High Tide by Jude Deveraux

into the back of the boat, but he was careful to place his own body between hers and Roy’s so she couldn’t see him stretched out on the floor.
    â€œGet in the shower,” he said, but when she didn’t move, he leaned over, and turned on the water. “Now peel off and get in there.”
    She couldn’t think about what was making her clothes stick to her skin, couldn’t think about the cold, wet stuff on her skin that was beginning to dry. When she didn’t move, Ace reached out both his hands and tore open the front of her shirt—his shirt.
    â€œGet it off! You hear me!” he shouted at her.
    It was as though he thought she was about to leave her body again, which she was, but his voice brought her back to reality. In the next moment he was tearing at her clothes in a way someone would remove burning rags from a human body, as though it was her very life to get out of them.
    When she was naked, he pushed her into the shower. The warm water woke her up and made her mind focus on one thing: getting out—out of the shower, off the boat. OUT. But when her way was blocked by the big body of Ace Montgomery, she did her best to get past him.
    â€œOh, no you don’t,” he said, and pushed her back inside,trying to close the door against her. “You need to wake up, to return to reality.”
    â€œI have to get out, you bastard,” she shouted as she tried to push past him.
    At the moment she didn’t think of the embarrassment of being naked in a shower while fighting a clothed stranger who stood just outside the door. All she thought about was getting away from this place. “Let me out of here!” she shouted at him, trying to open the shower door, but he was too strong for her.
    When she kept pushing against the door, he opened it and got into the shower with her. At first she fought him. He stood with his back to the shower pipes and held her about the waist as she fought him with all her might. He held her hands so she couldn’t claw his face, but she managed to rake quite a lot of skin off the back of his hands, and she pounded his chest hard.
    After long minutes of fighting and not being able to move him, she started sobbing. And when she started to cry, her body went limp against his. Both his arms were around her back, the warm water cascading over both of them, he fully clothed, she naked, and he held her against him while she cried.

Five
 
    â€œWhere are you taking me?” Fiona asked as she looked across the dark car at Ace. It had been only hours since she’d found Roy’s bloody body on top of her, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. After the shower—and cry—with Ace, she had, surprisingly, felt better. If angry and wanting to cut the head off the nearest person is better, that is. Once again, she was wearing Ace’s clothes, this time gray sweatpants and a thick green sweater that had the name of some Ivy League school embroidered over her left breast.
    In the time since the … finding, as she was calling it in her mind, Ace and Eric had done a lot of whispering. They seemed to agree on everything because they had done a lot of nodding and looking at Fiona as she sat on the edge of the boat and watched the moonlit water. As far as she couldtell, they seemed to think that she might throw herself overboard at any moment. But Fiona looked at the water and at the stars and tried to direct her mind to her real purpose in life: Kimberly. What was going on with her now? Fiona wondered. Who was handling her? Did her assistant Gerald send the maps to production or had he left them on the floor in the Saks bag?
    â€œYou ready?” Ace finally asked; he was treating her as though she were a mental case about to flip out again. What did she expect, right now he had every reason to think she was a murderer.
    When he’d finally shut off the shower, opened the door, and stepped out, he’d handed her a blanket, then