A Woman with Secrets

by Inglath Cooper

  She smiled. Harry’s good-natured humor was infectious. And she wished again that Margo had come with them.

  The waitress returned moments later with their drinks. As Harry had predicted, it was strong, but smooth and good.

  “They’re great,” she said, nodding in the direction of the band.

  Harry stood, pulling her up beside him. “Let’s show them a little support.”

  With a full dance floor, Kate held back. “I’m not a very good dancer.”

  “Then we’ll make a great couple.”

  At first, she felt self-conscious and awkward. In addition to that, it was immediately apparent that Harry had lied. He was an incredible dancer.

  “Okay, so you moonlight as an instructor,” she said above the music.

  He laughed. “Don’t think about it. Just go with it. Everybody else is having too much fun to notice us.”

  Halfway through “Margaritaville,” she decided he was right. She’d never seen a crowd enjoying themselves more. The vacationing group obviously cared about nothing more than making the most of this evening. Kate found herself humming along to the music, the rhythm hard to resist. It flowed through her, loosened her limbs and she could almost feel the hard knot of bitterness she’d been carrying around inside her these last months begin to loosen its grip.

  The hair at the back of her neck grew damp. She let herself go and just had fun. Plain old, ordinary, long-thought-lost-to-her fun.

  They danced for an hour or more. Harry had no sense of self-consciousness; embarrassment apparently a foreign concept to him. He danced like a fool, one leg kicking frantically to the side while he held his nose and shimmied in an exaggerated version of the sixties swim.

  Kate laughed at his antics until her sides hurt. “Is there an inhibited bone in your body?” she asked finally, catching her breath.

  He grinned and shouted, “What’s inhibited?”

  A half hour later, she begged for a reprieve. She pulled Harry from the dance floor, trying to keep a straight face when he insisted that the grass skirt on the lady behind them had been made from the end zone of the Houston Astrodome.

  They’d just sat down when Margo appeared at the table, still wearing the contacts with which she’d replaced her glasses that morning. Harry popped out of his chair as if someone had just hit a remote button, the look on his face one of pleased surprise. “Margo. You escaped the pop-police.”

  She shrugged, looking more than a little guilty. “He’s asleep.”

  “Great!” Harry said, clapping his hands together. “The more the merrier. Here, sit down. What would you like to drink? Tequila?” he added with a knowing grin.

  “Anything but that,” she said, not quite meeting his gaze.

  Kate slid her chair over and made room for her, wondering if she’d missed something in the exchange between the two of them. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said, squeezing Margo’s hand. “Harry’s about to wear me out, and he’s just getting started.”

  Harry ordered Margo a Bahama Mama, light on the rum. A new song began to play.

  “Come on, Margo,” Harry said, sliding back his chair. “Initiation time.”

  “Oh, no,” she protested, sounding something just short of horrified. “I just came to listen.”

  “Now there’s a challenge if I ever heard one,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her up. “Let’s dance.”

  “I really—”

  “Can,” he said.

  Margo stood and threw a rescue-me glance Kate’s way before letting Harry tug her out into the crowd.

  Kate watched them for a few moments, glad for the immediate smile on Margo’s face when Harry dipped and spun her.

  “Hi.”

  She looked up to find Cole standing next to the table. “Hello,” she said, unable to hide her surprise.

  “I saw Margo leave the boat,” he said. “I thought I’d make sure she got here all right.” He stared down at her for a moment, cleared his throat and added, “If you two will make sure she gets back—”

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” she interrupted a little too quickly. Aware that her boldness probably had something to do with the Popeye-strong drink Harry had ordered her, she added, “I mean, why don’t you sit down? The music is good.” She shook her head. “You probably need to get back to the boat, though.”

  He hesitated. “I can stay for a little while.”

  His change of heart surprised her. Pleased her, too, if she were honest about it.

  “Hey, Cole!”

  Harry waved and flashed them both a broad grin, dipping Margo backward in an arc, her hair hanging in a curtain that nearly touched the floor.

  “He’s one of a kind,” Kate said.

  “That he is,” Cole agreed with an indulgent smile that stood in direct contradiction to their frequent bouts of bickering.

  She stared at him, unable to help herself. By any definition, Cole was a man to whom women were no doubt drawn, the reasons needing no explanation. Looking at him made her think of three different movie stars at once. Only Cole seemed real. His smile made her heart beat a little too fast. Rare as it was, it transformed him, made her think there must be another side to him that he chose not to let others see very often. “So how did you and Harry meet, anyway?” she asked.

  Cole shook his head. “He’s just one of those people who appear one day and then seem like they’ve always been there.”

  “That’s kind of hard to find.”

  “He’s a good friend. Don’t tell him I said so, though. He likes to think he’s got me figured out. He’ll get an instant case of overconfidence if he thinks he might be right.”

  Kate smiled. Their eyes met and held, and Kate felt a new awareness between them that was startling in its clarity.

