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“Don’t thank me until you get home,” he replied wryly.

“Should I go looking for Alex and try to bring him with me?” she asked reluctantly. As livid as she was at him, it wasn’t right to just abandon him the way he had abandoned her.

“Alex can take care of himself,” André replied a shade tartly. “Trust me."

“I think they drugged him. He had an IV drip in his arm when I found him, and there were syringes on a table. Two of them were empty.”

“I’ve got him covered. You just take care of yourself,” André said heavily. The man sounded unhappy, and she didn’t blame him. He’d put a ton of effort into championing Alex with his superiors.

No sooner had she hung up than remorse for bailing out on Alex slammed into her. Not that he deserved an ounce of sympathy from her. Her remorse had more to do with the rightness or wrong of her actions. As for Alex, he could go straight to Hell and rot.

She ducked out of the storeroom and handed the phone back to the woman with a word of thanks and the rest of her cash in thanks for the woman’s patience. Katie took her plastic grocery bag of food and water and walked out of the store. She asked a random woman where the docks were and took off walking in the direction the lady had pointed.

It took nearly an hour to walk down to the pier. A half-dozen freighters were in port, but it wasn’t difficult to spot the Caelum. The ship was broad and long, sitting low in the water. A grain ship, maybe? She headed for the gangplank leading to a small door in the ship’s hull close to the water line.

A darkly tanned, rough-looking man lounged in front of the walkway. She’d ditched the military I.D. out of the woman’s wallet, but had kept the driver’s license. She pulled that out now.

“I’m Marianne Kleck,” she said expectantly. The guy threw her an I-don’t-give-a-damn look and didn’t bother to answer. “The nurse,” she added. Then, “I’ve been hired on to the Caelum.”

“No shit?” he had a heavy accent. Maybe South African. At least he spoke English.

“Are you going to let me board or do I have to call the captain?”

“You got identification?”

She handed over the driver’s license.

“Your hair’s the wrong color.”

“I heard blondes have more fun. Thought I’d see if it’s true.”

He grinned in a distinctively wolfish way that made her skin crawl as his gaze roamed boldly up and down her body. “Yeah, sure. Welcome aboard.”

She paused in the hatch. “Can you direct me to the infirmary?”

“Amidship, deck three, just aft of the beam.”

Whatever the heck that meant. She ducked into a narrow, steel stairwell and climbed until a door with a large number three painted on it came into sight. The passageway beyond was dim and claustrophobic with exposed metal pipes crowding down from above. Randomly, she wandered down it and spotted a Red Cross painted on a door. Thank God. She opened it and slipped inside. She fumbled around on the wall until she found a light switch.

Oh, God, it was tiny. The room had a bunk bed on one wall, about two feet of floor space, and a tall cabinet on the opposite wall with at least twenty drawers in it. A sink stood beside the cabinet, and a tiny desk was tucked behind the open door. Someone strode by outside and she closed the door quickly.

Beside the sink, she discovered a tiny closet with a life jacket hanging from a hook at eye level and a tiny refrigerator takingup the bottom half of the space. Inside the refrigerator were a half dozen glass medical bottles of serums, mostly morphine and penicillin.

The door opened. “I ‘ear there’s a good lookin’ sheila aboard,” a big, blond man boomed in a thick Aussie drawl.

She took an instinctive step back from the burly sailor as the guy whistled under his breath. “No lie. You’ll dine with me, tonoight. And I’m thinkin’ I’ll be bunkin’ in with you.”

“There will be no bunking in with anyone, thank you very much,” she retorted sharply.

He shrugged. “Well, if ye want the crew to gang rape ye, that’s your call.”

“Gang—what?” What the hell had André gotten her into?

“I can crack the noggins of every bloke on the crew with me bare ‘ands, lass. You’d be woise to let me bunk in ‘ere until I can dump ye overboard.”

“Dump me overboard?” she exclaimed.

“Well, yes. That’s what our friend, André, said ye wanted. As for me, if ye’ve a yen to cozy up with me for the entire cruise, I won’t be sayin’ no to it.”