Born to be Wild

Enjoy your stay.

That night, lying in the stateroom of his boat, Reese’s teeth ground together at the memory of Celia’s glib words. She’d blown him off as easily as she had thirteen years ago. No, he corrected himself, even more easily. Last time, she’d had her father do it.

Father. That led to thoughts of other things she’d said. Father-in-law. He knew, on an intellectual level, that time had passed. But he didn’t feel any older. And Celia still looked much the same. It was hard to believe she’d married and buried a husband since he’d seen her last.

Had she had something going with the Papaleo guy that summer while she’d been with him? His memory of this marina was vague, since his family had always kept their crafts at Saquatucket, but he could dimly recall the wiry Greek fellow who’d kept things in order years ago. He had an even less reliable memory of the man’s son, no more than another wiry figure, possibly taller than the older man.

No. If she’d cheated on him, he’d have known it. He’d been sure of Celia back in those days. She’d been his. All his.

He swore, gritting his teeth for an entirely different reason as his body reacted to the memories, and flipped onto his back.

Celia. God, she’d been so beautiful she’d taken his breath away. Today had been no different. How could that be? After thirteen years she shouldn’t look so damned good. She was thirty—he knew she’d just had a birthday at the end of September.

The thought pulled him up short. Why did he still remember the birthdate of a woman he’d slept with years ago for one brief summer?

She was your fantasy.

Yes, indeed. She had been his fantasy. At an age when a young man was particularly impressionable, Celia had been lithe, warm, adoring and pliable. If he’d suggested it, she’d rarely opposed him. She truly had been every man’s dream. But that was all she’d been, he assured himself. A dream.

A dream that had evaporated like the morning mist over the harbor once she’d heard the false rumor about him and that girl from Boston.

An old wave of bitterness welled up. He didn’t often allow himself to think about the last words he and his father had exchanged all those years ago. To people who asked, he merely said he had no family.

And he didn’t. He’d never opened nor answered the letters from his mother or his brothers and sisters, mostly because there was nothing to say. He hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, and he had nothing to apologize for. Nick had been the most persistent. Reese bet he’d gotten fifteen letters from his big brother in those first five years or so. There were probably more out there floating around. He’d sailed from place to place so much there would have been no way to predict his movements or the places he might have chosen to dock.

On the other hand, he’d never received so much as a single line from his father. That was all it would have taken, too. One line. I’m sorry.

He exhaled heavily. Why in the hell was he thinking about that tonight? It was ancient history. He had a family of his own now, was a very different person than he’d been more than a decade ago.

The thought brought Amalie to mind and he smiled to himself. He’d never pictured himself as a father, and he certainly wouldn’t recommend acquiring a child the way she’d come into his life, but he loved her dearly. If he could love a child who wasn’t even biologically his so much, what would it be like to have a child of his own?

As if she’d been waiting for the chance, Celia sprang into his head again. He was more than mildly shocked when he realized that, subconsciously, he’d always pictured her in the role of his imaginary child’s mother. Dammit! He was not going to waste any more time thinking about that faithless woman.

Throwing his legs over the side of his bunk, he yanked on a pair of ragged jeans and a sweatshirt and stomped through the rest of his living space to the stairs. On deck, he idly picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon. Nothing interesting, only one small fishing boat. A careless captain, too, he observed, running without lights.

Casually he swung the binoculars around to the shoreline. The area had been developed considerably since he’d been gone, as had the whole Cape and the rest of the Eastern seaboard. A lot of new houses, some right on the water. The only place that would still be undisturbed completely would be the Cape Cod National Seashore on the Outer Cape, but here along the Lower Cape he couldn’t see that.

The quiet sound of a small, well-tuned motor reached his ears and he glanced back toward the south. The little boat he’d seen was coming in, still without lights. Then the motor cut out and he saw the flash of oars. Why would the guy kill his power before he reached the dock?

The quiet plish of the oars came nearer. The boat was close enough that he could now see it easily without the binoculars, then closer still, and he realized the guy intended to put in right here at the marina.

