Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

then?”
    “Good question. I’ll be sure to ask him.”
    “First we have to find him.”
    “I’m working on that.”
    “From here, it looks like you’re fishing. And not very well, I must say. Good thing I got some chicken for dinner.”
    “I’ll bring the wine.”
    Honor smiled and wished she knew Jake well enough to kiss his hard cheekbone just above his beard. She had been hoping not to spend the evening alone, waiting for the phone to ring, wondering if it would be bad news, worse news, or Snake Eyes on the other end of the line.
    “What are you looking for?” she asked, leaning close to the blue screen, needing to think about anything except the unnerving silence that came when she said hello and no one answered.
    Jake tried not to take an extra-deep breath, savoring the sweet smell of woman so close to him. Then he tried not to think how nice her chin-length hair would feel tickling his bare skin. Then he tried not to think about her lips doing the same thing, tickling so fine.
    “Jake? What are you hoping to find?”
    “I’m . . .” He stared at the screen for a few seconds while he tried to think of a nice way to say that he was looking for her brother’s dead body or a cache of stolen amber sunk to the bottom by the missing anchor.
    There was no nice way.
    “I’m looking for fish,” he said. “That’s all. Just fish.”
    “The screen looks blank to me.”
    “It is.”
    Jake hit one of the buttons on the bottom number pad. The view changed back to the chart. Trying to see more clearly, Honor shifted position until she was half standing in the aisle. He hit a few more buttons and the picture changed again. A new route was laid out.
    “Steer while I reel in,” he said, sliding out from behind the helm seat.
    There was no way he could avoid touching her quite thoroughly as he passed her in the narrow aisle. There was no way he could avoid noticing the way her breath broke and her lips parted at the contact. And there definitely was no way he could help his elemental male response.
    At least one thing was working well today, Jake thought ironically as he brought the fishing lines in. Rock hard and ready to go.
    “What now?” Honor asked when he came back into the cabin.
    “Now we find out if their gas tanks are as full as ours.”

10
    T EN HOURS AND fifteen fishing spots later, Jake still had what he had started out the day with: unanswered questions and an ache in his crotch.
    It did nothing to improve his temper. He had pushed the speed hard getting to the sixteenth fishing hole, if only to watch the navy Bayliner scramble. Snake Eyes hadn’t made the cut. He had turned off to refuel at Fisherman’s Bay several hours before and hadn’t caught up again. The other Bayliner had dropped out for a time, but hadn’t had any trouble finding them again. A direct line to the Coast Guard no doubt helped.
    The only good news was that Honor had gotten so restless he had talked her into learning a few basics of fishing. He started by teaching her the fine art of casting a lure and buzz bombing on the retrieve. The buzz bombing part of it didn’t particularly interest her. What did was casting. She had a natural sense of timing and leverage that made her casts long and accurate.
    When Jake cut the speed back to an idle, Honor looked around. There were no other boats in sight. He had really burned up the water getting there.
    “Now what?” she asked.
    “Kyle entered a ‘hit’ in the log here. If the date is accurate—and I have no way of checking it—then this is one of the places he came to but didn’t record in his written log after he got back from Kaliningrad.”
    “Date? What do you mean? I didn’t know the Tomorrow’s electronics recorded dates.”
    There was a lot about the electronics that Honor didn’t know. Jake would just as soon it stayed that way. He didn’t want her to get any ideas about going off on her own if Ellen spilled the beans the next day. The way Honor had taken the helm and shot off over the water still haunted him. She had more guts than sense.
    “Some programs record all kinds of things,” he said. “In any case, Kyle tinkered with this computer the same way he fiddled with your alarm clock. All I know for sure is that this isn’t like any other chart plotter I’ve ever used. I’m still trying to figure out half the stuff I find.”
    That wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t entirely false, either. Jake supposed there was some kind of poetic