Reluctant Partners

Chapter Five

Allie got her second surprise when she stepped into the galley to prepare snacks for their 10:00 a.m. charter. A case of upscale beer now occupied the entire lower two shelves of her refrigerator. Either Cooper had a powerful thirst, or he planned on serving their guests alcohol.

She climbed the steps to the deck, where Cooper was wiping everything down with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, she’d give him that. Once he got a glimmering of how much work there was to do in preparation for each excursion, he’d jumped right in.

“Cooper!”

He looked up with a grin. “Yes, Allie?”

“Have you ever dealt with a bunch of drunks on a boat, armed with fishhooks? It’s not pretty.”

“I seem to remember Uncle Johnny serving drinks to the guests.”

Yeah, Allie remembered that, too-and a few cruises where the captain was drunker than the passengers. At least she’d learned how to pilot the boat by then.

“It’s too much for me to handle alone,” she argued.

“My cousins and I have been doing some research. If we make high-quality cocktails available, we can charge a lot more. We can hire a college kid to tend bar-in fact, I talked to the bartender at Old Salt last night and she’d be willing to do it for a few bucks.”

“Sara?” Allie would have a few words to say to her friend. “I don’t want drunk passengers.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. You want to make a profit, don’t you?”

She started to argue that she did make a profit. But with the current state of her finances, she couldn’t make a good argument. “Fine. You handle it, though. And if somebody gets drunk and falls overboard, it’s on your head.”

Once they got that argument out of the way, the morning went more smoothly. Their passengers included two couples and their preteen kids. Children always made Allie a bit nervous, especially when their parents didn’t control them. They usually required a great deal of one-on-one instruction. But this group was well-behaved. And to her surprise, Cooper handled the instruction part just fine.

Apparently he did know something about fishing.

When she brought out the platters of cold cuts for lunch, she saw that Cooper was patiently coaching the youngest member of their party, a ten-year-old girl, to pull in her first fish. It was a beautiful red snapper, quite a large one, and Allie held her breath as the girl struggled valiantly to get it into the boat.

A lot of men would simply have taken over for the small girl, but Cooper cheered on her efforts and offered advice when needed, stepping in only when the fish was out of the water.

“Nicely done, Brenna.” Cooper had the fish safely in a net.

The little girl beamed, but then her smile faded. “Do I have to eat him? Or can I put him back in the ocean?”

Cooper looked at the fish thoughtfully. “He’d be good eating. But if you’d like to let him go, that’s okay.”

“Can I, Daddy?” she asked her father.

The girl’s father looked pained-his mouth was probably already watering at the thought of grilled snapper for dinner tonight. But he nodded.

Allie couldn’t help smiling as Cooper took the fish off the hook and wistfully threw it back in the water. But her smile fled as he stepped away from the family and peeled off his golf shirt, which had apparently gotten wet.

She nearly dropped her platter.

Holy cow, muscles like that ought to be outlawed. Maybe he’d built himself up at some pricey health club rather than with hard physical labor, but her hormones sure didn’t know the difference. He had a bit of a farmer’s tan-or rather, a golfer’s tan. But a few more days on the boat with his shirt off, and he’d be smooth, golden brown all over.

She shivered at the thought.

Maybe she should get out more. The fact the thought of touching Cooper even crossed her mind felt like a betrayal to Johnny.

She passed a container of moist towelettes so everyone could wipe their hands before eating.

“What can I get everyone to drink?” Cooper asked. “We have all kinds of soft drinks, water and Sam Adams beer.”

One of the men grinned. “Now you’re talking. Bring all the adults a beer.”

Hmm. She hated to admit it, but maybe Cooper was right.

They’d scarcely gotten the families disembarked when their afternoon passengers arrived, a group of young, testosterone-laden men. They were probably close to her age, and all of them as handsome as good breeding and lots of money could make them, but not a one of them flipped her switch, even when they flirted with her mercilessly.

“Heck, Allie,” one of the men said when she turned him down for a date later that night. “One of the main reasons we picked your boat was because your picture’s on the Web site.”

But Cooper gave him a hard stare and he backed down.

By the time they were heading back to the harbor, the weather had turned. Threatening thunderheads had pushed in from the south, and the ocean was a bit rougher than it had been. It took all of Allie’s concentration to keep the boat from bucking.

Cooper appeared at the bridge. “One of the passengers is seasick. Do we have some medicine we could give him?”

“Yes, but I can’t hunt it down right now.”

“I can take the bridge.”

Allie’s first instinct was to say no way. Piloting the boat in smooth waters was one thing, but in this chop?

