Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

have gone from congratulations to raw hunger in a heartbeat. That would have been dumb.
    At least, that’s what he kept telling himself. But himself wasn’t listening. In his mind, Jake kept seeing that crotch-length T-shirt Honor slept in. He couldn’t help wondering if she wore underpants beneath. Thinking about that led to other things, like what she looked like when she opened herself to a lover.
    “Hello,” she said, waving a hand in front of his eyes.
    “What?”
    “Where are you?”
    For an instant he considered telling her that he had been mentally pushing her nightshirt up her hips and searching through her spicy thicket with his tongue until he found the soft woman flesh beneath.
    Dumb. Really dumb.
    “I was just thinking,” he said.
    “About dinner?”
    “Um . . . yeah. Dinner.”
    “How does pesto sound? Or would you rather stick to hot sourdough bread and salad?”
    “It all sounds good.”
    “You must be hungry.”
    “Yes,” he said curtly, stepping away from her. He was also dumber than a row of stumps for even thinking about how good it would feel to slide into her.
    “Why don’t we have some crackers and cheese right now?” Honor suggested warily. “As grouchy as you are, we’ll be at each other’s throats before the salmon is done.”
    Jake knew he was in a rough mood, just as he knew that cheese and crackers wouldn’t satisfy the hunger riding him. But food was better than what he had now.
    Nothing.
    He munched on cheese and crackers, drank a beer, and watched while Honor tossed pesto and pasta together.
    “Do you mind if I draw while the salmon cooks?” she asked, setting the pasta aside. “I keep thinking about that face in the amber.”
    “I don’t expect to be entertained.”
    She gave him a slanting, rather wary glance and headed for her sketch pad.
    The telephone rang. Jake expected Honor to hurry across the room and grab it eagerly. Instead, she walked slowly and extended her hand to the receiver as though she expected to be bitten.
    “Hello,” she said.
    “Disassociate yourself from Mr. Mallory or your brother will suffer.”
    “What? Who is this? Where is—”
    The phone went dead. She looked at it in disgust and slammed the receiver back into the cradle. “Damn him!”
    “Who was it?”
    “I don’t know. Not Snake Eyes. This jerk started talking as soon as I said hello.”
    Jake shut the front door and walked to her. She was pale except for bright spots of anger and adrenaline burning on her cheeks.
    “How can you be sure it wasn’t Snake Eyes?” he asked.
    “Linear logic sure or hunch sure?”
    “Either one.”
    “Actually, it’s both. I knew it before he started talking. The silence was different. Anyway, his accent isn’t as broad as the one Snake Eyes had when he mumbled around at my front door.”
    “What kind of accent did this caller have?”
    “Not French,” Honor said, replaying the words in her mind. “Not quite German. Not Spanish. Not British.”
    “What do you mean, ‘not quite German’?”
    “I don’t know. It just wasn’t.”
    He didn’t push. There was no reason. The odds were nearly one hundred percent that the caller was from Russia itself or one of its satellite states on the Baltic Sea. Nothing new there.
    “What did he say?” Jake asked.
    Honor took a deep breath. It broke into pieces. Carefully she took another one. Then she looked at Jake with shadowed eyes.
    “He told me to get rid of you or Kyle would suffer,” she said simply.
    Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Divide and conquer.”
    “What?”
    “The oldest tactic in the book. And the best. Someone wants you isolated.”
    She looked out the window. The wild gold of the sun and restless blue of the sea were long gone, leaving only the kind of deep black she didn’t want to face alone.
    “Kyle . . .” Honor whispered. “My God, what am I going to do?”
    The anguish in her soft voice was like a knife in Jake’s conscience. He wanted to comfort her, to reassure her; and if he did, she would only feel all the more deeply betrayed when the truth came out.
    He told himself he would be doing everyone a favor if he pointed out all the logical, rational reasons why she shouldn’t send him away. He was still listing those reasons in his mind when he found himself holding out his hand.
    “Come here,” he said softly.
    Honor walked into his arms as though she had always known she belonged there. He held her the same way, cursing Kyle with every