Man Trouble (12 page)
“Christ,” he muttered. He knew exactly what awaited him, and it involved fruit salad, poached fish, and an interminable period of time in a seat next to Bunny Koppelson, who was always on some kind of weird health-food diet that she wanted to talk about.
Cora had been laying on the guilt for the past few days, telling Jake that he was neglecting his duties as a host to Amanda. She had suggested that he redeem himself by escorting Amanda to the party, and Jake had made the mistake of pointing out that since he had not invited Amanda to stay with them in the first place, he did not—in his opinion—have any duties as a host. He should have known better than to argue. Cora had then given him a choice: Show up at lunch, or teach Amanda to scuba dive. She added, with the kind of smile that Jake knew much too well, that it was entirely his decision.
He wondered what the professor was doing at the moment. Frantically making calls to the Antigua Historical Society, no doubt, looking for some sort of title deed to the old plantation. He wasn't worried. They were talking about the 1700s, after all. He didn't know much about historical research, but he seriously doubted that such specific records from the colonial West Indies would be easy to find, if they still existed at all.
He dragged his board up onto the sand and shook his head like a dog, tossing the water out of his hair. A beach attendant trotted up and handed him a bottle of cold mineral water and a towel. The latter was not really necessary, as the sun would dry him before he even reached the boathouse, but he approved of the prompt attention.
“Mr. Berenger!” said a female voice, and Jake turned. Standing there, in huge black sunglasses and a hat the size of an extra-large pizza, was a woman he had never seen before in his life. Actually, he had no way of knowing, as he could only see the lower twenty-five percent of her face. But the girl next to her was very familiar. He remembered the sweet smell of her perfume, the feeling of her legs entangled with his own, and her hands pushing against his bare chest.
“Sandra,” he said. “Rico told me that you canceled your lessons. Is your ankle bothering you?”
“Oh,” she said. “No. Well, only a little. I felt a tiny twinge in it this morning, and I thought it would be better to let it rest.”
“No doubt,” Jake said. He absolutely could not imagine her on a windsurfing board, and if her coordination on land was any indicator of her skill level on the water, then she was likely to be doing more swimming than sailing, anyway.
The woman next to Sandra took off her glasses, and Jake realized that she was the one he had met at Cora's VIP cocktail party the other night. Elaine something. “What a pleasant surprise to see you here, Mr. Berenger,” she said. “Don't you usually go out at ten?”
“Usually,” Jake said. He took a drink from the bottle of water. “But I'm running late this morning.” He looked at Sandra and remembered something interesting. “Are you sharing your cottage with a history professor?”
Sandra looked as alarmed as if he'd said “ax murderer.” “I…uh…what?” she said.
“Molly Shaw. She's in Cottage Five with you, isn't she?”
“Yes…how did you know that?”
“My mother told me. She talked to Professor Shaw after the lecture last night.”
“Lecture?” Elaine repeated.
“Molly gave an informal talk,” Sandra said shortly. “About pirates, or something. I wouldn't know. I didn't go.”
“I thought she was a very good speaker,” Jake said.
Sandra looked surprised. “You did?”
“Yes. Have you known her for a long time?”
“No. She's my research consultant, that's all. We hardly know each other. I almost never see her. We talk by phone. She lives in Wisconsin, and I…don't.”
“Nice of you to bring her along on your trip,” Jake said. That solved the mystery of how a college professor had been able to afford Cottage Five.
“She needed a break,” Sandra said. A sudden smile twitched the corners of her mouth. “She's very hardworking. She's considered a rising star in her field, in fact.”
“Really,” Jake said. He frowned.
Sandra's smile grew. “Molly is utterly devoted to Caribbean cultural heritage, and her help has been invaluable to me on my current project. I'm writing a novel based on the life of Bonny Mary Morgan.”
Jake choked on his water and began to cough violently.
“Goodness!” exclaimed Elaine. “Mr. Berenger, are you all right?”
Jake nodded wordlessly. He had to clear his throat several times before he could speak. “Excuse me,” he said, finally. “Do you mean that you and Molly Shaw are writing a book together?”
