To the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “You sure you need more pictures of me at my computer?” Travis asked, watching Cat narrowly. “Why don’t we laze around on the beach instead?”

  Though they had spent most of the night asleep in his big bed with a humid, almost tropical breeze flowing over their skin, this morning Cat looked ghostly to Travis. Her rich auburn hair was startling against her pale skin. She was as unexpected as a flame burning in the center of cotton candy—in this case, his cousin’s wallpaper in the room he had taken over as his office.

  Even though Travis fed Cat every time he thought of it, he was certain she had lost weight. Not much. A few pounds. Just enough to remind him how close to the end of her physical resources she was.

  It haunted him. He wanted to make life simpler for her, easier; yet everything he did just complicated it. It took time to eat. Time to sleep. Time to laugh. Time to love. And time to work. That most of all.

  Cat needed more sleep than Travis did, yet when he got up for his dawn swim, he was alone. He would look out the window and see lights burning in the house across the ravine, lights throwing pale rectangles of yellow into the predawn darkness. When he finished his swim and was ready for breakfast, he would have to go next door and drag her away from her light table or her dunning letters or her files. He would make a big breakfast and watch her eat a quarter of what he ate, no matter how much he coaxed and teased and spoon-fed her.

  Travis no longer counted the times he bit his tongue against offering Cat the money she so obviously needed. The best he had managed in the way of help was sneaking off to the supermarket and stocking up her refrigerator and cupboards while she was out shooting corporate lions and making babies smile for Mommy. Although she had said nothing about it, he was certain that the Big Check from Energistics hadn’t come, which meant she had been forced to find other sources of cash.

  Work and more work. Small jobs that were only stopgap measures, an effort to stay afloat until she had some other kind of luck than bad.

  Though Travis waited, not once had Cat asked him for help paying bills. He knew she would make a nice bit of money when she finished his book, but she was taking too much time on it. Time she should have spent sleeping or sorting slides or simply doing nothing at all. He suspected that the extra hours and days she put into his book was her way to be with him, squeezing precious time out of her relentless schedule.

  “Cat?” Travis brushed his palm over her cheek. “Where are you?”

  She blinked, banished the empty, sinking feeling, and smiled up into beautiful tourmaline eyes. With a sigh, she kissed the broad palm that was caressing her. Travis was right here, within reach, touching her. There was no need to think about the future when he would be gone and there would be nothing but work and more work and solid ground dissolving beneath her feet, leaving her adrift, slowly spinning.

  No reason to borrow unhappiness from tomorrow. It would come soon enough.

  “Just planning my shots,” Cat said, focusing on the here and now. “Do you have some drawings you wouldn’t mind having made public? Stuff that’s already patented?”

  “I keep my old drawings on a hard disk,” Travis said, gesturing toward a box of multigigabyte disks that sat on the floor next to his computer. “What do you need?”

  “Real paper. It’s hard to photograph bytes.”

  Travis smiled and tugged lightly on a lock of Cat’s hair. “I have a printer.”

  “That does drawings?”

  He nodded.

  “Good,” Cat said. “Find me a drawing that’s simple, elegant, and mysterious without being alien to a layman.”

  “Swear to God, Cochran, you’re hard to please.”

  “You’ve been talking to Harrington again.”

  “He’s fussing around me like a mother hen,” Travis admitted.

  “Why?”

  “He’s wondering if I’m going to get in the wind before the book is done, but he’s too canny to ask outright.”

  It was an effort, but Cat managed to keep her smile in place. “Harrington’s nothing if not canny.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I told him?” Travis asked softly.

  Cat didn’t want to know when she would lose the only man she had ever loved, but she kept her voice casual as she bent over and rummaged in one of her camera cases.

  “Sure,” she said. “What did you tell Harrington?”

  “That I wasn’t going anywhere until I could talk a certain redheaded witch into sailing off to the ends of the earth with me.”

  Cat’s heart turned over with a longing that made her ache. If only that was true. If only Travis would wait for me until January.

  “Well, sailor,” she said lightly, “in that case you’re going to be in port for quite a while. It’s about this book I’m working on. . . .”

  A book she would find a way to continue working on until January, at least. But she wasn’t going to say that aloud. She would take one day at a time. And one night.

  “Now you’ve got it,” Travis drawled.

  “I do?”

  “Yeah. Pack up your gear. We’ll set sail and you can take pictures for the book until your camera melts or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.”

  Temptation prickled over Cat, a yearning so great that she shivered with it. “There’s a small problem,” she said in a low voice.

  “Just one? Go pack. The problem is solved.”

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “Have faith in your pirate.”

  “Even pirates can’t develop film at sea,” Cat said, smiling sadly, silently begging Travis to understand that she still wasn’t free to put her hand in his and step into the wind.

  “So develop film when we get ashore,” he said.

  “Sorry. Doesn’t work that way. Foreign film developers are dicey, at best. You ruin more rolls than you keep.”

  “Okay. We’ll send them back here.”

