Mesmerizing Stranger Read online

  Thrilling. Hells bells, it was a word out of her grandmother’s time, out of old movies in the forties in black-and-white. Real women weren’t thrilled by a guy’s kisses today. The whole idea was romantic and stupid.

  Yet thrills kept shivering through her bloodstream, making her heart pound, making her knees feel weak. Making need shoot through her body with cat claws, sharp and real. It was just desire, she told herself. Nothing important. Just hormones.

  But it didn’t feel like “just hormones.” His mouth felt like an answer to a question she’d never asked, the taste of him a spice and flavor she’d never known, the heat and power of him something her heart had craved her whole life-even if she’d never known it.

  Her hands walked around him, closing around his waist, inviting the glue of his brick-hard chest against her soft breasts, his tense abdomen against her cushioning pelvis. Oh, yeah, she thought. This was worth dying for. Who knew?

  When he suddenly jerked his head up, she just might have fallen if he wasn’t still holding on to her. She had to intake a good gulp of air, and even then, her head still felt foggy. His expression, she noted, was still glowering. But the anxiety and exhaustion and world of worry was gone. He was still mad.

  But now, he was only mad at her.

  “My God, you’re trouble,” he grumped.

  “Watch it. Compliments go straight to my head.”

  There. After that whole impossibly terrible day, she got a real smile out of him. Not that half-eaten grin he’d unwillingly let through in the café, but a real chuckle, a sign he’d thrown off a pound of that unbearable heaviness he’d been carrying around. But he removed his hands from her shoulders as if suddenly realizing his palms had been cooking on a hot stove, and immediately leaned back against the rail.

  “I was married twice,” he said abruptly.

  Now there was a conversation starter. “Yeah? That’s good.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Good? Most women run like hell when they hear that.”

  She suspected they did. She suspected that was exactly why he’d mentioned that little bit of biographical information out of the blue. “My theory is that pretty much all men run from commitment after they’ve been burned twice. Even if they were to blame for doing a good share of the burning. Divorces are no fun for either side, or so I hear. Anyway, I appreciate your telling me. Now I know you’re safe.”

  “Safe.” He rolled the word on his tongue, as if he’d never heard anyone, much less a woman, call him safe.

  “Hey, I’m footloose. Not looking for a commitment. So it wouldn’t do for me to fall in love or you to fall in love with me. I don’t like hurting people-or being hurt. And you know what, Harm? I think you’ve been hurt enough.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know you kiss like you mean it. That’s all I have to know.” She pushed off the railing. “The next time, though…”

  He rolled his eyes. “I hear the warning in your voice. The next time, what?”

  “The next time, don’t start something you don’t intend to finish.”

  There now, she’d shocked him again. She walked away, thinking she’d done what she wanted to do-which was remove that exhaustion and stress from his face for a few minutes.

  Of course, she’d also the same as dared him to make love to her.

  As she locked the door to her cabin, already chafing at the claustrophobic space, she told herself it was about time she learned to curb her impulsive tongue. But the internal scolding didn’t last after she turned off the light. Yeah, she’d dared him. Yeah, it was a foolish and risky thing to suggest to a man of his power and virility, with a life so alien to hers.

  But she didn’t regret it. She figured she should. That maybe she could talk herself into believing she didn’t want to make love with him. But her heart…just didn’t seem to swallow that good sense.

  The next morning, when Cate heard the first sounds of voices in the dining room, she poked her head around the galley archway. “Just pour yourself some coffee, guys. And start with the fruit. I’ll be bringing in breakfast in two shakes.”

  Her galley, she knew, looked as if a cyclone had hit. Outside, a blazing sun seemed to wash away all the gloom and troubles from yesterday-which unfortunately didn’t improve her own mood. She hadn’t slept well.

  As anyone with a brain knew, mess with the cook’s sleep and everybody paid. She was grumpier than a porcupine with a tummy ache.