There appeared to be only one sailor aboard, and a small one at that. Probably a teenager flouting the rules, which would explain his cutting the motor early and trying to sneak in. The boy tied up his boat and caught a ladder one-handed, nimbly climbing to the dock while carrying a fishing cooler in his other hand.

Reese grasped the smooth mahogany rail of his boat and vaulted over the edge onto the dock. He walked toward the boy, intending to give him a rough education in proper night lighting, but just then the boy walked beneath one of the floodlights that illuminated the marina.

The “boy” was Celia daSilva. No, not daSilva. Papaleo.

“Celia!” He didn’t even stop to think. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Of all the irresponsible, un—”

“Shh!” He’d clearly startled her, but she recovered quickly. She ran toward him, making next to no noise in her practical dockside slip-ons. Before he could utter another syllable, she clapped one small hand over his mouth.

Reese wasn’t a giant but he was a lot bigger than Celia, and the action brought her body perilously close to his. He could feel the heat of her, was enveloped in a smell so familiar it catapulted him instantly back in time to a day when he’d had the right to pull that small, lithe figure against him. His palms itched with the urge to do exactly that and he rubbed them against the sides of his jeans, trying to master the images that flooded his mind.

Her eyes were wide and dark, bled of any color in the deep shadow thrown by the angle at which she was standing. But he could see that she recognized the familiarity of their proximity almost as fast as he did.

“I can explain,” she whispered, her voice a breath of sound. “Just don’t make any more noise.”

The words had barely left her mouth when a light snapped on aboard a nearby yacht. “Mrs. Papaleo? Is that you?”

It was a deep, slightly accented male voice. Reese felt the vibration as the man leaped onto the dock, much as he had a moment before, and walked toward them.

“Don’t say anything,” Celia warned. To his astonishment, her hand cupped his jaw, sliding along it so that her thumb almost grazed the corner of his lips. At the same time he felt her bump his hip with the cooler she still carried. He lifted his own hands automatically, curling his fingers around the handle, over hers and putting his other hand at her waist. A part of him registered the fact that the cooler felt a lot lighter than it should if it was full of fish. But a larger part of him was much more attentive to Celia’s proximity, the way her soft hand felt curled under his and the way her palm cupped his jaw. Her hands were warm and he knew the slender body concealed beneath the wind shirt and jeans would be even warmer. Even softer.

She waited the barest instant until the man walking toward them couldn’t help but see the intimate pose, then she slowly stepped away a pace, letting her hands slide off him as if reluctant to let him go despite the interruption.

“Hello, Mr. Tiello,” she said. “It’s me. This is, uh, an old friend. Reese Barone. Reese, Ernesto Tiello.”

Reese stepped forward and extended his hand automatically, trying to ignore his racing pulse. What was she up to? She’d deliberately made it sound as if he were a very good old friend. “Nice to meet you.”

“And you, sir.” Tiello was a bulky fellow, probably ten years older than Reese himself, with a heavy accent that might indicate nonnative roots. The man looked from one to the other of them. “Were you out on the water?”

“Yes.” Celia turned to face Tiello. Her free hand reached for and found Reese’s and she intertwined their fingers. “A little night fishing. We used to do it all the time when we were young.”

A gleam of amusement lit the dark eyes and Tiello smiled. “I see.”

Reese felt his own lips twitch as he fought not to chuckle. Celia was going to be sorry she started this.

Another boat light along the dock snapped on. “I thought I heard your voice, Ernesto.” The voice was feminine, smoky and suggestive. It instantly made a man wonder if the woman attached to it lived up to its promise.

Tiello’s tanned features creased into what Reese assumed was a seductive smile. “It is, indeed, and I’m flattered that you thought of me, Claudette.”

A form leaped from the deck of the yacht from which the light shone. Backlit by the brightness, the woman appeared tall and slender. Then she drew closer. She had blond hair caught in a thick braid that trailed over one shoulder so far that Reese knew if it was unbound her hair would reach her hips. Big blue eyes, a heart-shaped face and a slight cleft in her chin added even more interest to her pretty face, but the mouth changed it all. “Pretty” became “sexy as hell” at the first glimpse of those lips.

