His features were clean and straight, his sea-green eyes so dark that when she gazed into them she swore she could hear things that went bump in the night.
He took in her styled blond hair, miniskirt and designer top and smiled briefly. “I’m where I have to be, princess.”
Meg turned up her nose and pretended interest in the worm.
Spencer pulled a laboratory manual out of his satchel. A folded square of paper came out with it and slid across the table. From the corner of her eye, Meg saw it coming and stopped it with her hand. She recognized the pale greens and blues and dotted curving lines of a navigation chart.
“Are you into boating?” she asked, sliding it back. “My dad has a cabin cruiser. We go over to Port Townsend all the time.”
“I have a kayak.”
For a second she thought he was being apologetic. But the look that accompanied his words withered that notion and made her cheeks flush. Spencer Valiella was not impressed by clothes or looks or wealth. Meg had brains, too, but she doubted he was interested enough to find out.
He tucked the chart back into his satchel and leaned closer to her microscope. “What have you got there—a polychaete?”
He seemed oblivious to the fact that his knee was now touching hers. She found it hard to focus on anything but the heat generated by the point of contact. Or the wild clean scent of salt air on his skin. “I’m almost finished the ID,” she said without looking up. “You can have the worm when I’m done.”
With a flick of his finger, Spencer turned the worm onto its dorsal surface. “Abarenicola pacifica.”
Meg blinked. It had taken her twenty minutes just to get the family name. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“How many segments is it supposed to have?”
“Twenty,” he said, sounding bored. “Three pairs of branched gills containing hemoglobin on the anterior segment.”
“Wait a minute.” She flipped through the pages of the identification key to the species’ descriptions. “You’re right.”
Meg wrote the name in her notebook beside her pencil illustration of the worm. “Thanks,” she said, and gave him her most brilliant smile. “I’m interested in killer whales, too. Are you studying them for your honors thesis?”
One corner of his mouth curved slowly upward. Above his high cheekbones, his dark eyes gleamed. “Only one thing you need to know about me, princess. I’m here for a good time, not a long time.”
“Oh, really.” She started to close her notebook, annoyed with herself now for even trying to get through to the guy.
“Wait a minute.” He reached for the notebook and took a closer look at her drawing of the worm, which was accurate and detailed, down to the very last segment and bristle. “This is good.”
Pride put a bloom in her cheeks. She whipped her notebook away and stuffed it into her bag. She didn’t need approval from Spencer Valiella.
With the eraser end of a pencil, he pushed back the lock of hair that hid her face. “I’m studying communication between maternal groups of resident killer whales, Meg.”
Reluctantly, yet irresistibly, she raised her eyes to his.
“I’ll take you along sometime if you’re seriously interested,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she replied as casually as she could. “I’m interested.”
CHAPTER ONE
FROM THE TOP FLOOR of his rented house. Spencer gazed out over the tiled roofs of Monterey Bay. Beyond the rocky shore lay the Pacific, blue and wrinkled, darker in patches where kelp forests swayed beneath the surface. The ocean stretched northward, its currents linking this temporary home with another he’d known in Victoria, British Columbia.
In his thirty-one years Spencer had moved thirty-five times. Victoria was one place he’d sworn never to return to. He still thought about Meg. Still felt the tug on his soul across the miles, across the years. A tug he’d resisted seven years ago and finally fled.
But Doc Campbell, his honors supervisor, had just suffered a stroke. Doc, his good friend and mentor, wanted Spencer to take over his marine mammals class until he could return to work. Christmas, at the latest, Doc had promised. The plea had been followed up by a formal request from Randolph Ashton-Whyte, the head of the biology department.
Spencer paced the sparsely furnished living room. His postdoctoral fellowship at the Monterey Aquarium had wound to a close. He’d applied for another research position in Bergen, Norway, but it could be months before he got word on that.
He didn’t want to go back to Victoria and memories of Meg. But for Doc he’d do it.
Two days later Spencer roared through Victoria in his beat-up Camaro with the California plates and muffler fall of holes. He had a kayak strapped to the roof rack, and the back end was loaded down with boxes of books, electronic gear and the few personal effects he’d hung on to over the years. He’d come straight up from Monterey, driving all day and all night, stopping only for gas and coffee and microwaved burritos that tasted like the cardboard they were served in.
It was eight in the morning when Spencer turned onto the potholed ribbon of asphalt that led to his father Ray’s beach cottage in Sooke, west of Victoria. A patchwork of brightly colored wooden houses lined the beach. Across the road, towering Douglas firs spilled their resiny scent into the mid-August heat where it mingled with the salt of the ocean. Spencer rolled down the window and his fingers tapped out the bass of an old Queen song on the hot black roof of the Camaro.
He slowed as he came around the bend, an eye out for the cottage his father had bought twenty years ago with the proceeds from the sale of his first record album. Ray’s flirtation with domesticity had been brief, coinciding with the birth of Spencer’s younger sister, Janis, and lasting only until the next big gig lured him across the continent. Except for the two years Spencer had spent at the university, the cottage had been inhabited off and on by itinerant musician friends of his father’s. His mother had split long ago, taking Janis and Spencer south to her native San Clemente, where she’d eventually settled down with, of all people, an investment banker. Spencer guessed he couldn’t blame her. Some people needed stability.
Around a bend he spotted the mailbox carved from driftwood and slowed to pull into the gravel driveway beside the tiny wooden house with peeling blue paint. The yard was overgrown with weeds and a wind chime of oyster shells clattered in the breeze that drifted around the porch.
He unfolded his limbs from the car and sucked the strong salt air deep into his lungs. Across the grass-strewn sand dunes, the ocean beckoned. The seemingly limitless expanse made him breathe easier. Home. The thought made him laugh. Like the tortoise, his home was on his back. Or more precisely, in the Camaro.
Yawning from lack of sleep, he pulled his duffel bag and laptop computer from the trunk and deposited them on the porch. The house appeared to be empty, as he’d hoped. He reached into a side pocket of the duffel for his key ring. Not the one with the brass killer whale that held his car keys, but the plain steel circle that held the keys to the cottage. And the keys to Doc’s laboratory and office. He’d never returned those when he left. If he believed in fate, he might have thought it was because he was meant to return.
Spencer opened the torn screen door and put the key in the lock knowing it wasn’t fate that had made him hang on to the keys. The research vessel he’d worked on that last summer had set sail early to follow a bumper salmon run that was drawing the killer whales north of their usual habitat. He hadn’t had time to drop off the keys. Or to say goodbye to... anyone.
The screen door banged shut behind him. Inside, the cottage wore the somnolent air of endless summer that seemed to inhabit all beach houses. Before