by Laura Kaye
“Wow,” she said, grimacing down at her cards like she was really worried.
“No shame in bowing out gracefully,” Jud said.
Which was when Tara called his bet. “Read ’em and weep, Mr. Taylor.” She laid down her kings, revealing her full house, kings over threes.
Jud flew out of his chair. “Fuck. Fuck.”
Chuckling, George flipped over Jud’s cards for him. Just like she suspected, he had the same but weaker hand, threes full of kings.
The rest of the night continued pretty much the same way, with Tara winning about seventy-five percent of the hands she played through to the river card. She really, really liked Hold ’em.
George was the first to drop out of the game. Jud went next, having written an IOU on her forearm for $65. And then it was just her and Jesse, who was a smart if a little bit of a conservative player. But that approach meant he’d lost the least of the three men.
“Still game?” she asked, collecting the cards from the last hand.
“I enjoyed the hell out of watching you play, but you already took enough of my money. Thank you very much.”
She laughed and made a chicken noise, and he threw his cards at her, making her laugh harder.
“Damn straight. Where the hell did you learn to play like that?” He leaned down to retrieve some of the spilled cards.
“My dad. He was also navy. We moved around a lot, of course, so he helped fill my spare time ’til I made friends by playing poker with me. I got good.”
He smirked. “You don’t say.”
She smirked back. “After I graduated high school, I played some at the tournament level. Probably could’ve kept at that for a while, but I decided to join the navy instead.” What she didn’t tell him was how much she’d second-guessed her decision when, just six months after enlisting, her mom died unexpectedly of a heart attack. She’d hated thinking of her dad all alone, but he’d been nothing but supportive.
“I joined right out of high school, too,” he said, his gaze more appraising. She’d guessed that about him when he’d revealed he served his full twenty. He didn’t look old enough to have served twenty years as it was. So enlisting after graduation was something else they had in common then.
And damn, why did she like when he looked at her so much? She didn’t just feel observed, she felt…seen. In a way she hadn’t in so long.
Tara slipped the cards into their box and rose. “We gotta be up in six hours anyway.” Jesse groaned, making her laugh. “It’ll be a great navy day.” It was something her dad said so often when she was a kid.
He rolled his eyes. “Roger that.”
They walked aft, then descended a ladder to the cabin deck. Jesse reached his door first.
“Good night, Jesse.” She kept moving because she didn’t trust herself to remain close to him.
“Good night, Daddy Warbucks.” He threw her a grin. A really sexy grin. One she wanted to kiss off his face. For starters.
Resisting that urge, Tara held up her bag of winnings. “It’s good to be queen.” And then she quickly closed herself in her room before she broke her own rules.
Chapter 10
Tara was soaked, and she wasn’t one of the divers who’d been in the ocean. It had been pouring for hours. Only the fact that the wind remained moderate kept them from calling the whole thing off. Plus, the GD was big enough that it remained fairly stable despite the minor swells. Still, it was an exercise in balance for her and Bobby to do what they needed for the team’s working divers.
Luckily, it wasn’t as rough for Jud and Jesse on the bottom as it was for them on the surface, but that didn’t mean it was perfect, either. The good news was that they only had one more dive to complete the survey of the remaining zone. Jesse was ascending now and Jud was ready to dive as soon as he hit the surface.
Tara and Bobby were huddled around the waterproof computer system when Bobby frowned. And then Tara saw Jesse’s message that explained why.
Skip safety stop
“Shit,” Bobby said. “It must be too rough for the diving stage.”
As Bobby communicated that to Boone and Mike, Tara looked over the edge of the boat. A safety stop was a three-minute stop made about fifteen feet beneath the surface during the final part of the ascent. Considered a best practice for safe diving at any depth beneath twenty feet, it was mandatory for deeper dives or dives where they’d surpassed the maximum diving time limits. In those situations, a diver had to make controlled ascents with occasional stops to allow his body to adjust to changes in ambient pressure and off-gas nitrogen absorbed while diving.
The diving stage broke the water, and Jesse appeared calm. Unharmed. Fine. Of course, he was a professional who’d probably worked under more hazardous circumstances. But still.
When the stage was secure, he came aboard and he and Jud immediately exchanged information. “Visibility’s declining,” Jesse said. “But there’s only two survey spots left.”
“You okay, son?” Boone asked.
Jesse wiped at his face. “I’m good. But it’s too rough at the surface to chance the safety stop.”
Boone nodded. “Still want George to check you out.”
“That’s not necessary, sir.”
Arching an eyebrow, Boone gave him a stern look. It wasn’t one he wore often, which made it all the more impactful when he hit you with it. “Get checked.”
“Roger that.” Jesse clapped Jud on the back. “Your umbilical’s gonna want to yank you around, so just watch it.”
Jud gave him an okay gesture, and Tara attached his regulator to his helmet. And then he was on the diving stage and going down.
