Night Diver: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Yet he didn’t think being volatile was a natural state for her. She didn’t have the pinched, nervous look of someone perpetually balanced on the edge of panic. Her hand on the steering was as competent as her posture was confident. She looked more and more relaxed with every minute.

  Maybe it’s just her family that makes her nervy.

  It would be a long time before he forgot her terror at the sight of the narrow staircase leading to the main deck. It would be even longer before he forgot the feel of her in his arms. The embrace had been meant to be soothing, but he was a man, after all. He had felt the woman heat as fear receded.

  He wanted to feel it again.

  Soon.

  You’re rushing your fences, he advised his body.

  His body didn’t listen.

  I’m a man, not a randy boy.

  His body didn’t listen to that bit of reason, either.

  Holden was relieved when the rental’s dock came into view. The sun was close to the horizon, setting sky and water afire, making the dock leap out like a welcoming hand. The engines dropped to a conversational hum as Kate slowed for docking.

  Though the tides weren’t as pronounced in the tropics as they were in the North Sea, they did exist. But tidal swings weren’t the reason many seashore buildings sat on stilts. It was the storms that shifted huge masses of water, making and remaking the sea bottom in a few hours, rearranging beaches and shorelines in their paths.

  “Amazing that the rental hasn’t washed away,” Holden said.

  “It’s on the leeward side of the island, protected from the worst of the storm surges,” Kate said, coasting into the dock. “If the storm you’re so worried about materializes, we might get wet but we won’t be swimming.”

  While she tied off, he grabbed his duffels and stepped lightly onto the dock. As always since the mishap, his thigh protested. As always, he ignored it. Some of his team would have been happy to be as lightly injured as he had been.

  “I’m not worried about the storm,” he said as she joined him. “My boss is.”

  “Has anyone ever thought that the whole supposed treasure was dreamed up by a long-ago bookkeeper to cover up losses or even theft?” she asked.

  “I have. It was not a well-received observation.” As he spoke, he reminded himself of the considerable intelligence behind her wide turquoise eyes. He could have ignored the curvy body, but he had always been drawn to smart women.

  Kate didn’t notice his assessing stare. With every step she took away from the water, she felt her nerves uncurling.

  “The idea of bean counters getting treasure fever would be funny if it wasn’t for my family’s business,” she said.

  “Oh, we bean counters have our romantic moments.”

  This time she laughed.

  “You don’t believe me?” he asked, pretending to be wounded.

  “Holden, you aren’t a bean counter and we both know it.”

  The undecided breezes of the doldrums riffled over him like a lover’s fingers. “You seem quite certain.”

  “Am I wrong?” she said, turning to face him as they approached the house’s sagging porch.

  “What gave me away?”

  “Your eyes were the first clue. Your fitness was another.”

  “I limp when I’m tired,” he said before he could think better of it.

  “Your point? I’ve seen men in wheelchairs who were incredibly fit.”

  “Another point to the lovely lady,” he said. “As for the rest, the eyes came to me at birth, no work required. They’re quite common in some areas of the world, crossroads of civilizations as it were. My eyes are a case of Pashtuns meeting soldiers of the British Empire in what we now call India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. More recently, I have an Irish grandmother and an ex-pat American mother. The men in my family have a real weakness for redheads.”

  “And a lot of redheads have a weakness for tall, dark, and different.” She put her shoulder into opening the front door. Humidity and wood made for sticky doors. “Your English is excellent.”

  “London boarding schools will do that to a man,” he said, sliding his sunglasses up on his head. He had never understood the trendy affectation of wearing unneeded sunglasses on the back of the neck, where they invariably got sweaty.

  “You must have a good ear for accents,” she said. “Sometimes there is a difference to your inflections and word choices that is almost American.”

  “Caught again,” Holden said. “I was raised in a very mixed household, linguistically speaking. As I said, my mother is American; my father’s childhood was divided between his father’s clan and his own preference for life in Wales. Unless I guard myself carefully—and really, why would I—I have quite a few accents and word choices.”

  “I hope one of your languages is cooking.”

  He gave her a sideways look. “It won’t be fancy.”

  “I’ll settle for edible.”

  “You don’t cook?”

  “All the time. And then I clean up, all the time. I’ll take half of the chores, thanks. A love of housework does not come down in the female genes.”

  He laughed. “Fair enough.”

  She stared. His laughter was beautiful, rich and full and warm, and his dragon eyes gleamed in the twilight inside the house.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Being human. It makes your robot turns all the more unsettling.”

  She flipped on a light, pushing away the dangerous feeling of intimacy that the hushed twilight gave.

  CHAPTER 6

  HOLDEN LOOKED AROUND at the accommodations. Nothing had changed. Spartan was the first word that came to mind, followed by shabby. But it was as clean as anything ever was in the tropics, where the greenery and insects fought humans for every bit of space.

  “Cozy,” he said.

  “That’s a word I hadn’t thought of,” Kate said. “My reactions were more along the lines of wonder that the whole thing is still standing.”

  “The fake wood paneling is particularly tasteful, don’t you think? The contrast with the broken louvered windows is quite witty.”

