by Lee, Rachel
And he hadn’t seen his most recent on-again off-again girlfriend since his diving accident. She could at least have visited him at the hospital, but instead she’d called him, and said, “I’m no good with this stuff, Chase. I can’t stand sickness.” And she hadn’t even apologized for it.
Not that he’d been in love with her or anything. He hadn’t made that mistake since Julia. But… well, it just confirmed his opinion. They were there as long as there was something in it for them, and gone just as soon as the ground got rough.
Now here was Callie doing exactly what he would have predicted. Willing to hang around with him if she thought it would help her brother, and ready to bail out the instant he was going to do something she wasn’t happy about.
They were all the same.
But this time it didn’t feel the same. He wasn’t shrugging it off. Instead he sat in the armchair and tried to figure out a way to solve his problem without doing what Callie didn’t want him to do.
He supposed he could hire another diver to go down. If anyone went down there and found the damage was consistent with Bruderson’s report, and not with Bill’s, he could at least be reasonably certain that he hadn’t screwed up his own dive. And they’d still have enough to go to the insurance company, and enough for Jeff’s lawyer to make a case that the missing divers were the murderers. Anybody, even a state attorney, ought to be able to understand the motivation of ten million dollars in uncut diamonds.
But he wouldn’t have made the dive himself, and as long as that was true, he’d still be a cripple.
Sighing, he rubbed his eyes and yawned, and tried to stay awake. The nightmares were lurking at the edges of his mind; he could feel them waiting to pounce and shred him. He wondered if diving would cure him of that, or if he was doomed to wake up drowning every night for the rest of his life.
Grim prospect. His back and hip were starting to throb mightily, so he got up to move around. Maybe, he thought, he should try to take a walk around the outside of the house. It would stretch his leg and loosen up his back, and maybe he could put a few more of his demons to “st.
He was just opening the bedroom door when tide phone rang. Callie hurried by him into the kitchen. He followed her, hoping it wasn’t some new catastrophe.
“Hi, Jeff,” she said into the phone. “Yeah, we’re back okay… no… Don’t worry. Chase is staying here tonight. I’ll be fine.” She paused. “Yes, he’s right herb. Just a minute.”
She passed the receiver to him and Chase took it. “Hi, Jeff.”
“I was just making sure she wasn’t lying about you being there,” Jeff said, amusement wrinkling his voice. “She lies to me all the time to keep me from worrying about her.”
“She does a lot of that, huh?”
“You bet. And she thinks I don’t know it. Anyway, I’ve got to look out for her, you know?”
“You bet.” He felt himself beginning to smile. Another white knight in the making. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a handle on tonight, anyway. You at your friend’s?”
“Phil’s? Yeah. Just got here.”
“How’s Sara?”
“Oh, man….” Jeff’s voice trailed off. “I gotta get off this murder charge, Chase. I gotta. Sara’s… well, Sara is…” He trailed off. “I can’t describe it.”
Chase was definitely smiling now. “I hear you. Just take it slow, okay? Give yourself a chance to really get to know her.”
“Not much else I can do right now. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“Well, that’s my best advice. I wasted it, huh?”
Jeff laughed. “I wanted to ask… is Callie pissed about something? She sounded funny on the phone.”
Chase looked at Callie. She was busy keeping her back to him and washing the coffee mugs. “She’s pissed at me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m thinking about diving down to the Maggie again.”
“No kidding? I’ll be she’s already measuring you for a casket.”
“Not quite.”
“Give her an hour or so. She’s convinced that anytime anybody gets more than twenty feet from shore they’re never going to come back again.”
“Well, she’s got some reason for that fear.”
“What? That my dad died at sea? He could have been hit by a truck, struck by lightning or—or had a heart attack.”
Chase had to smile again, hearing Jeff use the same logic he’d once offered Callie. The young man had more good stuff in him than his sister realized. “That’s the logic of it. But logic doesn’t always win over emotions, Jeff.”
“I guess not.”
“After all, I know there’s no reason to be afraid of the dark, but it still gives me cold sweats to step outside at night.”
After he hung up the phone, Chase stood looking at Cal-lie’s back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She didn’t quite glance over her shoulder. “For what?”
“For asking you to approve of me making a dive. I should have realized I couldn’t ask you that.”
“Why should you even ask me?” She scrubbed at the counter with a dish sponge. “It’s none of my business what you do.”
“Then how come you got so upset about it?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t care. I just said it was none of my business.”
“Mmm.” She kept right on scouring that counter and he kept right on studying her back. There had to be a way around this, he thought. There had to be. Because for some reason he didn’t think he could stand it if they couldn’t heal this breach.
“Calypso…”
She turned around and he was shocked to see tears running down her face. “You can’t do this,” she said. “You can’t. If something happens to you…” She threw down the sponge and ran from the room.
He thought about following her, but he didn’t. Not right away.
Because there was nothing he could say. Not a thing. He had to do this for himself as much as anything. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life crippled by fear and self-doubt. He couldn’t.
