Deep Waters

the heat and the quiet strength in him even though he had not touched her.
    "I'm sorry I snapped at you a few minutes ago," she said at last. "The crack about your coming over to see me because you were bored was rude."
    "Forget it."
    She hesitated and then decided to take the plunge. "I had an interesting conversation with my brother today."
    There was just enough light to reveal the brief, wryly amused twist of Elias's mouth. "I assume that I was the main topic of conversation."
    She sighed. "To be honest, yes. Davis said he'd heard of you and Far Seas, but he'd never met you."
    "I've heard of him, too. Our paths have never crossed."
    "He said I should be cautious around you, that you weren't the type to run a little curio shop on a small town pier. He said you were probably here in Whis pering Waters Cove on behalf of some big off-shore client."
    Elias kept his gaze on the grove of trees that marched down to the edge of the bluff. "My reasons for being here have nothing to do with business. Your brother's assumptions are based on a faulty premise."
    "In other words, he's looking through murky water?"
    "Sounds like you picked up a few things from Hayden."
    Charity smiled briefly. "I liked Hayden. But I never felt as if I knew him well. There was always something distant and remote about him. It was as if he existed in his own private universe."
    "You're right. He did. As far as I know, I was the only one he ever allowed into that universe."
    Something buried in his dark voice caught and held Charity's attention. "He was more than a friend to you, wasn't he? And more than a teacher, too."
    "Yes.".
    She breathed out slowly. Empathy washed away several layers of common sense and caution. "It's only been two months since his death. You must miss him."
    Elias was silent for a couple of heartbeats. "I was with him when he died. Made him go to the emer gency room. He kept telling me it was a waste of time, that he was going to die and that no doctor could do anything about it. But he knew that he had to let me take him to the hospital because if I didn't, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering if he could have been saved. He would have preferred to die quietly in my house."
    "But you took him to the emergency room, and he died there, instead?"
    "Yes." Elias looked out over the cove. "He was very calm at the end. Centered. Balanced. He died as he had lived. The last thing he said to me was that he had given me the tools to free myself. It was up to me to use them."
    "Free yourself from what?"
    Another beat of silence. "The need for revenge."
    Charity stared at him. "Against whom?"
    "It's a long story."
    "I don't mind listening."
    Elias did not respond for several minutes. Charity began to think he had no intention of answering her question. But after a while, he finally began to talk.
    "My parents were divorced when I was ten. I lived with my mother. She … suffered from bouts of depression. One month after I turned sixteen, she took her own life."
    "Oh, God, Elias. I'm sorry."
    "I went to live with my grandparents. They never recovered from their grief. I think they always blamed my father for my mother's problems. And some of that blame shifted to me after her death. I waited for my father to send for me. I never heard from him."
    Charity's throat tightened. "Where was he?"
    "He ran a small air-freight business based on an island named Nihili."
    Charity frowned. "I've never heard of it."
    "Few people have. It's out in the Pacific. After a while I talked my grandfather into paying my way out to Nihili. It wasn't hard."
    "What happened to your father?"
    "Dad had a rival, a man named Garrick Keyworth." Charity said nothing when he paused again. She simply waited.
    "Keyworth sabotaged Dad's only plane. My father knew it, but he took off, anyway. The plane went down out over the ocean."
    Charity was stunned. Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn't a tale of murder. "If that's the truth, then it seems to me that you had every right to want revenge against this Keyworth."
    "It's not as simple as it sounds. Things rarely are. Dad knew the plane had fuel line problems that day, but he chose to take the chance and fly. He had con tracts to fulfill. One of the things I never wanted to admit to myself was that he made his own decision to risk his life."
    A flash of intuition went through Charity. "He not only risked his own life, he risked leaving you alone, didn't he?"
    "You could say that." Elias's smile contained no