The Pirate & The Adventurer & The Cowboy

his vision gave him the excuse he needed to end the uncomfortable conversation with his bartender.

    He turned his head slightly to watch as a bulky man impeccably dressed in a white straw hat, white slacks, white sandals and a white shirt settled heavily into one of the fan-back chairs. The candlelight glinted on the many rings on the pudgy fingers.

    "Butterfield's here," the colonel noted, his aristocratic voice turning cooler than usual.

    "I see him." Jared reluctantly pushed himself away from the bar. "Guess I'd better go say hello."

    "You want to take him his drink?" The colonel was already pouring out a hefty portion of straight rum.

    "Sure. Why not? Save him the trip. You know how Max feels about exercise. Make it a double."

    Picking up the rum, Jared left his own whiskey on the bar and made his way through the gloom to the table where the portly man sat. Max Butterfield had removed his hat, displaying a pink scalp surrounded by a fringe of gray.

    The overweight man looked up expectantly as Jared joined him. He took the glass of rum and downed a swallow before saying a word. Then he beamed, displaying dimples. "Ah, manna from heaven. Just what I needed, my boy."

    "I figured it might be." Jared took the other seat. "Is it still on for tonight?"

    "Most definitely, most definitely. I've been counting on this little inspection tour you've arranged." Max lifted his glass in a toast. "To our successful completion of this project."

    "The sooner it's over, the better, as far as I'm concerned."

    "Such impatience, my boy. You must learn to control it. Everything in due course. Matters will be resolved soon enough."

    "How soon?"

    "Oh, I'd say sometime during the next month. The fish have taken the bait. It's just a matter of time."

    Forty-five minutes after she'd left the hotel, Kate rose from the moonlit rock where she had been sitting and started slowly back toward the lights of the resort. She thought she would be able to get back to sleep now, though her body still seemed confused.

    It wasn't just her body that was mixed up, she reflected. Her mind was definitely off track, too.

    She'd been sitting on the dark beach dwelling on the subject of Jared Hawthorne, of all things, and for the life of her, Kate could not figure out quite why. It was disturbing because the man was clearly not her type.

    She was wise enough to know she did not have a real-life type when it came to men. The man she longed for existed only in her dreams and between the covers of her books.

    On some intuitive level, Kate had always accepted that she would never actually meet her fantasy hero. She frequently joked to Sarah and Margaret that she probably wouldn't like him if she did happen to meet him. He would be too arrogant, too proud and infuriating and much too macho for a twentieth-century woman to tolerate.

    When she had eventually decided to fall in love and marry at the age of twenty-nine, Kate had deliberately chosen the sort of man modern women were supposed to covet. Harry had appeared to be a sensitive, supportive, intellectually stimulating male. There had been poetry and candlelight, art films and a shared interest in writing. What more could any woman realistically want, Kate had asked herself.

    But things had gone steadily wrong, and after the divorce, Kate had been consumed for a time with a sense of failure and guilt. She knew in her heart she should never have married Harry in the first place. It had been wrong for both of them.

    To exorcise the demons, she had turned to the one true love she could always count on—her writing. She knew now that Sarah and Margaret had been right when they said she had allowed her work to consume her these past two and a half years. One needed balance in life if one was to survive and stay sane.

    Amazing how clear that was tonight, Kate thought with a smile. Perhaps her friends had been right. A vacation was exactly what she had needed.

    Holding her sandals in one hand, she trudged through the sand toward the path that led up from the cove. It was an easy, well-lit walk, and she would have been back in her room within fifteen minutes if she'd stayed on it.

    But she didn't stay on it because she came across a fork in the path. One branch was barred with a heavy chain and a sign that warned trespassers not to proceed any farther unless accompanied by an approved guide from the hotel staff.

    Kate knew instantly that she had just found the path that led to the mysterious