Mesmerizing Stranger

Chapter 2

Cate wiped her hands on the linen towel. Panic was setting in. It was a comfortable, familiar panic, when a meal was just about to be served, but still, a definite panic. Lunch was a naturally easy menu to pull together, but it was still their first meal onboard, their first exposure to her as a chef. It had to be perfect. In fact, by her standards, it had to be way better than perfect.

“You ready to serve, Cate?” Ivan started to step in the galley.

“Out,” she snarled, then had to sigh when he threw his hands in the air in a gesture of comical apology. She could be nice. Really. She just didn’t have that people-pleasing gene-but God knew, she tried. Seconds later, she popped her head around the corner of the galley with a brilliant smile. “Just sit down, y’all. I’m bringing it out as we speak.”

And she did, one dish at a time. The first plate just held homemade bread, still steaming, accompanied by a fat scoop of mint butter. She’d chosen the asiago potatoes, because guys always-always-liked potatoes, and it was her own recipe with the bliss potatoes and specks of fresh chives and basil with the asiago cheese melted inside. The killer course was a thinly sliced skirt steak-if the guys didn’t go for that, she’d have to commit suicide. She made it with heavy cream and blue cheese and baby spinach, lemon juice-fresh, of course-and a bit of shallot. The only problem with the whole meal was having to do 99 percent of it at the last minute. At least the fresh salad had been easy; all she’d had to do was add some hazelnuts and mandarin oranges to perk it up.

She started to relax when she saw the Gobble Factor kick in. Each of the guys took a bite, looked at each other…then started wolfing it down. Men were such pigs.

She was so glad.

She heard two rounds of “Oh, my Gods” before she allowed herself to sink into the chair next to Harm. The seating wasn’t a choice. Cate had to be closest to the galley, and Harm and Ivan did the obvious male-posturing thing and had already claimed the two end chairs.

The minute they finished, she was prepared to bounce up and bring in dessert. It was an easy serve. She’d made peppermint cookies, her personal creation, and for those who wanted a heavier fare, vanilla honey-bee ice cream. For now, all she had to do was make sure no one needed anything. Ivan had the stage, was filling the guests in on the safety of the boat and the general lay of the land-or sea, as it were. There weren’t many rules. “We’ll get the safety drills out of the way. Then the boat’s yours. We do ask that you stay out of the pilothouse unless invited. Hans and I like company up there. We’ll ask every one of you to join us, but there isn’t space for more than two at a time…”

She listened. Sort of. She’d had a week onboard before the guests arrived, but she’d been running full tilt to get her food on and organized. She hadn’t paid a lick of attention to the safety stuff, primarily because she didn’t care. Harm, she noted, was studying his men more than he was eating, and felt a sudden frown coming on. Tarnation, maybe he didn’t like her skirt steak?

Ivan was onto the general itinerary by then. “Today, we’ll be at sea, so it’s a good afternoon to just relax, start soaking it all in. Chairs on both the fore and aft decks, with blankets and binocs. We’re starting on the west side of Admiralty Island, and the first offshore stop will be tomorrow night, Tennehee Springs. Anytime we see a run of good fish, we’ll stop, put our lines in. Any time we see whales or sea lions or bear, anything we run across, we drop anchor. You’re not in the city now. We built in time to kick back. If you don’t see a dozen eagles by this afternoon, I’ll be surprised.”

Cate took a bite of each dish. Par for the course, she wasn’t particularly hungry. Obviously, she taste-tested whatever she made, but she was fretting more how the others were responding.

Next to her, Fiske, as expected, pounced on anything sweet. Arthur devoured the potatoes, but wouldn’t have helped himself to more if Cate hadn’t unobtrusively passed the bowl again. Yale and Purdue presented no surprises; they wolfed down anything in front of them. Hans-Ivan’s uncle and first mate-refused to acknowledge that he had a hiatal hernia. She always had to watch out for him. If he didn’t eat slowly, he could suddenly start choking.

Ivan loved everything-his not being fussy was one of the few things about the captain’s character she appreciated-and at least he didn’t start with the liquor until after dinner.

Harm… She tried not looking at him again, but it wasn’t her fault that he was sitting right next to her. Their eyes kept meeting. A total accident, she was sure, not interesting or meaningful or anything…but damned, if he didn’t have killer eyes. Blue as the sea. Hawk eyes, narrowed, perceptive. For no sane reason in the universe, heat shimmered up her pulse. What was it about the darned man that kept disarming her? Tons of guys were good-looking. It didn’t make them any less problematic than the homely ones. Sometimes the opposite was true.