  His deadpan delivery sent amusement fizzing through her. Added to her relief at being on land again, the result was almost dizzying.

  Or maybe it’s that I haven’t eaten much today.

  “I hope you’re a believer in early dinners,” she said.

  “Supper. Or tea.”

  “Ah, the robot returns, and we are again divided by a common language.”

  “As a child in school I was twitted mercilessly for my ‘odd’ speech,” Holden said. “So I learned, only to be cut by an American for my odd speech.”

  The thought of him as vulnerable child with exotic eyes caught Kate off balance. It was so much easier to write him off as an upper-class British robot.

  Safer, too.

  Then a nonrobotic choice of words or inflections would remind her that he was a man, and a handsome one at that. Add in humor and intelligence and a kind of heat that made her itchy, and she was in trouble.

  “I’m hungry,” she said abruptly. “Are you?”

  “Quite.”

  The speculative fire in his eyes made her wonder about the mating habits of dragons.

  She looked away.

  Holden was trying to decide whether to snack on her and forget supper when he grabbed his wandering mind and put it to use. He did a quick recon of the kitchenette, which consisted of single electric coils plugged into an exposed junction box, a bar refrigerator, a sink that sat on four metal legs fashioned out of galvanized pipe, and a dubious-looking burner sitting crookedly on a small propane bottle. He lifted the bottle. If it wasn’t empty, it was close to it.

  “Do you have spare propane bottles?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see any by the back door.”

  “Right. Electricity it is.”

  He opened the cube-shaped refrigerator that was balanced p
recariously on a counter made of two-by-fours nailed to some packing crates. “So for protein we have reef fish.” He sniffed it. “Fresh. Lovely.” He kept searching. “Garlic. A pitcher of fresh tea. And an onion that has gone to the dark side. No wine or beer.”

  “No problem. I rarely drink. Don’t like the taste.”

  While Holden was looking in the refrigerator, Kate began rummaging in the cupboards. “Rice, coffee, tea, sugar, salt, canned milk—yuck—spices, and a bowl of fresh fruit, including coconuts,” she said. “Oh, and a really good olive oil. Do you suppose Farnsworth is a closet foodie?”

  “Doubtful. How fresh is the fruit?”

  She sorted through it. “Very. The oranges look yummy.”

  “That takes care of the scurvy issue.”

  “Thought that was limes.”

  “Any citrus will do,” he said, closing the refrigerator door. “Limes travel well.”

  “We have some of them, too.”

  Kate watched him cook out of the corner of her eye. He was efficient and quick to improvise. After he washed his hands, he opened a coconut with a kitchen knife that looked like a machete—and had probably been used as such on the resident greenery. He poured the coconut milk into a small pot and turned to the rice.

  “Instant rice,” he said, looking at the box. “Puts paid to the closet foodie theory.”

  “A foodie in a hurry?” she offered.

  “Contradiction in terms.”

  She smiled and relaxed even more.

  He poured rice into the pot, added water, and put the pot on one of the electrical coils. To his surprise, it heated very quickly. He stirred in spices and put one of the three unmatched dinner plates on top as a lid.

  In surprisingly little time, the whole rental smelled of spice and coconut, sliced fresh fruit, and fish fillets being seared in olive oil. He singed his palm on the handle of the cast-iron frying pan, swore about “not a bloody potholder in the place,” and wrapped a piece of his shirt around the handle before he speedily transferred the half-cooked fish to the plate that rested on top on the rice pot. The steam from below would take care of finishing the fillets.

  “You’re lucky that the electricity hasn’t yet gone out,” Kate said, trying not to drool over the food and the man. “All it takes is a tree frog or a sizable cockroach in a junction box and zzzzzt! you’re back in the Dark Ages.”

  “Raw fish in coconut milk is quite good,” he said. “But I agreed to cook, and marinating doesn’t quite make the cut.”

  Quietly she noted that he was a man of his word, even in such a minor detail. Too many men didn’t carry business ethics into personal life, assuming the men had any ethics to begin with. She had met a lot who would lie to get in a woman’s bed. She’d met her share of lying women, too.

  He squeezed lime juice into the still-sizzling fish pan and left it to simmer while he put slices of fruit on two mismatched plates. He dished rice onto the plates, put a fillet on top of each mound, and dribbled the pan sauce over.

  Kate wondered if she’d ever had a savory meal cooked by a man who was tall, dark, and different. Then she wondered if it would be shallow of her to be seduced by a handsome man who could cook.

  Good thing he isn’t wearing an apron. I’d lose all dignity.

  Silent laughter bubbled through her.

  “Glasses?” he asked.

  “I’ll see.” She opened the cupboards until she found two cracked teacups.

  He filled each from the pitcher of cold tea and placed everything on the tiny, chipped Formica bar that had two stools crowded along it.

  “I hesitate to inquire after forks,” he said. “Or chopsticks.”

  “Forks are in the basket on the counter,” she said, washing her hands.

  She sat down at the bar while he served the food. When he sat next to her, she barely had room to breathe. Part of it was the tiny eating surface. Most of it was Holden. Somehow he took up an unreasonable amount of room.

