by MJ Fredrick
“Jonathan! What are you doing here?” Okay, that came out a little more accusatory than delighted. She winced.
“I came to bring you home.” He glanced at her, then at the boat. Mallory refused to turn to see if Adrian was watching them.
“How did you get out here?”
“The roads weren’t as bad as I was led to believe.” Jonathan nodded toward the boat, and still Mallory refused to turn. He plucked at the shoulder of the too-big T-shirt. “What is this you’re wearing? I didn’t see you pack these things.”
She couldn’t control the flush that crept across her skin. “They’re—not mine. I didn’t have anything suitable to wear under the wetsuit, so I borrowed them.”
Jonathan reached down, twirled the string of the trunks around once. “They’re a bit big.”
She forced a laugh and stepped away, trying to remember the last time she’d felt uncomfortable around Jonathan. “Yeah, well, you should see the wetsuit.”
He studied her before he lifted a finger to her upper lip. “You have blood there.”
She raised the back of her hand to her nose self-consciously, found flakes of dried blood. “It’s stopped now. It’s all right.”
“What do you mean?” Concern creased his brow, and he tilted her chin back.
“When I dive, I get nosebleeds. It’s no big deal.”
She had to wonder why it was so easy for him to touch her and so hard for her to touch him. And not just in front of Adrian. Being near Adrian, who was so physically demonstrative, who she had to stop herself from leaning into, reminded her how she didn’t do that with Jonathan. The problem wasn’t that she was uneasy with him. Maybe she was just keeping her hands to herself because she knew she wouldn’t have a physical relationship with him till she was divorced from Adrian. She didn’t want to give him the wrong idea.
Now she could.
With some effort, she slid her hand down his arm, twined her fingers with his. She didn’t miss the surprise in his eyes and suppressed a niggle of guilt that maybe she was covering up the emotions that had been roused when she was with Adrian on the barge.
Footsteps vibrated on the dock behind her and that damn Scottish burr followed. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
Resisting the urge to jump back from Jonathan, she tightened her fingers on Jonathan’s hand as if he could ground her, but he pulled away to shake Adrian’s hand, leaving her to watch the two men measure each other. “Adrian Reeves, Jonathan Montcroft.”
She expected Adrian to be a jerk, but he was his charming, hand-pumping, give-me-the-funding-I-need self. Jonathan, on the other hand, was reserved. She sensed the tension running through his body. As hard as this was for her, it must be harder for him.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Johnny. Probably not nearly as much as you’ve heard about me.” Adrian clapped her fiancé on the back and turned him toward camp. His burr was thicker than usual. Yep, charming mode. “Can we get you something to eat? I’m starving, myself. Diving does it to me every time.”
“What is it?” Jonathan motioned out past the boat.
Adrian’s eyes crinkled and he tilted his head. She’d never realized Adrian was so much taller than Jonathan. “A ship. An amazing site. Mal is fortunate to get some time on it.”
“Well, her time’s up.” Jonathan forced a smile. “I’ve come to take her home. We have a wedding in a few weeks.”
“Yeah, sure, I know. You’ve come to take her, you say?” Adrian looked from Jonathan to Mallory and she knew what he was thinking. She would never have let Adrian get away with that possessiveness.
“We have a flight tonight at nine.”
“I can’t fly tonight,” Mallory blurted. “I just dived. I can’t fly for twenty-four hours.”
“What?” Jonathan’s tone was sharper than she could ever recall him using.
Adrian countered, inclining his head indulgently. “Well, you see, when you dive, nitrogen—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Jonathan interrupted in a manner that had Adrian looking at her curiously. She shook her head and gave a small shrug. “Well, all right. I’ll change the tickets to tomorrow night. Mallory, if you get your things and return your clothes to whoever you borrowed them from, I’m sure we can get a room in a hotel in the city.”
