Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

should have gone to a sperm bank.
    She rubbed her face with hands that were cold and told herself that she hadn’t been wrong in her assessment of Archer’s ability to love.
    Don’t worry. If it comes to visitation rights, I won’t do any damage.
    Tears burned behind Hannah’s eyes, tears she refused to permit. “I’m sorry,” she said tightly to Honor. “I had no business telling you that. Whatever you do, don’t mention it in front of your mother. She doesn’t know.”
    “So it’s The Donovan’s son,” Jake said.
    Distantly Hannah noticed that he had taken Honor’s hand and laced their fingers together tightly. The message was clear: whatever had to be faced, they would face it together. Envy stabbed through Hannah, surprising her with its cruel edge.
    “Yes,” she said, her voice much calmer than her eyes. “Before he met his wife. Long before.”
    “But Archer knew?” Jake asked.
    “Yes.”
    “And this half brother . . . he’s dead?”
    “His name was Len, Len McGarry. And yes, he’s dead.”
    “How?” Jake asked, but something in his tone told her he had already guessed.
    “Murder.”
    Honor made a low sound.
    Jake squeezed her hand and kept on talking, pinning Hannah with eyes that were like a cat’s—pitiless and clear. “Are you a suspect?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    He looked at her a moment longer, then nodded. “Are you at risk?”
    “I—” Her voice hitched, then steadied. “Yes. That’s why I called Archer.”
    “You’ll be safe here,” Honor said.
    “He told me the same thing,” Hannah said in a low, husky voice. “But I can’t stay.”
    “Why not?” Honor asked.
    Hannah looked at Jake and shook her head.
    “My husband is protective of the people he loves, but he’ll be civilized about it in the future,” Honor said. “Right, Jake?”
    “Sure.”
    She turned toward Jake and gave her husband a level look. “I mean it.”
    “So do I.”
    Honor sighed, smiled, and went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “I love you.”
    His whole body changed, loosening, sliding away from battle readiness. He returned the kiss and the soft words. Then he looked back at Hannah.
    “Tell us about it,” he said. He managed to make it sound more like an invitation than a demand.
    Just barely.
    Kyle, Lianne, and Archer sat on the floor around Kyle’s computer. She was wearing a pair of dark jeans and one of Kyle’s sweatshirts. It stretched over the mound of her pregnancy with not much to spare. Her bare feet were small, narrow, and tucked neatly under her thighs. Kyle and Archer wore the preferred uniform of America—jeans faded nearly to white and sweatshirts that had been washed so often their colors were a memory. Like Lianne, the men had bare feet. Unlike her, their feet were big.
    The thick Tibetan rug Lianne had added to Kyle’s suite after they were married made a comfortable mat and a timeless, colorful background to the pewter-colored laptop computer Kyle sat cross-legged in front of. Lianne had her tired back braced against Archer’s knees while her husband’s fingers raced over the keyboard. They waited for the screen to settle.
    “Okay,” Kyle said, seeing the pattern instantly in the spreadsheet. “It’s pretty clear that Len was laundering Chang’s Tahitian pearls. He wasn’t getting jack for it, though. Wonder why he did it.”
    “As a cover for his experimental shell,” Archer said. “Go back two screens.” He waited, then pointed to the bottom line on the screen. “See? Without those laundered pearls, he wouldn’t have had anything to show for his investment. The government was already unhappy with his claim of forty percent experimental shell. If experiments on that scale didn’t produce anything salable year after year, the government would have been more than unhappy. They would have been suspicious enough to come down on Pearl Cove like a hard rain to find out what the hell was going on. That was the last thing Len wanted.”
    “So he told the Aussies he was experimenting with producing Tahitian-style pearls from Australian shell, and he used Chang’s laundered pearls to prove it?” Lianne asked.
    “Right,” Archer said absently.
    “You sound like an Aussie,” Kyle said, pronouncing it “Ozzie” in the Australian manner.
    Archer thought of Hannah, who had adopted that particular linguistic mannerism. Right. Thinking of her made his whole body tighten in a combination of rage and hurt and need. Get used to it, he told himself