by Nora Roberts
“One of the survivors noted the brilliant, almost impossibly beautiful sunset on the night of June twenty-first,” Hayden continued. “The air was still and very heavy. Hot. Most put it down to their nearness to the equator.”
“But the captain would have known then.”
“Would have, or should have.” Hayden moved his shoulders. “Neither he nor the log survived. But by midnight on the evening of that beautiful sunset, the winds came—and the waves. Their route and speed put them here.” He took the computer-generated Justine south and west. “We have to assume he would have headed for land, Costa Rica by most accounts, hoping he could ride it out. But with fifty-foot swells battering his ship, there wasn’t much of a chance.”
“All that night and all the next day, they fought the storm,” Tate added. “Terrified passengers, crying children. You’d hardly be able to tell day from night, or hear your own prayers. If you were brave, or frightened enough to look, all you would see would be wall after wall of water.”
“By the night of the twenty-second, the Justine was breaking apart,” Hayden continued. “There was no hope of saving her, or of reaching land in her. They put the women, the children, and the injured in the lifeboats.”
“Husbands kissing their wives goodbye,” Tate said softly. “Fathers holding their children for the last time. And all of them knowing it would take a miracle for any of them to survive.”
“Only fifteen did.” Hayden scratched his cheek. “One lifeboat outwitted the hurricane. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t even have these small clues as to where to find her.” He glanced up, noticed with alarm that Tate’s eyes were wet. “It was a long time ago, Tate.”
“I know.” Embarrassed, she blinked back the tears. “It’s just so easy to see it, to imagine what they went through, what they felt.”
“For you it is.” He reached over and gave her hand an awkward pat. “That’s what makes you such a fine scientist. We all know how to calculate facts and theories. Too many of us lack imagination.”
He wished he had a handkerchief to offer her. Or better yet, the nerve to brush away the single tear that had escaped to trail down her cheek. Instead, Hayden cleared his throat and went back to his calculations.
“I’m going to suggest we move ten degrees south, southwest.”
“Oh, why?”
Delighted she’d asked, he began to show her.
Tate rose, moved behind him to view his screens and his hastily scribbled notes over his shoulder. Occasionally, she laid her hand on it or leaned closer to get a better look or ask a question.
Each time she did, Hayden’s heart would stutter. He called himself a fool, even a middle-aged fool, but it didn’t stop the hitch.
He could smell her—soap and skin. Each time she laughed in that low, carelessly sexy way, his mind would cloud. He loved everything about her, her mind, her heart, and when he let himself fantasize, her wonderfully willowy body. Her voice was like honey poured over brown sugar.
“Did you hear that?”
How could he hear anything but her voice when he was all but swimming in it. “What?”
“That.” She pointed overhead, toward the sound of engines. Planes, she realized, and grinned. “It must be the food drop. Come on, Hayden. Let’s go up top, get some sun and watch them.”
“Well, I haven’t quite finished my—”
“Come on.” Laughing, she grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. “You’re like a mole in here. Just a few minutes on deck.”
He went with her, of course, feeling very much like a mole chasing a butterfly. She had the loveliest legs. He knew he shouldn’t stare at them, but they were the most incredible shade of alabaster. And there was that enchanting little freckle just above the back of her right knee.
He’d like to press his mouth just there. The thought of doing it, of perhaps being invited to do it, made his head swim.
He cursed himself for being an idiot, reminding himself he was thirteen years her senior. He had a responsibility to her and to the expedition.
She was onboard the Nomad due to his agreement with the recommendation that had come straight from Trident through its Poseidon arm. He’d been delighted to agree. After all, she’d been his best and brightest student.
Wasn’t it wonderful the way the sun gilded the flame of her hair?
“Here comes another one!” Tate shouted and cheered along with the other crew who had gathered as the next package splashed off the stern.
“We’ll eat like kings tonight.” Lorraine, her lush little body stuffed into a snug halter and shorts, leaned over the rail. Below, crew were manning a dingy. “Don’t leave anything behind, boys. I put in a request for some Fume Blanc, Tate.” She winked, then turned to flutter her gilded lashes at Hayden. “Doc, where have you two been hiding out?”
“Hayden’s running new figures.” Tate leaned over the rail to shout encouragement as the dingy putted out to retrieve the supplies. “I hope they remembered the chocolate.”
“You only eat sweets because you’re repressed.”
“You’re just jealous because M&M’s go straight to your thighs.”
Lorraine pursed her lips. “My thighs are terrific.” She ran a fingertip along one, slanted Hayden a sly look. “Aren’t they, doc?”
“Leave Hayden alone,” Tate began, then squealed when she was grabbed from behind.
“Break time.” Bowers, tough and sinewy, scooped her up. While others applauded, he dashed to one of the ropes they’d rigged. “We’re going swimming, babycakes.”
“I’ll kill you, Bowers.” She knew their robotics and computer expert loved nothing better than to play. Still laughing, she struggled weakly. “This time I mean it.”
“She’s nuts about me.” With one muscled arm, he snagged the rope. “Better hold on, honey child.”
