The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 2

by Nora Roberts

  “Try that again, and I’ll take you down, old man or not.” Matthew planted his feet, prepared to face-off if Buck lunged again. “In ten days, I’m leaving for Hatteras with LaRue. You can pull yourself together, or you can go fuck yourself. It’s your choice. Now get the hell out. I’ve got work to do.”

  With a shaking hand, Buck wiped his mouth. His phantom leg began to throb, a nasty, grinning ghost that never quite gave up the haunting. Sick at heart, he hurried off to find a bottle.

  Alone, Matthew hefted another section of rail and went to work like a man possessed.

  CHAPTER 13

  A S FAR AS Silas VanDyke was concerned, Manzanillo was the only place to spend the first breaths of spring. His cliff house on the western Mexican coast afforded him the most spectacular view of the restless Pacific. There was nothing more relaxing than standing by his wall of windows and watching the waves crash and spew.

  Power never failed to fascinate him.

  As an Aquarian, he considered water his element. He loved the sight of it, the smell of it, the sound of it. Though he traveled extensively for both business and pleasure, he could never be away from his element for long.

  All of his homes had been bought or built near some body of water. His villa in Capri, his plantation in Fiji, his bungalow on Martinique. Even his brownstone in New York afforded him a view of the Hudson. But he had a particular fondness for his hideaway in Mexico.

  Not that this particular trip was one of leisure. VanDyke’s work ethic was as disciplined as the rest of him. Rewards were earned—and he had earned his. He believed in labor, the exercise of the body as well as the mind. It was true that he had inherited a great deal of his wealth, but he had not whiled away his time or whittled away his resources. No, he had built on them doggedly and shrewdly until he had easily tripled the legacy passed to him.

  He considered himself discreet and dignified. No publicity-seeking Trump, VanDyke pursued his personal and business affairs quietly and with a subtle flare that kept his name out of the press and tabloid news.

  Unless he put them there. Publicity, of the proper type, could shade a business deal and tip the scales when necessary.

  He had never married, though he admired women greatly. Marriage was a contract, and the negating of that contract was too often messy, too often public. Heirs were often a result of that contract, and heirs could be used against a man.

  Instead, he chose his companions with care, treated them with the same respect and courtesy as he would treat any employee. And when a woman ceased to entertain him, she was generously dispatched.

  Few complained.

  The little Italian socialite he had recently grown weary of had been a bit of a problem. The icy diamonds he’d offered as a parting gift hadn’t cooled her hot temper. She’d actually threatened him. With some regret, he’d arranged for her to be taught a lesson. But he’d given strict orders that there were to be no visible scars.

  After all, she’d had a lovely face and body that had given him a great deal of pleasure.

  It seemed to him that violence, well-skilled violence, was a tool no successful man could afford to ignore. In the last few years, he had used it often, and he thought, quite well.

  The oddest thing was that it gave him so much more pleasure than he had expected. A kind of cheap, emotional profit, he decided. Privately, he could admit that by paying for it, he often soothed those black tempers that raged over him.

  So many men he knew. Men who, like him, controlled great wealth and managed responsibilities, lost their edge by accepting certain failures, making too many concessions. Or they simply burned themselves out by fighting to stay on top. Frustrations, he thought, unreleased, festered. A wise man took his relief and always, always, counted the profit.

  Now he had business to attend to, business to entertain him. At the moment, his priority was the Nomad, its crew, and its brilliant find.

  As he’d ordered, the reports were on his desk. He’d handpicked the team for his expedition, from the scientists to the technicians and down to the galley staff. It pleased him to know that once again, his instincts had been on target. They hadn’t failed him. When the expedition was complete, VanDyke would see to it that each and every member of the Nomad team received a bonus.

  He admired scientists tremendously, their logic and discipline, their vision. He was more than satisfied with Frank Litz, both as a biologist and as a spy. The man kept him up to date on the personal dynamics and intimacies of the Nomad’s crew.

