Desire on Deadline Read online

  He didn’t think she was scared anymore as calm overtook them. She closed her eyes, and her hair sprawled over the pillow as she nestled against him. But with his arms full of her curves, Alden realized how much turmoil had been unleashed in his heart.

  And he was terrified.

  ≈≈≈

  Roz’s eyes opened at the smell of coffee. Good coffee.

  They opened wider when she remembered where she was and in what condition: naked in Alden Knox’s bed.

  “Damn,” she muttered. It hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea last night. In fact, after that orgasm, the one that had crashed through her again and again, it had seemed like a very good idea indeed. And the way he’d held her afterward, close and tender, made her feel as if nothing else could touch her.

  But now the morning sun was spilling around the closed blinds, and she could hear him in the kitchen, and they were going to have to work together while working for competing newspapers. She’d agreed to that, too, in a moment of weakness.

  Then again, she’d almost been killed last night, and he’d saved her, and that moment was a powerful thing.

  Now all the fear and confusion came back to her, too, all the questions surrounding this nutty story — if the attempts on her life even had to do with the story, which she was starting to doubt.

  She found her shirt and panties and pulled them on. Her bra and jeans were in the living room. She needed to get home and change before she did anything.

  She snuck into the bathroom, then tried to make a quiet foray into the living room. But with no walls between it and the kitchen, it was kind of hard to be stealthy.

  “Good morning, Ms. Melander,” came the voice she was starting to know so well.

  She turned to face him, determined not to be embarrassed as she stood there in her underwear. “So we’re back to that, are we?”

  Alden was dressed, put together in khakis and a white shirt, his debonair hair still wet from a shower. His look of cool amusement morphed into something else as he took her in. He set down his coffee cup, covered the few steps between them, tipped up her chin and kissed her lightly.

  “Is that better?” he asked, his gray eyes like silver this morning.

  She felt her face burn, and a low fire kindled in her core. “Very nice,” she whispered, then whirled to grab her jeans and put them on.

  “You don’t have to rush,” he drawled. He moved back to the kitchen. “Coffee?”

  “Yes, please. And I think we do have to rush.” With pants on, she now struggled to don her bra while not fully removing her shirt. He watched, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, before setting up the brewer to make her a cup.

  Next came socks and shoes, which she donned while seated on the couch. Ugh. Day-old underwear and socks. She really wanted to go home and reset her morning.

  The coffee maker finished its work. Roz walked over and took the cup from Alden. She took a tentative sip and looked at him in wonder.

  Mocha.

  “Do you need ice?” he asked.

  “No — this is good.” Wow. He’d actually noticed what she ordered for coffee in the morning, when she thought he’d been flirting with Lily. Well, he probably had been flirting with Lily, but still. The drink warmed her in more ways than one.

  “Breakfast?” he asked.

  “No time.” The microwave clock said 8:15 a.m. “We need to get my car from downtown, and then I want to shower and change, and then we have to file a report at the station and get over to my interview in Naples, the one I told you about. If you still want to come,” she added, giving him an out.

  “Of course.”

  “OK, great,” she said, trying to sound convincing.

  Alden stared her down, taking another sip of coffee. “Shall I summon our driver?”

  Ten minutes later, Tony the Uber driver was back in Alden’s driveway, and they were on their way north to town through the cool morning, paging through the two papers that had been delivered to Alden’s doorstep: the Gazette and the Times. They shot each other glances as they read the stories, pretending they weren’t spying on each other. Finally, Roz got to the classifieds of her own paper and took a moment to glance over the personals.

  “Looking for someone?” Alden teased.

  “Old habit,” Roz said. “It’s kind of calming to see everyone desperately searching.”

  “We’re all alone together,” Alden agreed as they rolled into town and pulled up outside the Gazette.

  Funny, Roz thought. She’d never thought of Alden as philosophical.

  It was windy and cloudier than yesterday as a cold front pushed past Mimosa Key. Still, it was a pleasant day; cold fronts rarely had much of a bite here. Roz hopped out of the amateur cab, took a breath of the fresh air and quickly entered her car.

