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  “Mercy. Why not schedule it for when the weather’s better?”

  “You know anybody that can schedule the weather? They set it for when the fish are supposed to be here.” Sally Ann finished ironing a uniform shirt, unplugged the iron and plopped it on the kitchen range to cool. “Trouble is, if the weather closes in, they wait until too late to get off the island. Once the highway’s flooded, they’re stuck with nothing better to do than shoot pool and tell lies about the big one that got away.”

  “Still, it doesn’t sound like good planning to me.”

  Sally grinned. A strawberry blonde, she had a weathered face, perfect teeth and the biggest, bluest eyes Molly had ever seen. “Makes for some fun, though. Socializing’s a big part of these tournaments. If the weather shuts down and they get tired of baling hay, they head for the pubs. And let me tell you, if this low hangs around too long, there’ll be some hot old times down at Delroy’s Pub.”

  One hand on the doorknob, Molly paused. “Uh—did you say baling hay? I thought they were fishing?”

  “Catching eelgrass. With the water so rough, the bottom’s all tore up. Seaweed’s about all they haul in.”

  The next day dark clouds closed in, bringing stiff winds that tore new leaves from ancient trees and set small boats to bobbing like corks at the wharf. It was raining, but not heavily when Molly left the general store with a sack of apples and headed back to the cottage. Rain or shine, she was determined to walk each day as part of her new regime.

  Diet and exercise. Ugh! Traffic had tripled since she’d arrived only a few days ago. Idly she wondered what had happened to her ferryboat acquaintance. Had he left? Was he shooting pool and swapping lies, or fishing in the rain?

  The fish wouldn’t know if it was raining or not…would they?

  Remembering Sally Anne’s warning, that he might try to score a little something on the side just to make the trip worthwhile, she had to laugh. It was flattering to think a warning would even be necessary. The new Molly must be coming along faster than she’d thought, if she had to worry about men trying to pick her up.

  “Hi there, pretty lady.”

  Molly nearly dropped her apples as the familiar-looking dark green truck pulled up beside her. “Oh, hi. How’s fishing, uh—Jeffy?”

  “Tournament’s over. We drew a lousy spot this year, but at least I didn’t get skunked. I’m staying on a few more days, long’s I come all this way—headed out now to look over conditions. With the wind like this, the beach’ll get cut up some. Might be a few promising new sloughs. Wanna come along for the ride?”

  A small voice in the back of her mind whispered, “Watch it, lady, you might’ve shed a few pounds, but you’re not ready for prime time yet.”

  The old Molly was aghast to hear the new Molly say cheerfully, “Well…sure, why not?” She accepted the callused hand and hauled herself up into the high cab. So he was something of a slob. So his grammar wasn’t perfect and he belched and tossed beer cans. Back in Grover’s Hollow some of the nicest people she knew probably did the same thing when no one was looking. But he was friendly, and after all, she wasn’t committing herself to anything more than a drive along the beach, which she certainly couldn’t do in her own car.

  Rarely did Rafe Webber find himself in an awkward situation, thanks to excellent instincts and an impeccable sense of timing. On the few occasions when he blundered, he usually managed to finesse his way out with the minimum amount of damage. This time things might be different. His instincts had been signaling trouble ever since Stu had called to tell him he was getting married to the most beautiful, brilliant, wonderful woman in the world. Rafe had strongly advised a cooling-off period, meaning, wait until I have time to check things out, little buddy. Unfortunately Stu had been too charged up to listen.

  Rafe had been on his way out of the country at the time. He’d been held up a lot longer than he’d expected, missing Thanksgiving and Christmas completely. Not that he was sentimental—no way! Still, he’d always made a point of getting together for holidays, just to give the kid a sense of stability. He’d read somewhere that establishing traditions helped ground rebellious adolescents, which Stu had been when Rafe had first got him. For the past ten years, Rafe always cooked his special turkey dinner, regardless of the holiday.

