Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

easily murder her. More easily, probably. Even in a wheelchair, Len would have been dangerous. He knew too many ways to kill. It was what he was best at. Destruction.
    But that didn’t mean he deserved to die.
    Deserve.
    Fair.
    Hannah’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. She hadn’t known that much of the missionary child still survived in her twenty-nine-year-old mind. The world was what it was. She was what she was: a woman who could die if she trusted the wrong person.
    Or even if she didn’t.
    Fair had nothing to do with it. Survival was the only thing that mattered. To be or not to be wasn’t the question for Hannah. How to keep on being was.
    Len had played his power games with too many dangerous people. He had won millions of dollars. Then he had lost his life.
    “Chérie?”
    Coco’s soft, husky voice slid through Hannah’s concentration. As always, the beautiful Tahitian woman was just on the edges of whatever happened, watching and listening and waiting for whatever it was she waited for. Hannah didn’t know. She didn’t care. Len valued Coco’s eerie skill in seeding oysters. When it was Coco’s delicate hands working on the oysters, the pea crab that lived within each shell survived. Without that pea crab, the oyster died.
    “Yes?” Hannah said. She turned toward the sound, confident that none of her bleak reverie showed on her face. Living with Len had taught her how to hide everything, especially fear. It was a simple matter of survival. Not easy. Just brutally simple.
    “You come inside, yes?” Coco said lazily. “You not born to stand under this sun at noon.”
    “Was anyone?”
    “My mama is.” Coco’s smile flashed whiter than any pearl against the rich brown of her skin, legacy of her half-Polynesian mother. “My papa isn’t. Sun finally burned him down.” She stretched her hands toward the sun. “Sun won’t hurt me. I am born for it. My half sister is same.”
    Hannah would have smiled at Coco’s confidence, but she was afraid that her smiles had become more and more like Len’s, a feral warning to the world to keep its distance. Not that she would, or could, hurt Colette Dupres of the smooth skin and cat-graceful body. Even Len in his blackest moods hadn’t ruffled the Tahitian. She simply had laughed and walked away, giving him an eye-level view of the best ass in Western Australia.
    “Ian come soon,” Coco said, watching the other woman closely for a response at the mention of Ian Chang’s name. There was none. She gestured to the dive fins, mask, and snorkel piled at Hannah’s feet. “Shower and dress nice for him, yes? You look like a diver after twelve hours down.”
    “Only one in my case, and I wasn’t really diving.”
    “Find anything?”
    “What’s to find?” Hannah answered, turning aside the question. “More wrack and ruin?”
    “Is bad, but not as bad as it looks.”
    It’s worse. But Hannah didn’t say it aloud. She wanted to trust Coco, wanted to believe that her beautiful tan hands hadn’t been among those scrambling after stolen pearls.
    Hannah’s mouth thinned into a savage smile when she listened to her own foolish thoughts. So much of the child still surviving. Still hoping. Still stupid.
    It could be the death of her.
    “Even if bad,” Coco added with a casual, Gallic shrug, “Ian fix ever’thing for you.”
    “Why would he do that?”
    Coco’s laughter was as sexy as her voice. “Know why.”
    “He got over wanting me years ago.”
    “Small white child,” Coco said, smiling and sounding much older than thirty-seven, “men never get over woman they no have. Now your husband dead. You no married.”
    “Ian is.”
    “What?”
    “Married,” Hannah said succinctly.
    “His wife, she no care.”
    “I do. I was raised by Christian missionaries. Marriage matters.”
    “Oui. Len talk sometimes when he drink,” Coco said, yawning and stretching to her full height, which put her almost at eye level with Hannah’s five feet nine inches. “Your . . . How you say? honor?”
    Hannah grimaced.
    “Oui, honor,” Coco said. “He smile at that. Sometime he even laugh.”
    “I know.”
    The thought of the innocent, sexually ripe teenager she had been no longer made Hannah wince with shame. She had wanted out of the rain forests of Brazil. She had gotten out. End of one life. Beginning of another. It hadn’t been the life she expected. No surprise there; she had been painfully naive when she formed her expectations. Life went