  “Snail mail,” Cat said, keeping her voice cheerful. “Too slow. I have to know which images fly and which die, and I have to know in time to get more of what’s needed.”

  Travis bit down on the anger and restlessness that surged up out of nowhere. He wanted Cat more than anything on earth. She wanted him more than any woman ever had.

  But not enough.

  “What about a digital camera?” he suggested neutrally. “You can see an exact preview of each shot. You can store the images in a computer, call up one of my programs, and play with the image any way you want. Don’t like the contrast? Change it. Don’t want the clouds? Delete them. Focus sucks? Fix it. Presto. Welcome to the miraculous world of photography in the twenty-first century.”

  “When I get there, I’ll welcome it. Digital is moving up on my must-have list.”

  “What if I bought a digital camera?”

  In the abrupt silence, each of them could hear the bold rhythm of a wave coming apart on the shore. Light dimmed and then redoubled as a cloud whipped across the path of the sun. The storms off of Mexico had been flirting with Southern California for weeks.

  “I didn’t know you were into photography,” Cat said, smiling carefully. But her eyes were the cool gray of pewter.

  “Just one of my many interests,” Travis muttered. He raked a hand through his hair and turned away before he said something he would regret. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Lunch.”

  “We just had breakfast.”

  “So who appointed you to the Meal Police? Besides, that was hours ago. You need more food.”

  Cat started to protest, then decided not to. If she told him she was too tired to eat, he would find some way to get her in bed early and keep her in bed late. As much as she would have enjoyed that, she simply didn’t have the time.

  At least Travis had dropped the topic of a shockingly expensive digital camera. And they hadn’t argued about money this time.

  Progress. Definitely.

  January, Cat thought with a combination of fear and hope. We c
an make it until January. Then I’ll put my hand in his and step into the wind.

  But all she said aloud was, “What do you think of shrimp salad and fresh rolls?”

  “As a nibble, fine. I had lunch in mind.”

  “Dare I ask?”

  “Enchiladas, quesadillas, burritos, and tacos. In no particular order.”

  “The stomach churns.”

  “The stomach needs food,” Travis shot back. “C’mon. Jason told me about this really fantastic Mexican place his dad took him to before he flew off back east.”

  “Jason is gone?” Cat asked, startled.

  “No. His dad. That’s the first sign, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “Malnutrition,” Travis said, sliding an arm around Cat’s narrow waist. “Your thought processes fry.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Uh-oh. That’s the next stage. Starvation. We’d better hurry.”

  Laughing, Cat put her arm around Travis’s waist. She could always make up for time lost at lunch by slipping out of bed even earlier than usual tomorrow.

  Or not sleeping at all.

  The phone woke Travis up. As usual, he was alone in the big bed with its fussy lace sheets and pink satin pillows. Groaning, he looked at the clock.

  Three A.M.

  Three! When did Cat leave? he wondered with a combination of irritation and anger.

  The phone kept ringing.

  And who would call at this hour?

  There was one way to find out. Travis snatched the pink receiver and snarled a word into it.

  “Ah, there’s the sweet boy I know and love,” Harrington said dryly.

  “What the hell do you want at this hour?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “That explains it. You’re surly because Fire-and-Ice had enough of your piratical charm and left you to stew in your own rude juices.”

  Travis smiled and yawned. “Cat is next door, trying to cope with that damned gallery’s demands. Can you believe it? Swift and Sons asks for sixteen images originally, she sends them, and then they up it to twenty-two. So she busts her ass and makes up the extra. Then they demand a total of forty-six and an exclusive contract for—”

  “Yo, Danvers, this is me, remember?” Harrington interrupted. “The agent for the photographer in question.”

  “Some agent. You’re killing her.”

  “A showing like this is a watershed in an artist’s career,” Harrington said simply. “They moved her from one of the side galleries on the second level to the main floor. Not just one room. Three. She’s the whole thing, Travis. Not just a sideshow.”

  “Then they should send someone out to help her put it all together.”

  “Does that mean you finally have someone to help you put together your designs?”

  “Of course not. Of all the lamebrained . . .” Travis’s voice trailed off into a sigh. “Hell. I really walked into that. I must still be asleep.”

  “Where’s Cochran?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “It’s too dark for photography, so I assumed I would catch both of you, um, at home.”

  “You’re half right. What’s up—besides me?”

  “Just wanted to see how things were going,” Harrington said casually.

  “Things are going fine.”

  “Everything on schedule?”

  Instead of answering, Travis scratched his beard thoughtfully, then the hair on his chest. He might wake up slowly without the help of a good swim, but he did wake up.

  Harrington wanted something.

  Travis had an idea of what it was.

  “Seems like it,” Travis said. “Dawn is starting to take a big bite out of night. The tropical storm that has been churning around off Mexico is slowly dying. The warm El Niño ocean and big waves had made a lot of surfers happy this summer. Temperature is—”

  “Much as I hate to interrupt your riveting little weather report, I do have important things to do. Combing my hair comes immediately to mind.”

  “Go for it. Should I tell Cat to call you?”

  “Does that mean you’re still speaking?”