“Hello,” she purred, extending her hand and favoring him with a brilliant smile that revealed small, perfect white teeth. “I’m Claudette Mason.”

“Reese Barone.” He repeated the ritual he’d just completed with Tiello, who was wearing a distinctly sulky look on his face.

“Did you just arrive?” Her gaze drifted over him. “I’m sure I would have noticed if you’d been here earlier.”

“I docked a few hours ago.” Celia’s fingers had gone stiff and uncooperative in his; he glanced down at her but she was wearing an absolutely expressionless mask that would have served her well in a poker game.

“I hope you’ll be here for a while. We could get to know each other.” Claudette had yet to acknowledge Celia’s presence, let alone the fact that he was holding her hand.

“Er, thanks,” he said, “but I’ll be occupied while I’m here.” He dragged Celia’s hand up with his to display their entwined fingers. “Celia and I haven’t seen each other in a while and we have a lot to catch up on.”

“Ah. I see.” Claudette Mason made a moue of regret. Without even a pause, she turned back to Tiello. “Could I interest you in a drink, Ernesto? Mr. Brevery has gone to Boston for the night.”

The man’s face brightened as if she’d brought him a gift. “I would be delighted,” he said. He turned to Celia and Reese. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Barone. Have a lovely evening, Mrs. Papaleo.”

“Thank you. You do the same.” Celia tugged discreetly at the hand he’d lowered, but he kept her fingers imprisoned in his. “Are you ready to go, Reese?”

As the other pair walked back down the dock toward the woman’s yacht—the Golden Glow, he noted—he lifted a brow and looked down at Celia. “Sure.” In a lower voice, he added, “But it might be nice if I knew where I was supposed to be going.”

“You’ll have to walk home with me.” Celia sounded grumpy and grudging as they moved out of range of the other couple, and he felt his own surly mood creeping back over him. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”

Reese nodded. “I guess.” Sarcasm colored his tone as he allowed her to tow him along the dock toward the street.

“Thank you,” she said curtly. “I appreciate you going along with my…my…”

“Deception?” he offered pleasantly. “Fabrication? How about lie?”

They were walking along the edge of the harbor now and as she turned onto a street away from the marina, Celia yanked her hand free. “There’s a good reason.” Her voice sounded defensive.

“I imagine so,” he said, allowing the cutting edge in his voice to slice, “since I can’t think of any reason you’d want to hold my hand after dumping me thirteen years ago.”

“I dumped you?” Celia stopped in her tracks. “Excuse me, but I seem to recall you being the one who dropped off the face of the earth.” Then she started walking again, fast, and despite his superior size, he had to take large strides to catch up with her. “Why are we arguing? As you pointed out, it’s ancient history. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

He could feel the anger slipping free of his control and he clamped down on it, gritting his teeth to prevent another retort. It made him remember gritting his teeth in a very similar manner—but for a very different reason—just a short while ago, and he pulled up a vivid mental image of himself smacking the heel of his hand against his forehead. How stupid would I have to be, he lectured himself, to care about what happened when we were still practically kids? He wasn’t any more interested than she was in resurrecting their old relationship.

“No,” he said softly, definitely. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

They walked in awkward silence for a few hundred yards.

“Who’s Mr. Brevery?” It was an abrupt change of topic but he wanted to show her how little he cared about the past.

Celia cleared her throat. “Claudette’s employer. He’s put up here every October for at least a half dozen years.”

“And Tiello?”

Her mouth twisted. “Playboy. Too much money and too much time to waste. This is the third year he’s visited us in the fall.”

The same probably applied to him in her estimation. So what? He’d stopped caring what Celia thought of him long ago. “So why were you out on the water with no lights?”

She looked around and he realized she was checking to be sure no one was near. “I’d rather tell you when we’re inside.”

Inside. She was going to invite him into her house. Although he knew she was only doing it because she’d entangled him in whatever little scheme she was up to, he still felt a quickening interest, as if he were still a teenage boy who saw a chance to score.