“Um.” She cast a look at Adrian, feeling out of control—that roller-coaster thing again. She didn’t want to be rushed off, swept away. She needed some closure here, not with Adrian necessarily, but with archaeology. “We could stay here. We could take you out on the boat and you could see the ship with the VideoRay.”
Both men turned to her, eyes wide, jaws dropped in identical expressions.
Creepy, really.
Then she realized what she’d said. She was forcing the three of them into at least eighteen hours of togetherness.
They both started talking at once.
“We can’t—”
“Mal, I didn’t really want—”
“Where would I sleep?”
“The filter hasn’t dried out yet.”
She held out her hands to stop the words. “Okay, okay, bad idea. I just thought, maybe, Jonathan would want to see what it is I used to do.” If she could get Jonathan to understand her love for the science, maybe she could return to it, at least now and again.
Not with Adrian, though. That would just be miserable.
Adrian’s defensive posture dropped at that, and Jonathan’s expression softened as he turned to her.
“I’d love to see it.”
She smiled, couldn’t help being self-conscious about it as Adrian rolled his eyes behind Jonathan.
“Let’s eat, then we’ll see if the boat will start,” she suggested.
If it didn’t, they’d be spending the night for nothing.
No amount of diving could make Adrian hungry right now. He couldn’t eat as he sat across from the man Mallory had chosen over him.
Okay, Jonathan wasn’t as obnoxious as Adrian had imagined. He looked less thrilled to still be here than Adrian felt about him being here. But he was doing it for Mallory, and that earned bonus points in Adrian’s eyes.
She’d chosen this guy, after all. The least Adrian could do was hope for her happiness if it couldn’t be with him.
Mallory’s eyes brightened when Robert joined them, looking curiously at Jonathan. She scrambled to her feet, and Jonathan followed more sedately—Adrian figured the guy to be at least ten years older than her—to greet the professor.
“Dr. Vigil, this is my fiancé, Jonathan Montcroft,” she said. Adrian imagined she stumbled a bit over the word fiancé.
He didn’t imagine the glance Robert shot him. Neither did Mallory. Adrian lifted his shoulder in a half shrug.
“Jonathan is spending the night,” he told Robert. “We’re going to take him out to the barge in a bit so he can see what we have.”
Robert opened his mouth to say something, looked at Mallory and closed it again. “That will be nice,” he said, his tone precise, polite.
Only when they were halfway through the meal did Adrian understand Mallory’s eagerness. Robert had been like a father to her after the death of her parents, and Robert, estranged from his own family, saw Mallory as a daughter and Adrian a son. Now she was seeking his approval of her new fiancé as she would from her parents.
Adrian had to make sure Robert gave it.
He was relieved Jonathan’s hands weren’t all over Mallory, though he had a hard time believing the man could not touch her. Hell, even now, Adrian couldn’t stop touching her.
Unable to take another bite of the sandwich that had turned to sawdust in his mouth, Adrian stood. “I’ll see if I can get the boat started. Come down when you’re done.”
The first thing Jonathan did when he stepped onto the gently purring Miss M was to reach for a life jacket. Mallory blinked at him a moment, before she reached for one herself. She hadn’t worn one the whole trip, but she didn’t want him to look foolish in front of Adrian.
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A glance at Adrian told her that her intervention was too late. But he didn’t say anything, just prepared the boat to launch.
Only Dr. Vigil joined them, though Mallory sensed the others wanted to come along too, just to see what would happen between Adrian and Jonathan. So far they’d mostly just ignored each other in the politest way possible.
Jonathan was nothing if not polite.
“Mallory, can you give me a hand up here?” Adrian asked as he stepped into the pilothouse. She recognized that tone. He didn’t need help any more than he needed more attitude. He wanted to talk. Three guesses what the subject would be.
“Can’t Dr. Vigil help you?” she asked sweetly from her seat by the rail. She did not want to have to explain to Jonathan what she and Adrian were discussing.
Adrian poked his head out of the pilothouse door and looked squarely at her. “No.”
