And Babies Make Four (3 page)

He’d had plenty of opportunity to flag down the pilot—to explain that this whole trip was a waste and that the lady should head back where she came from. But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d stood in the shadows of the hangar, studying her like a moray eel studies a passing angelfish. She’d lifted her chin and marched across the field, her petite build at odds with her determined expression. Wrong fish, he’d thought as a rare smile tugged at his lips. She’s more like a blowfish—a tiny terror that swells to twice its size when it’s riled.

On the drive to his bungalow he’d discovered just how accurate that description had been—the lady was about as angelic as a lighted stick of dynamite. Still, Sheffield Industries was paying him a great deal of money for playing tour guide to her and her equipment—a cake job. He didn’t know what she was researching and—beyond the fact that it wouldn’t hurt the ecosystem of the island—he didn’t much care. The good doctor could have all the secrets she wanted—as long as Sheffield Industries paid him cold, hard cash. Hell, for enough money he could even overlook the fact that she was a woman.

But as he pushed open the door to the bedroom that had recently been his, and saw a black silk stocking draped over the end of his carved mahogany four-poster, he silently admitted that overlooking her sex was going to be a hell of a lot tougher than he thought.

He stopped, listening to make sure that the shower at the end of the hall was still going strong. Then he headed across the bedroom toward his closet, bristling with territorial ire at the feminine clutter draping his once inviolate domain. Hell, the place was even starting to smell like a boudoir! And the worst part of all was that it was his own damn fault. He could have given her the lumpy living-room couch. She was expecting it—when she realized the bungalow had only one bedroom she’d headed toward the living room without a single word of complaint. That’s when he’d spoken up like some overaged Boy Scout, blurting out that she could use his room.

That soft heart will get you into more trouble than a dog has fleas.

The gravel-voiced memory brought a ghost of a smile to Donovan’s lips. Uncle Gus. Damn, he hadn’t thought of that sharp-eyed old reprobate’s favorite saying in years, not since—

Donovan stiffened, his smile hardening into a tight, bitter line. Ruthlessly, he shoved Uncle Gus’s memory aside, just as he’d locked away all the memories of his former life. He didn’t want to deal with his past. And here, in the lazy, languid world of St. Michelle, he’d found he didn’t have to.

He opened the closet door and reached into the dark interior, to the back corner where he kept his most prized possession—his tackle box. Fishing was the closest thing Sam had to a religion, and he did his best thinking while he was casting line. He intended to spend the next hour in well-deserved solitude on
the rock jetty below his bungalow, deciding how best to present the doctor’s case to Papa Guinea. It wouldn’t be easy since the island’s views on women were right out of the Middle Ages. Still, getting her access to the sacred grounds was part of his job. The other was keeping her undeniably shapely little rear end out of trouble until—

His thoughts ended abruptly as his fingers closed, not on the metallic hardness of the tackle box, but on a mass of soft, silky material. Jerking back his arm, he extracted a handful of frilly feminine underwear. “What the hell is this!”

“Garters and camisoles,” a helpful nearby voice replied. “Victoria’s Secret’s Spring Sale. Excellent buy.”

Donovan started. He glanced around, assuring himself that he was the only one in the room. Yet someone had spoken, and the tinny voice definitely didn’t belong to the doc. “Who said that?”

“I did, dude,” the voice replied, this time accompanied by a short, mechanical whir. “What’s shakin’?”

The whir gave the speaker away. Processing chips. Following the sound, Sam glanced over at the ironwork table near his bedroom’s wide French doors. Currently, the antique table was piled high with very modern computer equipment, which gleamed like newly minted coins in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun.

In the midst of the scattered equipment were a couple of notebook PCs and multimedia speakers,
surmounted by an ultralight camcorder on a small tripod stand. As he watched, the camcorder slanted forty-five degrees to the side, in a strangely human simulation of a person cocking his head.

Sam moved closer, his anger momentarily overridden by wonder. “Einstein?”

The camcorder jerked up and down. “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out. And you’re Sam Donovan, the ‘Lucky Irish.’ ”

Sam rubbed his chin. “You know about that nickname?”

“Sure do. And I know about Syria, and the assassination plot in Germany, and saving the dozen people in—”

“Okay, I believe you.” Sam had forgotten the computer had access to all his records.
All
his records, he thought as a frown creased his forehead. The last thing he wanted was to have his self-righteous employer find out about the months following his stint in the army—months he’d spent the last two years trying to forget. “Let’s just keep my past between the two of us. Still, I guess you’d better call me Sam, considering how much you know about me.”

