by Rachel Lee
“So?”
“So then, when I said you probably didn’t want any help because the salvage had to be done with care, he announced that we could either sail away immediately and leave the site to him, or he would ram us.”
“He was going to let us leave?”
“That’s what I don’t get. Letting us sail away would probably only mean that we’d come back with the big guns to drive him away. So why did he say that?”
“Probably to encourage us to cooperate with him. Which, as I said to him, is distinctly to his advantage. I’ve got the permits, Dugan. He doesn’t. I’ve got a contract on this area of water with the state of Florida. Nobody else can salvage this wreck.”
“Like he cares.”
“But he will care if the Coast Guard comes out here and finds an illegal salvage going on. It’s not like he can get what he wants overnight. This is going to take months, probably years. He needs us.”
“Well, I feel a little better,” he said sarcastically. “I guess I can count on breathing for the next few weeks.”
She ignored his tone. “As long as we don’t cross him. I’ve got a feeling he could get very ugly.”
“No kidding. Okay. So we do the deal with him in the morning. Tell him we want his help. Tell him even I agree with that. Then what? Is he going to let us go back to town every few days for supplies? I doubt it. Man, I just can’t see how this is going to work unless he kills us.”
Veronica frowned and traced the rim of her mug with her index finger. “He’ll let us go back to town. He has to. Because I’m going to explain to him that my father will raise the dead if I don’t show up when I’m supposed to. So he’s going to have to let us go. He probably just won’t let us go alone.”
“I don’t see it. He can’t let you have time alone with your father, and if you ask me, Orin’s going to get very suspicious if you have some thug glued to your side while you talk to him. It’d be easier just to make you gone.”
“I don’t know.” All of a sudden she rested her forehead in her palm and closed her eyes. “I’m so tired. So confused. There’s got to be a way to handle this.”
He didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t understand him anyway, with her eyes closed. So, against his better judgment, he reached out and laid his hand on her shoulder.
It was odd, but he’d gone from trying to find some way to outwit Emilio to trying to find a way to keep the two of them alive as long as possible. Ten minutes ago he’d been swearing he was going to haul up anchor and head for home as fast as the Mandolin would take him. Now he was trying to find ways to stay here and stay alive.
Veronica. It all had to do with Veronica. She was making him crazy. If he had two ounces of common sense, he’d hog-tie and gag her and head for home lickety-split, taking his chances with getting rammed.
But she wasn’t going to cooperate with that, and she was going to be very angry with him if he went ahead and did it anyway.
He didn’t want to make her mad at him, which just went to show that she’d softened his brain. Turned it to mush. For his own sake, he needed to get as far away from her as possible as soon as possible, before all he had between his ears was Jell-O.
But there was no place to go, and the big problem of Emilio still existed, and Veronica was clearly not going to vanish from the planet anytime soon. Not if he had anything to say about it. So instead of keeping his distance, he reached out and pulled her against his side, hugging her tight.
Somehow they would get through this. They had to.
“Dammit,” Tam said to Dugan, “I’ve got as much to lose as either of you right now. Do you think they have any use for me now that they’re here?”
Dugan looked at Veronica, wondering if she’d followed what Tam had said. But she didn’t look questioningly at him, so he let it go.
“So I’m supposed to trust you now?” Dugan asked.
“I don’t know if I’d call it trust. But you can believe I want to get out of this alive as much as you do, and cooperating with them isn’t going to save me, because they don’t need me. What can I possibly do for them that they can’t do for themselves, now that they’re here?”
“Well . . . you could tell them about the things we discuss. Our plans for getting away.”
Tam’s lips whitened as he tightened them. “I want to get away as much as you do. I never would have told them anything at all if they hadn’t threatened to hurt me.”
“Yeah? So what happens now if they threaten to hurt you if you don’t tell them everything we say over here?”
“This is different.”
Dugan leaned toward him threateningly. “How so?”
“Because before all they wanted was some information. I didn’t think it was that big a deal. For Chrissake, Dugan, everybody on Key West would have heard about what we’re doing out here before long anyway. Keeping a secret in that town is like trying to hold water in a sieve. I didn’t think it was any big deal to let them know we found a cannon.”
“Well, it turned out to be a big deal, didn’t it. Just what did you think they were going to do when they found out? If they were threatening to hurt you for not cooperating, what did you think was going to happen when they learned we’d found something? Did you think they were going to put on tutus and dance a congratulatory Swan Lake?”
Tam threw up his hands. “Okay. Okay. I didn’t think far enough in advance. I never do. You’ve been telling me that ever since you bailed the diving business out of trouble. So I’m not the world’s greatest prophet.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Yeah. Well.” He jerked his shoulders back and rotated his head as if his neck were stiff. “Still, this is different. They’re here now, they threatened to ram us, and I’m not going to do one damn little thing that might get any of us hurt or killed. This is different, man. Totally.”
Maybe it was. Maybe Tam was smart enough to see that his best chance at self-preservation didn’t lie with Emilio and his henchmen. On the other hand, that could change in an instant, couldn’t it? And Dugan wasn’t the kind of person who found it easy to trust again when he’d been betrayed once.