  Yes, he thought Litz a happy find, particularly after the disappointment of Piper. The young archeologist had had potential, VanDyke mused. But that one little flaw had made him sloppy.

  Addictions led to a lack of order. Why, he himself had given up smoking years before simply to make a point. Inner strength equaled power over personal environment. A pity Piper had lacked inner strength. In the end, VanDyke had harbored no regrets in offering him the uncut cocaine that had killed him.

  In truth, it had been rather thrilling. The ultimate termination of an employee.

  Settling back, he studied the reports from Litz and his team of marine biologists on the ecosystem, the plants and animals that had colonized the wreck of the Justine. Sponges, gold coral, worms. Nothing was beneath VanDyke’s interest.

  What was there could be harvested and used.

  With the same respect and interest, he studied the reports of the geologists, the chemist, those of the representatives he had sent to observe the operation and its results.

  Like a child with a treat, he saved the archeologist’s report for last. It was meticulously organized, thorough and clear as new glass. No detail was omitted, down to the last shard of crockery. Each artifact was described, dated and photographed, each item catalogued according to the date and time it was discovered. There was a cross-reference with the chemist’s report as to how the article was treated, tested, cleaned.

  A father’s pride swept through VanDyke as he read the carefully typed pages. He was glowingly pleased with Tate Beaumont, considered her a protégée.

  She would make a fine replacement for the unfortunate Piper.

  Perhaps it had been impulse that had urged him to have her education monitored over the years. But the impulse had more than paid off. The way she had faced him onboard the Triumphant with fury and intelligence firing her eyes. Oh, he admired that. Courage was a valuable asset, when tempered with a well-ordered mind.

  Tate Beaumont possessed both.

  Professionally, she had more than exceeded his early expectations of her. She’d graduated third in her class, publishing her first paper in her sophomore year. Her postgraduate work had simply been brilliant. She would earn her doctorate years before the majority of her contemporaries.

  He was thrilled with her.

  So thrilled he had opened several doors for her along the way. Doors that even with her skills and tenacity might have been difficult for her to unlatch. Her opportunity to research in a two-man sub off Turkey in depths of six hundred feet had come through him. Though like an indulgent uncle, he had taken no credit. Yet.

  Her personal life earned his admiration as well. Initially, he’d been disappointed that she hadn’t remained attached to Matthew Lassiter. A continued connection would have been one more method of keeping tabs on Matthew. Yet he’d been pleased that she’d shown the obvious good taste to shrug off a man so clearly beneath her.

  She’d concentrated on her studies, her goals, as he would have expected from his own daughter, had he a daughter. Twice she had explored relationships. The first no more than the rebellion of youth, in VanDyke’s opinion. The young man she’d attached herself to in the initial weeks after her return to college had been little more than an experiment, he was sure. But she’d soon shaken herself loose from the muscle-bound, empty-headed jock.

  A woman like Tate required intellect, style, breeding.

  Indeed, after graduation she had been drawn into a liaison with a fellow postgraduate stu
dent who shared many of her interests. That had lasted just under ten months, and had caused VanDyke some concern. But that, too, had ended when he’d arranged to have the man offered a position at his oceanographic institute in Greenland.

  To fully realize her potential, he felt Tate needed to limit her distractions, as he had over the years. Marriage and family would only tilt her priorities.

  He was delighted that she was now working for him. He intended to keep her on the fringes for the present. In time, if she continued to prove worthy, he would draw her into the core.

  A woman of her intelligence and ambitions would recognize the debt she owed him, and would understand the value of what he could continue to offer.

  One day they would meet again, work side by side.

  He was a patient man and could wait for her. As he waited for Angelique’s Curse. His instincts told him that when the time was finally right, one would lead him to the other.

  Then he would have everything.

  VanDyke glanced over as his fax began to hum. Rising, he poured himself a large tumbler of freshly squeezed orange juice. If he hadn’t had such a full schedule that day, he would have added just a dollop of champagne. Such small luxuries could wait.

