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  He shook his head. “Somebody gave her a trip to Jamestown for a birthday gift?” A change in barometric pressure always did a number on his head. This time it had evidently affected his hearing, as well.

  With a majestic sigh, the woman said, “It’s Annamarie’s gift to Stu. He’s the historian, as you should know if you really are who you say you are. While they’re down here working on her thesis, she’s giving him this side trip for a birthday present.”

  Rafe pressed his cool fingertips above his eyes and rubbed. With a sigh, he said, “Look, Miss—”

  “Dewhurst. And it’s Ms., not Miss. Annamarie is my baby sister.”

  “Ms. Dewhurst,” he repeated. Great. He’d come all this way, planning to check out his new half sister-in-law and make up to Stu for all the missed occasions with a belated birthday feast, and now he was stuck here with Ms. Congeniality.

  “Actually, it’s Molly,” she said in that quiet, husky voice of hers that kept getting between him and his anger.

  Make that frustration. “Well, Molly, whoever you are and whatever you’re doing here, I hope you like turkey. And candied sweet potatoes and spoon bread and whatever green vegetable I can find in Stu’s pantry. It’ll probably be canned peas, but with enough butter and seasoning, they’re not half bad.”

  “Balderdash, balderdash, balderda—!”

  Moving swiftly, Rafe closed the door between the two rooms, making the kitchen seem smaller than ever. The whole cottage would fit nicely into his suite at his latest acquisition, a small resort hotel on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

  “I think we’d better talk,” Ms. Molly Dewhurst said as she shucked off a pair of very wet pink sneakers. “But first I really need a cup of coffee. It might be April, but I’m freezing.” As if to prove her point, she sneezed, begged his pardon and said, “You’re welcome to a cup if you don’t mind reheated.”

  Three

  The coffee was weak and decaffeinated, but it served to wash down a couple of aspirin. “Okay, so talk.” His company manners were fading fast.

  “Talk. All right. What if I pay you for the groceries and you catch the next ferry out?”

  He didn’t bother to tell her he’d flown in, and until the weather broke, he wouldn’t be flying out again. “I’ve got a better idea,” he countered. “What if you catch the ferry and I stay here and house-sit until the happy couple gets back?”

  Slowly Molly shook her head. A few more lengths of damp brown hair worked free to brush her shoulders. Dry and left to its own devices, it would probably pass as a crowning glory. Thick, red highlights and a tendency to curl.

  “What was that?” Distracted, he’d missed her reply.

  “I said I’m not going anywhere. I promised Annamarie I’d stay here and look after Shag and the birds, and I always keep my promises.”

  “Always?”

  “Practically always.”

  “Then you’re one woman in a million.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that, but I’ll tell you this much—I’m staying. So if you want to hang around until they get back, I hope you’ve secured a room. I know it’s early in the season, but with this tournament thing and all, they’re probably pretty full.”

  Rafe never knew what made him dig in his heels. It sure as the devil wasn’t the woman’s personal attractions. She was a frump with pretty hair, a sexy voice, nice eyes and great skin. Period. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you book a room?”

  “Because I can’t afford it,” she said flatly. The last thing he was prepared for was a straight answer. Unless she was angling for a pay-off. “And because I promised I’d take care of things. I’ve never met you before, never even heard of you. That is, I knew Stu had a brother who didn’t bother to show up for the wedding, but for all I know, you could be just another—another beach bum, looking for a place to stay.”

  Rafe tipped his chair back and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was still there. Obdurate. Yeah, that was a good description. “What if I pay the tab? Would you go then?”

  Huffy. Another good description.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said loftily.

  He had to laugh. Headache and all. “Well, of course you do, honey. What about, How dare you? Want to run that one by me while you’re dishing up indignation?” And then he relented. “Look, you don’t trust me and I don’t particularly trust you.” Actually he was almost beginning to, which came as something of a surprise. “So what do you say we strike a bargain? I’ll check out the room situation, but if I can’t find a vacancy, I’ll bed down in the room with the miserable-looking cot buried under all the junk, and you can have the queen-size bed with a view of the cemetery.”

