Night Whispers

by Judith McNaught

  “All boats?” he teased.

  She nodded solemnly. “All of them—tugboats and fishing boats, slow boats and fast boats. I love the ocean and everything associated with it.”

  They were in the center of the ship, a level down from the main deck, and she stopped automatically at the next door.

  “We can skip that one,” he said firmly, putting his hand on her waist to urge her along.

  Sloan was instantly curious. “Why? What are you hiding in there?”

  “There’s nothing in there you’d be interested in.”

  She burst out laughing. “Don’t do that; it’s not fair. Now I’m curious. I can’t stand unsolved mysteries. I’m a sleuth by—” She broke off in horror. “I’m an amateur sleuth,” she amended quickly, and to further distract him, she said with sham indignation, “These are the women’s quarters, aren’t they?—you bring women along to keep the crew from mutinying on long voyages.”

  “Hardly,” he said, but he wasn’t unlocking the door, and Sloan’s fascination doubled.

  “Pirate treasure?” she ventured, trying to prod him into answering. “Smuggled goods? Drugs—” Her smile faded.

  He noticed, and with a resigned sigh, he unlocked the doors and turned on a light. Sloan stared in shock. The small room contained an arsenal of firearms, including a machine gun.

  “Courtney saw this and refused to go out to sea with me anymore.”

  Sloan shook her head a little, trying to recover.

  “Don’t dramatize it,” he warned more forcefully than Sloan thought was necessary.

  Sloan registered assault weapons and others that were illegal in the U.S. “Yes, but this—this—why do you need all this?”

  He tried to shrug it off as routine. “People who own boats frequently keep a gun aboard.”

  Sloan’s uneasiness was so intense that she shivered, and Noah leapt to an erroneous conclusion. “Don’t be afraid. These aren’t loaded.”

  Sloan stepped forward. He was lying, but she tried to sound like an amateur when she pointed it out. “If that’s true, then why is that belt-thing with the bullets in it hanging out of that machine gun?”

  Noah muffled a laugh and pulled her out of the room, turning out the lights. “It shouldn’t be there. That’s an old machine gun that we confiscated from a surprise guest on the last cruise.”

  Sloan’s mind reeled with the same refrain she’d heard earlier: She did not know him. Not really. She had gone to bed with him and done intimate things with him, but she did not know him.

  Standing beside her at the railing on the main deck, Noah sensed her withdrawal and assumed the weapons cache was the cause of it, but he attributed her reaction to the same vague panic that Courtney had felt. “Learning to use a gun is the best way to overcome a fear of them.”

  Sloan swallowed and nodded.

  “I could teach you to shoot some of them.”

  “That would be nice,” she said absently, trying to get a grip on her reactions. She was letting her imagination run wild, she told herself sternly, a silly mistake that was probably some sort of emotional backlash. She’d been falling in love with him almost from the moment she’d seen him in Carter’s living room; she’d just joined her body with his and moaned with passion in his arms. In view of all that, it made more sense to ask for an explanation than to invent one. “It would be even nicer if I understood why you have them. I mean, we’re not at war, are we?”

  “No, but I do business in countries where the governments aren’t always stable. Businessmen in those countries are frequently armed.”

  She turned fully toward him, her eyes searching his face. “You do business with people who want to shoot you?”

  “No, I do business with people whose competitors want to shoot them. Or me, if I were to get in the way. For that reason, I realized several years ago that it is not only wiser, it is healthier, to do business on my own turf. This ship is my own turf. Next month, I have a meeting off the coast of a major city in Central America. It will take place aboard Apparition, and my colleagues will be flown aboard by helicopter.”

  “Maybe you ought to get into a safer business,” Sloan mused aloud.

  He laughed. “It isn’t purely for safety; it’s also for effect.” She looked baffled, and Noah explained, “In a foreign port, dealing with people who are impressed by success, Apparition still gives me a home court advantage.”

  Sloan relaxed. What he said made a great deal of sense. “What sort of business do you do with those people?”

  “Import/export. Basically, I’m in the business of making deals.”

  “In Venezuela?”

  “That’s one of the places.”

  “Does Mr. Graziella carry a gun?”

  He didn’t like the question, Sloan noticed. “No,” he said impassively, “he doesn’t. If he did, someone would take it away from him and shoot him with it.”

  He knew she was suspicious, and instead of saying anything to allay those suspicions, he waited for her to make her own decision. Sloan sensed that she was being tested somehow—for her potential for loyalty? Or as his lover? She liked the thought of the latter, but even if he hadn’t meant that, her instincts told her he was telling the truth. In her work, these instincts were almost unfailingly reliable, and she relied on them now. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried,” she said, turning to the railing and looking out to sea.

  “Do you have any more questions?”

  She nodded slowly and somberly. “Yes, one.”

  “And that is?”

  “Why did we skip the tour of the saloon?”

  Noah was completely enthralled by her wit, her intelligence, and at the moment, by the way she looked in the moonlight in a strapless gown with her hair blowing in the breeze. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, drawing her close against his body, and his voice was already husky with awakening desire. “There’s a door to my stateroom off the stairs inside the saloon, and if you go into one room, you have to go into the other, too— there are no deviations allowed on this tour,” he teased.

