Deep Dish (28 page)

“Lisa?” It was the first time she’d considered how her sister would take her disappearance. “She’ll probably assume I ran away with you. Deliberately. She’ll think…I mean, just because we were alone together like this, that we hooked up. Lisa thinks you’re totally hot.”

“Hooked up?”

“Her word, not mine. It means—”

“I know what it means,” he said, chuckling. “She doesn’t know you very well, does she?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gina sat up so suddenly she felt dizzy. She chugged the rest of the beer in one swallow and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What? It’s so hard to believe somebody like you would go off with somebody like me—and that we’d hook up?”

He frowned. “I hate that phrase. It’s…crude.”

“Crude?” She hooted, and scooched over closer to him, peering into his face. “Who
are
you, Tate Moody? You see me naked on the beach, alone, and you just turn around and walk away? Is there something wrong with me, or is it just you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, sitting up now too. “You’re gorgeous. Amazing. And there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not somebody who just…anyway, it doesn’t matter, ’cuz Reggie, you sure as hell aren’t the kind for a hookup.”

“How do you know what I would or wouldn’t do?”

“You said it yourself. You’re the cautious sister. The apron-sewing, cake-baking, training-wheels-on-the-bike nice girl.”

She didn’t let him finish. Instead, she climbed onto his lap and wrapped her legs around his waist. “Nice? I’ll show you nice!”

Her kiss was fierce at first. She wanted to show him the new, improved Gina Foxton. The one who’d been born on that island. Who didn’t care about appearances, who did exactly as she pleased. No inhibitions.

But his response wasn’t what she was expecting. Not by a long shot.

“Hey,” he said, pulling away. He held her face between his hands, studying it in the orange glow of the firelight. “What’s this about, Reggie?”

She pulled him closer. She kissed the hollow of his throat, warm from the fire. He tasted salty. “This is me…being nice,” she whispered in his ear.

“Oh.”

He ran his hands slowly up her back, and she shivered.

She kissed him again, and this time managed to part his lips with her tongue. He kissed her back, telling himself it was the polite thing to do. And then, because he was nothing if not polite, he helped her with the buttons on that shirt of hers.

Gina wriggled out of the shirt and flung it aside. He kissed her neck, and her shoulders, and he thoughtfully pushed aside the skinny little straps of her undershirt, and then he cupped one of her breasts in his hand, and he realized she hadn’t done such a good job of sand removal….

And the next thing he knew, she was tugging at the waistband of his cargo shorts.

“Wait.”

She looked up from her work. “Wait?”

“Is this really what you want?”

“No,” she said flatly. “What I want is a bubble bath and air-conditioning and Porthault sheets and Marvin Gaye on my iPod
singing ‘Let’s Get It On.’ Preferably in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. But we’re on an island. I’ve got no job and no boyfriend and no future. So we’ll have to make do with SpongeBob here. Improvise. Now, are you gonna take off your pants, or do I have to do all the work?”

L
isa Foxton squinted through the salt-flecked window of the trawler’s cabin, but night had fallen, and despite the running lights mounted on the shrimp boat’s bow, all she could see was the inky blackness of a night at sea.

“I can’t see anything,” she wailed. “Don’t you people have a searchlight or something?”

“A searchlight!” Mick Coyle snorted. The wiry, sunburned captain of the
Maggy Dee
ran his hand over his bloodshot eyes to make sure they were still open. He still didn’t quite know how he’d gotten mixed up with this crazy crowd he’d met up with on Eutaw Island. Especially this chick. “We’re shrimpers, not the Coast Guard,” he reminded her. “Anyway, there’s nobody out on the water tonight. We’ve been all around Eutaw twice, talked to other boats out of Darien, nobody’s seen any sign of your sister. Diesel fuel ain’t cheap, you know.”

“She’s out here someplace,” Lisa said fiercely. She clutched at the sleeve of his grimy T-shirt. “She’s gotta be. We’ve looked everywhere else. You’ve gotta help me find her.” She turned those big brown eyes of hers on him and blinked back tears.

“Shit,” Mick muttered. It was the eyes that had gotten to him. He’d tied up at the ferry dock at Eutaw shortly after the storm started kicking up. His intention was to sell some shrimp to the woman who ran the lodge at Rebeccaville, maybe sit out the weather. He’d just popped a cold beer when the girl came running down to the dock, screaming that her sister was missing, caught out in the storm.

