“Leave the island alone, Sara. If you want to play accountant, go back to Florida and crunch numbers all you want. We like things the way they are.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Oh, really? You like eating tomato soup and taking naps and watching your world crumble into decay?”
“And not obsessing about where our next dollar is coming from, yes!”
He wrapped his hands around her shoulders the way he’d done that afternoon, but this time his grip was forceful. Sara wasn’t afraid. She stared into his pewter eyes and blasted him with the same words he’d said to her the day before. “If you’re trying to scare me to death, it won’t work.” She let her lips curl into a satisfied grin. “I can outrun you, Bass.”
His fingers flexed just before his hold on her moved to her upper arms and tightened. A tremor ran through his body and shuddered into hers. “God, you are one aggravating pencil pusher,” he ground out.
She thrust her chin at him. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you, Bass?”
He sucked in a breath and held it, his gaze fixed intently on her face. “You want to know what’s bothering me? Okay, I’ll tell you. You’re what’s bothering me. You and your accounting principles, formulas and plans for modernizing things, and you…just you.” He stopped talking, pulled her to him.
Before Sara could make an evasive move, his mouth was on hers. The kiss was hard and hungry, fired with frustration and the indefinable essence of powerful maleness. It tasted of Italian spices and tangy wine and filled her senses with something infinitely dangerous, undeniably provocative.
When he raised his head, she released a warm, drugged breath that ruffled the hair on his forehead. She swallowed hard. “Why did you do that?” she asked.
“Don’t expect any explanation,” he snapped at her. “Because I don’t have one that would satisfy either one of us. Just think of it as my way of saying thanks for dinner.” He strode from the kitchen without looking back.
A simple thank-you might have been more conventional, she thought. But it wouldn’t have left such a lasting impression.
CHAPTER FIVE
“NICK, COME ON! For pity’s sake, time’s wasting!”
The urgent call from outside her window jolted Sara from a light sleep. She sat up in bed and focused on the sound.
“Let’s go, Nickie!”
There was no mistaking that grumpy voice. Sara knew before she even reached the window that it was Brody issuing orders from in front of the inn.
“What is it with men?” she grumbled. “Is it some rite of manhood, this having to prove they can irritate the rest of society before the sun’s even up?”
Next she heard Nick’s irritated response coming from his window. “Keep your shirt on, Brody. For God’s sake, you start this little exercise earlier every time!”
Sara peered out the window at the walkway below. What the heck are they doing? She couldn’t see anything of Brody, since he was hidden under the metal canopy of a motorized golf cart. Just as she was getting the courage to widen the shutter opening for a better look, Brody poked his head out the side of the cart and risked a glance at her window.
Apparently satisfied when he didn’t see her, he said in a coarse whisper, “You know how I feel about Digging Day, Nick. Dex and Ryan are already there.”
Digging Day? What in the world was Brody talking about? She waited until he was hidden under the cart canopy and then parted the slat again. At the back of the cart, where golf bags were usually stored, was an assortment of digging tools—shovels, spades, a couple of buckets. And flying whimsically over all of it was a yellow plastic flag of the sort kids attach to their bicycles.
“Well, isn’t that cute?” Sara said to herself. “Brody must be afraid of being run over by all the traffic on Thorne Island!”
And yet the flag could prove useful. She could follow it and get to the bottom of this Digging Day thing. She was determined to learn as much as she could about the men of Thorne Island.
“Take your time, Bass,” she muttered, allowing herself one last furtive peek out the window. Drat! He was already stepping off the porch. He backed up slowly toward the golf cart, his gaze intent on her window. Sara grinned to herself. At least he hadn’t forgotten about her in his zeal to meet Brody. Even in the predawn light, his impressive figure sent tiny shockwaves of remembrance through Sara’s system. She definitely hadn’t forgotten his impulsive kiss the night before.
“Why don’t you wake up the whole island, Brody?” Nick grumbled, crooking his thumb at Sara’s window.
