Drowning Tides. Karen Harper

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      Darcy shrugged off Claire’s touch and held Jilly tight. Lexi came in, hands on hips and tears on her cheeks. “She’s not happy for us, Mommy! She’s mad at me and you too!”

      All four of them sat at the table and cried. Claire hated Clayton Ames even more right now. She made her vow to herself again: she’d do everything she could to help Nick ruin Clayton Ames, if they could find a way—and a way to stay alive.

      * * *

      Jace was glad to see his flying bud, Alex “Ace” Rutherford waiting for him when he taxied Ace’s Cirrus SR22 into a back lot hanger at the Naples Municipal Airport. Ace had married money and also had a cabin cruiser and a house in Grey Oaks, a ritzy, gated clubhouse community in Naples. He worked in stocks and bonds for his father-in-law, though he always said he’d rather be fishing.

      “Hey, my man,” Ace called out as soon as Jace popped the door, “at least you brought my baby back in one piece.”

      At least, Jace’s thoughts echoed, Claire and Nick had brought my baby back in one piece. Ames had assured him they had taken off from Grand Cayman just this morning. When he’d texted Claire, she’d texted back to say they were okay and not much else except to say thanks for the backup help and stay safe. That’s a joke, he thought. He’d nearly gotten himself killed.

      “Hope you didn’t doubt me,” Jace told his friend, but he doubted himself. Not that he’d had a choice, but he’d agreed to work for the man who had ordered his daughter abducted, who had evidently set it up for Nick and Claire to get hitched. And if Lexi hadn’t been kidnapped, he wouldn’t be so sure that they weren’t in on that.

      “Doubt you? No way,” Ace said. “Not after we were such a success with ‘The Ace and Jace Show’ that bombed the hell out of the Taliban. No problems down or back?” he asked, clapping him on the shoulder after Jace climbed down onto the concrete hangar floor. “You look like you haven’t slept. You okay, guy?”

      “Sure, sure. Your new toy handled great. Hey, I got a new gig from a high roller I met down in the Caymans. Going to fly his new Learjet that will be delivered here in a couple of days. The damn thing’s worth about sixty-five million.”

      “Sweet! He got a company here? Would I or ‘Daddy Dearest’ know him?”

      “He’s an expat, lives down there but needs people flown around from here sometimes.”

      Ace cocked his head and squinted at him. “No lie? Thought you loved the international airline gigs and were set on making pilot’s chair.”

      “I’ll be more my own boss this way,” he told Ace as they watched the mechanic who oversaw private planes walk in to check out the Cirrus.

      But, Jace thought, as Ace went over to talk to the guy, that was a lie. He’d put himself under Kilcorse-Ames’s very tight thumb to save himself. There were perks to the job, but sky-high risk too with very little leeway about taking orders from the top. He’d be flying Ames High, Inc.’s staff here and there on call as well as keeping a close eye on the murder case Ames said Nick would be taking. And he’d sworn to keep an eye on Claire and Nick—which galled him to no end, especially since that’s exactly what he wanted to do.

      Though he had the perfect excuse to drop in on them to see Lexi, he hated being another of K-A’s spies. Still, Claire had betrayed him, maybe not to marry Markwood if she was forced to in order to save Lexi, but to get involved in the first place with that too-clever criminal lawyer. Jace wasn’t even sure he’d take Claire back if Markwood dumped her, or, as K-A had hinted, if something bad happened to him. The fact that Markwood took on the man’s murder case provided at least temporary life insurance for him.

      But what K-A didn’t figure on was that Jace was big on paybacks.

      * * *

      “Your eyes are red,” Nick observed when he picked Claire up at Darcy’s in yet another rented car, this time a Jeep Cherokee. “Did your sister take it hard?”

      “Very. Her little girl, just Lexi’s age, did too.”

      “But she said she’d keep Lexi for a little while?”

      “We all cried, then made a tenuous truce. Nick,” she said as she closed the car door, “I knew it would really hurt her that I more or less eloped. But what Ames is planning to do is dangerous to know, so I couldn’t tell her any of that. So where are we going that Lexi couldn’t come along? To meet with your endangered species friend Haze?”

      “I’ll take you to meet him as soon as I can figure out a battle plan. Time’s a-wasting since the police may arrest him soon. But first, I wanted you to see a place I think we can live. I didn’t want Lexi falling in love with it first, so you can hear me out and decide. You said Jace borrowed his wealthy friend’s jet to come down to Grand Cayman. Well, this is a yacht that belongs to a friend of mine who has been after me to return a favor I did for him. That, and Lexi saying she loves boats, made me think of it.”

      “A yacht? He must owe you a big favor.”

      “I saved his life—or life without parole—by proving he didn’t murder a woman on this boat. A woman who wasn’t his wife. I established she was trying to shake him down, that he wasn’t having an affair with her and that someone else came on board and killed her before he even got there.”

      “I remember that in the papers, and on Nancy Grace’s TV show too. She always digs up sensational stuff like that—screwed-up lifestyles of the rich and famous. So you’re going to show me a yacht where a murder took place?”

      “True, but once you see it, you’ll forget about that. He hasn’t used it much since. He and his wife are still barely speaking. It’s a beautiful boat with six cabins and a small back deck pool, no less. It’s been just sitting at a marina in Naples Bay.”

      “It would give us freedom to move around and keep strangers out, at least until you—we—work on this so-called Mangrove Murder. Lexi doesn’t start preschool until the New Year. Maybe she’d see it as a vacation.”

      “We’ll tell her it’s an extended honeymoon. However hard we have to buckle down,” he said, reaching out to take her hand from her lap, “maybe it can be that.”

      * * *

      As Claire stood on the dock, she thought the Sylph looked like a floating palace. Sleek lines, pale gray-and-white hull. It had a Jacuzzi as well as a small pool. She could see that much from where they stood on the dock, so what must it be like inside? She could tell that its owner Dylan Carnahan was excited to have Nick use it for a while, at least. But it had stunned her to hear the man call the yacht his “twenty-million-dollar baby.”

      Dylan was about Nick’s age and almost as tall. He had much lighter hair and seemed to have a—well, a jumpy, nervous persona.

      “I owe you everything, pal,” Dylan told Nick after they were all introduced where he greeted them on the dock. The man was very talkative. Sometimes that meant a person was hiding something, but this man actually seemed lonely. “I’m happy to hear you have a ready-made family, and the Sylph’s all yours for a while,” he went on. “I’m gonna probably sell it, but not yet. Despite everything, it’s hard to let her go. I’ll get you a crew too, as it only has a captain and cook right now. I’d love to have her go out again. She doesn’t deserve her bum rap. You know what a ‘sylph’ is, Claire?”

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