Island Promises (3 page)

The room was much smaller than a hotel room with the bed—nothing more than a bunk—taking up most of the space. There was a tiny closet no bigger than a locker, with a mirror on the inside. The only saving grace of the room was the sun sending stripes of color, oranges and reds and purples, through the porthole.

As she plopped onto the bed to remove her shoes, she recalled how rude Captain Logan had been when she asked whether her room was on the right or left.

“Your cabin,” he’d snarled, “is port side aft.”

“I don’t get why you people can’t speak English? Just because you’re on a boat doesn’t mean you get to rename everything. Beds are bunks, windows are portholes, closets are lockers. What’s with that anyway?” She shoved a hunk of wet hair, which despite vigorous shampooing still smelled like chicken, out of her eyes.

“Your resume said you’ve cruised before.” He glared up at her from his position in the cockpit, a large hammer clenched in his hand as he paused in whatever he was doing on the underside of the oversized steering wheel.

“I have,” Riley said. “Four or five times.” It vaguely occurred to her then to ask how he’d gotten a copy of her resume and why in the world it would list the cruises she’d been on, but she didn’t have the energy to pursue it.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I need to sleep.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but right now she was too tired to care. Sleep first, then food.

For just a moment, he stopped working again and looked at her. “Anthony,” he called. The crew-cut head popped out of one of the openings in the deck. “Show Ms. Santey to her cabin. Otherwise, she’s liable to wind up in the engine room.”

Riley woke, unsure of where she was, at first thinking the noises were from traffic and pedestrians. Then she realized the voices were coming from the deck. Out in the hallway, she opened several doors before she found the bathroom. A couple of the rooms were much larger than hers, had more portholes, and had their own bathrooms. If they thought they were pulling one over on her by sticking her in a hole, they would find out she wasn’t a pushover. Riley had no problem with the crew using the large rooms when she wasn’t around. Hell, she’d owned this boat for a couple years and had never set foot on it. It was senseless for those rooms to sit idle all that time. But now that she was here, she expected some respect. This Captain Joe Logan was acting a little too possessive, as though this were his boat.

She brushed her teeth with her fingers and finger-combed her hair, which was becoming curlier by the instant, then made her way toward the voices. A lurch in the boat threw her to the left and she bumped her hip into one of the cabinets in the kitchen. They probably didn’t call it a cabinet, or a kitchen, but right now her hip hurt too badly and she didn’t care.

“Damn.” She must have said it louder than she imagined, because an upside-down head appeared through the hole above, sun-streaked hair billowing out.

“Good, you’re up,” Joe said. “I was going to send Anthony to wake you.”

“The boat’s moving,” she said, rubbing her hip.

“Yeah, that’s the whole idea.”

“I’m starving.”

“First thing we agree on,” he said. “Everyone up here is starved, too.”

“Everyone?” The head disappeared and Riley decided to follow it up the ladder. She had to grip the handholds with everything she had to keep from pitching backward onto the boards below.

She swallowed against the queasiness as her stomach jumped up and down, right along with the movement of the boat. Maybe some food would help settle it.

Above, the breeze was strong, but the air still warm and soft. The sky was that clear, inviting blue that you rarely see up north, even in the height of summer. Behind them, Riley could see the distant outline of the islands. Ahead, there was only open sea. Besides Anthony and Joe, a middle-aged couple was sitting in the cockpit. Both wore Hawaiian shirts, the man nearly bald and stocky, the woman thin with hair that must have been plastered with spray because not a strand moved.

Riley stood in the companionway waiting. Anthony was at the wheel, squinting out into the bright sea and sun. Joe had one foot up on the settee, hanging on to a rope that went to one of the sails. He wore a faded T-shirt and cut-offs, bleached almost white from the elements. His hair was pulled back and secured with an elastic band.

“So here she is,” the stocky man squeaked. “Now we can eat.” He clapped his hands together like a child about to get a treasured toy.

“We’re from Travel Delite in New York.” The woman with hair too deep a black to be natural, stuck out her hand.