“She didn’t hear me,” Brody shot back. “I’ve never known a woman who didn’t sleep past sunrise.”
Sara darted to her wardrobe to pull out shorts and a T-shirt. “A lot you know, Mr. Brody. With your attitude, I’ll bet your research sample has been pretty slim!”
Sara left the inn about two minutes after the golf cart carrying the two men pulled away. She followed the tire tracks until they disappeared around a corner of one of the narrow island paths, and then she cut through a wooded area to save time.
There was enough sun now for her to pick her way through the underbrush. Budding maple and oak trees were still in the early stages of new leaf growth, and parting the lowest branches, Sara spotted the bright yellow flag fluttering over the cart several hundred yards away.
The lush ground cover gave way to flowering plants, wild ferns and sumac the closer Sara got to the opposite side of the island. A cool mist rolled over the shore, bringing with it gentle swells to wash up on the rocky soil and retreat with a repetition that calmed the spirit.
Sara decided she would return to this part of the island some time when she wasn’t on a mission. She would choose one of the tall, straight paper birches that lined the beach, spread out a blanket and spend several hours reading a good book. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that now. The golf cart rounded a bend by a stand of sycamore trees. Two men emerged from the trees and met the cart when it stopped a few feet from the water. What an odd picture the imposing Dexter Sweet made as he walked beside the small, wiry Ryan.
Nick and Brody climbed out of the cart, and each man chose a tool from the bag-storage area. Sara crouched behind a patch of cattails and watched while the men set about doing exactly what the name of the day implied. They dug. Sand and rocks flew in the air with each upward swing of the shovels. When water seeped into the widening hole, one or more of the diggers jumped back and shouted a mild obscenity about possible damage to his shoes.
Once in a while one of them would stop and fill a mug from a thermos, prompting Sara to remember that she hadn’t yet had her coffee. After more than half an hour, she grew impatient waiting for something to happen.
Fifteen minutes later the men had produced a sizable hole. Results of their labor sat piled up around them in uniform pyramids of dirt, rocks and sand. Apparently the group decided the hole was large enough for their purpose, whatever that was. They stopped digging and stared at the ground.
Finally Brody removed his hat and wiped his brow. He spoke the only full sentence Sara had been able to distinguish from any of them since they’d started their chore. “Nope, nothing here,” he said. “Might as well get the rods.”
With that proclamation, the men walked back to the trees and returned with fishing equipment. They removed necessary supplies from tackle boxes and prepared their lines. The hole, at least for the moment, was forgotten.
“This is ridiculous!” Sara said, swatting for the umpteenth time at a persistent mosquito that obviously didn’t know the sun was now fully risen. “I’m not going to stay here and watch these guys fish!”
She headed back toward the inn. Her expedition had left her more puzzled than ever. What were they looking for? A body? No, surely not. Nevertheless Sara’s mind conjured up images of bleached white bones and grinning skulls. She envisioned the men of Thorne Island as part of some evil conspiracy. The Erie Islands had a long and colorful history. Perhaps the diggers knew
of a heinous murder that had taken place, and they were determined to unearth the grisly evidence of the crime.
By the time she reached the inn, Sara had convinced herself that such a scenario was unlikely. Dexter Sweet, whose goodness overshadowed his size and strength, and who, according to Nick, prompted the nightingales to sing, was not likely to disturb the remains of the dead. Neither was gentle Ryan who cared about flowers and a dying vineyard. And Nick Bass, antisocial hermit and mysterious gunshot victim? Well, anything was possible with him. Then there was Brody. A chill ran down Sara’s spine. She could almost picture him enjoying digging up bones.
Deciding she’d had all she could take of macabre thoughts for one day, she put the matter out of her mind. She entered the inn by the front door, then walked into the parlor and surveyed the nondescript lumps of furniture covered by yards of white cloth—harmless chairs, sofas and tables made to look like ghostly specters.
