Nerd in Shining Armor

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  “Did you bring a knife?” he asked.

  “A knife?” She couldn’t imagine why he’d ask.

  “To whittle with.”

  “Oh.” She’d been so sidetracked by the image of having sex with him that she’d plumb forgotten about her offer to teach him to whittle. “No, but I have a pair of manicure scissors in my makeup bag. I could make do with those.” She turned to glance up at him and found herself having to look past his crotch in order to get to his face. She gulped. “Do you really want to learn?”

  “It’d be a way to kill some time until we’re sure Brogan is gone for good.” His attention veered from her to the blue underwear in her suitcase. “Those look wet, too. Why don’t I hang them up?” He leaned over and reached one long arm toward the suitcase.

  “Never mind.” She spread her hand protectively over her damp undies. “They’ll dry in there.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. So are you ready for me to teach you to whittle? First we have to find some small pieces of driftwood.” She had to change her position and change it fast. This view of his male equipment was not helping her mental condition at all. She got to her feet, but in the process kicked the suitcase slightly. The contents shifted.

  “Whoa.” From the tone of his voice it was obvious he’d seen at least some of the condoms.

  She banged the lid shut and avoided his gaze. “Never you mind about that, either.” She started toward the beach. “Come on. Let’s find something we can whittle.”

  “Hold on.” He grabbed her arm. “You didn’t trust that smarm-meister to bring his own, and yet you were willing to go to bed with someone that irresponsible?”

  “When it comes to makin’ babies, I don’t trust any man.”

  His grip on her arm gentled, and a soft light came into his eyes. “You could trust me.”

  Chapter Nine

  Condoms. The suitcase Jack had rescued, the one that had nearly turned him into shark bait, the one that meant so much to Gen that the thought of trashing it had made her cry—that same suitcase had contained condoms. And not just one, either. If he’d known the suitcase had condoms in it, he would have dived down to the sunken plane, if necessary. Condoms were even more exciting than energy bars.

  This put a whole new light on things. True, she’d brought the condoms on account of Nick, but Nick had been revealed as a murdering, embezzling creepazoid, so Jack could rightly assume she had no more interest in Nick as a sexual partner. She had no interest in Jack as a sexual partner, either, but he had a decent chance to remedy that and absolutely zero competition. Statistically, he was in fine shape.

  She smiled at him. “When I said I wouldn’t trust any man, I wasn’t talking about you.”

  “Good, because I—wait a minute.” What had sounded like a compliment might have been the exact opposite. “Is that because you don’t think of me as a man?”

  “Well, of course I know you’re a man, but—”

  “You don’t think I’m highly sexed?”

  She began to laugh.

  “Don’t you dare laugh about that.” Warmth crept up from his neck to his face. “Don’t you dare.”

  “I’m sorry.” She struggled to control herself. “But take a look at the evidence, Jackson.”

  “Jack.”

  “Okay, Jack.” She began ticking off items on her fingers. “You haven’t had a date in a coon’s age, you pay no attention to how you look, I’ve never heard you tell a dirty joke, and your head’s buried inside your computer for days on end. If sex was that important to you, you’d be spending more time on it.”

  She had a point. Dating usually wasn’t as much fun as writing code, and he’d never had a sexual itch so great that it distracted him from his work until he’d met Gen. He’d have to conclude that sex per se wasn’t important to him. Sex with Gen was a different story. He’d fantasized about that ever since coming to work at Rainbow Systems.

  “Maybe it’s just that I’m very discriminating,” he said at last.

  Her cheeks turned pink. “See, that’s what I’m talking about. You’ve had a crush on me for a long time. A highly sexed man would have done something about it.”

  “Being highly sexed and being confident don’t always go together.”

  “So you’re trying to convince me that if you believed in yourself more, you’d turn into an animal?” Her color was still high, and she was looking at him with a speculative gleam in her eyes.