  “To you?” Travis asked innocently.

  “Swear to God, Danvers, you’d piss off a saint! Are things fine between you and Cat?”

  Travis smiled grimly. “I thought you’d get down to it.”

  “I did. Why don’t you?”

  “Things are just fine.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s your question, not mine. What does fine mean?”

  The next silence gave Travis plenty of time to enjoy dawn slowly consuming the night.

  “If things are so bloody fine between the two of you,” Harrington said coolly, “why is she working so hard?”

  “Money.”

  “Then give her more,” Harrington snarled. “God knows you can afford it.”

  “She won’t take one penny.”

  “What? Then how has she survived? Energistics hasn’t paid and that mealymouthed poet is taking forever choosing the pictures—excuse me, soul images—for his book. Tuition is coming due and Cat’s dear mother just spent a fortune on her trousseau!”

  Travis didn’t say anything.

  “Not a penny?” Harrington asked after a moment.

  “Not one.”

  “What happened to your rule about women?”

  “I broke it, just like Cat broke her rule about combining business and pleasure.”

  “Broke it. Swear to God. Amazing. What next?”

  “That’s the whole show,” Travis said evenly. “We’re two responsible adults and we’re enjoying the hell out of each other.”

  “What about the future?”

  Travis went still. He didn’t like thinking about the future. He liked talking about it even less. “What about it?”

  “Cat isn’t like your other women,” Harrington said.

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Stop pushing me, Harrington.”

  “After you answer my question.”

  “I can’t,” Travis said simply.

  The sun was halfway across the afternoon when Travis and Cat emerged from his cabin on Wind Warrior.

  “I knew you had enough time for a nap,” he said, tracing her cheek with his fingertips.

  “Nap, huh? Is that what we were doing?”

  “Eventually.”

  Casually Travis looked out over the water and smiled rather grimly. The Zodiac was tied at the pier, as he had ordered. Everyone was ashore. They had orders not to come back until evening. He didn’t like having to scheme like a teenager just to be alone with his woman, but he was getting good at it.

  And like a teenager, he was getting good at pretending tomorrow would never come.

  In order to be with Cat, Travis had turned himself into her assistant. When she went to photographic assignments, he was there. He not only carried her heavy camera bags, he began to anticipate her needs, handing her a piece of equipment before she could ask for it.

  The first time that had happened she simply stared at him and whispered, What did I ever do without you? His answer had been as swift as it was fierce. The same thing I did without you—go through life not knowing what the hell I was missing.

  Travis didn’t know how much longer he could go on juggling his professional demands, his hunger to be at sea, and his consuming need to be with Cat. He only knew he didn’t want to find out. He didn’t want that ultimate tomorrow to come.

  “Where is everyone?” Cat asked, looking around the deserted ship.

  “Shore leave,” he said laconically.

  “What about us?”

  “If it’s urgent, we’ll just have to swim.”

  Cat yawned and stretched languidly, feeling boneless from Travis’s loving and a long, wonderful nap. “Swim? Ha. I’d go down like a brick. Looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  Trav
is tilted her face up and kissed her swiftly. “Remember that, witch. You’re mine.”

  Her eyes widened into misty silver pools. She looked up at him through dense lashes that glinted red and gold.

  He smiled.

  “You really are a pirate, aren’t you?” Cat muttered.

  “Where you’re concerned, yes.”

  The sensual rasp in Travis’s voice sent echoes of ecstasy shimmering through her. His smile was rakish and utterly male, reminding her of what it was like to have him deep inside her.

  It was all Cat could do not to simply stand and stare at her lover. In the slanting afternoon light his eyes had a jewel-like purity of color. His skin was taut, deeply bronzed, and his beard was spun from dark gold. Beneath his faded black T-shirt and casual shorts, his body radiated ease and power.

  “Don’t move,” Cat ordered, heading back to the cabin.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t move!”

  She raced below deck, grabbed the two camera cases she used most often, and ran back on deck. While Travis watched her with a lazy, sexy gleam in his eyes, she pulled out a camera and a small telephoto lens. When she retreated a few feet back along the deck, he moved as though to follow.

  “No,” she said. “Stay right where you are. You’re perfect.”

  “Cat,” he said, amusement curling in his voice, “what are you doing?”

  “Taking pictures of an off-duty buccaneer.”

  The motor drive surged quickly, pulling frame after frame of film through the camera.

  “You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the Wind Warrior,” Travis pointed out.

  “I am. You’re part of the ship. The most important part. Creator, owner, soul.”

  She caught the sudden intensity of his expression, an elemental recognition of her words. The motor drive whirred in response to her command. After a few more frames she lowered the camera and walked back to him.

  “Get used to looking into a camera lens,” Cat warned Travis. “I’ve been itching to photograph you since the first time I looked into those gorgeous, sea-colored eyes of yours.”

  Laughing softly, he snaked one arm around her and pulled her snugly against his side. Together they walked the deck of the ship from bow to stern and back again, talking about the book project. Energy and ideas bubbled through her.