Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

Hannah’s upper arms, preventing her from turning toward the sound.
    “There’s some—”
    “I know,” he cut in, his voice still soft. “Talk to me. Tell me about Pearl Cove. Or else I’ll have to kiss you. Either way will work as a cover for standing around out here, but it’s your call.”
    Hannah realized two things at once. The first was that Archer had known a prowler was in or around the shed from the moment he asked her to talk about Pearl Cove. The second was that the idea of kissing him sent heat chasing after the chill of fear. She told herself she was losing it, that the last thing she needed in her life was another Len.
    Yet she wanted Archer’s kiss. She wanted the heady combination of his gentle touch and dangerous eyes, his cool restraint and a body that radiated vital heat.
    I’m crazy. Absolutely crackers.
    Hannah took a deep breath and began talking. Fast. “We turn the oysters to improve our chances of getting a round pearl. We also clean the shells to get off whatever is clinging to them. Later, in October, we move the rafts so that the water temperature will stay as close to ideal as possible.”
    “How big are your rafts?”
    “Standard size.”
    He gave her a look that reminded her to keep talking or start kissing.
    “A raft is made up of ten parts,” she said hurriedly. “Um, each part is about twenty by twenty feet, and has a hundred separate baskets which hold a thousand oysters total. Ten per basket.” She swallowed and thought quickly. “The rafts are held in place by anchors and kept afloat by big metal drums.”
    “A regular farm,” he said, telling himself that he wasn’t disappointed by her choice of talking over kissing. It was better this way, much better. He forced himself to look past her to the shed. “Do you feed your oysters, too?”
    “The ocean takes care of it for us. The huge tidal shifts send a lot of water over the oysters. That’s why the west-coast oysters are so big. Lots of nutrients. Oysters are filter feeders. All they have to do to eat is suck the tasty bits out of the big saltwater smorgasbord that rushes by them as the tide moves in and out.”
    Archer smiled slightly, a white gleam in the night. Hannah thought of the kiss she had turned down and told herself she didn’t regret it.
    “After the operated shell—um, the oysters we just seeded—rest for about a month,” she continued huskily, “we move the survivors to the growing-out area.”
    “Survivors? Do you lose a lot?”
    “The norm is somewhere between twenty and thirty percent, but Pearl Cove loses only eleven percent. Coco and Tom are very, very skillful. It’s rare for them to injure the tiny pea crab that lives inside each healthy oyster.”
    “So you’ve seeded and the crabs are happy. Now what?”
    “Prayer,” she retorted. “Oysters would much rather reject foreign bodies than make pearls. That’s why we slip in a tiny bit of living mantle tissue from a donor oyster of the preferred color. It grafts onto the mantle near the seed and—”
    “You lost me. Color?”
    Hannah doubted she had lost Archer, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. Not when his eyes were narrowed, intent on something over her shoulder. She cleared her throat against the fear that kept crowding in.
    “The pearl’s color reflects the inner shell color of the oyster.” Her voice frayed, then steadied. “Some oysters make silver-white gems. Some pink. Some gold. Some black, and so on. The mantle—the outer surface of the living animal—is the nacre factory. Mantle from an oyster with pink nacre on its inner shell will produce a pink pearl, even if it’s put into an oyster with a black shell. Len also did some biogenetic sleight-of-hand with the mantle so that—”
    “Right,” Archer cut in, heading her off from dangerous territory. “So we have a seed and a bit of mantle that is actually a biological work order for a certain color of pearl.”
    “Close enough,” she muttered. “Most people lose about twenty percent of the grafts. We lose just over seven percent.”
    “Good hands?”
    “The best.”
    Silently Archer doubted if even a fantastically skilled technician could lower the odds that much. Waving the flag of skill and biogenetics was a way of explaining how a medium-sized operation such as Pearl Cove ended up with more than its share of pearls. But he didn’t get the feeling that Hannah was lying. Wherever the truth lay, she believed what she was saying.
    Len had