“You can rake the siphon barrel if you want,” Holden said. “You don’t have to dive.”
Luis just waited for Raul to play.
Holden removed his hand from Kate’s thigh.
“Are you okay, Raul?” she asked. “Everyone on the boat was worried about you.”
A man who had been drinking at a nearby table leaned back and winked at Kate. “Don’ worry about that one. He be dumped by his boyfriend. You come to Evgeni,” he added, pointing at himself.
“That’s very kind, but I have the only man I want,” she said, putting her hand on Holden’s thigh. It was like petting steel cables. “Are you looking for dive work?”
Evgeni looked Holden over and apparently decided that the pretty redhead wasn’t worth a brawl. He saluted Holden with what looked like a glass of black rum and went back to drinking alone.
“Raul,” Kate said softly. “What’s wrong?”
Tears welled up in the man’s huge brown eyes and his lips curled down. “Mingo,” he managed hoarsely. “Gone.” He pushed his dominoes faceup, ending the game in a black scatter of tiles. “Gone!”
“Have you been lovers long?” Holden asked calmly.
Raul started to cry.
“Years,” Luis said. “Mingo like women, but he always come back to Raul. Eat the soup I bought for you.”
As he spoke, Luis pushed a bowl of callaloo closer, sending the chunks of green leaves floating in the broth into erratic flutters. Raul lifted a battered spoon and poked at the soup without interest.
“Where do you think your brother is?” Holden asked.
“Maybe look for a boat of his own,” Luis said. “He talk big. Want his own business. He say Raul be cook, because he is better in the galley than breathing trimix, and I be his first diver.”
“Mingo must have been saving money for a long time,” Kate said. God knows he wasn’t earning boat payments on the wages we paid him.
Raul smiled sadly. “Mingo is lover, not banker. No good with money. But he tell me it change soon. Big money come. Then he buy a boat and . . .” Raul’s voice died.
“Did Mingo talk to you about this?” Holden asked Luis.
“He always talk, but not about his big money. He just say he be rich before the next storm.”
“Was he selling goods on the side?” Holden asked, his voice matter-of-fact.
Raul and Luis exchanged a look. Then Raul turned back to stirring the soup that was the temperature of his tears.
Kate’s fists were balled in her lap, but her voice was soothing when she spoke. “I won’t go running to the cops. I just want to know.”
“I don’t know,” Luis said in a low voice. “But he talk big.”
“He always talk big,” Raul said.
“Beer-for-life big or something else?” Kate asked. “I mean, there are beer dreams and then there’s truly rich.”
“Big enough that he use it as an excuse to sneak away after we . . .” Raul shrugged. “He say he go dive.”
She made a startled sound. “Alone?”
“Not with me,” Raul said.
Holden looked at Luis, who shook his head. “Not me.”
“So he was the only one diving at night?” she asked.
Luis gathered up the dominoes scattered across the sticky table. “I dive. I drink. I sleep. I wake up. I dive. No trouble. That is the way of the Golden Bough. Smart men do same like me. Mingo, sometimes he not so smart.”
Slowly Raul nodded.
Kate’s expression said she wasn’t satisfied, but Holden’s hand was squeezing her thigh again.
“If Mingo has been peddling the odd bit of gold,” Holden said, “the local police could be the least of his problems. The kind of people he would be dealing with make bad enemies, especially with the bounty offered for information on anyone selling the Crown’s salvage.”
The tears on Raul’s face fell faster.
Luis went pale.
“Who was his fence?” Holden asked.
Silence.
“Have you had any luck finding out where Mingo is?” Holden asked, his voice both edgy and sympathetic.
Raul’s tears were the only answer.
Without a word, Luis began turning dominoes facedown and mixing them up, preparing for another game.
Holden knew the conversation was at a dead end.
“If you hear anything,” he said, standing up, pulling Kate with him, “get word to the boat.” He put his hand on Raul’s shoulder, squeezed, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Kate waited until they were in the truck before she said the words that were eating her up. “You believe Larry is in on it, don’t you?”
CHAPTER 15
OUTSIDE, IT WAS dark, scented with rubbish bins cooking in the tropical heat.
“I would be a fool if I didn’t consider the possibility that Larry is involved,” Holden said evenly. “Mingo might have got away with the odd night dive to pick up valuables he’d stashed beyond camera range during the day, but if he made a habit of it, it’s highly unlikely that no one aboard noticed.”
Her fingers whitened around the steering wheel. “Larry is a lousy businessman, but he’s not a thief.”
“Even if theft is the only way to keep the Golden Bough afloat?”
“My mind hears you, but my gut knowledge of my brother isn’t buying it.”
Holden didn’t point out that a lot could have changed in the years since she had been a part of the diving Donnellys. She knew it as well as he did.
“Do you blame me?” she asked hoarsely. “What if it was your family being accused?”
“Love, I don’t think you’re wrong to want to protect your family. My first instinct would be to do the same. My Pashtun grandmother would say it’s a clan trait. My mother would say it’s simply human.”
