On the Edge

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Renner looked mildly chagrined. “I can take a hint Maybe some other time?”

  “I’m not sure,” Amy said hesitantly. “My friend and I are going to be busy for the next few days.”

  “Say no more, I get the picture. It would be too much, I suppose, to hope that this, er, friend is female? When Guthrie’s not eating soup, he’s really a pretty decent guy. Any chance of a double date in scuba gear?”

  Amy laughed and shook her head.

  Jed heard the sweet, clear sound of her laughter as he walked into the tavern carrying a paper bag from Sanderson’s dive shop. He glanced around at the roomful of colorfully dressed tourists looking for Amy’s even more colorful fuchsia shirt. He spotted her talking to a dark-haired man who looked to be about her age. The man was seated at a table with another, slightly older man, but Jed ignored the second male. It was the first one, the one with the carefully styled black hair and the expensive bush shirt who was making the pass at Amy.

  Jed’s reaction was immediate and startlingly intense. Every nerve in his body reacted fiercely to the sight of Amy laughing with another man. The possessiveness he felt took him by surprise.

  He realized with a start that part of the problem was that he was accustomed to having Amy completely to himself. During the time he had known her—even when they had been playing the game of being friends—he had never had to deal with the potential threat of another man.

  Oh, there had been that brief moment when he was calling her from the L.A. airport and he had wondered if she was with someone else, but that jarring thought had quickly been forgotten when she’d agreed to meet his plane. Caliph’s Bay was a small place and Amy lived a quiet, private, almost reclusive life. She had never even dated anyone else in town.

  For the past three months Jed had had her virtually to himself. She was always at home when he called, available for dinner or willing to invite him over for an evening, and finally, after three long months, willing to share his bed.

  It occurred to Jed that he’d gotten pretty damn spoiled. Where had he picked up the notion that he actually had exclusive rights to Amelia Slater?

  In the next instant he realized it didn’t matter where he’d gotten the idea; it was firmly embedded in his mind. Amy belonged to him.

  He shouldn’t have let her leave the house with that shirt tied just below her breasts like that, he decided as he watched her. It left her neat little midriff fully exposed.

  Jed heard her laugh again and started forward. He walked up behind her just as the blue-eyed man spoke casually.

  “I understand the cruise ship has a standing invitation to the locals to go aboard in the evenings, spend a little money at the bar and enjoy the entertainment. Any chance you’d ditch your diving friend and join me tonight? Rosie says they usually have a good band. Apparently she and Hank go aboard when the ship is in harbor.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Amy began politely. “There’s not a lot of night life here on Orleana, but as far as tonight goes—”

  “As far as tonight goes,” Jed interrupted smoothly, “Amy is busy. Her diving buddy isn’t about to get himself ditched.” He put his arm around Amy’s bare waist. She glanced up at him in surprise.

  “Oh. There you are, Jed. I wondered what was keeping you. Did you get the batteries?”

  Her voice was a bit too bright and Jed knew why. She had sensed the potential for trouble and was determined to head it off at all costs. He knew instinctively that Amy would hate finding herself at the center of an uncivilized scene between two growling males. Ruthlessly he took advantage of her natural desire to avoid a rude exchange of masculine insults. Jed smiled down at her a little grimly.

  “I’ve got the batteries. Are you ready to leave?”

  She nodded quickly. “I’m ready.” Then her manners got in the way. She paused to introduce him to the two men seated at the table.

  “Glaze.” Renner’s smile went down a few watts but stayed in place. He studied Jed with interest.

  “Renner.” Jade acknowledged the other man with a cool inclination of his head. It was hardly worth bothering with Guthrie. He seemed concerned only with spooning up the last of his chowder. He did so with a distinct slurping noise that made Dan Renner wince. Jed didn’t like the wryly apologetic smile Renner gave Amy on behalf of his companion; it was too much like a private exchange. The man was a nuisance. Jed’s arm tightened around Amy. “Come on, honey. Let’s get going.”