  He waited for her to react and felt a fresh surge of lust when she nodded slightly.

  “There’s one more problem,” he whispered. “I made a mistake earlier. The package price didn’t include this part of the tour. There’s an extra charge—I have to collect it in advance.”

  His mouth touched the corner of her lips, waiting to collect, and with a shudder of surrender, Sloan turned her head to fully receive his kiss.

  33

  For Sloan, the next week passed in a sweet procession of sunny days and sensual nights. She spent at least part of every day with Paris and at least part of every night with Noah. His sailboat, the Star Gazer, became a private bower, close-by and yet private and mobile. His house on the beach became nearly as comfortable to her as her own home in Bell Harbor, and Douglas and Courtney seemed to regard her as part of their family. None of it was permanent, she knew that. She knew that only one thing from her Palm Beach trip was permanent and lasting: She was in love with Noah.

  Paul and Paris appeared to have paired off, and frequently the four of them spent the day together, though they usually went separate ways for the evening. Sloan couldn’t tell what sort of relationship the FBI agent was having with her sister. Paul was not the sort of man who invited questions about his personal feelings, and although Paris was perfectly willing to share hers, the truth was that she didn’t know how Paul felt about her either.

  That was a frequent topic of conversation between Sloan and Noah when they were alone, but on the eighth day after her fateful night aboard the Apparition, Sloan didn’t have him to talk to; in fact, for the first time, she had a solitary evening ahead of her, and although that would have pleased her a few weeks ago, she felt restless and alone now.

  Noah had some sort of business meeting in Miami and wasn’t due back until the following day. Sloan had intended to spend the time with Paris and Edith, but Paris developed a migraine headache that afte
rnoon and had taken some medication that put her to sleep. Paul had also gone away for the day on some sort of “personal business” and hadn’t known whether he’d return that night or the next morning. After an early dinner, Edith wanted to spend the evening watching game shows on satellite TV and by nine-thirty Sloan couldn’t sit through another minute of them. Carter had a poker game with friends and wasn’t due home until after eleven.

  Sloan had an awful premonition that when she left here, when Noah was no longer near, restlessness and loneliness were going to be her constant companions. She did not deceive herself about his intentions; she’d heard enough remarks from Douglas and Courtney, and from Noah himself, to know that he was antimarriage and antichildren. What’s more, she’d gotten to know some of his friends when he took her to the country club, and from things she’d heard, it was apparent that Noah discarded women as carelessly as he changed shirts—and almost as frequently.

  And yet, even knowing all that and knowing how much this was going to hurt when it was over, Sloan wouldn’t have missed a moment of it if she’d been offered the choice.

  Until the past week, she’d felt like an oddity around Sara and most of their old friends. Except for Sloan, they’d all been “boy crazy” as teenagers; in college, they’d slept around and fallen in and out of love constantly. Unlike all of them, Sloan had had only two sexual relationships in her entire life, and one of those relationships would never have happened if she hadn’t been feeling like a complete outsider at the time.

  Her mother was the only one who hadn’t found that strange, although as Sloan neared thirty with no man in her life, even Kimberly began to hint that she ought to date more often. Kimberly had little ground to stand on in that regard; men asked her out all the time, and she almost never went. “I’m just not attracted to him,” she would tell Sloan. “I’d rather stay home or go out with friends.”

  As Sloan was discovering, she was more like her mother than she’d imagined. The two of them simply weren’t attracted to just any attractive, eligible man; they were attracted rarely, but when it happened, it was evidently a life-altering experience. The phrase “one-man woman” ran through Sloan’s mind as she wandered out onto her bedroom balcony and looked out at the moonlight on the water.

  Sloan glanced at her watch and decided to go for a walk on the beach. It was nearly ten and a walk on the beach would soothe her so that she’d be able to sleep. She put on a pair of jeans and sneakers and pulled a bulky pale pink cotton sweater over her head; then she pulled her hair up into a ponytail and headed downstairs.

  When she got to the beach, she decided to turn left, away from Noah’s house, so that she wouldn’t see it and use it as a landmark. She needed to stop dwelling on him this way. She needed to think about her future, when he wasn’t going to be around. She needed to, but she couldn’t make herself do it. It was so much sweeter to think instead about the things he did and said when they were together. He was brilliant and witty and willing to talk about anything that interested her—anything, that is, except his feelings for her. Never, not even in the heat of passion, did he ever use the word “love” or talk about the future after she left Palm Beach. He never even used an endearment or called her by an affectionate nickname. In Bell Harbor, Jess called her “Short Stuff,” and when he was in his Humphrey Bogart mood, he called her “Hey, sweetheart.” Half the guys on the police force had nicknames for her, but the man she made love with for hours at a time called her “Sloan.”

  Rather than worry about all that, Sloan decided to think about all the glorious fun she’d had with him.

