Dangerous Tides (10 page)

"I'm virtually overwhelmed by your extraordinary compliments, Derrick," Libby said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. She would not—
would not
—let him see how his casual dismissal of her feminine qualities still had the power to hurt her. "A woman always loves to hear she looks starved and unhealthy, thank you."

She made the mistake of looking up at him, her gaze locking with his.

He was watching her with a look she'd never seen in a man's eyes before, at least not when those eyes were directed at her. He looked hungry, like a predatory wolf. She swallowed hard and turned her face back toward the ocean. She just couldn't look at him and be rational. Everything he said annoyed her. He was the
only
person in the world who could get her riled, yet for some logic-defying masochistic reason she craved him. She always had.

"I never said you looked bad, Drake. It was merely an observation and genuine concern over your health. I hadn't realized you were so sensitive." He slid his fingers over her wrist to capture her hand, tugging until she came with him. "I noticed the paint on your house. It's very unusual."

She blinked up at him, more flustered than ever, trying desperately to follow the conversation. Her head was beginning to hurt. "The paint? Oh. The paint. What is it with men and paint?"

"Pardon me?"

"Damon, Sarah's fiancé, was quite interested in the paint as well. He never got around to examining it."

"Really? The first thing I did was take a sample of it."

"You chipped the paint off of our house?" Libby nearly stopped in her tracks, but he kept walking as if it were the sanest thing in the world to peel paint off other people's houses.

"Of course. Don't you want to know if an ancestor of yours found a preservative that would benefit the entire world? Even if he chose to keep it to himself to defraud the townspeople into believing it was magic, you would have the chance to set the record straight."

Libby felt a powerful rush of emotion so uncommon to her that it actually took a second or two to identify. Anger. Genuine, riled-up, I'm-so-not-a-good-girl anger. She yanked her hand away from him. "First of all,
Derrick
, most of my ancestors who lived in Sea Haven were women, so it's far more likely one of them found the preservative, if there is one, not a man. Women actually are quite capable of mastering science you know."

He didn't look at all impressed by her outburst. He reached out to tuck a strand of dark hair behind her ear, fingers lingering on her face. "As I recall, for the most part, you were nearly as good as me in the sciences."

"
For the most part
?" she repeated through clenched teeth. "I totally kicked your butt the second semester at Harvard."

"I don't think so, Drake, you never even came close. That aside, the preservative is important. Paint in the salt air never lasts long. Did you know that the ancient Egyptians used varnishes and enamels based on beeswax, gelatin and clay at least as early as 3000 B.C.?"

"Fascinating," Libby said through her clenched teeth. "Did you know the druids of ancient times also knew how to produce durable protective coatings using ox blood and lime?"

He smiled down at her, not noticing her tone. "I remember when I was a kid and Sam first pointed you and your sisters out to me. You all awed me. The Drake sisters, the royalty of Sea Haven. You were all so beautiful. I wondered how you got your hair to be so shiny and why you were always laughing. It was a long time ago and your hair is still shiny and you still always laugh when you're with your sisters."

For a moment Libby thought the ground had shifted, she was suddenly so unsteady on her feet. She was ready to put him on a rocket to Mars and then he had to go and say something like that. "You thought of us as royalty?"

"Everyone thinks of you as royalty."

"Oh, right. That's just what Irene was thinking when she bashed me over the head with her purse. Elle told me she had a picnic smacking me around." Amusement crept into her voice.

The small note of laughter, of shared fun, startled him. There had always been awkwardness between them. His mouth softened, began to curve into a smile, but her choice of words hit him. Once again he brought her to a halt, pulling off her dark glasses and looking her straight in the eye. "You don't remember her hitting you with her purse? Your sister had to tell you about it? Did she give you a concussion? Is that what's been wrong with you? Damn, Libby, you should have said so. You should be sitting down."

"I'm perfectly fine. And I don't want to talk about that." She took the sunglasses back and pushed them onto her nose, frowning at him.

