Secret Assignment

by Paula Graves

  He watched, waiting for her to reverse course and move back down the path toward his house. But as she turned to do just that, she stopped, her head craning to look upward.

  He followed her gaze and saw only the darkened windows of the service room and the reflection of moonlight on the glass that enclosed the lantern room. But whatever had drawn her attention upward held it, luring her toward the lighthouse entrance.

  She disappeared into the gloom inside.

  Chapter Eight

  Shannon had seen nothing out of the ordinary. No flicker of movement in the windows, no flash of color, no ghostly hand against the lantern room window. Nor had she heard anything more substantial than the whisper of the Gulf breeze through the dry fingers of sea grass growing hip-high around the base of the lighthouse.

  But the hair on the back of her neck rose, a warning sign that something in the lighthouse was different.

  If this were a horror movie, she thought as she eased her way toward the lighthouse entrance, there’d be a man with a butcher’s knife just inside, poised to make the pretty but dim heroine pay for being too stupid to live.

  But this wasn’t a horror movie, and she’d seen herself today how seriously the local fishermen and even the Harbor Patrol had taken their roles as gatekeepers. No way had a Zodiac Bayrunner gotten anywhere near Nightshade Island today.

  This is really about regaining honor, isn’t it, Cooper? Last night you got spooked and ran like a little girl.

  Well, so what if it was? The only way something retained the power to frighten a person was if she let it, right? The lighthouse had spooked her last night. Tonight, she would conquer her fear and rob the creepy old place of any power over her.

  The penlight painted a pale streak of illumination across the old stone walls of the spiral staircase and speared the darkness overhead as she directed the beam upward. There was only stillness above, as far as she could see. No floating wraith of the old lightkeeper. No gremlins waiting in the shadows to dash her down the stairs to the stone floor below.

  She was pleased with how normally she was breathing when she reached the service room. A little winded from the exertion, her heart rate up a little, but not bad at all. She doubted any of her brothers could have managed the climb in the dark any better.

  Without the press of dangerous invaders and a ticking clock to drive her into haste, she took a good look around the service room. It was dusty. Draped with cobwebs. Dank and cool, drafty where the wind moaned through the cracked window and the narrow space beneath the door.

  She looked at the closed door. Had she closed it last night? She didn’t remember whether she had or not.

  She flashed the beam toward the far wall, where a small light about the size of a pinhead glowed red. It was part of a switch connected to a cast-iron box that seemed to disappear into the wall where the foghorns emerged on the other side.

  The mechanism was on. Had it been on last night?

  Definitely not when she entered the service room. She’d have noticed the light shining in the gloom. And she’d been too freaked out to notice anything but the fastest way out of the room after the horn went off.

  At least everything seemed to be working now. Maybe there’d been a short. Or the connector might be loose, which made it susceptible to coming apart again.

  She studied the switch mechanisms under the penlight and made sure anything that connected to anything else was firmly seated. Nothing seemed particularly loose.

  She stood very still, just taking in the atmosphere. Musty air filled her nostrils, with just a hint of the salty sea blowing in on the breeze.

  And something else.

  Gun oil, she realized. Reminiscent of Gideon sitting at the kitchen table at Stafford House, cleaning his Walther.

  She closed her eyes, the image of him still imprinted on her brain—Gideon, standing there in the caretaker’s house, stripped to the skin and about the most intensely masculine thing she’d ever seen. Dark hair had curled across his sternum, narrowing to a dark line that intersected his belly and dipped beneath the waistband of his jeans. He had a flat, toned abdomen and wide, powerful shoulders, his body well-proportioned without looking overmuscled. His skin was lightly tanned and nicked here and there with the souvenirs of a life in the military, scars large and small, including a Marine Corps insignia tattooed on his left deltoid muscle and a surgical scar in the shadowy valley beneath his left pectoral muscle that suggested a close brush with not making it back alive.

  If she’d plugged her ideal parameters for the perfect male body into a computer search engine, she didn’t think she could have come up with a better representative sample. She’d tried not to stare, but his sheer, imposing masculinity was a thing of beauty.

  And when they’d kissed, oh so briefly—

  Enough. She opened her eyes and looked around the empty service room, grounding herself in the stark reality. He’d stopped the kiss. He didn’t want things between them to go any further, and that was fine with her. She was there to do a job, not to moon over a big, surly stranger built like a superhero.

  She made it to the ground floor without stumbling. And if she felt the hair on the back of her neck prickling, as if unseen eyes followed her all the way to the ground, well, that was just her silly imagination.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Gideon had pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, Shannon’s penlight reappeared up in the service room, outlining her slim silhouette as she moved about inside.

  She was still up there when he slipped out his back door and started up the crooked path to the lighthouse, his body protesting in creaks and groans, like a rusty engine forced into use. As he neared the lighthouse, the light disappeared. He heard the sound of her footsteps ringing on the metal stairway as he neared the entrance and had to step back as she emerged from inside, her stride forceful, as if she were on a mission.

  She skidded to a sudden stop as he loomed up in the dark, slumping back against the lighthouse wall. “You scared the hell out of me!”

