Donovans - Pearl Cove Part 43

Honor looked at the grim weariness in Jake's eyes and wanted to cry. Instead, she smiled at him and put her arm around his waist. "Adrenaline overload?"

"Yeah." He hooked an arm around her shoulders. "Too much Seattle coffee will wire you every time."

"Jake," Archer said.

He looked away from Honor. "Yeah?"

"Thanks."

"What for? Hannah's the one who knocked you out of the line of fire."

Honor and Lianne both stiffened.

"I should have been the one with the shotgun," Archer said simply.

"Bulls.h.i.t. Haven't you figured it out yet?"

"What?"

"No one's Superman. Not even you."

Archer's laugh was as grim and weary as Jake's eyes. He went and brushed a kiss over Honor's cheek. "I knew you had a good man, sis. I just didn't know how good. Take care of him."

Honor let go of Jake long enough to give Archer a hard hug. "I love you."

He ran the tip of his finger down her nose. "I love you, too. Now get out of here before Summer wakes up and spoils your shower."

Honor waited long enough to give Kyle a hard hug and get one in return. Then she and Jake walked away, arms around each other, talking in low voices.

Watching with something close to envy, Hannah leaned wearily against the entry wall. She wondered if the wild hum of adrenaline in her blood would let her sleep before she fell down.

Archer turned to Lianne. The sight of his pet.i.te, fierce sister-in-law brought a gentle smile to his lips. "I owe you a big one, Lianne. Thanks."

"As Jake put it so succinctly bulls.h.i.t." She stepped close and hugged Archer. "I wish I could have done more. I hated being here, waiting. Listening. Waiting."

"On any operation, communications is the hardest job of all. I was lousy at it."

She glanced up at Archer. The black stubble on his face made him look harder than ever. "I can't imagine you sitting back and relaying messages."

"Like I said, I was lousy at it." He looked at Kyle over Lianne's dark hair.

"Next time," Kyle said bluntly, "I'm wearing the Kevlar and one of you is sitting on his thumb in the car."

"There won't be a next time."

"Does that mean you aren't going after Len's killer anymore?" Kyle's voice was pleasant, but his gold-green eyes were as hard as stone.

Hannah straightened and pushed away from the wall. "That's exactly what it means," she said, but it wasn't Kyle she spoke to. It was Archer. She had come too close to watching him die, watching and knowing that she had put him in the path of the bullets that killed him. "Whatever you thought you owed Len died with him. Take off that armor and go back to your family. Be... safe."

"What about you?" Archer asked evenly. "I'll sell my half of Pearl Cove to whoever wants it."

"Even if it's Ian Chang?"

"I don't care if it's Satan himself. It's over, Archer." He almost laughed. It wasn't that easy to get out of the game. It never was. "I'll write a check for your half of Pearl Cove."

"No." Her response was instant and certain.

"Why not?"

"People would believe you know the secret of making black rainbows. You'd be a target. Like Len."

"I have more friends than Len did."

Her chin came up and her mouth flattened. "I want you out of this, Archer. All the way out. I have to know that I didn't lead you to your death."

"I don't lead worth a d.a.m.n. Ask anyone. I'll pay you a million for Pearl Cove."

"I won't sell it to you at any price."

Archer's eyebrows rose. "Fine. Call Ian Chang. He'll buy your half."

"So he can kill you for your half? I'm stupid, Archer, but eventually I learn. I don't want you killed for a handful of b.l.o.o.d.y pearls."

"According to Yin, Chang isn't the problem."

"What?"

"Just before everything went from sugar to s.h.i.t, Yin told me he got the pearls from Christian Flynn."

For a moment Hannah's ears rang as though someone had just fired a shotgun ten feet from her head. "Christian? I don't believe it."

Archer could. He had seen Flynn move, felt the calluses along the edge of his palm. "Let's have a look at the pearls."

She glanced down at the box she still clutched in her hands. For the first time she realized that her fingers ached from their death grip on the cheap wood. She stared at the box. At that instant she hated black pearls and everything they stood for.

"Even if you put it all down the garbage disposal, nothing would change," Archer said, reading her expression accurately.

Hannah shuddered. He was right. But if the garbage disposal would have solved the problem, she would have shoved everything down it and smiled while steel ground incomparable black rainbows to dust.

"I need nonincandescent light and a table," she said thinly. "The breakfast nook's light is wrong."

The tight, edgy quality of her voice made Archer ache. "Sell out. Get out. You're too gentle for the game."

"The name of this game is survival. If I'm too gentle for it, I'll b.l.o.o.d.y well die."

"Hannah." Just that. Her name. It was all he could think of to say.

The line of her shoulders told him it didn't matter what he said. She wasn't going to budge.

"There's a suitable table in my your suite," she said, striding down the hall. "I think the light on the night table is fluorescent."

Archer knew it was. Silently he followed her, ignoring the sting from the cuts on his face and the dull aches where bullets had slammed into Kevlar, bruising the much more fragile flesh beneath the high-tech fibers. It was far harder to ignore the rain-wet silk plastered to Hannah's body in a way that told him she wore nothing beneath but skin. He wondered if it was the same beneath her jeans: bare, beautiful skin.