  “Oh, but—”

  “I’ll do the cooking, you look after the birds, we’ll both watch to see that nobody steals the family silver, and if the honeymooners aren’t back by the time the weather breaks, I’ll leave.” He might. He might not. “Fair enough? Meanwhile I’ll do my best to stay out of your hair.”

  Which was beginning to curl around her face. Half the women he knew had gone red this year. He’d lay odds she was the genuine article. Even her eyebrows were auburn.

  Outside, the rain pounded down harder than ever. The trouble with Hatteras Lows was that they had a tendency to hang around too long, flooding highways, cutting new inlets, generally messing things up.

  “Well, I guess… I mean, all right, we’ll give it a try. But I’m warning you, if I find out you’re not who you say you are—”

  Rafe taught the parrots a new word. “Look, can you think of another reason why any man in his right mind would show up on Ocracoke Island in this kind of weather when he could be down in sunny Florida sharing a pitcher of margaritas with a pretty woman and watching preseason baseball?”

  The truce lasted until dinner was served. Molly had already eaten dinner, but that had been hours ago. Since then she had burned up a lot of emotional energy. She had spent the last few hours trying to ignore the tempting smells permeating the whole house while she shifted stacks of books, tapes and taping equipment off the cot and spread it with clean, if musty-smelling, sheets. After that she’d spent an hour or so trying to concentrate on the paperback novel she’d brought to read on the beach while the stranger in her kitchen slammed pots and pans together and muttered under his breath.

  He might or might not be Stu’s brother. Men lied. Besides, they didn’t look anything at all alike. Stu had freckles, red-blond hair that fell over his forehead and a jack-o’-lantern grin. He claimed to have three sisters and one brother, but none of them had showed up at the wedding. His mother was supposed to be somewhere in Europe, and he wasn’t quite sure where his father was. According to Annamarie, they weren’t at all close.

  As for the volunteer chef, he looked like an advertisement for some tropical resort. Tall, tanned, with sun-bleached hair and a pair of pale gray eyes that were clear as rainwater yet impossible to read. Like a trick mirror. His features were far from perfect—his nose a tad too large, his jaw a bit too strong. His cheekbones were more flat and angular than high and aristocratic.

  All of which made it hard to understand why she suddenly found herself redefining everything she had ever considered physically attractive in a man. If she needed to prove how wretched her judgment was when it came to men, she had two perfect examples to refer to. Smooth-talking Kenny and Stallone-look-alike Jeffy. Even their names sounded immature.

  Their names sounded immature? Oh, for heaven’s sake, it must be the weather. On a rainy night like this, with nothing to distract her, her mind obviously had a mind of its own.

  “Blue cheese okay?”

  Molly glanced up at the man in the doorway and caught her breath all over again. Telling herself to quit staring, she managed to say, “Blue’s fine.”

  Any kind of cheese was fine, since she wouldn’t be indulging. She had a feeling she could gain weight just looking at that delectable mouth of his and wondering…

  Wondering nothin
g. All she needed to know was what he was doing here, why he was going to all this trouble and how long he intended to stay. At the rate it was raining, the roads would soon be flooded. Sally Ann had mentioned something about high water tables and creeks backing up. If it got much worse, not even the ferries would run, which meant they would be trapped here together.

  What if he was lying about being Stu’s brother? Men always lied when it was to their advantage. Her ex-husband was a prime example. As her neighbor back in Grover’s Hollow had said when she learned that Molly was planning to marry Kenneth Dewhurst, “You don’t want to do that, honey. He talks real pretty but there ain’t a speck o’ truth in him.”

  Jeffy of the beer cans and bedroom eyes had lied, at least by omission. This man could be lying, too, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of a single reason why he should. There was no reason for him to stay, as Stu wouldn’t be back for several days. Let him head on back to Florida and his margaritas and pretty women.

