Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

for a pair of earrings. Others wanted to create triple-strand necklaces or parures with hundreds of pearls. A few people went from booth to booth, collecting for purposes only they knew.
    “You like this, don’t you?” Archer asked, watching Hannah because he couldn’t make himself stop. Right now her eyes were a vivid indigo with flashes of violet. Her whole body was alert, quivering, like a cat closing in on prey.
    “I love it,” she said. “At first Len didn’t let me do any of the selling or trading. For the last few years I’ve done all of it. I never went beyond Broome, but I always wanted to. Pearl Cove has some of the best-matched, highest-quality pearls in the world.” Excitement faded as she remembered. “Or we had. Now . . .” She shrugged. “It depends on whether you want to resurrect the operation. Even if we find the Black Trinity, I don’t have the money.”
    “Is that what you want? Pearl Cove up and running again?”
    “It’s what I know.”
    “That’s not the same thing.”
    “It’s as close as I can come.”
    “Why not do what you love?” Archer asked.
    Eyebrows raised, she looked at him. “And what would that be?”
    “This.” He waved a hand at the room where pearls were changing hands. “Trading pearls.”
    She opened her mouth. No words came out.
    He was right. What she loved most was weighing and balancing the merits of individual lots of pearls, pricing them, bargaining over them, coming away with a good deal because she had a better eye than anyone she had ever met when it came to matching pearls.
    “All the professional traders I’ve known are men,” she said.
    “Yet it’s a fact that most women’s color vision is better than most men’s.”
    “No argument here, mate,” she said dryly. After a moment she smiled rather like a shark. “I’ll just have to be the first, won’t I? My color vision against theirs.”
    And she laughed.
    Archer wished he could pick her up and whirl her around, laughing with her, sharing the heady feeling of a new world opening up. But that was the kind of thing you did with family or friends or a mate. Sex alone didn’t qualify for the latter, sharing Len between them didn’t qualify for the former, and she didn’t like Archer well enough for them to qualify as friends.
    “How do you go about becoming a trader?” Hannah asked.
    “Get a reputation for knowing good pearls.”
    “I have one, but it’s half a world away.”
    “Then we’ll just have to work on it here.”
    “Not when I look like a tart.”
    The corner of his mouth kicked up. “What you look like is a sexy woman.”
    Unconsciously she smoothed the creeping skirt farther down her hips. “I feel awkward.”
    “Every time I’ve had my hands on you, you felt just fine.”
    She shot him a sideways look that glittered like blue-black sapphires. “That isn’t what I meant.”
    He shrugged. “You walk around in three patches and a handful of string and never worry, but you’re fidgety in a dress that covers you from collarbones to midthigh.”
    “That was the tropics. This is here. Honor’s clothes just don’t fit me.”
    “Then we’ll go shopping after we’re done here.”
    “We?”
    “You’re not getting out of my sight until all the players know that you’re off the table.”
    “I was out of your sight last night,” Hannah said before she stopped herself.
    “That’s different.”
    “Bull dust.” She took a breath and a better grip on her too-quick tongue. “I can’t afford clothes.”
    “I’ll give you—”
    “No,” she cut in. “I owe you too much already.”
    “You don’t owe me a cent.”
    “You’ve got that right, mate. I owe you a hell of a lot more than a penny.”
    “Wrong. You’re family, and family doesn’t owe family.” Archer held up his hand, cutting off the hot words he saw ready to boil out of Hannah. “But I’ll take whatever you spend on clothes out in work, if that will make you feel better.”
    “What about the airline tickets and the—”
    “Right,” Archer interrupted curtly. “You owe me a bundle. I’ll tally it to the last cent. When this is over, I’ll send you a goddamn bill, you’ll pay it, and you’ll be free of the Donovans.” He gave her a look that had her backing up. “Unless you’re pregnant. Are you pregnant, Hannah?”
    “I—I don’t know.”
    “I’ll get a test kit.”
    She stiffened. “They’re not reliable.”
    “Neither is life. We all get through it