“Yes, indeed,” Sandra said sweetly. “Molly is helping me with the research. She has an amazing ability to find information about
almost anything.
You'd be amazed by how many documents still exist from the eighteenth century.”
“Really,” Jake said again.
“Of course, I can't be bothered to sort through it all. It's much too boring and complicated for me, but Molly is a research
genius.
You'd never guess by looking at her, but she's actually very witty. And exciting. Not boring at all.”
“I thought you said that you hardly know her.”
“Oh,” Sandra said. “Well, that's true. But I'm getting to know her now, on this trip. You'll have to meet her sometime.”
Jake said nothing.
Great,
he thought.
Just great.
Not only did he have to deal with a “rising star” with a sadistic plan to sabotage his golf course, but now her friend, a best-selling novelist, wanted to immortalize Mary Morgan in print. This was becoming a complete nightmare.
“Is that why you're here?” he asked. “Because Molly Shaw thinks that Mary Morgan lived on this island?”
Sandra nodded. “That and the spa. I absolutely adore your spa. My international jet-set friends and I agree that any resort that offers both a rich cultural heritage
and
a five-star spa is tops on our list of destinations.”
Elaine cleared her throat impatiently. “Sandra, dear,” she said.
Sandra looked startled, as if she'd forgotten that her friend was there. “Oh,” she said, and smiled charmingly at Jake. Her eyes were as blue as the bay on a clear morning, and he wondered if she had any idea that she was colluding to ruin his life. Probably not, considering that Molly Shaw had not even told her about their encounter at the ruins that morning. His impression was that Sandra St. Claire was a nice and slightly ditzy woman; some sort of literary savant who churned out salacious prose while the “brilliant” Molly Shaw worked the strings behind the scenes like an evil puppeteer.
“Sandra,” Elaine said again. “My head.”
Sandra nodded. “Jake,” she said, “Elaine and I had a plan to take a picnic lunch up to—what is it called? Eagle Point?”
“Falcon's Point,” Jake said.
“That's right. It's all packed and ready to go, but poor Elaine has a terrible headache, and now she'd rather go home to bed. I just hate to be alone, and I was wondering if—by any chance—you might like to have lunch with me?”
M
olly looked over at Jake, who was in the driver's seat of the open-air Jeep, and suppressed a mild attack of panic. She hadn't actually expected him to say
yes.
He had seemed about to refuse, in fact. She could have sworn that she had seen the shape of the words of a refusal touch his lips before he paused, narrowed his eyes as if he were making a mental calculation, and then—shockingly—accepted.
Could it be that there really was something to Carter's so-called scientific plotting? He had also given her detailed instructions about how to manage the lunch, and how to bring up the topic of interviews, publicity, and biographies in a seductive and appealing manner, but Molly—convinced that things would never reach that point—had barely listened. And now here she was, alone in a car with Jake, and she had no clue of what to do next.
There seemed to be one main road that circumnavigated the island, rising and falling in elevation as it cut through the varied terrain. Narrower, less-trodden tracks branched off of it, with rustic wooden signs pointing the way to the sightseeing spots. “Falcon's Point, 5 kilometers,” proclaimed a crooked arrow pointing to their turnoff. The road began to climb, winding through the forest as it rose along the low slopes of the old mountain in the center of the island. It had been a volcano once, thousands of years ago, but the slopes had been softened by time and overgrown with tropical rain forest. Molly could feel the air becoming heavy and damp as the elevation increased, and commented on it.
Jake nodded. “The winds generally come from the east, and we're moving up into the rain shadow of the mountain.”
They reached a cleared area beside the road, and he pulled the car over and cut the engine. A steep flight of wooden steps led up into the greenery and disappeared.
“Go ahead up the stairs,” Jake said, getting out of the car. “I'll grab the picnic things and follow you.”
“I can help,” Molly said.
“No,” he said immediately with a glance at her shoes. She was wearing the obligatory platforms, and it was not hard to guess what he was thinking.
“Okay,” she said grudgingly. It annoyed her to be thought of as a tottering fool. On her own feet, she could have bounded up the stairs two at a time, carrying the basket. As it was, though, she found that she was grateful for the wooden handrail.
