The Best Way to Lose (20 page)

“What Trace failed to tell you,” Morgan said, “is that I was second pilot under him for a long time. We plied these waters many a time together. It’ll be like old times to have him back on board when we make this trial run.” Then, as if remembering his manners, he added, “It’ll be a pleasure to have you with us, too.”

“Thank you. I’m looking forward to it.” It had the sound of an adventure about it, something totally new and out of the ordinary. An earlier remark by Trace had caught her interest, and she went back to it before he could complete the introductions. “What did you say the name of the boat is going to be?”

“The
Santee Lady
.” Behind the lazy look he gave her, there was something warm and suggestive. “It seemed fitting to name her after one of the owners of the company.” He held her gaze for an instant longer, then made an obvious effort to break away from it. “This is Pete Turner, the engineer. And the deckhands for this trip—” Four men were standing in a loose row and he went down them, pointing them out as he gave her their names. “Joe Allen, Billy Bob Davis, Rick Connors, and Tucker Smith. And last but not least, the most important member of the crew, Woody Evers, the cook.”

“Hello.”
She addressed her response to all of them.

Evers removed the cigar from his mouth long enough to say, “Pleased to meet you,” then clamped it between his lips again.

“Evers’ reputation as a cook is known up and down the river,” Trace explained with a sly smile. “Most people don’t know why his food always tastes so different. But his secret ingredient is that cigar that’s always hanging out of his mouth. The smoke flavors everything he fixes.”

The cigar was obviously an inhouse joke, since the others laughed heartily at Trace’s jibing remarks and gave the cook a rough time about it. The interplay permitted Pilar a glimpse of the rough-and-tumble life Trace had once led.

Before the round of introductions was completed, she had met representatives from the boat builder as well as two officers from the Coast Guard. A lot of general conversations went back and forth, some idle bantering and speculation about the new towboat.

“Shall we get on with the ceremony?” Trace suggested and half turned. “Mike? You brought along the requisite bottle of champagne, didn’t you?”

“Got it right here.” He produced the bottle with a ribboned bow around its neck and handed it to Pilar.

“Come on.” Trace led her to the freshly painted bow of the towboat where it sat on a
ramp to the water. “Do you see this area right here?” He showed her a section of the angled edge of the bow. “Take the bottle in both hands and swing it just as hard as you can and aim it for this spot. Okay?”

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Everybody stand back,” Trace advised as he moved away from her. “I don’t know what she’s going to hit. If she had her choice, it’d probably be me.”

There was a certain awkwardness to the moment as Pilar gripped the neck of the bottle as if it were a baseball bat and kept her eye on the spot Trace had indicated.

“Remember those newsreels they used to show?” Evers was saying in the background. “I remember seeing one this one time where some woman kept trying to bust a bottle of champagne over the bow of this brand new Navy ship. She never did do it.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” Pilar inserted dryly.

She drew the bottle back, then took aim and swung as hard as she could. She felt the jolt of the bottle hitting the bow and flinched in anticipation of the splintering crash that followed and the spray of champagne. There was a burst of cheers—more from surprise than anything else, she suspected. She stepped away from the bow, shaking the wetness of champagne from her hands while she continued to hold the ribboned neck of the bottle.

“You did it!” Trace’s arm hugged her by the
shoulders while his broad, laughing smile beamed at her with pride. “The first time, too.”

Someone was already picking up the larger, broken chunks of glass as Trace led her back to join the others at the top of the ramp.

“Didn’t you think I could?” she challenged him and offered him the broken bottle neck as proof.

“I’m beginning to think you can do everything except make up your mind,” he declared, but in a low voice, meant for her hearing alone.

A second later Pilar was caught up in the rush of voices congratulating her. Someone popped the cork of a chilled bottle of champagne and paper cups of it were passed around for the toasting as the lines securing and steadying the towboat eased it gently into the water.

An hour later the Coast Guard had completed its final inspection of the craft and the towboat was chugging out of the boatyard area. The New Orleans harbor was busy, tugs and towboats moving steadily up-and downstream, freighters and cargo ships tied up to wharfs.

