She looked up and saw a tall man with dark hair and blue eyes in an almost ugly face, a boy who was obviously his son, waving madly, and Old Sam with his nasty grin dwarfed between them.

Gull, thrown off his rhythm, frowned up at the end of the dock. After a moment his brow cleared. "Hey, isn't that Jack Morgan? Who's that kid with him? Kate?"

But when he looked around she was already running for the gangway.

5

They left that evening at ten o'clock, and dropped anchor in Alaganik Bay a little after eleven. With the sudden facility of prepubescence, Johnny crashed in the spare stateroom across from Old Sam's, who was already bunked down and out if the snores rattling the door in its frame were any indication. Kate and Jack rendezvoused in the bow, beneath a clear sky with a rim of light around the horizon, no clouds and no stars, either, because it was too light to see them. It would be too light until September.

"Goddam, woman, I have missed the hell out of you," Jack said, and without bothering to wait for a reciprocal declaration grabbed her up into a comprehensive embrace that escalated rapidly.

"Hold it," Kate managed to say after a moment.

"Funny," he said, "I was just about to ask you the same thing."

She smothered a laugh. "Jack, no"

"Not the 'n' word, not now." He lifted her to sit on the gunnel and moved purposefully between her legs.

"Jack!"

"What!" he bellowed.

"Knock it off." somebody yelled from another boat, and somebody else cursed and added, "Can't a person get some goddam sleep around here?" The comment was followed by a long, loud wolf whistle, and at least three heads popped out of cabin doors.

Kate stiff-armed the extremely aroused and extremely frustrated male away from her. "That's what."

She was not unaffected by having her legs wrapped around Jack Morgan for the first time in three months. Johnny had spent spring break with his grandmother in Arizona, and Jack had spent his in the loft of Kate's cabin. It had been an extremely active ten days, followed by a long and very fallow three months interrupted only by Kate's too brief spring shopping trip to Anchorage. Considering Jack lived in Anchorage and Kate lived on her homestead in the Park, they took what they could get when they could get it. But not here, and not now, with half the boats in the bay moored side by next to the Freyas gunnels.

She cleared her throat and pulled herself together. Her voice, already husky from the scar tissue that would never fade from her throat, rasped with an unconscious frustration it did Jack's heart good to hear. "In case you hadn't noticed, we've got boats sitting at anchor all around us, not to mention we've got four rafted to starboard and three to port." She was reminding herself as much as she was explaining to him.