Pretty soon she’d been joined by two more men, a squirrelly-looking guy in his early twenties, dressed head-to-toe in black, and
the older one, kind of a bodybuilder type dressed in what he probably thought was foul-weather gear—an expensive-looking raincoat, khaki slacks, and mud-spattered loafers.

The bodybuilder seemed to be the self-appointed sheriff of the search party.

“How much to charter the boat?” he’d demanded, pulling a fancy ostrich-skin billfold from his back pocket and flashing a platinum American Express card.

Coyle ignored the credit card and took another sip of his beer.

“Well?” the sheriff repeated. “What about it?”

“You wanna go shrimping? In this weather?”

“Zeke, Scott, make him listen,” the girl cried, stepping between them. “We think she’s out there—in a boat. You’ve got to help us. Please?”

“Lisa, please,” Scott had said, pulling the girl aside. “Just calm down. Let me handle this.”

Lisa crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.

“My girlfriend is missing,” he went on.

“Ex-girlfriend,” Lisa piped up. “Gina is so over you, Scott.”

Zeke, the one dressed in black, cleared his throat. “Gina is Lisa’s big sister,” he’d said apologetically. “We’re all staying here at the lodge, shooting a television show, and this afternoon, Gina—that’s the sister—just disappeared.”

“I’m her executive producer, Scott Zaleski,” the older man said. He pulled a business card from the wallet and handed it across to Coyle, who nodded, but didn’t take it. “Maybe you’ve seen our show—
Fresh Start with Regina Foxton
?”

“Nope,” Coyle said. He jerked his head at Zeke. “What makes you think she’s not still on the island?”

“We found her golf cart parked by a shell bank on the creek, but there’s no other sign of her,” Zeke said eagerly.

“She’s been gone for hours,” Lisa wailed. “I
told
Scott there was something wrong when she didn’t come back on time—”

“Gina’s very focused on winning this competition,” Scott said. “There was no reason to get alarmed, especially since Moody also missed the deadline.”

“That’s the other thing,” Zeke added. “We found Tate’s golf cart parked right beside Gina’s. Their fishing equipment is gone, and their coolers, so we’re thinking—”

“Tate?” Coyle said. “You mean Tate Moody?”

Zeke’s glasses slid down his nose. He pushed them back up. “Well, yeah. Tate’s missing too. Nobody’s seen either one of them since this morning, and one of the women who works at the lodge seems to think they might have found a boat and decided to go off together. Although I think that’s highly unlikely—”

Mick put his beer down and headed for the
Maggy Dee
. “Why didn’t you say it was Tate missing to begin with? We never miss
Vittles
. Man! My old lady would kick my ass if she knew I turned down a chance to meet the Tatester.”

The three of them had followed him down the dock to the boat, ready to board, until Coyle held up two fingers.

“Two of ya can come, but that’s all. This ain’t no cruise liner.”

“She’s my sister, and I’m going,” Lisa had said, and without further ado, she nimbly jumped from the dock onto the deck of the
Maggy Dee
.

Scott Zaleski looked down at the waves slapping up and over the deck of the shrimp boat, and seemed to have second thoughts about this mission. “Maybe it would be better if I stayed on the island, just in case she turns up,” he said. “I can coordinate things from here.”

“Wuss,” Lisa called. She held out a hand to the other man. “Come on, Zeke.”

The younger man took a deep breath and jumped. His foot slipped when he hit the wet deck, and he went sprawling on his ass at the girl’s feet.

“Christ,” Coyle said, stepping over the man in black. “Gonna be a long night.”

L
isa picked up a pair of binoculars from the
Maggy Dee
’s console. She stepped out onto the deck and swept them slowly to the right and to the left. Zeke drifted over and put an arm around her shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll find her. Barry had me put in a call to the Coast Guard earlier. They had a Liberian tanker grounded on a sandbar down near Jacksonville, but as soon as they get the crew transported to land, they’ll have a cutter on the way. And when it turns daylight, we’ll send out a spotter plane.”

“Daylight!” Lisa shrieked. “It’s nearly ten o’clock. We can’t wait till morning to find her. Anything could happen if she’s out here. Mama’s been calling nonstop since this morning.” She clutched Zeke’s collar in both hands. “Do you want to be the one to tell Birdelle Foxton that the Coast Guard was too busy rescuing some stinking old
Liberians
to find her daughter?”

“Nooo,” Zeke admitted. Lisa had replayed some of the messages Birdelle had left on her cell phone. She sounded formidable, to say the least.