“I don’t know, Tam.”
“Look, I swear, all I want is for us to find a way out of this. All of us. I was a jerk, and I know it. But I learned my lesson.”
It was possible, Dugan supposed. Tam had never been stupid; he just wasn’t the kind who could see very far beyond his own nose.
“Look,” said Tam. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll do my part. Whatever you tell me. And I won’t ask why. I’ll just do it. Fair enough?”
“I guess so,” Dugan agreed reluctantly. “So . . . do you think you can take the first watch? And will you wake me up if you see anything suspicious at all?”
“I can do that. You know I can do that. I won’t let those guys within a hundred yards of the Mandolin.”
Dugan had decided that they needed to keep watch through the night. He hadn’t told Veronica that yet, and he didn’t know how much of this conversation she was following, but he felt that they shouldn’t dare lower their guard for a minute. If Emilio Zaragosa really wanted them out of the way, what better opportunity than to ram them in the middle of the night? No one would see, and no one could even start looking for them before dawn. If anyone bothered, because he figured that it would be at least three days before anyone would report them missing.
“This sucks,” he said to no one in particular. But Veronica nodded.
“Okay,” he said to Tam, “you take first watch. Wake me at two.” It sounded good, though frankly he didn’t think he was going to sleep a wink.
“You got it.” Tam climbed the ladder and closed the hatch behind him, leaving Dugan alone with Veronica.
“We’re taking watches,” he told her. “I’ll take over at two.”
“I gathered that.”
“So you can go to bed and sleep without worrying.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’m not going to sleep
, and I don’t want to go to bed alone.”
He didn’t know if she meant that the way it had sounded. Probably not, he decided. She just didn’t want to be alone.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m not going to sleep either. So we can just sit here and play cards or something.”
She made an exasperated sound.
“Why? What?”
“Is playing cards all you can think of doing?” she asked.
There was no mistaking the look in her eye. He felt his mouth go dry. “Now?” he asked. “With death breathing down our necks?”
“Can you think of a better time? We’ll probably be dead by this time tomorrow, and all you want to do is play cards?”
One of them was crazy, but he wasn’t sure which. What she said made a kind of perverse sense. After all . . . Well, hell, he couldn’t get himself into any trouble if they were going to be dead this time tomorrow. On the other hand, if they survived . . .
“Why?” he asked. He had to know why.
She shrugged. “Because I’ve been wondering what it would be like to be with you without all our clothes on. Because you attract me. Because I’m damned if I want to spend the next eight hours crawling up the walls with my nerves screaming.”
“So I’m like . . . an antianxiety pill?”
She would have laughed, he thought, if she hadn’t been so tense, and if her eyes hadn’t held a dark sorrow in them. But she didn’t laugh, and all she did was shake her head.
He didn’t want to know what that meant. It was safe to be an antianxiety pill for her. For them both. But anything more, he couldn’t handle.
Or thought he couldn’t, until finally she said, her lips quivering, “Dugan, I’m scared.”
Why the hell hadn’t she just said that in the first place?
Without another word, he took her hand, tugged her to her feet, and pulled her back to the cabin.
All of a sudden, this seemed like absolutely the sanest thing they could do.
And he would brook no other opinions on the subject.
Chapter 18
Dugan turned on only one light in the cabin, a small bulb in a wall sconce. It was enough light for the minutes to come. He had a feeling that neither of them would welcome harsh reality just then. This was an escape, a journey into a dream territory where there weren’t any villains.
He could hear Veronica’s rapid breaths. He wondered if she could hear his. He wondered if she would hear anything at all, or if she would take out her hearing aids and make these moments utterly silent.
She did. He watched her put them away, and felt a pang that she was putting that barrier between them. But maybe she didn’t see it that way. Maybe for her the hearing aids were more of a barrier, bringing her sounds he wouldn’t even notice, sounds that might trouble her. Or maybe by cutting off her hearing she could concentrate more on other sensations.
It didn’t matter.
Because she was reaching for the hem of her shirt, pulling it up over her head. He liked this in her, he realized, her lack of shyness, her lack of reluctance. Finding a lover who was willing to take full responsibility for what she was doing, a lover who came as an equal . . . that was pretty special. It was also something he’d never experienced before. Most women wanted to be coaxed and seduced, at least the first few times.
Veronica was so different.
He found himself wondering if she had really meant what she said about being dead this time tomorrow. And he discovered that he hoped she hadn’t really meant it, that it had just been an excuse for the next few hours. Because if she had meant it, then these moments would have to be locked up forever in memory as if they had never happened, if they survived. That thought saddened him. What she was offering was another kind of death.
His hands were shaking. He hadn’t allowed himself to realize just how much he wanted to make love to her. He’d been skating away from the feelings for weeks, pretending they didn’t exist, refusing to acknowledge them even when they tried to force their way to his attention.
Now he could evade them no longer. He wanted her. He wanted her as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. His mouth was dry with longing. His body felt heavy with building desire, like the air right before a thunderstorm.
