Loving Evangeline Read online

  Evie resisted the urge to look at Robert, though she could feel his hard, glittering gaze on her several times. For the rest of her life she would remember the cold terror she’d felt when that man had shot at him and she had thought she would have to watch another man she loved die in front of her. The devastation she’d been feeling all day, bad as it was, paled in comparison to that horror. Robert didn’t want her, had used her, but at least he was alive. Reaction was setting in, and fine tremors were starting to ripple through her body.

  The mopping-up seemed to take forever, so long that her sopping clothes began to dry, as stiff as cardboard from the river water. The wounded man was placed in another boat and taken for further medical attention, with two agents in attendance. Mercer and the other man were taken away next, both of them handcuffed. There was a lot of maneuvering around the two wrecked boats as the salvaging continued. Gathering her strength, she took control of the boat she was in, while the driver added his efforts to the job. Finally, though, it all seemed to be winding down. Robert brought his boat alongside the one Evie was handling.

  “Are you all right?” he asked sharply.

  She didn’t look at him. “I’m fine.”

  He raised his voice. “Lee, get this boat. I’m taking Evie back to the marina.”

  Immediately the agent clambered back into the boat, and Evie relinquished her place behind the wheel. She didn’t want to go anywhere with Robert, however, and looked around for anyone else she knew.

  “Get in the boat,” he said, his voice steely, and rather than make a fool of herself, she did. There was no way to avoid him, if he was determined to force the issue. If he wanted to discuss private matters, then she would prefer that they were private when he did.

  Nothing was said on the ride back to the marina. The black boat moved like oiled silk over the choppy waves, but still every small bump jolted her head. She closed her eyes, trying to contain the nausea rising in her throat.

  As Robert throttled down to enter the marina, he glanced over at her and swore as he took in her closed eyes and pale, strained face. “Damn it, you are hurt!”

  Immediately she opened her eyes and stared resolutely ahead. “It’s just reaction.”

  Coming down off an adrenaline high could leave a person feeling weak and sick, so he accepted the explanation for now but made a mental note to keep an eye on her for a while.

  He idled the boat into his slip, and Evie climbed onto the dock before he could get out and assist her. True daughter of the river that she was, she automatically tied the lines to the hooks set in the wood, the habits of a lifetime taking precedence over her emotions. The boat secured, she turned without a word and headed toward the office.

  Burt was behind the counter when she entered, and a look of intense relief crossed his lined face, followed by surprise and then concern when he saw her condition. It went against his grain to ask personal questions, so the words came reluctantly out of his throat, as if he were forcing them. “Did the boat flip? Are you all right?”

  Two questions in a row from Burt? She needed to mark this date on her calendar. “I’m all right, just a little shaken up,” she said, wondering how many more times that day she would have to say those words. “The boat’s wrecked, though. Some guys are bringing it in.”

  Robert opened the door behind her, and Burt’s expression went full cycle, back to relief. “I’ll get back to the shop, then. How long do you reckon it’ll take ’em to get the boat here?”

  “About an hour,” Robert answered for her. “They’ll have to idle in.” He went to the soft-drink machine and fed in quarters, then pushed the button. With a clatter, the bottle rolled down into the slot, and he deftly popped off the top.

  “Well, don’t make no difference. I reckon I’ll stay until they get here.” Burt left the unnatural surroundings of the office and headed back to where he felt most comfortable, leaving the oily smell of grease behind.

  Evie walked behind the counter and sat down, wanting to put something between herself and Robert. It didn’t work, of course; he knew all the moves, all the stratagems. He came behind the counter, too, and propped himself against it with his long legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle.

  He held out the Coke. “Drink this. You’re a little shocky and need the sugar.”

  He was probably right. She shrugged and took the bottle, remembering another time when she’d been fished out of the water, and how he had insisted she drink very sweet coffee. The last thing she wanted to do was faint at his feet, so she tilted the bottle and drank.

  He watched until he was satisfied that she was going to follow his orders, then said, “Mercer was manager of my computer programming firm in Huntsville. We’ve been working on programs for the space station, as well as other things, and the programs are classified. They began turning up where they shouldn’t. We figured out that Mercer was the one who was stealing them, but we hadn’t managed to catch him at it, so we didn’t have any proof.”

  “So that’s what was in the tackle box,” she said, startled. “Not dope. Computer disks.”

  His dark eyebrows rose. “You thought he was a drug dealer?”

  “That seemed as plausible as anything. You can’t sneak up on anyone in the middle of the river. He must have been weighting the package and dropping it in a shallow spot between the islands, and the others were picking it up later.”

  “Exactly. But if you thought he was a drug dealer,” he said, his voice going dangerously smooth, “why in hell did you follow him today?”

  “The federal seizure law,” she replied simply. “He was in my boat. I could have lost everything. At the very least, he could have given the marina a bad reputation and driven away business.”

  And she would do anything to protect the marina, he thought furiously, including sell her house. Of course she hadn’t balked at following a man she suspected of being a drug dealer! She had been armed, but his blood ran cold at the thought of what could have happened. She had been outnumbered three to one. In all honesty, however, she had had the situation under control until the waves from his boat had washed them all together.

  “You could have killed yourself, deliberately ramming the boat like that.”

  “There wasn’t much speed involved,” she said. “And my boat was bigger. I was more afraid of the gas tanks exploding, but they’re in the rear, so I figured they’d be okay.”

  She hadn’t had time to consider all that, he thought; her reaction had been instantaneous and had nearly given him a heart attack. But a lifetime spent around boats had given her the knowledge needed to make such a judgment call. She hadn’t known that reinforcements were almost there, she had simply seen that one of them was about to escape, and she had stopped him. Robert didn’t know if she was courageous or foolhardy or both.

  She still hadn’t so much as glanced at him, and he knew he had his work cut out for him. Carefully choosing his words, he said, “I’ve been working with the FBI and some of my own surveillance people to set a trap for Mercer. I soured some deals he had made, put some financial pressure on him, to force him to make a move.”

  It didn’t take more explanation than that. Watching her face, he saw her sort through the implications and the nuances of what he had just said, and he knew the exact moment when she realized he had also suspected her. A blank shield descended over her features. “Just like you did with me,” she murmured. “You thought I was working with him, because he was using my boats, and because I’d been following him, trying to find out what he was doing.”

  “It didn’t take me long to decide that if you were involved at all, you probably didn’t realize what was going on. But you kept doing suspicious things, just enough that I didn’t dare relax my pressure on you.”

  “What sort of suspicious things?” she asked, a note of disbelief entering her flat tone.

  “Leaving the marina in the middle of the day to follow him. The day before yesterday, when you left the bank, you immediately stopped at a