  With a restless sigh, she laid her book aside. Her stomach growled, either in protest of the fried food she had consumed earlier or anticipation from the delectable smells issuing from the kitchen. She was accustomed to eating early and going to bed before she succumbed to late-night temptation. Not even to herself would she admit that tonight’s temptation might involve more than food.

  She wandered over to the birdcages and checked the water cups. There was a grape in one. “Messy, aren’t you? I’ll take care of it tomorrow. It’s your bedtime now.”

  As usual, her comments were greeted by a cacophony of gutter language and filthy suggestions, “Stick it up yer arse” being one of the milder ones.

  “Eat soap and die,” she growled as she snatched her fingers from the danger zone.

  “Bill-ee, shaddup! Bill-ee, shaddup!”

  “Both of you shut up, or I’ll—”

  “Balderdash. Hell-oo, honey!”

  “Don’t you honey me, you dirty old man.” Their names were Pete and Repete. A little too cute, but then, they were Annamarie’s problem, not hers.

  Pete—or maybe it was the other one—did a flushing toilet and then a series of noises that reminded her of someone cracking his knuckles. Molly ignored it and reached for the sheets to cover the cages.

  “Belly up, down the hatch, belly up, down the hatch!”

  “Just hush up and go to sleep.” Her stomach growled once more as she picked up her book and settled down in the slipcovered easy chair again. It was a grisly murder-mystery, the last thing she needed on a night like this with a stranger in the house.

  And she was hungry again. It wasn’t fair. Both her sisters, Annamarie and Mary, took after the Stevenses, who were all tall and lean and burned up calories without even trying. Molly had taken after her mother’s family. The fact that hips and thighs were supposed to be the healthiest place to store fat didn’t help. She’d rather not have to store it at all.

  It was almost eleven. Normally she would have eaten a light supper at six and been in bed by now. Shag, the half-Persian, half-coon cat Annamarie had had for years, climbed onto her lap, circled and settled down. He smelled like fish. She’d been buying him special treats at the fish market so that he wouldn’t wander away and get lost and break Annamarie’s heart.

  “Dinner is served, madam. I thought a nice merlot. Okay with you?”

  She didn’t even know what a merlot was, only that it was a wine, and if she had to use up her daily allotment of calories, she intended to use it on something she liked a lot better than she did wine. “Um…water will be fine.”

  The kitchen table had been spread with a sheet. There was no dining room. No table linens, either. But there were hurricane candles, and her genial host—a little too genial to be trusted—had stuck them into a pair of red glass holders he’d found somewhere and used them as a centerpiece. There wasn’t room on the table for the turkey.

  “Oh, no, not candied yams.” She uttered a soft moan.

  “Butter, coconut, orange juice, pecans and brown sugar. Here, try some.” He’d cooked enough to feed a platoon.

  “Just a taste,” she said, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “I ate earlier.” Darn it, she’d come so close to having cheekbones. She had lost weight during the breakup of her marriage, but after Kenny had followed her to her next job and made such a pest of himself that they’d found an excuse to let her go, she had nibbled the pounds back again.

  Poor Kenny. It wasn’t that he was stupid, because he really wasn’t. The trouble was, he worked so hard trying to keep from working that he never got anywhere. It hadn’t taken long after they were married to discover that he had fallen for her earning capacity, not her looks or her personality. For years she had worked two jobs to put her sisters through college. By the time she’d met Kenny, she was well on the way to rebuilding her savings account, with every intention of cultivating a whole new Molly Stevens, minus the extra pounds and plus a whole lot more pizzazz.

  Just as she was ready to reach out for something of her own, Kenny Dewhurst had appeared on the scene. He’d been briefly employed as a sales rep for a farm implement company at the time, despite the fact that he knew little or nothing about farming. But in a tiny place like Grover’s Hollow, he’d created something of a sensation. All the girls were talking about him, but to everyone’s astonishment, it was Molly he’d singled out. Smooth, handsome—short for a man, but just right for her—he had called her darling. Not honey, or babe, but darling. She’d been in awe of this man who spent more on one pair of shoes than she spent on her entire best outfit, and he drove a convertible, besides.

