“French is Coco’s native language. She still has trouble with English, especially when she’s upset. She meant done in. Killed.”
“Killed or murdered? There’s a difference.”
“The police say Len was killed.”
“But you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.” She tensed, waiting for him to ask why. He didn’t, which surprised her into relaxing just a bit.
“How long had Len been dead when you found him?” Archer asked, keeping his opinion on murder to himself. He would have to examine Len’s body before he decided whether Hannah was smart or paranoid.
“I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“You could try the Territorial Police in Broome, but it’s a waste of time. They’re understaffed, overworked, and had their own cyclone problems to deal with.”
“Where is Len’s body?”
Hannah drew a shaky breath. “In Broome. The cremation is set for tomorrow. Early.”
Archer glanced at his watch. He would have to move quickly if he wanted to see Len. “Do you miss him?”
He shouldn’t have asked. He had no right to the answer. But it was too late to call back the words.
Abruptly Hannah laughed, then pressed her hands over her mouth to push the laughter back down. It was impossible. The thought of missing what Len had become was so horrifyingly absurd it was hysterical.
Archer watched Hannah struggle with her composure, watched her lose, and felt a chill in his gut as her laughter rose and rose, only to crash into sudden silence. Len, what did you do to your innocent, missionary-raised wife?
But that was the one question Archer wouldn’t ask Hannah. He had no right to the answer. He was part of whatever had happened to her.
“I mourn the man I thought I married,” she managed finally, breath breaking. “I mourn the man who could laugh. But that man died seven years ago. I’m through mourning him. The man who took his place, I can’t mourn. He taught me too well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Len came to hate me as much as he loved pearls, and he loved pearls more than my parents loved God. Len taught me not to love him, not to like him, not to care about him at all.” She looked up at Archer with eyes that were as bleak as his own. “If that shocks you, I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t. I knew Len better than you did.” Archer wanted to ask why Hannah had stayed with Len, but he had no right to that answer, either. It had nothing to do with Len’s death. And that was the only reason Archer was here: his half brother’s death.
If he told himself that often enough, maybe the message would sink through his skull all the way to his crotch.
“Why do you think someone killed Len?” Archer asked.
“Pearls,” she said simply.
“Greed?”
“Greed. Money. Power.” Hannah closed her eyes. “Maybe he was killed because someone could, so someone did.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
Hannah went still. It was a question she had asked herself over and over again. She had no answer but the one she gave Archer. “I’m only sure of two things. I didn’t kill him. You didn’t kill him. After that, there’s a whole bloody world of people who hated Len.”
“What makes you think I didn’t kill him?”
“You had no reason.”
Archer looked at her short, sun-streaked hair, spiked by careless combing and shining like a dream. Her lashes were long, thick, the color of bittersweet chocolate, and her eyes were an indescribable color from the dark end of the rainbow. Her lips were too pale, too tight, yet nothing could hide the promise of sensuality in their full curves. As for the rest . . . she was long, slender but for her breasts, even more elegant than his memories.
If he had known how it was going to turn out, he would have fought Len McGarry ten years ago and let hell take the leftovers. But Hannah had watched Len with worshipful eyes, and Archer had told himself that she was what Len needed, that her lush, sweet innocence would heal the breaks in his half brother’s soul.
Remembering his own naïveté, Archer smiled. The curve of his lips was about as comforting as a scythe. No reason to kill Len? “You have no idea how wrong you are, Hannah.”
Her breath stuck in her throat at what she saw in his face. At that moment he reminded her chillingly of Len. Dangerous. Distant. Ruthless.
“But in one thing you’re right,” Archer said. “I didn’t kill Len. Where were you when he died, Mrs. McGarry?”
She met his eyes straight on, as controlled and remote as he was. “I didn’t kill Len.”
“You had a better motive than most.”
“If I wanted his death on my conscience, all I had to do was walk out on him.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hating me kept him alive. Loving pearls almost kept him sane.”