  Alden, however, took his time, making her plan to avoid the walk of shame almost impossible. He called out a boisterous “Good morning!” to her painfully prompt co-worker Bruce, who shot her a strange look as he walked up to the Gazette building. The business staff, of course, was already in there, probably staring out the window and wondering what was going on.

  “Are you trying to make things difficult?” Roz asked when Alden finally got into the car.

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  She couldn’t exactly accuse him of trying to get her fired. She was the boss. But her co-workers didn’t need to know everything about her personal life. Alden, as usual, was pulling her virtual pigtails.

  She drove to her rented bungalow, and they looked around for suspicious characters before exiting the car and going into the house. Roz invited Alden to sit in the living room while she took a shower and changed — conscious the entire time of his presence in the next room, with a tiny part of her wanting him to join her.

  But he didn’t. He was the essence of politeness. And then she started thinking, What’s so wrong with me? We have one night of hot almost-sex, and then he ignores me?

  This was why she hadn’t wanted to sleep with him: the second-guessing. The professional muddle. Unfortunately, scared and lonely in the middle of the night, facing mortality and tempted by his valiant, intoxicating presence, she’d gone to him. Or maybe not unfortunately. She hadn’t felt that way in — well, ever. And she hadn’t ever done anything like that after formally meeting a man just the day before. Though there was no denying that she’d been watching Alden for a month like a ravenous dog eyeing a steak she knows she’s really, really not supposed to take.

  Roz emerged from her bedroom in opaque charcoal leggings and a matching long, scoop-neck dress that fit her bodice and flared around her legs, with a slit that ran all the way up her thigh. Black boots and a long silver necklace and earrings completed the power outfit, which was concealing and provocative at the same time.

  “You look like a badass,” Alden said appreciatively as she picked up her bag. He put down the magazine he was reading and stood, almost twitching, as if he wanted to touch her and was holding himself back.

  A big part of her didn’t want him to hold himself back.

  She hefted the bag she’d packed in case she had to escape to a hotel. “Ready to go?” she asked, and he nodded.

  Next stop: the sheriff’s office downtown. Jimbo was out, to Roz’s chagrin, but Deputy Cinder agreed to take their report. With varying degrees of disbelief, scolding for not reporting the shooting earlier, and sympathy and alarm at the kidnapping attempt, she took down the details, including the first few letters of the license plate that Alden got.

  “When were you going to tell us about the boat?” Deputy Cinder asked Roz again, her voice severe.

  “I was worried reporting it might make me a target,” Roz said.

  “And we can see how that worked out.”

  “Take it easy,” Alden interrupted. “We’re telling you what we know so you can keep an eye out for whoever is targeting Roz.”

  “And why would anyone target you?” the deputy said, slightly less stern.


  “That’s what we’d like to find out,” Roz said.

  “I suggest you take precautions,” the deputy said. “Don’t go anywhere alone. Don’t put yourself in a vulnerable position. You might even engage one of the bodyguards from that security firm based at Casa Blanca. And don’t visit crime scenes without telling us first.” Roz nodded as she continued. “We’ll step up patrols and see what we can get out of the license plate, but this doesn’t give us a lot to go on. Does your office have security cameras?”

  “No,” Roz said, thinking that was one more amenity she couldn’t afford.

  “Consider getting them. And you,” Deputy Cinder said, turning to Alden, “don’t be a hero. Call the police.”

  “If you’re referring to last night, there wasn’t time,” he said.

  “You could have called us right afterward.”

  Roz spoke. “We had to sort some things out. Is that all, deputy? We have another appointment.”

  “You do, do you?” She looked from one of them to the other, obviously realizing that it was kind of unusual for reporters from two different papers to have an appointment together. “Anything we should know about?”

  “Gazette business,” Roz said impatiently.

  “You may go,” Deputy Cinder said, entertained by Roz’s exasperation. “But I have some information that might be of interest first.”

