And Melissa hadn’t been about to argue. She was certainly as pleased as a cat. They were sitting down to split a sausage-and-pepper omelet and an order of Bahamian cinnamon French toast. It wasn’t all that different from the breakfast she’d had a dozen hours earlier next to the Clearwater hotel pool, but it tasted about a thousand times better. The setting was part of it. To the north lay the pale blue of submerged reef and the long reach of palm-covered Cat Island. Just on the other side of the pencil-thin island was the great drop-off to the distant limits of the true ocean floor—six thousand feet of water that didn’t get shallow again until it hit Africa. Out to the west and north, a few more islands dotted the horizon, so low they were mere suggestions of palm-dark shading. Only directly behind them lay the thick palms that passed for a forest on Cat Island. Small huts and a lodge were nestled in among the bare trunks.
