Nita grimaced, pushing short, straight hair away from her forehead. “I just fired another cook, and Jean-Claude had to go shop for the vegetables. I’m everything—cook, waitress, and desk clerk.”
Stacey pulled out the elastic and shook her dark, waving hair free. “I’ll help. I can wait table and—”
“Not in those clothes,” laughed Nita.
“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll go bath and change, then I can help until Steven comes.”
“Are you eating in?”
“No. Steven called this morning; he wants us to go out. Someone I’m to meet.”
“Well, then, get ready! Make yourself look like a girl who just got engaged. Are you going to have a ring?” Outside, a car door slammed and Nita said, “There’s Jean-Claude. We’ll manage.”
“You’re sure you don’t need help?”
“Positive. Go, make yourself beautiful. Take a cup of wine, sip it in the bathtub.” Nita giggled as she filled a thin-stemmed glass with house wine. “It’ll get you in the right mood.”
The wine was a mistake, decided Stacey as she lay with her eyes closed in the big old bathtub upstairs. The bubbly liquid seemed to take the energy right out of her, and the hot water was draining strength from her bones. She might never get out of this tub.
The knock on the door was rapid, three light raps. “Anastasia?” The voice had a French accent. Jean-Claude, the only person who ever called her by her full name. “Telephone, Anastasia.”
She wrapped herself in a thick bath sheet and tied up her hair with a smaller towel. The couple downstairs were walk-ins who had come for a meal, and the New York couple had checked out this morning, so the upstairs should be deserted. She could hear Jean-Claude’s feet running back down the stairs. He’d be gone to help Nita with the walk-ins. And Steven wouldn’t be home yet, so she was safe enough to go to the phone wearing a towel. Not that it really mattered if Steven did come. He was her fiancée, and the towel went from above her breasts down to her knees.
She picked up the receiver, wondering how it would feel the first time Steven made love to her. Would the warm tingling pleasure of his kiss grow to a gasping passion?
“Hello?” she said, looking down at the trail of wet prints she had made on the hardwood floor. Luckily, tomorrow was Jean-Claude’s day for waxing and running the electric polisher over the upstairs floors.
“Stacey?” Eric’s voice demanded. “You forgot the sailboat.”
“What sailboat?” She was positive she’d completed every one of the work orders Eric gave her.
He rattled off a work order number, and the name of the boat. “It’s a sailboat. VHF radio not transmitting. He’s on C dock at the south harbor. Number eleven.”
“It’s too late now.” She lifted her wrist, but her watch was back in her room. “I’ll get it in the morning.” Saturdays she worked until noon, but adding the sailboat would probably have her working into the afternoon.
Eric made a sound between a groan and a growl. “The man wants to get out of here tomorrow. I promised him you’d be down this afternoon.”
Damn! She’d have to do it.
A sailboat would be clean, so she could change for Steven first. She picked the blue skirt and peasant blouse. The skirt would give her freedom of movement for climbing aboard if the deck was high. If the radio turned out to be anything more than a corroded antenna connection, she would tell him tough luck, sailor, and come back tomorrow morning.
Damn Eric to hell! The man had done this deliberately, waited for her to get home, knowing she had plans for the evening, and then dumping a faked-up rush job on her.
The rain was a light drizzle as she left the lodge and ran for the shelter of her battered blue Mazda truck. Her tool kit was in the locked box in the back. Thankfully she hadn’t taken it back to the shop, so it was just one stop. The south harbor. The sailboat. Then back, and with luck she wouldn’t be more than ten minutes late for Steven.
Steven would be irritated. He wanted her to meet someone. Being late was unforgivable. She frowned and stepped on the accelerator, tearing over the bridge across the harbor entrance as if the demons were after her.
The rain had turned to a torrent by the time she parked at the harbor. No parking spots any closer than F float. She got out the tool box, ducked her head, and ran towards C float, wishing she had worn her running shoes. High heels were killers on a wet dock.
Why hadn’t she thought to bring a jacket? She hunched her shoulders and felt the wet plastering her blouse to her back. It had been sunny for weeks, so she hadn’t stopped to think about the morning’s forecast, or even look at the sky.
This was stupid! She would be shivering all over while she looked at the sailor’s radio; then she’d have to go back and change again for Steven. She was going to be so late that he’d have every right to be furious.