  Roz and Alden waited while the officer tapped through windows on her computer, then went over to another table to pull a piece of paper off the printer.

  She handed it to Roz. “Look familiar?”

  It was a report of a flaming husk of a boat coming ashore at Coconut Island. The description matched Roz’s missing Grady-White.

  “Where’s Coconut Island?” Alden asked, reading over her shoulder.

  “It’s basically a sand bar off Marco Island,” Roz said. “Boaters like to anchor there. Lots of wildlife. So, uh, it didn’t hurt anyone?”

  “Only your pocketbook, apparently,” Deputy Cinder said with her first real smile.

  Which was kind of mean, Roz thought. “So the boat is toast, and my camera really is lost. I thought, maybe, if I was lucky — ”

  “I think it’s safe to say that this week, ‘lucky’ is not among your attributes,” Alden said.

  “So I won’t buy any lottery tickets.” Roz tried to control her irritation. She turned to the deputy. “How did my boat get to be in, uh, that condition? Was it anything like the Boyd Bellamy accident?”

  “You mean, did it blow up?” the officer said. “Nothing so exciting. It appears it was deliberately torched, though the boaters who found it noted a few bullet holes.”

  “Fabulous,” Roz said with a grimace. “Thank you, Deputy Cinder. We’ll be in touch.”

  “As will we,” the officer said, still smiling as the pair left.

  “Was she serious about hiring a bodyguard?” Roz asked when they got outside. “That would drive me crazy. How would I be able to report anything? And is it just me, or does she seem to take a perverse pleasure in other people’s pain?”

  “Maybe she just hates journalists,” Alden said. “You really can’t blame her.”

  Roz chuckled as they walked toward her car. “You can’t blame people for hating you,” she said. “I, on the other hand, am a responsible reporter and all-around nice girl.”

  “Are you really?” Alden paused, leaned close and whispered in her ear. “You didn’t seem like a nice girl last night.”

  Heat shot through her, and her gaze snapped to his. A small smile played about his lips, those kissable lips, as if his teasing were inconsequential. But she saw the fire in his eyes.

  She swallowed and unlocked the car. “Let’s get over to Naples.”

  ≈≈≈

  Quentin Rodebaugh lived in an apartment above a garage attached to a beautifully restored Mediterranean Revival home in Old Naples, with a grand banyan tree and swishing coconut palms in the yard. Roz parked in the wide driveway outside the house, which glowed with a peach stucco exterior, white cast-iron railings and dark red roof tiles.

  She and Alden ascended the staircase outside the garage and knocked. They were answered by the yapping of a dog and a gruff, “Be quiet, Auggie.” After a moment, the door opened, revealing a stocky, sixty-something man with thin, flyaway white hair, a bristling gray beard and a not-so-gently-loved sweater of the same color. He wore it with jeans and tattered canvas sneakers. His rough red face had seen too much of the Florida sun, Roz thought, but his blue eyes were bright, and they lit up with his smile as he welcomed them in. At his feet, a dachshund yipped, let Roz pet him, sniffed Alden with suspicion and then cowered behind his master.

  “Very interesting subject you’re writing about, Ms. Melander,” said Quentin, leading them into his cluttered, bookcase-lined sitting room after the introductions. She saw Alden suppress a laugh at his formal use of her name.

  “Call me Roz,” she said, shooting Alden a quelling look. “I was hoping you might be able to help us.”

  “Of course. Sit down, won’t you?”

  Quentin sat in a comfy chintz chair that had a pink crocheted piece sewn into the back where his head would rest. Next to it, like most of the surfaces in the room, an end table was overflowing with books. Roz had to move a pile of books from the threadbare, flowery couch so she and Alden could both sit down, but the cushion was still crowded enough with pillows and magazines that he had to sit close to her. Or maybe he simply chose to sit that close to her. She tried to ignore the feel of his warm thigh against hers and focus on the task at hand. She pulled a notebook from her bag. Alden, she noticed, didn’t take out his digital recorder. He was letting her lead on this one.

