Love Overboard - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,5

roost. God had sent him Stephanie Lowe.

“After you turn the wood down, you should probably try to snag some eyes,” Stephanie told Ace.

“That’s going to be tough. They’re hidden under all this scum.”

An hour later the ship was heading due east, pitching through open seas. The scum had been ladled off, and the fish eyes slopped in the broth, mercilessly bashing themselves against the side of the big metal pot while Ace hunted them down with his spoon. Sweat rolled in rivulets along Stephanie’s back and collected on her upper lip as she stood guard over her baking biscuits.

“Any problems?” Ivan called down. “Folks are getting hungry.”

“Tell them to keep their pants on. You can’t rush a gourmet feast like this,” Stephanie yelled over the sizzle of coffee splattering on the hot stove. She opened the oven door, whipped out a tray of biscuits, and dumped them in a bread basket lined with a red linen napkin. “Hardly burned at all,” she told Ace. “I don’t think we even have to scrape the black off the bottoms of this batch.”

Ace took time out of his fish-eye hunt to appreciate the biscuits.

“How many eyes have you got?” Stephanie asked.

Ace poked around in the cup sitting next to the stove. “Seven. Looks like I’m only missing one. You think we could have had a one-eyed fish?”

“You keep looking while I take the biscuits up.” She assembled a tray of chowder mugs, soup spoons, napkins, and tubs of butter, and set them on the roof of the midship cabin. She added baskets of biscuits and bowls of fresh fruit, and felt her lip curl involuntarily when Ace appeared with the tureen of fish stew.

“Are you going to eat this?” he asked in a whisper.

Eat it? Was he kidding? She’d inhaled enough fish stew to last her a lifetime.

Mrs. Pease got a peculiar expression on her face halfway through her lunch. She was short and round with dimpled elbows and dimpled knees and short curly white hair. She slid her glasses low on her nose and squinted into her soup. “There’s something staring at me in here.”

Her husband looked over her shoulder. “I don’t see anything.”

“Right there.” She pointed with her spoon. “It’s a little bitty eyeball.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “What would an eyeball be doing in your soup?”

Ace jumped to Mrs. Pease’s side and dipped his spoon into her mug. “Okay, where is it? Where’s this eyeball from outer space?” He held the spoon an inch from his nose and studied its contents. “That’s not an eyeball. That’s a black-eyed pea.” He fired the object off his spoon slingshot style, and a seagull caught it in midair. “Seagulls love black-eyed peas,” he told Mrs. Pease. He looked at Stephanie and mouthed the word “eight.”

Stephanie took a biscuit and avoided looking in Ivan’s direction.

“Our captain is staring,” Ace said. “You think he knows it was an eyeball?”

“Not a chance.”

“He looks intense,” Ace said. “I’ve only seen him look like that one time before. It was when Andy Newfarmer’s dog lifted his leg on Ivan’s new all-weather boots, and Ivan was in them.”

Stephanie nibbled on the biscuit. “What’s Ivan like? Have you known him long?”

“Ivan’s first-class. Comes from an old seafaring family. His grandfather and great- grandfather were captains of coasting schooners, and people tell me Ivan’s a descendant of Red Rasmussen, the pirate. Supposedly, Ivan’s house, Haben, is haunted by the ghost of Red’s widow. Lucy said Ivan sold the house this summer.”

Great, Stephanie thought, I bought a haunted house. Another point of interest the real estate lady failed to mention.

A gust of wind rattled the sails, Ivan spun the wheel, the ship leaned into the wind and surged ahead, and Stephanie found herself watching Ivan, trying to sort through a mixture of uncomfortable emotions. As much as she hated to admit it, he was awesome. He stood in calm control with a suggestion of suppressed power in his wide stance and steady hand. His beard hugged the angle of his jaw, making him look like the perfect captain for a ship named Savage. He was a man who felt comfortable with authority and inspired confidence. An hour ago she wouldn’t have trusted him to change the kitty litter, and now she was trapped on a little wooden boat, bobbing around in a huge ocean, counting on Ivan to keep her safe. And she was sure he would. Stephanie thought he looked very fierce and wondered if he could also be gentle.

Their gazes locked,