Ty had a very odd and disturbing compulsion to lean down and kiss the frown right off her face. He hesitated, not wanting to further annoy her, but weighing whether he should try insisting she return to her chair.

"You either have a little bite of disapproval in your voice when you talk to me or you get that frown," he said instead. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over her lips as if he could erase her expression. Her breath was warm on his skin, her lips soft. His stomach tightened and his groin hardened in instant reaction.

"I do not," Libby denied, but even she heard the note of disapproval. "What do you expect when you do things like that?" She had to pull away from him. That light touch, oddly intimate, set her pulse racing. She was just too darned old to act like a ninny just because he was really gorgeous. Libby pressed her lips together to keep from blurting out something ridiculous, like "shut up and just let me stare."

"Like what?"

Now he sounded amused and she clenched her teeth together. "Did you come here just to make me crazy?" She suppressed a groan and the need to cover her face. He always managed to reduce her to an idiot within five minutes of conversation. She was just too aware of him as a man. She could feel his body heat, or maybe it was her own body heat. Her temperature was definitely rising. He was definite bad boy material and try as she might, Libby was not bad girl material.

"Do I make you crazy?" He sounded pleased.

This time she took off her glasses to glare at him. "You're doing it deliberately, aren't you?"

His smile fascinated her. She hadn't realized he could smile. Most of the time he looked focused and brainy, oblivious or arrogant and too superior for words. Now that she'd seen his smile she was really gone. Libby shoved her glasses back on and tried not to be affected by his looks. It was so shallow. She wasn't a shallow person, was she? Because he just wasn't all that nice.

He took her hand and continued walking down the beach to the tide pools without answering her. He kept her off balance and instead of taking charge and ending things, Libby found herself content to walk with him. His stocky body made her feel ridiculously feminine, something else she wasn't going to admit to her sisters. She didn't hold hands. She couldn't remember holding a man's hand, but she liked walking with him, the feel of his fingers wrapped tightly around hers. He stopped to examine a crab and tucked her hand against his chest.

"Hermit crabs are fascinating. The right claw is larger and a different shape than the left. They use it for protection and holding food while the left is used for eating." A mischievous grin crossed his face and lit his brilliant blue eyes. "The male drags the female around with him using the smaller claw, much like a caveman." He twisted his fingers in Libby's silky hair. "All the while he fights off other males with his large claw, holding on to his mate until she's ready to molt and becomes receptive and fertile." He tugged experimentally on Libby's hair.

"Fortunately, I'm not a female crab," she said.

"You're crabby," he pointed out. He allowed the strands of silky hair to slip through his fingers.

Her heart jumped. "I actually had two hermit crabs as pets and they must have both been males because they didn't drag each other around. They were named Toothbrush and Toothpaste. They escaped and went on a suicide mission right off the deck. I cried for a week."

His eyebrow shot up. "You cried over a crab?"

"Well, of course, they were my pets."

"You aren't normal, Libby," he said with a faint smile, his tone affectionate.

"I suppose not. Everyone teased me." She pointed to the tide pool. "I've moved on to starfish, but I leave them in their own environment."

"Starfish?" He gave a little sigh. "That isn't saying much for your taste. Starfish are carnivorous. They eat whatever they get their feet on. They flip their stomachs outside their mouth and digest prey from the inside out. Only after the animal is completely digested do they pull their stomachs back inside."

"Ew. You sound like Abigail. Leave me
some
illusions."

Tyson laughed aloud and it startled him. He didn't laugh. He pretended to laugh at appropriate times for the sake of his cousin, one of his small concessions to social niceties, but it was never genuine. Libby actually made him laugh for real. She fascinated him. She was a woman born into a family of con artists. Just knowing that should be reason enough to stay away from her, but he never could. She was just so… so nice. So real. Over the years he'd come to believe she wasn't part of her family's con, but was, instead, a victim of the very people who should have loved her, just as he was to some extent. Without the influence of his aunt, he doubted if he could even function in society at all.

"You're getting sunburned. I think we need to get you into the shade."

"I used sunscreen."

"Well, your nose is getting red."