“Go!” Lisa urged, pointing toward the
Maggy Dee
’s cabin. “Talk to the captain. You’re a man. He’ll listen to you. Make him understand that we have got to keep looking. Gina’s out here, somewhere, I just know it.”

Zeke hesitated. The only reason Mick Coyle had agreed to this particular search-and-rescue mission was that he was a huge fan of Tate’s. That and the five crisp hundred-dollar bills Zeke had folded into the man’s grubby fist before they’d left the dock. Coyle made him nervous. This shrimp boat made him nervous too. Not to mention seasick. He’d already logged serious time hanging over the side of the
Maggy Dee
, tossing his cookies. He was a rising star in the galaxy of culinary entertainment. What was he doing out here in the middle of nowhere, on this oil-belching garbage scow?

“Zeke.” Lisa wrapped her arms around his neck, stood on tiptoe, and pressed her body close to his. “Please, lover. Help me find my sister.”

Oh, yes. Now he remembered.

He sighed and went into the pilothouse to have a word with Captain Coyle.

The boat’s radio crackled with ghostly disembodied voices, men’s voices, checking in from boats like the
Little Lady
, the
Craw Daddy
, and
Hellzapoppin
.

“
Maggy Dee, Maggy Dee
,” a man’s voice called. “This is the
BadDawg
. You folks still lookin’ for that party missing out of Eutaw?”

Coyle flipped a button on the boat’s console and spoke into a microphone. “Roger that. You got something?”

“Could be,” the voice came back. “We’re headed back to port, but just went by the south end of Rattlesnake Key. I didn’t see it, but my mate swears he saw a light out there.”

“Light?” Coyle repeated. “On Rattlesnake?”

“Roger that,” the voice repeated. “He says maybe a fire, something like that. Could just be campers. Teenagers out of school for the summer. Or maybe it’s them folks you’re looking for.”

“Thanks,
BadDawg,
” Coyle said. He flipped the switch again, and put his own binoculars to his face.

“Rattlesnake Key,” Zeke said eagerly. “How far off is that?”

Coyle shrugged. “Not far. We’ve been by there twice tonight, but I didn’t see nothin’. We’ll check it out, though.” He swung the boat’s steering wheel hard right and shoved the throttle forward, sending the trawler surging through the waves.

I
t occurred to Tate that he was living every red-blooded American man’s fantasy. He was alone, on an island, with a gorgeous, willing woman who was urgently trying to undress him.

And yet…

He hesitated.

“What?” Gina saw the uncertainty in his eyes.

He hardly knew how to articulate what he was feeling. But he had to try to explain himself. Somehow.

He took her hands in his and kissed them gently. “You’re ready to make love to me tonight—but why? Is it because we’re out here in the middle of nowhere, and you think nobody will ever have to know?”

“No!” She snatched her hand away from his. His rejection felt like a bucket of icy water had been splashed over her head. She scrambled to her feet. “I thought…you wanted to…as much as I did. I’m attracted to you, damn you, Tate Moody.”

He stood up too, and reached for her, but she pulled away again, turning her back to him.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around so that they were facing each other again, but she wouldn’t look at him. “Don’t get me wrong, Reggie,” he said. “I want you. Here. Now. Wherever. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been working really hard not to want you. But it’s no good. Hell, I think I loved you even when I didn’t like you.”

She was crying now, dammit. “Then why…”

“I don’t want to be your last resort,” he said. “I won’t be that. I won’t ever be a hookup. Not for you or anybody.”

“That’s not what I want, either,” she insisted. “I’ve changed, Tate—”

Suddenly Moonpie, who’d been drowsing by the fire, leaped to his feet. He dashed to the edge of the campsite, barking ferociously, his tail up, on point.

“Stay here,” Tate told Gina, glancing around in search of something to use as a weapon. “There’s something out there on the beach—”

“Uh, people?” a voice called from the darkness. “Tate? Gina? Is that you? If it is, could you please call off the dog?”

“Moonpie!” Tate’s voice was sharp. “Here!”

The dog sat on his haunches, his ears quivering with anticipation.

“Who’s that?” Tate called.

Slowly, a slightly built figure crept toward the firelight, dressed all in black, water streaming from his clothes and every orifice. The creature’s eyes loomed unexpectedly large and dark without their customary horned-rim glasses.

Gina blinked in disbelief. “Zeke?”