She felt the weight of the rain pulling her hair out of the pins. She had tied it in a twist at the back, pinning it and thinking it would do for the radio call, yet look fancy enough for dinner out. Now water trickled down her neck and around her throat, and she could feel her long fine hair dragging down onto her neck.
“Oh, shoot,” she muttered, grabbing the rail and starting down the ramp. The tide was low, making the ramp steep. She was wearing heels like a city girl who didn’t know better, instead of a fisherman’s daughter who had crawled around boats before she could walk. She stepped down, her toe making contact, then relaxed, letting her heel down.
Her ankle twisted as she put her weight down, the heel of her shoe seeming to pop out from under the shoe. She lost her balance, grabbed wildly for the rail, her tool box swinging out and smashing into the rail with a jolt that went right through her arm and shoulder.
She limped the rest of the way down the ramp, hanging onto the rail as if it were her life line in a storm. When she got to the bottom, she examined her heel and found it twisted, half snapped off. She pulled it the rest of the way off and promised herself that she was going to have a showdown with Eric.
She looked up and saw the sailboat, white and clean, sporting one tall wooden mast. It was the boat from last night, and she almost forgave Eric for this, because it was the sailboat she had watched navigate the channel as Steven asked her to marry him.
As she limped down C pier, she could hear the roar of a machine, louder as she came to the end of the pier. The boat’s name was Whisper, evoking an image of this gleaming white beauty, all sails raised as she slipped through the still waters of a wide ocean.
Whisper’s cockpit door was open. For a second she thought there was a faint cloud of something like smoke coming through the door, but it was only the rain.
“Hello! she shouted. “Ahoy, Whisper?”
No answer. The noise was coming from inside. He wouldn’t hear her, no matter how loud she shouted. She rapped on the hull, hard, then stood, waiting for him to come out. Then the wind twisted and the rain hit her with renewed force. To hell with etiquette! To the devil with the proper calling procedure for a boat. She was going to get inside, under cover.
There was no boarding ladder. She had to climb up and over the gunwales. As she slithered over the broad wooden gunwale, her skirt twisted and clung around her legs. She brushed it down, her eyes following her hands until they stuck.
Oh, no! He must have been varnishing the gunwales before the rain started, and she’d smeared the sticky stuff all over her skirt, all the way from her hip halfway to her hem. Damn Eric!
Then she heard the sound of fabric tearing, felt the pull on her skirt as it caught on a turnbuckle. She gritted her teeth and freed the skirt. It was hanging ragged on the left side now, a great gash in the back of the fabric. She’d be looking like a refugee from the wars by now! Nita would laugh when she told her friend this story.
Stacey landed on the deck and heard a growl or a shout from down below. She ignored it. If sailor boy didn’t like thundering feet overhead, he could darned well answer when she pounded on his hull.
&n
bsp; She started along the side deck to the cockpit, only to be stopped dead by a pile of plastic bags. What the devil? Boards and tins and scraps of foam piled up high. She felt the urge to turf the whole lot overboard, but her good sense was starting to recover by now and she satisfied herself with an unladylike word Steven would have winced at. Then she walked all the way around the front of the wheelhouse. The rain was running down her neck, down inside the front of her pretty embroidered peasant blouse. She stumbled across the raised front deck. It was cluttered with expensive equipment—global positioning system, radar, depth sounder. This was a well-equipped boat, but the decks were littered with traps for the unwary foot. What was this, his spring cleaning? How the devil had he managed to make such a mess in just a few hours in Fort Bragg?
She got into the cockpit and under his canopy, then knocked again. The door was half open, but she couldn’t see in. Her eye was caught by something blowing on his rat lines, and she realized it was a towel. Hung out to dry, but it was too soaking wet now to do her any good.
She knocked again, harder, and was rewarded by a growl that came up on the sound waves. Abruptly, the roaring sound changed, seemed to grow marginally less. In the relative quiet, the wind abruptly caught at the rain and drove icy wetness under the canopy and into her face.
“Hello?” she screamed.
The roaring noise resumed, grew to an angry howl, then stopped. She heard a curse from down below, then a crash. She ducked back just as a cloud of black soot burst through the open doorway.
“Hey, are you all right?” she called out.
An angry shout came back, suggestive of a big, dangerous man. Then another cloud of black smoke, accompanied by a series of curses.
She was darned if she was going down into that black, sooty air. She knocked again.
“What the hell do you want!” He sounded dangerous. “Come on down, I sure the hell can’t—” A resounding crash, then a sound that could easily be a big man falling.
“Are you okay?”
