Romancing the Alpha: An Action-Adventure Romance Boxed Set

by Zoe York

  Dex placed a finger between his brows. “After all this time, why would anyone care either way?”

  “Because the Americans were supposed to be neutral in 1915. And because on previous voyages, the British Navy had always sent destroyers to escort the Lusitania through the war zone. Only on this particular trip, no escort was sent, despite the Navy knowing a submarine was active in the area and that the German Imperial Embassy in New York had issued a warning to passengers planning to travel on the Lusitania not to do so.”

  “Wait…are you saying the British and Americans conspired to deliberately let the Germans sink the ship?” He shook his head. “It seems farfetched, even in our jaded world.”

  “I’m not sure about the Americans,” she mused, scrunching her forehead. “Woodrow Wilson tried his best to keep them out of the war. However, I think they were secretly supplying the British with guns and explosives to help them win. Given that almost two years passed between the sinking of the Lusitania and the Americans declaring war on Germany, my guess is that they had nothing to do with endangering the ship.”

  Dex lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking hard. “Sorry, Katy, but I can’t bring myself to believe that the British would deliberately allow the ship to be torpedoed. That would be taking Machiavellianism to extremes.”

  “But no one could have expected the ship to sink within eighteen minutes. Even the German U-Boot commander was baffled that one torpedo had the power to sink the Lusitania. It made no sense. They expected it to cripple her, yes, and to humiliate the British. As for the Admiralty, even if they did deliberately put the ship in harm’s way in an effort to persuade the Americans to join the war, they wouldn’t have expected even two or three torpedoes to sink a massive ship in such a short space of time. Given the ship’s proximity to the Irish coast, they could have reasonably anticipated there would be plenty of time for rescue to arrive if the ship was sinking. That the torpedo hit the ship in precisely the right area to cause a massive internal explosion was pure bad luck.”

  Her passion for the subject sent a ripple down his spine. Regarding her flushed face and bright eyes was a bittersweet reminder of all the reasons he’d fallen in love with her. Katy seized the moment and wrung every gram of goodness out of each day. She didn’t half-arse a task, nor did she plod through life unsure of her purpose. Whatever she chose to do, she did it to the max. Her quick wits and sassy attitude had hooked his interest when they first met, but it was her enthusiasm and dogged determination to succeed that had captured his heart.

  He leaned back and considered her theory. “Why are the British still keen to cover up what happened to the ship? What repercussions could there be a century after the fact? Everyone involved is long dead.”

  “I have no idea. National pride? Embarrassment?”

  “Perhaps. To bring us back to your original question, who do you think the spy is? You must suspect someone or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Katy’s grin was sly. “My money’s on your boss.”

  “Rick?” His eyebrows shot up. “No way. I’ve known him for over ten years. He’s a bounder and a treasure hunter, sure, but I don’t see him as spy material.”

  “Jeez.” She rolled her eyes. “Do you expect him to show up in a dark suit and sunglasses? This isn’t Men in Black.”

  “True, but I don’t see Rick being on the payroll of anyone who wasn’t prepared to pay him big bucks and send him in pursuit of something shiny.”

  “So who do you think our pet spy is?”

  Dex turned mental images of their new colleagues over in his mind. “I’m not sure I believe we have a spy, but if we do…Mark, maybe? I only know the guy by reputation, but I’ve never met him in person before.”

  “Nah.” Her forehead creased in contemplation. “I don’t think Mark’s a good enough actor to pull off the roll of the flirty tech guy with such aplomb.”

  “Who does that leave us with? Jack Huntington is posh enough to attract the likes of MI5 and MI6. Don’t they tend to target the Oxbridge types?”

  Katy laughed. “Put it this way—no one’s ever tried to recruit me for an intelligence agency.”

  “Me neither. Who else do we have? Bill and Moira aren’t likely. We’ve known them for years. Besides, Moira lacks the subtlety required for a covert operation.”

  Katy snorted. “Moira lacks a lot of things, and subtlety isn’t top of the list.”

  “Now, now, cupcake. Your claws are showing.”

  She flipped him the finger. “Moira’s a bitch. I can’t believe you dated her.”

  “Long before our time. And I wouldn’t define it as ‘dated.’ We slept together once.” He sighed. They had to tackle the elephant in the room. “You know her Facebook updates were bullshit, right? We worked together on the Jakarta expedition and we took a few team photos. I don’t recall posing for a photo alone with her and I sure as hell didn’t sleep with her. She cropped the pictures and uploaded them to Facebook, presumably to piss you off.”

  Katy scowled. “It worked.”

  “If we decide to add strings to whatever is going on between us, you’re going to have to learn to trust me. I’m not your father, Katy. I didn’t cheat on my previous girlfriends and I have no intention of cheating on you.”