  “Sorry.” He sort of meant it. Mostly. Even though he still wanted to know what she was doing climbing to the top of the lighthouse in the middle of the night.

  “I thought you were going to bed.”

  “I thought you were, too,” he replied, ruthlessly ignoring the mental image that arose from thinking about Shannon Cooper and a bed in the same sentence. “What were you doing up there?”

  She flashed a sheepish smile that made his stomach turn flips. “Exorcising ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “I got freaked out last night while I was up there and the horn sounded. Ran away like a big baby.” Her chin lifted. “I felt the need to prove to myself that I could go back there and be okay.”

  “And did you?”

  She nodded. “While I was up there, I checked the connectors on the foghorn. Everything looks as if it’s pretty tightly seated. All the connections were solid. I’m not sure why it didn’t sound last night.”

  He felt a ripple of shame at not thinking to check the connectors himself that morning before he left the island. What if the switch hadn’t worked again, leaving Shannon and Lydia without any way to call for help?

  “You look dead on your feet.” Shannon closed her hand around his elbow, nudging him toward the path. “You should be in bed.”

  His body concurred with her, though probably not in the spirit she’d intended. “I’ll walk you back to Stafford House.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  He was beginning to think it was. If only to exorcise his own ghosts.

  Shannon Cooper had become a powerful temptation to him, a distraction from his mission to protect Lydia Ross and her husband’s legacy. He’d almost let a kiss derail him from that mission entirely. He needed to prove to himself he could handle having her around without letting his libido get the best of him.

  “Maybe you should reconsider staying there,” Shannon said as they neared Gideon’s house. “Safety in numbers.”r />
  “You afraid to be there alone?”

  She turned to look at him, her eyes shining in the moonlight. “Actually, I’d like to have you where I can check on you. That’s a pretty big lump on the back of your head.”

  “I’m—”

  “Fine,” she finished for him with a frustrated sigh. “Maybe you are. But if you’re not, I’d like you to be where you can call for help and someone might actually hear you.”

  He knew she was right. While he was fairly sure he didn’t have a concussion—he’d experienced no double vision and very little head pain—it would be obstinate and stupid not to take precautions. A closed head injury was nothing to mess around with.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me grab some clothes.”

  She walked with him up to the porch but dropped onto the double bench that sat outside his door. “I’ll wait here and enjoy the view.” She waved out toward the moonlit water.

  He followed her gaze, taking in the glittering Gulf of Mexico, bathed silvery blue by moonlight. It was beautiful. Mysterious. Full of hidden depths. His gaze slid back to Shannon Cooper’s face, realizing the same could be said of the serene, composed young woman sitting on his porch. Even though his whole body seemed to vibrate whenever he was near her—all the worse now after their brief kiss—she showed little sign of being affected by his nearness at all.

  Was it an act? Or was she truly unaffected by their fleeting moment of intimacy?

  Suddenly annoyed, he pushed through the front door and shoved a change of clothes into a canvas duffel. He put the first aid kit inside as well and returned to the porch. Shannon still sat on the bench, her head resting against the wall. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was slow and even.

  He hated to wake her, but he could hardly leave her out here to nap all night. “Shannon?”

  Her eyes snapped open, unfocused. She finally spotted him and shot him a sheepish grin that made his heart flip. “Sorry. Long day.”

  “Tell me about it,” he murmured, holding out his hand to help her up.

  She stared at his outstretched hand for a moment, indecision evident in her expression. But she lifted her hand, finally, placing it in his. Her gaze rose to meet his, vulnerability shining in her dark eyes.

  So she had been affected, he thought, unable to fully quell a feeling of sheer masculine pleasure.

  He closed his fingers around hers, careful to be gentle, and tugged lightly, pulling her to her feet. It took all his strength not to pull her closer and finish what they’d started in his kitchen earlier.

  He loosened his grip on her hand, and she let her fingers slide away from his. An ache settled low in his belly as she moved forward, down the stairs, putting distance between them.

  Slowly, he followed her down the garden path to Stafford House.

  * * *

  “YOU SHOULD HAVE come straight here last night!” Lydia’s voice was firm but affectionate as she took the plate Gideon handed her. “You could have had a concussion.”

  Shannon glanced at Gideon, surprised he’d even told his employer about what happened to him on the dock at Bay Pointe Marina. Gideon’s gaze slid across hers, settling for a second, before turning back to Lydia, who sat next to him at the table and unfolded a napkin across her lap.

  “I’m fine,” he said. Shannon stifled a laugh.

  “Well, at least Shannon had the good sense to talk you into staying here last night. I shudder to think what might have happened had you passed out at the caretaker’s house. All alone with nobody to help you—” She paused in the middle of slicing her waffle, angling her head to take another look at the egg-size lump on the back of his head. “Does it hurt terribly?”

  “Only when you touch it,” he said lightly. “So don’t touch it.”

  Lydia chuckled. “Duly noted.”

  They ate their waffles in silence for a few minutes, enjoying a quiet camaraderie that Shannon found soothing. Her experience with family breakfasts leaned more toward the loud and boisterous.