Silence, no answer to her shout.
She stumbled through the doorway and down a short flight of stairs that seemed to go into the black pits of hell. Black everywhere, clouds of blackness. She choked on the thick, sooty air. Had he collapsed, had a heart attack? Was this a fire? She couldn’t smell fire exactly, maybe kerosene or—
Her broken shoe settled onto an uneven surface.
“Hey, watch out—!” The shout made her jerk to a standstill, but it was too late. Her foot came down on the black suction hose of the vacuum cleaner. The hose rolled under her, throwing her off balance entirely, plunging her forward into a horrifying black apparition that loomed out of nowhere.
Midnight-colored, a specter of a face, eyes ringed with soot. Massive black hands reached out, seeking her neck. She fell towards those deadly fingers, and they closed on her shoulders, then her neck.
“Let go of me!” she screamed, but she was tumbling into it. Its arms closed around her as the force of her falling body pushed it back. White teeth gleamed at her as the creature’s mouth opened, then it shouted out, the words harsh and angry and profane. The last thing she saw as they hit the floor was two deep, dark eyes opened wide, the darkness ringed with dead white, the pupils widening with the foretaste of her doom as she was imprisoned in a steel grip.
To purchase
WIND SHIFT
and for more books by Vanessa Grant
visit your favorite online bookstore, or
backlistebooks.com/author/vanessa-grant/
Did you love Angela's Affair? Then you should read Lifelines: Kate's Story by Vanessa Grant!
Kate Taylor hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since her husband David died. It doesn’t help that David’s dog, Socrates, watches her constantly as if he expects her to bring his master back; that her personal life is a series of telephone conversations with her evasive adult daughter and her demanding mother; that working as a family counselor she regularly faces a client named Rachel, a narcissistic woman who evokes Kate’s most painful memories.
Kate is exhausted: tired of coping, tired of listening, tired of life. Then one night on an icy road, she goes into a treacherous skid. A razor’s edge from death, she realizes she wants to live.
She makes plans. She sets goals. She takes a lover. She copes with her daughter’s newest crisis and her mother’s financial foolishness. Then Kate discovers something about Rachel that throws her into an ethical nightmare.
Her career could be destroyed.
… so could her life.
Read more at Vanessa Grant’s site.
Also by Vanessa Grant
Gabriola Island
With Strings Attached
When Love Returns
Think About Love
Latin Legacy
Catalina's Lover
Dance of Seduction
Strangers by Day
Pacific Waterfront Romances
Storm - The Author's Cut
Shadows and Dreams
Jenny's Turn
Stray Lady
It Started With Angus
Make Love, not Music
Awakening Dreams
Wild Passage
Taking Chances
So Much for Dreams
The Touch of Love
Angela's Affair
Wind Shift
Standalone
Seeing Stars
If You Loved Me
The Colors of Love
After All This Time
Seeing Stars
The Broken Gate (Short Story)
Lifelines: Kate's Story
On Johnny's Terms
Yesterday's Vows
Watch for more at Vanessa Grant’s site.
About the Author
Meet Vanessa Grant
“Writing fiction is a perfect life choice for someone like Vanessa Grant who can’t make up her mind what she wants to do when she grows up!”
There are so many choices and I want to do them all. In real life I’ve taken a lot of roads: I’ve studied psychology, volunteered on a crisis line and as a peer counselor for a family life organization, worked as an accountant and a software developer, more recently taught accounting and fraud investigation at a university, and best of all–told stories about life, love, and secrets. In my stories, my heroes and heroines have lived many of the lives I’m fascinated by.
I live with my wonderful husband and two aging-but-energetic Australian Shepherds on Vancouver Island … and every so often we indulge in wanderlust and leave the island to go exploring.
In addition to publication in print, most of my novels have now been released as eBooks for Kindle, Sony, Apple and Kobo as well as other formats. Free samples are available for all my eBook editions.
I love discussing storytelling, books, and the creative process, so don’t hesitate to post a comment on my blog or one of my pages here on the site, or contact me through my Web site at VanessaGrant.com, or on Twitter @Vanessa_Grant
For book listings and links to my books at online retailers, visit BacklisteBooks.com/author/vanessa-grant/
If you’re a writer, feel free to check out my free online database of 60,000 Character Names for Writers on my Web site at VanessaGrant.com.
Read more at Vanessa Grant’s site.
Angela's Affair (Pacific Waterfront Romances, #13) Page 19