“God-rotting bureaucrats.”
“I’m not happy about being on the god-rotting sea, but here I am.” Then she remembered his house in Florida, his collections, and an explanation she really didn’t want to hear. “Grandpa, you aren’t keeping this dive afloat out of your own pocket, are you?”
He bit down on the pipe stem. Hard.
And ignored her.
“That’s your retirement,” she said, “and Larry’s legacy from our parents. Without it, there is nothing for either of you!”
He looked at the distant horizon where a coy storm was flirting with the future.
She wanted to scream at him, to shake him, to make him listen. But she couldn’t rage at the man whose eyes were so like her dead father’s. She could only do the best she could with what she had right now.
“Come with me,” she said. “It’s time to meet with our very own bureaucrat.”
“I belong up here.”
“We’re at anchor and you have an alarm set,” she said, pointing to the small inset on the nav screen. “If we drag anchor, the whole boat will know it. Stop stalling.”
With that, she turned and opened the wheelhouse door, only to find herself looking into Holden’s startling eyes. He was standing on the narrow walkway just to the side of the door.
“There you are,” he said. “Larry is waiting for us. I told him I would fetch you and your grandfather.”
How long has he been standing here? she wondered. Could he hear us? Then she remembered the open porthole. Of course he could.
“A boat is too small a place to keep secrets,” Grandpa said behind her.
Holden smiled.
It was nothing like the sexy smile that had startled Kate earlier.
CHAPTER 5
LARRY HADN’T MOVED from where Holden had left him, head propped on his crossed arms on the long wooden table, eyes closed, body slack in one of the swivel chairs that were bolted to the deck around the table. Holden had seen enough soldiers in combat to know that Larry wasn’t done yet, but he was closing in on exhaustion. He was forty-four and diving was a young man’s game.
The old-alcohol smell on Larry’s breath wasn’t helping, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as that of an end-phase alcoholic. If a company deep-sixed every diver who drank, there would be very few divers left.
Grandpa Donnelly sat beside Larry, jostling him awake. Holden sat across from them. When Kate hesitated, he smiled a very different smile and patted the chair next to him.
“I won’t bite,” he said. Although a bit of nibbling . . . yes, I’d quite like that.
Warily she sat down. The chairs were so closely spaced that she could feel his body heat like a ghostly caress with every breath he took. She tried not to notice it. The others certainly didn’t seem to be aware of the muscular dragon coiled beneath the proper accent, but she could think of little else when he was near.
“Now that I’ve had a chance to do a brief recce, it appears that this dive isn’t as badly off as my superiors feared,” Holden said. I suspect it’s worse, but until I can prove it, I’m just another British prig. Or as the old man says, a god-rotting bureaucrat.
“Not a total ‘cock-up’ after all?” Larry asked in a gritty voice.
The elder Donnelly snorted.
“Are you here to shut the project down?” Kate asked bluntly.
“Not after we just struck the lode,” Grandpa said. “Right, Mr. Cameron?”
“Not at the moment, no,” Holden agreed. “My employer’s interest, which is very keen, is based on a single coin that was minted in the mid-seventeenth century. The coin was found on a rocky beach not far from here after—”
“A gale ripped through some coral reefs and generally rearranged some sea bottom last year,” Larry interrupted, yawning. “We’re clear on all that.”
“The sea is a fickle bitch,” Holden said. “That coin could have come from anywhere. It could be the first of a hoard or a one-off kicking around on the storm currents. We believed that it would lead to more. The handful of coins and raw metal you have found so far is welcome, but it’s not the weighty kind of proof my superiors expected.”
“And they’re all worried that either they were wrong about diving on this wreck and will be shown up for it,” Larry said, “or that someone on Golden Bough is a thief. We’re clear on that, too.”
Kate shifted, wondering if she could kick her brother under the table.
Holden pinned Larry with his unusual eyes. “Antiquities was divided on that very subject. However, after the money chain was discovered, they are quite excited that you are on the right track.”
“How clever of them. Ouch!” Larry gave his sister a look.
She lifted one eyebrow at him.
Holden hoped his own amusement didn’t show. Under other circumstances he probably would have enjoyed Larry, who was a very well-regarded diver and drinking companion. However, the circumstances were what they were and Larry might well be a thief or simply an incompetent captain who drank when the pressure got too intense. In either case the result was the same.
The advance on expenses wouldn’t be made and the dive would be shut down.
“Antiquities is hoping that the treasure isn’t scattered over the entirety of the seafloor between St. Vincent and Grenada,” Holden said. “Again, opinion is divided. I’m told there is quite a lively discussion at the moment. Anything you find will be weighed carefully in the decision whether or not to advance the monies you have requested or invoke the weather stipulation and terminate the dive.”
“Look, this isn’t anything new,” Larry said impatiently. “You come on board and throw your weight around, but you don’t know any more than we do about what’s below. You’re hoping for a big payout but you’re reaching for shadows.”
“Is that what you believe?” Holden asked, switching his attention to Larry’s grandfather.
The old man shrugged. “Nothing’s sure but death.”
“What have you heard about the coin that started this whole scramble?”