And he couldn’t see any way around it.
CHAPTER 17
Callie sat on the seawall, her toes dangling in the warm water, feeling the tickle of the surface tension as the gentle waves rose and fell. The water was getting ruffled, she noticed, and the breeze was stiffening. A storm in the making? If so, there was hope that Chase wouldn’t make his insane dive tomorrow.
And it was insane. After what had happened to him last time, and with no proof whatsoever that he’d had the wrong air mixture, he had to be utterly crazy even to consider going back down there.
A snuffling sound from the water caught her attention. A manatee, she thought. They sometimes came into the inlet hunting for seaweed. The first time she had seen one, she’d been eight years old, and she had been on The Wind Drifter, her father’s fishing vessel. The Drifter had been tied up to the dock, and her dad had been scraping the hull, diving down below to scrape, and resurfacing every minute or so to take a breath. At least four times that afternoon he swore he was going to get an aqualung for doing this miserable job.
He never did. Probably never could afford it, she thought now. There’d always been something she and Jeff had needed more, or the boat needed more. And so he had kept diving the hard way.
That afternoon, he’d had Callie brushing flecks of paint off the bow railing, scouring it smooth for a fresh coat of paint. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure how much she’d really helped him, but she’d felt she was helping, and her dad had believed that kids were never too young to learn useful tasks.
All of a sudden he’d surfaced beside the boat, shaking the water off his face.
“Calypso,” he’d called quietly. “Calypso, come look. There’s a manatee momma and her baby….”
The inlet waters had been nearly as clear as glass that day, with the beds of seaweed visible on the bottom. Leaning over the rail, Callie had watched in awe as the big manatee had grazed on the
seaweed and nursed her baby from the nipple under her armpit. The manatee hadn’t appeared to be disturbed by the human in the water, and when she had drifted close to Wes Carlson, she had even seemed to enjoy the gentle pats he gave her.
Remembering that magical afternoon now, Callie felt tears rolling down her cheeks. God, how she missed her dad! For a few minutes her throat was so tight with grief that she could barely breathe.
But as grief began to ease, she remembered something else. There had been a time when the sea hadn’t been her enemy. A time when the sea had been full of wonder and promise. A time when she had wanted to grow up and become a fisherman just like her dad. There had been a time when she had begged to go fishing with him, and all she had wanted for her birthday was a trip on a glass-bottomed boat to see the reefs.
And then her mother had died, and it had begun to seem that the sea was taking her dad away from her. “Find some other job,” she’d begged.
“I can’t, Callie,” he’d replied. ‘There’s nothing else I can do as well, nothing else I can do that will keep us fed.”
So she had begun to hate the sea. Her father’s death had only hardened her hatred. The sea had kept him away from her for weeks on end, claiming what should have been Callie’s by right: her father’s time and emotional support.
Looking back, she could see the selfishness in her demands and needs. Her dad had been doing the best he could, and thrusting early motherhood on his fourteen-year-old daughter had been necessary. It also hadn’t been unreasonable. In Wes Carlson’s generation, a lot of girls who weren’t much older got married and had babies. His sister had been a mother at fifteen. Why would he think he was asking too much of his daughter?
Prolonged childhood didn’t exist in her father’s world. Wes Carlson had had his first job at the age of eleven, and had gone to sea at twelve as a fisherman, during school breaks. He’d owned his own boat by the time he was twenty. No, he hadn’t seen anything wrong in asking his daughter to care for his younger son while he went to sea. That’s how it was done.
He’d been wonderfully proud of Callie for going to college and graduate school. “Bustin’ my buttons,” he’d used to say. But would he be proud of her now?
The question tightened her throat again, and made her chest feel heavy. No, she thought, he wouldn’t be proud of her. He’d say, “The sea gives life, Calypso. I can go out on my boat and cast my nets and bring up enough fish to feed us all and pay the bills. The sea is our mother.”
And if she argued that the sea had killed him, he’d shake his head sadly and say, “No, Calypso. It was my fault. I wasn’t wearing a safety line.”
That’s what he would say, and she could hear it as clearly as if he were sitting here right beside her. Wes Carlson had never blamed anyone or anything but himself for his problems. Never.
And he’d be very ashamed of Callie for blaming everyone and everything she could for her own misery.
So what if life had made her a mother at fourteen? Given the opportunity, would she have put Jeff in someone else’s care all those years? Of course not. She wouldn’t have allowed it. So maybe it was time to stop blaming her father and the sea, and start accepting her own responsibility. She could have refused the task. If she had, her dad would have found someone to take Jeff in while he was at sea. But she hadn’t done that. It had never entered her head to do that. Instead she had cherished the idea of herself as put-upon.
Her mouth suddenly tasted bitter, and she decided she didn’t like herself very much. Instead of drowning in self-pity, maybe she ought to try being proud of herself for having done what was necessary to give her brother a stable home life.