She stripped off her shorts and stood before him in nothing but panties and bra. She looked at him then, her face revealing an insecurity, a fear of what he might think that swept past all his defenses and buried itself in his heart. Yet there was something else, he realized. Without her aids, she never took her eyes from his face. He watched every emotion play through her heart: hope, longing, need, and fear. She couldn’t turn away, and the intensity of her gaze left him nowhere to turn either. He hadn’t yet taken off a stitch of clothes, and he felt more naked than ever before in his life.
He looked down to unbutton his shorts, but she crossed the cabin in an instant, her hands on his face, turning his eyes back to her. “Here,” she whispered soundlessly, locking him into her world of silence, bringing him closer to her by making him read her lips. “Let me. Let me.”
He nodded and felt his entire being sink into those luminous eyes as her fingers worked the button, then the zipper, then slid his shorts over his hips. He wiggled them down, thinking for a moment that it was a wasted gesture with their eyes locked together, but her hands told her what he was doing. She smiled softly and let out a silent giggle. “Nice buns.”
“Ummm . . . yours, too,” he answered. It felt so out of place to say such a thing at such a moment. For in the unbroken contact of their gaze, he was finding an intimacy that went far beyond anything he’d ever known with a woman, an intimacy that was almost reverent. And yet words tumbled out. “Very, very nice,” he added, his hands trailing over her body like a blind man reading braille.
Hills, valleys, hollows, and curves, they became his as his hands wandered over them, learning them, memorizing them. He watched the play of response in her eyes and on her face, reading her as he had never read a woman before. Feeling her as he had never felt a woman before.
Her hands found the bottom hem of his shirt and lifted, peeling it off of him. He felt a pang in his soul as the fabric neared his chin. If only for an instant, he would lose her eyes. Only for an instant, but for an eternity too long. He raised his arms to make it easier for her, and tried to tell himself it was only a blink. Just a second. Maybe less.
Yet as soon as the shirt slipped past, his eyes shot open and searched for hers. Just a second. Maybe less. Far too long. She seemed to recognize the moment and paused with their hands upraised and touching, the fabric still at his wrists. She studied him, and he her, renewing a contact that reached to the ends of time and space. “I need you,” she mouthed.
“I need you, too,” he mouthed back, now with equal silence. For his world had gone silent too. The creak of the boat, the susurration of the sea, the rustle of cloth on skin, all of these were lost to him. He was drowning in the depths of her passion, her joy, her need. She was all that existed. She had become the entire universe, and in that universe, sound was irrelevant. In that universe, there was only the soft, shared, longing gaze of lovers, and the connection of two souls. “You are perfect,” he said soundlessly.
For a moment, she nearly lost sight of his eyes again. Seconds ago it had been his T-shirt that took him away from her. Now it was the fast-rising film of her own tears. She hadn’t imagined it. You are perfect. He’d said it, and in the reflection of his eyes, for just an instant, she had felt it. And then her body betrayed her, her eyes welling with the echo of a need that ran to the core of her being. And in the sweet caress of his soundless words, in the echo of that need, in the release of her tears, her vision dimmed, and she lost him. She blinked, but her body seemed determined to win this race of eyelids and tears. She felt a tug from his hands, still held over their heads, and she knew what he wanted. She shook her head. She needed his face again first. It was utterly inexplicable, but seeing his eyes had become the single most important thi
ng in the whole world. She needed to see into his soul again. And in his soul, to see the reflection of her own, as he saw her.
Even with tear-dimmed vision, she could see and feel him moving closer. Now lips brushed against eyebrows and lashes. Gentle kisses, so soft she could barely feel them, wicked away moisture. The soft scratch of his cheek against hers. The warmth of his breath on her ear. She tipped her face backward and opened her eyes. Her vision was clear enough to see what she needed, for his face was strong and soft and open and near.
Now their hands lowered. Underwear slid away, and fingertips searched. Eyes remained locked together, windows on souls that were about to become one.
They slid onto the bunk as one being, a silent sigh as heads rested onto the pillow. Her hands grew bolder, and her fingernails scraped delicately along his belly, then his chest, circling closer, teasing the moment to agonizing frustration.
It was almost as if he were blindfolded, for he was so lost in her eyes that only the scintillating echoes of nerve endings told him where she had been, and only his aching need could predict where she would go next.
Finally . . . was it? Had she? It was too faint to be sure, and he felt a plea deep within him. She must have seen it, for she answered it with a wicked smile and another too-faint-to-be-sure touch. Then another. His back arched as if reaching up for her, but her deft fingertips rose with him and continued their patient work.
Two could play at this game, he realized, and his hands began to explore her with equal playfulness. Her eyes grew wide as he traced a slow circle around her areolae, contact so faint it nearly buzzed at the very tips of his fingers. He did it again, and then again, watching her face go soft and dreamy. He wanted to close his eyes and sink into her touches. She no doubt wanted the same. And yet, on this night, there would be no comfortable distance behind closed eyelids. Their passion and need and joy would play out in the full light of each other’s eyes.