  She didn’t argue with him but she insisted on stopping by the kitchen before they left. Rosie had dished up the last hamburger and was about to carry it into the other room. She smiled when she saw Jed.

  “I hear you two are going diving this afternoon. You take good care of this girl now, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “And you bring her out to the boat tonight. Be fun for both of you. I’m gonna make Hank put on a fresh shirt and polish his shoes. That man can dance when he puts his mind to it, you know.”

  Hank loomed in the doorway behind Jed and Amy. He exhaled gustily. “The woman wears me out on the dance floor. Hadn’t danced in over thirty years and then this cruise ship started putting into port every week and inviting all us local yokels on board. Next thing I know, I’m trying to remember how to fox-trot.”

  “Believe me, I understand,” Jed muttered. “I’m not much of a dancer, either. Never was.”

  “Well, it sounds like fun,” Amy said with an enthusiasm Jed knew he wouldn’t be able to override. “Save us a seat tonight.”

  “Will do,” Rosie confirmed. “I guess Renner and Guthrie are planning on living it up, too. Heard them say they wanted to take in the night life on board.”

  Jed glanced back toward the two men. “I hope Renner realizes he’s going to have to turn up his own dancing partner from among the passengers. He’s not going to borrow Amy.”

  “Jed!” Amy gave him a quelling glance which Jed ignored.

  Rosie laughed zestfully and patted Amy’s arm. “Don’t fret, girl. The good ones are always a tad possessive. Seems to go with the territory.” She paid no attention to the warmth in Amy’s face. “You know, that Renner puts me in mind of someone I once knew.”

  “You’ve met him before?” Amy asked.

  Rosie shook her head. “Oh, no. I’d remember if I had. You know me. Never forget a face. No, there’s just something familiar about him. What about you, Hank. Does he remind you of anyone?”

  Hank glanced down the aisle of rattan tables, frowning in concentration. “Can’t say that he does. Probably just your imagination, Rosie.”

  “Maybe,” Rosie agreed. “Well, you two run along and have fun this afternoon. We’ll see you tonight.”

  Jed nodded, using his hand on Amy’s waist to steer her toward the door as she said her good-byes.

  “Really, Jed,” she announced as she found herself out on the street beside him, “you came very close to being rude in there.”

  “I can do better than come close. I can get right down to the real thing.”

  She was clearly taken aback by his words. “Don’t you think you overreacted a bit? Dan was only being friendly.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure, what?” she demanded. “That’s no kind of answer. Sure you overreacted or sure he was being friendly?”

  “Amy, your voice is rising.” He opened the Jeep door and helped her onto the seat.

  “My voice is rising?” she squeaked. “I can do more than raise it a little, I can scream. Jed, this is ridiculous. Why are you so upset?”

  He sighed as he got in beside her and turned the key in the ignition. “I just realized I’ve gotten spoiled.”

  When she tried to pin him down on his meaning he switched the conversation to the dive plan.

  An hour and a half later Amy watched a sleek blue jack swim lazily through the water in front of her and knew this time she was going to be all right. Her breathing was normal, the water felt good and she was actually beginning to enjoy the dive. Jed was to her left
and a little behind her, swimming easily. If he was watching her for signs of incipient panic he was doing a good job of hiding his concern. He appeared relaxed and interested in the underwater landscape.

  The bomber lay in shallow water just beyond the reef that ringed a small cove. Jed and Amy were both carrying dive lights to explore the inside of the fuselage, but the lights weren’t necessary for anything else. Sunlight filtered through the beautiful water, illuminating the waving seaweed, the scalloped sand and the flashing schools of endlessly patrolling fish. Everything was clear and gently lit. There were no terrifyingly dark corridors that led nowhere, no confining rock walls that threatened to close in on a diver, no body guarding the only exit.

  And Jed was with her. Jed, who now knew everything. Amy had told him the truth about her worst nightmares and he had accepted it all without batting an eye.

