Her Passionate Protector

by Laurey Bright

  She closed her eyes, exhausted, her head cradled on his shoulder, and slowly, slowly, came back to earth.

  Brodie kissed her hair, her cheek, then—lingeringly—her mouth. He eased away from her and only then she realized he'd been prepared for this. Stupid to feel a slight chill at that. It was sensible of him, especially after last night when they'd shared that sexy kiss in the moonlight. He must have anticipated something like this. Even while she was pretending to herself that it would never happen, that she still had control over her increasing desire for him.

  In the aftermath she felt empty, oddly emotionless. Not even regret penetrated the vacuum that seemed to surround her.

  Brodie moved away, and she sat up, knelt on the sand and wrapped the pareu around her, knotting it tightly under her still-tingling breasts, trying to blot out the intimate attention he'd given them—given every part of her.

  He watched her for a minute, then hauled on his clothes, the rasp of the zip as he did up his jeans, sounding loud in the silence.

  She pulled her panties back on, now sandy as well as damp.

  "You okay?" he asked her.

  "Yes." But when he reached out to touch her she shied away. "I need a shower." She began walking back toward the boat.

  He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked beside her, head bent. "I must say you surprised me." He sounded as though something bothered him. "I didn't expect…"

  "Let's not start analyzing." She had surprised—shocked—herself. It was as if some other woman had taken over her body, her mind. A woman she didn't know, couldn't trust. Who might lead her into unknown depths that frightened her. She could lose herself in those depths, let herself be taken by the powerful currents of mindless, needy sentiment, and drown in a fatal emotional maelstrom. "It happened," she said, desperate to regain the safe shore of reason, of prudence. "It was nice, it's over."

  "Over," he repeated. "Yeah?"

  "Yeah." Deliberately she echoed the word, and increased her pace. She'd been a little mad, for a short while. Now she had to return to sanity, to reality. Protect herself. Brodie was silent for the rest of the walk to the boat, and there she went straight into the shower and afterward to bed. Tomorrow they'd leave the island and there'd be little opportunity for any private encounter. Perhaps she'd recapture a sense of proportion, of judgment. But she wished Brodie wasn't going to be on board.

  Next day the Sea-Rogue set sail again, with the island's one tugboat, having escorted the cargo ship out of the harbor, now towing the salvage barge where the other members of the dive crew would eat, sleep and work.

  On arrival at the site almost twenty-four hours later the barge was secured near where Rogan said the wreck was located, just far enough off to ensure its anchors couldn't damage anything on it. The Sea-Rogue was tied up alongside, and with barely contained excitement the divers, and an engineer from Parakaeo who was to man the winch, transferred their gear to the barge and readied themselves for work.

  One of the new divers, a large, square-jawed American known as Hunk, had medical training, and the other, a Norwegian called Olin, owned a range of camera equipment that put Sienna's waterproof snapshot camera to shame. He told her he had photographed underwater all over the world and supplemented his diving income by selling his pictures to magazines. He was also a computer wizard and could, Brodie said, make any electronic machine "sit up and sing."

  Brodie and Rogan had both spent time studying the use of sidescan sonar and magnometers, equipment designed to locate anomalies on the seafloor.

  "At sea," Brodie said, "it's always handy to be able to turn your hand to more than one thing. Cheaper too. And the fewer people who know about this the less chance there is of word leaking out about where we are exactly."

  He and Sienna made a preliminary dive so she could physically survey the site before it was disturbed any further.

  They went down on scuba, although later the divers would be using surface-supplied air, which would allow them to stay longer on the bottom.

  Sienna followed Brodie into the blue depths, trying not to be distracted by the reef with its rainbow-hued corals, waving seaweed, and the fish darting about among them in flashes of silver, yellow, blue and orange.

  When Brodie pointed, she experienced a shivery thrill at the sight of the long curve of the downed ship's hull, almost hidden under its covering of sand and marine growth.