At the top of the steps, tropical vegetation gave way to open blue sky, soaring high above a plateau that overlooked a vista so huge and magnificent that Molly stopped in her tracks to stare.
They were on the southern slope of the old volcano, close to the top. From here, looking southwest and down, Molly could see Gold Bay. The resort was as tiny and bright as a jeweled brooch pinned at the throat of the island. To the east, the mountain slopes crumbled away into a rocky cliff that dropped hundreds of feet to the ocean below. To the west, the slope was long and gentle, with green treetops slowly melting into scrub brush, which flattened gradually into the salt marsh. In that direction, somewhere along the edge of the forest, was the ruin of Mary Morgan's plantation. The area would have been cleared of trees in Mary's time, and the location had obviously been chosen to place the cane-crushing windmills in the path of the prevailing easterlies.
She heard the sound of Jake coming up the stairs behind her and turned. “It's incredible,” she said. “How did you find this place? And why are we alone here?”
“Most of my guests don't want to travel so far from the daiquiri service,” Jake said. He put down the picnic basket. “Frankly, I'm surprised that you did. You don't seem like the outdoorsy type, Sandra.”
Molly hesitated, wondering if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Should she agree or argue? Based on the costume Carter had created, it seemed most logical to agree. If Jake liked outdoorsy women, Carter would have dressed her up as a lumberjack. “That's true,” she said. “I do prefer a refined environment. There are too many…uh…yucky bugs in the wilderness. But I was told that the view was worth the effort, and I am actually quite…adventurous, Jake.”
She saw his eyebrows lift slightly as he heard the invitation in her voice.
There,
she thought, suppressing a grin of triumph. Carter would be proud. She wasn't so bad at this. It just took a little bit of practice, like teaching a freshman lecture class. She hadn't been any good at that at first, either.
“Do you come here often?” she asked coyly.
“Occasionally,” he said. “I first saw this place twelve years ago, when we were scouting islands for the resort. When they brought me up here, that did it. I looked out there”—he gestured toward the arc of Gold Bay—“and I saw the resort, in my mind, almost as clearly as you can see it now.”
“How fascinating,” she breathed.
His smile was polite, but distant.
Uh-oh,
Molly thought, alarmed.
Not good. I'm losing him.
Flirting was apparently like a tennis game, and a weak return would not suffice. Not with this man, at least. He was too easily bored by an amateur.
“And when you looked out there,” she said in a teasing voice, pointing toward the western slopes, “I'll bet that in your mind, you saw an enormous golf course, didn't you?”
Jake stopped short. For a moment he didn't move, and Molly's heart thudded in her chest.
Damn,
she thought, chagrined. She wasn't a clever flirt, she was an idiot. He had taken her tone for sarcasm. It would have been better to stick to silly platitudes.
He turned back to look at her, and stood silently for a moment, staring at her. His eyes moved over her face, lingering on her mouth. “Sandra St. Claire,” he said slowly, “you are full of surprises, aren't you.”
Molly looked nervously at him, but he was expressionless.
Well,
she thought,
at least I have his full attention.
“So,” he said, “you and your…friend…the professor have been talking about my development plans?”
“She mentioned it to me.”
“Really,” Jake said. “When?”
“This…uh…this morning,” Molly said.
“Just a little while ago, at the beach, you told me that I should meet Molly Shaw. But obviously you already knew that I had met her.”
“Hmm,” Molly said uncomfortably. Had she said that? She had forgotten. Jake was staring at her as if he were an inquisition judge. “Well, I guess that's true. It slipped my mind.”
“Since Professor Shaw found out about my golf course only this morning,” Jake said, “and I know for a fact that she didn't get back to the resort until ten-thirty, that means that you and she must have had your conversation less than one hour before you and I met on the beach. I wonder how it could have slipped your mind in such a short time.” He looked inquiringly at her, eyebrows slightly raised.
Molly's knees felt weak.
Buck up, girl,
she told herself sternly.
This is no time to get waffly.
“I have occasional problems with short-term memory loss,” she said haughtily. “As a result of an accident I had. As a child.”
“I'm very sorry to hear that,” Jake said.
“Thank you. I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind. It upsets me.”