  Both of them fell on the food with barely civilized greed.

  “Wonderful,” she said after her first bites. “I nominate you chef.”

  “I decline. Who knows what we’ll find in the refrigerator tomorrow.”

  “You’d make something tasty of it.”

  “Ever had snake in coconut milk?”

  “Right,” she said. “I’ll cook tomorrow.”

  He saluted her with his cup of tea.

  In a comfortable silence she demolished her food, shook her head when he went to dish himself seconds, and sipped at her tea. A dreamy kind of mood settled over her, a mixture of time and food and fatigue. Idly she wondered how many hits she would get on Holden Cameron, UK, if she did a computer search.

  “Some, I would imagine,” he said.

  She started. “Do you read minds?”

  A smile flickered over his mouth. “Only when people speak clearly.”

  “Oh.” She felt heat moving over her face and knew she was blushing like a stoplight. “Want to save me some trouble?”

  “You don’t even have a network connection here,” he said, neatly scraping up the last morsel of his second helping.

  “Everything’s cellular on the island. St. Vincent is wired to the max. When it comes to the tropics, towers are cheaper to maintain than cables. Talk about yourself and save me a trip to the bedroom to get my computer elf.”

  “What is it you’re so keen to know?” he asked.

  “What did you do before you worked for the Antiquities Office?”

  “I was a sailor.”

  “Breaking hearts in every port,” she said, looking at his forearms. Golden brown, muscular, with a sheen of dark hair. Very different from the First Nations people who had been her clients in Canada. “How many years did you serve?”

  “I believe I’ve answered your one question for the evening. Perhaps you can try again tomorrow.”

  “Google never sleeps.”

  “If you’re that curious, I suggest you take it up with him.”

  “I will,” she said. “So you were a sailor . . .”

  Holden shot her a look. “Royal Navy, ABCD.”

  “What happened to the rest of the alphabet?”

  He shook his head and held up the tea pitcher in silent question. She held out her cup. He filled it, then his.

  “ABCD was my rank,” he said. “Able Seaman Clearance Diver.”

  The lazy curiosity vanished. “You’re a diver.” She knew she shouldn’t be surprised, much less disappointed, but she was.

  “Clearance diving is hardly glamorous work to a family of treasure divers,” he said.

  “What exactly does a clearance diver do, rake debris out of shipping lanes?”

  “I spent most of my time deactivating mines.”

  “Mines?” she asked. Suddenly treasure diving seemed like a positively safe way to make a living.

  “Yes. Dreadful business.”

  “I didn’t know British harbors had that many mines left over from World War Two.”

  “That would explain why I spent most of my time in other places.” When she opened her mouth to ask another question, he shook his head. “My turn. Where were you raised?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You eat like you’re in a mess hall, surrounded by larger upperclassmen.”

  Kate half laughed. “Well, that’s a pretty apt description of my childhood, the smallest person at the table.”

  “You were raised institutionally?”

  “No, but perhaps I should have been institutionalized after it.”

  He gave her a look that said he would wait for a real answer.

  “That ship we were just on was where I spent my childhood,” she said. Her tone of voice said she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “You lived aboard the Golden Bough?”

  “With my grandfather, parents, and brother, plus assorted divers.”

  “Close quarters,” Holden said.

  She got up and began clearing the plates. “You hav
e no idea. I had to share a cabin with Larry until that became impossible. He went to bunk with our grandfather.”

  She rinsed, soaped, and rinsed the dishes again. There were no dish towels and no rack to drain wet cutlery. With a mental shrug, she put the plates back into the cupboard.

  “I can understand how you might have wanted to get away from that,” Holden said into the silence. “How did the rest of your family take your departure?”

  “Grandpa was angry. Larry was relieved because if I’d stayed, I would be captain. Grandpa made that very clear.” Her voice was ruthlessly neutral.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Holden said. “Your brother is looking thoroughly shagged. I gather that you were called in to pretty up the books?”

  “Pretty up. Is that the Brit way of saying cooking the books?”

  Warily Holden eyed the fork in her hand. “No.”

  “Good answer,” she said, turning back to the sink. “I was brought in to translate Larry’s eccentric way of bookkeeping into something anyone can read.”

  “I’ll be glad to help.”

  “A diver and a bookkeeper, too. Fabulous.” Her tone of voice said the opposite. “Too bad you haven’t been aboard all along.”

  Silverware hit the basket with a ringing sound.

  “Is that a yes or a no?” he asked.

  “Sorry, what was the question?”

  “May I help you with the books?”

  “If I hit a wall, I’ll run up a flag,” she said. “Excuse me, I’ve got a pan to scrub on the beach. It should give you plenty of time to go through my stuff. Just put everything back where you found it and we’ll both pretend nothing happened.”

  Kate felt him watching her every step of the way. She crouched where water met dry beach, grabbed a fistful of sand, and scrubbed the pan. It took several tries, but finally there was only the smell of the ocean on the metal.

  When she got back to the rental, Holden was nowhere in sight. The murmur of a deep voice coming from the back of the house told her that he was in his room, either talking to himself or to someone at Antiquities.