Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

until you’ve tried it. Or are you the type who carries a can of pepper spray and a purse pistol?”
    “No to the gun,” she said. “I’ve thought about buying some pepper spray but it never got farther than that. Thinking.”
    “How are you at screaming?”
    “I used to be about nine on the Richter scale. Faith has more volume, but Archer swore that I could pierce eardrums at fifty yards.”
    Jake smiled. “How worried are you about those one-way calls you’ve been getting?”
    “Worried enough to be glad that someone will be within screaming distance,” she admitted.
    “Does that mean you don’t think I’ll give you reason to scream?”
    “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have hired you.”
    “I’m no Snake Eyes, is that it?”
    Honor toasted him with her glass of wine. “I’ve never met a gray-eyed snake. Lucky for you, huh?”
    Luckier than she could imagine, Jake thought. She was as wary as any intelligent urban female, but she lacked the bone-deep spookiness of a wild animal—or someone who had been burned to the bone by trusting the wrong person.
    Jake raised his wineglass. “To luck.” He would need a lot more of it to get out of this mess intact.
    And whether Honor knew it or not, so would she.

7
    I T WAS STILL dark when Honor’s alarm clock went off. The alarm began as a gentle chiming, graduated to a reasonably polite buzzer, then moved on to an alley-cat-ecstasy imitation, the kind of screeching that gets mating felines in trouble with the neighbors. The whole cycle took fifteen minutes. She had been asleep for the first fourteen minutes and fifty-five seconds. She still wanted to be asleep.
    Groaning, she pulled the pillow over her ears and burrowed beneath the covers. The alarm clock’s shriek followed her. The sound was electronically created, electronically amplified, and absolutely impossible to ignore. Not for the first time she cursed Kyle’s inventiveness with bits and pieces of technology. Somehow he had spliced the horrific scream into an otherwise normal battery-driven clock.
    “All right, all right! I’m awake! ”
    The alarm was neither bright enough to accept her surrender nor stupid enough to believe it. The wailing, gnashing sounds went on until she shot out of bed, stalked across the room, and silenced the infernal machine.
    “At least I’m sure Kyle isn’t a drunk,” Honor said, rubbing her eyes. “No man who suffered regular hangovers would invent an alarm clock like that.”
    A pounding sound came from the direction of the front door.
    “Honor! Are you all right?”
    She hadn’t known Jake long, but she had plenty of older brothers; she recognized the voice of a man who was one inch from doing something physical. She raced to the front door, shot the bolt open, and jerked on the handle.
    The porch light showed Jake with his fist raised above the door frame out of her sight. She had no doubt that he was lining up for another blow to the innocent cottage.
    “The sun isn’t even a prayer on the eastern horizon,” she snarled. “Why in God’s name are you hammering on my door?”
    “Are you all right?”
    “I’ll let you know as soon as I wake up. Now was there anything in particular you wanted or are you just a born-again pain in the ass?”
    Jake leaned his weight against the fist that was out of sight above the door. He put his other fist on his hip.
    “What in hell is going on?” he asked.
    His tone sliced through the lovely fog of sleep Honor had been trying to hang on to. Her eyes widened as she really looked at Jake for the first time. He had shaving cream smeared across one bearded cheek. An oddly carved amber medallion on a black silk cord gleamed against a pelt of rumpled male chest fur. Dark blue skivvies rode low on his hips, cupping the remains of an early-morning erection.
    “Good grief!” she said, staring. “Do you always run around in your underwear?”
    “Only when I’m racing to the rescue of screaming idiots.”
    “Screaming . . . ohmygod. Could you hear it clear down on the boat?”
    “The boat, hell. I’m expecting them to scramble a squadron from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.”
    She groaned and covered her eyes. “It’s all Kyle’s fault.”
    “What? Is he here?” Jake asked sharply, looking past her.
    “No. Just his alarm.”
    “Alarm? As in clock?”
    She nodded. “Kyle and I have one thing in common. We are not morning people.”
    “So?”
    “So he built an alarm clock guaranteed to get me up. It