Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

poking around the wreckage. He didn’t want them watching him, noting what interested him, suspecting what he was really after.
    “Any guesses on the code?” he asked.
    Hannah shook her head, sipped coffee that was almost as steamy as the air outside, and waited. It was early evening, she had had a nap, and she felt like she had been up forever. Archer must have felt the same, but it didn’t show except in the darkness beneath his eyes. His thick, short hair was rumpled by casual, raking swipes from his long fingers. His beard was too short to show any lack of combing. Sweat gleamed, caught like dew in the black thatch of hair across his bare chest.
    As she watched, several drops gathered at his breastbone and trickled down the narrow line of hair that vanished beneath the waistband of his shorts. Loose, dark blue, and thin enough to dry in minutes, the cloth clung to him almost as closely as sweat.
    She couldn’t stop looking. He was beautifully made, neither too heavy nor too lean . . . supple and powerful, entirely and elementally male. She wondered if he was like Len when it came to sex: hard and fast and furious, as though he couldn’t finish soon enough. Then the accident had come and the end of anything sexual.
    Hastily Hannah looked at her coffee, unsettled by her own thoughts and the fugitive heat pulsing out from the pit of her stomach. Now was the wrong time for her body to wake up from its long hibernation. Even if it had been the right time, Archer was the wrong man to be looking at. He was too hard. Too cold. Too ruthless.
    She couldn’t survive another Len.
    When Hannah looked away, Archer let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. The fundamental female approval in her eyes had him halfway to an erection before he knew what hit him. The faint flush high on her cheekbones didn’t help him to cool off. He wished he could pull her shorts down, open her legs, and push into the sultry velvet deep inside her.
    With an impatient curse at his own unruly lust, Archer forced his thoughts back to Len’s computer. It wasn’t a cold shower, but it was close enough. After a few minutes of thinking about various possibilities for entry codes, his body slowly relaxed again.
    He shoved in the disk. As he settled deeper into the chair, broken wicker strips poked into his legs, homing in on the same tender places like heat-seeking missiles. He wondered how Len had tolerated the ridiculous chair. Then he remembered—the nerves leading to his brother’s legs had been severed years ago. The only thing he sat in was a wheelchair.
    The screen lit up. The cursor flashed in a little box, urging him to enter the user code. He started with the simple stuff first. When the first two tries failed, he turned off the computer, waited, and rebooted.
    Hannah waited until the fourth time he restarted the machine before she asked, “What are you doing?”
    “Using Len’s name with variations based on elementary codes.”
    She blinked. “Oh.” After five more tries, she said hesitantly, “Len didn’t think much of codes. Said they were for little boys in tree houses.”
    Archer grunted, shut down the computer, and rebooted.
    “Why do you keep shutting down the computer?” she asked.
    “Even the most paranoid password programs will give you two tries before they fry circuits. Kyle has a way around that, but he isn’t here. I’ll just have to do it the hard way for a while.”
    “I see.” She sipped coffee that was now the same temperature as her tongue. “This could take a long time.”
    He slanted her a sideways glance that reflected the tropical blues and greens of the tiles in her kitchen floor. “Yeah. You have something better to do?”
    “Watch flies land?” she suggested.
    Smiling, he tried two more variations. Nothing.
    Fifteen minutes later, he shut down the computer and turned to Hannah. “Okay, his code probably isn’t a variant of his name or birthday, the date of his marriage or the date he was paralyzed. It’s not a variant of your name or birth date, either. You don’t have any pets, so—”
    “My name?” she cut in. Her eyes widened into startled, navy blue pools. “Why mine?”
    “People have lousy memories. When it comes to passwords, they use names and dates that are important to them.”
    She laughed out loud. “Forget my name. I wasn’t important to Len. Not that way.”
    “You were his wife.”
    “We shared a computer.”
    “And a house.”
    “Not in the last