  “One-minute warning. Y’all better be sitting down,” she called out. The Ebelskivers pan on the stovetop was hers. It took a unique pan to create the dish. The recipe for Danish pancakes was lighter than air, each one filled with a treat-like blueberries or cherries or a little orange marmalade or a scoop of wild honey. A few she filled with ham and cheese to make them more substantial. The boys could pick them up with their hands if they wanted. They didn’t even have to use silverware. “Need help?”

  There. Her heart slammed like mad out of the complete blue, even before she whirled around and saw Harm. The circles under his eyes were bigger than whales, a testimony that he hadn’t slept any better than she had. But when a man looked that rough around the edges, how could he still exude so much virility and sexiness?

  “No,” she said with no fanfare and no apology. As she’d reminded herself fifty million times in the middle of the night, she barely knew the man.

  So she’d made a major judgment mistake and tried him. No one could be hopelessly addicted that fast. No one. “Out,” she said, and immediately turned around.

  It wasn’t tricky to make Ebelskivers. It was just tricky to make them exquisitely perfect, and Cate wanted them better than even exquisite. When she had a free second-and she only had a single free second because the Ebelskivers couldn’t be left-she dashed into the dining room and put a glazed flowerpot of monkey bread on the table.

  “You just pull it apart with your hands, guys. Eat it like that. The Ebelskivers are on their way in, but I’ve only got one pan, so they have to come out in shifts.”

  She’d just dashed back into the galley when Ivan showed up. “Out,” she said.

  At least he knew enough to obey by now.

  They started diving in. She heard the first round of marriage proposals and vows of eternal love while she plopped in the second batch. In spite of the blinding sun, a stiff wind seemed determined to push the boat around. Since the stove was perfectly gimballed, the surface was automatically made level-and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t cooked in far worse conditions than this-but the pitch and roll still made cooking a wee bit more challenging.

  She ran in with the next batch. By then, the men were hovering over the table, looking like kin to pigs at a trough. No one was drooling, but they’d all turned into obedient children-no hair combed, no shaved chins, but all with the same expressions.

  “Each of you has that angelic look men get when they want sex. I’m not fooled,” she said. “And you can’t have sweets and carbohydrates like this all the time, so don’t beg.”

  “We just want you to cook forever for us, Cate.”

  Harm said, “Have you had even a bite?”

  Actually, she hadn’t. Who had time? She’d share coffee with them when the last batch was done and on the table. For now, she had one more platter to go…and she was thinking, really, it wasn’t like today could be good for any of them. Fiske’s death was still fresh. So maybe she’d put together another round of comfort foods later. Like strawberry pie? Fresh? And maybe one more batch of peppermint cookies.

  She opened the cupboard, watching her Ebelskivers, glanced in to check her spices, reached for the peppermint extract…and stopped dead.

  The peppermint extract bottle had no top.

  In her lifetime, Cate had never put away a spice without securing the lid. Spices aged too fast as it was.

  Confused, she reached for the small container, and stopped dead again. The bottle was completely empty.

  It couldn’t be. True peppermint extract was so
strong that she never used more than a drop at a time. And she’d just opened it days before to make the first batch of her original cookies. The bottle should have been full, just short a couple of drops. She’d bought fresh from her favorite supplier before the trip.

  “Cate?”

  A sudden vision of Fiske filled her mind. The way he’d been lying on the galley floor, the oddness of his hands cupped around his neck as if he’d been choking.

  A wisp of smoke startled her, made her realize her pancakes were burning. She grabbed the handle, saved the cakes in the nick of time, scooped that last round onto a plate and carted them into the dining room.

  At a glance, she could see the men were filling up. Hands were going on tummies. The guys were getting that glazed-eye look testifying that they’d been sugared-up and filled-up for now…except for Harm.

  His gaze found hers across the table, shrewd and sharp as one of her Wüsthof-Trident knives. “You all right?”