  Gideon took their empty plates to the sink, waving off their offers to handle the cleanup. He rinsed the plates with dish soap and water and placed them in the drying rack.

  “How did you sleep?” Shannon asked when he returned to the table.

  “Like the dead.” He dropped into his chair.

  “Don’t say that.” Lydia looked appalled.

  He looked mortified. “I’m sorry.”

  She laid a forgiving hand on his shoulder. “No, I’m being a superstitious old woman.” She dropped her hand away and stood. “I believe I’m going out to the garden this morning. I’ve neglected my poor babies in all this excitement.” She looked at Shannon. “Have you showed Gideon the coded diary yet?”

  Gideon looked at Shannon. “Coded diary?”

  Shannon had brought the book down with her that morning, spending a little time on the front porch enjoying the morning air and trying to make some headway with the cipher. She went to the coffee table to retrieve the journal, showing it to Gideon as Lydia headed out to the garden.

  “Lydia said it’s definitely the general’s handwriting,” she told him as he thumbed through the pages. “Does the code look at all familiar to you?”

  He gave her a wry look. “If it looks familiar, it’s not good code.”

  She smiled. “I have some books at home on cryptography—” At his perplexed expression, she added, “It’s a hobby.”

  His dimples came out to play. “I suppose you also do open heart surgery and build cold fusion reactors in your spare time?”

  “I’m a computer geek, remember? Code is my life.”

  “Not quite the same sort of code.” He frowned as he looked down at one of the pages.

  “Did you find something?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “It’s just—this word looks familiar.”

  She went around the table and looked over his shoulder. His index finger was pointing to a series of five letters. VETCA.

  “Vetca?” she said aloud.

  “I’ve heard that term used before. I’m just not sure where.”

  “Could it be a foreign word?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. This book is definitely in code, not a foreign language.”

  His brow furrowed as if he were in pain. She reached across the table and put her hand on his arm, trying not to notice the crisp hair tickling her fingers or the way his sinewy muscles flexed at her touch. “Are you sure you’re fine?”

  He looked up at her. “My ribs hurt like hell.”

  She smiled. “Must be really bad for you to admit it.”

  “Probably should have taped them up last night.” He handed the book back to her. “I’m not sure what this is about. I’ll give some thought to where I’ve seen the word vetca before.” He stood from the table, moving a little gingerly. “Yeah, definitely should have taped them.”

  She rose with him. “I can do it for you.”

  He slanted her a wry look. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  The air between them heated immediately, supercharged by his frank admission. “Because of what happened last night?”

  “I’m not looking for that kind of entanglement.”

  “Neither am I,” she said quickly, wishing she sounded a little less tentative. “It’s hard enough trying to convince my brother I can handle a field assignment without complicating it with—” She faltered, searching for the right word.

  “A complication,” he supplied wryly.

  “A complication,” she agreed.

  He just nodded, as if they’d said all that needed saying. “Lydia doesn’t remember, because of all the chaos, I guess, but she has a hair appointment in Terrebonne later this morning.”

  “You remember her hair appointments?” she asked with surprise. Talk about taking a caretaker’s job seriously.

  “It’s written on the calendar next to the fridge,” he said with a dimpled grin that almost made her forget their recent agreement to
ignore their attraction. “Do you want to stay here and go through more boxes or come with us?” His tone was almost wheedling, as if he was consciously tempting her to play hooky from work and come play.

  And she had gotten through more of the general’s papers yesterday than she’d thought she could accomplish in that short time….

  “Why not?” she asked with a grin. “Let’s go to Terrebonne.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Have you ever been here before?” Lydia asked Shannon as they walked the short distance from Terrebonne Marina to the marina’s rental garage where she and Gideon kept their vehicles.

  “Just through town to get to the marina,” she admitted. “But my cousin spent some time here a while ago. His first wife grew up here, and his new wife, Natalie, used to work here as a sheriff’s deputy.”

  Lydia gave her a quick, interested look. “Natalie Becker?”

  “Yes. Natalie Cooper now—she and J.D. married up in Gossamer Ridge a few months ago.”

  “Becker Oil Becker?” Gideon asked with a low whistle.

  “I believe so,” Shannon said. Her cousin-in-law came from family money, she knew, though neither J.D. nor Natalie talked about it.

  Gideon unlocked the padlock on the garage unit and pulled open the large, wide doors, letting daylight illuminate the dark interior. Side by side in the well-maintained garage, a cream-colored Cadillac and a big black Ford F-150 made an odd pair. No question who drove what, either, although it was Gideon who unlocked the Caddy and slid behind the wheel, apparently willing to play chauffeur to Lydia as well as take care of Nightshade Island.

  Shannon sat in the back, behind Lydia, and watched with interest as they pulled onto Terrebonne’s tiny, oak-lined main drag and drove into the center of the small coastal town.

  Redbrick city buildings filled one side of the central square, across the street from a small green park, where oaks, hickories and magnolias dripped with Spanish moss, setting a picture-postcard scene of somnolent Southern charm. Gideon parked the Caddy in front of a small store a block down Main Street, with a plate glass storefront sign, crimson letters outlined in white, proclaiming Pamela’s Style Salon lay inside.