  “Could be.” He wondered how many condoms were in the suitcase. A guy with a low sex drive wouldn’t wonder things like that, would he? Of course, he didn’t have much else to think about right now. Although he’d fantasized about Gen in the past, it obviously hadn’t taken over his whole life or he wouldn’t have been able to do his job.

  Maybe he didn’t have any competition for Gen’s attention right now, but then again, she didn’t have any for his, either.

  He’d always told himself that with the right woman he’d go crazy with lust. He’d felt crazy with lust ever since they’d crawled up on the beach, but maybe being marooned with someone wasn’t a very good test. Once he got back to his keyboard he might put the whole idea of sex out of his mind for days at a time, as she’d accused him of doing.

  She continued to study him. “You are an original, Jack. I’ll give you that.” Then she dropped her gaze. “Come on, let’s go hunt up some driftwood to whittle.”

  “Okay.” Feeling dismissed, as if he weren’t manly enough to capture her attention, Jack followed her to the waterline. He didn’t like the status quo, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. Until the discovery of the condoms, he’d abandoned the idea of fooling around, because he wasn’t sure he could keep himself in check. Now he was worried that he might be a keep-himself-in-check kind of guy.

  Still, the condoms meant all his options were open. He’d been handed a golden opportunity to have the sexual experience of his dreams if he could convince Gen to go along. A guy named Jack wouldn’t let that opportunity slip through his fingers.

  But what if it didn’t turn out to be the incredible experience he’d envisioned? What if sex with Gen, the most beautiful woman he could imagine getting frisky with, was only so-so? Would that mean that he was some sort of eunuch, saddled with a genius IQ and the sexual drive of broccoli? He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out the answer to that question. Maybe he was better off living in ignorance of his true nature.

  At the waterline, Gen paused to shade her eyes. “Remember those clouds we almost flew into a few hours ago?”

  “Yeah.” It seemed centuries ago that they’d been up in the Sky King, terrified that they would both die. They’d made it through alive, which might mean his sexual doubts weren’t very important in the grand scheme of things. It was amazing how quickly perspective changed, because now, besides being alive, he also wanted to be a potent sex god.

  “They’re building up and moving this way.”

  He squinted toward the horizon. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “Here, use the glasses.” She whipped them off and handed them to him.

  He put on the glasses and, sure enough, some big bruisers were headed this way. The line of clouds extended eastward, toward Oahu, which meant the entire chain of islands would soon be hit.

  “I’d rather be worried about too much sun than have to deal with a storm,” Gen said.

  “So would I, and not just because we might get rained on.”

  “I know.” She glanced over at him. “Bad weather means they’ll have more trouble searching for us, huh?”

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  Her expression grew serious. “I think we’d better find driftwood so we can make a fire. We can worry about the whittling later.”

  “You have matches in your suitcase?” Maybe the two of them needed to take a careful inventory, and not because they had to count the condoms. She might have brought all sorts of useful gear she’d forgotten about.

 
“No matches, but we can start a fire with some dry grass and your glasses.”

  “That only works in the movies, Gen.”

  “That shows what you know. I’ve done it plenty of times. When I was a kid that was the only reason I was happy about having glasses. I could start my own little campfires in the woods. You had a peculiar childhood, Jack.”

  He couldn’t help laughing at that. “Fortunately for us, yours was completely normal.”

  Annabelle noticed that the weather was getting worse as Matt guided the boat he’d rented out of Haleiwa Harbor. She didn’t say anything, though, because she didn’t care how bad the weather got. Genevieve was out there in the same weather, and Annabelle intended to find her.

  Lincoln stood beside her at the back of the boat, both of them watching the frothy wake as they headed out to sea. Lincoln had taken the news of the missing plane as well as could be expected. He’d panicked at first and had made Annabelle promise that under no circumstances was his sister going to end up dead. Annabelle had promised.

  Because she’d said it with total conviction, Lincoln had settled down, but she couldn’t have left him in Honolulu. He would have gone crazier than a hound with a nose full of porcupine quills if she’d made him stay with a friend while she went off with Matt. She was his security right now, and she knew it.