  Amy didn’t kid herself about why he had been able to handle the facts about her past so easily. It was because his past contained nightmares that were undoubtedly a lot worse than her own. But hadn’t she subconsciously guessed that all along? He had confirmed those half realized truths the night before, although he had spared her the details.

  It occurred to Amy as she watched Jed glide down to explore a small reef cranny that she had accepted his past as easily as he had accepted hers. In spite of what had happened to her eight months before she had a feeling she should have been far more shocked when she heard the truth about Jed. After all, for her the terrifying experience with LePage and the excursion into darkness that had followed were distinct aberrations in her world. For Jed such things apparently bordered on the normal.

  He wasn’t the kind of man she had once thought she could love. Never in her wildest imaginings had she envisioned losing her heart to a man like Jedidiah Glaze.

  Strangely enough, the shadows in him weren’t what disturbed her the most, although a year ago they would have been the reason she would have steered clear of him. No, now Amy knew it was Jed’s manner of dismissing most of his past and a large part of his future that truly bothered her. He kept both locked away in the farthest corners of his mind, just as he kept the shadows imprisoned. Amy sensed it was his ability to do so that had helped him survive. It had been her inability to do just that which had threatened her sanity.

  She understood Jed’s commitment only to the present, but she wondered what hope there was for a love that existed within such boundaries. She wasn’t even sure that in Jed’s case the emotion could be labeled love. It was probably more in the nature of a short-term sexual bond that could be severed quite easily. Unfortunately for her, her emotions were far more complex. She was in love, and there was nothing else she could label it.

  Amy pushed aside the unanswered questions and concentrated on her diving. Kicking forward, she led Jed around the reef toward a large, hulking shape on the ocean floor. The twin tails of the B-25 were still intact, although their once sleek outlines were marred by decades of marine growth. The sea had done its work on the invading object from the outer world. It accepted it and used it for its own purposes. The bomber was now home for a variety of plants and aquatic creatures.

  Amy swam around it first, letting Jed have a good look at the empty nose where the gunner had once crouched. The glass was long gone, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how it had looked. Amy thought briefly of the unknown young man who had sat there at the front of the craft, so vulnerable and exposed, in order to do his job. She had always told herself that the crew of the plane had managed to bail out before the bomber went down. It was probably a fairy tale, but she preferred it to the more likely truth that everyone on board had been killed.

  A creative imagination, Jed said, had its drawbacks. Sometimes he was right. She couldn’t bear to think of the crew of the bomber trapped in the plane as they watched their doom rise to meet them. It was one thing to create that sort of scenario on a word processor, quite another to imagine it happening in real life.

  Amy turned away from the gunner’s seat and swam toward the broken fuselage. She was aware of Jed keeping an eye on her now. He was trying to be unobtrusive about it, but she knew he was wondering if she would find the interior of the plane too reminiscent of the interior of a cave. Amy was wondering the same thing. She switched on her dive light.

  A wave of relief swept through her, and for the first time Amy realized she had been more tense than she had thought. This wasn’t a cave. It wasn’t anything like a cave. Her imagination had been a little overactive on that subject, too. Sunlight pierced the shattered, twisted skin of the craft in several places. Amy glanced around, bouncing her light off the encrusted interior walls of the plane as she hovered just outside a jagged tear in the metal.

  Jed appeared on the opposite side of the craft, his light pouring through what had once been the hatch. The twin beams of the dive lights caught a school of colorful wrasses. They were propelling themselves through the cavernous interior of the plane with the distinctive rowing motion of their pectoral fins. They seemed unperturbed by the human intruders.

  Gingerly Amy swam through the tear in the fuselage and went toward the cockpit. Jed followed. Their lights played over what remained of the panel and the pilot’s seat. Amy was about to turn around when she spotted an untidy little pile of empty shells beneath the seat.