  The convertible had been repossessed two weeks after their wedding because Kenny had had a falling-out with his boss, quit his job and couldn’t make the payments. By that time he was no longer calling her darling, or even honey. His famous-name shoes had lasted a lot longer than his charm, but by then she wouldn’t have cared if he wore golden slippers. Her neighbor had been right. Not only was he a world-class liar, he hadn’t a grain of ambition. Two jobs were enough for any married couple, and she had both of them.

  Besides, he was working on “something big.” Kenny was always “working on something big.” She hadn’t dared quit her home-bookkeeping business because her job at the bank, while the title was nice, didn’t pay a whole lot. Meanwhile, Kenny went right on working on his Big Deal. So far as Molly was concerned, his Big Deal was making such a pest of himself that he’d managed to get her fired from the bank, and later on, from a job with a small insurance company before they’d separated. She’d left her next job voluntarily after a break-in, because she suspected him of having something to do with it.

  Not that she’d ever voiced her suspicions, either to Kenny or the authorities, because the divorce had come through by then, and the last thing she wanted was another kind of involvement with her ex. She had given him every chance to live up to his promises, but he never had. She had tried to understand his point of view—that he was slated for better things, that he’d had some bad breaks, that nobody understood him. It all boiled down to one thing. Besides being bone lazy, Kenny Dewhurst lacked so much as a grain of integrity. He was a failure. He would always be a failure because he refused to listen to advice or accept help, other than the financial help he demanded.

  That was when she’d moved from West Virginia to North Carolina and taken a position as head housekeeper for a small assisted-living home. Two months ago she heard from a friend back in West Virginia that Kenny had been asking about her. That was the main reason she’d jumped at the chance to house-sit for Stu and Annamarie while Holly Hills Home was closed down for renovations. She knew Kenny. He was tenacious as flypaper when he wanted something, but like a child, he was easily distracted. With any luck, he would soon get discouraged and look for some other poor woman to hit on.

  “Earth to Ms. Dewhurst.”

  Molly glanced up at the man seated across the table and was struck all over again by the combination of rugged features, pale gray eyes an
d a crooked grin. So he was attractive. Okay, so he was devastatingly attractive. For a woman who had any number of marketable skills, she was notoriously bad when it came to judging character, but at least knowing her weakness, she was forewarned.

  “More spoon bread?”

  “What? Oh, no thanks, I never eat—” Oh, my mercy. He had loaded her plate and she’d cleaned it off without even realizing what she was doing. Fifty thousand calories, gone to waste. Make that, gone to waist.

  There was no earthly reason, Molly told herself that night as she lay in bed listening to the rain, why they couldn’t simply ignore each other and go their own way. Once the rain stopped and the roads were clear, Rafe would probably be more than ready to move on. Then she could go on cleaning cages, brushing a shedding, long-hair cat, counting calories and enjoying her first beach vacation. She’d discovered dozens of purple shell fragments on the beach that Sally Ann told her were bits of ancient clam shells. Remembering a book that had come out a few years ago, about older women wearing purple, she decided to take everyone at the home a handful of purple shell fragments.

  A few hours later in another part of the house, Rafe moved restlessly from window to window, looking for a way out. So much for his great instincts and impeccable sense of timing. The least he could have done was to call before he’d gotten himself trapped in an impossible situation.

  He switched on the kitchen radio, hoping for news or a weather forecast. He got static. Lightning noise. There was no TV, and even if there were, chances were it wouldn’t work any better than the radio. Which meant he was trapped here until the weather cleared. Trapped with a wary female who had a sharp tongue, lambent eyes and the kind of body that would have made her the toast of the town a hundred years ago.

  The birds were asleep—at least, their cages were covered. His headache had backed off, but he’d given up trying to sleep. Restless, he located the phone book and settled down with the old black rotary phone to call every damned hotel on the island. Only, instead of a dial tone, he got a sound like a drunk gargling whiskey.