  They swam toward it, and Sienna saw a dark, uneven shadow that when they came closer revealed itself as a large, jagged hole in the sea-worn timbers.

  Brodie planted a buoy line to mark the location of the wreck, then he caught the edge of the hole and peered down into the blackness. Lifting away from it, he motioned Sienna to follow, and they swam in increasing circles from the buoy line, systematically traversing the area. There were lumps of coral, some of which might be hiding artifacts, but little on the surface that looked like goods scattered from the wreck.

  When they surfaced and climbed on board the barge where Rogan and the others waited, Brodie pulled off his mask, looking grim. "Someone's blown a hole in her," he said with disgust.

  Rogan swore, Camille gave a shocked "Oh no!" and the other divers looked glum. Sienna, her own mask in her hand, said, "That hole wasn't there before?"

  "No," Brodie said. "Not where there's one now."

  Sienna's heart sank. Heaven knew what sort of damage the explosion might have caused.

  Rogan asked, "Did you go inside?"

  "Nope. They've made a mess of it. There's a lot of smashed timber in there, including some pretty heavy beams, and God knows what else."

  Rogan suited up himself, and went down with Camille and Joe.

  After surfacing, Rogan said, "Accessing the ship through that hole carries too much risk of getting trapped, or snagged on something."

  "I wonder if the guys who did it tried?" Hunk the American said. Everyone was wondering how much of the treasure might have been taken.

  "They'd have to be crazy," Brodie told them. "It's a death trap."

  Rogan decided, "We'll keep uncovering the ship and see how much there is before we try clearing the hole."

  Next morning at dawn a ship was clearly seen, anchored not far away. A rusty-hulled fishing trawler.

  "Damn, they can't stay there," Rogan said. "If they put nets down they could snag our machinery, or even the divers. It's far too dangerous."

  Brodie lifted binoculars to his eyes. "The Scorpio. I'm pretty sure she was anchored at Parakaeo. There was something on the radar screen last night, probably her."

  Rogan said, "At Parakaeo? I didn't see her in port."

  "She was anchored at the other side of the island."

  "I'll see if we can raise her on the radio."

  The Scorpio's captain, Rogan reported minutes later, was polite and immovable. "He says we're on his fishing ground, that they've fished here regularly."

  "That close to the reef?" Brodie queried. "Has he brought up any bits of wreckage or cargo?"

  "Probably," Rogan muttered. "Maybe they're responsible for the hole in the wreck's hull."

  Joe, the redheaded Australian, said, "Some fishing boats use dynamite to stun their catch and bring the fish to the surface."

  "That's illegal, isn't it?" Sienna asked.

  "Yeah," Joe confirmed, and grinned. "But on the high seas, who's to know?"

  Rogan said, "Anyway, I've told him we have certain legal rights on the site, and asked him nicely to move on. We can't force him."

  Brodie offered, "We could make fishing uncomfortable, with our airlifts. The bubbles might scare the fish away."

  Sienna gave him a dubious look. "He has just as much right to be here as we do, doesn't he?"

  His gaze rested on her for a moment, and she felt as if he'd touched her with a warm finger, sending a tiny shiver down to her toes.

  "The Pacific's a big ocean," he pointed out. "There are plenty more fishing spots but only one Maiden's Prayer." Turning to Rogan, he said, "Can we offer him compens
ation to move on?"

  "I'm not keen to do that in case it's exactly why he's here. He's turned up just when we're ready to start, and I somehow doubt it's pure coincidence."

  "He wouldn't be stupid enough to lower his nets near our anchors," Brodie suggested. "We can make a start, anyway, if we stick close to the barge."

  Rogan agreed. "The first thing is to airlift some of the overburden of sand off the wreck. We don't know if the complete hull is here or bits of it have scattered for miles. And Sienna, you can see how well our new computer program works for you in practice."

