Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

him.”
    Honor let go of Jake long enough to give Archer a hard hug. “I love you.”
    He ran the tip of his finger down her nose. “I love you, too. Now get out of here before Summer wakes up and spoils your shower.”
    Honor waited long enough to give Kyle a hard hug and get one in return. Then she and Jake walked away, arms around each other, talking in low voices.
    Watching with something close to envy, Hannah leaned wearily against the entry wall. She wondered if the wild hum of adrenaline in her blood would let her sleep before she fell down.
    Archer turned to Lianne. The sight of his petite, fierce sister-in-law brought a gentle smile to his lips. “I owe you a big one, Lianne. Thanks.”
    “As Jake put it so succinctly—bullshit.” She stepped close and hugged Archer. “I wish I could have done more. I hated being here, waiting. Listening. Waiting.”
    “On any operation, communications is the hardest job of all. I was lousy at it.”
    She glanced up at Archer. The black stubble on his face made him look harder than ever. “I can’t imagine you sitting back and relaying messages.”
    “Like I said, I was lousy at it.” He looked at Kyle over Lianne’s dark hair.
    “Next time,” Kyle said bluntly, “I’m wearing the Kevlar and one of you is sitting on his thumb in the car.”
    “There won’t be a next time.”
    “Does that mean you aren’t going after Len’s killer anymore?” Kyle’s voice was pleasant, but his gold-green eyes were as hard as stone.
    Hannah straightened and pushed away from the wall. “That’s exactly what it means,” she said, but it wasn’t Kyle she spoke to. It was Archer. She had come too close to watching him die, watching and knowing that she had put him in the path of the bullets that killed him. “Whatever you thought you owed Len died with him. Take off that armor and go back to your family. Be . . . safe.”
    “What about you?” Archer asked evenly.
    “I’ll sell my half of Pearl Cove to whoever wants it.”
    “Even if it’s Ian Chang?”
    “I don’t care if it’s Satan himself. It’s over, Archer.”
    He almost laughed. It wasn’t that easy to get out of the game. It never was. “I’ll write a check for your half of Pearl Cove.”
    “No.” Her response was instant and certain.
    “Why not?”
    “People would believe you know the secret of making black rainbows. You’d be a target. Like Len.”
    “I have more friends than Len did.”
    Her chin came up and her mouth flattened. “I want you out of this, Archer. All the way out. I have to know that I didn’t lead you to your death.”
    “I don’t lead worth a damn. Ask anyone. I’ll pay you a million for Pearl Cove.”
    “I won’t sell it to you at any price.”
    Archer’s eyebrows rose. “Fine. Call Ian Chang. He’ll buy your half.”
    “So he can kill you for your half? I’m stupid, Archer, but eventually I learn. I don’t want you killed for a handful of bloody pearls.”
    “According to Yin, Chang isn’t the problem.”
    “What?”
    “Just before everything went from sugar to shit, Yin told me he got the pearls from Christian Flynn.”
    For a moment Hannah’s ears rang as though someone had just fired a shotgun ten feet from her head. “Christian? I don’t believe it.”
    Archer could. He had seen Flynn move, felt the calluses along the edge of his palm. “Let’s have a look at the pearls.”
    She glanced down at the box she still clutched in her hands. For the first time she realized that her fingers ached from their death grip on the cheap wood. She stared at the box. At that instant she hated black pearls and everything they stood for.
    “Even if you put it all down the garbage disposal, nothing would change,” Archer said, reading her expression accurately.
    Hannah shuddered. He was right. But if the garbage disposal would have solved the problem, she would have shoved everything down it and smiled while steel ground incomparable black rainbows to dust.
    “I need nonincandescent light and a table,” she said thinly. “The breakfast nook’s light is wrong.”
    The tight, edgy quality of her voice made Archer ache. “Sell out. Get out. You’re too gentle for the game.”
    “The name of this game is survival. If I’m too gentle for it, I’ll bloody well die.”
    “Hannah.” Just that. Her name. It was all he could think of to say.
    The line of her shoulders told him it didn’t matter what he said. She wasn’t going to budge.
    “There’s a