Rising Tides (24 page)

‘‘Cheap bastard,’’ he muttered, thinking of Claremont. He switched off the spray and wrapped one of the bright-pink towels around his waist. He intended to go back and dress in the dark, but when he opened the door, he could see the light from the kitchen and hear Grace’s still sleep-husky voice singing about finding love, just in the nick of time.

While the first drops of rain pattered against the windows, he stepped into the scent of bacon frying and coffee brewing. And the sight of Grace wrapped in a short cotton robe the color of spring leaves. His heart gave such a hard bounce of joy he was surprised it didn’t simply leap out of his throat and land quivering in her hands.

He moved quick and quiet, so that when he wrapped his arms around her, pressed his lips to the top of her head, she jolted in surprise.

‘‘I told you to go back to sleep.’’

She leaned back against him, closing her eyes and absorbing the lovely thrill of a kitchen embrace. ‘‘I wanted to fix you breakfast.’’

‘‘You don’t have to do things like that.’’ He turned her around. ‘‘I don’t expect things like that. You need your rest.’’

‘‘I wanted to do it.’’ His hair was dripping, his chest gleaming with wet. The sparkling gush of lust both delighted and shocked her. ‘‘Today’s special.’’

‘‘I appreciate it.’’ He bent, intending to give her one soft morning kiss. But it deepened, lengthened until she was on her toes straining against him.

He had to pull himself back, block off the rushing need to tug off the robe and take her. ‘‘The bacon’s going to burn,’’ he murmured, and this time pressed his lips to her forehead. ‘‘I’d better get dressed.’’

She turned the bacon briskly to give him time to cross
the room. Anna had been right, she thought, about having power. ‘‘Ethan?’’

‘‘Yeah?’’

‘‘I’ve got an awful lot of need for you stored up.’’ She glanced over her shoulder, and her smile was smug. ‘‘I hope you don’t mind.’’

The blood danced gleefully out of his head. She wasn’t just flirting, she was challenging. He had a feeling she knew she’d already won. The only safe answer he could think of was a grunt before he retreated to the bedroom.

He wanted her. Grace did a quick dance and spin. They’d made love three times, three beautiful, glorious times during the night, had slept wrapped around each other. And he still wanted her.

It was the most beautiful morning of her life.

I
T RAINED ALL DAY. THE
water was rough as the tongue of a shrew and just as likely to lash. Ethan fought to keep the boat on course and was glad he hadn’t let the boy come with them. He and Jim had worked in worse, but he imagined Seth would have spent a good portion of the day hung over the rail.

But foul weather couldn’t spoil his mood. He whistled even as rain slapped his face and the boat pitched under him like a rodeo bronc.

Jim eyed him sideways a few times. He’d worked with Ethan long enough to know the boy was the friendly, good-natured sort. But a whistling fool he wasn’t. He smiled to himself as he hauled up another pot. Looked like the boy did something more energetic than reading in bed last night, if you asked him.

About time, too—if you asked him. By his reckoning Ethan Quinn was round about thirty years of age. A man should oughta be settled down with a wife and kids by that time of life. A waterman was better off going home
to a hot meal and a warm bed. A good woman helped you through, gave you direction, cheered you up when the Bay got stingy. As God knew it could.

He wondered who this particular woman might be. Not that he stuck his nose in other people’s business. He minded his own and expected his neighbors to do the same. But a man had a right to a little curiosity about things.

He pondered on how to bring the subject around when an under-the-limit she-crab found a tiny hole in his glove and snapped before he could toss her back.

‘‘Little bitch,’’ he said with a wince but without much heat.

‘‘She get you?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ Jim watched her splash back into the waves. ‘‘I’ll be back for you before the season’s over.’’

‘‘Looks like you need new gloves there, Jim.’’

‘‘The wife’s picking me up some today.’’ He shoved the thawing alewives they used for bait into the trap. ‘‘Sure helps matters to know you got a woman to do for you some.’’

‘‘Uh-huh.’’ Ethan shoved the steering stick with one hand, picked up the gaff with the other, and timed the chop and the distance.

‘‘A man spends the day working on the water, it’s a comfort to know his woman’s waiting for him.’’

