He mocked her attempt to gloss over the truth. "That's not going to fly, Sloan. I knew Carter's mother and father when they were older, and they couldn't have changed that much. What really happened?"
A little unnerved by his bluntness, Sloan straightened the napkin in her lap and finally met his unwavering gaze. "Actually," she said with a sigh, "when Carter came home that night, he was drunk, and his parents were already furious with him for a long list of transgressions. They threw him out and my mother with him. It must have been a sobering experience for him; he stopped in Las Vegas and married my mother before they went on to Florida. He had enough money left somewhere to buy a sailboat, and for the next two years he chartered it out Paris was born; then I was born."
"Then what?"
"Then Carter's mother arrived one day in a limousine to tell him that his father had had a stroke. She told him he was welcome back in the family fold and she told him to bring one daughter with him. They left that same day with Paris."
"Courtney is under the impression that you and your mother weren't well provided for in that deal."
"My mother was given a modest settlement," Sloan said vaguely.
"How modest?"
"Modest," Sloan said stubbornly; then she smiled and shook her head. "It wouldn't have mattered if it had been much larger. My mother is so naïve and so sweet that she would have given it away to anyone who asked her for a loan or been swindled out of it by some phony 'financial adviser.' "
"Is that what happened to the settlement she got?"
"Most of it," Sloan confirmed.
"You never refer to Carter as your father, do you?" he asked.
She gave him a laughing look and rolled her eyes. "He isn't my father."
Noah slowly lowered his wineglass. "He's not?"
"Not in any significant sense."
"What, specifically, do you class as 'significant' here?"
"He is my biological parent, period. A 'father' is so much more than that. A father is someone who dries your tears when you're little and looks under your bed because you're afraid a monster is down there. He makes the school bully leave you and your best friend alone. He goes to PTA meetings and your softball games, even though you're too little to play and they keep you on the bench. He worries about you when you're sick, and he worries about boys getting intimate with you when you're a teenager."
Noah grinned at the insight she'd unwittingly provided. An image of a little blond girl in a softball uniform, sitting on a bench, drifted through his mind. Her big violet eyes would be sad because they wouldn't let her play. "You played softball?" he asked, trying to remember if he knew a single woman who'd played softball as a child, rather than tennis or field hockey.
"I would be exaggerating to say that," she said, her laugh touching his ears like the soft tinkling of bells. "I was so little for my age that if I played in my own age group, my teammates mistook me for grass and ran over me. I was in my teens before I finally hit a growth spurt."
"It wasn't much of a spurt," Noah said tenderly.
"Oh, yes it was," she assured him, laughing.
On second thought, Noah decided, it must have been one hell of a maturation process, because she had a gorgeous figure, perfectly proportioned for her height. Perfectly proportioned in every way for his body… The mere thought made him harden, and with a mixture of exasperation and amusement, he said, "I promised you a tour."
He stood up and walked around to pull out her chair; then he draped the stole she'd brought over her shoulders.
Sloan was fascinated by the tour; she'd been on boats many times, but Apparition was more like a cruise ship than a boat. She explored the spotless engine room and then the galley, and when he realized she was truly interested, Noah got out the keys and showed her places he would normally have skipped, stopping to open corridor doors that concealed everything from cleaning supplies to spare nautical equipment. "I love boats," she confessed to him with glowing eyes.
"All boats?" he teased.
She nodded solemnly. "All of them—tugboats and fishing boats, slow boats and fast boats. I love the ocean and everything associated with it."
They were in the center of the ship, a level down from the main deck, and she stopped automatically at the next door.
"We can skip that one," he said firmly, putting his hand on her waist to urge her along.
Sloan was instantly curious. "Why? What are you hiding in there?"
"There's nothing in there you'd be interested in."
She burst out laughing. "Don't do that; it's not fair. Now I'm curious. I can't stand unsolved mysteries. I'm a sleuth by—" She broke off in horror. "I'm an amateur sleuth," she amended quickly, and to further distract him, she said with sham indignation, "These are the women's quarters, aren't they?—you bring women along to keep the crew from mutinying on long voyages."
"Hardly," he said, but he wasn't unlocking the door, and Sloan's fascination doubled.
"Pirate treasure?" she ventured, trying to prod him into answering. "Smuggled goods? Drugs—" Her smile faded.
He noticed, and with a resigned sigh, he unlocked the doors and turned on a light. Sloan stared in shock. The small room contained an arsenal of firearms, including a machine gun.
"Courtney saw this and refused to go out to sea with me anymore."
Sloan shook her head a little, trying to recover.
"Don't dramatize it," he warned more forcefully than Sloan thought was necessary.
Sloan registered assault weapons and others that were illegal in the U.S. "Yes, but this—this—why do you need all this?"
He tried to shrug it off as routine. "People who own boats frequently keep a gun aboard."
Sloan's uneasiness was so intense that she shivered, and Noah leapt to an erroneous conclusion. "Don't be afraid. These aren't loaded."
Sloan stepped forward. He was lying, but she tried to sound like an amateur when she pointed it out. "If that's true, then why is that belt-thing with the bullets in it hanging out of that machine gun?"
Noah muffled a laugh and pulled her out of the room, turning out the lights. "It shouldn't be there. That's an old machine gun that we confiscated from a surprise guest on the last cruise."
Sloan's mind reeled with the same refrain she'd heard earlier: She did not know him. Not really. She had gone to bed with him and done intimate things with him, but she did not know him.