Tara had to stay focused on Jud’s dive profile, but she couldn’t help being curious as George led Jesse away. Staying down too long and ascending too aggressively could cause a diver all sorts of problems, not all of which manifested right away. The most common was the joint pain caused by nitrogen bubbles hitting your blood and tissues, known as “the bends” or decompression sickness. But injury from expanding air was also possible to the ears, sinuses, and lungs. And far more serious were arterial gas embolisms and nitrogen narcosis, which could impair brain function, giving an affected diver headaches and visual disturbances, impairing judgment, and even causing paralysis.
Jesse’s fine, Tara told herself. And she made herself believe it so she could do her job.
“Jud’s down at sixty-one feet,” she called, calculating his max dive time on the tables. It hadn’t even been an hour since he’d completed his last dive, which limited how long he could stay down this time.
19 minutes before reqd deco
Damn that was tight. Jud’s replies came in quick succession:
Roger
Poor visibility
Survey underway
The rain turned to more of a drizzle, and Tara breathed a sigh of relief. They were almost done. Jesse and Jud had really kicked ass today.
When George and Jesse returned, Jesse was holding a mask to his face with one hand and carrying the portable oxygen cylinder from the resuscitator kit in his other.
George reported to Boone, but everyone gathered around. “Anderson’s good. Recommending thirty minutes of oxygen as a precaution.”
Boone clapped Jesse on the shoulder. “Decompression chamber if you need it, okay?”
Jesse nodded, but he didn’t look too happy about any of it. Tara winked at him and gave him a little smile. In her experience, SPECWAR people made terrible patients, so she suspected it was probably hard for him to accept the help.
He rolled his eyes at her, but his expression beneath the mask shifted, eased.
As the rain backed off, the wind picked up—and so did the waves. Tara checked the dive time and sent an update to Jud:
Ten minutes to reqd deco
Rain decreased but wind gusts to 25 knots
She frowned when he didn’t respond right away, but finally his message came through: Roger
Then four minutes later:
Survey complete
Returning to stage
“He’s done,” Tara said.
Mike sprang into action, preparing to reel up the diving stage. Boone returned to mission control to monitor the reports Jud’s computer would be uploading.
Beam me up, Scotty
Tara grinned at the team joke they’d had programmed into all the dive computers. She motioned to Mike to bring Jud up.
She wasn’t sure exactly what happened next. One minute, the winch was whirring as it lifted the diving stage. The next, the wind kicked up hard enough to drive a line of swells against the GD’s haul, rocking the girl’s big ass to starboard. It shouldn’t have been that remarkable, except that the winch motor made a grinding sound and then there was a high-pitched metallic rasp.
George and Mike flew to the mechanicals to see what’d happened, and Boone nearly skidded onto deck like he’d hauled ass the second things had gone fubar.
Tara’s gut dropped as she typed out a query to Jud: Report status
No answer.
Jesse appeared at her side without his oxygen, his expression like a dark storm. “Something happened to one of the cables.”
That was all she needed to hear. “Bobby!” Tara called, her brain going on autopilot.
The man was there in an instant, already knowing why she’d called him. She was Jud’s standby diver. It was her responsibility to go to his assistance.
She checked her dive computer then grabbed her helmet. “Gonna use the scuba,” she said, referencing the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus she’d wear harnessed to her back. It would give her an extra bail-out cylinder in case Jud’s air had been compromised in the accident and more freedom of movement than an umbilical connected to surface-supplied air.
Bobby had her fully kitted in thirty seconds.
Tara turned for the deck’s open edge, catching Jesse’s concerned expression just before she performed a stride entry, maintaining a vertical posture until she was fully submerged.
Her hand found the shot line that connected the dive buoy to the dive site on the bottom, and even though she registered the cold temperature and the waves trying to pull her this way and that, her sole focus was on descending as quickly as possible, being careful to equalize her pressure to prevent barotrauma as she went deeper. Twenty feet. Thirty. Forty.
Diver 3 in the water
She peered upward but was already too deep to make Bobby out. It was good that he was coming, because he could handle assessing the equipment damage.
Fifty. Fifty-five. Darkness enveloped her. Her helmet light only penetrated a few feet in front of her. Tara touched bottom and oriented herself in the direction where the stage should be.
It only took her twenty seconds to locate the tall square structure—and then Jud himself.
He was calmly sitting on the bottom facing the metal box.
Tara made an okay symbol with her fingers, asking him with hand signals if he was injured.
Jud pointed to his foot.
Leaning down, Tara found that the stage had trapped one of Jud’s feet beneath it when it hit the bottom. She dug at the sand, attempting to create a cavity beneath his foot that would free him. But the bottom was more compacted than she expected. They needed to move the stage.
Just then, Bobby arrived, and Tara signaled the problem to him.
Bobby gestured that he would lift the stage, allowing Tara to haul Jud out of the way.
She gave him an okay symbol and grabbed Jud under his arms from behind.
Hands under the stage bottom, Bobby strained until it finally gave enough that she could pull their teammate free.
She hooked a buddy line to Jud’s suit and sent two pre-programmed messages:
Diver retrieved
Status good
With a thumbs-up, she told Bobby she was hauling Jud to the surface.
Jud’s dive computer told her he’d missed his maximum dive time without decompression by six minutes, so she followed its guidance on the depth ceiling where he’d need to make his first deco stop.