  He lifted a brow as he picked up the fax. It was his latest report on the Lassiters. So, he mused, Matthew had jumped ship and gone back to his uncle. Perhaps he would stick the drunken fool in another rehab center. It continued to surprise him that Matthew didn’t simply leave the old man to wallow in his own vomit and disappear.

  Family loyalty, he thought, shaking his head. It was something VanDyke knew existed, but had never experienced. If his own father hadn’t conveniently died at fifty, VanDyke would have implemented his plans for a take-over. Fortunately, he had no siblings to rival with, and his mother had faded quietly away in an exclusive mental hospital when he’d been barely thirteen.

  He had only himself, VanDyke thought, sipping the chilled juice. And his fortune. It was well worth using a small part of it to keep an eye on Matthew Lassiter.

  Family loyalty, he thought again with a small smile. If it ran true, Matthew’s father had found a way to pass his secret to his son. Sooner or later, Matthew would be compelled to hunt for Angelique’s Curse. And VanDyke, patient as a spider, would be waiting.

  Rough weather hit the Nomad and halted excavation for forty-eight hours. High seas had half the crew down for the count despite seasick pills and patches. Tate and her cast-iron constitution rode out the storm with a thermos of coffee at her worktable.

  She’d left the cabin to a moaning, green-faced Lorraine.

  The rock and roll of the boat didn’t stop her from cataloguing the newest additions to the trove.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  She looked up, let her fingers pause on her keyboard and smiled at Hayden. “I thought you were lying down.” She tilted her head. “You’re a little pale yet, but you’ve lost that interesting green tinge.” Her smile widened wickedly. “Want a cookie?”

  “Feeling smug?” Warily, he kept his eyes averted from the plate of cookies on the table. “I hear Bowers is having a great time finding new ways to describe pork to Dart.”

  “Hmm. Bowers and I, and a few of the others, enjoyed quite a hardy breakfast this morning.” She laughed. “Rest easy, Hayden, I won’t describe it to you. Have a seat?”

  “It’s embarrassing for the team leader to lose his dignity this way.” Grateful, he lowered himself into a folding chair. “Too much time in the classroom, not enough in the field, I guess.”

  “You’re doing okay.” Happy to have company, she turned away from the monitor. “The entire film crew’s down. I hate to be pleased with anyone’s misfortune, but it’s a relief not to have them hovering for a couple days.”

  “A documentary will pump up interest in this kind of expedition,” he pointed out. “We can use the exposure, and the grants.”

  “I know. It isn’t often you have the benefit of a privately funded expedition, or one that pays off so successfully. Look at this, Hayden.” She lifted a gold watch, complete with chain and fob. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The detail of etching on the cover. You can practically smell the roses.”

  Lovingly, she rubbed a thumb over the delicately etched spring of buds before carefully opening the clasp.

  “ ‘To David, my beloved husband, who makes time stop for me. Elizabeth. 2/4/49.’ ”

  Her heart sighed over it. “There was a David and Elizabeth MacGowan on the manifest,” she told Hayden in a voice that had thickened. “And their three minor children. She and her eldest daughter survived. She lost a son, another daughter, and her beloved David. Time stopped for them, and never started again.”

  She closed the watch gently. “He’d have been wearing this when the ship went down,” she murmured. “He’d have kept it with him. He might have even opened it, read the inscription one last time after he said goodbye to her and their children. They never saw each other again. For more than a hundred years, this token of how much she loved him has been waiting for someone to find it. And remember them.”

  “It’s humbling,” Hayden said after a moment, “when the student outstrips the teacher. You have more than I ever did,” he added when Tate glanced up in surprise. “I would see a watch, the style, the manufacturer. I would note the inscription down, pleased to have a date to corroborate my calculation of its era. I might give David and Elizabeth a passing thought, certainly I would have looked for them in the manifest. But I wouldn’t see them. I wouldn’t feel them.”

