But it had happened. Oh, it had. And she was becoming weary of carrying on the charade all alone.

The restaurant they’d chosen, of the many that lined the only highway on the island, was called Teach’s Pub, a reference, Tom told her, to the notorious pirate Blackbeard, who’d supposedly been killed somewhere near here. A casual, friendly and well-lit place, it was busy on a Saturday night even in the off-season, with people calling out to each other and a basketball game going on a big-screen TV. The smells of good things cooking made Jane feel a little faint.

“Okay?” Tom asked her as they were settled at a table, with menus spread in front of them and a promise of coffee to come.

Already hungrily poring over the menu, Jane wasn’t sure whether he was asking after her own well-being, or for her approval of the table. She looked up, smiling vaguely, and nodded-and found that he was meeting her eyes for the first time since they’d left the back of the moving van. Her heart shuddered and began to pound.

Okay? No, she wanted to say, of course I’m not okay. You idiot. You jerk. You dropped a hand grenade into my life, and I will never be the same.

“I wonder if they have she-crab soup here,” she murmured, diving back into the menu.

They didn’t, of course, so she ordered clam chowder instead.

“Is that all?” Tom asked her while the waitress hovered. “I promised you a seafood dinner.”

“You bet me a seafood dinner,” Jane said with a small smile. “And I was smart enough not to take you up on it. If I had, I guess I’d owe you one, wouldn’t I? Anyway,” she added, with a wider smile for the waitress as she handed back the menu, “I only have room for so much, no matter how empty I am to start with.”

Tom ordered a medium-rare steak and French fries. “I’m not big on seafood,” he explained in response to Jane’s raised eyebrows. “Never have been,”

“Funny,” she said thoughtfully as she watched the waitress walk away with the menus tucked under her arm, “that you live on a boat.”

“I wasn’t after the fishing.” She looked at him, drawn by the growl in his voice, and found that he was staring fiercely out the window now, at the jumble of umbrella tables on the deserted deck. “I was looking for a particular life-style, is all. Simple. Uncomplicated. Uncluttered.”

“Solitary,” murmured Jane.

His eyes flicked at her. He shifted uncomfortably as he reached for his cigarettes, looking around for No Smoking signs. Jane slid the table’s ashtray over to his side, saying nothing. After he’d lit his cigarette and smoked in silence for a few minutes, he transferred that passionate glare to her and said in a cracking voice that might have been blamed on the smoke, “My wife had died.”

Having already guessed as much, she only nodded and said softly, “You wanted to get away from the memories.”

He didn’t reply. The waitress bustled by, dropping a basket of rolls on their table in passing. Jane took one and buttered it, bit into it with a sigh. Tom smoked on in silence. Intensely aware of him, Jane chewed and swallowed, discovering only then that her throat already had a lump in it. Damn him, she thought, furious. Damn him.

She looked away, her eyes pricking with the tears she couldn’t allow herself to shed. She wondered if he’d done it deliberately, picking a time and place for such revelations when emotions could not be allowed to run rampant.

Almost as if he’d heard her thoughts, he broke that charged silence with a cough and said, “About what happened-” Jane made a reflexive motion of protest, which he overrode by increasing the intensity, not the volume, of his voice “-between us, back there…”

“It’s okay,” said Jane faintly. “I understand.” Is it better, she bleakly wondered, or worse, talking about it like this, in a crowded, well-lit place? If we were somewhere in private, would I fall apart? Make a fool of myself? Again?

Blessedly, the waitress arrived with coffee just then. Jane doctored hers with artificial sweetener and creamer and made a neat pile of the trash, conscious all the while of Tom’s brooding presence across the table, and of his expression, black as the brew steaming unheeded before him. She wondered how she would swallow past the lump that was still wedged in her throat, and whether her hand would shake when she lifted her mug.

“I don’t-” he said, just as she began, “I know-” And it was she who paused and said politely, “Go ahead.”

He looked at her for a moment, and she thought she’d never seen eyes so intense. Then he smiled unexpectedly, his mouth slipping awry in that poignant and so familiar way of his, and he shrugged and said, “That’s just it-I don’t know what to say.”