She broke your heart, remember? You’re not interested.

Right. That’s why you came back after you stopped by Saquatucket in late August and found out she was still around.

“Here,” she said. She pushed open a gate in a low picket fence and led the way up a crushed-shell path to the door of a boxy Cape Cod farmhouse-style home. The place clearly was an old Cape treasure. She paused on the stoop to unlock the door, then pushed it open and beckoned to him without meeting his eyes. “Please come in.”

Formal. She was nervous. About having him around? About what he’d interrupted? He told himself it didn’t matter. “Nice place,” he said. When she was young, she’d lived in one of the most modest cottages on the Cape. This house probably was on the historic register.

The living room was furnished with heavy pieces in shades of creams and browns, with an irregularly shaped glass coffee table mounted atop a large piece of driftwood. Over the mantel hung a painting of the harbor as it must have looked a hundred years ago, with small fishing boats moored along the water’s edge, stacks of lobster pots and nets piled haphazardly and a shell path leading to small, boxy cottages similar to the one in which he stood. There was a bowl filled with dried cranberries on the coffee table, and as he watched, she switched on additional lights.

“Thank you.” She hesitated. “It was my husband’s family home for four generations.”

“Your husband the harbormaster.”

“Yes.” She sounded faintly defensive. “Would you like something to drink?”

“No.” He flopped down into a comfortably overstuffed chair without invitation. “I’d like an explanation.”

Two

Celia took a deep, nervous breath, trying to calm the fluttering muscles of her stomach. What on earth had possessed her to involve Reese in this mess? She’d reacted instinctively, knowing she’d had no time to waste. And knowing Reese was safe. The one thing she did know was that he couldn’t possibly be involved. That would have required him to be in the area in the last few years.

“I was looking for drug smuggling activity.”

“Drug smugglers?” He sounded incredulous. The faint air of hostility she’d sensed from him disappeared as he sat up straight and stared at her.

She perched on the edge of the couch and clasped her hands together. “It’s imperative that none of the clients along the dock learn about it.”

“Why?”

“It’s possible that someone moored here could be a part of a drug operation.”

“So when I came along and blew the whistle, you decided to use me as a cover?” Reese’s eyes were intent, unsmiling.

She shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do. You were shouting loud enough to wake folks on the other side of town.”

The side of his mouth twitched, as if he were struggling not to smile. “Sorry.” He leaned back against the rough fabric of the chair, stretched out his long legs, then looked at her skeptically. “Drug smuggling?”

She popped up off the couch, uncomfortable with his questions and annoyed at the derisive tone. “I’m not crazy,” she said defensively. “You’d be amazed at the amount of illegal stuff that goes on around here.”

He laughed aloud, but she had the sense that he was laughing at her rather than with her. “I’ve been in dozens of harbors along dozens of shorelines and, believe me, I’ve seen more kinds of ‘illegal stuff’ than you could imagine. I’m just wondering what you think you can do about it.”

“Maybe nothing.” She carefully looked past him, hoping her face wasn’t too transparent.

“Celia.” He waited until she reluctantly dragged her gaze back to mesh with his. “You could be putting yourself in serious danger. Drug runners are criminals. They wouldn’t think twice about hurting you if they caught you spying on them. Leave the investigation to the law enforcement guys who get paid to do it.”

She wanted to laugh, an entirely inappropriate reaction, and she bit the inside of her lip hard. If he only knew! “I’ll be careful,” she said.

“Careful isn’t good enough.” His tone was harsh. “Do you think I’m kidding about getting hurt? This isn’t a game—”

“I know it’s not!” Her voice overrode his. “They killed my husband and my son.” Dear God, help me. She couldn’t believe she’d blurted that out.

The words hung in the air, still stunning her after two years. She collapsed again on the couch like a balloon that had lost its helium, putting her face in her hands. An instant later she realized that Reese’s weight was settling onto the cushions beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. A large, warm hand settled on her back and rubbed gentle circles as if she were a baby in need of soothing. “I am so sorry, Celia. I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t expect you would.” She pressed the heels of her palms hard against her eyes, pushing back the tears. She wasn’t a crier; tears accomplished nothing but making you feel like you needed a nap to recharge the batteries you drained bawling. “It was just local news.” Except to me.

