Mesmerizing Stranger Read online

  The big yacht barely made a sound as it skimmed through the water. Everything around her was extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily huge. A person seemed awfully small in a landscape this isolated, this totally wild. The smells, tastes, sights and sounds were all exotic, all breathtaking.

  She was still savoring the scenery when she suddenly heard voices below. Loud voices. Angry voices.

  She held her breath, listening, confused as to where the sounds were coming from-inside the boat, for sure, but not as close as the pilothouse or galley. Maybe from the dining room or salon just beyond that. She wasn’t close enough to make out any specific words, but the nature of conversation filtered through. Two men were talking.

  Incorrect thought, she decided. They were fighting.

  And they weren’t just a little angry with each other. From the tone, from the nature of voices, they were both furious. Rage-furious. Vicious-furious.

  She gulped, then gulped again. She told herself that people argued all the time. Some people fought nice; others fought mean and loud. And men sometimes used anger like fiber, just a way to clear out their systems, an easy purge.

  But the way her pulse rate was suddenly hiccupping-as if adrenaline was shooting up her veins-she knew this wasn’t likely some impassioned argument about politics or ball scores. Something was wrong, really wrong.

  A thump indicated that something was thrown. Then…more loud voices. Then nothing.

  A spank-sharp wind slapped her cheeks as she barreled down the ladder. In the next life, when she got around to growing up, she wasn’t going to interfere in other people’s business-ever. But right now she was afraid that thump meant someone had been hurt, and could need help.

  That was stupid thinking, she knew. Even if the fight had turned physical, dangerous, she was the last person who had the power to stop it. The problem was, she might well be the only outside person who’d heard it. And the other problem was that she’d never had a brain when someone could be hurt. It was a genetic flaw. Back in school, she’d see a kid hounded by a bully and she’d hurled herself onto the bully’s back, come home bruised and wincing.

  She should have learned.

  She slid open the door to the salon-and found nothing, except for a chunky book about Alaskan birds on the carpet. It was definitely a sacrilege, in her view, to throw such a gorgeous book, but there was no other sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing.

  Shaking her head, she stalked through the dining room into the galley. The argument had made her uneasy, oddly shaken.

  Cooking was the answer. Cooking was always the answer. The galley was her nest; she already knew every nook and cranny. Although it was still too early to start dinner prep, she could at least start messing around.

  If she couldn’t quiet her nerves, she could at least concentrate on food.

  Her theory on the dinner menu was that the guys would need absorbers. It was the first night out, so men being men, they were likely to drink. She’d thumbed through her recipes, looking for food that was easy on the stomach, not too heavy, and settled on pasta puttanesca. The wine choice was still a question, but she’d about decided on a Montenegro.

  Ivan had given her a separate budget for the dinner wines. He’d been stingy, but she knew her wines and how to stretch a dollar. The reds from Provence were predictably good…

  The galley door suddenly slid open. She must have jumped five feet, even though she could have sworn she’d completely calmed down.

  “I know. You’ve got a rule about intruders in your galley. But I was hoping you might have a bandage.”

  Harm stood there with a hand over his neck where she could see blood between his fingers.

  “What on earth did you do? Get in here!” Men. Such idiots. She pulled open a drawer, grabbed a clean white towel, then pushed his hand away when he failed to remove it fast enough. That close to him, her hormones gave an instantaneous buck, which she tried to ignore. “Who taught you to shave? Attila the Hun? These days we use razors instead of axes.”

  “I just figured I’d try to look more civilized before dinner. But it seems I packed an old razor because the blade sure seemed dead.”

  “You think?” There were no chairs in the galley, just a stool wedged under the counter-which she pulled out and motioned him to sit in. Impossible for her to get a good look at his neck if she was stuck balancing up on tiptoes.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

  She edged between his legs, took a good look at the cut, then reached above his head for the first-aid kit. “I know it’s nothing. But you’re still getting antiseptic, and yeah, a bandage. Did the blade have rust on it?”