  The music changed then, fast to slow, but still with the beat distinctive to reggae, an impossible to resist soft, melodic harmony.

  “Would you like to dance, Kate?” he asked.

  It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. No, thank you, should have been her unquestionable response. But when he offered her his hand, she told herself there could be no harm in one dance.

  After all, one dance couldn’t change a person’s life, could it?

  * * *

  THIS WAS A mistake.

  Cole knew it as soon as he pulled Kate into his arms, as soon as they were close enough that her perfume drifted up and settled over his senses with the appeal of a good wine or a summer peach.

  Common sense told him he should have left after seeing for himself that Margo was all right. But he couldn’t shake the image of Kate when he’d first walked in the bar and saw her dancing with Harry. Appealing as all get-out in her bare-backed dress, face flushed, hair damp. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Now, he held her in his arms. And everything about it felt too good. The Caribbean night lay clear and star-dotted above them in the open-roof bar. They moved in a small circle on the dance floor, close enough to raise his pulse and set his train of thought out on a track it had no business taking.

  She tipped her head back, her neck long and graceful. “It’s nice out here,” she said. “I can see why a person… How you could get attached to a life like this.”

  “It didn’t take me long,” he said. “I can’t imagine living in a city again.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “D.C. Land of the commute.”

  “Is that why you left it all behind?”

  “No. I never even realized it bothered me until I’d walked away from it.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I was a corporate attorney.”

  “Really?”

  “Shocked?”

  “A little. You’ve shed your skin so convincingly.”

  He smiled at that. “I’m sure you meant that as a compliment.”

  She looked up at him. “How did you end up on a boat in the Caribbean?”

  “A client I’d done a lot of work for lef
t it to me when he died. He didn’t have any family and never made time to take the thing out himself. I’d had it a couple of years. Never used it. After my marriage broke up—” He stopped there, not sure where to go with this explanation. Talking about Ginny left him feeling like someone had taken a sledgehammer to his chest. And, too, maybe he wasn’t ready to see judgment in Kate’s eyes.

  She waited, as if she knew he was having trouble finding the right words. “After my marriage broke up,” he started again, “I realized I needed to make some changes to my life. I took the boat out one weekend just to get away. And I never went back.”

  Her eyes widened. “Wow. That must have been a hard decision.”

  “If I’d actually thought about it, maybe so. But luckily, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror one morning, thirty years down the road, and realized I was going to end up exactly like my client. A heck of a lot of things accumulated along the road to old age and not a person in sight to share it with.”

  “That’s amazing though,” she said. “To just one day decide you’re going to be something different from what you’ve always been.”

  “It’s not so difficult when you realize that what you’ve been isn’t that great.”

  She stared at something over his left shoulder. He could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. He wondered what comparisons she was making. “But then that’s the part most of us never get to,” she said. “An honest look at ourselves.”

  Something in her voice told him she was talking about herself, and again, he wondered. But he didn’t ask. Not his place.

  Here, on this crowded dance floor, with the beat of the music throbbing around them, he was glad he’d come. Glad for the feel of her in his arms.

  She looked up just then, and the spark of attraction between them took firmer hold, no words needed to confirm its existence.

  He wanted to kiss her. Really wanted to kiss her. He was certain, too, that it showed on his face. And something—the slight shift of her body toward his, the way her eyes softened—told him she wanted him to.

  Unable to stop himself, he reached out, rubbed his thumb across her cheek. “Kate—”

  She stepped back suddenly, dropping her gaze to the floor. “You know, I’m really thirsty,” she said. “I have a drink at the table. Do you want something?”

  “No,” he said, wondering if he’d misread the signals. He was rusty enough that it was possible. Either way, he couldn’t deny that she was right to put on the brakes. “I’d better head back, anyway,” he said. “Make sure everything’s all right with the boat.”

  She met his gaze then, nodding once. “Okay. See you later.”

  “Tell Harry to behave,” he said and left in spite of the fact that he very much wanted to stay.

  * * *

  KATE WATCHED HIM go with an undeniable sense of regret for her own cold feet.

  A dance was a dance. And maybe she’d just been too long without attention from the opposite sex. The last two years of her marriage had been a joke. And there had been no one since the divorce. She didn’t trust herself to look at a man, much less date one. Her track record spoke for itself. So. That would explain her overcharged response to Cole’s arm around her waist, his hand clasped with hers.

  She was human. A normal woman with normal needs. And very bad judgment. Very bad. That admitted, maybe Cole had done her a favor in leaving. Given her a chance to let common sense override that physical zing.

  But then common sense came complete with its own convincing arguments. Her life was a wreck. She’d allowed herself to be hoodwinked by a man presenting himself as something completely different from what he’d turned out to be. Allowed that man to squander the inheritance her father had spent his life working for. She’d made her share of mistakes. She didn’t need to continue the trend with a vacation fling.

  If she’d learned anything from her disastrous marriage, it was that choices matter. Choices paved the way to an eventual destination. Keeping her distance from Cole Hunter was the right choice.