A little surprised that they were having a conversation, Ethan nodded. ‘‘I suppose. We’ll just finish up this line, Jim, then head in.’’

Jim culled the next pot, let the silence settle between them. A few gulls were having what Jim thought of as a pissing match overhead, screaming and diving and threatening each other over loose fish parts.

‘‘You know, me and Bess, we’ll be married thirty years come next spring.’’

‘‘Is that so?’’

‘‘Steadies a man, a woman does. You wait too long to
marry up, though, you get set in your ways.’’

‘‘I guess.’’

‘‘You’d be around thirty now, wouldn’t you, Cap’n?’’

‘‘That’s right.’’

‘‘Don’t want to get set in your ways.’’

‘‘I’ll keep that in mind,’’ Ethan told him and shot out the gaff.

Jim merely sighed and gave up.

W
HEN ETHAN WANDERED
into the boatyard, Cam was at the skill saw and three young boys were sanding the hull. Or pretending to.

‘‘You hire a new crew?’’ Ethan asked as Simon trotted over to investigate.

Cam glanced to where Seth chattered away with Danny and Will Miller. ‘‘It keeps them out of my hair. You give up on crabs today?’’

‘‘Pulled in enough.’’ He pulled out a cigar and lit it while he gazed thoughtfully out the open cargo doors. ‘‘Rain’s coming down pretty hard.’’

‘‘Tell me about it.’’ Cam sent an accusing scowl toward the streaming windows. ‘‘That’s why those three were in my hair. The little one’ll talk your ears blue. And if you don’t have the others doing something to keep them busy, they make trouble out of thin air.’’

‘‘Well.’’ Ethan puffed out smoke, watched the kids send Simon into ecstasy with rough rubs and scratches. ‘‘At the rate they’re going, they’ll have that hull sanded down in ten or twenty years.’’

‘‘That’s something we have to talk about.’’

‘‘Hiring on those kids for the next two decades?’’

‘‘No, work.’’ It was as good a time as any to take a break. Cam stooped and pumped iced tea out of the cooler. ‘‘I got a call from Tod Bardette this morning.’’

‘‘The friend of yours who wants the fishing boat?’’

‘‘That’s right. Now, Bardette and I go back a ways. He knows what I can do.’’

‘‘He offer you another race?’’

He had, Cam mused, cutting the dust in his throat with the sweet tea. Turning it down had stung, but the sting had eased more quickly this time around. ‘‘I made a promise here. I’m not breaking it.’’

Ethan tucked a hand in his back pocket and looked toward the boat. This place, this business, had been his dream, not Cam’s, not Phillip’s. ‘‘I didn’t mean it that way. I guess I know what you put away to pull this off.’’

‘‘We needed it.’’

‘‘Yeah, but you’re the only one who’s given up anything to make it happen. I haven’t bothered to thank you for it, and I’m sorry for that.’’

Every bit as uncomfortable as his brother, Cam stared at the boat. ‘‘I’m not exactly suffering here. The business is going to help us get permanent guardianship of Seth— and it’s satisfying on its own account. Of course, Phil’s bitching about our cash flow every time you turn around.’’

‘‘That’s his strength.’’

‘‘Bitching?’’

Ethan grinned around the cigar clamped in his teeth. ‘‘Yeah, and cash flows. You and me, we could never pull this off without him nagging us about the details.’’

‘‘We may have more for him to nag about. That’s what I started to tell you. Bardette has a friend who’s interested in a custom catboat. He wants fast and he wants pretty, fitted out and sailing by March.’’

Ethan frowned and worked timetables in his head. ‘‘It’s going to take us another seven or eight weeks to finish this one, and that puts us into end of August, beginning of September.’’

Calculating, he leaned back against the workbench, his eyes narrowed against the smoke. ‘‘Then we got the sport’s fisher. I can’t see us finishing her off before January,
and that’s pushing. That doesn’t give us enough time to deliver.’’

‘‘No, not the way things are. I can give it full-time and after crab season’s over, I imagine you’ll put in more hours here.’’

