by Zoe Dawson
“Yeah, I know that.” There was a heavy silence. “You need us, Blue, we’re there. It goes without saying, but I’m saying it. Let the navy cops handle this, agreed?”
“Yes, sir. Agreed. I have a class to run.”
He worked on his lectures for the week. Monday would be the deep dive using some of what his class had learned. He was sure Charlie would pass with flying colors. He was being impartial here; her scores were off the charts, and she was definitely master diving material. He would recommend that as part of his final assessment and place it in her record.
There was a knock on the door, and he rose to answer it. A man and a woman stood on his threshold. “Mr. Ocean Beckett?” the woman asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Special Agent Rachel Stratton, and this is Special Agent Ryker Garrett, NCIS,” she said, with a decidedly sultry husk to her voice, nodding to the tall blond man beside her as she flashed her badge.
The woman had long, dark hair and big ice-blue eyes that contrasted with her hair and olive skin. She had full lips and a well-formed nose. She came to the man’s shoulder, about five feet six, he would guess, and was dressed reservedly in black slacks and a blazer, a white button down underneath.
The man was dressed in a dark gray suit and tie and white shirt, his dark blond hair short on the sides and swept off the forehead, light stubble on his face and a pair of piercing blue eyes. He looked both intelligent and sharp.
“May we come in?” Garrett asked.
He stepped out of the way, and they walked in. “Could I offer you some coffee?”
“Yes, please,” Stratton said as her partner declined with a shake of his head.
Blue went into the kitchen and poured her a cup. “Anything in it, Special Agent Stratton?”
She sat down on the sofa and said, “No, black is fine.”
He came out with the blue mug with NAVY in yellow letters across the side. He set it in her waiting hands, and she took a sip.
“We understand you had an incident this morning. Someone was watching you, your team member, Mr. Thorn Hunt, and Ms. Charlotte Coventry, one of your students, outside a coffee shop.”
“That’s correct.”
“Had you seen this man before?”
Blue hesitated. This wasn’t about him and Charlie having an affair, but he had seen the man outside her condo. He didn’t want to hold back information if it was important. “I saw him outside Ms. Coventry’s condo.”
“What were you doing there?”
“We were going to have coffee and discuss her PT routine.” That was a white lie, but it was minor.
Stratton stared at him with those shrewd sloe eyes. He wasn’t sure if she suspected why he was really there…leaving the condo after a night of mind-blowing sex. But he figured it didn’t have anything to do with the investigation.
“Okay. So, he watched you, then when you approached him, he was picked up by another man in a black van.”
Blue nodded.
“Can you describe them?”
“The watcher had a round face, high cheekbones, pointy chin, dominant forehead, straight nose with a ball at the end, dark hair and dark eyes. He was dressed in a black polo and jeans. The driver was dark in both hair and eyes, round face, square chin with a cleft. He was dressed in a gray T-shirt.”
Stratton wrote on a pad while her partner kept eye contact with Blue. “Did you get a license plate on the van?”
“Yes, I did.” He rattled it off, and she wrote it down.
“All right. We’ll look into this and be in touch with you.”
They rose, and Stratton finished off her coffee with a big gulp, her partner giving her a wry look.
He led them to the door and shook hands with them as they left. Then he went back to work.
The weekend passed without incident, and it was back to NDSTC for class on Monday. The course progressed into its second, then third week as he and Charlie got to know each other even better outside the bedroom.
But today it was time to put the divers in the open ocean and see how much of his lectures had sunk in. He’d been in Florida and off the teams for three weeks, and it felt like an eternity. He pulled out his wallet and fingered the paper LT had given him. With a new perspective, he slipped it out as his students started to file into the class.
He pulled out his cell and turned his back to the class. When the call was answered, he made an appointment for the next day during his lunch hour.
He finished the call right at the top of the hour and turned to the class. He hadn’t been able to relax his guard ever since he’d seen that man two weeks ago. He’d spent Sunday away from Charlie. After all that she had told him, he needed the time to think about what had happened. He’d made love to her, and she’d seen his scars. That moment in the shower when he’d forgotten about his mutilation and instead worried more about comforting her in her delayed grief floored him. He couldn’t imagine what she must have endured during that terrible time in her life and at such a young age. She’d been able to pick herself up and move forward, conquer the ocean and her fear of it.
Her courage in the face of such adversity gave him the courage to let her see him when he’d been at the lowest, most rock bottom of his life.
He still had a lot to tell her. He would get to it.
“So far, most of this course has been theory and lecture, but now we’re going out on St. Andrews Bay to see what you all have. There we’ll give you some down-in-the-trenches training. Are we ready?”
“Hooyah!” He nodded and then allowed himself to look at Charlie in the front row. She’d been the model student up to this point, her brain as beautiful as the rest of her. She gave him a private smile, and he remembered what it had been like to wake up to her. He’d been so comfortable in her bed. It had been the first time he’d slept through the night since he’d gotten back from Kirikhanistan. There had been no dreams, just a deep, blissful sleep. He looked away. Lingering on her would give them away.