  “Can we focus on the spy angle?” Her expression was pleading. “I know we need to talk more about…us…but I can’t face it at the moment.”

  “Okay. I’ll humor you for now, but we’ll need to come back to this discussion before the expedition ends.” If he had his way, it would be far sooner than that. “To get back to the spy. What about Con?”

  Katy considered this possibility for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. He has an honest face, but then many people would say we seem above board. Basically, it could be any of them.”

  “Or one of us,” Dex said lightly, making her whip round to face him.

  Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You trying to tell me something, Fitzgerald?”

  “Oh, come on, Katy.” His low drawl sent sparks across her skin. “Don’t tell me you haven’t wondered if I might be the spy. You were quick enough to suspect me of having an interest in the Vanderbilt jewels.”

  “That’s different. I know you’re a ruthless treasure hunter. There isn’t an artifact on the planet you wouldn’t sell to the highest bidder.” The words tumbled out before she could filter them.

  He let out a crack of laughter. “Couldn’t the same description apply to you? You haven’t been known to show such scruples in the past.”

  Pink crept up her cheeks. “I’ve changed. Unlike you, I have a code.”

  “Katy Ryan has a code.” He grinned and she threw her pillow at him.

  “I’m serious, Dex. I went straight after we broke up. This expedition is a one-off.”

  He eyed her curiously, recalling the shadows beneath her eyes and the stress lines that hadn’t been there before. “Why? What’s so important that you’re willing to ignore your ‘code’ for one last assignment?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then opened her mouth as if to respond. A piercing alarm silenced whatever she’d been about to say. With palpable relief, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. “We need to get moving or we’ll be late for castoff.”

  — EIGHT —

  The day’s dive didn’t happen. The weather was bad and the currents dicey. In the end, only Rick and Mark, as the most experienced divers, ventured underwater. The rest of the team were left on land to kick their heels and hope the following day’s conditions would prove more favorable.

  Katy had mixed feelings about the missed dive. On the one hand, she was excited to continue the search for the jewels. On the other, she was still recovering her strength from yesterday’s dive, and her mind was still reeling from the aftermath of spending the night with Dex. Was she ready for this? Could she sleep with him and keep him at an arm’s length emotionally? At the memory of what they’d done last night, butterflies took fli
ght in her tummy. She didn’t want to get hurt again but last night was the first time she’d felt properly alive in months. And then there was the nagging discomfort left by the note…

  “Did you get many pictures at your site?” Mickey Lawlor asked, intruding on her thoughts.

  “Uh, yeah, I did. I hope they turned out okay.”

  She and the other photographer were taking the opportunity of a rest day to sort through photos and video footage from yesterday’s dive.

  After they’d supplied themselves with takeout coffee from the Cottage Café, they’d headed to the local library, where Rick had arranged for them to have a room to work together. Katy was particularly interested in Mickey’s footage. He’d been in the area of the ship where the jewels were most likely to be located.

  After they’d arranged their work materials for the day, Mickey pulled a large folder out of one of the boxes. “Here’s the expedition’s collection of photographs of the ship and the passengers,” he said, “plus a few eyewitness reports that didn’t get wide circulation. Do you want to flick through them?”

  “Definitely.” Katy seized the folder with delight. A cursory glance showed her that most of these photographs were ones she hadn’t seen before. “This collection is fascinating. How did Rick get hold of it?”

  “From me. Most of the photos are copies from various private collections I’ve accessed over the years.”

  Katy sipped her coffee and flipped through the photos. They consisted of pictures of survivors as well as those who perished. When she came upon a lovely shot of a smiling young couple, she paused and checked the inscription on the back. Jack Ryan and Millicent Beresford, passengers on RMS Lusitania. Pictured in Queenstown two days after the sinking.

  Queenstown. The old name for Cobh where many of the Lusitania survivors were housed in the days after their rescue.

  “Can I make a copy of this photo, Mickey?” she said in a voice high with excitement. “The people in this photo are my great-grandparents.”

  Mickey leaned over her shoulder to take a look. “Handsome couple.”

  “They died long before I was born but I remember my grandmother telling stories about how they fell in love aboard the Lusitania. That’s what sparked my interest in the ship.”

  The older man patted her on the back. “I need to make copies of a few photos for the local museum. I’ll include this one and make an extra copy for you.”

  “Thanks, Mickey.”

  Katy resumed her perusal of the photograph collection. She paused again when she came to a shot of a young Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, handsome in a top hat and sporting a mustache. One of him aboard the RMS Olympic—a sister ship to the ill-fated Titanic—showed him clean-shaven and dapper in a peaked hat. “He was romance-cover handsome, wasn’t he?” she remarked, but Mickey was too absorbed in his work to murmur more than a vague “Hmm?”

