LITMIR.BIZ

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tapped on his brother’s door. Granger opened it wearing a cream golf shirt and beige slacks that might have graced the pages of a fashion magazine. “What?” he asked as Rogan grinned.

      “Nothing.” Rogan himself wore his shabby khakis. Stuffing his tongue firmly in his cheek, he said, “You look very elegant.”

      “I wasn’t expecting to be playing charladies.”

      “I could lend you something—” not that he had much in the way of clothes with him, his diving gear taking up most of the space “—but you probably wouldn’t be seen dead in—” He came to an abrupt stop.

      Granger said smoothly, scarcely missing a beat, “Anything of yours, no.”

      “You don’t have to stay, you know. If you need to get back to work. Leave this to me.”

      Granger shook his head. “I’ll shoot off tomorrow and be in the office on Monday. Shall we go?”

      “Camille’s coming too,” Rogan told him.

      Closing the door behind them, Granger lifted his brows.

      “She volunteered,” Rogan said. “She’ll meet us downstairs.”

      They were waiting at the foot of the stairs when Camille came down, wearing sneakers and denim shorts with a pale yellow T-shirt. Watching her long legs descend toward them, Rogan swallowed hard, and noticed Granger too was staring with some interest, before he turned to Rogan to share a male moment.

      On the boat the men surveyed the chaos with identical expressions of masculine cluelessness in the face of a mammoth housekeeping chore.

      “Are there cleaning things on board?” Camille asked. And when they turned to her, “Brushes, cloths, detergents?”

      Rogan said vaguely, “There’s a cupboard opposite the head.”

      They worked for hours—stopping only briefly to have a drink, nibble on crackers that the vandals had surprisingly spared in the galley cupboards, or take short breathers on deck.

      Rogan somehow managed to control his breathing and his blood pressure whenever he caught sight of Camille’s curvy feminine behind stretching the fabric of her shorts as she bent to sift through the jumble on the floor, or when he couldn’t help noticing how pretty and perky her breasts were as she reached to replace a book on a railed shelf.

      When the daylight in the cabin began to dim, Rogan glanced at his watch. “Anyone hungry?” he asked.

      Granger straightened from his task of mopping the galley floor. “Now you mention it…”

      Rogan pulled off his sweat-dampened shirt and wiped his forehead with it, leaving a streak of something that might have been cocoa across the tanned skin. Camille dragged her gaze away as he lowered the shirt. “Shall we call it a day,” he suggested, “and go back to the hotel?”

      Camille said, “Couldn’t we finish tonight?” The main cabin was no longer strewn with foodstuffs, and the men had dealt with the gear and miscellaneous sacks and boxes that had cluttered the hold in the bow. Although the two sleeping cabins tucked into the sides and the larger one at the stern had been vandalised, they weren’t as bad.

      “Sure,” Rogan acquiesced, “but I need to eat.”

      Granger surveyed his brother, then himself, and finally Camille. The spilled condiments mixed with sauces, spreads and the water and detergent they’d used had left them all the worse for wear. “No decent establishment would have us,” he deduced. “We’ll have to buy hamburgers or something.”

      “You volunteering?” Rogan asked. “I’ll have a double burger with egg and bacon, and plenty of fries. And a couple of doughnuts.”

      With good grace Granger accepted the request and turned to Camille, who asked for a cheeseburger. “You’d better start the generator,” he advised Rogan, “so we can have some light.” Then, throwing his brother a quizzical glance, he ascended to the deck.

      Camille realized she and Rogan were alone. The cabin seemed small and increasingly dark, and he was gazing at her rather disconcertingly.

      She put a hand to her hair, smoothing several strands that had escaped from their elastic band to fall stickily across her eyes. Pulling the hair tie off, she gathered up the ponytail again and secured it.

      Rogan’s eyes glazed. He cleared his throat and said, “I’ll get that generator fired up.”

      He disappeared, and a few minutes later she heard and felt the throb of an engine. A light flickered on, and soon afterward Rogan came back.

      Camille was carefully wiping down an old copy of Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, handsomely bound in tooled leather. She glanced up. “Your father read The Three Musketeers in French?”

      “He was fluent in French,” Rogan said. “And a few other languages, including Pidgin.” He nodded at the book in her hands. “I struggled through that when I was a kid.”

      “You did?”

      “I’d already read it in English—but it was a challenge.”

      Camille could picture him welcoming physical challenges; it hadn’t occurred to her he might enjoy intellectual ones.

      She placed the book with others on a shelf. A lot of them seemed to be about disasters at sea. “You must have seen more of your father than I did of mine.”

      “He dropped by when he was in port—a couple of times a year—and took us sailing along the coast when we were old enough. My mother wouldn’t let him go out of sight of the land when we were on board.” Rogan laughed. “I stowed away once. I was fourteen, and when the old man found me he went ballistic. Turned right round and brought me back. He said if I ever did that to my mother again he’d flay the hide right off my backside.”

      Camille looked at him curiously. “Didn’t she mind that he spent so much time away from her?”

      “I guess she did. She went with him one time, before she had Granger and me, but she got so seasick they had to airlift her off before Dad could get her back to shore, because she was dangerously dehydrated. After that she couldn’t face a boat again. But Dad lived for the sea. On land he was a fish out of water. I don’t think she ever tried to change him.”

      “Is she…?”

      “She died,” Rogan said abruptly. “When I was nineteen.”

      “I’m sorry.”

      He looked down at the books still piled on the floor, waiting to be cleaned and replaced.

      Camille picked up a copy of Treasure Island. “I suppose you devoured this?”

      “You bet. And this.” He lifted another book and wiped the cover with his hand. “Coasts of Treachery by Eugene Grayland. Great yarns, full of mayhem and murder.” Meeting her level look, he added hastily, “I mean, very well written. Educational,” he told her. “You should read it.”

      “I have.” She read every New Zealand history book she could get her hands on—those aimed at a general audience as well as weighty, heavily referenced tomes and professional journals. “I’m a history lecturer.”

      “Is that right? Where?”

      His eyes were brilliant with interest and, Camille saw with satisfaction, respect. “At Rusden.” It was a small campus in the lower half of the North Island, a satellite of one of the larger universities.

      She couldn’t help noticing again what an unusual blue his eyes were, like the inner curve of an incoming breaker at certain blue-water beaches. And his mouth was quite beautiful in a masculine way, the curves well-defined, his lips firm but not thin. Catching a glimpse of white, straight teeth, she felt her blood thicken. Her own mouth softened and parted infinitesimally.

      Disturbed by a quick heat that made her legs weaken, Camille turned back

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