TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

by Sharon Mignerey

  "That's the one—for the trial where Lily is testifying. Anyway, the marshal is keeping an eye on your folks, and by late today some extra law will be arriving from the state police. But they're all in agreement."

  "No," Rosie murmured. "No."

  "We need to stay away," Ian finished. Franklin Lawrence wasn't content to go after Annmarie. If he couldn't get to her, he'd go after other insurance. Lily's sisters and her parents were fair game, too, and anybody else that might be used as leverage to keep her from testifying. Which meant they had even bigger problems.

  "That's right," Kyle said. "Your dad and me—we figured the radio frequencies are being monitored, so that's why I didn't answer you this morning."

  "Good thinking," Ian said.

  Rosie shook her head. "We can't stay on the boat."

  "Think about it, Rosie," Ian said. "They don't know where we are right now—that's a much safer proposition for Annmarie." He glanced around. "We can stay aboard until after Lily has testified." When he and Annmarie had left California, Lily had thought she would be testifying in a week or ten days. The yacht would be plenty comfortable for that length of time.

  "We can't stay on the boat," she repeated.

  "Why not?" Ian demanded.

  She looked away from him. "We don't have any clothes."

  It was a feeble excuse, and they both knew it. He glanced at her cousin. "I bet Kyle would go shopping for us."

  "Oh, sure, just whip out the old American Express card."

  Ian pulled a wallet from his pants' pocket and counted out ten hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Kyle. "What else?"

  "You can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to go away."

  "That's right," he agreed. "But sometimes it damn sure helps."

  "We don't have enough fuel."

  "It's a diesel engine?" Kyle asked. "What do you need, a couple hundred gallons?"

  Ian nodded.

  "I can refuel you."

  Ian peeled off another three bills and gave them to Kyle.

  She stared in disbelief at Ian. "The neighborhood store is—"

  "About five hours from here," Kyle interrupted. "I can get everything you need in Wrangall or Ketchikan. Make me a list."

  "I don't believe you. You can't afford this." Rosie threw her hands up.

  "Actually, I can," Ian replied. A couple thousand dollars … per day … wouldn't put a dent in his bottom line. That she didn't want his money raised his estimation of her … a lot. The list of people who wanted his money was long—acquaintances and strangers and his ex-wife who had wanted nothing to do with him until he had money. His buddy, Jack Trahern, was the only other person in his life who had been as unmoved by his money as Lily, and now Rosie.

  She gave him another scathing glance before turning away. She couldn't have been any more clear that being isolated on the boat with him was the last thing she wanted. Unfortunately, it couldn't be helped. Ian's gaze lingered on her a moment before he looked at Kyle and nodded toward the steps, then followed the man to the deck.

  "These guys are damn persistent," Ian said. "Is there any way they could know about your coming here?"

  Eyes narrowed, Kyle thought a moment. "Anything is possible. Rosie called me on the radio yesterday, so if they are monitoring like we think they could be, they might. I sailed pretty far into the bay, and I haven't seen a soul, which is about right for this time of year. I didn't notice anybody unusual when I bought fuel at Wrangall last night."

  He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and wrote down a number. "This is the frequency Rosie called. Let's adjust it up or down depending on the hour." He added the notations with the comment, "Old Navy SEAL trick from a coon's age ago. It's not foolproof, but it'll make keeping track of us harder."

  "I could have sworn that was an old ranger trick."

  Kyle's eyes gleamed. "Just treat this like any other covert operation, and things will go fine."

  "How did you know I was onboard?" If Ian recalled yesterday's plans correctly, he wasn't supposed to have been with Rosie and Annmarie.

  "I talked to Hilda," Kyle returned. "Knew something was up when she began speaking in Tlingit," he continued, relating how she had called him after Rosie's radio check. He patted the cash he had put in his pocket. "Guess I'd better get the shopping list from Rosie and get moving."

  "Too bad this yacht is so conspicuous." Ian said. Kyle glanced up and down the gleaming white deck. "It's not too bad," he finally said. "There's a lot of craft on the water this size, and every day closer to summer, there will be more. A month from now, nobody would give it a second glance." A big grin creasing his eyes nearly closed, he slapped Ian on the back, "If you're worried, just throw a little mud on her so she doesn't gleam quite so bright. I've got a couple of fishing nets, if you want one."