  She was still doing that an hour later when she neared Carter’s house again on her return trip. With her hands shoved into her back pockets, she gazed out across the water, smiling at the thought of how he looked sailing a boat with the wind ruffling his hair. He was as relaxed and competent at the helm of that demanding sailboat as he was driving a car, and he’d volunteered to teach her to sail it, too. As a teacher, he’d had a tendency to expect too much at first, calling out orders she didn’t understand more quickly than she could follow them. She’d broken him of that during the second lesson by addressing him as “Captain Bligh” in a semiserious voice.

  Sloan was so absorbed in her memory of that day that when she heard his voice, she thought for a moment she was imagining it. “Sloan!”

  She looked away from the water and scanned the beach ahead; then she looked to the right. She stopped walking and stared, unable to believe her eyes. Noah was in Miami on business . . . Noah was walking toward her from the back lawn of her father’s house wearing jeans and a knit polo shirt. She started walking again, and he stepped up his pace. “Going anywhere in particular?” he asked with a boyish grin, stopping in front of her.

  Sloan shook her head.

  “By any chance, have you been feeling sort of lost and lonely and unable to concentrate today?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” she said, overjoyed because he evidently felt that way, too. “I think it must be some sort of flu!”

  “A flu? Does that make you irritable and impossible to please?”

  In the last week, Sloan had noticed that he had a temper and that when displeased, he could be curt and even harsh, but he never showed that side of himself to his family or to her. She gave him a look of jaunty superiority. “I wouldn’t know about that. My disposition is always sweet.”

  He laughed and opened his arms. “Then come and share it with me.”

  Sloan rushed forward, and his arms closed around her with stunning force. “I missed you,” he whispered. “You’re addictive.” His mouth seized hers in a ravenous kiss, forcing her lips to part for his probing tongue. When he was satisfied, he turned and put his arm around her waist and started walking with her toward his house.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To the place I love to see you in the most.”

  It was late, and Sloan made a wild guess. “The kitchen?”

  “How did you know?” he teased. “I came back tonight instead of waiting until morning because I wanted to see you. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, and Claudine has already gone to bed. Courtney incinerates anything she touches, and Douglas won’t touch anything in the kitchen that he doesn’t plan to put directly in his mouth. Do you think you could whip up one of those omelettes like the one you made me last week?”

  Sloan smothered a laugh. “It breaks my heart to think you’d have to go to bed hungry if you couldn’t find a woman on the beach who can figure out how to turn on a stove. It’s so sad.”

  Noah glanced at her face. “You don’t look sad,” he noted.

  “You are not only handsome, brilliant, and incredibly sexy,” Sloan said, trying to make a joke of what she really felt, “but you are also perceptive. I don’t look sad because I have a solution.”

  “Am I going to like it?”

  • • •

  Courtney rushed into her father’s study and grabbed Douglas’s hand, pulling him out of his chair. “What are you doing?” he protested as the book he was reading slid to the floor.

  “You have to come downstairs. Sloan is here, and you aren’t going to believe this unless you see it.”

  “See what?”

  “Noah is cooking!”

  “You mean ‘cooking’—as in ‘angry’?” Douglas speculated, walking swiftly beside her.

  “No, I mean ‘cooking’—as in ‘kitchen.’ ”

  As they neared the kitchen, they stopped talking and walked softly, anxious to witness this unprecedented event without being seen.

  Noah was standing in the center of the kitchen watching Sloan, who was gathering the ingredients for an omelette. “I have a philosophy about cooking,” he announced in the professional tone of one who is about to expound on a theoretical analysis of a topic on which he is an expert.

  Sloan grinned at him as she took an onion, a couple of tomatoes, and a red and a green pepper from the produce drawer and put them on the counter to
be chopped. “Does your philosophy go something like—‘I paid for the food; let someone else figure out what to do with it’?”

  “Oh, have you already read my best-selling book on this subject?”

  Ignoring that, Sloan said, “Would I be correct in assuming that the ‘someone else’ in your philosophy is probably female?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Isn’t that a little sexist?”

  “I don’t think of it that way,” he declared with outrageous gall. “I think of it as delegating responsibility.” The bacon was cooking in the microwave, and Noah sniffed appreciatively. “That smells delicious.”

  She sent him a smile over her shoulder. “Does it?”

  “I’m partial to omelettes, and I’m starved.”

  “Want to hear my philosophy on cooking?” Sloan warned.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She told him anyway: “He who does not help with the cooking does not get to help with the eating.”

  “Okay, I’m ready. Give me an assignment. Make it a tough one.”

  Without turning, she passed him a knife and green pepper over her right shoulder. “Here you are. A green pepper.”

  He grinned at her back. “I had something more macho in mind.”

  She passed him the onion.

  Noah laughed, enjoying himself hugely. He began to peel off the outer layer of the onion. “I hope the guys at the bowling alley don’t hear about this. I’ll be ruined.”

  “No you won’t. Knives are good. They’re macho.”

  In answer he picked up a dish towel and snapped it, landing a soft whack on her buttocks.

  “Better not try that on me, Noah,” Courtney said, sauntering forward. Leaning her elbows on the counter, she perched her chin on her fists and regarded him with prim superiority. “Sloan has been showing me some excellent self-defense moves. I can toss you on your—ouch,” she said as the dish towel landed with more force on her rump.