A man came to the door and nodded at Blue. Their transportation. “All right, let’s get going.”
They were bused over to the NDSTC dock where the dive boat YTD-20 Proteus was waiting. Blue sat up front, but he could feel Charlie’s presence behind him. It was like a warm pressure to his back. They exited the bus and went aboard the ship. His class took seats around the bow. As soon as all the checks were accomplished, the ship was unmoored and headed out to the center of the bay.
St. Andrews Bay made up the shores of Panama City located in the Florida panhandle, waters that were rich with sea life, plants and birds and close to the Gulf of Mexico. The bay was a unique estuary, its salinity high due to the low flow of freshwater of inland creeks.
The southern portion of the bay was located between two major bridges—Hathaway and DuPont, and extended south to the gulf inlets—East Pass at the eastern end of Shell Island and the rock-jettied West Pass, which served as the entrance for commercial vessels. West Pass was their goal. In the ninety-foot waters, his class would gain something out of his lectures on mental toughness.
But as the boat moved into position for the dive, Blue looked back toward shore. The land was hazy, but he could make out people splashing in the lush blue and green shaded water, the city glittering in the sun behind the beach as traffic moved. There was a soft cry, and the class congregated to the bow as a pod of dolphins cavorted in the clear waters just ahead of the boat.
As the Proteus approached, the dolphins swam alongside and played in the waves as the class watched with avid faces. There was only one face he was interested in watching. She was as captivated as the rest of them. Watching her enjoy life infused him with so much energy, he felt he could jump in and swim to shore in a burst of speed.
It was hard to believe the woman from two weeks ago was one and the same as the woman now. Her eyes sparkled, and her smile was contagious. She looked toward him, and he smiled wide in response.
When they reached the dive site, the students starte
d gearing up. There was an odd number, and Blue had already volunteered to buddy up with Charlie. He helped her on with her gear, trying not to be affected by the brushes against her skin or her hair. The dry suit he wore wasn’t forgiving with hard-ons, so he took his own advice and ran sports scores in his head to keep from succumbing to his intense attraction to her.
“You ready?” he asked.
The task was to dive deep and then perform a welding task. The students didn’t know they were going to be using torches that were deliberately at half power, so the task was impossible to perform in the thirty minutes of time allotted them.
This was a test on how they overcame that frustration.
They descended to the required ninety feet. Blue buddied her all the way down to the bay floor where the metal was ready for her blow torch.
“I see the test metal,” she said through her comm.
“Yes, that’s it, Coventry. Get to work.”
“Roger that,” she said.
He’d read all their files and was damned impressed with Charlie’s resilience and performance of duty under stressful situations. She had several commendations.
He wanted her, and he was beginning to think it wasn’t a temporary thing. But now circumstances had changed. Someone unknown had been watching him. It couldn’t be for benign reasons, and the definite Slavic features of the two men had made his gut clench. Almost seven months ago, there were many faces like that, men who had held him captive, held him down, tied him up so Natasha could break him. His heartbeat in his ears, he pushed aside those thoughts as they crowded around him.
He focused on the dive, Charlie solidly in front of him on the sandy floor near some algae-covered rocks, a colorful array of fish swimming around them. Above them, Proteus floated on the gentle waves as they lapped against her hull.
The compressor was loud in his ears, the hiss of air continuous as it pumped oxygen into his dive helmet, the faint smell of rubber pungent, sweat and sunscreen intense in the enclosed space.
Submerging put him in a different world. As a SEAL and a surfer, the water had never held any fear for him. Drowning was a distant threat, but with calm and experience, he’d never been in danger of that in all the missions he’d been deployed on.
It was soothing under the waves, a world where Charlie worked.
* * *
The water was a murky green, visibility almost non-existent, but Charlie saw what she needed to see. The piece of metal that had to be severed in two. She turned on her blow torch and started on the piece, but ten minutes in, she realized, from experience and from knowing her equipment, that the torch wasn’t up to full capacity. That’s when she realized they’d sent her down here to fail. It wasn’t about clearing the metal. It was about what she would do when faced with failure. She bit the inside of her mouth.
Damn, she hated to fail.
She continued to work at the piece, but with the torch being too weak to finish the job, she concentrated on either side of the metal. When it was sufficiently compromised, she looked for a good, solid rock. Blue was a warm presence at her back. She reached down for the right rock and with several concentrated, sharp blows, the metal split.
She turned to look at him with a grin that quickly disappeared when out of the green murk, a shark swam at her with lightning speed. It hit her face mask and bounced off. Jarred, Charlie lost her equilibrium in the water as she was pushed backwards and flipped upside down.
Suddenly, she was back in the Cessna. It was hurtling toward the water, the pilot’s frantic voice over the loudspeaker telling them all to brace for impact. Then darkness. She’d awoken to water all around her, blood blinding her and knee-deep in water, her parents and sister unconscious. She looked up. The Proteus seemed so far away, and inside the face mask she started to hyperventilate. She had to get to the surface. She couldn’t breathe!