  But to look at him standing in the wind with his earphones and his wraparound sunglasses, anyone would think he didn’t need her at all. Whenever Lincoln was plugged into those earphones, he bobbed his head in time with whatever was slowly destroying his eardrums.

  Annabelle worried about his hearing, but she wasn’t going to bother him about the earphones now. He probably needed the music to distract him from his worry about Genevieve. From this side she couldn’t see the little gold earring he’d insisted on having put in last week. She usually tried to approach him from the non-earring side so she could pretend he hadn’t done that.

  Both she and Lincoln wore orange life vests, although she noticed that Lincoln had unfastened his so that he’d look cool. He hadn’t wanted to wear one at all, but Matt had said they weren’t leaving the harbor until everyone had on a life jacket, only Matt had called them something else, a set of initials that sounded like BVD but probably wasn’t.

  The boat was gorgeous, all gleaming wood and sparkling white paint and shiny brass fittings. Quite a step up from Rufus’s smelly old rowboat with the outboard motor that hardly ever worked. This was what Annabelle thought was called a pleasure craft. If only she and Lincoln could be going on a pleasure trip. But they weren’t, so the wonders of the boat were lost on both of them, which was a shame.

  Before they’d left the dock, Annabelle had stored the groceries she’d brought in the boat’s tiny kitchen. Matt had called it the galley, so she would try to remember that. And the tiny bathroom, not much bigger than the one in the airplane they’d flown in eleven years ago, was the head. She thought, considering what it was mostly for, that the name was backward.

  Their sleeping arrangements would be tight. She’d get the only real privacy—both Matt and Lincoln had insisted she take the little space in the bow, the one sleeping area with a door. The other two beds in the main cabin doubled as bench seats during the day. There’d be no sleeping in for Lincoln, not that she thought he would with his sister missing. Annabelle didn’t think any of them would sleep much, but they needed the beds in case someone was ready to drop.

  Annabelle didn’t care about the close quarters. She’d put up with a lot worse during her years in the Hollow. And although she wondered if Matt minded being crammed in cheek-by-jowl with a strange woman and her teenage son, she didn’t really care if he minded or not. By being business partners with Nick, he’d put himself right in the middle of this mess of trouble, and she didn’t plan to let him wiggle out of his responsibility.

  Now that they were moving out into open water, she needed to focus on Genevieve and establish a mental connection. If she didn’t achieve that, she wouldn’t be able to tell Matt which way to go once they left the harbor. Lincoln would be a help with that, too. He didn’t like to admit that he had a touch of psychic power, but he did. Besides that, he had a powerful bond with his sister.

  Lincoln unhooked his earphones and dangled them around his neck. “This is an awesome plan, Mom. I’m glad you talked this Matt guy into renting the boat and going out to look for Gen.”

  “Call him Mr. Murphy, Lincoln.”

  “But he told me to call him Matt.”

  “I know, and I’m telling you to call him Mr. Murphy.”

  “Don’t get all mad at me, just because you’re worried about Gen, okay?”

  She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. Instead he was staring at the boat’s wake, and his jaw was set in that stubborn way that reminded her of Granny Neville. Nothing would be served by the two of them barking at each other.

  Yet she didn’t want him calling Matt Murphy by his Christian name. He could dye his hair any color he wanted, wear T-shirts with mouthy sayings on them, pierce his earlobes, and let any music he wanted filter through those earphones. He could do all that to his heart’s content, but no boy of hers would be disrespectful to his elders.

  “I am worried about Genevieve,” she admitted. “I reckon you are, too. But we will find her.”

  He continued to study the churning water. “Yeah, I know. I hope it’s soon, though.”