Riley shook it, groping with her other hand for a hold on the boat.

“We’re a small agency with a personal touch. Walter and I pride ourselves on not recommending anything to our clients that we haven’t done ourselves.”

“All the details are important, aren’t they, Frannie?” said the man. “Especially the food. Right, Frannie?”

She patted him on the thigh, a blinding white blubber of skin exposed below a blooming pair of khaki shorts. “That’s absolutely right, Walter, absolutely.”

A wave broke behind them, sending the boat skidding. Riley was caught off guard and plopped down with little grace, almost onto Walter’s lap. He giggled like a junior high school girl.

“When do we eat?” Riley asked, shifting around her borrowed clothes into some semblance of shape.

Walter and Frannie laughed; he with a high-pitched whinny, and she with a snort.

Joe looked hard at Riley. She shrugged her shoulders as if to say:
Whatever the hell your problem is, I’ll handle it better after lunch
. Her cell phone and her watch were both still soaked with muddy water and she hadn’t seen a clock on this boat but judging by the height of the sun and the warmth of the day, she had slept through breakfast.

“Excuse us.” Joe grabbed her by the collar of the big faded denim shirt she wore.

“What?” She put out her hands to stop him, but she wasn’t accustomed to the rolling of the boat.

He led her down the companionway and didn’t let go until they were in her cabin, the tiny floor space forcing them to stand toe-to-toe. He was taller than she first thought and his shoulder muscles, exposed by his T-shirt with the arms ripped out, were well developed, probably from all that lifting and bailing. The ‘ripped sleeve’ look must be his concession to fashion.

“Those guests up there are expecting a gourmet lunch.” His voice was full of command. Not shouting, not out of control, but expecting to be obeyed.

“So am I,” she answered, smelling the salt and engine oil on his skin.

“When are you going to start cooking?”

“Hopefully, never. I could live on take-out quite happily for the rest of my life. I don’t know about restaurants here, but Chicago has—”

Joe slammed his hand against the decking, which made her jump. “You’re not a cook?”

If she’d had the room, she would have backed away. The glint in his eyes was the same one ingrained in her memory from the night she’d been mugged in an alley in Chicago. A look of murder, of wanting to wring her neck, of power.

“I never claimed to be a cook.”

He slammed the wall again and she jumped again. “I thought, when you came . . . we were expecting . . . a woman answered the ad . . .”

“You thought I was hiring on as a cook?” Riley burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes. Eventually her stomach hurt from laughing, and she had to bend over, so she laid her head against his chest. Even through the T-shirt his skin was warm from the sun. His heart beat strongly against her forehead. “That is so good. Wait until they hear about this in Chicago. I’ve been called a lot of things, but ‘chef’ isn’t on the list.”

Taking hold of her shoulders, his hands rough against her exposed skin, he shook her slightly until she straightened up and stopped laughing.

“Hey.” She tried to bat his hands away but he was incredibly strong.

“Cap’n?” Anthony was just outside the door. Still holding her with one hand, as though she might disappear in this tiny room in the middle of the ocean, Joe cracked open the door with the other.

“Tell them lunch will be soon.” Joe waited until they heard Anthony climb back up to the cockpit before turning back to Riley. “I don’t know who the hell you are . . .”

“I own this boat, that’s who I am.” Riley had had about enough of his arrogance. “As owner, I expect to be treated with respect.”

“The
Reprieve
is mine.” That domineering captain’s voice was coming out again. “
I
give the orders. You’ve got 20 minutes to get some food up there. And it damn well better be good food.” He let her go and she swirled around so quickly she almost fell over onto the bunk.

“What if I don’t?” Riley sucked in her stomach, straightened her spine, and jutted out her chin. She was not about to let this island reincarnation of Captain Bligh intimidate her.

He leaned toward her and she had to work hard to keep her courage up in the face of his resolve. He was so close she could see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes and the sun-bleached white hairs where the stubble from his chin met his cheekbones.

“The rule of the sea.” They were inches from each other. “It’s a long swim back.”