"Great." Of course her nose had to be burned. She had such fair skin that every time she removed her sunglasses she looked like a raccoon. Her glasses were staying firmly in place. "I'm not certain there's much shade on this part of the beach." For some silly reason she wanted to stay in his company just a little while longer, even though she knew she should get out of the sun.

He took her hand and gently tugged until she followed him back to the chairs. "Where's your sunscreen?" He picked both chairs up as if they weighed nothing and moved them against the wall of the cliff in the shade. "Sit down here. You really need sunscreen but maybe this will do."

She was
not
going to have her nose be white, covered in zinc while she sat there talking to him. "I left it up at the house."

He folded his arms across his chest. He had great arms, all rippling muscle. He was a biochemist. How did he get arms like that? Libby bit her lip to keep from sighing. She needed darker glasses so she could just get away with staring. If he kept his mouth shut, she could fantasize and then life would be great again. If only he wouldn't talk.

"I saw the brain scans of my head after the accident."

Libby stiffened. All at once she was totally tense, leery of the real reason he must have sought her out. There was belligerence in his voice. She remained silent and pinned her gaze on the foaming surf.

"Shayner tells me I had major head trauma. Fractures, swelling of the brain, blood clots, that sort of thing. Basically, I had scrambled eggs for a cerebellum."

"Interesting."

"He said I should be a vegetable. Instead, I'm walking around with a smashed chest and a few broken ribs."

"I see."

"What do you see?" Tyson leaned close to her, his piercing eyes boring into her. "What the hell did you do? And don't give me any of your magic crap. I don't believe in it and I want the real explanation. You did something. You had to have. Shayner said before you were in that room with me, I was a vegetable. After, other than a few cracked ribs and other minor injuries, I was perfectly fine. What the hell did you do?"

"Crap?" Libby repeated. "Our magic crap?" Fury shimmered through her body, gripped her hard so that she actually looked around for something to throw at him. She'd endangered her sisters as well as her own life and he called what she did
crap
. "Is that what you call what I do?"

He ran a hand through his hair. "You know, I'm not saying what you do doesn't have some small validity, I'm just saying it isn't done with magic. You really don't believe in witches and voodoo and casting spells, do you? You're a doctor. There's a reasonable scientific explanation for what you do."

"Is there?"

"Well, of course. And I want to know what it is."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Why? Are you serious? Libby, if what everyone says is the truth, you restored by what all accounts was an irreparably damaged brain—my brain. The possibilities, the benefits alone for medicine and science are beyond staggering, if you really could do it. Who the hell
wouldn't
want to know how you did what you did?"

She regarded him for a long time while the gulls cried overhead and the waves pounded the shore. If her blood pressure went up any more at the utter disbelief in his voice, she was going to stroke out. "You figure it out and come tell me how my sisters and I do that magic crap. It will give us all a good laugh."

He glared at her. He was getting angry. He'd come with the best of intentions, but he didn't want to hear her defend herself or her family. "I don't care to be the butt of your jokes. You've got this entire town fooled, but I don't buy it. Just tell me."

"Why don't you start with examining the tests? Maybe they were falsified."

"I already did that. They appear authentic. And you were busy in another part of the hospital when I was brought in so I don't see how you would have had time to tamper with the records."

"You
checked
to see if I falsified records?" Libby was appalled. She drew in a deep breath. "Go away."

"I
had
to rule falsifying documents out. That's the oldest scam in the world," Ty said dismissively. "Just tell me how you did it."

"You think I gave you some new drug I don't share with other brain-damaged patients?" Libby was furious. "I didn't do a thing. The scan must have been wrong. Maybe there was a glitch in the system. I'm tired and you're annoying me. Go away."

Tyson let a few moments of silence go by, hoping she'd calm down. "You're tossing me out because you know I'm going to fixate on this. That's just mean, Drake." He shaded his eyes and looked up at the cliff. "While you're at it, explain why you don't have erosion by your house when every other cliff around here is slowly crumbling. And yes, I took samples of the soil as well."