Night Whispers (33 page)

"Hmm?"

"I'm a very quick learner," she said earnestly.

Noah tipped his head down to see her beautiful face, and his lips quirked in a tender smile. "I noticed that," he whispered.

"What I mean is, I'll get better with practice."

The bed shook with his laughter as he snatched her into his arms, burying his face in her neck. "God help me."

Noah's laughter faded, but his lighthearted mood lingered as he held her against him. Normally an orgasm left him feeling relaxed and then energized; it did not leave him feeling absurdly happy. He could not understand why the woman in his arms had such a profound effect on him in bed and out of it. She could make him hot with a glance, cheer him with a smile, melt him with a touch. She was without greed, vanity, or guile.

She was also without dinner, he realized. He turned his wrist and looked at his watch. He'd wanted her aboard early to see the sunset, and the evening was still delightfully young.

He smoothed her heavy hair off her smooth cheek, and she looked up at him. "The evening's entertainment includes dinner and a tour," he teased.

She gave him a slumberous smile, her long fingers idly spreading on his chest. "Was that included in the price of the ticket, or is it extra?"

"Don't look at me like that or you'll get something besides dinner and the tour."

"Really?" she asked. "What?"

"Dessert."

To avoid further temptation, he reached for the telephone and instructed that dinner be served in a half hour; then he reluctantly got out of bed.

They dined by candlelight in formal attire with music playing softly in the background, but the atmosphere between them was different. Without the distraction of unfulfilled sexual desire, they were able to talk like new friends getting to know one another.

By the time dinner was over, she was so relaxed that she thought nothing of answering his question about Carter and her mother. "My mother won a beauty contest when she was eighteen, and the prize was a trip to Fort Lauderdale and a week in the best hotel," Sloan explained. "A photographer from the Fort Lauderdale newspaper was taking her picture on the beach. A cocktail party was taking place nearby—part of a rehearsal dinner for a wedding that Carter was attending—and he wandered over to see what was happening. He was wearing a white dinner jacket. My mother was dazzled. And that's what happened."

"That can't be all that happened," Noah pointed out as a joke.

"That's nearly all that happened. My mother had been raised by her grandmother, and she was as naïve as she was beautiful. She spent the remaining three days of her trip with him in her hotel suite. She gave him her virginity, and Carter gave her Paris. She went back home, completely convinced they were in love and that he wanted to marry her—as soon as he could win his socially prominent family in San Francisco over to the idea. Naturally, Mom was a little surprised when she never heard from her 'fiancé' again. She was even more surprised when the doctor told her that she wasn't sick with the flu, she was pregnant."

Noah lifted his wineglass, watching the emotions play across her lovely face. She was trying very hard to sound offhand, but her voice softened when she mentioned her mother and it hardened almost imperceptibly when she mentioned Carter. "Then what happened?"

"The usual," she said with a jaunty, sideways smile. "My mother went to the library and located the father of her baby by looking up his family's name in
Who's Who
." When Noah didn't smile at her attempt at humor, Sloan sobered and said lightly, "She was still so certain that he loved her and that his family must be being unfair to him that she took the rest of her prize money and bought a plane ticket. She arrived on Carter's family's doorstep at night, with her suitcase—also part of her contest prizes—but they told her Carter was out. She explained that she was his fiancée and asked if she could wait for him there. You can imagine the rest."

"Probably," Noah said, "but I'd like to hear it from you."

"You're awfully persistent," Sloan joked. Instead of being dissuaded he cocked a dark brow in inquiry and waited for her to go on. Helpless to ignore his silent command to continue, she sighed and said, "In a very few minutes, they got the whole story out of her, and they were furious." She paused, trying to think of a way to phrase the rest of the story. Carter was his friend and Paris's father, and she didn't want to needlessly tarnish his image. "They naturally felt he had done a wrong thing, and when Carter came home, he accepted responsibility and left with my mother—"

He mocked her attempt to gloss over the truth. "That's not going to fly, Sloan. I knew Carter's mother and father when they were older, and they couldn't have changed that much. What really happened?"

A little unnerved by his bluntness, Sloan straightened the napkin in her lap and finally met his unwavering gaze. "Actually," she said with a sigh, "when Carter came home that night, he was drunk, and his parents were already furious with him for a long list of transgressions. They threw him out and my mother with him. It must have been a sobering experience for him; he stopped in Las Vegas and married my mother before they went on to Florida. He had enough money left somewhere to buy a sailboat, and for the next two years he chartered it out Paris was born; then I was born."

"Then what?"

"Then Carter's mother arrived one day in a limousine to tell him that his father had had a stroke. She told him he was welcome back in the family fold and she told him to bring one daughter with him. They left that same day with Paris."

"Courtney is under the impression that you and your mother weren't well provided for in that deal."

"My mother was given a modest settlement," Sloan said vaguely.

"How modest?"

"Modest," Sloan said stubbornly; then she smiled and shook her head. "It wouldn't have mattered if it had been much larger. My mother is so naïve and so sweet that she would have given it away to anyone who asked her for a loan or been swindled out of it by some phony 'financial adviser.' "

"Is that what happened to the settlement she got?"

"Most of it," Sloan confirmed.

"You never refer to Carter as your father, do you?" he asked.

She gave him a laughing look and rolled her eyes. "He
isn't
my father."

Noah slowly lowered his wineglass. "He's not?"

"Not in any significant sense."

"What, specifically, do you class as 'significant' here?"

