Terrors of the High Seas - DK6 by Melissa Good

grunted, satisfied with their progress and with her navigating skills. She nudged the throttles forward a little and rested her elbows on either side of them, gazing out at the horizon with a slight grin.
    Hands-on had always been something she’d enjoyed, right from the very start of her career. It was one thing to sit in some boardroom with a pad of paper and argue about how to do things, but a very different thing to be able to put your hands on the technology and actually do it yourself. It’s what had set her apart from the rest of the management at ILS. Dar had worked very hard to keep her skills current, and she was very, very proud of the fact that she could go into their state-of-the-art ops center and run every piece of technology inside it. It wasn’t always easy. Her position kept her very busy and the tech changed every day, it seemed. But Dar had decided she never wanted to be in a place where her staff knew more about what they were doing than she did, so she put in the long nights, bought the new manuals, and occasionally even took things home so she could take them apart and play with them.
    Being able to captain her ship across the sea had been just another challenge, and again she’d put in the time to brush up on her charting and diesel skills. Her peripheral vision caught a change in the depth meter and she studied it, then altered their course just a little, steering the Dixieland Yankee into a deeper channel.
    With no other immediate piloting needs to see to, Dar picked up the pencil next to the notepad and started idly sketching. At first she doodled in the horizon and the boat’s bow, but that got boring, so she started looking around for something else to draw. She 32 Melissa Good leaned back and looked down, then grinned. Ah . Her pencil moved against the paper as she focused on her new inspiration.
    KERRY PUT HER pen down for the nth time and let her head rest against the chair. She was ostensibly working on poetry, but the sun, the mild drone of the engines, and the sweet sea air were combining to subvert her creative intentions in favor of some lazy daydreaming.
    She wiggled her bare toes contentedly. Dar had promised a twilight dive when they neared the Virgin Islands, then dinner at a small place she’d last visited just before they’d met. “Fresh conch chowder.” Kerry licked her lips thoughtfully. “Sounds great, just so long as you don’t think too much about what a conch actually looks like.”
    “You say something?” Dar called down from the bridge.
    “No, sweetie,” Kerry replied. “Just mumbling to myself.” She worried a grape off its stem from the bowl next to her and popped it into her mouth. “Whatcha doing?”
    “Driving the boat.”
    “That all?” Kerry asked, tipping her head back and looking up, one hand shading her eyes.
    “Doodling.”
    “Yeah? What this time?”
    “Nothing you’d wanna see,” Dar remarked with an easy grin.
    “How’s the writing coming?”
    Intrigued, Kerry tucked her book into the side pocket of the deck chair and put down her fruit bowl. “It’s not,” she admitted, getting up and walking to the ladder, stretching out her body as she did. “Sad to say, I’m too lazy to even write today.” She climbed up onto the bridge and put her arms around Dar, gazing down at the pad in front of her. Then she blinked. “Yikes.”
    Dar snickered. “Toldja.”
    “That’s me.”
    “Sort of, yeah,” Dar agreed.
    Kerry eyed the sketch, which showed a reasonable rendering of the boat’s stern, with her sprawled in the chair. “You’re getting pretty good at this, you know that?”
    “Depends on what I’m drawing,” Dar said with a shrug.
    Kerry gave her a kiss on the top of her head. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she told Dar, as a memory floated into her mind’s eye.
    Another day, another meeting. Kerry carried her notes into the big conference room and paused; most of the table was already full up. That left the end