Joanne Rock - The Pleasure Trip

He needed to find her, to find the money and figure out what happened, but despite his best efforts over breakfast, he found himself thinking about Rita again and figuring out what happened with her sister. With Missy’s help last night, he’d eventually pieced together enough information to realize his high-kicking date had been filling in for her absentee sibling.

Now, as he carried his tray from room service out onto the ocean-view balcony, he wondered how he could wrangle time with a woman whose list of priorities put his own to shame. She filled in for her sister, gave her friend a shoulder to cry on…plus she had her own job and she’d sewed costumes for a whole production on top of that.

Something about Rita’s unique blend of fiery demeanor and cool practicality appealed to him on a gut level he couldn’t explain, powerful enough to have distracted him from his primary mission on the cruise. He needed to ’fess up to his quest for information about Sonia’s trip before much more time elapsed since he wouldn’t want Rita to think he’d been using her. Not in six years with the Bureau had he ever found cause to kiss a woman for the sake of his job and he wouldn’t let Rita think as much for even an instant.

He debated calling her room and offering his services for the day while she searched for her sister when a knock sounded on his door. Could she have come looking for him instead?

Logically, he knew it was probably housekeeping, but that didn’t stop him from vaulting over an armchair in his haste to get the door. Telling himself it was just the sex—or promise of sex—that had him so keyed up, he forced himself to wait another two-count before opening the door as a penalty for being too eager.

But it wasn’t Rita on his threshold. Missy waited there instead, her blue eyes huge and punctuated with dark circles underneath them. Technically, he recognized her as an attractive female, but she didn’t come close to Rita in his book.

“Sorry. It’s just me.” She apparently read the disappointment on his face in all of a second. “I hate to bother you again, but you were so smart about offering advice last night, I wondered if you could be persuaded to talk to Rita?”

“I was just having my breakfast.” And plotting his way into spending time with the ship’s seamstress. “But I can make time. Everything okay?”

“I think she’s content with giving Danielle a little cool down period first, like you suggested.” She teetered on the threshold of his stateroom as if scared to put so much as a pinkie toe in his suite. “But she’s getting frantic about her sister and—”

Harrison didn’t hesitate. Turning his back on his work, he slid into his shoes and scooped up his cell phone while he listened to Missy pour out the Tale of Two Sisters. It was a lot to absorb, even if they had thirteen floors to descend in order to reach Rita’s cabin on the lowest level of the ship. But Harrison took in everything he could, gleaning that Rita was as much a workaholic as he’d ever been and that her sister played a crucial role in her life. And as Missy related what she knew of the events of the past few days, Harrison wondered if it was such a bad thing that Jayne was missing.

He began to revise the opinion when Rita opened the door for them, however.

Ear glued to a telephone, she had red-rimmed eyes and wild curls flying in every direction as if she hadn’t slept all night but stayed up to pull her hair out. She gave him a halfhearted wave as she admitted him, but when he turned to let Missy enter first he realized the dancer had apparently tucked her tail and run, leaving him to deal with the crisis. From somewhere down the hall he heard the bing of an elevator car and silently cursed Missy for a coward.

In the meantime, Rita paced with the corded phone tucked between her shoulder and ear as she carried the base around the room with two fingers. Her room was strewn with half-finished sewing projects, uniforms of all kinds on hangers dangling from a makeshift stretch of rope at the foot of one bed, pins jabbed in hems and sleeves at every angle.

“…can’t you just double-check? Her name is Jayne Frazer. Or else Jayne Garcia. And sometimes for fun she books herself under a code name like Cinderella. Or Ariel. Do you have an Ariel?” Rita covered the handset with her palm while mouthing words to Harrison. “She’s big-time into Disney.”

He knew then and there he had zero chances of getting to know Rita—let alone ever quizzing her about Sonia—until she found her sister. Now, he focused solely on how to find yet another missing person. All his leads on Sonia had dead-ended because he’d allowed the trail to grow cold. He wouldn’t make the same mistake with Jayne.

“They hung up on me.” Rita slammed the receiver back onto the base and stared at him with cold fury in her eyes. “Do you believe that?”

“We’ll find her.” He was a patient man and he didn’t mind working for the things he wanted. His wild fantasies about Rita would keep.

“We need a boat.” He started working up a plan to help. They should have a real boat. Not some fifteen-story mega-cruise liner that put as much room between their guests and the water as possible. “You could get around the island in a hurry and check with all the harbormasters.”

Too bad Rita didn’t look hyped about the idea. Her face was pretty pale for a woman who’d just inherited the dedicated help of a special agent as an answer to all her problems.

“My God. You don’t think they ever would have tried boating over to Barbados from St. Kitts to meet up with the ship?” In an instant, the phone was tucked back under her ear. “It never occurred to me to check in with the harbormasters.”

Panic welled in Rita’s throat at the idea of brainless Horatio possibly talking her sister into sailing into the port at Bridgetown. But it made perfect sense in a screwed-up way. He wouldn’t want to lose his job aboard the Venus any more than Jayne would want to lose hers.

And Rita had to find Jayne as soon as possible—not only to make sure she kept her job, but also to corral her into helping manage the latest Margie scare. Their mother had telephoned well after midnight in a rare and very expensive phone call to inform Rita that the bar where she’d been singing a couple of nights each week had just installed video poker.

Just exactly what Margie didn’t need. The machines were probably illegal but Rita knew those kinds of laws were poorly enforced. And the Frazer women couldn’t withstand another bankruptcy. Margie could be homeless by the time the ship docked in Fort Lauderdale.

“I think you’d be able to wrangle your answers faster if we rented a boat. Any harbormaster worth his stripes spends more time out on the docks than taking calls anyway. You can bring your phone to keep making calls, but we’ll look around all the docking areas for ourselves once we find a boat.” Harrison explained the strategy patiently enough but he looked ready to bolt from her tiny, cramped cabin. He couldn’t walk two feet in any direction without stepping on Jayne’s strewn clothes, Rita’s sewing jobs or bumping into furniture. “How about we check with some of this guy’s—Horatio’s—friends to see if they knew where he planned to take his bride?”

“Of course.” Nodding at the practical wisdom of his plan she slammed the phone down again. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that right away.”

“You want me to go ask some questions while you get ready to disembark?” He backed toward the door, careful to sidestep a shimmering gold satin bra.

He would do that for her?

“That’d be great.” She’d never had smart, sensible help before while facing a crisis, so having Harrison around seemed really…nice. Most guys who were interested in a cruise fling would have zero desire to play private detective for the sake of a missing sibling, but Harrison Masters was obviously not most guys. “Horatio is friends with a few other casino workers. Mostly a lady pit boss—Fiona, I think—and a nerdy security guard named James who makes sure nobody pockets chips that don’t belong to them.”