"He is my biological parent, period. A 'father' is so much more than that. A father is someone who dries your tears when you're little and looks under your bed because you're afraid a monster is down there. He makes the school bully leave you and your best friend alone. He goes to PTA meetings and your softball games, even though you're too little to play and they keep you on the bench. He worries about you when you're sick, and he worries about boys getting intimate with you when you're a teenager."

Noah grinned at the insight she'd unwittingly provided. An image of a little blond girl in a softball uniform, sitting on a bench, drifted through his mind. Her big violet eyes would be sad because they wouldn't let her play. "You played softball?" he asked, trying to remember if he knew a single woman who'd played softball as a child, rather than tennis or field hockey.

"I would be exaggerating to say that," she said, her laugh touching his ears like the soft tinkling of bells. "I was so little for my age that if I played in my own age group, my teammates mistook me for grass and ran over me. I was in my teens before I finally hit a growth spurt."

"It wasn't much of a spurt," Noah said tenderly.

"Oh, yes it was," she assured him, laughing.

On second thought, Noah decided, it must have been one hell of a maturation process, because she had a gorgeous figure, perfectly proportioned for her height. Perfectly proportioned in every way for his body… The mere thought made him harden, and with a mixture of exasperation and amusement, he said, "I promised you a tour."

He stood up and walked around to pull out her chair; then he draped the stole she'd brought over her shoulders.

Sloan was fascinated by the tour; she'd been on boats many times, but
Apparition
was more like a cruise ship than a boat. She explored the spotless engine room and then the galley, and when he realized she was truly interested, Noah got out the keys and showed her places he would normally have skipped, stopping to open corridor doors that concealed everything from cleaning supplies to spare nautical equipment. "I love boats," she confessed to him with glowing eyes.

"All boats?" he teased.

She nodded solemnly. "All of them—tugboats and fishing boats, slow boats and fast boats. I love the ocean and everything associated with it."

They were in the center of the ship, a level down from the main deck, and she stopped automatically at the next door.

"We can skip that one," he said firmly, putting his hand on her waist to urge her along.

Sloan was instantly curious. "Why? What are you hiding in there?"

"There's nothing in there you'd be interested in."

She burst out laughing. "Don't do that; it's not fair. Now I'm curious. I can't stand unsolved mysteries. I'm a sleuth by—" She broke off in horror. "I'm an amateur sleuth," she amended quickly, and to further distract him, she said with sham indignation, "These are the women's quarters, aren't they?—you bring women along to keep the crew from mutinying on long voyages."

"Hardly," he said, but he wasn't unlocking the door, and Sloan's fascination doubled.

"Pirate treasure?" she ventured, trying to prod him into answering. "Smuggled goods? Drugs—" Her smile faded.

He noticed, and with a resigned sigh, he unlocked the doors and turned on a light. Sloan stared in shock. The small room contained an arsenal of firearms, including a machine gun.

"Courtney saw this and refused to go out to sea with me anymore."

Sloan shook her head a little, trying to recover.

"Don't dramatize it," he warned more forcefully than Sloan thought was necessary.

Sloan registered assault weapons and others that were illegal in the U.S. "Yes, but this—this—why do you need all this?"

He tried to shrug it off as routine. "People who own boats frequently keep a gun aboard."

Sloan's uneasiness was so intense that she shivered, and Noah leapt to an erroneous conclusion. "Don't be afraid. These aren't loaded."

Sloan stepped forward. He was lying, but she tried to sound like an amateur when she pointed it out. "If that's true, then why is that belt-thing with the bullets in it hanging out of that machine gun?"

Noah muffled a laugh and pulled her out of the room, turning out the lights. "It shouldn't be there. That's an old machine gun that we confiscated from a surprise guest on the last cruise."

Sloan's mind reeled with the same refrain she'd heard earlier: She did not know him. Not really. She had gone to bed with him and done intimate things with him, but she did not know him.

Standing beside her at the railing on the main deck, Noah sensed her withdrawal and assumed the weapons cache was the cause of it, but he attributed her reaction to the same vague panic that Courtney had felt. "Learning to use a gun is the best way to overcome a fear of them."

Sloan swallowed and nodded.

"I could teach you to shoot some of them."

"That would be nice," she said absently, trying to get a grip on her reactions. She was letting her imagination run wild, she told herself sternly, a silly mistake that was probably some sort of emotional backlash. She'd been falling in love with him almost from the moment she'd seen him in Carter's living room; she'd just joined her body with his and moaned with passion in his arms. In view of all that, it made more sense to ask for an explanation than to invent one. "It would be even nicer if I understood why you have them. I mean, we're not at war, are we?"

"No, but I do business in countries where the governments aren't always stable. Businessmen in those countries are frequently armed."

She turned fully toward him, her eyes searching his face. "You do business with people who want to
shoot
you?"

"No, I do business with people whose competitors want to shoot
them
. Or me, if I were to get in the way. For that reason, I realized several years ago that it is not only wiser, it is healthier, to do business on my own turf. This ship is my own turf. Next month, I have a meeting off the coast of a major city in Central America. It will take place aboard
Apparition
, and my colleagues will be flown aboard by helicopter."

"Maybe you ought to get into a safer business," Sloan mused aloud.

He laughed. "It isn't purely for safety; it's also for effect." She looked baffled, and Noah explained, "In a foreign port, dealing with people who are impressed by success,
Apparition
still gives me a home court advantage."

Sloan relaxed. What he said made a great deal of sense. "What sort of business do you do with those people?"

"Import/export. Basically, I'm in the business of making deals."