There was a small silence. “Tell me what happened.”

She hadn’t spoken of it in a long time. Not even to Roma, who she knew worried over her silence. But for some reason, she felt compelled to talk tonight. Maybe it was because she had a certain degree of familiarity with Reese due to their shared past. Maybe it was because he hadn’t known her family and therefore could be less emotionally involved. Most likely it was because she knew he wouldn’t be around long and it wouldn’t matter.

Drawing in a deep breath, she sighed heavily and shifted back against the couch, her hands falling limp in her lap. Reese sat close, his arm now draped along the back of the couch behind her shoulders. It should have bothered her, but the numbness that had been so familiar in that first horrible year of her bereavement was with her again, and she couldn’t work up the energy to mind.

“We only had been married for two years when Milo’s dad passed away and Milo was asked to take over as harbormaster. He’d been raised on the pier and he knew the work already.” She smiled briefly, looking into the past. “He was good at it. Everybody liked Milo.”

Reese didn’t speak, although she saw him nod encouragingly in her peripheral vision.

“Our son was born three years later. We named him Emilios, like his father and grandfather. Leo was his nickname. I had worked at the marina but I stayed home with him after he was born.” The numbness was fading and she concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly, forming the words with care. Anything to keep from letting the words shred her heart again.

“When Leo was two, Milo mentioned to me that he thought there was something funny going on down toward Monomoy Island. One night in September he came home and told me he’d called the FBI, that he was pretty certain some kind of illegal contraband was being brought ashore.”

“That was smart.” Reese’s voice was quiet.

“He didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “After he showed them where he thought the action was happening, he stayed away. The federal agents got a lot of information from him and that was it. Almost a year passed and nothing happened that we knew of. We figured they probably were proceeding cautiously, starting some kind of undercover operation. And then one day Milo took Leo with him on an errand over to Nantucket. Halfway across the sound, their boat exploded.”

Reese swore vividly. “What happened?”

She took another deep, careful breath. “At first I assumed it was an accident. Just a horrible, awful accident. And then federal agents came around one day and told me there had been an explosive device attached to the bottom of the boat. It had been detonated by someone close enough to see them go out on the water.”

She stopped speaking and there was silence in the room, broken only by the steady tick-tock of the old captain’s clock Milo’s father had restored. She wound it every morning when she came downstairs.

“How old was your—Leo?”

Her heart shrank from the question. She could deal with this if she just didn’t think too much about it. But she couldn’t talk about Leo. She just couldn’t. “Two and a half. He would have started kindergarten next year.” Her voice quavered. Shut up, shut up. Stop talking. “He was very blond, like I was as a child, and he had big velvety-brown eyes. He adored his daddy and there was nothing he loved better than going out on the…the boat w-with Milo.” Her voice was beginning to hitch as sobs forced their way out.

She felt Reese’s arms come hard around her, pulling her to his chest as the floodgates of long-suppressed grief opened. “Shh.” His voice came dimly through the storm of agony that swept over her.

“I wish—I w-wish I’d died, too.” She stuffed a fist in her mouth, appalled at voicing the thought that had lived in her head since the terrible day she’d buried her husband and her baby boy.

“Shh,” he said again. “I know.” She felt a big hand thread through her hair, cupping her scalp and gently massaging. He’d done that years ago, she remembered, when she’d been upset with her father’s reaction to him the day she’d introduced them.

Abruptly, it was all too much. Her father, her family, Reese…

She cried for a long, long time. Reese did nothing, simply held her while she soaked the front of his sweatshirt with tears. At one point he reached over to the end table and snagged a box of tissues—probably afraid she’d use his shirt to blow her nose—but he didn’t let go of her and as soon as he handed her a tissue he put his arm around her again.

His hands were big and warm and comforting. His arms made her feel ridiculously secure. She hadn’t allowed herself to lean on anyone in so long….