  So he’d missed the wedding, too. By the time he made it back to the States, the deed was done. But tomorrow was the kid’s birthday, and regardless of the bride and an inconvenient nor’easter, he wasn’t going to miss that. He’d checked the weather when he’d filed his flight plan. Two separate low-pressure areas were due to join forces just off the North Carolina coast, but he figured he had plenty of time to slide on in before the weather closed in. What he hadn’t figured on was finding the whole damned island foundering under a load of surf fishermen. While it might be good for business, it was a damned nuisance when a guy got in late, needing a decent rental car and a room for a couple of days.

  Before leaving Pelican’s Cove, Florida, Rafe had cleared his calendar for a week, even though he figured it would take only a couple of days to make things up to the kid and find out how much trouble he’d gotten himself in. Not to mention what it was going to take to get him out of it. Stu’s taste in women was notorious. From the time Rafe had taken over the care and feeding of a freckle-faced adolescent with too much money, too many hormones and too little common sense, Stu had been a target for every predatory female in range.

  This one had waited until Rafe was headed out of the country on a little unofficial business for the government and then reeled in her catch. Stuart Montgomery Grainger III. Old family, new money. Gullible Grainger, green as his daddy’s billions. Rafe had dared hope that, with a college degree and a brand-new teaching job waiting for him, his half brother might have matured enough to be let off the leash. The lady had outsmarted him. She’d sprung her trap before any of the family had had a chance to check her out. Not that anyone besides Rafe would even bother, unless it was Stu’s father’s lawyers.

  Ten years ago Rafe’s mother had dropped in out of the blue with a scared, resentful fifteen-year-old in tow and announced that as the two of them were half brothers, it was time they got to know one another. To say Rafe was appalled would be an understatement. The only thing that had kept him from flat-out refusing was the fact that the kid obviously felt the same way. Rafe could remember all too well how he’d felt at that age, being shunted between summer camp and boarding school so as not to cramp his mother’s lifestyle.

  They’d spent the next five years getting to know each other, with Rafe trying his damnedest to instill a few survival instincts in a kid who hadn’t a clue.

  Evidently he hadn’t succeeded. Those wedding pictures that had been waiting when he’d finally made it back to the States had pretty much told the story. Gorgeous bride wearing a knock-out gown, grinning groom wearing cake on his face. The kid still looked about fifteen. You had to wonder if the bride would have been so determined to tie the knot if his name had been Joe Jones instead of S. M. Grainger III of the shipping and banking Graingers.

  About all Rafe could do at this point was damage control. Fly in unannounced, apologize for missing out on all the festivities and cook Stu his favorite holiday dinner, which happened to be the only family-style dinner Rafe knew how to prepare. It would serve as a birthday treat, a reminder to Stu that he had family standing squarely behind him, and a similar warning to the bride. It would also tell him a lot about this paragon the kid had married. If she could be bought off, he’d be better off without her.

  Rafe wondered how much Stu had told her about his wildly dysfunctional family. There was the father who couldn’t be bothered to keep in touch. The mother who sent extravagant birthday gifts on the wrong date. Somewhere there were some half siblings who might or might not know him personally—not to mention a big brother who had invested a lot of years into keeping him on the right track.

  At the moment Rafe was more concerned with the woman. On the way north h
e had settled on a test he used often in business: the element of surprise. Setting things up, then observing the way people reacted to the unexpected. Having a stranger drop in out of the blue with an armload of groceries to commandeer a woman’s kitchen might not be quite as effective a test as being stranded together in a leaky cabin cruiser, but it should do the trick. He could hardly come right out and ask the bride if she was more interested in the trust fund Stu stood to inherit at the age of thirty-one, or the shy, good-natured guy with a good mind, a heart of gold but damned few social skills.

  While he secured the plane, taking extra precautions against the wind, Rafe ran through a few old chestnuts about brothers’ keepers and no man being an island in an effort to rationalize his guilty conscience for having dropped out of sight at a time when Stu had needed him. He didn’t do guilt well. When he’d found out the honeymooners would be spending a few months on one of the islands off the North Carolina coast, it had seemed like the perfect chance to mend a few fences and at the same time see how much trouble Stu was in with this bride of his and what it was going to take to sort things out. Happy marriages did not run in their family.