She looked down as his eyes rolled in his glossy ebony face. He bared his teeth, made her giggle helplessly. “How come you always pick on me?”
“ ’Cause we look so fine together. Grab hold. Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
Tate gripped the rope, sucked in her breath. With Bowers’s wild Tarzan yell ringing in her ears, she pushed off with him into space. She screamed, because it felt good. The wide, wide sea tilted beneath her, and as the rope arched, she let go. The air whisked over her, the water rushed up. She heard Bowers cackling like a loon an instant before she hit.
It was bracingly cool. She let it bathe her before kicking her way to the surface.
“Only an 8.4 from the Japanese judge, Beaumont, but they’re picky devils.” Bowers winked at her, then shaded his eyes. “Oh Christ almighty, here comes Dart. Everybody out of the pool.”
From the rail, Hayden watched Tate and his associates play like children freshly released to recess. It made him feel old, and more than a little stodgy.
“Come on, doc.” Lorraine gave him her quick, flirtatious smile. “Why don’t we take a dip?”
“I’m a lousy swimmer.”
“So, wear a flotation, or better yet, use Dart as a raft.”
That made him smile. At the moment, Dart was bobbing around in the Pacific like a bloated cork. “I think I’ll just watch.”
Keeping her smile in place, Lorraine shrugged her bare shoulders. “Suit yourself.”
More than three thousand miles away from where Tate frolicked in the crystal Pacific, Matthew shivered in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.
The fact that he headed the salvage team was a small point of pride. He’d worked his way up in Fricke Salvage over the years, taking on all and any assignments that paid. Now he was in charge of the underwater dig and hauled in ten percent of the net profits.
And he hated every minute of it.
There wasn’t a nastier cut to the pride of a hunter than crewing a big, ugly boat on straight metal salvage. There was no gold, no treasure to be discovered on the Reliant. The World War II vessel was crusted with the icy mud of the North Atlantic, its value solely in its metal.
Often when his fingers felt like icicles and the exposed skin around his mouth was blue with cold, Matthew dreamed about the days when he’d dived for pleasure as well as profit.
In warm, mirrorlike water in the company of jeweled fish. He remembered what it had felt like to see that flash of gold, or a blackened disk of silver.
But treasure-hunting was a gamble, and he was a man with debts to pay. Doctors, lawyers, rehab centers. Jesus, the more he worked, the more he owed. Ten years before if anyone had suggested his life would turn out to be a cycle of work and bills to be paid, he would have laughed in their faces.
Instead, he’d discovered that life was laughing in his.
Through the murk, he signaled to his team. It was time to start the slow rise to the surface. The damned ugly Reliant lay on its side, already half hacked away by the crew. Matthew poured salt on his own wounds by studying it as he stopped at the first rest point.
To think he’d once dreamed of galleons and man-of-wars. Privateers bursting at the seams with bullion. Worse, he’d had one only to lose it. And everything else.
Now he was little better than a junkyard dog, harvesting and guarding scraps. Here, the sea was a cave, dark, hostile, almost colorless, cold as fish blood. A man never felt quite human here—not free and weightless as a diver felt in the live waters, but distant and alien where there was little to see that wasn’t eating or being eaten.
A careless movement sent an icy spurt of water down the neck of his suit, reminding him that like it or not, human he was.
He kicked to the next point, knowing better than to hurry. However cold the water, however tedious the dive, biology and physics were kings here. Once, five years before, he’d watched a careless diver collapse on deck and die painfully from the bends because he’d hurried the rest stops. It wasn’t an experience Matthew intended to have.
Once he’d boarded, Matthew reached for the hot coffee a galley mate offered. When his teeth stopped chattering, he gave his orders to the next team. And he damn well intended to tell Fricke that the men were getting a bonus on this trip.
It pleased him that Fricke, the miserly bastard, was just enough afraid of him to dip a little deeper into his tight pockets.
“Mail came in.” The mate, a scrawny French Canadian who went only by LaRue, shouldered Matthew’s tanks. “Put yours in your cabin.” He grinned, showing a gleaming gold front tooth. “One letter, many bills. Me. I get six letters from six sweethearts. I feel so bad, maybe I give one to you. Marcella, she not so pretty, but she fuck you blind, deaf and dumb, eh?”
Matthew peeled off the hood of his wet suit. The chill Atlantic air breathed frigidly on his ears. “I’ll pick my own women.”
“Then why don’t you? You need you a good bounce or two, Matthew. LaRue, he can spot these things.”
Matthew brooded out toward the cold, gray sea. “Women are a little scarce out here.”
“You come with me to Quebec, Matthew. I show you where to get a good drink and a good lay.”
“Get your mind off sex, LaRue. At this rate, we’re going to be out here another month.”
“If my mind’s all I can get on sex, then it’s going to stay there,” LaRue called out as Matthew stalked away. Chuckling to himself, he took out his precious tobacco pouch to roll one of his favored fat, foul-smelling cigarettes. The boy needed guidance, the wisdom of an older man, and a good fuck.
What Matthew wanted were warm clothes and another shot of coffee. He found the first in his cabin. After he’d tugged on a sweater and jeans, he poked through the envelopes braced under a rock on the small table that served as his desk.