Beyond the high levees that kept the Mississippi River within its banks was the city of New Orleans, its streets below the river’s waterline. Leaning forward, Pilar rested her forearms on the deck railing outside the pilothouse, feeling a part of all this subtle excitement.

“Wait until you see how she handles, Trace,” Dan Morgan said from inside the house. “She likes a lover’s touch. No rough stuff for this lady.”

“Is that right?” The idle response came from a point very close to her. Pilar glanced over her shoulder to discover that Trace was studying her intently. “Is that where I made my mistake with you?” he murmured to her.

She looked to the front again, her side vision noting his approach to stand beside her at the railing. “You like saying things that are slightly unnerving to me, don’t you?” she accused, conscious of how erratic her pulse had become at his suggestive comment.

“Not nearly as much as I like doing things that slightly unnerve you,” he replied.

“You’re doing it again,” Pilar said.

“All right then, no more words,” he said. “Why don’t I take you below and show you which cabin will be yours? You’d probably like to change clothes.”

“Yes, I would,” she agreed, having already discovered that her leather-soled shoes were not the best choice.

When she stepped over the raised threshold into the cabin, Pilar discovered that it was larger than she had guessed it would be. Everything was brand-new and gleaming. It was all so compact and efficient, yet so much roomier than she had expected.

“This is nice,” she said to Trace with a degree of surprise when he followed her into the cabin.

“It’s the captain’s quarters. Morgan willingly gave it up one night for you,” he said as he wandered into the cabin, idly looking around. “It’s a home away from home. Or in some instances, this is home and the house on land is the second home. This is where they live and they vacation somewhere else.”

“Was a place like this home for you?” Pilar heard the undertones of nostalgia in his voice and wondered about this side of his life. She halted by the bunk and sat down.

“Yes.” He wandered over and sat down next to her. “It should be comfortable.”

Pilar stood up and moved away from the bed before the thoughts that were in his mind became actions. “I’m sure it will be very comfortable.”

Turning his body, he stretched out on the bed and cradled his hands under his head. “This bed is going to be the envy of every riverman up and down the way. Morgan’s lucky.”

“Why?” Although she sensed she was walking into something, she had to ask.

“Because you’re going to sleep in this bed tonight. A man’s imagination can keep that dream alive every time he crawls into this bunk and thinks of you in it.”

“Did you ever have a woman aboard?” She supposed it was natural curiosity that prompted her to inquire about his previous affairs. Not for a minute did she believe there hadn’t been any before her.

“I’ve entertained women in my cabin be
fore,” he admitted. “But I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about you.”

“And I want to change clothes.” Pilar reminded him of the reason he had ostensibly shown her the location of the cabin. She wasn’t ready for the discussion to become personal.

“Go ahead and change.” He settled more comfortably into the bunk.

“Trace, I’m not going to stand here and strip for your benefit,” she advised him with a small laugh.

“Come here a minute,” he urged and sat up on one elbow.

Hesitantly Pilar moved to the edge of the bunk. “What do you want?”

“You.” He caught her hand and pulled her onto the mattress, turning her with his hands to lay her down beside him. “All this talk and where’s it getting us? Not where either of us want to be, which is right here.”

His hand glided across her stomach and covered a round breast. There was no sound she could utter, nothing she could say as he lowered himself toward her. His kiss was long and slow, plunging deep to curl her toes with sensation. He hooked a leg between hers as his body became pleasantly heavy on her. Every inch of her face was covered by his seeking mouth, down her lips to the hollow at her throat.

“It’s no good, Pilar.” It was a thickly murmured comment, half muffled by her skin. “I love you too much. I’ve got to know.”

“Don’t ask me now,” she protested on an aching whisper. “I’d say anything just because I love what you’re doing to me. It isn’t fair to tell you that.”

With a groan he turned his head aside. “When will it be fair?” he demanded.

His hands ceased their stroking arousal, and some of her sanity seemed to return. She twisted from beneath him and swung out of the bunk. Her blouse was half unbuttoned and she was still quaking inside.