Still…the more she didn’t look at Harm, the more she happened to notice that the shadows under his eyes spoke of a very real exhaustion. And unlike his staff, who were generally decked out with the most expensive labels REI and Patagonia sold, Harm’s shirt was untucked, his pants wrinkled-as if he hadn’t had time to do more than throw clothes in a suitcase. And he rarely took his eyes off his men.

And he still wasn’t eating.

If there was one thing Cate couldn’t stand, it was a man who didn’t appreciate fabulous cooking. At least if it was her fabulous cooking.

She didn’t see any sign of the huge problems with Harm’s men that he’d implied, but she did pick up a bunch of information. The guys looked ultrabright for apparently darned good reasons. Plump Fiske was the financial VP. Tall Arthur was the head of “projects.” Yale and Purdue were lead scientists. Cate wasn’t sure what all that meant, but she gathered their lab was located in a quiet, wooded area somewhere outside of Cambridge, and that they created some serious, heavy-duty medicines.

The tension around the table only turned itchy when the subject of some new cancer treatment came up. Cate sensed that easily enough, but more, she was stuck rethinking her first impression of Harm. Sure didn’t sound as if he were just a money monger or a suit. He was obviously involved in something real and serious.

Once she got that, she started studying his staff the way he did. In two blinks, of course, it was obvious the men weren’t behaving like bosom buddies. Yale and Purdue had to compete with every breath. One couldn’t eat a bite without the other trying to eat two. Fiske tended to act like an abuse victim, not cowering exactly, but stellar at being invisible. He didn’t contribute to the conversation unless dragged into it. Arthur spoke only of the trip, what they were going to see and do, nothing of business or outside life.

And they all sucked up to Harm. Would he like this, would he like that? Had he done this, would he like to do that? They piled it on so thick, Cate didn’t figure a shovel could get through it.

Eventually, though, they’d leveled lunch, including a complete annihilation of her peppermint cookies. By then, she’d already leaped up twice to serve coffee and tea, and finally sank back in the chair to enjoy a cup herself, when she abruptly realized the table had gotten quiet. She glanced up, suddenly aware the whole group was staring at her. “What? What?”

“We’re in love with you,” Yale said.

“Completely. All of us,” Purdue contributed, with serious passion in his voice. “We want to be with you. Forever. All of us.”

She grinned. “Yeah, I know. That’s what they all say. And if you think you liked lunch, wait until dinner.”

Cate never left a galley-never left any kitchen-until the counters shone like mirrors, but after that she sneaked away for a break. Since the rain stopped, the men had been freely wandering around the boat, but after that she moved with the stealth of a thief. Once the rain stopped, the men had been wandering freely around the boat, but none of them had discovered the upper-upper deck over the pilothouse yet.

It was all hers.

Although no one would ever know it-it was forbidden-she’d been sleeping up here every night unless it rained. At night, it was colder than a well-digger’s ankle, but she didn’t care, didn’t care that the narrow white deck was slick with rain right now. She leaned on the rail, just breathing in the breathtaking view. Damn, but this really was Alaska.

Mountains speared up from the endless sea. A watery sun painted the water with the sheen and depth of black diamonds. Tufts of emerald-green softened the craggy land masses, and pines reached tall enough to touch the sky. She spotted an eagle, then another, perched high and regal, reigning over their kingdoms. The air was so fresh it stung her lungs. Something leaped in the water…something bigger than she was. She snuggled deeper into her old Sherpa fleece and inhaled the peace.

Sometimes, rarely, she remembered the god-awful time when her parents died, the fire, the night she and her sisters lost everything they’d ever known or loved. Lily and Sophie dwelled on it more than she did. Cate still experienced the loss in nightmares…but moments like this reminded her what enabled her to build a life alone, no matter what it took.

The big yacht barely made a sound as it skimmed through the water. Everything around her was extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily huge. A person seemed awfully small in a landscape this isolated, this totally wild. The smells, tastes, sights and sounds were all exotic, all breathtaking.

She was still savoring the scenery when she suddenly heard voices below. Loud voices. Angry voices.