‘‘Oystering isn’t what it was, but—’’

‘‘You’ll have to decide if you can juggle more time off the water, Ethan, and in here.’’ He knew what he was asking. Ethan didn’t just live on the water, he lived for it. ‘‘Phil’s going to have to make some hard decisions before much longer, too. We’re not going to have the cash to hire on laborers for a while yet.’’ He blew out a breath. ‘‘ Unless we count a couple of kids. This friend of Bardette’s isn’t ready to commit. He’s going to come down and take a look at the place, and us, and what we’ve got here. I figure we make sure Phillip’s around to sweet-talk him into a contract and a deposit.’’

Ethan hadn’t expected it to happen so soon, to have one dream grow and steal from the other. He thought of the chill winter months spent dredging, the rise and fall of the skipjack over hard chop, the long, often frustrating search for oyster, for rockfish, for a living.

A nightmare for some, he supposed. But hope and glory for him.

He took the time to look around the building. The boat, nearly finished, waiting for willing and able hands under the hard overhead lights. Seth’s drawings were framed on the wall and spoke of dreams and sweat. Tools, still shiny under a coating of dust, stood silent, waiting.

Boats by Quinn, he mused. If you wanted to grab ahold of one thing, you had to let go of another.

‘‘I’m not the only one who can captain the workboat or the skipjack.’’ He saw both the question and the understanding in Cam’s eyes and jerked a shoulder. ‘‘It’s just juggling time where it needs to be spent most.’’

‘‘Yeah.’’

‘‘I guess I could work up a design for a cat.’’

‘‘And have Seth do the drawing,’’ Cam added and laughed when Ethan grimaced. ‘‘We all have our strengths, pal. Art isn’t yours.’’

‘‘I’ll think about it,’’ Ethan decided. ‘‘And we’ll see what happens next.’’

‘‘Good enough. So . . .’’ Cam drained his cup. ‘‘How’d the recipe exchange go?’’

Ethan ran his tongue around the inside of his cheek. ‘‘I’m going to have a talk with your wife about that.’’

‘‘Be my guest.’’ Smiling, Cam plucked the cigar from Ethan’s fingers and took a trio of careless puffs. ‘‘You sure look . . . relaxed today, Ethan.’’

‘‘I’m relaxed enough,’’ he said evenly. ‘‘And I’d think you might have seen fit to mention to me that Anna had some plot to improve my sex life for me.’’

‘‘I might have, if I’d known about it. Then again, since your sex life needed some improvement, I might not.’’ On impulse, Cam grabbed Ethan in a headlock. ‘‘Because I love you, man.’’ He only laughed when the elbow plowed into his stomach. ‘‘See? It even improved your reflexes.’’

Ethan shifted, angled his weight, and reversed their positions. ‘‘You’re right,’’ he said and rubbed his knuckles hard on the top of Cam’s head for good measure.

S
INCE IT WAS HIS NIGHT
to cook, Ethan added an egg to a bowl of ground beef. He didn’t mind cooking. It was just one of those things you did to get through. He’d harbored a small, selfish, and purely chauvinistic hope that Anna would take over the kitchen duties as woman of the house.

She’d squashed that hope like a bug.

Of course, having her around did spread out the chore. But the worst of it, as far as he was concerned, was figuring out the menu. It was different from cooking for himself.
He’d learned quickly enough that when you cooked for a family, everybody was a critic.

‘‘What is that?’’ Seth demanded when Ethan shook oatmeal into the mix.

‘‘Meat loaf.’’

‘‘Looks like crap to me. Why can’t we have pizza?’’

‘‘Because we’re having meat loaf.’’

Seth made a gagging sound as Ethan dumped some tomato soup into the mix. ‘‘Gross. I’d rather eat dirt.’’

‘‘There’s plenty of it outside.’’

Seth shifted from foot to foot, rose up on his toes to get a closer look at the bowl. The rain was driving him crazy. There was nothing to
do.
He was starving to death, he had six million mosquito bites, and there was nothing but kid crud and news on TV.

When he listed this litany of complaints, Ethan merely shrugged. ‘‘Go bug Cam.’’

Cam had told him to go bug Ethan. Seth knew from hard experience that it took much longer to bug Ethan than Cam.

‘‘How come you put all that crap in there if it’s called meat loaf?’’