“It was gold,” Larry said sarcastically.
Holden kept looking at the real captain, who finally spoke.
“It’s a gold sovereign, no more than an inch across. It was minted in England, not just poured and stamped in Jamaica or made in a Spanish mold from the New World. It’s marked with Charles II’s head on one side.” Grandpa Donnelly’s voice was dry, leathery, whispering of a crossroads where Ireland and Jamaica met. “The other side has the cross and the shields of the four kingdoms. The portrait side had Charles’s long nose pointed to the left. Not many of that particular coin was minted.”
“Which makes them all the more valuable today,” Holden said.
“But you and your god-rotting bureaucrats already knew that, didn’t you? It’s the only reason you offered the salvage contract.”
“Grandpa,” Kate said. “Please remember the difference between honey and vinegar.”
Holden had to work not to show his amusement at her efforts to civilize the old salt.
“They’re English coins and England is trying to recover them,” she said to Holden. “This is hardly a surprise.”
Yet even as she spoke, ghostly fingertips slithered down her spine. There was only one treasure she knew of that was reputed to contain coins minted in England with the portrait reversed. Her parents had died looking for it.
No, she thought as her heartbeat speeded in dread. It can’t be.
“They’re far from ordinary coins,” Holden said. “Legend has it that these coins were a shadow currency, used to pay off acts of official treachery and other covert ventures. The story had it that Bloody Green himself was worth a hundred such coins, fully a tenth of the rumored thousand that were supposed to exist. It was the Crown’s bounty on the head of a renegade English privateer, Declan Horatio Smyth-Fothergill, better known as Bloody Green.”
Kate’s nails dug into her palms. When she sensed Holden’s attention, she slowly unclenched her fists. But
she could do nothing about the tension that had seized her body and iced her blood . . . the vision of a dead man who was also her father sprawled in the bottom of a dinghy.
Breathe. Just breathe.
One way or another, you’ll get through this.
From the corner of his eyes, Holden watched color slowly return to Kate’s cheeks. He wanted to gather her close again, inhale her unique scent of sunlight and flowers and the underlying woman heat that drew him like a compass needle pointing true north.
“I assume you know the story?” he asked the men across the table.
Larry yawned.
“Which one?” asked the old man, taking the cold pipe from his teeth. “Hero or villain, lover or rapist, privateer or pirate?”
“Agreed,” Holden said. “It rather depends on the point of view of the person experiencing Bloody Green. In the version the Antiquities Office cherishes, the man was no better than he had to be and of great use to the Crown. While pillaging—or helping—a foundered English merchant ship, he risked his own life to rescue a beautiful young aristocrat. Apparently it was love at first sight, as the story goes.”
“My parents,” Kate said hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “They said it was like that for them.”
“That it was, Kitty darling,” her grandpa said gruffly. “It was a blessing they died together.”
Not for me. But she kept the bitter words to herself.
“In any case,” Holden said, drawing attention away from the shine of tears and terror in Kate’s eyes, “her family was quite furious. Seems they had sent the girl to wed a rich old man who had essentially purchased her. They had enough influence in court to get the Crown to issue the bounty.”
“Hardly the first time titled blood was sold to untitled riches,” Larry said around a yawn. “The part of the tale that my parents loved was that in order to keep the girl and get back into the good graces of the Crown, Bloody Green sacked and pillaged until he had her weight in jewelry and gems. And the bounty coins. Bet he laughed his ass off when he took them. Then he offered everything to the girl’s father for his daughter. The father accepted, the Crown took its cut, and Bloody Green was a citizen in good standing again.”
Holden listened carefully. Larry’s tone was that of someone retelling a story he had heard so often it had become part of him.
“The happy lovers and the treasure set sail for London on the pirate ship called Moon Rose,” said the elder Donnelly. “It vanished, as did the Cross of Madrid, a merchant ship Green was sailing with. Have we covered the high points?”
“Admirably. My superiors assumed from the name of your company that you were familiar with the legend.”
The old man shrugged. “Around here, everyone knows it.”
“But everyone doesn’t name their company after a pirate ship.”
“Mom and Dad did,” Larry said. “They left a whole trunk of maps and speculation on the location of those ships when they went down. It used to be a family game to trace possible storm tracks and old records and currents.”
“My daughter-in-law was very fond of Bloody Green’s story.”
Holden looked at the old man whose eyes had seen more of the sea and sorrow than most.
And treasure.
“My parents died looking for the wreck of Moon Rose,” Kate said flatly. “It’s not my favorite story. Are you telling me that we’re parked over that hulk now?”
Silence followed her words.
Grandpa Donnelly shifted his pipe and looked unhappy.
“It is a possibility,” Holden said carefully. “Experts in London have decided that the ribs of the ship down there aren’t big enough to belong to a merchant ship such as the Cross of Madrid.”
The thought that she might be anchored on her mother’s unmarked grave had Kate on her feet and out the salon door, fighting for breath every step of the way. She grabbed the deck rail and hung on, forcing herself to breathe through the panic attack.
I can’t be here anymore. The sea took too much from me that day.
The only reason it didn’t take Larry and Grandpa was they were ashore while Grandpa had a bad appendix taken out. If they had been there, the sea would have eaten them too.