She held her breath, listening, confused as to where the sounds were coming from-inside the boat, for sure, but not as close as the pilothouse or galley. Maybe from the dining room or salon just beyond that. She wasn’t close enough to make out any specific words, but the nature of conversation filtered through. Two men were talking.

Incorrect thought, she decided. They were fighting.

And they weren’t just a little angry with each other. From the tone, from the nature of voices, they were both furious. Rage-furious. Vicious-furious.

She gulped, then gulped again. She told herself that people argued all the time. Some people fought nice; others fought mean and loud. And men sometimes used anger like fiber, just a way to clear out their systems, an easy purge.

But the way her pulse rate was suddenly hiccupping-as if adrenaline was shooting up her veins-she knew this wasn’t likely some impassioned argument about politics or ball scores. Something was wrong, really wrong.

A thump indicated that something was thrown. Then…more loud voices. Then nothing.

A spank-sharp wind slapped her cheeks as she barreled down the ladder. In the next life, when she got around to growing up, she wasn’t going to interfere in other people’s business-ever. But right now she was afraid that thump meant someone had been hurt, and could need help.

That was stupid thinking, she knew. Even if the fight had turned physical, dangerous, she was the last person who had the power to stop it. The problem was, she might well be the only outside person who’d heard it. And the other problem was that she’d never had a brain when someone could be hurt. It was a genetic flaw. Back in school, she’d see a kid hounded by a bully and she’d hurled herself onto the bully’s back, come home bruised and wincing.

She should have learned.

She slid open the door to the salon-and found nothing, except for a chunky book about Alaskan birds on the carpet. It was definitely a sacrilege, in her view, to throw such a gorgeous book, but there was no other sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing.

Shaking her head, she stalked through the dining room into the galley. The argument had made her uneasy, oddly shaken.

Cooking was the answer. Cooking was always the answer. The galley was her nest; she already knew every nook and cranny. Although it was still too early to start dinner prep, she could at least start messing around.

If she couldn’t quiet her nerves, she could at least concentrate on food.

Her theory on the dinner menu was that the guys would need absorbers. It was the first night out, so men being men, they were likely to drink. She’d thumbed through her recipes, looking for food that was easy on the stomach, not too heavy, and settled on pasta puttanesca. The wine choice was still a question, but she’d about decided on a Montenegro.

Ivan had given her a separate budget for the dinner wines. He’d been stingy, but she knew her wines and how to stretch a dollar. The reds from Provence were predictably good…

The galley door suddenly slid open. She must have jumped five feet, even though she could have sworn she’d completely calmed down.

“I know. You’ve got a rule about intruders in your galley. But I was hoping you might have a bandage.”

Harm stood there with a hand over his neck where she could see blood between his fingers.

“What on earth did you do? Get in here!” Men. Such idiots. She pulled open a drawer, grabbed a clean white towel, then pushed his hand away when he failed to remove it fast enough. That close to him, her hormones gave an instantaneous buck, which she tried to ignore. “Who taught you to shave? Attila the Hun? These days we use razors instead of axes.”

“I just figured I’d try to look more civilized before dinner. But it seems I packed an old razor because the blade sure seemed dead.”

“You think?” There were no chairs in the galley, just a stool wedged under the counter-which she pulled out and motioned him to sit in. Impossible for her to get a good look at his neck if she was stuck balancing up on tiptoes.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

She edged between his legs, took a good look at the cut, then reached above his head for the first-aid kit. “I know it’s nothing. But you’re still getting antiseptic, and yeah, a bandage. Did the blade have rust on it?”

“I don’t think it was that old.” And then, when he saw where she was reaching, he muttered, “Good grief.”

She grinned. Her first-aid kit did rival a complete trauma unit. “Yeah, I know. But the thing is, I’ve got a collection of knives that would make a gangster proud. When a girl works with knives for a living, she unfortunately tends to get cut once in a while, so naturally I’m prepared.”

Instead of sounding reassured, his voice took on a punch of panic. “Wait a minute. What are you going to do?”

She had to chuckle. Only then… She looked at him. She’d stepped between his legs to get a better view and angle on his cut. There was nothing odd about that. It was only now, she realized, that her outer thigh was grazing his inner thigh. And her palm cupped the side of his face, not unlike how a woman would cup her lover’s face for a kiss. And his eyes were on hers, her eyes on his, with enough electricity to crackle up a fire or two.