  Unfortunately marriage did. Stella, the mother they shared, had been married four times to date. A six-foot-tall ex-Vegas showgirl, she was still a beautiful woman at age fifty-nine-and-holding.

  Rafe’s father had been married three times to successively younger women, and was currently working out prenuptials with number four. Probably a high school cheerleader this time. Rafe didn’t know about Stu’s old man, but figured he was probably in the same league, marriagewise.

  It was when Stella had been about to set out on honeymoon number three a few days before Thanksgiving that she’d turned up at the door of Rafe’s condo with the kid. Once he’d gotten over the shock of finding himself unexpectedly landed with the care and feeding of a half-grown boy, Rafe had scrambled like crazy not to blow it. He’d canceled a nine-day trip to Vancouver with Linda—or maybe it had been Liz. He had taken a crash course in basic cooking and started reading every book on adolescent psychology he could lay his hands on. Over the next few years they had weathered countless minor mishaps and a few major ones. He liked the kid.

  Hell, he loved the kid.

  He’d done a good job of raising him, too, if he did say so himself. Stu was no athlete—they’d both reluctantly faced that fact after half a dozen or so spectacular failures. He was a fine young man, smart as a whip when it came to books. Trouble was, he was dumb as a stump where women were concerned.

  That was where Rafe had always come in. Sifting the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Unfortunately it had mostly been chaff up to now, but at least he’d managed to keep Stu out of major trouble until the call had come a couple of months ago. Rafe had been within hours of leaving the country on another unofficial fact-finding trip. As a small-time Gulf Coast resort developer with a modest charter boat fleet, he had the perfect excuse to explore the coastal regions of Central and South America. Having served a hitch in the Coast Guard before Stu had come to live with him, he was well aware of the fact that DEA was undermanned, underfunded and overwhelmed.

  Which was how he’d happened to miss the wedding. Thanks to a small misunderstanding with a bunch of entrepreneurs in a little fishing village in Central America, he’d been out of circulation for the next several weeks, but at least he was going to make the kid’s twenty-fifth birthday.

  What he hadn’t figured on was the size of Ocracoke Island in relation to the concentration of tourists. Wall-to-wall fishermen, according to the fellow who’d driven the rental out to the airport to meet him. He should have made advance reservations, in case the honeymoon cottage lacked a guest room.

  The airport was little more than a paved landing strip with a phone booth and an open pavilion, all within a few hundred yards of the Atlantic. It was crowded and exposed, but adequate. He’d seen a lot worse. Knowing the weather was likely to deteriorate before the low moved offshore again, he took his time with the tie-downs and chocks. Hatteras Lows were notorious, even in Florida. Once he was satisfied, he slung his gear, which included several large grocery sacks, into the only available rental vehicle, an SUV with a gutted muffler and rusted-out floorboards.

  He dropped the driver off at the rental place after learning the location of Yaupon Cottage and roughly how to find it, and toyed with the notion of checking into a hotel first. He decided against it. The turkey needed to go into an oven, or else they’d be lucky to dine before midnight. And while that didn’t bother him at all, Stu and whatsername might have other ideas.

  Mission underplanned.

  Traffic was bumper-to-bumper. Locating Yaupon Cottage wasn’t quite as easy as it had sounded. The village was laid out as if someone had tossed handsful of confetti into the air and then built something wherever a scrap of paper landed. With the low cloud cover, there was barely enough light left to see his way up and down the narrow, winding roads with vehicles parked haphazardly on both sides.