  “It isn’t scientific.”

  “Archeology is meant to study culture. Too often we forget that people make culture. The best of us don’t. The best of us make it matter.” He laid a hand over hers. “The way you do.”

  “I don’t know what to do when it makes me sad.” She turned her hand over so that their fingers linked. “If I could, I’d take this and I’d find their great-great-grandchildren so I could say—look, this is part of David and Elizabeth. This is who they were.” Feeling foolish, she set the watch aside. “But it doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t even belong to them now. It belongs to SeaSearch.”

  “Without SeaSearch, it would never have been found.”

  “I understand that. I do.” Needing to clarify her own feelings, she leaned closer. “What we’re doing here is important, Hayden. The way we’re doing it is innovative and efficient. Over and above the fortune we’re bringing up, there’s knowledge, discovery, theory. We’re making the Justine, and the people who died with her, real and vital again.”

  “But?”

  “That’s where I stumble. Where will David’s watch go, Hayden? And the dozens and dozens of other personal treasures people carried with them? We have no control over it, because no matter how important our work, we’re employees. We’re dots, Hayden, in some huge conglomerate. SeaSearch to Poseidon, Poseidon to Trident, and on.”

  His lips curved. “Most of us spend our working lives as dots, Tate.”

  “Are you content with that?”

  “I suppose I am. I’m able to do the work I love, teach, lecture, publish. Without those conglomerates, with their slices of social conscience, or eye for a tax write-off, I’d never be able to take time for this kind of hands-on fieldwork and still eat on a semi-regular basis.”

  It was true, of course. It made perfect sense. And yet . . . “But is it enough, Hayden? Should it be enough? How much are we missing by being up here? Not risking anything, or experiencing the hunt. Not having some claim or control over what we do, and what we discover? Aren’t we in danger of losing the passion that pulled us into this in the first place?”

  “You aren’t.” His heart began to accept what his head had told him all along. She would never be for him. She was an exotic flower to his simple, plodding drone. “You’ll never lose it, because it’s what defines you.”

  In a symbolic farewell to a foolish dream, he lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles.


  “Hayden . . .”

  He could read the concern, the regret and, painfully, the sympathy in her eyes. “Don’t worry. Just a token of admiration from colleague to colleague. I have a suspicion we’re not going to be working together much longer.”

  “I haven’t decided,” she said quickly.

  “I think you have.”

  “I have responsibilities here. And I owe you, Hayden, for recommending me for this position.”

  “Your name was already on the list,” he corrected. “I merely agreed with the choice.”

  “But I thought—” Her brow creased.

  “You’ve earned a reputation, Tate.”

  “I appreciate that, Hayden, but . . . Already on the list, you said? Whose list?”

  “Trident’s. The brass there was impressed with your record. Actually, I got the feeling there was some definite pressure to put you on, from one of the moneymen. Not that I wasn’t happy to go along with the recommendation.”

  “I see.” For reasons she couldn’t name, her throat felt dry. “Who would that be, the moneyman?”

  “Like you said, I’m just a dot.” He shrugged his shoulders as he rose. “Anyway, should you decide to resign before the expedition is finished, I’d be sorry to lose you, but it’s your choice.”

  “You’re getting ahead of me.” It made her nervous to realize she’d been singled out somehow, but she smiled at Hayden. “But thanks.”

  When he left her, she rubbed her hands over her mouth. Where had this spooky feeling come from? she wondered. Why hadn’t she known about a list, or that her name had been on it?

  Turning to her monitor, she clattered keys, eyes narrowed on the screen. Trident, Hayden had said. So she would by-pass Poseidon and SeaSearch for the moment. To find where the power was at any level, you looked for the money.

  “Hey, friends and neighbors.” Bowers strolled in, gnawing on a chicken leg. “Lunch is up, in more ways than one.” He wiggled his brows at Tate and waited for her to chuckle.

  “Give me a hand here, Bowers.”