  Swimming closer, Amy dropped down and aimed the dive light up under the skeleton of the instrument panel. She saw what she had half expected to find. The tip of a tentacle was just barely visible. The shells piled up below the pilot’s seat were the remains of several meals. She had found an octopus’ den.

  Experimentally she moved her wrist back and forth in the water, inviting the den’s resident to view the shiny metal casing of her dive watch. It was a toss-up for a minute or two, but eventually the creature’s curiosity overcame its natural timidity. A tentacle whipped out to wrap around Amy’s wrist. It was a very small tentacle and Amy wanted to laugh. She glanced back and saw Jed watching. Behind the mask she saw the amusement in his eyes.

  Gently she reached out to stroke the tentacle. But the instant she touched the octopus it panicked and withdrew completely into hiding. The game was over.

  Amy swung slowly around in the water, following Jed back out of the cockpit. As they slipped past the entrance a moray poked its head out from under a jumble of wooden crates. Amy backed off, giving the creature room. Morays weren’t aggressive, but they had no compunction about biting a stray hand or foot that wandered too close to their territory.

  Amy was about to swim out through the hatch when she caught Jed’s questioning gaze. She signaled she was fine and kicked easily back out of the plane.

  She was fine, she realized. A small burst of relieved euphoria caught her and she swung around to wait for Jed. He appeared after a moment and seemed to understand her mood. Side by side they headed back toward shore.

  As they waded out of the surf Jed shoved his mask back on his head and asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Peachy,” Amy said blithely. “Terrific. A-OK. Wonderful. Great.”

  “Good. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll go after that box in the caves.”

  Amy’s euphoric mood splintered. “No, Jed. I’ve told you there’s no need to drag that thing out of there.”

  “Have a little faith in me, sweetheart. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Why, you overconfident, arrogant son of a—”

  He leaned down and cut off her words with a quick, salty kiss. “I enjoyed the dive. You’re a good partner underwater. Come to think of it, you’re pretty good out of the water, too. Terrific in bed, in fact.”

  Amy saw the unabashed sexual humor in his eyes and didn’t know whether to yell at him or give him a disgusted, cold shoulder. It was obvious he wasn’t going to argue about the box in the caves. He was going after it and if she didn’t go along, he’d probably go by himself. Quietly she turned away from him and began unbuckling her gear.

  Jed watched her mood shift and stifled a sigh of regret.
He was genuinely sorry to have caused the change, but there wasn’t any help for it. The business with the box in the caves had to be handled sooner or later and it was his nature to take care of loose ends as soon as possible. It made him distinctly uneasy to know Amy’s secrets had been so precariously hidden for so long.

  She’d handled herself well in the water today, he thought as he silently helped pack the gear. She had been relaxed and efficient. Jed realized he was taking a certain pride in the fact that she seemed back in control. Had confiding her secrets to him relieved some of her stress? It was undoubtedly his ego at work, but he liked to think he’d helped Amy. It satisfied the side of him that wanted to protect her.

  As if her secrets were all that horrendous, Jed thought wryly as he swung the tanks into the back of the Jeep. But death and fear could be relative matters. For someone like Amy, the events that night at the caves constituted a true nightmare.

  Whenever he thought about how close she had come to getting herself killed by LePage, Jed had a few nightmares of his own.

  “What you have to understand, Amy,” Jed said as he climbed into the Jeep beside her, “is that that damn box can come back to haunt you in more ways than one. Leave it where it is and it might do more than keep you awake nights.”

  She turned to eye him uneasily. “What are you talking about?”

  “That box has already gotten two people killed, Wyman and LePage. Don’t look at me like that, Amy. I’m glad it was LePage lying on the bottom of that pool the next morning, not you.” He saw her wince. “Yeah, think about it. He had plans to be the one who discovered your ‘accidentally’ drowned body that morning.”

  Jed knew he sounded cold, but he was determined to do whatever he had to in order to make an impression. Amy was too gentle to be involved in this mess, but the world rarely respected such innocence. Amy was involved and the only way to free her was to make her face her involvement.