Then again, Cooper had so far proved himself perfectly capable. He’d watched her navigate in and out of the harbor three times now; he was probably up to it, and the seas were smoothing out as they got into more protected water.

“Yeah, okay. Just be careful. The rocks we passed on our way out are hidden by high tide now.”

“I remember.”

She scampered down the ladder and below, where one of the men was indeed looking a bit green around the gills. She might regret serving the guys beer after all.

The instructions she gave all passengers with their reservation confirmation included a list of things they should bring with them, and that included seasick medicine, though she always kept some on hand. But she had to rummage around in a couple of cabinets before she found it.

She gave some to the green man, then headed back toward the bridge. She checked their position just before climbing the ladder.

Damn it, Cooper was heading straight for those rocks. She climbed as fast as she could, yelling as she did.

“Swing hard to port! You’re gonna-”

A loud thump cut her off. Oh, God. They’d hit something.

By the time she reached the bridge he’d swung left, and the boat was chugging away from the hazard.

He turned over the wheel with a murmured “Sorry.”

She resisted the urge to yell at him, because she’d done the same thing once when she was learning to pilot her father’s boat. They’d probably only bumped a rock.

Anyway, she was the captain. She was responsible for what happened on this boat.

“The currents are tricky here,” she explained. “And when the water’s rough, the Dragonfly doesn’t respond as quickly.”

Cooper said nothing, but she could tell he felt bad.

“You want to take her in?” she asked, because she knew exactly what he felt like. And she remembered that after she’d nearly wrecked the Ginnie, she’d been terrified to take the wheel again. But her father had explained that it was like riding a bicycle. If you didn’t get right back on after falling off, you might be scared of bikes the rest of your life.

“I’ll watch you take her in,” he said quietly. “Maybe I have more to learn than I thought.”

Well, would miracles never cease? The man who’d stormed her boat acting like he knew everything had just admitted he didn’t.

She ought to be glad he’d had a scare. Maybe he would realize running a charter service wasn’t all fun and games and change his mind about his new direction in life.

But that wouldn’t help, she realized. He would still try to take the Dragonfly away. Then he would sell her future to the highest bidder.

REECE WAS WAITING AT THE DOCK when they pulled in. Although the rain had come and gone, Cooper’s ever-prepared cousin had an umbrella in his hand.

Cooper had arranged for Reece to come on board and look over the books this evening, which was supposed to be Allie’s night off. He had promised to handle all the post-cruise business, and he would-as soon as his stomach unknotted.

He still couldn’t believe he’d hit a rock.

He’d been so sure he knew what he was doing, so intent on proving to Allie that he could do her job as well as she could. He’d figured that by the time the legal battle for the Dragonfly was over, he would have learned anything he needed to about running a charter service, and Allie Bateman would be evicted and on her way.

But clearly that wasn’t the case.

He wondered if he could hire Allie as his pilot. She would soon need a job. But he rejected that possibility, just as he’d done the first time it occurred to him. Once he wrested the boat away from her she wasn’t likely to want to work for him. In fact, she would probably go to work for one of the other charter businesses and do her damnedest to run him out of business.

“How’d it go?” Reece asked as Cooper secured the boat.

“Not so good,” he admitted.

He helped their passengers disembark and carried their cooler of fish as far as the dock. The men were in high spirits, even the one who’d been seasick. They promised Cooper and Allie they’d be back next year.

“It sounds like the customers had a good time,” Reece observed as he followed Cooper onto the boat. She was bobbing up and down so fiercely, they had to time their move just right to avoid falling in the water. “How did the beer thing work out?”

“The passengers seemed to like it.”

“Hello, Allie,” Reece said politely.

Allie was busy emptying the trash barrel, and she barely looked up. “Hello…Reece, is it?”

“Yes, ma’am. Let me help you with that. This was my job when I used to visit Uncle Johnny.”

“The only thing Johnny would trust him to do,” Cooper added.

“Oh…thank you.”

“Allie, this is your night off, remember?” Cooper said. “We’ll handle all the cleanup and restock provisions.” He would also have to take the boat to be refueled and to clean out the holding tank. He felt a little jittery at the idea, though it was just around the corner. “What’s on the schedule for tomorrow?”

“Nothing, unfortunately,” Allie replied, “but we should still stock up in case there’s a last-minute booking.”

“Do you often have idle days?” Reece asked.

Allie immediately went on the defensive. “It’s still the off-season, and I’m only now getting the business back up to full speed. Johnny couldn’t work the last few weeks of his illness.”