Mallory narrowed her eyes at the back of his head when he withdrew into the pilothouse, but smoothed her features before Jonathan noticed. “I’ll be right back,” she said in the same sweet tone, maneuvering to her feet more awkwardly than usual with the added bulk of the life vest. She grasped the railing outside the pilothouse, more to diffuse the tension running through her body than to keep her balance. She refused to enter, so she stayed in the open doorway. “The boat started easily enough. What did you need?” she asked through her teeth.
He bent his head down, glancing over her shoulder at Jonathan. “He’s not going to puke on my boat, is he?”
Just as she thought, he didn’t need any help. He’d only brought her in here to razz her about Jonathan. “I doubt it.” God, she really hoped not.
“Can he even swim?”
“Why? Planning on pushing him off the boat?”
He gave her a disgusted look and turned his attention to the controls. “He seems a little nervous, keeps looking at the water. Can he?”
“I—” Truth was, she didn’t know.
“That’s something you should know about the man you’re going to marry,” he chided, reading her thoughts and pushing the throttle.
Mallory jostled a little, did everything she could to keep her balance, never easy around Adrian.
“Knowing everything about each other didn’t save our marriage,” she shot back and looked toward the stern and Jonathan, who was gripping the rail and grinning.
He loved her. She knew that much, and that was all that was important. She started to go to him but Adrian grabbed her arm, pulling her inside.
“I thought you understood I didn’t want word about this getting out.”
She blinked. He thought Jonathan was a security risk? “He won’t say anything.”
“Maybe not on purpose, but damn it, Mal, this isn’t a sightseeing trip. I can’t have him going home blabbing about what he saw here.”
She widened her eyes mockingly. “You are going to throw him overboard.”
“No, of course not,” he said quickly before he realized she was joking, then he scowled. “Just downplay it, all right? He’s a linguist, not an archaeologist, right?”
Yes, but he wasn’t stupid. Still, he wasn’t known for his discretion, and the wrong word to the wrong person could expose the secret Adrian had sacrificed so much to keep. She returned to Jonathan hoping she hadn’t destroyed Adrian’s chances again.
“So what are we looking at here?”
Jonathan crowded a little closer to Adrian to look at the computer screen, and Mallory tensed as Adrian did. She couldn’t have come up with a worse idea, or for a more selfish reason. Just because she didn’t have the courage to tell Jonathan she wanted to stay—or Adrian, for that matter—she was putting them all through hell.
“Nothing, yet,” Adrian said, and she recognized the strain in his voice. “It takes a bit for the submersible to get down there.”
“Less time than it takes us to get down there, though,” Mallory said brightly.
Both men looked at her. Jonathan gave her an indulgent smile.
She hated indulgent smiles.
God, she’d made her choice and she didn’t have the nerve to speak up.
What were her options? She had to speak up, or live the rest of her life married to a man, always wondering…
No, not about Adrian. This wasn’t about Adrian. This was about the life she’d known and loved since she was a child. The longer she stayed here, the longer she wanted to stay, the more unwilling she was to walk away.
“Are you seeing this, Mallory?” The excitement in Jonathan’s voice gave her hope, for just a moment, that he could love this life too, but he would never understand her obsession. She would do to him what Adrian had done to her, leave him behind for something she needed more.
That thought alone should have given her the courage to end it, to walk away from everything the two of them had built, the future they’d planned.
But she was a coward.
She lifted her head and forced a smile, then looked past Jonathan to the screen, where fish flitted around the camera, investigating the invader.
“Do they do that when you go down there?” Jonathan asked.
She shook her head. “No, they’re wary of us.”
“When we were off the coast of Mexico, that time, though,” Adrian interjected, “they were all over the place. Most beautiful fish you’ve ever seen. Remember?”
Sensing Jonathan’s discomfort at Adrian’s reminisces, she made a noncommittal noise. Adrian glanced back and she glimpsed his grin.
“We’re coming up on it now.” Adrian turned his attention to the joystick, guiding the camera deeper.