And instead of trying to keep Jeff from growing up, maybe she ought to devote herself to getting a life of her own.
As for Chase—her heart ached painfully, and her mouth went dry. She didn’t think she could stand the fear.
But what right had she to beg him not to do this? Did she really want him to spend the rest of his life mired in self-doubt and nightmares? As a psychologist she damn well knew that what he was proposing would be the best possible cure for all that ailed him. Facing his demons, conquering them, and returning triumphant would heal him in a way nothing else could.
So what was the matter with her? Could she actually be this selfish? Yes, he might die, but if he didn’t do this, he might as well be dead. That Beretta that had been stolen from his table—she didn’t think he kept it for protection. She didn’t think it had been sitting on his table so that he could shoot his nightmares.
No, she would bet he’d actually contemplated suicide more than once since his accident. Heck, she’d been trying to avoid involvement with him because he was so psychologically wounded, and now that he’d devised a method of curing himself, what right did she have to stand in his way? How could she?
Since when had her feelings become so important that she considered everyone else’s needs to be secondary?
Little by little the tightness in her throat and chest eased, and a calm began to steal over her. She knew what she had to do. It was the only right thing to do. And for Chase, dying in this dive would probably be better than continuing to live the way he’d been these past few months.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t even be suggesting this.
Given that, she had absolutely no right to stand in his way.
After a while, she rose and returned to the house. She was surprised to find Chase sitting on the porch.
“I was watching you,” he said simply. “Lately I’m not all that sure what might be creeping around these woods.”
“Thank you.” She stood looking at him, filled with yearnings and fears that nearly locked her in place. “I… um… You’re right. You need to make that dive.”
She blurted out the words fast, needing to say them before fear stopped her.
“What changed your mind?”
“I… did some thinking. I was being selfish.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being selfish.”
“Sometimes there is. This time there is. You’re right. You need to do this or you’ll be crippled for the rest of your life. So… just do it. Just… just… oh, God, be careful.”
Chase didn’t know what to say. Even in the moonlight he could tell Callie was shaking like a leaf. He had some appreciation of how difficult that had been for her to say, and he felt something inside him begin to unlock for the first time in years. “You’re sure about that?”
“I’m not sure of anything! I don’t want you to do this, but you have to. Even I can see that. And I’m just not selfish enough to try to stop you. Even if… even if…”
He had an idea what that cost her. This woman had been wounded by enough loss in her life, and he could hardly blame her for fearing more of it.
But he also realized something else. If she didn’t give a damn about him, she wouldn’t be so upset about this. If she didn’t care a lick for him, she’d be eager to have him make this dive because it might help Jeff.
But she cared enough for him to let him do it. She hadn’t phrased her acceptance in terms of Jeff, but in terms of what he needed.
Something inside him swelled, making it nearly impossible for him to breathe. It had been a hell of a long time since anybody had cared enough about him to put themselves second. Certainly no woman in his life ever had.
“I’ll be careful,” he heard himself saying. “I swear I will.”
“I know,” she said raggedly. “I know…”
Somehow he was off the chair and across the porch. He started to wrap his arms around her, but hesitated, remembering her fear last night. Then he felt her reach for him, and all his qualms vanished.
“It’ll be okay,” he said, or tried to, as the rhythm of the sea in his veins became a pounding surf of need and hunger. Her caring was reaching him at levels that hadn’t been touched in a long, long time, and he needed to hold her more than he’d needed anything in ages.
When he held her tightly against him, he
closed his eyes and let the intense feeling of warmth wash over him. God, had an embrace ever felt this good!
Bending his head, he pressed his face into her hair and smelled coconut. She filled his senses, and filled his soul, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to let her go. Not this time.
But he remembered her fear, and the memory of it nearly paralyzed him. He didn’t want to say or do the wrong thing, didn’t want to scare her. She’d been scared too often and too much in her life, and he didn’t want to give her any more of that.
He felt her stir against him, and for an instant he thought she wanted him to let go of her. His heart took a tumble, falling into a dark pit, then soaring again as her hands clutched at his back, as if she wanted him even closer.
Then she tilted her head back, and her mouth sought his. Joy burst in him, a nearly blinding white light that reached the mustiest corners of his soul. She was asking for his kiss, and he gave it willingly, covering her mouth with his as if he could take her very essence into himself.
She responded eagerly, her tongue meeting his and engaging in a teasing dance that thrilled and delighted him. He couldn’t remember a woman’s kiss ever having seemed so precious.
Her hands were all over his back, stroking, clutching, as if she was seeking something more. Finally, he lifted his head, tearing his mouth from hers, and said huskily, “Callie, if we don’t stop now, I’m not going to stop.”
Because if he took one more step down this road, stopping would come close to killing him. Hunger was hammering at him, and her closeness was driving him to an edge he had seldom reached. But it wasn’t that he wouldn’t be able to stop; it was that if he had to stop later, they would both be left feeling bruised and frustrated, and he was damned if he was going to allow that to happen to either of them.