Holden stroked the back of his fingers down Kate’s cheek until the skin over her knuckles no longer looked pale in the dashboard lights.
The computer in Holden’s ever-present duffel pinged.
She looked at him.
He hated adding to the shadows in her eyes, but he spoke anyway, “Pressure is dropping again.”
The sky in front of the windshield was taking on that thick, translucent silver gray that told of weather changing. The waves would probably be picking up and the surface would carry some wind chop. Not dangerous, just different. A bit bigger, a bit stronger, a bit less predictable, forerunner of the raw power to come.
No time limit, of course, Kate thought unhappily. Just one more thing waiting to break all over me.
Us.
She felt like crying or screaming, anything to ease the tension growing inside of her, pushing at her like air bubbles in the blood of a diver who had rushed decompression. But there were no marked time-out flags along her way, nothing to signal how close she was to the surface. Or to drowning.
When they approached the cottage this time, the headlights of the old truck flashed over a dock shifting uneasily in the quickened water. No boat was tied up. They would have to go back to the marina to pick up the workboat before heading out in the early morning.
Kate didn’t feel like eating, but when Holden put chicken and fruit and bread in front of her, she made herself chew and swallow. When she couldn’t force down another bite, she pushed back her plate.
“What a mess,” she said. “Mingo was going over the side during the night and picking up the lightest, most valuable salvage.”
Holden made a noncommittal sound.
“He could have done it alone,” she said. “Crazy. Stupid. But possible.”
Deliberately Holden sliced a particularly ripe mango and put the best pieces on her plate.
“That would explain the shortage of breathing gas I discovered,” she continued. “But one man can’t keep up that sort of double-shift diving forever.”
She looked at Holden, hope in her shadowed turquoise eyes.
“Having essentially done the same thing on several occasions,” he said carefully, �
��I agree that such diving is quite possible. It requires a very fit, experienced diver.”
She waited for the but that hovered between them, unspoken, because to speak it would be to strip away the last of her hope.
“It’s all over for the business, isn’t it?” she asked finally.
Holden stretched as he stood from what passed for a dining table. His thigh jabbed at him, still unhappy from the dive.
“All we’re certain of,” he said finally, “is that Mingo is missing and could have been stealing artifacts by means of solo night dives. A few quite valuable small goods have surfaced on the black market. How they got there is unknown. When I dove with Larry today—”
“You dove?” she cut in, startled. “What about your leg?”
“I saw your brother doing the best he could with the materials at hand,” Holden said, ignoring her interruption. “Most important, I know that even if this dive goes straight to hell in a handbasket, you will weather whatever happens to Moon Rose Limited. You’re a survivor, love. Never forget that. The treasure sickness that haunts your family has no part of you.”
Tears stood in her eyes. “You went diving in spite of your leg. Why?”
“Larry would have gone down alone.”
“And if something had gone wrong, I would have blamed myself,” she whispered. “That’s why you went, isn’t it? Even though it hurt you.”
“The thigh aches anyway. Might as well do something worth the pain.”
“Was it?”
“We found some bits and bobs of gold, the dredge brought up some loose gems,” Holden said, rubbing his leg absently. “Enough to keep Farnsworth busy for some hours, but not enough to make AO pop champagne corks.”
“We’re almost out of time, aren’t we?”
“Unless we make a very large find in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, the dive will be shut down, if that’s what you mean.”
“Maybe waterfront gossip is right,” she said bleakly. “Maybe the Golden Bough is cursed.”
“I know nothing about that. I’m simply pleased to dive in clear water where I’m not looking for nasty devices that are rigged to explode.”
She waited for him to say more, but he only shook his head.
“We can talk for hours about what-ifs and maybes,” Holden said, “and not one bloody word we say will change what happens on the Golden Bough tomorrow. So come with me to my narrow, wretched bed. The problems of the dawn will arrive much too soon.”
She looked at his fascinating eyes, golden green now, blue against the tropic sky, green against the jungle, always different, always beautiful.
Let the lover be.
A weight lifted as she took his hand and walked down the short hallway.
“So this is a decompression stop?” she asked almost whimsically.
He smiled and tugged her down on his neatly made bed. “A breather,” he agreed.
“I’d rather take your breath away.”
His eyes changed even as his heartbeat did. “You just did.”
“Then lie down, lover,” she said. “Ease your leg and let me do the work.”
“The leg isn’t hurt, but the rest sounds good.”
He made room for her on the bed as she leaned in and traced the curve of his lips with her tongue. The change in his breath and the sudden heat of his body made her smile.
Whatever he might have said was lost when she lowered her head and kissed him until every muscle in his body was tight. Before the kiss was over, his shirt was open and hers was strained across her breasts, revealing her nipples standing hard and proud.
The sheen of his chest hair in the lamplight drew her eyes, then her fingers. The hair was surprisingly silky, the muscles beneath hot and vibrant with life. The skin stretched over his abdomen was dark against her pale fingers, a kind of dusky bronze that she knew tasted as warm and sweet as it looked.
