High Tide by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page A

he regretted something.
    â€œBut that’s good,” she said, leaning a bit forward and for the first time thinking that there might be a person inside the teddy bear body.
    â€œNot every person in this world thinks that success is everything, Miss Burkenhalter,” Ace said loudly.
    â€œNo one asked you,” she fairly hissed at him, then turned back to Roy. But Ace’s interruption had broken the man’s mood.
    â€œNow, now, don’t you two spat,” Roy said, his face once again looking as though he wanted to throw a party. “Why don’t you two tell me about yourselves? What have you done since you were kids?”
    The last thing Fiona wanted to do was stay up all night telling Roy and the scowling raven across from her all about her uneventful childhood. Besides, she’d had no sleep for acouple of days now, plus a great deal to drink, not to mention a stint in a Fort Lauderdale police station and …
    When she stood up, she staggered a bit in fatigue. “Is there a place to sleep on this boat, or do we jump in the mouth of the nearest whale?”
    â€œI swear you’re a lot like—” Roy broke off, then smiled. “You’re a lot like a friend I used to know.” Standing, he took her arm and looked at her in a way that made Fiona hope that he wasn’t going to bury his face in her chest. She didn’t think she’d have the strength to fight him off.
    Still stumbling, she followed him into the back of the smelly old boat, and when he showed her two sets of bunk beds, she didn’t think about the lack of privacy, she just fell into the nearest one and went to sleep, a smile on her face because she thought that the worst day of her life was finally over.
    She was very, very wrong.

Four
 
    Fiona had had the dream before. She was suffocating as she was being held down by something huge. But in the past she’d awakened to find that it was just the covers wrapped too tightly about her. And once when she was staying at Diane’s house, she awakened to find herself underneath the family’s Irish setter. “You’re sleeping in his bed,” Diane had said without the merest trace of humor.
    So now Fiona was reluctant to wake fully. Her head hurt, and she was tired beyond description, so she didn’t want to wake up. “Go away,” she said and tried to elbow whatever was on her off. But the big thing didn’t move, and she found that it was so heavy that she couldn’t move. Also, there was something warm on her stomach. “If that damned dog haspeed on me …” she muttered, then gave a good sharp kick, but the thing was too big to allow her to move.
    It took her a moment, but she began to wake more fully, and it slowly dawned on her that it was a
man
on top of her. As her mind began to clear, she remembered where she was (the smell brought that memory back), so she knew that the big man motionless on top of her had to be Roy.
    â€œListen, mister,” she said as she pushed against him. “I may be here at your request, but that doesn’t mean—” She kept pushing, but the man wasn’t moving. “He’s passed out,” she whispered. “All three hundred pounds of him has passed out on top of me.” And worse, she was definitely getting wetter around the middle. “An incontinent drunk!” she hissed, then tried to get her legs up so she could use her larger muscles to push against him. Her personal trainer said she had great quads. “So let’s use those babies,” she said, then braced her hands against the sides of the bed to get a good grip in preparation for the push, but her hand grasped something cold and wet.
    â€œCan’t a man even sleep,” came a voice she had heard too often in the last few days. In the next moment the room was flooded by an overhead light, and she looked over Roy’s big body on top of her into Ace’s handsome