“Almost,” Archer repeated softly, understanding much of what Hannah didn’t say. Even ten years ago, Len had gone off on rages of laughter or drinking or screwing. Or mayhem. “Yet you stayed with him. You’re either very brave or very stupid, Hannah.”
“I’m neither. Life happens one day at a time, like water dripping on stone. You don’t notice the change except over years.” She rubbed her aching eyes. “As for the rest, no one deserves all the good or the bad that comes their way. You just take it the way it comes, one day at a time.”
“Echoes of a missionary upbringing?”
She shrugged and stuffed a slippery piece of hair behind her ear. “I no longer thank God for the good that happens or blame my inborn evil for the bad. I just . . . ” Her voice faded.
“Survive,” Archer finished.
“Yes. What else is there?”
“Everything.”
“For some people, perhaps. Not for me.”
There was no self-pity in Hannah’s voice, no anger. She accepted, and from that acceptance she drew the strength to survive. It hadn’t always been that way. Len had very nearly destroyed her.
“What do you want from life?” Archer asked before he could think better of it.
“What I’ve earned: the Black Trinity. But to find it, I—we—will have to find Len’s murderer. Whoever killed him took the pearls. If you help me find what has been lost, I’ll give you half of whatever we get for it.”
Hearing all that Hannah hadn’t said in the tension of her voice, Archer wondered who else knew about the pearls, who had killed to take them, and who would kill again to keep them.
She rose, gathered plates, and took them to the sink. When she turned, he was watching her, waiting.
“What’s the Black Trinity?” he asked.
“An unstrung triple-strand necklace of black pearls. The whole necklace is worth three million American, wholesale.”
Archer whistled softly through his teeth. “Three million? That would be some necklace. Especially since the Aussies took the steam out of the Tahitian black pearl market when they learned how to make Australia’s huge silver-lipped oysters produce big black pearls.”
“The Black Trinity is worth at least three million,” Hannah said evenly. “The smallest strand is twenty inches long, with twelve-millimeter pearls. The middle strand is twenty-two inches, with fourteen-millimeter pearls. The longest strand is twenty-four inches, with sixteen-millimeter pearls. All of the black pearls are round and color-matched within and across their strand.”
“Luster?”
“Superb. The pearls have a surface that is as close to flawless as nature gets. If nature doesn’t provide it, I try.”
“You’re a pearl doctor?” he asked, surprised. Softly, softly, sanding a pearl down through layer after layer of nacre in the hope of finding a less flawed surface was like rolling dice with the devil. When you lost, you lost it all. It took guts and confidence to peel a pearl as patiently as the oyster had created it in the first place.
“If the stakes are high enough, I doctor pearls,” Hannah said. “It’s rather like sculpting. You remove whatever get
s in the way of the vision. Sometimes your vision is clear and you end up with something beautiful. Sometimes you end up with a pile of sawdust.”
Soapy sponge in hand, she began washing the lunch dishes. The food had helped her physically. Her hands were much more sure. Not that it mattered. Her dishes were the high-tech kind that could be shot from a canon without taking a scratch.
Archer watched, thinking about Len and pearls, greed and obsession, cruelty and accident. Len had loved pearls, but only one kind of pearl had obsessed him enough to make him take crazy risks. “What shade of black?”
For the first time Hannah hesitated. Once she told him, she wasn’t certain she would be able to trust him. But she didn’t really have any choice. If she went after the murderer alone, she would end up like Len, facedown in the warm, pitiless sea.
“The Black Trinity’s pearls are every color of the rainbow, all at once,” she said flatly. “Red, green, blue, gold, all of it gleaming under a clear black surface, like liquid gemstones under black ice.”
“So he did succeed. I assumed he had, but I never saw the proof of it.”
Swiftly Hannah turned toward Archer. Her eyes were wary. She was very much afraid that she had just invited the wolf to dine with, and possibly on, the lamb. “You knew about the black rainbows?”
