Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

way, are you? Where is your brother? ”
    “Jake. Listen to me,” she said with exaggerated patience. “I. Don’t. Know.”
    He barely managed to swallow a torrent of Russian curses. It was such a satisfying language to swear in. And if ever a situation deserved cursing, this one did.
    Jake believed her.
    Neither one of them knew where Kyle or the amber was.
    “Okay,” he said, reassessing quickly. “What do you know that will help us find Kyle?”
    Honor let out her breath in a long, hidden sigh of relief. Us . Ever since she had admitted to herself that she could spend weeks learning the boat and not get any closer to Kyle, a chill had spread in her soul.
    She knew her brother needed help. She was certain of it. She just didn’t know how to give it to him. With Jake along, she felt a lot better about her chances of finding Kyle.
    “Then you’ll help me look for him?” she asked.
    “I insist on it,” he said ironically.
    “I’ll pay you, of course. Just like you really were teaching me how to fish and run the boat.”
    “I really will be.”
    “What?”
    “Teaching you how to fish and handle the Tomorrow. ”
    “But I don’t want to know!”
    “Okay. I’ll give on the fishing, but not on the boat handling.”
    “Why?”
    “If something happens to me, you’ll have to run the boat. Deal?”
    Honor took a shaky breath and held out her right hand. “Deal.”
    The hand that took hers was slow, male, and very warm. So was Jake’s smile.
    “Congratulations, honey. You just hired yourself a fishing guide and boating instructor. Again.”

9
    T HIS TIME JAKE took the helm. Honor didn’t argue. But that didn’t stop her from asking questions.
    “Where are we going?”
    “A place called Secret Harbor.”
    “Why?” she asked, intrigued by the name. “Do you think Kyle might be there?”
    “Doubtful.”
    “Then why are we going?”
    “To fish.”
    “What!”
    He almost smiled. “I thought you wanted a salmon dinner.”
    “I can buy it at the grocery store.”
    “This is better. Trust me.”
    “I don’t have much choice, do I?” she asked evenly.
    Jake’s hands held the wheel too hard. He didn’t like to think about that part of what he was doing. Honor was damned if she trusted him and damned if she didn’t.
    And so was he.
    He wished he had a soothing, charming, amusing response, but he didn’t. All he had was the cold comfort of knowing that, like Honor, he didn’t have much choice.
    “We’re going to Secret Harbor because the trolling line there is a long ellipse that will give us a chance to look over the competition,” he said. “Since Secret Harbor is also one of the places Kyle mentions in his log, we’ll scan the shore for anything that might have . . . washed up.”
    “Like what?”
    “The missing Zodiac, dive tanks, an anchor, anything that shouldn’t be there.”
    “What if we don’t find anything?”
    “Then we go on to the next place Kyle mentioned in the log. And the next. And the next. Unless you have a better idea?”
    “No. It’s what I was going to do once I learned how to drive the boat.”
    Jake grunted. “The good news is that no one else has a better idea.”
    “How do you know?”
    “If they did, they wouldn’t be following us.”
    Honor blinked. “So if we look around and no one is following, we know we’re on the wrong trail.”
    Jake wondered if he should tell her about his near certainty that Kyle had altered the chart plotter enough to hide or add routes. There was also a good chance that Kyle had decided to hide the route in plain sight and had wired some useless stuff into the computer to confuse anyone who came looking. It was the sort of double reverse that would have appealed to Kyle’s sense of humor.
    After a moment Jake decided to spend the day going over the stored routes and another night trying to hack into Kyle’s plotter by himself. He should have more than twenty-four hours before Ellen started whispering in Honor’s ear. If Ellen kept her word . . . . He smiled cynically. Ellen’s word wasn’t exactly cast-iron.
    “We’ll do the close-in spots first,” he said. “That way we’ll waste as little time as possible just getting from here to wherever.”
    The Tomorrow sped across the blue-green sound. A white, surprisingly flat wake unfurled behind the SeaSport. The other boats followed. Honor kept turning around to check on them. Jake didn’t. He was watching the radar screen for a fourth boat. One way or