Shot line in her hand, they ascended to forty-five feet. Tara made a gesture of her hand rising and falling over her chest, asking about his air. Jud gave her an okay, and then they ascended to his next ceiling. They stopped again at thirty feet. At fifteen feet, Tara made him pause for the final safety stop. Even though the water churned around them, she didn’t want to risk him further injury.
Finally, they broke the surface. Waves drove them toward the ladder, and hands helped pull Jud onboard. And then her.
As soon as their helmets were off, Jud recounted what’d happened. “The stage was probably about twenty feet off the bottom when the whole thing jolted and swung to probably forty-five degrees. Dumped my ass to the bottom and then fuck if the stage didn’t come down right on top of me. I almost got out from underneath it.” Tara unzipped him, and the others helped him out of his dry suit as he spoke. “Landed on my foot.”
“Let’s take a look,” George said, the medic kit at the ready.
Since Bobby was still in the water, she didn’t shed her scuba gear. Just in case. She joined Jesse at the dive computer, where he was standing watch over the other man’s dive.
His gaze cut to hers, and his eyes were dark fire. “You okay?”
“Fine,” she said. The answer was a hundred per cent rote. Because Tara was completely and utterly numb. “What’s going on with Bobby?”
He tilted the screen toward her, and she read the incoming messages.
Stage cable 2 snapped
Repairing
Standby
Before she and Jud had ascended, Tara had seen one of their welding kits resting by the shot line. Welding broken cable wasn’t a long-term solution by any means, but it would hopefully be enough for them to get the stage back onboard the GD.
“Ask him if he needs help,” Tara said, the wind blowing tendrils of hair in her face.
Jesse’s eyebrows slashed downward. “It’s too soon for you to go back in.”
“Not if he needs help it isn’t.”
Scowling, Jesse sent the query.
Repair complete
Even though that was good news, Tara frowned. Restlessness stalked her blood.
The computer dinged another incoming message: Beam me up, Scotty
This time, the silly message didn’t make her smile.
It only took another fifteen minutes before the crisis was completely resolved. Bobby ascended and the team worked to get the stage secured on the deck. They were going to have to rethread a new cable, but that would be a job for a different day.
“Told you today would be fun,” Jud said where he still sat on the deck. Under a bag of ice, the top of his foot was already turning purple. His humor was met with a low murmur of chuckles and smart-ass comebacks.
And then everything was back to their normal routine. Securing equipment. Cleaning suits. The only thing that stood between them and dry land was one last video briefing with the crew from AWE, and Boone, Jesse, and Jud were the only ones required to be in on that.
“I’ll take care of your suit,” she told Jud. “You take care of you.”
George helped their teammate to his feet, and then gave him a pair of crutches to use until they could x-ray his foot. Jud used them to come right to her. “Thank you.”
His unusual seriousness pricked at the backs of her eyes. But no way was she letting tears come in front of him—or any of them. “No big deal.”
He narrowed those dark blue eyes at her. “Big fucking deal, Tara. So thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she managed. Then she nodded her head at the closest hatch. “Go get off your feet.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Boone was the next to poke at the emotions she didn’t want to face. “You did good, Tara. Real good.”
She nodded, her throat suddenly too tight to speak.
Heading back inside, Boone pointed at Jesse. “We’re on with AWE in fif
teen.”
“Roger that,” he said. And then his gaze was back on her.
But Tara kept her eyes on her work. Hosing down Jud’s suit. Then her own. Hanging them up. Waxing their zippers. She performed each new task almost mechanically, but she gave them all her focus. Because she’d rather focus on them than the other things she was going to have to confront sooner or later.
Finally, she moved to the computer to complete Jud’s dive profile and enter one for herself.
Jesse appeared at her side. “How are you doing?” His voice was low, serious, concerned.
“Don’t,” she said. Because she couldn’t answer him. Not yet.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I’m here, Tara.”
A quick nod. Then he was gone. Which was one less distraction keeping her from facing the tsunami of emotions cresting inside her.
Chapter 11
Approaching the Ocean City inlet meant it would be only fifteen minutes until they’d be docked. And Jesse hadn’t seen Tara once since he’d left her on the deck of the GD.
“Don’t.”
That one word wouldn’t stop echoing in his head. Because it was just…off. Wrong. Nothing like the Tara he’d come to know. Ever since that exchange, intuition had unleashed prickles up and down his spine. His gut told him she wasn’t okay.
Not physically harmed, no. But not all injuries were visible. He knew that as well as anyone.
The problem was, he couldn’t think of a good explanation for going to check on her, not when they’d played it that they’d been strangers that first day. He didn’t think she’d appreciate him acting in any way that might reveal anything about their real relationship…
Whatever the hell it actually was, Jesse didn’t know. He just knew that watching her jump into the roiling ocean to dive to an accident site in sixty-foot waters had been damn hard to do. Not because he didn’t think she could handle it. Not because she wasn’t competent. Not because she wasn’t capable of rescue and recovery. But because she meant more to him than just a colleague.
How much more, he didn’t know.
Bullshit, a little voice in his head said.
Fine. More than a friend, even.
