door behind her. It was silly to cry, but she did.
A cool bath made her feel better. She dressed in white slacks and a sleeveless, V-necked white blouse before she went back out again, in search of the little church.
If only she had someone to talk to, someone she could ask for advice. It would be better if she got on a plane and went home right now, before she got in over her head with Callaway Steel. Apparently he was having second thoughts of his own, because he wasn’t all that anxious to spend any more time with her. He’d actually seemed relieved when she suggested parting company.
She sighed, walking along the crowded sidewalk, oblivious to her surroundings. She must have really gotten to him with that remark about what pushed him, and it had been a wholly innocent one. She hadn’t meant to dig at him, but perhaps he was used to people who dealt in that brand of sophisticated knife turning.
That kind of loss would be hard to take, those two tragedies so close together. Perhaps he blamed himself. He wasn’t a man at peace with himself, nor a man who enjoyed life to any great degree. She suspected that if it hadn’t been for his businesses, he wouldn’t have made it through until now. The pressure of daily decision-making had probably saved his sanity.
But what kind of life was it? He’d admitted that it had been a long time since he’d slowed down enough to notice his surroundings, since he’d been able to smile. She was glad she could do that much for the tycoon. But it was the man who interested her, despite the gaping difference in lifestyles that separated them. She’d wanted very much to get to know him, and she knew now that wasn’t going to be possible. Callaway Steel preferred people at arm’s length, and that was where he planned to put Nikki, despite the closeness they’d shared last night. It must have been the moon and the rum, she thought sadly. Because in broad daylight, Cal had eyes only for the Steel companies.
She stopped at the door of the Christ Church Cathedral, her eyes riveted to the worn stone building with its windows that opened from the bottom and swung out, the courtyard with a black wrought iron fence and hibiscus blooming profusely inside it. It was the most beautiful church she’d ever seen, its history ancient and fascinating.
The interior had a sweeping grace of design, with high ceilings and ceiling fans, mahogany pews and white columns. The walls were lined with marble plaques in memory of deceased persons dating back far into the 1800s. One sad one read:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF LOUISA, WHO DIED 6TH JUNE, 1856, IN THE 25TH YEAR OF HER AGE.
Another marked the deaths of the crew of a British ship: crewmen aged sixteen through twenty-nine who succumbed to yellow fever in 1862. Besides the plaques there was an RAF Book of Remembrance listing the officers and men of the RAF who died in performance of their duties while stationed in the Bahamas during World War II from 1939 to 1945.
The silence inside the church was reverent, made more so by the memorabilia of those who had lived and died in the islands so long ago. Nikki wandered down the aisles between the pews, reading the markers, reflecting on what the lives of those people had been like, whether they had been happy or sad, what accomplishments they’d left behind them.
It was a reminder of how fleeting life was, and she remembered Leda, whose twenty-five years had ended so suddenly and so tragically. No one ever expected to die. Death came like a winter storm, so silently, so suddenly.
She clutched her purse tightly in her fingers, staring blankly toward the altar as she remembered, graphically, every minute of the flood she’d covered, Leda’s body, the frantic efforts of the rescue people to work around the clutter of reporters and cameras and microphones. It was reminiscent of another flood Nikki’s uncle had covered in the mountains, when a dam burst in a heavy rain and shot over a waterfall, killing a number of people, mostly children. That graphic coverage, and the vivid details that had been too horrific to print, had haunted her. The flood that claimed Leda had been added to the other one in her mind, and the combined memories had caused her some serious problems with her emotions.