  Instantly deciding the nets could be effective in making the yacht less conspicuous, at least from the air, Ian said, "Yeah, I want one."

  He helped Kyle transfer the net from the fishing boat to the yacht, and the two of them arranged the net over the bow, draping it to look as though it had just been pulled from the water. As camouflage, it wasn't too bad. As long as you didn't stop to contemplate how out of place the net looked on a yacht.

  Kyle left a few minutes later, shopping list in hand and a meeting place and time set for later in the day. Ian went back inside, which felt warm after the brisk temperature on deck. Rosie had moved to the salon, and she sat with Annmarie, each of them coloring side-by-side pages.

  "What next?" Ian asked. "We've got hours to kill before we meet Kyle again. And by the way, you were right and I was wrong."

  "A macho man who can admit he's wrong. I am amazed. I was right about what?"

  She didn't look up, but Annmarie did, blinking both of her eyes in a wink.

  "About your cousin being an okay guy."

  "You promised that we'd do something fun," Annmarie said. "And I've decided."

  "You have?" he asked.

  She nodded. "I want to find some pretty seashells to take home to Mommy." She jumped up and clapped her hands together. "She loves seashells. And you know what?"

  "What, petunia?"

  She scowled at him, making him anticipate that she would scold him for his pet name.

  "You told me to think of something, and I did." She went back to the table, propped her elbows on it, and looked at her aunt. "Aunt Rosie, what's a really yucky plant?"

  "Bind weed," she promptly answered.

  Annmarie shook her head. "Even worse."

  Rosie looked at Annmarie and thought a moment. "Thistle."

  "And it has a flower, right?"

  "It does—a prickly purple one."

  "Good." Annmarie skipped over to Ian, and plopped her same elbows on his knee, and looked at him with guileless eyes. "That's what I'm going to call you, Mr. Ian. Mr. Thistle. If you don't call me a petunia, I won't call you Mr. Thistle."

  Ian met Rosie's gaze over the top of Annmarie's head. Rosie snickered, then laughed out loud, a belly laugh that invited others to join her. If he hadn't been attracted to her before, her laugh would have done it.

  "Okay, petunia," he said with a grin.

  Annmarie looked at her aunt, then lifted her hands in the air in a gesture so similar to Rosie's that Ian laughed.

  "He's hopeless," she said in a very grown-up voice.

  "I know," Rosie agreed.

  Only "hopeless," Ian thought. Things were definitely looking up.

  * * *

  Chapter 8

  « ^ »

  "Ohh, look at this one," Annmarie said, rubbing a small shell against her pant leg, imitating her aunt Rosie. Her cheeks were rosy and her brown eyes sparkled, and she held the shell up for his inspection.

  To Ian the shell looked much like the others they had spent the last couple of hours collecting—some kind of small clam. He wouldn't have given two licks for finding any shells, but Rosie, resourceful and knowledgeable as always, knew exactly where to look.
<
br />   "Hold it for me, okay?" Annmarie added. "We found a whole bunch more." She clapped her hands. "I can't wait to give these to Mommy."

  He grinned at her enthusiasm as she scampered over the rocky shore to rejoin Rosie. She opened her arms and laughed at something Annmarie said. Abruptly he was struck with the old, old memory of bringing his mother presents when he was little older than Annmarie. His mother would open her arms and hug him just the way Rosie was hugging Annmarie. By the time he was twelve he'd learned his mother was happy to see him so long as he brought presents. Somewhere along the way she had stopped liking his presents, and he suspected that she had stopped loving him a long time before Aaron died.

  "Snap out of it," he muttered to himself. That part of his life was over.

  Rosie and Annmarie were bent over a tide pool, and Sly was dragging a huge piece of driftwood, his tail wagging. Rosie pointed, and Annmarie laughed. They were irresistible to Ian, and he joined them. For the next hour they traipsed up and down the rocky shoreline, examining everything on the beach from gnarled driftwood to tide pools, ever shadowed by the dog. Through it all Annmarie searched for shells.