Don’t they understand that?
Don’t they know that the sea is still hungry?
The door opened and closed behind her as someone came out.
“Hey,” Larry said. “Are you still having panic attacks? It was years ago, Kitty.”
Not for me. It’s as fresh as my next nightmare. And she would be having one tonight, no doubt.
It didn’t make her look forward to sleeping.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You should be glad it might be a rich wreck. Even with that lousy contract, we’d come out ahead.”
“Assuming we’re in the right place and not just finding occasional scattered pieces,” she said stiffly.
“We’re not,” Larry said. “I have a feeling about this one. This is the big one we’ve looked for all our lives.”
“Every treasure diver gets that feeling and then they follow it too far down,” she said. “It’s a sickness.”
“I know you’re thinking about Mom and Dad,” Larry said. “But you can’t blame them for following their dream.”
“I can. Especially when their dream turned into my nightmare.”
Even as Kate spoke, she knew she was wrong. Yet that was how she felt. That hadn’t changed since she was almost eighteen and found out that everything could be taken away without warning. The sea she had once loved was unpredictable and treacherous.
“They were my parents, too,” Larry said. “Do you ever think of that?”
She let out a careful breath. “I know I’m not being fair. But damn it, you were a man when they died. I was seventeen, had basically lived on board all my life. Just a child in some ways. Important ways.” And at night, I still am. Panic and terror and screaming. “I’ve done enough for today,” she said abruptly. “Too much. Being out here is making me crazy.”
“You’re making yourself crazy.”
“Because I realize that when I’m out here, I’m at the mercy of a sea that has none?”
“Okay, okay, go back to the rental. Just don’t run off. We need you. Most of the time you’re all brains and common sense. You know that between Grandpa and me, we don’t have enough of either to fill a coffee cup.”
A ghostly smile flickered over her lips. “That’s the truth.”
“There’s my Kitty Kat,” he said. The pinched lines around his eyes and mouth relaxed. “You ready to go back in there before Grandpa does something stupid, like throw a punch at the Brit?”
The child in Kate wanted to pitch a screaming fit. The adult in her knew she had to find a better way to live with the past, took a deep breath, and headed back inside. It quickly became obvious that she was indeed needed. Grandpa was standing up, pointing his pipe stem at Holden.
Which meant that Grandpa was about to lose his temper.
“I didn’t ask for the captain’s cabin,” Holden said in a reasonable tone of voice. “I simply want a place to sleep aboard. It’s difficult to oversee a dive from shore.”
“We don’t dive at night,” Larry said. “On the wages your AO demands, we’re lucky to find enough men to dive during the day. Kate can taxi you back and forth from the rental along with supplies.”
“I don’t have time to be shopping for—” began Kate.
“There’s no room aboard,” Larry cut in with the irritation of the sleep deprived. “You saw the crew quarters on the way to the dive center. Men are doubled up as it is. We’re doing all we can and more just to keep the Brits off our backs.”
Holden supposed the mess he had seen through open doors could be the result of crowding, but he was much more interested in the fact that no one wanted him aboard. “The contract—” he began.
“Says we house and feed our overseers,” Grandpa cut in. “Doesn’t say where. We rented the house for the geek out of our lo
usy expense allowance, and that’s where you’re staying. If you don’t like it, whine to your bosses.”
“Bugger,” Holden snarled. Then he looked quickly at Kate. “Apologies.”
She shrugged. “Why? It’s rather refreshing.”
Larry snickered. “You can double up with the geek. Mingo’s brother is onto a cache of broken pottery found near the gold chain. Malcolm will be doing pictures and measurements and log entries aboard until sunrise.”
“Where does he sleep?” Holden asked blandly.
“In a cubbyhole the size of a coffin, with his feet propped on his desk and his chair tipped back against the door. You’d rather be ashore and so would he.”
Leaving the argument behind her, Kate walked out to the work boat and got in. The craft rolled in the gentle afternoon swell. She fired up the engines on the second try and then let them roar, signaling just how out of patience she was.
“This water taxi leaves in one minute,” she yelled above the noise.
Holden made a command decision and scrambled down into the workboat.
The ride back to the rental was swift and silent but for the engines. Behind his sunglasses, Holden thought about how eager the Donnellys had been to see him off.
Could be hiding something.
Could be responding to my persistent lack of charm.
At the moment, the possibilities were about even, but his orders hadn’t changed. If anything, the Antiquities Office was more eager than ever to pursue the salvage. The cynical side of Holden kept coming back to the oh-so-terribly convenient find just after he came aboard. The rest of him kept pointing out that coincidences happened. That was why the English language had a word for it.
Any pursuit of answers would have to wait until tomorrow. Which meant other pursuits were available tonight.
He concentrated on Kate’s profile. She was an intriguing woman, seemingly unaware of her beauty, making no attempt to ingratiate herself with the man who held her family’s fate in his fist. Yet he had caught her more than once looking at him the way a woman looks at a man who interests her. During the brief time he had known her, she had ricocheted between fear and anger and aloofness more than many women he had known over years of acquaintance.
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