  * * *

  THIS, HARRY DID not expect.

  An hour and a half after she’d arrived, he and Margo were still dancing.

  “So where’d you learn to dance?” he asked when the music slowed down again, and they’d had a moment to catch their breaths.

  She looked up at him, then glanced away. “You’ll laugh.”

  “I won’t,” he said, holding up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  She considered his vow, then said, “One of my students was flunking out of Italian. I minored in Italian in college and agreed to tutor him in exchange for dance lessons. He worked four summers at Arthur Murray and knew everything from the tango to salsa. There was one problem, though.”

  “What?” he asked, intrigued now.

  “He was at least a foot shorter than I am, so something about it never felt quite right.”

  “What about when you tried it out with other guys?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I never tried it out with anyone else until—”

  “Until?”

  She looked up at him. “Now.”

  The declaration startled him into a loss for words, making him wish suddenly that he hadn’t asked that question. “Wow.”

  “Ridiculous, huh?”

  “No, no,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m just feeling a significant amount of pressure here, following in your instructor’s footsteps.”

  “His feet were considerably smaller than yours,” she said, glancing down at his shoes.

  A laugh burst free from Harry’s chest, and he realized that it was his real laugh, not the one he trotted out when he was trying to prove to the rest of the world how perfectly amusing his life was. “If you get tired and need to stand on them, feel free,” he said.

  This time, Margo laughed. And again, he liked the sound of it. Liked, too, being the one to wrestle it free from her. He got the feeling she hadn’t done a lot of laughing in her life. He wondered why and decided that at some point during this trip, he was going to find out.

  For now, though, the dancing was nice.

  * * *

  AFTER LEAVING THE Pelican, Cole went for a walk on the beach. The air cleared his head, and by the time he drifted back to the boat, he had convinced himself that leaving that dance floor had been a wise decision.

  Back at the Ginny, he rounded the corner that led to his cabin and came to an abrupt halt. A flash of light beamed up from the stairway. “Who’s there?” he called out, adrenaline rushing through him.

  The only answer was a loud thump followed by the sound of pounding feet. Cole took the stairs down at lightning speed. At the bottom, he spotted two hunched-over men scurrying like overweight mice for the stairs at the other end of the hallway.

  “Hey!” he called out. “What are you doing?”

  One of them looked back and then yelled at his partner, “Let’s get outta here!”

  Cole took off after them. They moved surprisingly fast for their size, as if they’d had a lot of practice at the art of escape. He reached the top of the stairs only to see them hop off the dock and into a small motorboat. One of them waved a gun at him.

  He considered using the Ginny’s dinghy to go after them, but didn’t relish the thought of taking a bullet just to get the opportunity to punch the daylights out of one or both of them.

  “What’s going on, Cole? Who were those guys?”

  He turned to find Harry jogging up the pier, Kate and Margo right behind him. “I don’t know. I caught them down below. I guess they were looking for something to steal.” He glanced back at Kate, noticing that her face had gone suddenly pale.

  “Did they get anything?” she asked, her voice neutral.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look.”

  “I’ll go check in my cabin,” she said quickly and disappeared downstairs.

  “They didn’t appear to be your typical criminal,” Harry said. “Weren’t they wearing suits?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” he said, wondering again what Kate was so protective of.

  “What would they want on here?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “You’re not running any illegal contraband between islands, are you, buddy?” Harry asked with a grin.

  Cole gave him a look. “Right.”

  “Just checking,” he said, raising a hand. “Hey, man, why’d you run off tonight?”

  “I didn’t run anywhere,” he defended himself.

  “I saw you tear out of there like the hounds of hell were at your heels,” Harry said with a disbelieving snort.

  “I just needed to get back. It’s a good thing I did.”

  Harry stared at him, looking as if he suspected there was more to the story. “It’s Kate. She’s got you rattled, doesn’t she?”

  Cole ignored the accusation. “I’m going down to see if anything is missing.”

  “I’ll look around up here,” Harry said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “And I’m not going to,” he said, heading downstairs where he first stopped at Kate’s cabin. He found her tucking the sheets back under the side of her bed. “Anything missing?”

  She jerked up. “No. No, everything’s fine.”

  He studied her for a moment, hit again with the feeling of suspicion. But he’d already accused her once and ended up feeling ridiculous for it. “About tonight,” he said. “I’m sorry I left you there like that.”

  “There’s no reason to be. I shouldn’t have insisted that you stay. And anyway, I’ve never been a great dancer. My feet and my brain are on different lines of communication.”

  “You’re a fine dancer,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’d better check out the rest of the boat.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking as if she would like to add something else.

  He waited a moment, and when she remained silent, headed for the door. “See you in the morning,” he said.

  “Good night,” she answered.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.

  —William Shakespeare

  SHE FOUND THE money in the same place she’d left it.

  Kate ran a hand through her hair, hit with the sudden thought that maybe this was no random break-in. What if Karl had sent those two thugs to find her?