  He managed to find the place, and then had to squeeze in between a picket fence and a tan sedan. By then the rain had started coming down in solid, wind-driven sheets. Hatless, coatless, he jogged up the path to the front door and knocked. And then he pounded again and waited. There was no light on inside. It might not be wise to walk in unannounced on a honeymoon couple, but dammit, his backside was getting wet. The grocery sacks were melting. So he pounded a few more times, then tried the doorknob. Finding the door unlocked, he opened it and called, “Hey, kids? Stu? Anybody home?”

  Two

  Dammit, they couldn’t be too far away, or else they’d have locked the place. Pushing the door open, Rafe shoved the groceries and his battered leather bag in out of the rain. He should have called first. He should have called before he’d ever left Florida.

  Too late now. After a quick look around, he set to work on the surprise birthday dinner. He preferred to think of it as that rather than as a test for the bride, but he was beginning to have a funny feeling about this whole affair. If things didn’t work out, Stu was going to take it hard. From some unknown ancestor, the kid had inherited the genes for vulnerability and sensitivity. Thank God those had skipped Rafe. If there were two things he was not, it was vulnerable and sensitive.

  The place was a dump. If there was a level surface anywhere, it wasn’t easily discernible. It was small to the point of claustrophobic, and the two refrigerator-size birdcages in the room across the hall didn’t help. Stu had mentioned that his bride had a couple of birds. Rafe had pictured budgies. Maybe canaries.

  Through the open door, he eyed the two red-tailed gray parrots in the next room. Tilting their heads, they eyed him back. Feeling vaguely self-conscious, he turned his attention back to the turkey he’d bought in Tampa and allowed to thaw on the way north. He probably should’ve opted for something simpler, but the grand gesture had been part of the plan. Showing up with deli food and a bottle of wine wouldn’t do the trick. It had been his experience that wives didn’t care much for surprises, and a raw turkey definitely qualified as a surprise.

  Rafe had had a wife of his own, briefly. He’d like to think Stu would have better luck, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Marital bliss was not a component of their gene pool, on either the maternal or the paternal side, he reminded himself as he rummaged underneath the counter for a roasting pan. If the kid found himself married to the wrong kind of woman, who better than Rafe to lead him out of the wilderness?

  Judging strictly from the wedding pictures that had been waiting in his stack of mail when he’d gotten back from his extended stay in Central America, the lady was gorgeous and at least three inches taller than her bridegroom, who’d been grinning like Howdy Doody in every single picture. Knowing Stu, Rafe figured his half brother probably hadn’t bothered to draw up a prenuptial agreement.

  Knowing women in general, the bride probably would have talked him out of it even if he had. His baby brother all but carried a sign that said Kick Me.

  T
he range was an ancient model, the oven barely big enough to hold a roasting pan and the sweet potato casserole he’d planned. In the years after Stu had gone off to college, Rafe’s cooking had been limited to intimate dinners for two, usually followed by breakfast. Other than that, he ate out. Domestic, he was not. A woman he’d once known briefly had called it a defense mechanism. She’d been into pop psychology and thought she had his number.

  Defense mechanism? No way. He simply liked his life just fine the way it was, and saw no reason to change it. And dammit, he was not lonely, no matter what anyone said! Anytime he wanted company, all he had to do was pick up the phone. Could a man have it any better than that? All the fun, none of the hassles?

  There was a row of broken shells on the kitchen windowsill and he wondered if that was a clue to the kind of woman Stu had married. Was there some hidden psychological meaning here? What sort of person would bring home broken shells? Judging solely from the wedding photos, the bride could be a model or a starlet. She had the looks. According to Stu, she was supposed to be working on a degree in linguistics.

  What the hell was linguistics, anyway?

  A long-haired yellow cat with a wide head and ragged ears stalked into the kitchen and glared at him. Rafe glared back. “Don’t even think about it, friend,” he growled, plopping the turkey into the sink.

  “Balderdash!” screamed one of the two African Grays from the living room.

  “Yeah, right,” Rafe grumbled as he ran water through the cavity and wondered if he’d remembered to buy prepared stuffing. He was getting a low-pressure headache. Either that, or second thoughts were piling in faster than his brain could process them.