Stryker's Wife. Dixie Browning
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which was probably why it had been so cheap. She blamed her great-aunts for not teaching her such practical things as how to deal with bankers and lawyers and nosy reporters. She blamed Mark for not teaching her practical things like how to shop for a reliable secondhand car. And she blamed herself for trying to blame others for her own shortcomings.
Maybe she should shop for a mail-order course for handling guilt.
It was late in the afternoon by the time she checked into Swan Inlet’s one and only motel. Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the costlier chains. This entire project was beginning to erode her meager savings rather badly.
Before setting out to locate Captain Stryker and his boat, to make sure that everything was on schedule, she washed her face and brushed her straight, shoulder-length hair, tying it back with a narrow black ribbon. Not for the first time she wished she’d been born with black hair. Or red, or platinum blond. Anything but plain old brown. The next time she broke out in a rash of self-assertiveness, she just might march down to Suzzi’s Beauty Boutique and get it cut, bleached and frizzed to a fare-thee-well before she came to her senses.
Kurt was on the flying bridge hanging out laundry because the marina’s dryer was on the blink again when a woman pulled up in a spray of gravel. He noticed her right off because her car obviously needed a ring job. And then he noticed her because of the way she was dressed. Most women around these parts dressed pretty casually. It was that kind of place.
This one was wearing a dress. Not just any dress, but a floaty, flower-printed thing with a lace collar. The kind of dress he could picture his mother wearing to teach Sunday school back when he was a kid.
She had a plain face. Not homely, just plain.
Although she couldn’t be much more than five feet tall, there was nothing at all plain about her body.
She picked her way carefully out along the finger pier, dodging the clutter of lines, buckets and shoes. And the cracks. She was wearing high heels.
“Excuse me, sir, but do you know where I can find a Captain Stryker?”
“You found him.” Kurt dropped the pair of briefs he’d been about to pin to the line and waited. She smiled then, and he decided maybe she wasn’t so plain, after all.
“Oh. Well, I’m Deke Kiley. Debranne Kiley? I wrote you—I sent a check? For tomorrow?”
From the hatch just behind him, Frog said softly, “I thought you said you was taking out some camera guy tomorrow.”
Deke Kiley. D.E.E. Kiley. That had been the name on the check. The stationery had been plain. No letterhead. If she was a Deke, then he was a blooming hibiscus. “Yeah, I got it. You’re on.” And under his breath, he said, “Pipe down, pea brain. She’s a paying customer.”
“Yes, well…I’ll see you tomorrow morning then,” the woman called out in a soft little voice that reminded him of something from the distant past. “I just wanted to be sure which boat was yours,” she went on. “Eight o’clock, is that all right?”
Kurt nodded. It wasn’t all right, but it would have to do. A charter was a charter, and if some lace-trimmed lady photographer wanted to snap pictures of dolphins, he reckoned her money was as green as anyone else’s.
“Hey!” he yelled after her. She stopped and swiveled around and he remembered what it was she reminded him of. The ballerina on a tinkling little music box that used to sit on his mama’s dressing table. “Wear sneakers tomorrow, okay?”
She smiled and nodded, and Kurt watched her swish her shapely little behind down the wharf, climb into a yellow clunker about the size of an aircraft carrier and drive off.
Semper paratus, man. The Coast Guard’s motto was Always Prepared. Kurt had a feeling he just might not be prepared for this one.
The widow wore black. Black slacks and a black silk blouse, bought especially for the occasion. She also wore a faded yellow sweatshirt because it had turned cooler than expected. Her shoes were red high tops, which weren’t exactly proper funeral attire, but she wore them anyway because Captain Stryker had said to. And Deke, while she was no great sailor—had never been on a boat in her life, in fact—was savvy enough to know that a boat was no place for high heels.
She was heading out to the pier carrying the basket, her purse and her camera bag when a lanky, freckle-faced boy emerged from Captain Stryker’s boat and hurried to meet her.
“Gimme that,” he said, and she wondered fleetingly if he was robbing her. “Watch yer step—there’s ropes and stuff.”
Deke let him take the basket. He would hardly be warning her of hazards if he was planning on mugging her. Any mugger worth his salt would have grabbed her purse and camera case first. The camera alone was worth a couple of thousand dollars. It had belonged to Mark. It was one of the two things he had left her, which was just fine, because she hadn’t married him for his money.
Three things, if you counted a nagging sense of disappointment.
The boy handed her down into the boat with an old-world courtliness that Deke found oddly touching.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
He flashed her a grin and leapt onto the pier. “Gotta run,” he said just as someone spoke from behind her.
“Miss that school bus, boy, and you’re road kill.”
“Aye, sir!”
Turning, Deke encountered the man she had seen only from a distance the day before. Tall, tanned, lean and blond, he would have been the handsomest man in captivity without the eye patch. With it, he was quite simply devastating. And not entirely because, as a writer of children’s adventure stories, she was partial to pirates.
“Captain Stryker?”
Kurt nodded. “Ms. Kiley.”
“I’m early.”
“A few minutes.”
The words meant nothing. Kurt sized up his passenger. She was tiny. Looked as if a stiff breeze could capsize her. Good thing he didn’t charge by the pound.
Still, a charter was a charter. Every one added a few more bucks to the house fund. In case the child welfare people wanted to make a federal case about his casual arrangement with the boy, he needed to get them off the R&R and settled in a real house as soon as possible. That ought to weigh in his favor.
“I’ll set your gear below,” he offered, reaching for the basket, from which the neck of a dark green bottle protruded. “You didn’t have to bring your own rations. Sandwiches and drinks are included in the price of the charter.”
She murmured something he didn’t quite catch, mainly because he was too busy checking her out. Yesterday he’d thought she was plain. Just went to show you the dangers of making snap judgments. She was plain the way a sunrise over a frozen bay was plain.
He settled her in one of the three fighting chairs bolted to the deck and headed topside. Frog had cast off before he’d jogged out to meet the school bus. “You need any sunscreen?” he called down over the muffled throb of the wet exhaust.
She twisted around and glanced up at the flying bridge. She had a nice smile. Simple, uncomplicated. She was probably a nice woman, he thought as he eased out into the harbor. Attractive, nice…and already spoken for, if the plain gold band on her third finger, left hand, was anything to go by.
Not that he was interested.
They were well beyond the breakwater, headed for open sea, when he sensed her presence on the ladder behind him. Some passengers weren’t content to stay put and let him get on with his job. That was where Frog came in. For a streetwise kid who was, in the parlance,