  The program he'd briefly introduced her to while they sailed toward their destination would show her a virtual grid superimposed on the video picture the divers would send back to the barge from their helmet-mounted cameras, improving on laboriously setting out physical grid lines underwater.

  Sienna said, "There could be breakable items down there. Crockery's valuable in an archaeological sense, even if not in market terms."

  "We'll take it gently," Rogan promised.

  "Yeah," Brodie agreed. "We don't want to accidentally smash anything."

  She thought his gaze this time was meant to be reassuring, but the warmth in his eyes almost undid her. Without even trying he could remind her of a tropical night that she desperately wanted to forget.

  Once the first two helmet divers were down, connected to the barge by their yellow air hoses, and the airlift was creating a five-foot-wide circle of bubbles on the surface, Sienna and Brodie sat side by side in the control center set up on the barge, watching the underwater operation on computer screens.

  She tried not to notice when his bare arm brushed hers. Tried to concentrate on the picture before her and not on the way a sun-kissed lock of hair fell over Brodie's forehead when he leaned forward to study something that had caught his eyes on the screen, nor on how surprisingly long his eyelashes were, and so much darker than his hair, or how strong and brown his blunt-fingered hand looked when it moved the computer mouse to zoom in on whatever had interested him.

  The man was just too sexy for her peace of mind. She wrenched her attention back to the computer.

  Chapter 6

  « ^ »

  Sand churned in opaque clouds, making it difficult at first to clearly see the divers systematically moving the ends of the airlifts, like giant vacuum-cleaner hoses, over the buried ship.

  Sienna knew exactly where they were, the numbers on the screen indicating which square of the grid they were in. On deck Rogan and Camille were watching the filters for anything brought up with the sand.

  The first thrill of anticipation ebbed away as the work progressed and nothing of interest was recovered. Lumps of coral retrieved from the filters were just what they appeared to be. Several fragments of wood were put aside in a tub of water for examination later. A round object retrieved by one of the divers, causing brief excitement, turned out to be a modern fishing float.

  Brodie shifted uneasily and muttered, "Someone's cleaned out the surface stuff, at least."

  "Are you sure Rogan didn't collect more than he's letting on?"

  Brodie turned to give her a hard stare. "Rogue's not a cheat. Or a liar."

  "But he's big on secrets," she pointed out. "Joe told me he and the other divers didn't have a clue where we were going."

  "Rogue didn't want it leaking out. Anyway, the first time he dived the site, Camille was with him. And the second time, I was."

  "What about when he was in Rarotonga to organize the dive barge? After all, who else would have known where to look?"

  "A navy ship picked up him and Camille the first time. The captain was sworn to secrecy, of course, but the crew could have put two and two together, specially when the papers got wind of the story and the reporters started making up theories because Rogue wouldn't talk to them. And James Drummond's on the loose somewhere. He knows where it is. And his skipper."

  "Who's in prison," Sienna reminded him. The man had confessed to everything he'd been charged with, and swore that Drummond had been the mastermind behind it.

  "Yeah, but he could have talked to his mates in there—and they don't stay locked up forever."

  When the first divers came up and entered the decompression chamber to purge their systems of nitrogen, two more replaced them and the work continued. More of the hull became visible, much of its timber remarkably almost intact. Then came the first real find of the day—one of the divers pushed aside the mouth of the airlift and stooped, then held up something that, though heavily encrusted, was obviously a candlestick.

  Sienna leaned forward, zoomed the computer in on the picture, and clicked for a still shot that the computer would automatically store. Brodie, in telephone communication with the divers through a headset, said, "Put it in the basket, Joe."

  Joe gave a thumbs-up signal and carefully placed the candlestick in the wire basket that had been lowered nearby, before returning to his painstaking work.

  Sienna noted the exact location of the find and said, "Did you and Rogan think of using those new machines that pick things up underwater?"

  "They're designed for areas too deep for divers," Brodie answered, his eyes on the screen in front of him, "and they're very expensive."