Cooper felt a pang of loss and guilt. Though Allie would never believe him, he’d have been here to take care of Uncle Johnny if he’d known the man was dying.

He’d always thought there would be time.

“We’re still well-stocked with soft drinks,” Allie said, pulling them back to business. “But we need cold cuts and fruit. Bread we can buy tomorrow morning at Romanelli’s Bakery, when it’s freshest.”

“Don’t worry,” Cooper told her. “We’ll handle everything. You just go out and have a good time. But before you leave, can you show Reece your financial records? He’s here to go over the books.” He tensed, expecting her to balk.

“Of course,” she said smoothly. “But I’m not going anywhere. I’ll fix myself some dinner and read in my bunk.”

That seemed a strange choice to Cooper. She’d been on the boat all day. Didn’t she want to get out? Maybe she wanted to keep an eye on things, in case he and Reece had in mind to walk off with the silverware or something.

Allie led them downstairs and to the rear of the boat. She unlocked the hatch that led to the captain’s quarters.

Johnny’s presence was still strong here, and a wave of nostalgia washed over Cooper. The cabin looked exactly the same as he remembered, right down to the picture of St. Brendan the Navigator, patron saint of sailors, bolted to the wall. Even his pipe smoke lingered.

The finality of Uncle Johnny’s passing hit him hard in the gut. The old man wouldn’t emerge from some hatch, whistling a jaunty tune, pipe clenched in his teeth and a glass of Scotch in his hand. He’d always been a drinking man, but before Aunt Pat’s death, spirits were strictly for after the boat was in port.

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.

He couldn’t take her records without her permission, so he backed down a fraction. “We’ll make a list of everything I remove from the premises, and we’ll both sign it. When I return everything, we’ll tear up the list.”

She thought about his offer for a few moments, and finally she relaxed a bit. “I guess that’s fair.”

Allie could think of no graceful way to refuse Cooper’s request without sounding like she had something to hide. But as she signed her name to the list of items he was removing, she felt like she was signing a bargain with the devil.

Would she ever see her carefully maintained financial history again? Yes, she’d made copies, but that didn’t completely lay her mind at ease. Cooper could trip on his way up the dock and send all that paperwork flying into the water. He could have a wreck on the way home and the papers could burn up.

He could orchestrate any number of ways to destroy the records once he realized they proved she’d sunk her life savings into this boat. She’d been Johnny’s partner, which gave him clear and reasonable motivation for leaving her the boat in his will.

That was something Cooper Remington did not want a judge to see.

WHEN ALLIE WOKE UP THE NEXT morning, she knew immediately something was wrong.

The storm that had blown in had kept her awake much of the night. The boat had pitched and the wind had howled and whistled through the cracks in the windows. Some of the seals were broken, and she’d had to place rolled-up towels around a few windows to keep the rain from coming in.

But all was quiet now. The dawn sky looked clear.

Still, something was definitely wrong, and it wasn’t until Allie came more fully awake that she realized what it was.

The boat sat too low in the water, even accounting for low tide, and it listed to one side.

Allie flew out of her berth in her pajamas and went directly to the hatch in the galley that led down to the engines. When she opened it, she nearly fainted.

The Dragonfly was taking on water.

When they’d hit that rock, they must have done more damage than she’d thought. She’d checked last night and hadn’t seen any water coming in, but it had been too dark and the water too choppy for her to get in the water and inspect the hull. She ran to put on her waders, then vaulted down into the engine compartment and switched on the pump. But that was just a stopgap measure; she had to get the boat into dry dock immediately.

She quickly changed clothes, then dialed Cooper’s cell phone as she clamored up to the deck to cast off. It wasn’t that she felt any obligation to notify him; nor did she have any desire to rub his nose in the fact he’d wrecked her boat. But she was keenly aware of the agreement she had made not to sail without a Remington on board until their case had been decided. Cooper would use any excuse he could come up with to give her trouble or argue that she was defying a court order.

Unfortunately, she got his voice mail. “Cooper, it’s Allie. The Dragonfly has sprung a leak and I’m taking her to Sinclair Marine, about three miles east. I have to do it now or she’ll sink.”

Allie didn’t have any of the other Remingtons’ numbers. She tried the B and B-she would have Miss Greer drag Cooper out of bed if necessary. But Miss Greer turned the ringer down on her phone at night because people called at strange hours. So Allie got no answer there, either. She left another message, then made one more phone call to Otis Sinclair, letting him know she was coming and to get ready for her.

At least the engines started.

She eased the Dragonfly out of her slip and turned east for her slow trip up the coast, limping along and praying the boat didn’t sink.