Amber Beach by Elizabeth Lowell Page B

more Jake thought about it, the more he was forced to accept the unhappy fact that Honor was his only route to the amber. To prove his own innocence, Jake would have to use her as ruthlessly as Kyle had used everyone else.
    Even though Honor was a Donovan, Jake didn’t like using her that way. But then, he hadn’t liked much that had happened in the past month.

 
4
     
    “Pretty as a postcard, isn’t it?” Jake asked.
    Honor jumped at the sound of his voice. Uneasily she stared out the side windows of the Tomorrow. The blue-green water of Rosario Strait did indeed look like a postcard. She wished it were. Ever since they had left the dock behind, she had been intensely aware of the lack of truly solid footing. She licked her dry lips.
    “Postcards don’t jig around beneath your feet”, she said.
    “Jig? It’s dead calm.”
    She licked her lips again and said nothing.
    Jake had noticed Honor’s increasing restlessness. He was pretty certain of its source: she was afraid. He had been in enough tight places to recognize fear when he saw it. His employer was thin-lipped, pale, vibrating like a high-voltage line.
    It took a strong motivation for someone to confront such a deeply rooted fear. He wished he knew whether love for her brother or greed for the fairy dust known as the Amber Room drove her out onto the water.
    As Jake looked back at the smooth surface of the sea, he wondered what Honor would do when it got rough. He hoped she wouldn’t come unglued. The thought of smacking sanity back into her didn’t appeal to him. Instead of testing the Tomorrow’s seaworthiness the first time out as he had planned, maybe they should do something nice and calm and easy, like trolling for salmon. The local grapevine said fish were biting in Secret Harbor.
    Normally the idea of salmon fishing would have made Jake eager, but at the moment things weren’t exactly normal. He decided to head for more open water, where he could find out if Kyle’s SeaSport performed the way it should.
    Besides, if his employer was going to fall apart, they both should know it now, when everything else was calm.
    Jake changed the course forty-five degrees and simultaneously kicked up the throttle.
    “What are you doing?” Honor asked. She knew her voice was sharper than it should have been, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She was feeling as edgy as broken glass. Going for a ride in a small boat was turning out to be much harder on her nerves than she had expected. She was thirty, but the overwhelming fear she had felt as a child was scraping her emotions raw.
    “I was thinking about fishing”, he said mildly, “but…”
    “Good.”
    Surprised at what could have been mistaken for enthusiasm, Jake glanced across the narrow aisle to the pilot seat.
    “Good, huh?”
    “Yeah. Thinking about fishing beats actually doing it.”
    He shook his head. “You’ve got to work on your attitude.”
    “Believe me, I have.”
    “Scary thought.”
    She didn’t respond. Her hands gripped the bench seat as though she expected it to be yanked out from under her.
    He said something under his breath. Using Honor was one thing; tormenting her was another. He was discovering that he simply didn’t have the stomach for it. That was one of the reasons he had left Ellen to her spider games and never looked back. He hadn’t enjoyed watching living things flutter in his sticky web.
    With a muttered curse, Jake spun the wheel hard, turning the boat back toward the distant dock.
    “What are you doing?” Honor asked quickly.
    “Going back.”
    “Why? Is something wrong?” Her voice was as thin as the line of her mouth.
    “Yeah.”
    “What?”
    “You.”
    Her head snapped toward him.
    “What are you talking about?” she asked through clenched teeth. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
    “And I’m the Easter Bunny.”
    “Wrong fairy tale. You appeared with the girl in the red coat.”
    Smiling slightly, he shook his head. Even scared