  “I wanted to ask about unexploded bombs and whether there might be any in the gulf,” Roz said.

  Quentin laughed, and his little dog jumped onto his lap. “Oh, yes. Oh, my, yes. The gulf was quite a dumping ground after World War II, and not just American bombs. All kinds of UXOs — unexploded ordnance.”

  “How much are we talking about?” Alden asked.

  “Well, that’s the thing. No one really knows. The military doesn’t even know. But some pretty smart fellows have guessed there’s, say, thirty million pounds of it out there.”

  “All in the gulf?” Roz asked in disbelief as Alden grunted.

  “Oh, yes. There’s more off our other coastlines, but we have quite a bit of it in our beautiful gulf.”

  “But where is it? Is any of it nearby?”

  “Well, again, it’s hard to say just where it is,” Quentin said, stroking the back of his little dog, who closed his eyes and basked in the attention. “We know there are concentrations off the Texas and Louisiana coasts, but not all of it has been mapped. Much of it is, say, fifty miles out or more.”

  “So there wouldn’t be some about ten miles off Naples?” Roz asked.

  “I don’t see why there wouldn’t be,” the professor said in his jovial manner. “The stuff does move around. Authorities had to blow up a bomb found on the beach near Tampa last year. Besides, a lot of it was dumped in uncharted places, and if someone was feeling lazy one day, they might have decided to drop it just offshore.”

  “But why would they do that?” Roz asked. “Didn’t they know it was dangerous?”

  “They simply didn’t imagine anyone would be interacting with the sea floor.”

  “So they haven’t done this since World War II?” Alden asked.

  “Oh, my, no. The surpluses started after the war. Dumping didn’t stop until 1970.”

  “What?” Roz and Alden asked together.

  Perversely, Quentin laughed again. “I don’t know why you’re surprised. The sea is still, sadly, the world’s trash bin.” Auggie the dog rolled onto his back on Quentin’s lap and basked in more petting. “The practice is banned now, but it’s too late. The chemical weapons may be the worst. No doubt they’re leaking after years under the water. And then there are the land mines and the classic bombs.”

  “Classic
bombs?” Alden asked archly.

  “Well, you know, the large UXOs, two hundred fifty to a thousand pounds. Some of them are the size of refrigerators. You don’t want to catch that in your fishing net or run into them when you’re installing a new drilling platform.” Quentin chuckled as Roz wrote furiously.

  There was silence for a moment as she caught up. “You mentioned fishing nets. So a charter fishing boat might trigger one of these bombs?”

  “Well, I’m not much of a fisherman, but they don’t use the big nets, do they?” Quentin said.

  Alden shook his head. “Bait nets, if anything, and they barely dip below the surface.”

  “What about an anchor?” Roz asked. “Could that set off a bomb?”

  “Perhaps if you were especially unlucky,” the professor said. “Now if you were really cursed, your anchor might tangle with a large fishing net and pull one of those bombs to the surface, and then — well — ”

  “Boom,” Alden said. He and Roz exchanged a glance. Could the Consummate Catch boat have been that unlucky?

  They got a little more background from the professor, along with his bona fides and an exhaustive summary of the book he was writing about the home front in Florida during World War II, before leaving him and the snoozing Auggie.

  “He seemed pretty amused by the idea of blowing up,” Alden remarked after they got into her car.

  “I suppose life is a comedy or a tragedy,” Roz said, heading for a local taco place where they could grab lunch. “He chooses to view it as a comedy.”

  “Until his fishing boat runs into a World War II bomb the size of a refrigerator.”

  “Do you think that’s really possible?”

  “The anchor-fishing-net scenario?” Alden mused. “It’s not that much weirder than a fuel leak, now that we know there are millions of pounds of explosives out there.”

  “But with the lack of evidence,” Roz said, “we’ll probably never know for sure.”

  “Consummate Catch also does commercial fishing, right?”