“Enough of this!” Sara announced to the gloomy room. She yanked back the draperies and opened all the windows. Then she ripped the cover from the lump nearest her to expose a beautiful balloon-backed Victorian chair. Its brocade seat was worn, but its curved mahogany arms could be brought back to their previous splendor with a little polish and some energetic rubbing.
Sara decided upon her project for the rest of the morning. She hoped Bass had left the coffeepot on in the kitchen. She’d have a cup first, then gather up supplies to dust and sweep. She would coax life back into the parlor of the Cozy Cove Inn.
NICK AND DEXTER walked back to the inn after fishing for two hours. Brody had offered to drive them in the cart one at a time, but Nick refused, and not just because Dex had told him the walk would be good for him. The truth was, he’d had about all of Brody he could handle for one day. Also, Nick was getting tired of Brody’s damn Digging Day. Ritual was one thing, but there was no reason this particular ritual couldn’t be carried out at a decent hour. Plus, the guy could really be a cantankerous old coot. Sara was right about that, though Nick would never admit it to her.
Nick thought about Brody’s son, Carl Junior, who hadn’t seen his father in years. The two men had fought over money long ago, but Nick called Junior every few months to give him an update on Brody’s well-being. He’d been making the calls for years, hoping someday the two Brody men would put an end to their feud. But that wasn’t likely to happen very soon. In fact, Brody would have a fit if he knew Nick kept in contact with Junior. But how long could one man hold a grudge? Forever, it seemed, if his name was Carlton Brody, owner of Good Company Hygiene Products.
Nick almost laughed out loud as he approached the steps to the Cozy Cove veranda. To think that slovenly Brody had made his millions by making other people deodorants and bath oils! Yep, someday Nick was going to call Carl Junior and tell him to get over here. It was time to put that family back together.
Dexter stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t you want to come in?” Nick asked. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“No thanks,” Dexter said. “I’m working on a couple of end-run plays I think might click. Wanna get them down on paper. But I’ll come back later if you want help with your exercises.”
Nick waved him away. “Nah, I’ll do them myself.” Seeing the skepticism in Dexter’s eyes, he added, “Really. I promise. You don’t need to play nursemaid, Dex.”
The men parted at the porch, and Dexter headed toward his two-room cabin down the lane from Brody’s place. The small accommodations suited the large man just fine, or so he said. Just enough room to catch the sports events on his big-screen TV and analyze the heck out of them when they were over. All the guys had chipped in on the satellite dish, but it was Dexter who dictated what channels they could watch.
They really were an odd bunch, the men of Thorne Island, Nick decided as he stepped into the inn. But they were his family now, and he accepted them with all their faults. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to make them see the error of their ways once in a while.
Nick stopped in the lobby and sniffed the air. What was that smell? Lemon and ammonia. It was strong but not unpleasant. And it sure as hell wasn’t a scent common to the Cozy Cove. The source came to his mind immediately. Sara Crawford was playing at housekeeping again.
He stepped into the parlor and was bombarded with floral fabrics, needlepoint tapestries and gleaming mahogany. All the furniture he’d covered so carefully years before now basked in the sunlight coming through washed windowpanes.
And Sara Crawford, her pleasing little butt covered by a skimpy pair of cutoffs and her hair wrapped in a bandanna, was crouched over the hearth sweeping old ashes into a dustpan.
“Good morning, Bass,” she said without looking at him.
He stood, legs slightly apart, fists on his hips. It was a strong, manly stance, he thought, but it had little effect on a woman who didn’t bother noticing. So Nick dropped his hands and took two steps closer to her. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Sara?”
She looked up at him. Smudges of soot streaked her face and a gleam of perspiration dotted her upper lip. Strands of blond hair trailed over a shoulder not covered by her knit tank top. God, she looked adorable. Nick had to remind himself that was not the issue.
She set the dustpan on the brick hearth. “Really, Bass, your powers of observation are limited at best. You just asked a woman holding a whisk broom and a pan of ashes what she was doing.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” He waved his arms to indicate the entire room. “I’m talking about all this…this…”
“Cheerfulness?” she suggested with an infuriatingly smug grin.