“I knew Len found an extraordinary pearl in Kowloon. I knew he was determined to discover where it came from, no matter who got hurt. I assumed he had found what he wanted, put it to work, and kept the results to himself. It would be like him.”
Breath trickled out of her lungs in a hidden sigh. “Len found out where that first black rainbow came from. Then he found out how to culture more.”
“No surprise there,” Archer said. “Len could have pried secrets out of the Sphinx.”
The casual tone of Archer’s voice disarmed Hannah. “Do you want to know the secret?” she asked, curious.
“What will it cost me?”
Oddly, his answer reassured her. She had seen enough envy, enough obsession to possess, enough plain greed, to recognize their presence at a glance. Archer was interested, but he wasn’t avid.
Even so, she hesitated. It was one thing to know your life was at risk. It was another to simply hand over the means of your own destruction.
“It won’t cost you a cent,” Hannah said, her voice low. “I don’t know the secret of producing the rainbow pearls.” She took a broken breath, let it go. “And if the vultures circling around Pearl Cove discover my ignorance, I suspect that my life won’t be worth a handful of broken shell.”
This time Archer couldn’t resist offering some comfort, however small. Gently he put his right hand on her cheek. Her skin was cool, too cool. On some cellular level, Hannah was running on empty. But there was nothing he could do about that right now.
He had an urgent appointment with a dead man.
“Can you stay awake for a few more hours?” he asked.
She shivered and raised her chin. “Of course. The children will help.”
“Children?”
“When I have time, I teach English to some of the workers’ children.”
He almost smiled. For a few hours, kids would be as good as an armed bodyguard protecting Hannah. “I’ll leave when the kids get here and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Where are you going?”
“Broome.”
Hannah didn’t ask why. She knew.
Len McGarry.
Five
Before Hannah called the children, someone knocked on the front door. Reflexively Archer stepped to the side and stood deep in the shadows, invisible against the brilliance of the light outside.
Uncertain, Hannah looked at him. He jerked his head, silently telling her to answer the door. She went through the front door, crossed the verandah in a few steps, and opened the screen door that offered a thin, useful shield against the blazing light.
“Christian,” she said, surprised. She noted the cuts, scrapes, and bruises on his arms. Fighting with sunken oyster cages wasn’t easy work. “Is something wrong?”
“Hello, luv.” Christian Flynn looked her over thoroughly. Cutoff jeans, a tank top the color of a peach, and full lips to match. Eyes a blue so deep it slid off into purple. Breasts that would just fill a big man’s hands. Bare, narrow, arched feet. “Pretty as a pearl. How do you do it?”
“I sleep with oysters.”
She retreated across the verandah into the relative coolness of the house. He followed her without waiting to be asked. His sandals made faint slapping sounds just behind her heels. With his tall, athletic body, quick grin, and rugged Outback blond looks, he went through women like a home-grown Australian flu.
Hannah found Flynn almost amusing, as long as he wasn’t turning those cobalt blue eyes in her direction. Of course, there could be another, more sinister reason that Flynn was watching her with predatory interest. Two days ago he had offered to find a buyer for Pearl Cove. She had refused.
The thought that she might be in danger from the genial Aussie made Hannah’s stomach twist, so she concentrated on doing what she was good at: keeping a man at arm’s length without making an enemy of him.
“You want your usual mud tea?” she asked neutrally, leading Flynn away from the front door and toward the kitchen. “Or are you ready for a beer?”
“Tea or beer, whatever is cold.”
“Is something wrong?” she asked again. “More injuries?”
“Nothing new. I came to see how you are.”
“She’s fine,” Archer said from behind them. With a smooth, balanced movement, he stepped out of the shadows by the front door. “Anything else on your mind?”
Flynn spun around, half crouched in a fighting stance, weight poised on the balls of his feet. The sight of a big, handsome, confident male in Hannah’s house made the Aussie’s blue eyes narrow. “Who the devil are you?”