  Just when Annmarie seemed ready for more stimulation, Rosie initiated a game of fetch with Sly … at least until the dog tired of the game. Then they went back to looking for shells.

  Ian tagged along with his attention mostly focused on keeping a sharp lookout for other boats and planes. Only one float plane had come within shouting distance, a green, single-engine plane with red wings that Annmarie was sure belonged to Santa Claus. She had clapped her hands and waved and offered the reasonable explanation that Santa used his reindeer only at Christmastime. Since it wasn't Christmas, he obviously traveled by plane. She was disappointed when it flew on without so much as a dip in its wings acknowledging them. Ian was relieved.

  Rosie had kept Annmarie on the move, which he suspected was as much to keep her mind occupied as it was to play with the child. Play they did. Whatever concerns Rosie had, they were clearly secondary to keeping Annmarie entertained and occupied. For the umpteenth time he found himself silently asking why she hadn't ever come to see Lily and Annmarie.

  Rosie cared about the child. He'd have to be blind, deaf and a total idiot not to see that. Had she not wanted to give the child up? Then why had Lily taken her? What possible reason had kept Rosie away from Annmarie?

  Deliberately he cataloged the possibilities. Rosie had a fling that resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. A low-life of a lover had walked out on her when he discovered she was pregnant. She'd deliberately agreed to carry a child for Lily and her husband, then regretted giving up the child. Any one of those scenarios were plausible, Ian decided.

  He concluded that none of them mattered under the larger reality that Lily was the best mother a child could hope for, and Rosie clearly loved Annmarie. Still, he found himself caught in that moment of Annmarie's announcement and Rosie's stricken expression. He found himself redefining the ideal family that he'd longed for as a boy. He kept wondering what his own would have been like if there had been love and commitment like Rosie and Lily had for each other and for Annmarie.

  Ian glanced at his watch. The small nameless island that she had chosen for their shell-collecting excursion was about an hour from the rendezvous point that he and Kyle had agreed upon, which meant they had to leave soon.

  "Look," Annmarie said, running to him as she had a dozen times over the past hour. "This one has real pretty colors on it, don't you think?"

  He carefully took the small, sand-scoured shell from her, treating it like the treasure she thought it was. She turned it over so he could see the iridescent inside.

  "Aunt Rosie says this shell is a mussel." Annmarie grinned at him. "Did you know you have muscles?" She poked at her small bicep, hidden beneath her jacket. "And you can eat mussels, too, did you know that?"

  "Really?" He gave the small shell another look. "It would take a lot of these to fill you up."

  She giggled. "That's what Aunt Rosie said."

  "Said what?" Rosie asked, coming toward them.

  Ian flexed his own bicep, smiling broadly and unwilling to pass up an opportunity to tease her. "That you like muscles. Big ones."

  A quick grin flashed across her face. "You wish."

  "Hey, a guy can hope."

  "As long as he doesn't mind disappointment."

  "Not me. I'm lucky. Ask anybody."

  "Is that how you came to have cash enough to send Kyle shopping?" she asked.

  "Yeah," he said, meeting her gaze. "In a manner of speaking. A few years back, I was injured—"

  "Is that where you got the scars on your chest?"

  He'd forgotten that she'd seen him without a shirt. "Yeah."

  "And that was lucky?"

  "That wasn't. But being on medical leave was. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone out to buy a six-pack, and I wouldn't have bought a lotto ticket that won me several million dollars."

  "If you're so rich, what are you doing hanging out in my sister's neighborhood?"

  "Because I like it. Kids play outside, and people mow their own lawns. They invite the guys who live on the back fence over for a barbecue. And if a neighbor wants to repair his car in the driveway, they come over to help instead of raising a stink and claiming the neighborhood is going to the dogs."

  "I see." She turned away.

  "Do you?" He wanted to tell her about the kids and the work his foundation supported, but couldn't find the words to keep from sounding like some bleeding heart, Goody Two-shoes. He wanted to tell her how Lily's neighborhood represented everything he'd always wanted. Stability. Where normal was going to the movies and taking your kids to soccer practice instead of dodging cars while playing stickball and dodging the cops because of what you'd done the previous night. He waited until she stopped walking and looked at him. "With the money or without it, I'm a pretty simple guy."