It was early evening when they got back to the dock. The galley, as she was told to call it, was a mess. A pot was upside down on the stove, the remainder of the soup covering the burner. A streak of vegetable oil ran down the counter. Pieces of lettuce were stuck to the overhead light. Riley could barely cook on dry land, let alone on a boat that was pitching and rolling.

“Riley, honey, we’re going,” Frannie called.

Riley climbed the ladder to the cockpit and hugged them.

“Most interesting,” said Walter. “Your combination of tastes, of simple styles, was intriguing.”

“We enjoyed talking to you, honey.” Frannie tied the wide straw hat under her chin. “Sometimes the crew can be so standoffish that it makes it uncomfortable, especially on the smaller boats.”

Riley couldn’t help but send a big smile Joe’s way. He’d done little more than grunt through lunch. Anthony had stood guard at the wheel, silent. The guy was carrying this strong, silent type to such an extreme that it was irritating.

Once Riley had settled upon her “simple, down-home” menu of soup, salad, fruit, and bread, she’d used her reporter’s skills to get Frannie and Wally talking. One thing she’d learned was that people loved to talk about themselves. Normal people, anyway, which explained the silence of the two stone brothers. The travel agents were so busy talking about themselves that they’d barely noticed the food. All those days on planes, in hotel rooms, writing at computer screens, with only each other for company, made them pathetically grateful for a fresh listener.

As soon as they lurched away in the rickety taxi, Riley threw down her apron, donned the flip-flops she’d found in her room, and grabbed her purse. On one of the settees she found an old Cleveland Indians ball cap and jammed it over her hair, which had taken on a life of its own and tried to jolt the cap back off, tufts springing up everywhere. Instead of the sleek, polished look of a Chicago reporter, her hair now curled and bent in any way it wanted.

Anthony had scrounged a T-shirt for her along with a pair of men’s shorts that she had to use a rope as a belt to hold up. The fact that she didn’t have to pull the rope too tightly was something she preferred to ignore.

“It’s been real, boys,” she said. “By the time I get back, I expect you to have your stuff cleared off my boat.”

Neither of them answered. Anthony was coiling some rope and Joe was folding a sail. Ignoring her was not something she could tolerate. She stood there for a moment waiting, her blood pressure rising, making her cheeks even hotter than the sun had made them. Still they didn’t even act as though she had spoken.

“We’ll just see what the authorities have to say about you taking over my boat,” she declared. That got their attention.

“Just where the hell do you think you’re going?” Joe peered at her over the sail.

“On the way in, I saw a sign for the Police Station. That’s where I’m going.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

It was the first full sentence Anthony had spoken in her presence since he’d chided Joe for being mean. The words stopped her in midair, one leg on the boat, the other hefted over the lifeline ready to be set down on the dock.

“You don’t know anything about these islands and how they work,” Joe said. “Involving the officials is a mistake.”

“A mistake for you two, maybe.”

“Look, lady, I don’t know if you’re a scam artist or just delusional, but Anthony here is right. You don’t want to drag the authorities into this,” Joe said.

Riley considered her options. Her cell phone wasn’t working. She had no money to make a call, no one to call, and no place to go except this boat. They might keep her on here since today hadn’t been a total disaster. But what kind of wimp would that make her if she hired on to the boat she owned? She’d have a hard time feeling sorry for herself, let alone have anyone else sympathize or understand if she became that big of a doormat and let them walk all over her. Decided, she put her foot on the dock.

“It’s a bad idea.” Anthony was looking at her with something that might have passed for concern on his football player features.

“Let her go,” Joe said. “There isn’t much we can do. If the lady wants to get herself thrown into an island prison, let her. Maybe some of those big shots from Chicago will get her out.”

She got to the end of the marina road, dust swirling around her, the sun baking her, when an old, dirty four-wheel drive vehicle skidded to a stop in front of her.

“Get in,” Joe commanded, but Riley ignored him and kept walking. “This is no joyride for me, either. More than likely you’re a nut case. But if you’re not, I can’t let you wander around by yourself.”

“Of course you can. I wander just fine by myself.”