  A little later Joe's partner found some shards of china. Then a complete coral-coated wine bottle, more china shards and an apparently undamaged china plate joined the other artifacts. But the main task at the moment, Brodie said, was to determine which end of the ship was which, and how much of it was there. Sometimes a portion of a shipwreck might be found, with the rest perhaps being miles off in deeper water, carried by the current when the ship broke up.

  At the end of the day the basket was hauled up and its contents collected by Sienna and carried to the cabin on the barge set aside for her work.

  The fishing boat had moved off for a time, trawling in a desultory fashion back and forth, always within sight. But it returned to the same anchorage before darkness fell. Rogan spent some minutes with his hand shading his eyes, staring across the water.

  After a hearty dinner that she helped Camille cook, Sienna left the table early and returned to her lab.

  Brodie strolled in while she was carefully chipping coral from the wine bottle with a rubber mallet.

  "How's it going?" he asked, looking over her shoulder. "You're not afraid of breaking the glass?"

  "Not if I'm careful," she said. "It takes patience."

  Brodie looked at her bent head. She seemed almost oblivious to him. On the island he'd felt she was nearly ready to allow him to get beneath the surface of her firmly maintained outer shell, when she'd spent most of the day with him, danced with him, let him kiss her as they stood on the headland. And finally made love to him so generously, so unreservedly. Only to clam up immediately afterward, shutting him out of her mind, her heart.

  He said, "Sienna … on the island we were as close as two people can get, at least physically." Her hand rested on the table in front of her, still clutching the mallet. Clutching it quite hard, he noticed.

  "It was a beautiful night," she said. "We were both affected by all that tropical romance."

  Excuses, he thought irritably.

  Sienna lifted her hand again and gently tapped at the coral. A small piece fell off, revealing a bit more of the bottle. "It was nice," she said.

  Nice? It had been more than that. Special. Something to be treasured—and repeated. He looked down broodingly at the painstaking way she was removing the hard coating that hid the delicate artifact.

  Sienna hid her real self behind a protective layer of indifference and even cynicism. But she wasn't as tough as she made out. Underneath she was as fragile and brittle as the glass she handled with such care. Brodie knew it.

  Restlessly, he shifted position to lean against the table where he could see her face. She had her hair tied back out of the way, but her eyes were hidden by her lashes as she turned the bottle to access another portion of it.

  He couldn't believe the episo
de on Mokohina had meant so little to her, when he'd found it a mind-blowing experience. What was she trying to hide? Or hide from? "I thought," he said carefully, "that we had something going there."

  She lifted a shoulder. "We had a good time."

  "I hoped there might be better ones to come."

  Fleetingly her eyes met his. When she looked down again she said steadily, "If you mean you hoped to sleep with me again, I'm sorry—it's not going to happen."

  Tempted to ask, Wanna bet? Brodie refrained. Almost thinking aloud, trying to fathom this baffling turnaround, he said thoughtfully, "You don't hate me."

  That got her attention. "Of course I don't hate you!" Her cheeks went a deep pink.

  He watched with interest. "Who do you hate?"

  "No one!"

  Not even her father—she'd said she was glad he was happy. Taking a gamble, he said, "What about the guy—or guys—who hurt you in the past?"

  The color in her cheeks faded and she looked away from him. "No one goes through life without being hurt."

  "So badly you've shut yourself away from enjoying life?"

  She glanced up then, her expression hostile. "I have a very good life. I love my job, I have plenty of friends and a brother I'm close to, and my mother. Do I seem so miserable to you?"

  "You just seem … enclosed," he said. "As if you're afraid to let yourself go. What are you scared of?"

  "I'm not afraid!" She flashed him a fierce look that made him grin. She sure wasn't intimidated by him, although he could have picked her up with one hand if he were so inclined.

  "Prove it," he said.

  Her eyes turned suspicious, then scornful. "You'll have to do better than that," she said with deliberate sarcasm. "I'm not going to bed with you again just to show you don't frighten me."