Jane laughed. Unevenly. I don’t dare pick up my coffee, she thought. My hands will shake and I will spill it for sure. Lightly, she said, “It’s okay, really. I know what you were trying to do. And congratulations-it worked very well. I didn’t get seasick”

He shifted in his chair. “Well, I think there was more to it than that.”

She couldn’t for the life of her think what to reply. It would have been easier, she thought, if he’d just shrugged off what had happened between them in the van, made nothing of it. Pretended it hadn’t mattered. And then, perhaps, she could have done the same.

Heat engulfed her, setting her cheeks on fire. Don’t do this, she pleaded silently. Don’t do this to me.

“I think I got a little carried away,” he said, lopsidedly smiling.

“1 think we both did.” Jane lifted her mug and, supporting it with both hands, lowered her mouth to the rim. She closed her eyes as fragrant steam misted her hot cheeks and sweet warmth filled her insides, and thought that from now on, as long as she lived, she would always remember this particular cup of coffee. Just as she remembered the piece of cherry pie that had been sitting before her when she’d uttered the words, “David, I don’t want to be married to you anymore.”

She lowered her cup and smiled brilliantly at the man across the table. “No big deal. Completely understandable, under the circumstances. I consider my honor unsullied, and I promise not to cringe and blush every time I look at you.” At least, I hope I won’t. Oh, God, I hope.

“I sure wouldn’t want that.” And studying her, he added with unexpected and devastating softness, “I’d really miss your smile.”

“Here you go,” the waitress trilled, blowing in like a nor’easter, dispersing the sultry, weighted atmosphere that had settled over them with gusts of good cheer and wonderful fragrances. And as she briskly deposited plates and bowls in their proper places and left them with instructions to “Enjoy your meal!,” Jane thought what a relief it was, for a time, to have to deal only with a hunger so uncomplicated, and so easily assuaged.

After the waitress left, for a while they did just that, other needs put aside while they attended with silent concentration to one perhaps even more fundamental. Perhaps. Because, with an empty bowl and a full stomach, Jane found her thoughts returning to-if indeed they’d ever really left-that other hunger, the one so rudely, so voraciously awakened by the gentle press of this stranger’s mouth on hers. By the weight and warmth of his body, the electrifying caress of his fingers. The hunger that, once awakened, stubbornly refused to creep back into hibernation.

Tom Hawkins… Always a fast eater, having disposed of her bowl of chowder while her companion was barely beginning his assault on his steak, she watched him narrowly through the steam from her refilled coffee cup and thought how strange it was that features so forbidding and irregular should have become, in so short a time, so pleasing to her eyes.

Man From Interpol… How alien that sounded, without reality, like the title of a book, or a movie. And how impossible now to think of him that way. Now he was just…a man, a flesh-and-blood man, in need of a shave, a shower and a good night’s sleep, a man who had covered her with his jacket and watched over her while she slept, a man whose hands had touched her in intimate places, a man whose tongue she’d tasted.

A man who played games in which the stakes were human lives.

How could this have happened? she thought. To me.

“I think,” said Hawk, pushing aside his plate and reaching for his coffee, “we’d better talk about what we’re going to do.” He felt much better for having a decent meal under his belt, much less off balance, much more in control. A good night’s sleep, he thought with dogged optimism, and I’ll be back on track again.

Jane was nodding, regarding him steadily, as she had been for a while now, across the rim of her coffee mug. She’d been hiding behind that damn mug, it seemed to him, ever since they’d sat down. Which was probably just as well. Her eyes were bad enough, dark and disturbing as the sea just before a storm, but vulnerable, too, and smudged with shadows. He wasn’t sure that in his own exhausted state he would have been able to look at her mouth and have the willpower and concentration to block out the way it had felt…tasted… Or to stop himself from thinking about how much he wanted to taste her again.

He lit a cigarette, then said, “I still don’t think there’s much use trying to get back to the mainland tonight. It would take us till morning to get anything accomplished anyway. Better we check into a motel here, get some rest I’ve, uh, arranged for a flight out in the morning.”

She’d been nodding, going along with him, but when he said that, she pulled up, looking surprised. “A flight? You mean, an airplane?”

“Yeah, there’s an airstrip here.”

“Air…strip. You mean, a small plane.”

He quirked a smile at her. “Little one.”

She murmured, “Oh,” and her eyes flicked sideways in a way that made him uneasy.