  “Sure,” she said. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t remotely all right. She wasn’t sure if she was ever going to be all right again. Maybe it was crazy-she had to hope she was crazy-but the thought in her mind was as indelible as lead ink. Fiske had been murdered. And not just murdered, but killed by someone on the boat.

  Once she set down the platter, she poured herself a mug of coffee and held it with both hands so she could keep the darned thing from shaking as she sat down. She was sitting with a murderer, her mind kept telling her-which was probably why her heart was pounding louder than a freight train.

  The craziest thing of all was that she was the only one who knew what had happened. And even if she told, she couldn't imagine anyone would believe her.

  Chapter 6

  Immediately after breakfast, Harm joined Ivan in the pilothouse, where he could use the radio to check with Juneau. The response didn’t take long. Harm made a sound of irritation as he clicked off.

  Ivan said, “What?”

  “In the immortal words of the authorities, the pathologist is fishing.”

  “Ah. This is Alaska,” Ivan said, as if that was an answer in itself.

  “He’ll get to the autopsy. But maybe not today. Or tomorrow. Soon, I believe, was the word used by the office.”

  Ivan said, “It’s just different thinking up here. The man’s dead, so what’s the hurry?”

  “That we’ve all been put in limbo until we have results from the tests? That the man has a daughter who very likely wants to plan a funeral?” Harm shook his head again. “I’m going below. The coroner asked me to go through Fiske’s things. The coast guard took the list of his medical conditions and medicines, but they want me to check to see if there were any other medicines or things he might have been taking that weren’t on the list.”

  “You want me to ask Hans to do it?” Ivan asked.

  “No. I’m fine.” Harm clipped below deck, hoping to catch Cate en route, but she wasn’t in the galley or the dining area. Something had shaken her at breakfast. Since nothing seemed to shake Cate-certainly not whales or finding dead guys-Harm figured it must have been something substantial.

  Not that she was any of his business…but sweet damn, she’d become his business. The dimensions of the why and how, right then, he refused to examine.

  First off, anyway, he needed to explore Fiske’s belongings. No one was below deck. The men were all topside for the sail toward Baranof and Hot Springs-their next land destination. Fiske’s cabin was big enough for a squirrel. Fiske’s duffel was sitting navy-tight on his bunk.

  Harm rifled through it, found four brown plastic prescription containers. One was a statin, a cholesterol drug Harm recognized. Two were heart medicines, and the last-he just didn’t know. Never heard of the name, and the labeling didn’t indicate what the one-a-day dosage was for. All the medicines had already been reported to the coast guard.

  Harm hefted the heart pills, feeling a sharp gulp. Yesterday, the coast guard had come to the most obvious conclusion-that Fiske was an overweight guy under a lot of stress, a heart attack or stroke waiting to happen. Harm hadn’t created that stress, but he still felt responsible for failing to find answers that could have alleviated it. Fiske was a good soul. His uncle’s closest friend in the company.

  Harm bent over, hoping to find something else in Fiske’s belongings. He saw the corner of an old, battered red-leather case-just a calendar-and was about to pull it out when he heard Cate. “Harm?”

  He didn’t have to spin around and see her face to know something was wrong. It was like at breakfast. Her usual sass and sparkle had disappeared. There was none of the full-of-herself sexy love of the night before, the daredevil, the troublemaker. Just a quiet voice and nerves. “I need to tell you something,” she said. “And you’re not going to believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

  “Because no one will. No one’s going to take this seriously. And you won’t, either. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you.” Quickly, he steered her out of Fiske’s cabin, out of the empty corridor and into his cabin. Last night, after she’d damned near seduced him-and thoroughly rattled his timbers-he’d vowed not to be in private quarters with her alone unless…well, unless.

  This definitely wasn’t an “unless.” But he could tell from her face that he wouldn’t want anyone else hearing this-or even knowing that she was talking privately with him.

  “It’s about Fiske,” she said. She obviously couldn’t stand still. She started pacing-and promptly bumped into his chest the first time she did a spin around. “I think someone killed him, Harm. With peppermint.”

  “Say what?”

