Jennifer Greene - Mesmerizing Stranger

“And there’s no one else who could be the thief?”

“Not really. There’s other staff, but they’re clerical or broom pushers, some apprentices coming up. But no one who had access to those studies, the specific private lab or those computers. The thing is, over time, the whole formula could be recreated, but that’d be a matter of years. And literally millions of dollars. Probably more than millions.”

“Eek,” Cate murmured.

“Yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“So you’re in quite a mess.” She wasn’t exactly alarmed when he lurched up from the stool. It was just that her heart rate tripled when he stepped toward her. His eyes were on hers, a flash of flirting, a flash of stark, sharp sexual intent. Thankfully, she saw his hand aim for the bowl on the counter before she leaned into the kiss she thought was coming.

She slapped his hand.

“A major mess,” he agreed-although he tried one more time for a lick of batter from her bowl. Then he gave up, eased away, got serious again. “I closed the lab for a couple weeks. Took them all here. None of us can escape from each other, not on this boat, in this environment. I had to do something. This was the best choice I could think up.”

She nodded. “I think you made a great move. That’s what I do with a soup sometimes. Put the ingredients together, then just let it cook, see what happens.”

“Something will.”

She nodded again. “Something has to happen. When you mix ingredients together, the tastes start blending. Different flavors show up. Flavors that never existed before.”

“That’s what I need,” he said grimly. “Something to force…new information. To bring more out in the open.”

“Harm…” She couldn’t believe he had the nerve to go behind her back with his finger. This time she just motioned for him to remove his hand. He tried giving her a meek, apologetic look-but he couldn’t sell “meek” in this lifetime. “I heard something this afternoon. The fight? You heard it?”

He quit playing around. “What fight?”

“Two men. I don’t know which two, but they were really going at it.” She rinsed her hands, wiped them on a linen towel. “At first I thought everyone would have heard them. But then I realized, of course no one would have, below deck-or in the pilothouse, with those doors closed and the engines going. Still. You didn’t hear anything at all?”

He shook his head. “After lunch, I grabbed a catnap. Hadn’t slept in two days. I went down so deep I wouldn’t have heard a cannon.” He cocked his head. “You didn’t see who it was?”

“No. But, as you may have noticed, I’m not the shy, retiring type. A little argument wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d never have thought twice about it. But this fight…it was…wrong.”

She’d have said more, but the side door to the galley suddenly opened. Ivan popped in, his jaw dropping when he saw Harm in the galley with her. “Hey. You letting the guests get hors d’oeuvres ahead of me? Where is the justice in life?”

She shooed them both out, snapping her towel, warning they’d get no food at all if they didn’t let her get back to it. By then, she had to buckle under and get serious about her dinner prep. But her conversation with Harm still troubled her.

It was over, she supposed. There was nothing else she could have told Harm, beyond what she’d overheard. It was his problem, and he already knew he had a big problem. There was nothing she could help with or do anything about.

But it worried her, once he’d let out how huge the stakes were. A cure for one of the scariest cancers. That was big medical stakes. Big hope. Big money. Big risks.

As she unlocked her knife chest and chose her favorite paring knives-what her chef cronies called the Sheep’s Foot and Bird’s Beak-she thought that Harm didn’t seem the kind of guy who let information slip. Whatever he’d shared with her, he’d wanted to. Possibly, she considered, he was trying to warn her again about avoiding getting close to his men.

She started pulling out pots, cutting boards, ingredients, but an alarming thought kept going through her mind. This trip was enabling Harm to get closer to his team. The closer he got, the more danger he could be in himself.

The fury and tempo of the argument she’d heard earlier kept replaying in her mind like a mosquito bite that wouldn’t quit itching.

It wasn’t her business, she reminded herself, any more than Harm could ever be her business. That unexpectedly sharp buzz of attraction to him needed to be cut off at the pass, pronto. Cate was no idiot. Harm came from a completely different universe than her life.

So for once she was going to be good, just do her job and enjoy the trip, not interfere or nose into anyone else’s problems-and stay out of Harm’s way.

It was such a good plan.

“Marry me, Cate.” Yale had a foot cocked up on the priceless wild cherry sideboard. “I have a condo just outside of Cambridge. You can have it. You can have my life savings. My grandmother’s wedding ring. My six-year-old BMW. Everything I have.”

“That’s sweet.” Cate looked around the dining table. “Anyone willing to up the ante?”

“Me! Me!” Purdue was still hunched over the dessert, clearly trying to protect it from anyone else claiming thirds. God knew they’d all had seconds. “He’s only got a condo. I’ve got a house. A kitchen with a Sub-Zero freezer and stuff. I’m not sure what all the appliances are, but I was told they were top-of-the-line. And…I put the lid down. When I remember, anyway.”

“But she’d have to sleep with you,” Yale pointed out. “See, that has to be a deal breaker for her right there.”

Arthur choked. “Don’t you boys ever have a sense of limits?”

“It’s totally all right, Arthur,” Cate assured him, as she thumped him on the back. “I’ve trained puppies before.”

That set the whole group laughing yet again. Harm leaned back, as stuffed as everyone else, confounded by the teasing and jovial atmosphere around the table. It seemed impossible that one of them was a thief, had sabotaged millions of dollars-and lives.

Cate was the one who’d initiated the easy dinner conversation, enabled it, played to each of the guys as if they were keys on her favorite piano. She wasn’t a manipulator, he mused. It wasn’t like that. She didn’t remotely come across as having any agenda-beyond wanting them all to enjoy her cooking. But she had some people skills that put Harm in downright awe. She’d brought down the tension level in his guys by about 900 percent.

“Where are you from, Cate?” he asked, when he could finally get a word in.

“Actually…nowhere.” Just as she had through the whole meal, she spotted Arthur’s empty cup and poured him a cup of coffee, then pushed the wine toward Ivan. “I came from a family of five. Mom, Dad, three sisters. All of us closer than peas in a pod. But there was a fire-we lost my mom and dad. I was the middle sister, around eight when it happened.”

“Hey. That’s seriously awful.” Yale dropped his flirtatious tone, at least for that second.

“Yeah, it was,” Cate agreed, in that clear-bell voice of hers. “We had no family who could take us in, so the court took over, split us up. We were fostered three different places. It was bad enough to lose both parents, but then we were ripped from each other, as well. At least we all had decent caregivers, and we wrote each other-but we had to be grown-up before we found a way to actually see each other again. Still, we e-mail each other a couple times a week.”

“Do you at least live close by?” Harm asked.

“No. Nowhere near. But we’ve built up a pattern of going back home-our original home, in Georgia-at Christmastime. Although this year that might change because Sophie, the youngest, just tied the knot a few months ago. I suspect we’ll use her home base now.”