He turned, ready to band the claws, and found Emma a step ahead of him, using the banding tool to apply the elastic rubber band to the lobster in her gloved grasp. It wasn’t easy work. Or for the queasy or fearful. It took her a bit longer than it would have taken him, but she’d mastered the skill faster than he had his first time out.
“I can do that,” he said. “You should rest.…”
“I can do it, too, Chris. I need to stay busy—if I just sit here I feel worse. And besides, you need to be steering this thing to the next stop. You’re not going to have time to get all your work done before the sun goes down.”
“You amaze me,” he told Emma, watching her for a second.
She wrinkled her forehead. “Why? Because I can learn a new skill?” She grunted as she wrestled with another lobster.
“No. Because you puke and pop right back up,” he said. “You spend twenty-five years looking for your sister and still have the ability to believe that she might be alive. Do you ever give up?”
“Oh, no, you don’t, buddy.” Emma repositioned the lobster, which had almost slipped from the clasp she had around his claws. “I give up,” she answered him in the next breath. “Ask Rob. I gave up on him.”
Dropping the banded lobster in the bin, Emma moved on to the next one.
And Chris moved on, too. She was right; he was behind schedule.
* * *
THERE WAS A missed call from Rob on Emma’s cell phone when she returned to shore late Sunday afternoon. There was one from Cal, too. She had aches and pains in every place her body had sensation. Her arms and shoulders throbbed, her ribs cried out every time she moved. And even though she’d been wearing gloves, the lobster pinches had still managed to bruise a couple of her fingers.
“I stink,” she announced, dropping her phone back into her purse. Shower first, then voice mail. Right after Chris sold his catch and took care of the rest of his business at the dock.
“You want to head straight back to your place as soon as I’m done here?”
She wanted to head straight to bed with him. “Yes, please. I thought I’d make a big Caesar salad with French bread for dinner tonight. How does that sound?”
As soon as the question left her mouth, she realized how much it sounded as if they were an old married couple and she promptly lost her appetite. Hopefully her call from Rob would garner Ramsey whatever information he needed so that she and Chris could end this charade.
“How about fresh lobster salad?” he called from the deck of the boat.
Right. They’d just come back with a full cargo of lobster. “I don’t know how to prepare lobster.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to make dinner together.”
Emma started to shake—and she wasn’t the least bit cold. She was petrified. The man wanted to cook with her.
Which was her idea of a perfect date.
* * *
“HEY, MILLER, I’VE got your results.”
Another possible victim of Walters’s.
Looking up from his desk, Ramsey studied the face of the forensic scientist coming toward him. Shawn was a good kid. A hard worker. Based in the Boston lab, Shawn didn’t complain about the extra hours Ramsey caused for him in Comfort Cove. Ramsey’s biggest problem with the guy was his fear that Shawn hero-worshipped him.
For a scientist, the kid sure was slow to discover that Ramsey’s feet were made of clay.
Right now, Shawn didn’t appear to have discovered anything. His face was a blank slate.
The back of Ramsey’s neck tensed.
With one last glance at the skinny, bespectacled young man, he reached for the folder Shawn held out, opened it and read.
There’d been another positive identification of victims’ belongings found in Peter Walters’s basement.
At four o’clock on Sunday, Ramsey Miller tucked a stack of folders under his arm and left the office.
* * *
“EMMA, BABE, PLEASE call me back. It’s important.” Waiting in Chris’s truck while he conducted his business with Manny, Emma punched the button to save Rob’s voice-mail message and listened for the second new message to play.
“Hi, Em, it’s Cal. Great news about Claire. Great news. Please call when you can. Morgan wants to meet you. We were thinking about taking a trip up to Comfort Cove during fall break. Call me.”
She listened to Cal’s message a second time with tears in her eyes. It was so hard to believe that she had her big brother back after twenty-five years. Someone who’d known her before Claire was taken, someone who was there that horrible day that changed their lives for eternity.
* * *
“ROB CALLED,” EMMA said as Chris climbed into his truck, holding their wrapped dinner in his hand.
His gaze shot to her face, trying to get a read on her emotional state. “What did he say?”
“Nothing. He just asked me to call, said it was important.”
“He didn’t sound agitated, or upset?”
“Nope.” Emma’s ponytail swung from side to side as she shook her head. “He sounded completely normal. It was pretty much like every other call I’ve had from him in the past three weeks.”
That glorious hair was his downfall. If she’d just cut it off he’d be fine.
“Did you call him back yet?”
“No, and I don’t intend to.”
“Good. Miller said if Rob contacted you to call him before you did anything.”
