Stryker's Wife. Dixie Browning
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a hefty $23.11, but she had two part-time jobs, each of which paid the minimum wage, less deductions.
“Talk, don’t think, you nut! Did you bring your light meter?” Talking was supposed to prevent her from thinking about that awful feeling in her belly. “I hope you brought your meter,” she muttered, “because shooting on water is tricky, and you’re going to have to come up with a few decent pictures if you’re planning to write this whole wacko expedition off on your taxes.”
Because she was going to do it. Guilt or no guilt, she fully intended to write Mark’s memorial service off on her taxes. The whole blooming thing, charter, motel, mileage and all. Caught in the throes of guilt and nausea, she clutched the bucket and moaned.
But then, Mark would have approved, she reminded herself. Hadn’t he written off their entire honeymoon trip because he had spent a few minutes looking over a shopping complex on Maui?
Still, she did feel guilty. Partly about the tax thing, but mostly about the fact that she hadn’t really grieved as much as she should. Not that she knew what she could do about that. Evidently she was one of those people whose feelings didn’t run very deep.
As for this empowerment business, she was beginning to think it was a mixed blessing. So far, all she felt was confused.
“Hey, you all right down there?” the captain called from the open companionway. He had a nice voice. A little like rusty velvet.
Goodness, that didn’t even make sense! Deke managed a wobbly smile. “Fine. I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”
He grinned and saluted her, and she thought, What a nice man. Any other time she might have thought, What a strikingly masculine, stunningly handsome man, but right now, nice was all she craved.
Mark hadn’t been nice. There, she’d admitted it. He’d been suave and sexy and Hollywood handsome, but nice?
No. Not really. At least, not after they’d been married for a few months. She’d put it down to his being so busy, so ambitious to get ahead. There’d been all those late nights at the office. All those business trips. Nearly every weekend.
With his secretary.
With his young, drop-dead-gorgeous secretary who was supposed to be such a whiz on her laptop he couldn’t travel without her.
Or maybe she’d been such a whiz on his laptop.
Deke remembered the night Mark had taken her out to dinner for her birthday. When he’d opened his wallet for his credit card, she’d seen a little silver packet. She’d wondered at the time why he still carried a condom, but she’d been too embarrassed to ask.
All the same, she had wondered. She wondered all over again. Wondered about that and a lot of other things she had tried for too long to ignore because it wasn’t seemly to think ill of the dead.
Suddenly, like watching tea leaves settle into a pattern in the bottom of a cup, a picture of her relationship with Mark came into focus. “Well…damn!” she whispered plaintively.
Still struggling to deal with guilt and nausea, she was overcome with anger. It never even occurred to her that the motion of the boat had changed—less forward, more up and down, with a jiggly little corkscrew action thrown in for good measure—until she heard the sound of uneven footsteps on the little ladder doohickey that led into the living room.
She sat up, still clutching the bucket. Tears streaked her cheeks, but they were tears of anger. “Are we there?” she demanded as Captain Stryker hovered over her, looking almost as stricken as she felt.
“Kiley,” he said. “His name was Kiley, wasn’t it?”
Numbly, Deke nodded. It was one thing to be made a fool of. It was quite another to have it become common knowledge.
It occurred to her that he looked oddly vulnerable for such a powerful man. “You should’ve told me to shut up and mind my own business,” he growled.
She swallowed hard. Sitting up made her feel marginally more empowered, but it didn’t do a thing for her seasickness. “I was taught never to tell anyone to shut up. In my family, we say hush. It, um—it sounds softer.”
“But it means the same thing.” He raked his fingers through his shaggy blond hair, then hooked both thumbs under his belt. “You should’ve said something. I’m sorry, Ms. Kiley—just as sorry as I can be.”
“Hush. It’s not your fault.”
He grinned, looking more than ever like the hero of a pirate story in his faded, body-loving khakis. “Hush, huh? How does your family go about telling somebody to butt out and mind their own business?”
A fresh wave of nausea swept over her, but gamely she replied, “Mostly they just change the subject. Are we there yet?”
“Speaking of changing the subject? Sorry, we’re only about halfway. I thought I’d better check on you. Do you need anything? Sure you don’t want to head back in?”
Deke thought about how much this project was costing her. She could hardly ask for her money back just because on the way to memorializing her late husband she happened to have discovered that he was a philandering, four-flushing, lying, greedy snake in the grass.
At least he had been all of those things while he was still alive. Poor Mark. No one, she supposed, deliberately chose to be a stinker. As long as she’d come this far, she might as well pay tribute to whatever good there was in him. It would make a nice, tidy end to that particular segment of her life, and she needed that to satisfy her sense of orderliness.
“I want to go on to Wreck Rock,” she said as firmly as she could, considering she was about to disgrace herself into a plastic bucket that smelled of disinfectant.
For a minute he just stood there, swaying with the motion of the boat. A shaft of sunlight slanted down through an open hatch, highlighting the golden hair on his tanned, muscular forearm.
“We’d better hustle you topside,” he said, after studying her with a single sympathetic gray eye. “You’re no sailor, that’s pretty clear. Maybe if you suck on a cola and let the wind blow in your face, you’ll feel better.”
Under a thin layer of cheap indoor-outdoor carpet that served primarily to cover the twin hatches, the deck vibrated to the beat of the engines below. Kurt noticed that the atmosphere was none too fragrant. Frog had a bad habit of hanging his fishy clothes in his locker instead of tossing them out to be washed.
Bracing his bum leg against the bulkhead, he bent and slipped his arms under her slight form. She didn’t protest. Probably felt too lousy to argue. Funny thing, though—Kurt had a feeling that small or not, she was nobody’s pushover. He’d caught a glint in her eye, a certain tilt of her delicate chin before she’d been done in by a weak belly.
In the cockpit, with a cool northwest breeze in her face, he figured she’d come around pretty fast. “Breathe deeply,” he said. “That’s it, nice and steady—inhale, exhale…no, don’t hyperventilate, just take regular breaths. You’re doing fine.”
Breathing lessons. Man, he’d really lost it. But damn, she smelled good. Crazy thing, considering where they were, but she reminded him of the way a cornfield smelled when the tassels were drying under a hot summer sun.
Carefully, he lowered her onto a chair, watched for a few seconds to see that she didn’t keel over, then shoved an ice cold can in her hand. “Sip,” he said. “Don’t gulp it down. Let me get us underway again and I’ll see what I can do about smoothing out the ride.”
She sipped. Kurt skimmed up the ladder and took the controls again. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder. She was hanging in there, angling her face to the wind, which was beginning to kick up a few knots. They were going to be doing some pitching and yawing before they reached their destination. He hoped to hell she was up to it.
Kiley, he thought. The joker’s name was Kiley, and he’d gone down with another