“Diver one, calm your breathing. We lost visual. What is happening down there?”
“Shark attack,” came Blue’s deep voice in her ears, but the sound of him was too distant.
She pushed up from the bottom, her training a detached memory as panic took over, blocking out even her common sense.
Something caught her ankle, and she struggled against the pull, but whatever had snagged her wouldn’t let go. Then she was being restrained in a set of strong arms. She opened her eyes to find Blue’s face peering at her from his helmet, the yellow color like a beacon in the cloudy water.
He put his finger to his face mask to tell her to be quiet.
“Status report,” topside said.
“Stable. Shark is gone. We’re ascending now.”
“Affirmative.”
Charlie tried to calm her breathing with sheer willpower, the flashback still playing out in her head. Blue wouldn’t let her move, and she searched for a reason, tried to get the images to recede back into her memory banks. But with the shark attack, everything just kept rolling.
He was restraining her, and she tried to push him away. But he shook his head. His eyes so steady and blue bored into hers. She latched onto his eyes, like looking into twin pools filled with warmth and serenity. She shook from the fear of the water all around her. A fear she’d fought against for so long.
She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, taking in four breaths, then blowing them out. The four times that SEALs used to calm themselves during stressful situations. He let her rise slightly, and it dawned on her. Blue was making sure she ascended so that the nitrogen in her blood wouldn’t cause the bends.
How could she have lost herself so much that she totally disregarded diving protocol that was ingrained in her?
The panic and fear had taken over, but Blue, her baby Blue, had saved her life.
And as he cradled her in his arms, a new fear came over her, one she was more afraid of than anything. She was falling for him, and it was impossible.
Completely impossible.
11
Come to my office after you get changed. Was all that Blue had said to her after they pulled her out of the water. Topside had no idea that she had panicked. Her camera had been damaged during the shark attack, and her faceplate cracked, but that was it. She had also completed her task in the allotted time. She was the only one in the class who had improvised.
She huddled in the bow of the boat feeling cold even in the warmth of the Florida sun. Blue was standing close to her, as if guarding her, but she was lost inside. Other than one during her flight to the Horn of Africa, she hadn’t had a flashback in twelve years. She closed her eyes. Could that have been because she had buried everything so deep, she had effectively closed off her emotions about the day her family had died? Was opening up to Blue bringing everything back?
She squeezed her eyes closed and worked at getting herself under control. She hated this feeling, but it wouldn’t go away.
When the boat docked, she disembarked to go to the bus, Blue steadying her as she walked down the gangplank, his touch all too brief. Once back at the school, she showered and changed back into her uniform.
She headed toward his office, some of her classmates congratulating her for her quick thinking.
When she reached his door, she knocked.
“Come in,” he said.
She opened the door and went inside, closing it behind her. His expression compressed into hard lines. He stared at her, his eyes giving nothing away. He could derail her whole career right here, right now. If they found out she had flashed back underwater and almost lost her shit, it would be a long time getting back into a wetsuit, let alone a dry suit for her deep-sea dives.
He looked dark and foreboding and unapproachable, but the look in his eyes made her heart pound and her knees go weak. She closed her eyes and swayed, the aftermath of her fear and panic leaving her feeling so exposed, so scared of losing what she had fought so hard to gain. He rose from the desk and came around it. She heard the lock turn, then he took her into his arms. “Baby, I’m so sorry.” Blue whispered.
&n
bsp; She clung to him, releasing a hard breath, her grip urgent and tense, almost desperate.
She leaned back so she could look at his face. “It won’t happen again. I was just caught off guard by the shark. Please don’t take me out of the water.”
There was a flare of emotion in his eyes, and he tightened his grip on her. “I’m not turning you in, Charlie. You were amazing, not only on the test, but the way you got ahold of yourself impressed the hell out of me. That’s SEAL shit right there. You inspire me and humble me with your courage.”
She started to cry just like that, tears washing down her face.
“It’s all right, beautiful.” He took her hand and slowly, so slowly stroked the palm with his thumb. Charlie was trembling so hard that she wasn’t sure how she made her legs function. The only thing that kept her together was the tight grip Blue had on her.
Locking her arms around his torso, she closed her eyes and sagged against him, his presence making her feel so damned safe. How had she ever gone through so much of her life without this? It made her think of Steve and how supportive he’d been all these years. How much of a father figure he’d been in her life and how she had depended on him? She really needed to tell him that.
He cupped her chin. “I just wanted to hold you for a bit. You had a helluva morning.”
She looked up at him. “The dolphins were amazing.”
He smiled just like he had on the boat. It transformed his face and made her heart stall. God, when that man smiled.
“That’s one thing about you, Charlie. You see the bright side of life. I like that a lot.”
She took in his close-cropped hair, the strong cut of his jaw, and the sensual, full-lipped mouth that had given her so much pleasure. As she stared at him, she read his body language and those subtle nuances she picked up from him. There wasn’t much fear or anger left in him. He had released a whole lot of frustrated energy, but there was a different, almost bright energy about him that bolstered her hope that he was going to get to where he needed to be.