“Detective Miller also said to act normal, to do what I’d normally do, so as not to tip off Rob.”
“So what would you normally do?”
She shrugged. “He’s been calling for three weeks now. And for three weeks I’ve been ignoring him. It’s going to frustrate him more if I continue to ignore him. We need him to think he’s lost all hold on me.”
She was right. And he should have reached the same conclusion.
“But you’re still checking in with Miller, right?”
Pushing the speed-dial button on her phone, Emma did as Chris asked. Miller agreed with her that the best defense was to ignore Rob’s call.
And so they were off to her place.
Chris had packed a change of clothes the night before, and almost wished he hadn’t. Wished he had an excuse to go back to his own house, even if he couldn’t stay.
* * *
ALMOST AS IF they’d had some tacit agreement, Emma faced her room at the top of the stairs and Chris pointed in the direction of the spare bathroom. “You said you have towels in there?” he asked, his overnight bag in his hand.
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs, then.”
They weren’t showering together. They couldn’t. It was entirely too intimate—more intimate than sex, even.
But the idea of running a washcloth all over Chris’s body, of having him standing before her so that she could see every part of him at once, had Emma reaching for the cold-water tap.
She made sure to check that she had clean sheets on her spare bed, too.
Chris was already in the kitchen, a pot of water on the stove, the two-pound lobster in the sink behind him, when Emma came downstairs.
“Do you have to cut its head off or remove the shell before you cook it?” she asked, staring into the open eyes of the critter.
“Nope. I’ve already scrubbed it. Now we’re just waiting for the water to boil.”
“You cook it live?”
“
Yeah.”
“That seems cruel.”
“It’s the only way I’ve ever seen it done,” Chris said. “It’s how the great chefs cook them in the best restaurants. And the crustaceans’ ability to feel pain is up for debate. As human beings we tend to humanize all organisms when, in fact, a lobster has no central nervous system and therefore no ability to process a thought, or any sense of pain. On the flip side, some studies have suggested that even low-level organisms react negatively to certain stimuli, so maybe they do feel something.”
Oh.
Chris was watching her, a small grin on his face.
“The water’s boiling,” she said.
“So it is.” Turning, he picked up the lobster and held it above the pot. “We put it in headfirst because lobsters have a habit of whipping their tails, and you don’t want it to splash boiling water all over you.”
In a matter of seconds the crustacean was submerged. Chris put the lid on the pot. “It’ll be ready to eat in ten minutes or so.”
“How do you know when it’s done?”
“When its shell is completely red and the meat is white with no translucency.”
He looked so at home in the kitchen that Emma wanted to kiss him. She buried her head in the refrigerator instead. “I’d better get busy,” she said, pulling out lettuce and cucumber, celery, onion and any other fresh vegetables she could find. She needed to occupy her hands. She had a fourth entry for her journal. I want to have great sex with the man I marry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DINNER WAS GOOD. The company was good. Too good. Once they’d finished their meal and cleared away the dishes, they relocated to the living room, ostensibly to choose a movie from Emma’s extensive collection of DVDs to entertain them until bedtime.
Thinking he’d let her do the honors, Chris settled onto one end of the couch, and realized he wasn’t quite finished with the last topic they’d been discussing. “You light up when you talk about your students,” he said.
Emma sank onto the other end of the couch. “Really?” she said, a strange smile on her face. “I mean, I know that the classroom is where I need to be. I love teaching.”
“And the girl you were talking about. The one whose uncle you don’t trust. Does she ever call you like she says she will?”
“She hasn’t, but I haven’t seen any evidence that her uncle’s actually done anything, either. His temper scares her. He throws things. But so far he hasn’t hurt her. Still, she’s a sensible girl and if she’s afraid, there’s probably cause. I’ve reported my concerns to the guidance counselor and principal at the school, and they’ve spoken with her mother. From there I can only hope and pray that she’ll call me if anything happens.”
“I don’t think there were teachers like you when I was a kid.”
“I’m sure there were. You probably just didn’t ignite their protective instincts being the strong, self-sufficient guy you are.”
He shifted, crossing his ankle over his knee.
“Yeah, well, from what I remember there were books to read, lectures, homework and tests. Period.”
“Do you think you’d have stayed in school if you hadn’t been bored?”
He hadn’t said he’d been bored. “Maybe. Didn’t make much sense to me to waste days sitting inside when I could be out making money.”
“And your father agreed with you?”
“No. It was one of the few times he was truly disappointed in me. He threatened to keep me off the boat, but I gambled on the fact that I knew him better than that and quit, anyway. There wasn’t anything he could do about it. I was sixteen.”
“How long did he keep you off the boat?”