  “I know. Death by peppermint. It sounds silly. Crazy. Impossible. And part of the problem is that I don’t think anyone would know. How could authorities think of this? Why would a pathologist test for it? He wouldn’t. It’s not a drug.”

  “Whoa. Start at the beginning. I’m having trouble following.” He didn’t push her on the bed, just framed his hands around her shoulders and gently sat her down. Two of them couldn’t pace at the same time. And once she’d suggested murder, Harm figured he had the biggest reason to pace.

  He heard her spill out the details. The empty peppermint bottle. The missing lid. The way she’d found Fiske, his position indicating he’d been clawing at his neck, as if he were choking. But there’d been no sign of vomit. And the bottle had been put away, except for the lid.

  “Do you understand, Harm? I don’t see anyone will find evidence of it in an autopsy because it’s not a drug or anything anyone would ever test for you. But I would think it would create a burning in the esophagus or throat. You could ask them that, couldn’t you? To look for it?”

  “Yes. I’ll radio immediately on this.”

  “That’s why I had to tell you. Because if you don’t ask, I don’t see how they’d find it.”

  “But I’m still not totally grasping this, Cate. I mean, peppermint’s a candy. And you made cookies from it. And I think I remember a grandmother advising that you could rub it on a sore tooth. Couldn’t it have been like that? He got a toothache, got up in the middle of the night, thought he’d try that old wives’ tale, and that’s how he got into your peppermint?”

  “No. I mean, yes, it’s possible he had a toothache, might have known of that old wives’ tale. But if that were the case, he’d have used a drop or two, not the whole bottle. No one would take a whole bottle of peppermint by choice. It couldn’t happen. Your throat would burn like fire. You might try it by accident, not realizing that…but then you’d rush to a sink, to the nearest water, start spitting it out, do anything to make it stop burning.”

  Harm spun around, only to find that Cate had bounced up from the bed and was trying to pace again, too. It couldn’t happen. Not in a space the size of an animal cage.

  “Maybe he dropped the bottle. Spilled it. And that’s why it was empty. It seems logical to me that he’d have thought peppermint would soothe his stomach, something like that. You know he ate l
ike a horse that night, easy to believe he had a stomachache-”

  “That could have been. And I’m not trying to say that I know how he died. For that matter, maybe he did die of a heart attack. If someone forced him to intake a whole bottle of peppermint, I can well believe it caused an impossible shock to his heart. I’m not a doctor. Just a chef. And I’m telling you…someone handled my peppermint in a way that couldn’t have been an accident. Someone used the entire bottle. Someone, not me, didn’t put the lid back on. And if Fiske had been the one to think he wanted it, who touched it, then swallowed that amount, there’s no way in the universe he’d have been physically capable of putting it back in the cupboard and closing the door and leaving the galley all tidy. He’d have been frantic to stop the burning in his mouth and throat.”

  “Okay. I hear you. I got it. But who knows that stuff about peppermint?”

  She thought about that, answered slowly, “I have no idea. I mean, I’d think it would be common knowledge from someone like me, a chef, a cook, someone who knows foods. But otherwise…well, I can’t imagine why you’d know it. Or any other normal person. I guess I’d assume a scientist-type might, just because they’d get the chemistry part of it.”

  Unfortunately, all his men had that background-that is, everyone but him. His mind kept replaying the men, the dignified Arthur, the Ivy-League boys with their arrogance and outward devotion to their jobs and the cancer cause.

  “I just can’t figure out the why. If there was a murder, it was logically to cover up the theft. Only there’s no sane reason for the theft.” He socked a fist into the other hand. “If greed were the motivation, I’d get it. Power, I’d get it. But neither of those make sense. The man was already going to get money-big money-when the medicine hit the market. He was already going to be part of the massive credit, the satisfaction, for finding a cure for this uniquely destructive cancer. So why steal it? Why try selling it elsewhere, where the instant the sale came to light, the thief would be identified? None of it makes any sense.”