  "Simple, yeah, right." Then she smiled. "Your money has nothing to do with my opinion of you. Someday you might tell me about your project—Lucky's Third Chance—instead of trying to make me believe you're just a good ol' boy doing good deeds to pass the time."

  While he absorbed that, she took Annmarie's hand.

  "Once more up and down the beach, sweetie. Then it's time to go meet Kyle."

  "Okay." Annmarie motioned to Ian. "C'mon, Mr. Ian."

  "You go ahead," he said. "I'll meet you at the boat."

  As the afternoon had gone on, the one thing he kept worrying about was the tenacity with which Franklin Lawrence had gone after Lily's family. A concern took root that he couldn't banish. If Lawrence would go after Lily's parents when he couldn't get to Rosie or Annmarie, what would keep him from going after the youngest sister, Dahlia? Even if the local police could be convinced to keep an eye on her, Ian would feel better knowing she was being looked after by somebody who could devote himself to the job twenty-four hours per day.

  And the one man for the job was his buddy, Jack Trahern.

  While Rosie and Annmarie had played, Ian worked out the details for a viable plan—assuming Jack was agreeable. If they were right and the radio traffic was being monitored, all he and Jack had to do was talk in the old code they had developed a long time ago, and nobody would be the wiser.

  Back at the boat he requested a patch to a land line and made the call to Fort Benning, Georgia. To his relief Jack was home. Antsy and bored from the month's leave he had just started, Jack related that he had to decide soon whether to re-up for another three-year hitch. He caught on immediately they needed to speak in code when Ian identified himself as Lucky, his nickname from the army. They fell into the routine of their army strategies when they had been planning a mission. Jack made it clear that he'd rather come cover Ian's back, but agreed to go to Colorado and keep an eye on Dahlia. Ian hung up, feeling relieved that he'd done what he could for Lily's youngest sister, mere seconds before Annmarie came inside and joined him at the bridge.

  "We have lots of treasures for Mommy," A
nnmarie announced, sitting down on the floor and pulling shells and rocks out of a mesh bag. "This one is pretty, don't you think, Mr. Ian?" She held out one of the rocks, pointing out the flecks of fool's gold within it. "Aunt Rosie says it might be a good one to slice open. Grandpa has a special saw to do that. And then we can polish it all up so it looks wet and shiny all the time." She chattered on, telling him about each find and relating some tidbit of a story that Rosie had passed on to her.

  While Ian listened to her, he was aware of Rosie moving around the back of the boat, talking to Sly. Curious about what they were doing when they still hadn't come inside five minutes later, he went out to the aft deck. There, he found Rosie sitting on the floor, marred with drying mud and scuff marks, with a disgusted-looking Sly between her legs, who was having his feet washed.

  Ian grinned. "He found the mud hole, I see."

  "It must be a male thing." She dunked his paw back into the pail of water. "Too bad he didn't make it worth the effort by going after the clams."

  She made a point of glancing at his stocking feet.

  Somehow he'd managed to find the same hole before he'd come aboard earlier. Much as he'd like to blame the dog, a lot of the mud on the deck he'd brought on board. He met Rosie's eyes, and she gave him a good-natured grin.

  "You're a slob, aren't you?"

  "I like things to be clean." It wasn't much of a defense, just enough to keep her teasing him.

  She laughed. "Like this morning's dishes—that I washed."

  "I cooked," he said.

  "Hmm. Yes, you did. Where would we be without toasters and microwaves?" She finished patting the dog's foot dry, then stood up in a single fluid motion. "After we're underway—"

  "I'll swab the deck," he finished, hoping she'd smile.

  She did. "Good idea. A woman's place is at the helm."

  Relieved that the tension between them had lessened enough they could banter with each other, he watched her climb the ladder to the flying bridge, his attention drawn, as usual, to the sweet curve of her fanny.

  They had several days ahead of them, and if they couldn't get along, the forty-five-foot yacht was going to be small. If they got along as well as he'd like … it was still going to be damn small, since they had a chaperone.