“Hannah’s partner,” Archer said calmly. He hadn’t missed the automatic movements of someone trained in unarmed combat. Beneath that charming grin and shoulder-length, sun-bleached hair lurked a fighter. Archer knew how bad his mood was when the thought of testing the young Aussie’s fighting skills appealed to him.
“Partner!” Flynn’s head snapped around toward Hannah. “Did you sell to this bloke?”
“No. Mr. Donovan has been a partner in Pearl Cove since it was founded.” She looked at Archer. “This is Christian Flynn. He manages the water end of Pearl Cove.”
“Len never mentioned a partner,” Flynn said. His voice was even less welcoming than his expression.
Archer just stood there, taking in the good-looking, angry Australian. He wondered why Len had put up with having the muscular young stud around Hannah. Len hadn’t wanted Archer within seventeen thousand miles of his wife, and had said so in words that still echoed bleakly deep in Archer’s mind.
Get the hell out of my life and stay out. All the way out. You think you can have her now that I’m paralyzed, but you’re wrong. You come near her and I’ll get even. Not with you. With her.
At the time Archer had told himself it was just the drugs, just the fear, just the rage of a newly paralyzed man speaking. He had tried to get through to Len, to reassure him that he had no intention of seducing Hannah. All he wanted to do was help his brother.
Len hadn’t listened. The harder Archer tried, the more wild Len become. So Archer did as his brother asked. He got the hell out of Len’s life. All the way out.
“There was no reason to talk about having a partner,” Hannah said warily, sensing the currents of tension coiling between the two men. “Archer wasn’t an active partner.”
Something shifted in Flynn’s stance. “Archer? Would that be Archer Donovan?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Bloody hell,” Flynn muttered. Anybody who knew anything about buying pearls had heard of Archer Donovan. The man was a legend. He had a shrewd understanding of pearls, people, and the marketplace. Unhappily Flynn kneaded his neck with
his left hand while he thought about how Archer’s presence changed an already fluid situation. None of the possibilities made him smile. But he turned to Archer anyway, smiled, and held out his right hand. “Sorry if I was rude, mate. I’m short on sleep. After the big wind, things are a right bitch around here.”
Archer smiled from the teeth out and took the other man’s hand. “No worries. I’m short on sleep, too.”
The ridges of callus on Flynn’s hand told Archer a lot about the other man’s training. Whether he could put that training to effective use in face-to-face combat remained an open question.
The sudden flare of speculation in Flynn’s eyes told Archer that his own calluses had been noted.
“How long before Pearl Cove is up and running?” Archer asked, distracting the other man.
Flynn looked sideways at Hannah. She was watching Archer. It rankled the Aussie.
“I don’t know,” he said carefully. “We had just moved the newly implanted oysters to the grow-out areas. Some of those rafts broke loose and sank. We repaired the floats and lines and have been stringing up the cages as fast as we find them. We’re losing shell, though. Too much jigging around.”
“How much of this year’s shell is a total loss?”
Again Flynn looked uneasily at Hannah.
“Tell him,” she said without looking away from Archer.
“Sixty-five percent. Maybe more.”
“How much more?” Archer asked.
“Worst case?” Flynn asked.
Archer smiled like a wolf. “It’s the only case that matters, isn’t it?”
“Ninety-five percent,” Flynn said.
Hannah made a harsh sound. She had been told fifty-five percent loss, sixty percent tops.
“Total loss, in other words,” Archer summarized.
Flynn hesitated, looked at Hannah’s drawn face, and wished Archer Donovan was the kind of man who could be intimidated into not asking uncomfortable questions.
“It could be a write-off,” Flynn admitted finally. “Frankly, we’re not recovering as many of the rafts as we hoped.”
“Why?”
Archer’s cool, neutral question made Flynn wish that Hannah’s partner was someone else. Anyone else. He was certain his bosses would feel the same way. The cyclone had seemed like such a perfect solution to a sodding impossible problem.
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