  “I don’t think it was that old.” And then, when he saw where she was reaching, he muttered, “Good grief.”

  She grinned. Her first-aid kit did rival a complete trauma unit. “Yeah, I know. But the thing is, I’ve got a collection of knives that would make a gangster proud. When a girl works with knives for a living, she unfortunately tends to get cut once in a while, so naturally I’m prepared.”

  Instead of sounding reassured, his voice took on a punch of panic. “Wait a minute. What are you going to do?”

  She had to chuckle. Only then… She looked at him. She’d stepped between his legs to get a better view and angle on his cut. There was nothing odd about that. It was only now, she realized, that her outer thigh was grazing his inner thigh. And her palm cupped the side of his face, not unlike how a woman would cup her lover’s face for a kiss. And his eyes were on hers, her eyes on his, with enough electricity to crackle up a fire or two.

  Where the patooties had that come from?

  “Hmm,” she said, and stepped back fast.

  The instant she let up pressure, unfortunately, the scrape on his neck immediately started bleeding again. It needed to be cleaned. Then she had to wait until the moisture dried before applying antiseptic. That had to dry before a bandage could conceivably stick, so that took another wait. Obviously, none of those minor actions took long…but all of them took touching him. She was close enough to smell and sense and see. To be aware. Too aware. So she started asking him nosy questions. She sensed he wasn’t normally into chatting up strangers, but maybe he was just uneasy enough around her to open up. Either that, or he was actually interested in spilling about his company and his current situation.

  “So,” she started out with, “is your first name ‘Harm’ symbolic of what you’re like to be around or what?”

  He chuckled. “Nothing that interesting. Harm is just a Dutch name. Means ruler or leader or something like that. My dad was Scottish, my mom Dutch. Inherited stubbornness from both sides, or that’s what the parents claim.”

  “Are they right?”

  “I plead the fifth.”

  It was her turn to smile. “So what’s the deal with this company of yours?”

  He took his time answering, but eventually, out it came. “I never anticipated having anything to do with the company. That’s the problem. My uncle’s name was Dougal, hit a mother-lode lottery when he was twenty-five. He was only married a couple of years when his wife got cancer, pancreatic, which is one of the wrong kinds, the kind where there’s just not a lot of hope. Anyway, he was nuts about her, and that’s how it all started-he was supposed to be an engineer, but when she died, he poured everything into a research lab, determined to find a cure. Didn’t know shoes from shinnola when he first started.”

  “But he learned?”

  “He more than learned. He spent his life at it, and like I said, Connollys seem to have that particularly stubborn gene. The first really great drug he patented over twelve years ago. By then he was almost broke, but that brought in a new flood of money. He wasn’t interested in living high. He wanted the infusion for the research. The two areas he never stopped targeting were pancreatic and ovarian. Just when the lab had come up with an outright miracle drug, he fell ill. And right after that, the guys came through with an even more incredibl
e breakthrough.”

  “For one of the biggies he cared especially about? Pancreatic or ovarian?” It was a relief when she could step away from those eyes, that skin, the feel of him. She piled the first-aid supplies back in the box and whirled around, happy to talk-but with a little distance between them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find dinner chores to work with by then.

  “Pancreatic. Two new drugs had passed FDA by then, and a brand-new one-the best, a true miracle drug-was a pinch away from the last clinical trials. That’s when Dougal died. I knew he wanted me to have the company, to continue with his work, but man.” Harm scrubbed the back of his neck. “I was in the military. Mechanical engineer. Built bridges, roads, had a ton of math but never much straight science. Only my uncle, he had a terror of the firm getting sold, falling into the hands of certain pharmaceutical corporations-he wanted it kept in the family, with people who had the same goals, to conquer this cancer thing. Not to just be about profit.”

  “So he passed it on to you…” She put a little plate in front of him because that’s what she did-fed people. A few wedges of bread, fresh herbs in a dip for him to dunk, one of the hors d’oeuvres she’d put on in the salon in a bit.