How did she know he’d gambled and lost? “Six months.”
“And how old were you when you regretted your choice?”
“What are you, psychic?”
“Nooo. But I’m paid to be observant.”
He quirked a smile at her. “I was twenty-three. And before you tell me what I did next…I got my GED followed by a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in business in night school. It took me nearly ten years.”
Her eyes wide, she gaped at him. “You’re kidding!”
“What, you didn’t think a fisherman could be university-educated?”
“No, I guess I just didn’t expect it. I mean, it’s not like college was going to make you any better at what you do.”
“It did, though. I doubled my income the first couple of years out of school through better management and record keeping. And by selling directly to the consumer. I met Don Carmine, the owner of Citadel’s, when I was in school. He had this idea to open up a restaurant and have me supply his fresh lobster.”
“Cody told me about that.”
He nodded, and then said, “I was engaged once, too.”
Her shock was palpable. “You were? I thought you were a confirmed bachelor!” She sounded almost accusing. Or hurt. As though he’d lied to her.
“So there’s something about me you don’t know. Sara is part of the reason I’m a confirmed bachelor,” he said. “We met in high school. Growing up with a philandering mother, and a father who worked sixteen hours a day every day, I was a pretty serious kid. Sara made me laugh.”
“You asked her to marry you because she made you laugh?”
“No. I asked her to marry me because she was my best friend. She still is a good friend—until you, she was my only real friend.”
“Is she here in town?” Emma sounded interested. And something else, too. Something different.
But he knew better than to think that she could be jealous. It wasn’t Emma’s way. And they had no future together.
Shaking his head, he told her about Sara’s husband, Jeff, their daughter, Lily, and their home in South Carolina.
“Sara broke off our engagement after a pregnancy scare,” he told her, making certain—just in case it had been jealousy he’d detected—that Emma knew without a doubt they could not have a future together. “I was horrified when she told me she was afraid she was pregnant. I was twenty-two. I didn’t handle the situation very well. But the truth is, I feel the same way today as I did back then. The thought of having a child, of the responsibility that comes with it, the time and commitment kids take, does not sit well with me. I think of my childhood, of the times my father wasn’t there, and I think how like him I am and…”
“It’s okay, Chris. Don’t worry so much.”
The words—spoken for the umpteenth time—didn’t ease his tension any.
“You got any other broken hearts out there?” she asked, her voice light. And her smile—her smile made him hungry all over again.
Which made him cantankerous. He had to stop this.
“Did you start your period today?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you getting the least bit worried about that?”
She met his gaze openly. “Not really.”
His mother had been able to lie to him while looking him straight in the eye.
“How can you not be? You had unprotected sex and we know you have higher than normal levels of HCG in your system.”
“I’m not late enough to worry,” she said. “If it wasn’t for your fears, I probably wouldn’t even have called the doctor.”
Her attitude was frustrating. Their whole lives were at stake and she wanted him not to worry?
“I’ve heard of women being in their fourth month of pregnancy without knowing they were pregnant. It
’s not like you get a memo sent up through your bloodstream.”
“If I went four months without a period, I’d know.”
Nothing she said calmed the panic growing inside him.
Chris felt a lot older than her all of a sudden.
“You were violently ill today. Even with the patch.”
“I was seasick.”
She’d pegged him right—intuited things that he hadn’t told her about himself—but even people who were perceptive couldn’t see themselves in an unbiased light.
And Emma wasn’t giving him any indication that she was seeing this situation with any clarity at all.
“You had one of the worst cases of seasickness I’ve seen. It could have been a combination sickness.”
Emma stood. “Look, Chris, if you want to drive yourself crazy worrying, then there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But I’m not going to join you. I have plenty of real things to worry about right now.”
“You know, don’t you? You know whether or not you’re pregnant.”
“I told you all along that I don’t think I am.”
“Then let’s go get another test. Take it tonight.”
“We had a deal. I’m going for a blood test as soon as my doctor returns. There’s no point in taking another home test. It’s likely that the result will be the same. I haven’t started my period so my HCG levels will still be high.”
Was she evading the truth? Burying her head in the sand because she was afraid? As if hiding from it could change the facts.
He’d learned the art from his mother; women with something to hide were evasive.
“You wouldn’t do something crazy like plan to have my child without letting me know about it, would you?”
She whirled on him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t think you’re being honest with me. I’m just trying to figure out why. By your own admission, your mother wouldn’t be able to handle you dating a man from the docks so I’m doubly sure she’d have a problem with you being pregnant by one of us. It would be a repeat of her mistake, right? And, by your own admission, you do everything you can to keep your mother free from worry.”
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