“Sure thing. Pleased to meet ya, Sam, and so’s PINK. Aren’t you, babe?”

“Charmed,” agreed a higher-pitched voice from a speaker on the far side of the table. “You’re the cat’s pajamas.”

“Thanks, I think,” Sam answered. Fagen had sent him material on the prototypes’ technical features, but he hadn’t warned him that they were quite so,
well, human. He peered at the equipment and took another step closer, intrigued.
It’s been a long time since anything’s made me this curious.

Not that long. He glanced down at the frilly and delicate underthings still clutched in his fist, and thought about their leggy, brainy, and completely perplexing owner. She’d been a puzzle right from the start. The lady had the body of a centerfold and enough letters after her name to start her own alphabet, but her mouth seemed permanently fixed in a frown. He’d never seen a mouth more in need of a smile. Or a kiss.

PINK’s camcorder spun in a tight arc, focusing on his chest. “Interesting. You don’t look the least bit dirty.”

He looked down, giving himself a quick scan. His jeans were a little dusty from the trip, but that was all. “Why should I be d—”

“And you don’t look beastly, either,” PINK continued, rotating her cam toward Einstein. “He doesn’t resemble a filthy beast. Noel’s mistaken.”

Sam’s jaw tightened dangerously. “She called me a filthy beast?”

“ ‘Filthy, hulking, oversexed, macho-jerk beast’ were her exact words, I believe,” Einstein supplied helpfully. “Maybe she needs her eyes examined.”

“For starters,” Sam growled, his former compassion dissolving. Several descriptive words for Noel Revere came to mind, none of them repeatable. For now. “Look, all I want is my tackle box. Where’d she put it?”

“Under the bed,” E replied. “She said it smelled like fish.”

“Of course it smells like fish!” He hunkered down beside the bed, dumping the undergarments in a heap on the edge of the covers. Sheffield Industries isn’t paying me enough, he thought as he inched his large frame under the cramped space beneath his bed. Not nearly enough.

He spotted his tackle box shoved into the far corner next to the headboard. With a grunt of triumph he scooted completely under the bed and grabbed the handle, pulling it toward him. Okay, so maybe it did smell like fish. Badly. But that still didn’t give her the right to rearrange his things. Or to call him—what was it?—a filthy, hulking, oversexed, macho-jerk beast.

He’d met her kind before. Hell, one of the reasons he’d left the States was to get away from people like her. Self-righteous harpies who wouldn’t know a charitable thought if it bit them in the behind. Since she’d arrived the lady hadn’t had one good thing to say about him—or about St. Michelle. And Sam, who owed the island and its inhabitants more than he could ever repay, took that as a personal insult.

Two years earlier he’d drifted into the harbor, as scarred and battered as a piece of tide-tossed driftwood. Working as a mechanic on a ship with a mostly legal cargo, he’d joined his crewmates in a hurricane of a bender—and had ended up alone and nursing a force-five hangover in the local jail. When he got out he’d found that his ship had sailed without him, leaving
him stranded and virtually penniless, with only the clothes on his back to his name.

But fickle Lady Luck hadn’t deserted him. To his surprise, the simple, goodhearted townsfolk had taken him in like one of their own. He was a complete stranger—they hadn’t even known his name—yet they’d generously shared their meager wealth with him as if they’d been richer than Rockefeller. They’d taught him a way of living between the sea and the sky, between the storms of rage and calms of despair that still occasionally battered his soul.
They taught me how to live in the eye of the hurricane. And if I don’t move too far in any direction, I can just manage to survive
—

The sound of an opening door curtailed his thoughts. Sam heard Dr. Revere’s voice. “Hi, E. Hi, PINK.”

He froze. Dammit, she wasn’t supposed to be finished so soon. And once she’d finished she was supposed to spend a solid ten minutes primping. The women he’d known always primped after showers. Damn, it was just like her to mess up his plans by doing something unexpect—

Sam’s internal monologue screeched to a halt as Noel walked to the bed and dropped her bath towel to the tile floor inches from Sam’s nose. His mattress-limited perspective cut off everything above her ankles. Unfortunately, that left him with an unobstructed view of her slim, provocatively arched feet, her toenails painted a ridiculously frivolous hot pink, her light, graceful step, and the undeniable knowledge
that she was standing above him as naked as the day she was born.

