High Tide Read online

  “You don’t remember anything about golden lions in any of the stories?” he asked, and his tone said that she was a moron for not remembering something so important.

  “Don’t start on me,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “You grew up in this swamp, on the site of the map, so why didn’t you find the nails and the lions when you were a kid?”

  “Actually, I did.”

  That statement stopped Fiona in her tracks, but Ace reached back, grabbed her arm, and pulled her forward. “Please don’t make a scene,” he said quietly. “Do you want the others to know?”

  “Know what?” she asked, and there was a hysterical tone beginning in her voice. “Know that you, not me, have known everything all along?”

  “If you start playing female on me, I won’t tell you anything.”

  “Me play female?” She pursed her mouth, ready to hit him with something. “ ‘Oh, Ace, darling, I can’t lift this feather, and it’s hurting my teeny tiny ankles,’” she mimicked Lisa.

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

  “As jealous of her as you are of Jeremy,” she snapped back at him.

  “Then that’s quite a lot,” Ace said softly, and looked at her from under his eyelashes.

  In spite of herself, Fiona’s breath caught in her throat, and when she nearly tripped over a fallen log, Ace put his hand under her elbow to steady her.

  “Still mad at me for not telling you that my family is fabulously wealthy and that I can easily afford to manufacture your swamp doll and set you up in your own toy plant so you can run it the way you want and never again have to worry that some jerk will fire you?”

  At that overlong sentence, without a pause in it, Fiona had to laugh. “When you put it that way, it’s not such a bad idea. Maybe I could stand it. But …” Hesitating, she looked away for a moment, then back at him. “But what about … about …”

  “Lisa?”

  “You are going to marry her, remember?”

  “When you snooped through my house at the park entrance, didn’t you wonder why her picture was under the bed?”

  “I didn’t—Okay, so maybe I did look and maybe I did wonder, but you’ve confessed undying love for her since I met you.”

  “I was lonely, I went back to my parents’ place for a month-long visit, and Lisa was there. We had a great time, what can I say? I thought I wanted to spend my life with her. But when I got home, back to here …” He motioned his hand to include the swamp and the constant barrage of wildlife around them. “I knew that she wouldn’t, couldn’t, fit in. I was planning to break it to her gently, but …” He shrugged.

  “But I came along and broke your crocodile, then woke up with a dead man on top of me and—”

  “Alligator,” he said.

  Fiona gave him a brilliant smile. “I know, but does Lisa?”

  Ace kept his eyes straight ahead, then lowered his voice. “I think maybe Lisa has found something she likes more than Montgomery money.”

  When Fiona gave a puzzled frown, Ace nodded over his shoulder and Fiona looked backward. Their little line of people was paired off as though they were entering Noah’s ark. Suzie and Gibby were head to head, whispering urgently to each other, while Lisa and Jeremy were …

  Fiona looked back at Ace in wonder. “I guess they’ve spent a lot of time together in the last week or so.”

  “Seems so,” he said, eyes straight ahead, but Fiona saw the tiniest bit of a smile about his lips. His beautiful lips, she thought.

  Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she took a deep breath to try to calm herself down. “So it looks like your wedding is off,” she said after a while, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “And yours too,” Ace said with so much little-boy eagerness that Fiona laughed again.

  For a moment they walked in silence; then suddenly, Ace tripped over a piece of wet ground and fell against a hard-barked palm tree. And when he fell, he took Fiona with him, so that they landed in a tumble of long legs and arms. And, somehow, his mouth found hers, and he kissed her for several long, delicious seconds before the others came running.

  “Are you all right?” Lisa half screamed. “Oh, Ace, darling, I’d just die if anything happened to you.”

  Sitting on the ground, Fiona looked up, shading her eyes against the sun, and saw that Jeremy’s hands were made into fists at his sides. “We are fine,” she said with emphasis. “Just tripped over a snake.”

  “At least it wasn’t another dead body,” Suzie said, standing in the background near Gibby, and Fiona wondered what it was that they had been talking about with so much intensity.

  “Now that everyone is stopped, maybe we should camp tonight,” Gibby said, looking hard at Ace. “Unless you want us to circle around some more.”

  “Circle?” Lisa said quickly. “What does he mean, Ace, honey? You aren’t leading us in a circle, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Ace said, but Fiona could see that he wasn’t looking anyone in the eye. “Gibby just means to ‘ circle the wagons,’ that sort of thing, don’t you, old man?”

  “Sure thing,” Gibby said, but his eyes never left Ace’s.

  Ace got up off the ground, then hefted his backpack. “I brought fishing gear. Gibby, you get some bait, and you, lawyer, get the kerosene stove working. Suze, you know how to fish?”

  “I can do most anything, including following a map,” she said, looking at Ace with cold eyes.

  “I guess we know what they were talking about,” Fiona said into Ace’s ear as she got up to stand beside him.

  “Go away,” he said to her, under his breath, and for a moment Fiona thought he meant he wanted her to get away from him. But then she figured out what he wanted.

  “Suzie,” Fiona said brightly, “I’ll help you fish just as soon as I, uh, take a trip into the bushes.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Lisa said in that age-old belief that women should go to the powder room together.

  Turning to pick up his pack from the ground, Ace looked up at Fiona and gave her a barely perceptible shake of his head.

  “ ’Scuse me,” Fiona said, as lightly as she could manage, “but the absence of stalls makes me crave privacy.”

  Lisa blinked for a moment at that, then gave a little giggle. “Oh, sure. I understand. You aren’t going to escape, are you?”

  “I didn’t know that I was considered a prisoner,” Fiona said, aghast. The woman really was too much.

  “Oh, yes. It’s all over the news. The police want you very much. They think you—”

  Jeremy took Lisa’s arm in his. “She knows that. She just—”

  With a swiftness that surprised all of them, Ace knocked Jeremy’s hand off Lisa’s arm. “If you want to keep that hand, lawyer, keep it off my woman!”

  When everyone’s attention was on Ace, Fiona slipped through the bushes unnoticed.

  Ten minutes later she was still hidden from the group and still waiting. Where is he? she thought. Had she misunderstood him? Maybe he hadn’t meant for her to meet him alone? Maybe he was … Maybe he’d been so overcome with jealousy over Jeremy’s touching “his” woman that Ace was now in a brawl to the death with Jeremy, and maybe Ace would never show up. And maybe Ace had been lying about—

  When Ace touched her arm, Fiona nearly jumped out of her skin. To keep her from making a sound, Ace put his mouth on hers.

  “Do you always talk to yourself?” he whispered against her lips.

  “Your woman?” she said with more venom than she meant. In truth, she hadn’t meant to say anything about Lisa. Jealousy was unbecoming to a woman of her caliber. “Your woman?”

  Ace laughed, then grabbed her hand and started pulling her through the brush. “I’ve given them so much to do that I figure we have thirty minutes before they miss us,” he said as he adjusted the heavy pack on his back.

  Fiona pulled back on his hand, as though she were reluctant to follow him. “Sure you don’t want Lisa to go with you? Wherever we’re going, that i