Kara Lennox - Reluctant Partners

And Aunt Pat. Cooper had been focusing so much on Johnny he hadn’t given much thought to her, because she’d died so many years ago, but memories of her lurked at the edges of his mind. She’d been a hard-living, wiry woman with a sense of adventure every bit as strong as her husband’s. She’d had a tattoo of a sailboat on her shoulder long before tattoos were stylish.

She’d been a heckuva cook and she taught her nephews to play poker like pros.

“Something wrong?” Allie asked.

He realized he’d just been standing in the doorway, frozen. He shook himself. “Just remembering.”

Allie went to a small desk in the corner of the cabin, opened a drawer, and pulled out an old-fashioned ledger book as well as four checkbooks and a cash box.

She laid out the checkbooks on the desktop. “Business account, Johnny’s personal account-which has been closed, and my two personal accounts-savings and checking. You’re welcome to work in here, but you’d have more room in the salon,” she said.

“Won’t we be in your way in here?” Reece asked.

“I don’t use this room except to do bookkeeping. I sleep in the V-berth. Will you need anything else?”

Reece had opened the cover of the ledger book and was looking at it with a strange expression on his face. “You don’t have your records on computer?”

Allie shrugged. “Never felt the need. Remington Charters’ accounting is pretty simple, and as you can see I don’t have room for a computer. The salt air eats them up pretty bad, anyway.”

How did anyone survive in this day and age without a computer? Cooper wondered.

“We might want to wait until tomorrow to get fueled up,” Allie said on her way out of the cabin. “The storms will pass by then.”

“Okay.” Cooper couldn’t deny he was relieved.

He knew he should get to the grocery store before it closed. He’d quickly discovered that during the off-season Port Clara rolled up the sidewalks at night. Only the bars and the Quicky Mart stayed open past seven o’clock.

But he was curious to know what was in the ledger. If they could find evidence that Allie mismanaged funds, it would help their case.

After spending a couple of days with Allie, he couldn’t picture her siphoning off funds and socking them away in a Swiss bank account. And what would she spend it on here? She clearly didn’t have a lot of expensive clothes or jewelry, and he’d seen her car, an ancient Isuzu Rodeo.

They took Allie’s suggestion and moved to the salon where they could spread out a bit. Cooper helped himself to a beer and settled into a comfortable chair while Reece began studying the ledger in earnest, making notations on a legal pad every so often.

But watching Reece frown and scribble and punch numbers into his calculator got pretty boring after a minute or so, and Cooper found his gaze straying toward the galley, where Allie was fixing herself some dinner. One of the passengers-a guy who’d flirted with Allie at every opportunity-had gifted her with a small snapper fillet on his departure, and it appeared she was marinating it in some concoction.

She fixed herself a salad-spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers-then tossed the fish on an indoor grill, adding spices from a well-stocked rack.

“Allie apparently knows how to cook,” Cooper observed quietly.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I want to offer our passengers a gourmet meal. Maybe Allie could be our cook.”

Reece looked up. “Are you insane? If we win this lawsuit, she won’t want to work for us, she’ll want to kill us.”

Cooper sighed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He’d just needed someone to confirm the conclusion he’d already drawn.

He resumed his study of Allie, fully appreciating the length and shapeliness of her tanned legs. She’d abandoned her deck shoes, and Cooper saw that her toenails were painted bright red. That little feminine detail intrigued him. She didn’t wear makeup-not that she needed any-and her idea of a hairstyle was to pull her long red hair into a clip on top of her head. She obviously saw no need for designer clothes, preferring those ancient cut-off jeans and tank shirts. Her nails were short and utilitarian and her hands work-roughened.

But the toenails said she hadn’t forgotten she was a woman.

Cooper wished he could forget she was a woman. Every time he looked at her he got distracted, and that was a bad thing.

Heather had distracted him, though in a different way. She was nearly six feet tall with a model’s body and a slick, magazine cover look about her. When she entered a room, all heads turned, and she had used that power, along with her wide-eyed innocent act, to divert attention from her nefarious activities.

She had started out stealing knickknacks and baubles from his house, and then the considerably more valuable stuff from his parents’ home. His parents had actually fired a hapless housekeeper over the missing items.

Emboldened by her success with minor thefts, she had progressed to stealing credit card numbers and shopping on the Internet.

Cooper admitted it-he never looked over his bill that carefully. He used it for everything, so the list of charges went on for pages. So long as the total didn’t seem out of line, he just paid it.

He’d finally caught on when an eight-hundred-dollar charge from a designer shoe store caught his eye. He started looking closer at his bill and was horrified to find a half-dozen charges for purchases he knew nothing about.

He knew immediately who’d done it. At first he was inclined to believe he’d somehow given her implicit permission to use his Visa. They were, after all, engaged.

He spoke to her about it, and if she’d just simply admitted she’d done it, apologized, and promised not to do it again, she would have gotten away with it.

But she denied any knowledge of the mystery purchases and tried to blame it on his parents’ cleaning lady, who had become a convenient scapegoat.

After launching a full investigation, the depth of her thievery came to light. She’d siphoned off thousands and thousands of dollars-not just from his credit card, but his bank accounts and those of his parents. She wasn’t just a greedy woman with a shopping addiction, she was a skilled con artist.

Turned out her name wasn’t even Heather.

She’d disappeared before Cooper could gather together enough facts to have her arrested, probably living high in the Cayman Islands on his money.

When he turned his attention back to Reece, Cooper saw that his cousin was no longer studying the ledger. He had his eyes closed and his hands extended beside him, as if to hold himself upright.

“Reece?”

“This wasn’t a good idea,” he said without opening his eyes. “It’s like reading in a car. These records will require several hours of study, and I can’t do it on this moving boat.”

“You can’t take all my financial stuff off the boat,” Allie called from the galley where she sat at a fold-down table, eating her dinner. Apparently she’d been listening. “I might never see it again.”

“We’ll take it and have it photocopied,” Cooper said. “We’ll bring it right back.”

She looked at her watch, an ancient windup Timex. “Copy shop’s closed.”

“We’ll do it first thing in the morning.”

Reece stood and staggered toward the hatch. “You guys work it out. I need fresh air.”

Allie stood and came into the salon. “You can’t take all my financial stuff away,” she said again. “That’s ludicrous.”

“Allie. I wouldn’t destroy your property. I don’t need to cheat.”

“Cheating’s the only way you’ll win.”

They stood staring at each other, both of them breathing hard, and Cooper felt an insane urge to pull her into his arms and kiss her into agreeing with him.