  “Yes. Only the will was barely read-I’d just found a place in Cambridge, wasn’t unpacked-when the clinical trials for BROPE, the new drug, disappeared-”

  “BROPE?”

  “Bright Hope. The guys named it-”

  “Okay. Got it. So the drug was stolen?”

  “No. The trials were. The data. The proving data. Damn, this is good-” He motioned to his decimated plate. “Anyway, that crisis took place my first week. Then Fiske, our financial guru, comes into my office the next week looking gray and sick. The funds allocated for the last trial disappeared. They exist on paper. There’s no record of anyone unauthorized-or authorized-touching the account. Only the money’s gone. And Fiske is beside himself, worried I’ll accuse him.”

  She rolled her eyes. Just like a child, he was holding out the empty plate, begging for more. “But you didn’t?”

  “No. There’s no way Fiske did anything wrong. Fiske is good to the bone. Can’t say he’s a twenty-first-century economics man-he was my uncle’s crony in age, old-fashioned in his thinking. But he’d have gone to the wall for Dougal. They were like brothers. But to sum up this cyclone-I’ve got this company that on paper is thriving beyond all anyone’s expectations, with a cure for pancreatic cancer, a real damn cure, on the cusp. Reachable. Only now the whole thing is at risk. Someone inside has to be the problem, but it’s not that easy figuring out the who. Yale and Purdue claim it was their research that was suddenly obliterated, so they’d hardly be guilty of any wrongdoing. They’ve been set back several years. And Arthur claims he’d been pushing Dougal for more careful recording and reporting practices for years, couldn’t get anyone to listen to him, so finding him guilty doesn’t make any sense, either.”

  “And there’s no one else who could be the thief?”

  “Not really. There’s other staff, but they’re clerical or broom pushers, some apprentices coming up. But no one who had access to those studies, the specific private lab or those computers. The thing is, over time, the whole formula could be recreated, but that’d be a matter of years. And literally millions of dollars. Probably more than millions.”

  “Eek,” Cate murmured.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “So you’re in quite a mess.” She wasn’t exactly alarmed when he lurched up from the stool. It was just that her heart rate tripled when he stepped toward her. His eyes were on hers, a flash of flirting, a flash of stark, sharp sexual intent. Thankfully, she saw his hand aim for the bowl on the counter before she leaned into the kiss she thought was coming.

  She slapped his hand.

  “A major mess,” he agreed-although he tried one more time for a lick of batter from her bowl. Then he gave up, eased away, got serious again. “I closed the lab for a couple weeks. Took them all here. None of us can escape from each other, not on this boat, in this environment. I had to do something. This was the best choice I could think up.”

  She nodded. “I think you made a great move. That’s what I do with a soup sometimes. Put the ingredients together, then just let it cook, see what happens.”

  “Something will.”

  She nodded again. “Something has to happen. When you mix ingredients together, the tastes start blending. Different flavors show up. Flavors that never existed before.”

  “That’s what I need,” he said grimly. “Something to force…new information. To bring more out in the open.”

  “Harm…” She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to go behind her back with his finger. This time she just motioned for him to remove his hand. He tried giving her a meek, apologetic look-but he couldn’t sell “meek” in this lifetime. “I heard something this afternoon. The fight? You heard it?”

  He quit playing around. “What fight?”

  “Two men. I don’t know which two, but they were really going at it.” She rinsed her hands, wiped them on a linen towel. “At first I thought everyone would have heard them. But then I realized, of course no one would have, below deck-or in the pilothouse, with those doors closed and the engines going. Still. You didn’t hear anything at all?”

  He shook his head. “After lunch, I grabbed a catnap. Hadn’t slept in two days. I went down so deep I wouldn’t have heard a cannon.” He cocked his head. “You didn’t see who it was?”

  “No. But, as you may have noticed, I’m not the shy, retiring type. A little argument wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d never have thought twice about it. But this fight…it was…wrong.”