Where the patooties had that come from?

“Hmm,” she said, and stepped back fast.

The instant she let up pressure, unfortunately, the scrape on his neck immediately started bleeding again. It needed to be cleaned. Then she had to wait until the moisture dried before applying antiseptic. That had to dry before a bandage could conceivably stick, so that took another wait. Obviously, none of those minor actions took long…but all of them took touching him. She was close enough to smell and sense and see. To be aware. Too aware. So she started asking him nosy questions. She sensed he wasn’t normally into chatting up strangers, but maybe he was just uneasy enough around her to open up. Either that, or he was actually interested in spilling about his company and his current situation.

“So,” she started out with, “is your first name ‘Harm’ symbolic of what you’re like to be around or what?”

He chuckled. “Nothing that interesting. Harm is just a Dutch name. Means ruler or leader or something like that. My dad was Scottish, my mom Dutch. Inherited stubbornness from both sides, or that’s what the parents claim.”

“Are they right?”

“I plead the fifth.”

It was her turn to smile. “So what’s the deal with this company of yours?”

He took his time answering, but eventually, out it came. “I never anticipated having anything to do with the company. That’s the problem. My uncle’s name was Dougal, hit a mother-lode lottery when he was twenty-five. He was only married a couple of years when his wife got cancer, pancreatic, which is one of the wrong kinds, the kind where there’s just not a lot of hope. Anyway, he was nuts about her, and that’s how it all started-he was supposed to be an engineer, but when she died, he poured everything into a research lab, determined to find a cure. Didn’t know shoes from shinnola when he first started.”

“But he learned?”

“He more than learned. He spent his life at it, and like I said, Connollys seem to have that particularly stubborn gene. The first really great drug he patented over twelve years ago. By then he was almost broke, but that brought in a new flood of money. He wasn’t interested in living high. He wanted the infusion for the research. The two areas he never stopped targeting were pancreatic and ovarian. Just when the lab had come up with an outright miracle drug, he fell ill. And right after that, the guys came through with an even more incredible breakthrough.”

“For one of the biggies he cared especially about? Pancreatic or ovarian?” It was a relief when she could step away from those eyes, that skin, the feel of him. She piled the first-aid supplies back in the box and whirled around, happy to talk-but with a little distance between them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find dinner chores to work with by then.

“Pancreatic. Two new drugs had passed FDA by then, and a brand-new one-the best, a true miracle drug-was a pinch away from the last clinical trials. That’s when Dougal died. I knew he wanted me to have the company, to continue with his work, but man.” Harm scrubbed the back of his neck. “I was in the military. Mechanical engineer. Built bridges, roads, had a ton of math but never much straight science. Only my uncle, he had a terror of the firm getting sold, falling into the hands of certain pharmaceutical corporations-he wanted it kept in the family, with people who had the same goals, to conquer this cancer thing. Not to just be about profit.”

“So he passed it on to you…” She put a little plate in front of him because that’s what she did-fed people. A few wedges of bread, fresh herbs in a dip for him to dunk, one of the hors d’oeuvres she’d put on in the salon in a bit.

“Yes. Only the will was barely read-I’d just found a place in Cambridge, wasn’t unpacked-when the clinical trials for BROPE, the new drug, disappeared-”

“BROPE?”

“Bright Hope. The guys named it-”

“Okay. Got it. So the drug was stolen?”

“No. The trials were. The data. The proving data. Damn, this is good-” He motioned to his decimated plate. “Anyway, that crisis took place my first week. Then Fiske, our financial guru, comes into my office the next week looking gray and sick. The funds allocated for the last trial disappeared. They exist on paper. There’s no record of anyone unauthorized-or authorized-touching the account. Only the money’s gone. And Fiske is beside himself, worried I’ll accuse him.”

She rolled her eyes. Just like a child, he was holding out the empty plate, begging for more. “But you didn’t?”

“No. There’s no way Fiske did anything wrong. Fiske is good to the bone. Can’t say he’s a twenty-first-century economics man-he was my uncle’s crony in age, old-fashioned in his thinking. But he’d have gone to the wall for Dougal. They were like brothers. But to sum up this cyclone-I’ve got this company that on paper is thriving beyond all anyone’s expectations, with a cure for pancreatic cancer, a real damn cure, on the cusp. Reachable. Only now the whole thing is at risk. Someone inside has to be the problem, but it’s not that easy figuring out the who. Yale and Purdue claim it was their research that was suddenly obliterated, so they’d hardly be guilty of any wrongdoing. They’ve been set back several years. And Arthur claims he’d been pushing Dougal for more careful recording and reporting practices for years, couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, so finding him guilty doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“And there’s no one else who could be the thief?”