The vivid image hit him in the gut with the force of the falling walls of Jericho.

He gritted his teeth, wondering how he was going to get out of this mess. He knew she’d never believe his innocent reason for being under the bed. Hell,
he
wouldn’t have believed it. She’d accuse him before he got two words out, probably adding voyeur to his list of faults. Filthy beast voyeur, he thought grimly. One step above ax murderer.

Uncle Gus had said he had a soft heart, but no one had ever accused him of having a soft head. He was about to spend ten days in close quarters with this woman—ten days that would be difficult enough without her thinking of him as some sort of pervert. He gripped the handle of his tackle box and shoved his big body farther under the bed, shutting his eyes against the unexpectedly charming and—though he’d have died before admitting it—incredibly arousing image of her slim bare feet with their pink-painted nails.
Hell, maybe I am a pervert
.…

He kept his mouth shut, and hoped to hell that the “intelligent” computers had brains enough to keep theirs shut, too.

“So you don’t think the diode corrosion will be a problem?” Noel stood beside the bed and adjusted the collar of her white oxford button-down shirt.

“No way,” Einstein replied confidently. “And if it
is, we’ll just get Sam to take a look. ’Cording to his files, the dude can fix anything.”

“Except his manners,” Noel muttered, then winced. It wasn’t like her to be so mean-spirited—in fact, she was usually the last to say a condemning word about anyone. She ran her hand through her still-damp hair, silently admitting that Sam Donovan had an amazing knack for bringing out the worst in her. She didn’t know why. She wasn’t sure she
wanted
to know why.

She couldn’t deny that he was good-looking. She also couldn’t deny that he had a certain animal magnetism about him that she found marginally appealing. But what of it? she thought with a nonchalant shrug. If she took away that macho, muscle-bound physique what did he have left? Nothing. Well, almost nothing. Just those incredible, heart-stopping, breath-robbing blue eyes, and that slow sultry smile that made her insides sizzle like a strip steak on a Texas grill …

“So where is our host?” she asked abruptly. “I haven’t seen or heard him since I got out of the shower.”

PINK piped up. “That’s ’cause he’s under the—”

“Weather,” Einstein interrupted. “Er, the dude wasn’t feeling so hot, so he took off for a while.”

PINK’s camera tilted questioningly to the side. “No, he didn’t. He’s—”

Suddenly Noel heard the loud whir of Einstein’s coprocessor, a sign that he was exchanging a flood of info-bytes with PINK over their coax-cable link.
What kind of information was so critical that he couldn’t wait for PINK to finish her sentence? Frowning, she left the bed and walked toward the computers, smelling a digital rat. “Okay, you two, what’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” E assured her.

“Nothing,” PINK echoed. “Sam’s not here. He’s never been here. And he’s not hiding under the bed, either.”

Noel glanced sharply at the large four-poster, a horrible thought crossing her mind. What if he— But no … Donovan wasn’t the type to hide in a dark corner like a Peeping Tom. The man was all bellow and bluster, but somehow she knew he’d never take advantage of a woman. Of course, that didn’t make an ounce of difference in the way she felt about him.

And how exactly do you feel about him? her conscience nagged.

Noel bent down, smoothing an almost invisible wrinkle out of her sensible, knee-length navy skirt. “PINK, I think you need to run a diagnostic on your humor program. Your jokes are getting a little thin. Meanwhile I’m going to see if I can locate the absent Mr. Donovan. He said we’d need to meet this Papa Guinea character tonight. I don’t intend to miss that meeting—even if our guide doesn’t seem to give a damn about his paying clients.”

She thought she heard a sharp hiss. Turning, she looked around … but it was only the wind rustling through the palm leaves on the terrace. Except for the prototypes, she was alone in the room. Except for the
prototypes—and her annoyingly persistent conscience.

Shrugging off her thoughts, she went to the French doors and stepped out on the stone veranda that circled the bungalow. She was determined to set her mind on finding her missing host—until she caught sight of the ocean below. The sun hung low over the western horizon, turning the sea to liquid gold. Brilliant purple bougainvillea and flame-colored birds of paradise poured their blossoms over the stone railing, filling the cooling air with a scent as rich and heady as the finest perfume.