  She’d have said more, but the side door to the galley suddenly opened. Ivan popped in, his jaw dropping when he saw Harm in the galley with her. “Hey. You letting the guests get hors d’oeuvres ahead of me? Where is the justice in life?”

  She shooed them both out, snapping her towel, warning they’d get no food at all if they didn’t let her get back to it. By then, she had to buckle under and get serious about her dinner prep. But her conversation with Harm still troubled her.

  It was over, she supposed. There was nothing else she could have told Harm, beyond what she’d overheard. It was his problem, and he already knew he had a big problem. There was nothing she could help with or do anything about.

  But it worried her, once he’d let out how huge the stakes were. A cure for one of the scariest cancers. That was big medical stakes. Big hope. Big money. Big risks.

  As she unlocked her knife chest and chose her favorite paring knives-what her chef cronies called the Sheep’s Foot and Bird’s Beak-she thought that Harm didn’t seem the kind of guy who let information slip. Whatever he’d shared with her, he’d wanted to. Possibly, she considered, he was trying to warn her again about avoiding getting close to his men.

  She started pulling out pots, cutting boards, ingredients, but an alarming thought kept going through her mind. This trip was enabling Harm to get closer to his team. The closer he got, the more danger he could be in himself.

  The fury and tempo of the argument she’d heard earlier kept replaying in her mind like a mosquito bite that wouldn’t quit itching.

  It wasn’t her business, she reminded herself, any more than Harm could ever be her business. That unexpectedly sharp buzz of attraction to him needed to be cut off at the pass, pronto. Cate was no idiot. Harm came from a completely different universe than her life.

  So for once she was going to be good, just do her job and enjoy the trip, not interfere or nose into anyone else’s problems-and stay out of Harm’s way.

  It was such a good plan.

  Chapter 3

  “Marry me, Cate.” Yale had a foot cocked up on the priceless wild cherry sideboard. “I have a condo just outside of Cambridge. You can have it. You can have my life savings. My grandmother’s wedding ring. My six-year-old BMW. Everything I have.”

  “That’s sweet.” Cate looke
d around the dining table. “Anyone willing to up the ante?”

  “Me! Me!” Purdue was still hunched over the dessert, clearly trying to protect it from anyone else claiming thirds. God knew they’d all had seconds. “He’s only got a condo. I’ve got a house. A kitchen with a Sub-Zero freezer and stuff. I’m not sure what all the appliances are, but I was told they were top-of-the-line. And…I put the lid down. When I remember, anyway.”

  “But she’d have to sleep with you,” Yale pointed out. “See, that has to be a deal breaker for her right there.”

  Arthur choked. “Don’t you boys ever have a sense of limits?”

  “It’s totally all right, Arthur,” Cate assured him, as she thumped him on the back. “I’ve trained puppies before.”

  That set the whole group laughing yet again. Harm leaned back, as stuffed as everyone else, confounded by the teasing and jovial atmosphere around the table. It seemed impossible that one of them was a thief, had sabotaged millions of dollars-and lives.

  Cate was the one who’d initiated the easy dinner conversation, enabled it, played to each of the guys as if they were keys on her favorite piano. She wasn’t a manipulator, he mused. It wasn’t like that. She didn’t remotely come across as having any agenda-beyond wanting them all to enjoy her cooking. But she had some people skills that put Harm in downright awe. She’d brought down the tension level in his guys by about 900 percent.

  “Where are you from, Cate?” he asked, when he could finally get a word in.

  “Actually…nowhere.” Just as she had through the whole meal, she spotted Arthur’s empty cup and poured him a cup of coffee, then pushed the wine toward Ivan. “I came from a family of five. Mom, Dad, three sisters. All of us closer than peas in a pod. But there was a fire-we lost my mom and dad. I was the middle sister, around eight when it happened.”

  “Hey. That’s seriously awful.” Yale dropped his flirtatious tone, at least for that second.