“What is that?” Jonathan pointed to the black substance that shone in the light from the camera.
“The tarp we used to cover it.” Mallory realized the mistake too late. “I forgot. We won’t be able to see it.”
“We have to cover it to prevent it from disintegrating,” Adrian said.
“Did it not disintegrate before?”
“It was pretty well buried,” Mallory said. “We think one of last summer’s hurricanes uncovered it.”
“Amazing.” But some of the enthusiasm had leached from his voice. Damn it, she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten about covering it.
Still, Adrian outlined the length of it for Jonathan’s benefit, coasted the camera past how far they suspected the bow and stern extended.
“A Spanish galleon, you think? A treasure ship?”
Mallory gnawed on her lip. If he were an archaeologist he would realize this site was too small to be a galleon.
“Not a treasure ship, too small,” Adrian said. “Exactly what she is remains to be seen.” He eased away, coaxing the camera up with the tips of his fingers on the joystick. “Sorry you couldn’t see more.”
“Ah, well.” Jonathan pushed back, too, and stood. “I probably wouldn’t have known what I was looking at.”
Or cared, Mallory thought with a lurch of her heart. If he cared, it was only because she did, and that wouldn’t last long. She felt courage building, but of course she couldn’t do this in front of Adrian. She wasn’t even sure she wanted Adrian to know. But how else would she explain her sudden availability to work on the dive?
Jonathan walked over, cupped a hand under her elbow. “Are you all right?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Adrian glance over sharply. She nodded.
“I’m fine.”
“Sure? You look a little flushed.”
She glanced at Adrian, hoped he wasn’t listening. He wasn’t. He was swearing and fighting with the joystick.
She turned from Jonathan. “What is it?”
“The camera is hung on something.”
“What?”
He scowled and shoved to his feet. “Hell if I know.”
“Well, we can’t leave it down there.”
“My dive gear’s on the skiff. I didn’t think to get it.”
“Jacob’s is here.” She nodded toward the corner of the barge where she’d shed the su
it and tank when she’d stripped earlier, after she’d gotten so cold. Her T-shirt and panties were tossed on top as well. She’d been so flustered after the encounter with Adrian, she’d left it behind, only wanting to get back to camp where she could have some space.
The snap of Adrian’s head told her he’d noticed her discarded clothing, also. Jonathan turned to see what they were both looking at.
“No.” The sharpness of Adrian’s tone attracted Jonathan’s attention. He walked to Mallory, stopping between the suit and Jonathan. “You’re not going down there after what happened earlier.”
“What happened earlier?” Jonathan asked.
Adrian kept his attention on Mallory. “She got chilled. The suit doesn’t fit right, lets too much water in. I haven’t checked for tears.”
“My body can’t heat it fast enough,” Mallory explained, pulse thudding as she waited for Jonathan to see her clothes tossed on the wetsuit. That Adrian came to her rescue surprised her and softened her toward him. “It’ll only be for a few minutes, Adrian. You spent too much on that to abandon it, and you can’t fit in Jacob’s suit.” She said the last over her shoulder as she walked to the suit, gathered her panties and stuffed them in her pocket. She picked up the suit, held it in front of her as she inspected it for tears, her heart pounding at the near miss.
“Is it dangerous?” Jonathan asked, anxiety creeping into his voice.
She looked up and wondered if it had been a near miss, and if her own guilty conscience put that strained look on Jonathan’s face.
“She could become hypothermic,” Adrian said, through gritted teeth.
“I’ll be fine.” Her tone was just as tense as she looked around the barge for some privacy but knowing she wouldn’t find any. What would Jonathan think if she stripped here in front of them all? There was no help for it, though she moved behind the bench that held the laptops. That was some barrier as she stripped to her underwear and stepped into the suit, tugging it into position. To Jonathan, she said, “He won’t let anything happen to me.”
Adrian glared at her a moment, then motioned for her to turn around so he could help her into her tanks. He tapped the gauge to let her know he’d checked it. “You don’t have too long.”