The adrenaline of battle shifted into a different kind of readiness, his body humming with heat and life. While she set up the lamp on the coffee table in the sitting room, he had time to think about how quickly she had dressed, how much she might have left behind. He shifted uncomfortably, wishing that Kevlar shorts stretched like regular underwear.

When she bent over to spread out the pearls, the black silk clung to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, outlining her erect nipples. A drop of water went from the ends of her dark hair to her neck, and from there to the soft, pale hollow of her throat.

Archer swallowed hard and looked away. He fought a brief, bitter battle for self-control. When he could no longer count his heartbeats in his crotch, he focused on the pearls Hannah had spread across the table. Without a sorting screen, he couldn't be certain, but they looked like they went from twelve to sixteen millimeters. There were at least two hundred of the iridescent black gems. Perhaps as many as three hundred.

Even if there had been only one third that number, he had made a h.e.l.l of a buy.

Stretching the thumb and index fingers of both hands as wide as she could, she gathered the pearls into a group and nudged them along the table, watching how they moved. Her hands were too small to corral all the pearls.

"Here." Archer knelt across from her and helped her to form a bigger rectangle around the pearls with his hands. "Better?"

The huskiness of his voice sent a flick of fire over Hannah's nerve endings. Not trusting herself to look at him, not knowing what she would do if she saw desire in his eyes, she said, "Roll them."

Together they eased their hands across the table, herding gleaming pearls within the rough rectangle their ringers created. She watched intently. There were no obvious culls, no pearls that lurched or staggered. She divided out one third of the gems.

"Roll those while I watch," she said.

Under Hannah's directions, Archer rolled and spun the pearls while she watched for any less-than-spherical gems. It would have been easier with the slanting table used in pearl-sorting rooms, but this way worked almost as well. Pearls had been sorted by hand long before slanted tables were used.

"Round," she said finally. "Not a wobbler in the lot. No obvious imperfections, but I'll check them individually. The orient is good. Excellent."

"So tell me. Did I buy the Black Trinity wrapped in a cheap rubber band?"

She bit her lip. She very much wanted these to be the Black Trinity, to have it over with. Finished.

She was very much afraid it wasn't.

"Do you want a loupe?" Archer asked.

"Do you have one?"

Instead of answering, he went in the bedroom. There he opened the belly drawer of his desk and pulled out the handy little magnifying gla.s.s jewelers used. Cleaning it on his flannel shirt, he went back to the living room.

Without looking away from the pearls, Hannah took the loupe. But she felt the casual touch of his fingers all the way to her toes. There was a fine trembling in her fingers when she opened the gla.s.s and put it to her eye.

Archer sat down to take off his wet shoes and socks. His jeans were also wet, but he didn't trust himself to take them off and not reach for her.

For a long time there was no sound but the soft click of pearls being picked up and returned to the table, one after the other. When Hannah was finally finished, she looked up. He was watching her with eyes that were patient and something more, something elemental. Hot. An answering heat snaked through her.

"Well?" he asked.

"No."

"You're certain?"

"Yes. These are the final culls, the ones that were replaced within the strands when more perfect color matches were discovered in each new harvest."

Archer looked down at the deeply iridescent, darkly mysterious pearls. He whistled softly. "These are culls?"

"Len's G.o.d was a demanding G.o.d. Perfection or h.e.l.l."

"So we're back where we started from," he said.

"Not quite."

"What do you mean?"

"These pearls were kept with the Black Trinity."

Archer went still. "You're sure?"

"As sure as I can be without knowing Len's hiding place. But I can't think he had more than one."

"For all his special pearls?"

She nodded.

"How many does he have?"

"Rainbow pearls?"

"Yes."

"Even after he ground up the less-than-perfect ones, there must have been at least a thousand left, plus the Black Trinity."

"A small hiding place, then. One that is within reach of a wheelchair and proof against professional searches and natural disasters like cyclones."

"I never thought of it that way, but... yes."

"That's why you called me, Hannah. To think like Len." His voice was cool and remote.

She watched his long finger gently rolling a pearl back and forth, back and forth. A stark memory ripped through her: a gun barrel poking out of the wall, pointing at Archer and the table where money was stacked like poker chips in a deadly game. There had been no time for her to think, to reason, to plan. There had only been the certainty of his death and her scream tearing her throat as she threw herself at him and knocked him aside.

Then the bullets thudding home, making him jerk against her as they lay tangled on the floor.

Abruptly Hannah stood and combed back her damp hair with fingers that shook. She wouldn't think of what had happened. She couldn't or she would scream again. Somehow she had to force herself to be as calm as he was, to accept that murder was as much a part of life as safety.

Yet when she looked at him, she ached with the emotions that were buried inside her, clawing to be free. His face was shadowed by black stubble and something much darker. His hands were big, hard, and very careful with the fragile pearls. His shoulders were straight despite the weariness that she had seen in his eyes. She wanted to go to him, touch him, kiss him, sink into him even as he sank into her, to forget everything but the heat and vitality of him; and she wanted it so much she could barely stand.

And she feared wanting him. She feared showing vulnerability to a man as hard as Len had been.

The sound Hannah made was small, but it brought Archer's head up sharply. He saw the wet silk painted to her body, saw her tight nipples and soft mouth, her indigo eyes as wild as any storm.

"Don't think about it," ht said quietly. "It's over. Everyone is safe."