  Annabelle wanted to reach up and touch his cheek, right where a little downy growth had started coming in. But he wouldn’t appreciate that, so she didn’t. “Me, too. Lincoln, about what you should call Mr. Murphy, I—”

  Lincoln’s sigh of protest was loud and dramatic, like most of his behavior in the last couple of years. “If it bothers you that much, I’ll call him Mr. Murphy, but he’s pretty cool, and he’s gonna be all Why are you calling me Mr. Murphy? That makes me feel old. And I’ll be all Don’t blame me. My mom made me call you that. He is old, of course, but I don’t think I should be the one reminding him about it.”

  She smiled a little at that. If she hadn’t been so weighed down with worry, she might have laughed. She thought Matt was a fine-looking man, very much in his prime. He had the sort of handsome face that she’d learned to steer clear of.

  If she hadn’t desperately needed his help, she wouldn’t have had a thing to do with Matt Murphy. With those big brown eyes and great smile, he was much too pretty, and she’d promised herself never to fall for a pretty face again. But all Lincoln saw was a guy with a touch of gray in his hair, a guy on the far side of forty, which made him old and creaky.

  “I’ll take the chance he’ll feel old when you call him Mr. Murphy,” she said.

  “Annabelle,” Matt called above the sound of the boat’s motor. “Could you come here a minute, please?”

  “Be right there!” She turned to Lincoln. “Want to come with me while I see what he wants?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just stand here and concentrate.”

  This time she couldn’t resist putting a hand on his arm, even if he was four inches taller than she was and thought he was too cool for hugs from his mama. “Are you concentrating on Genevieve?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced down at her. “You know when we first moved here, and Gen used to play hide-and-seek with me?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Probably because we quit playing. I always found her right away, so she got all bent. She couldn’t find me, but I could always find her.”

  Annabelle squeezed his arm. “That’s nice to know. You concentrate.”

  “I will. I’m listening to that Harry Connick Jr. garbage she likes so much.”

  “You are?” Annabelle liked that music herself, but Lincoln always said he wouldn’t pollute his ears with it.

  “Yeah. It sucks, but maybe it’ll help me think of where she is.”

  “Thank you, Lincoln. You’re a good boy.” Before he could see the tears in her eyes, she turned and climbed up the stairway to
where Matt was. That part of the boat, where Matt steered, was called the helm. Annabelle liked learning new things, but she would rather be learning under different circumstances.

  Matt had one hand on the wheel and the other fiddling with the dials of whatever instruments the boat had. He wore the kind of wire-rimmed sunglasses she’d always liked on a man, and a blue golf cap with “Hanalei Bay Resort" embroidered on the front.

  “We need to talk about something,” he said.

  He was going to bring up the bad weather. She braced herself to hold her ground. “What?”

  “The Coast Guard just notified me that they plan to postpone the air search because of the weather. In fact, the weather may interrupt most of the rescue efforts until the storm blowing in passes over the islands.”

  Annabelle took a deep breath. “I wasn’t putting much store in their help, anyway.”

  He motioned to the swells ahead of them. “Besides that, they’ve issued a small craft warning.”

  “We’re not so small. This is the biggest boat I’ve ever been on.”

  He flicked a glance in her direction. “Trust me, we’re still considered small.”

  “We’re not going back. I don’t give a care what the weather is doing. We can’t go back.”

  “Hang on. I didn’t say anything about going back. I just wanted you to know. We have Lincoln with us.”

  She turned and looked down at her son bobbing his head in tune with Harry Connick Jr. Surely she wouldn’t be expected to risk Lincoln to save Genevieve. “Are we in danger yet?”

  “Not yet.” Matt leaned over the wheel and peered at the clouds. “But we need a plan. We’re headed toward Maui, but I think maybe we should put in at Molokai instead of going all the way to Maui. I should be able to make it there before the water gets too rough.”

  “I need to ask Lincoln.”

  Matt’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”

  Too late she realized that wouldn’t make any sense to him. Even explaining might not do any good. She had to be careful how much she talked about intuition and psychic connections, or Matt would take her right back to Oahu and call the men with the butterfly nets. “What I intended to say was, I need to ask Lincoln if he wants us to go back to the harbor or not.”