“Interference! You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Changing things. You’re leaving in a couple of days—”
“I never said that.”
“Okay, a couple of days, a week, whatever. Anyway, you’ll be gone, and I’ll have to go around and cover all this stuff up again.”
She feigned innocence. “Why would you do that?”
“We don’t use this room, Sara. Sometimes in the winter I come down and sit by the fire in this chair.” He walked over and slapped his hand on the back of one of the two pieces of furniture that hadn’t been covered. Dust rose in the air. “This is the only chair that is used in this room—ever.”
She stood up and adjusted the tank top so it covered the tantalizing band of skin revealed at her midsection. Nick felt deprived.
“Until now,” she said. “For your information, I intend to come into this parlor and move from chair to chair and then start all over again. I intend to sit in every blessed seat in the room until I leave Thorne Island.” She marched over to a window and pulled the heavy drapes even farther apart. “And I will do it in brilliant sunlight!”
She was daring him. Did she think he was a vampire and she could kill him with sunshine? “You are one stubborn, bossy lady, you know that, Crawford?”
She muttered something he couldn’t quite make out, but he thought he detected the word ghoul somewhere in her sentence. “What did you say?”
She didn’t back down. Instead, she approached him with a swagger in her step. “I said, ‘At least I’m not a ghoul out digging graves.’”
Oh, so that was it. He should have added nosy and sneaky to her list of attributes. “I get it,” he said, reaching for her. When he grabbed her hand, she flinched, but it only made him hold on tighter. He ran a finger up her arm, stopping at intervals. “I see you have several mosquito bites. And now I know how you got them.”
“So what?” She pulled her hand free. “It was your buddy who hollered under my window like a foghorn this morning. Besides, it’s a good thing I did follow you. I need to know what manner of degenerates I’m dealing with on this island.”
“Yeah? And what manner are we?”
She scratched absently at one of her bites. “Unfortunately I don’t know…yet.”
“Did you actually think we were dig
ging up a grave?”
“Well—”
“Sara, at the risk of having Brody flail me with his hat full of tetanus-infected lures, I’ll tell you what we were doing. We were digging for hidden treasure, like we’ve done every Monday morning when the ground isn’t frozen for the last six years.”
Her jaw dropped, and she stared up at him. There was no mistaking the sudden interest in her eyes. “There’s hidden treasure on this island?”
“Frankly I don’t think there’s so much as a single sou, but Brody does, so we look.”
“Why does he think there’s treasure buried here?”
“It’s some loony bit of folklore about the first French fur trappers who came to the island. They were with this missionary named Father Bertrand. He had a small fortune in coins and jewels entrusted to him by the French monarch, and he was supposed to barter with the Indians for land that might be valuable to the French crown. According to Brody, who studies things like this, the fortune was never spent, but left here on the island. The story has passed down through generations since the eighteenth century. But like I said, I don’t believe—”
“Wow.” A veiled wonder had suddenly appeared over the bright blue of Sara’s eyes. “You must believe it, Bass. Otherwise why would you help Brody find it?”
Don’t women get anything? “Because he wants me to,” Nick said simply. “It’s what he does.”
Sara’s perplexed look told him she still didn’t get it. “But do you keep records? Maps? Logs of your diggings?”
Just like an accountant! “No.”
“How do you know you’re not digging in a place you’ve dug before?”
“I suppose we could be. Who knows? We always fill the holes before we leave.”
She sank onto the sofa and placed her sooty cheeks in her palms. “This is incredible, Bass. I don’t understand you men at all.”
That was the first thing she’d said that he could agree with.
“You spend your time on what you believe is a totally fruitless endeavor,” she went on, “and you don’t even do it with a modicum of precision or planning.” She gave him a look that was part bewilderment and part sympathy. “You’re all spinning your wheels, Bass. You’re not getting anywhere.”
The Men of Thorne Island Page 6