don’t wait for me. I’ll get there. You just go see what’s wrong with Ivan.”

But he wouldn’t leave her. You’d think she needed a babysitter. The only thing she needed right then was a heart-sitter, Cate thought, because repercussions were starting to filter into her brain about what she’d done-or what she’d been about to do. No matter how much she wanted to straighten out some things with Harm, though, there was no possible time.

Down the hill, past the scattering of buildings, halfway down the dock to the boat, Ivan was on the ground, clutching his stomach and bellowing. “I’m fine! I’m just sick! Get me on board and leave me alone!”

Hans’s gentle face reflected confusion and worry. Harm hustled between the group and crouched down. “What are we dealing with?”

“Hurling. That’s what we’re dealing with. Disgusting, but there it is.”

“Like food poisoning? Something you had here at the café? Something we could need a medic for?”

“All I need is my own bunk, my own head, some privacy. And time. I’m not the wrong kind of sick. I just want to get the hell out of Dodge.”

By the time Cate reached Ivan, the captain was using increasingly colorful language…and he’d been sick over the dockside right there, which made all the men step back several feet. Except for Harm. Cate knelt down, carefully poked the captain’s sides, felt his forehead for fever, checked his pulse, looked for signs of shock.

Harm didn’t ask what she was doing, just echoed, “I checked for the same things, but it’s been years since I had first aid in the army. What do you think?”

“I don’t see any signs of anything serious, like appendicitis…”

“Would you all get away from me? If I’m gonna hurl, I don’t like an audience. And I’m not going to a hospital. I’m going to my boat.”

“Quit being a child, Ivan,” Cate said.

He said, “You’re fired.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Everyone participated in getting Ivan aboard and below, which was probably why it took forever. En route, all Harm’s men were singing the same tune. Enough was enough. Catastrophes were following them like ants at a picnic. It was time to call this trip off and get home.

Late afternoon, Harm left the pilothouse in search of Cate. As he might have guessed, she was in the galley. He’d barely opened the door before he was bombarded by enticing and exotic smells. Bowls and pans and utensils cluttered every counter. Cate, garbed in an apron and a T-shirt that read Incrediby Good-Looking And Built To Last was shimmying to rock and roll in her head-at least until he startled her by opening the door.

“What are you doing? You should be resting!”

“I am, I am.” She motioned. “I figured on some Yukon sourdough bread pudding-because we had some day-old bread, so might as well find a good use for it. Then saffron risotto cakes. Herbed tomatoes. And then chops with a warm-belly barbecue sauce…”

He scraped a hand through his hair. “Cookie. You’re hurt. You’re exhausted. The captain’s sick. Everything’s a disaster. So maybe you still felt responsible for coming up with dinner for the group, but what would have been wrong with some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“Well…nothing. But this isn’t work for me, Harm. It’s stress relief. Honest. And in the meantime, what’d you find out?” She seemed to read his expression.

“Autopsy results. What is warm-belly barbecue sauce?”

“Something that’s guaranteed to put hair on your chest.” She flashed him, lifted her long-sleeved T-shirt-showed him braless breasts, bitsy, adorable-then swiftly covered up again. “Which you’ll find out, via taste, at dinner. In the meantime, you get nothing more until you fill me in. What’d the coroner in Juneau say?”

He wasn’t going to make it through this trip. Embezzlement, theft, murder, maybe poisoning. And this woman who could spin his world on its axis in two seconds flat, without half trying. He started to answer the question, found his throat too dry to emit sound. Tried again. “I forget the formal phrase they used. But the cause of death was essentially a heart attack.”

“All right.”

“Like you said-his throat and esophagus were raw. Some substance had to cause it, but they couldn’t pin down a chemical or poison.”

“Which there wouldn’t be. For peppermint. Not like it’s an illegal or managed substance.” She opened the gimballed oven, pulled out what looked to be a big, round pudding thing with a crust. It smelled like sin. Sin times ten. He instinctively moved toward it, but she blocked him with the royal finger. “Go on,” she said.

“The bottom line is that the pathologist couldn’t pin down anything that would be a court-provable homicide. I repeated the peppermint question. He acknowledged that could have created the problem-but it still doesn’t prove or establish how that happened or exactly how it might have contributed to Fiske’s death. His heart suffered a massive arrest.”

She started splashing all kinds of unknown things into a bowl, swirling them together with a wooden spatula. “So it doesn’t matter if peppermint killed him?”

“It matters. But the substance itself doesn’t prove that he deliberately chose to take in the peppermint. Or to take too much of it. Or if it was forced on him. There’s no bruising or verifiable evidence of force.” He didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted Cate back at the springs, couldn’t stop replaying how close they’d come to making love. Her eyes, her mouth, her hands. The emotions bursting from her, flying off him. He couldn’t explain it, what was happening with them-but it had nothing to do with Fiske, with his uncle’s business, with all the increasing nightmares around them.

“So,” she said. “We’re stuck on a boat with a murderer. This is so not what I had in mind when I took this job. And Ivan being sick isn’t helping anything, either… Uh-oh.” She glanced up, caught the expression on his face. “What else is wrong?”

“I hate boats.” He balanced between the counters, but he could feel it-how the wind had picked up. The boat was sloshing from side to side. He couldn’t fathom how she could continue to cook. Even more, he couldn’t imagine why tumultuous seas didn’t bother her.

“Are you going to turn green on me, Harm?”

He shook his head. “I don’t get seasick. I just hate boats.”

“I’ll bet you only hate things you can’t control or fix on your own, right?”

“Are you insulting me again?” But he was immediately diverted when he saw her open a bottle of liquor and pour it liberally into a saucepan. “You take up drinking while cooking? Not that I’m against it.”

“Actually, no, although this would sure be a good day for it. The dessert’s called Yukon Bread Pudding because it has some liberal Yukon Jack liquor in the sauce.”

“What kind of liquor is that?”

“Trust me. You won’t care when you taste it.” Possibly because this day, like yesterday and the day before, had been exhaustingly traumatic, she suddenly zipped across the galley, pounced up on her toes and planted a good, solid kiss right on his open mouth.

He had no chance to react before she was back to whisking cream and butter into the Yukon Jack on the stove.

He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Did I just dream that?”

“Uh-huh. It never happened,” she assured him.

The response in her eyes, though, wasn’t teasing but…warning. The two of them had a reckoning coming. It had nothing to do with murder and mayhem, and conceivably might be even more earth-shattering than murder and mayhem, anyway.

At least for him.

Maybe for her, too. She stirred the whiskey so hard it almost sloshed out of the pan.

The sound of the intercom startled them both. Harm was being paged to the pilothouse, where Hans’s voice relayed there was a message for him.

“Damn,” he murmured.

“That’s what I was thinking,” she murmured right back.

But he had to go.