“I’m sorry, Trace, but I don’t know,” she insisted and felt that awful twist of agony when she heard him angrily rise from the bed.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he muttered.

“Neither do I,” Pilar retorted. “And I wish you’d stop making me feel like some cheap tease who gets her kicks out of doing this to a man.”

“You’d better change.” He breathed out heavily, as if trying to release some of that taut emotion. “I’ll see you topside.”

It was several minutes after Trace had left the cabin before Pilar even bothered to open her suitcase to take out the jeans and sleeveless white blouse she’d brought along. When she had changed her clothes, she sat on a chair to tie on a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes.

There was suddenly a hard jolt as if they’d run into something. Alarmed, she quickly finished tying her shoes and hurried to the door.
Vaguely she remembered the varying pitches of the engine, but she had merely assumed they were testing something.

She practically flew through the companionway and up the ladders to the pilothouse, where Trace had said he was going. She stopped in the open doorway, clutching the sides, slightly out of breath.

“What happened?” She was panting as she looked past the two men in the pilothouse at an obscured view of a wharf.

“Nothing.” Trace appeared calm and completely unperturbed. “Why?”

“I thought … didn’t we run into something?” She ducked her head back outside to look to the bow.

“No,” he replied.

“Well, we did bump the barges a bit. Maybe that’s what she felt,” Dan Morgan suggested.

“Oh.” Feeling a little sheepish, Pilar backed out of the pilothouse and stuck her hands in the hip pockets of her jeans as she wandered forward.

If she had taken the time to look, she realized she would have seen there wasn’t any trouble. From her high vantage point, she could see the deckhands working below. They seemed to be securing a set of four barges, tied abreast, to the towboat. Pilar frowned, a little confused. When she heard Trace step onto the deck behind her, she turned.

“What are they doing?” she asked.

He came to the railing beside her and looked
down expectantly, then slid her a puzzled glance. “What do you mean? They’re making the barges fast.”

“But—” She shrugged. “I thought this was going to be a trial run just to test it out. You’re going to push barges, too?”

“Only four. We aren’t taking a full complement. We want enough to put some strain on the engines and check how they function,” he explained with an indulgent look, then turned back to watch the working men. His expression sobered slightly. “From the looks of that river, it’s going to do some testing of its own.”

Earlier Pilar had been more interested in what was going on around her than the muddy water rolling around the boat. But his comment drew her attention to the foamy brown water, churning and boiling below her. It was swollen, with odd bits of debris and broken branches tossed and sucked under by its angry current.

“It’s high, isn’t it?” she realized.

“They’ve been having a lot of heavy rains up north,” he stated. “The runoff has swollen the Mississippi, which makes for turbulent water and stronger, fast-running currents. The gal’s gonna be tested going upstream against this,” Trace concluded, referring to the boat.

“Do you think she’ll make it?”

Trace looked at her. “I’m betting on it.” Everything with him seemed to have a double meaning.

“I think Cassie’s right—you like taking chances,” she replied and lowered her gaze to the swollen river.

“The Mississippi is an amazing thing when you think about it,” he said, changing the subject.

“Why is that?”

“It drains nearly half the total area of the United States. The Indians named it right when they called it the Father of Waters,” he said idly. “That water down there—some of it probably dripped off a house in Pennsylvania and flowed into the Ohio, or it came from Wyoming and Montana down the Yellowstone and into the Mississippi by way of the Missouri. The muddy Missouri—too thick to drink and too thin to plow. The Tennessee drains into it, reaching all the way back to North Carolina, and the Platte from Colorado. Not to mention all that Texas rain that dumps into the Mississippi where the Red River flows into it above Baton Rouge. And that’s just the big rivers. That doesn’t count all the smaller tributaries and streams.”

“It almost sounds like a geography lesson.” She laughed.

“I guess it does,” he agreed with a slow smile, then pushed away from the rail. “I think I’ll go check to see how much longer we’ll be here. You’re free to wander around anyplace.”