She pulled her hand down, brushing past one of his nipples and under the curve of his pectoral, down over his ribs and to the tight abdomen below. He was wonderfully alive, skin responding to every touch, his sigh low and pleading.
“You always make me feel so sexy,” she said, tracing his smile.
“You are.”
She laughed. “Funny, but you’re the only man to see me that way.”
He framed her face with his big hands. “You really believe that.”
“Of course.”
Before he could speak, her lips were pressed to his again and her agile tongue was testing every changing texture of his mouth. They breathed each other and went in deeper, wanting more. His fingers worked between them until she was naked from the waist up. His uninjured thigh pressed up between her legs and found her hot enough to make him groan.
“I’m supposed to do all the work,” she reminded him.
“Work faster. My pants are strangling me.”
She laughed against his chest as she shimmied out of her pants and underwear. Then she carefully peeled his clothes down his long, muscled legs until he was as wonderfully naked as she was. While he struggled to put a condom on, her tongue traced the angry ridges that surgery had left on his thigh.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” she asked against his skin.
He took one of her hands and wrapped it around the only part of him that hurt at the moment.
She felt his heartbeat, his thickness, his sheer heat. He was on fire.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said, meeting his eyes.
“If you want to make the pain go away, take me into that silky body. I guarantee the only thing I’ll feel is the kind of pleasure that makes the world stop.” As he spoke, his fingers slid between her legs, testing, hoping. Then he groaned. “So hot, so wet. Let me in, love.”
His fingertips, wet with her own need, traced her nipples. She shuddered like his touch sent an electric current through her. When his hands closed around her breasts and kneaded, she forgot who was supposed to be doing the work.
“Yes, more,” she said huskily.
And the hand wrapped around him more than returned his caresses.
Through narrowed eyes he watched fire slide through her hair with every sigh, every quiver, her pale skin flushed with desire, her eyes a smoldering turquoise he could have happily drowned in. He would have told her how beautiful she was, but she shifted, taking his breath away as her body took him with a slow, hungry glide.
She rode him gently, completely, working her inner muscles to bring them both the greatest pleasure with the least effort on his part. His hands touched everywhere, caressing and demanding at the same time. When she leaned down to lick the sweat from the rigid tendons of his neck, his teeth closed on her shoulder in a bite that made her gasp. So he did it again, and then again, until her body began to undulate like a dancer’s.
He shuddered and put his hands on her hips, holding her still.
“Patience,” he said hoarsely, feeling none himself.
“Another attribute of dragons.” She looked into his untamed eyes and smiled as she locked him inside her, squeezing and stroking him in a way he could neither control nor deny. “But I’m not a dragon. I’m a dragon rider.”
He surrendered to her with a laugh and a wrenching groan, giving himself without hesitation or restraint as she came apart around him, filling her as she consumed him.
And in the stillness that followed, they slept, the heat of their bodies comforting and enclosing them while dawn with its tears and dangers slid closer to them with each breath.
CHAPTER 16
BY THE TIME Kate and Holden had refueled the workboat, picked up some spare parts at the chandlery, and headed back to the tender, both of them were sweaty. The air was motionless, then it would move like hot breath, then go still again. The humidity was so high there was little difference between air and water. The sky had glazed over completely with moisture, becoming a nearly opaque, silver-gray dome. The sun was little more than a white circle barely seen through the lid of heat and humidity.
There was a sullen anticipation in the air, a sense that the doldrums were fighting a losing battle against the earth’s motion and the returning rivers of air that humans knew as the trade winds. But the doldrums wouldn’t give in easily. Before the rivers returned, there would be the kind of storms where sky and sea went to war. Until that happened, there would only be an oppressive kind of waiting.
“How is your leg?” Kate asked when they reached the workboat.
“Slightly more surly than the day.”
“Ouch.”
“It has been a lot worse.” And will be again as soon as I dive.
But there was no need to share that tidbit with her. She felt bad enough about watching her family’s business circling the drain. She didn’t need to feel guilty about his diving, too.
“I just have this hunted feeling that something is going wrong,” she admitted as she stepped into the workboat.
It is, Holden thought.
He could sense the coming storm, feel it in his thigh, taste it in the back of his throat. It could come in an hour. It could come in a day.
But come it would. The coy tropical depression that had been dubbed “Davida” had decided to quit fooling around and get down to the serious business of pushing around countless tons of air and water.
Kate brought the workboat quickly up on plane. It was good to have the air moving fast enough to make her feel less like she was wrapped in a sticky cocoon. That, and the feeling of imminence, had her pushing up the throttle, racing something she could only sense, not describe. She chased the feeling inside her head, trying to put it into words.
About a kilometer out, the wind came up, chopping the oily-looking water into sharp little waves that rode on top of the underlying swell. The workboat had to push hard across the dull surface of the sea, aluminum hull smacking as it hit the chop kicked up by the sudden exhalation of wind.
“Would you mind backing that down just a bit?” Holden shouted to her. “I’d like to be able to dive when I get there.”
She realized that she was pushing the boat at a speed better suited to calm water. It made for a rough ride, and no doubt his thigh was already aching from the dropping air pressure.
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