“Not really. There’s other staff, but they’re clerical or broom pushers, some apprentices coming up. But no one who had access to those studies, the specific private lab or those computers. The thing is, over time, the whole formula could be recreated, but that’d be a matter of years. And literally millions of dollars. Probably more than millions.”

“Eek,” Cate murmured.

“Yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“So you’re in quite a mess.” She wasn’t exactly alarmed when he lurched up from the stool. It was just that her heart rate tripled when he stepped toward her. His eyes were on hers, a flash of flirting, a flash of stark, sharp sexual intent. Thankfully, she saw his hand aim for the bowl on the counter before she leaned into the kiss she thought was coming.

She slapped his hand.

“A major mess,” he agreed-although he tried one more time for a lick of batter from her bowl. Then he gave up, eased away, got serious again. “I closed the lab for a couple weeks. Took them all here. None of us can escape from each other, not on this boat, in this environment. I had to do something. This was the best choice I could think up.”

She nodded. “I think you made a great move. That’s what I do with a soup sometimes. Put the ingredients together, then just let it cook, see what happens.”

“Something will.”

She nodded again. “Something has to happen. When you mix ingredients together, the tastes start blending. Different flavors show up. Flavors that never existed before.”

“That’s what I need,” he said grimly. “Something to force…new information. To bring more out in the open.”

“Harm…” She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to go behind her back with his finger. This time she just motioned for him to remove his hand. He tried giving her a meek, apologetic look-but he couldn’t sell “meek” in this lifetime. “I heard something this afternoon. The fight? You heard it?”

He quit playing around. “What fight?”

“Two men. I don’t know which two, but they were really going at it.” She rinsed her hands, wiped them on a linen towel. “At first I thought everyone would have heard them. But then I realized, of course no one would have, below deck-or in the pilothouse, with those doors closed and the engines going. Still. You didn’t hear anything at all?”

He shook his head. “After lunch, I grabbed a catnap. Hadn’t slept in two days. I went down so deep I wouldn’t have heard a cannon.” He cocked his head. “You didn’t see who it was?”

“No. But, as you may have noticed, I’m not the shy, retiring type. A little argument wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d never have thought twice about it. But this fight…it was…wrong.”

She’d have said more, but the side door to the galley suddenly opened. Ivan popped in, his jaw dropping when he saw Harm in the galley with her. “Hey. You letting the guests get hors d’oeuvres ahead of me? Where is the justice in life?”

She shooed them both out, snapping her towel, warning they’d get no food at all if they didn’t let her get back to it. By then, she had to buckle under and get serious about her dinner prep. But her conversation with Harm still troubled her.

It was over, she supposed. There was nothing else she could have told Harm, beyond what she’d overheard. It was his problem, and he already knew he had a big problem. There was nothing she could help with or do anything about.

But it worried her, once he’d let out how huge the stakes were. A cure for one of the scariest cancers. That was big medical stakes. Big hope. Big money. Big risks.

As she unlocked her knife chest and chose her favorite paring knives-what her chef cronies called the Sheep’s Foot and Bird’s Beak-she thought that Harm didn’t seem the kind of guy who let information slip. Whatever he’d shared with her, he’d wanted to. Possibly, she considered, he was trying to warn her again about avoiding getting close to his men.

She started pulling out pots, cutting boards, ingredients, but an alarming thought kept going through her mind. This trip was enabling Harm to get closer to his team. The closer he got, the more danger he could be in himself.

The fury and tempo of the argument she’d heard earlier kept replaying in her mind like a mosquito bite that wouldn’t quit itching.

It wasn’t her business, she reminded herself, any more than Harm could ever be her business. That unexpectedly sharp buzz of attraction to him needed to be cut off at the pass, pronto. Cate was no idiot. Harm came from a completely different universe than her life.

So for once she was going to be good, just do her job and enjoy the trip, not interfere or nose into anyone else’s problems-and stay out of Harm’s way.

It was such a good plan.