Bills, of course. Medical, the rent on Buck’s apartment in Florida, the lawyer Matthew had hired to square things when Buck had wrecked a bar in Fort Lauderdale, the last statement from the last rehabilitation center he’d hauled Buck into in hopes of drying out his uncle.
They wouldn’t break him, he mused. But they sure as hell weren’t going to leave him a lot to play with. The single letter gave him some pleasure.
Ray and Marla, he thought as he sat down with the rest of his coffee to enjoy it. They never failed. Once a month, rain or shine, wherever he happened to be, they’d get a letter to him.
Not once in eight years had they let him down.
As usual it was a chatty letter of several pages. Marla’s looping, feminine handwriting was offset by Ray’s quick scrawl in notes and messages in the margins. Nearly five years earlier, they’d moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and built a cottage on the sound side of Hatteras Island. Marla would pepper the letters with descriptions of Ray’s puttering around the house, her luck, good or bad, with her garden. Woven through were details of their adventures at sea. Their trips to Greece, Mexico, the Red Sea, their impulsive dives along the coast of the Carolinas.
And of course, they wrote of Tate.
Matthew knew she was nearing thirty, working on her Ph.D., joining varying expeditions. Yet he still saw her as she’d been that long-ago summer. Young and fresh and full of promise. Over the years when he thought of her, it was with a vaguely pleasant nostalgic tug. In his mind, she and those days they’d spent together had taken on a burnished golden hue. Almost too perfect for reality.
He’d long ago stopped dreaming of her.
There were debts to be paid, and plans, still in the dim future, to be settled.
Matthew savored each word on each page. The expected invitation for him to visit touched a chord, making him both wistful and bitter. Three years before, he’d browbeaten Buck into making the trip. The four-day visit had been anything but a success.
Still, he could remember how quietly at home he felt, looking at the serene waters of the sound through the fan of pines and bay trees, smelling Marla’s cooking, listening to Ray talk of the next wreck and the next shot at gold. Until Buck had managed to hitch a ride over to Ocracoke on the ferry and get himself stinking drunk.
There wasn’t any point in going back, Matthew thought. Humiliating himself, putting the Beaumonts in that miserable position. The letters were enough.
When he shuffled the last page to the front, Ray’s crablike handwriting shot Tate, and that summer in the West Indies, into sharp and painful focus.
Matthew, I’ve got some concerns I haven’t shared with Marla. I will, but I wanted to get your thoughts first. You know Tate is in the Pacific, working for SeaSearch. She’s thrilled with the assignment. We all were. But a few days ago, I was researching some stocks for an old client. I had an impulse to invest in SeaSearch myself, a kind of personal tribute to Tate’s success. I discovered that the company is an arm of Trident, which in turn is a part of The VanDyke Corporation. Our VanDyke. Obviously this concerns me. I don’t know if Tate is aware. I strongly doubt it. There’s probably no need for me to worry. I can’t imagine Silas VanDyke would take a personal interest in one of his marine archeologists. It’s doubtful he even remembers her, or would care. And yet, I’m uncomfortable knowing she’s so far away and even remotely associated with him. I haven’t decided if I should contact Tate and let her know what I’ve learned, or leave well enough alone. I’d very much like your thoughts on this.
Matthew, I’d like them in person, if you can find a way to come to Hatteras. There’s something more I want very much to discuss with you. I made an incredible find only a few weeks ago—something I’ve been searching for for nearly eight years. I want to show it to you. When I do, I hope you’ll share my excitement. Matthew, I’m going back for the Isabella. I need you and Buck with me. Please, come to Hatteras and take a look at what I’ve put together before you reject the idea.
She’s ours, Matthew. She’s always been ours. It’s time for us to claim her.
Fondly,
Ray
Jesus. Matthew skipped back to the beginning of the page and read it a second time. Ray Beaumont didn’t believe in dropping his bombshells lightly. In a couple of quick paragraphs he had set off charges that exploded from Tate to VanDyke to the Isabella.
Go back? Suddenly, fiercely angry, Matthew slapped the letter down on the table. Damned if he’d go back and dredge up his most complete and horrendous failure. He was making his life, wasn’t he? Such as it was. He didn’t need old ghosts tempting him back toward that glint of gold.
He wasn’t a hunter anymore, he thought as he lunged out of the chair to pace the small cabin. He neither wanted nor needed to be. Some men could live on dreams. He had once—and didn’t intend to do so again.
It was money he needed, he fumed, money and time. When both were in his pocket, he would finish what was begun half a lifetime ago over his father’s body. He would find VanDyke, and he would kill him.
And as for Tate, she wasn’t his problem. He’d done her a good turn once, Matthew remembered, and scowled down at the letter on the table. The best turn of her life. If she’d screwed it up by getting hooked into one of VanDyke’s schemes, it was on her head. She was a grown woman now, wasn’t she? With a potload of education and fancy degrees. Goddamn it, she owed him every bit of it, and no one had the right to make him feel responsible for her now.
But he could see her, as she’d been then, awed by a simple silver coin, glowing in his arms, courageously attacking a shark with a diver’s knife.