  Katy flipped to the eyewitness accounts and began to read. According to many survivors, Vanderbilt and his valet, Ronald Denyer, had assisted numerous women and children into lifejackets and onto lifeboats. Both men had gone down with the ship. She was about to put the folder down and concentrate on yesterday’s footage when a sentence leaped out at her. It was in a woman’s account of being helped into a lifeboat by Denyer. “Mr. Denyer saw me struggling to secure my lifebelt. Jettisoning the black box he was carrying onto the deck, he rushed to assist me. Once he had my lifebelt correctly fastened, he helped me onto a lifeboat. I never saw Mr. Denyer again.”

  Katy’s fingers tensed around the paper and her pulse accelerated. A black case…Could it be…? What were the odds? The ship had gone down fast. Would Denyer have had time to rush back to Vanderbilt’s room, retrieve the case, and play the hero so many eyewitnesses had seen on the deck? She did a rough calculation of the distance from Vanderbilt’s rooms to the promenade deck. It was possible, even probable, that Denyer had gone to fetch the jewels the moment the torpedo hit. Neither he nor Vanderbilt could have imagined how quickly the ship would sink.

  Katy tapped the table thoughtfully. If the case containing the jewels had been removed from the safe, it would have sunk to the seabed, along with the rest of the ship’s debris. On the one hand, this would make it more likely to gain access to it than through the collapsed wreck of the ship. On the other hand, the debris field around the wreck was large, and their expedition was set to focus on the area nearest to the ship’s remains. Whether or not she’d find the case was still a matter of sheer chance. That was assuming no one had snatched the case from the deck and somehow clung to it until they’d been rescued. Nah. She dismissed this hypothesis as unlikely. With total chaos and a rapidly sinking ship, even the most ingenious of thieves would be concentrating on saving themselves rather than chancing that a randomly discarded case on the deck contained something worth risking his life for.

  “Good coffee,” Mickey said, drawing her attention back to the photos. He had his laptop open and was sorting through thumbnail shots of yesterday’s dive.

  “Yeah, good coffee,” she said vaguely, eyeing thumbnails of the seabed. “Do you mind if I take a look at the photos you shot yesterday? We’re supposed to explore the area right beside it on our next dive. It would be good to get a feel for the surrounding, you know?”

  Mickey’s expression was skeptical. “I doubt it’s much different from where you dove yesterday.”

  Luckily for her, Katy was a quick thinker and no stranger to ad hoc improvisation. “Cruiser mines,” she said without blinking, “and other potential explosives. I’d like to take a closer look at your pics to see if I can spot any close to where we’ll be working. We found one yesterday on our patch and the experience has made me paranoid.”

  Mickey appeared to accept this explanation. “Fair enough. I guess I should do the same with your footage.”

  “Deal.” Katy unhooked her laptop cord and traded computers with her colleague.

  A cursory glance told her Mickey was the superior photographer, although she flattered herself that she was steadier with the video camera. He’d taken some remarkably clear photos of the seabed. For the next couple of hours, Katy painstakingly examined each and every photo, each and every second of video footage, in search of a glimpse of something—anything—that might indicate the whereabouts of the black case. But nothing in her footage or Mickey’s revealed anything of the sort. Damn. Well, she’d known it was a long shot. Hell, the entire search for the jewels was a long shot, but it didn’t stop her feeling the low burn of disappointment in her stomach.

  The church bells chimed the hour. Four o’clock. Yawning, Katy pushed her chair back from the desk and stretched. “We’re due to meet the team at the Cottage Café in thirty minutes. Should we start packing up?”

  “Yeah.” Mickey moved his neck from side to side as if to loosen tight muscles. “I chose some photos of the wreck to print out for the local centenary exhibition. They’ll be pleased.”

  Katy backed up all her files to cloud storage and an external hard drive. While she was waiting for them to transfer, she took a last look at some of the photos from around the place where she and Jack had stumbled upon the old depth charge.

  And then she spotted it. In the top right corner of one of the shots, something rusty protruded from the sand near the depth charge, just shy of an old fishing net. There was no guarantee that it was the black case, but it was the only item she’d spotted in any of the photos that was the correct shape and size.

  Heart racing, her fingers flew over the keyboard. She scrolled back to the footage she’d shot of Jack’s dig before the panic over the cruiser mine. Using the photo as her guide, she zoomed in to the area where the rusty case was buried in the sand. There it was, looking more like a metal box this time, complete with an old-fashioned lock. Bull’s-eye.

  — NINE —

  Dex spent the day examining and cataloguing the salvaged artifacts with Bill and Jack. A few of the finds were museum-worthy. From an archeological and historical perspective, the sea-worn
woman’s shoe wasn’t going to shed any new light on fashions of the time, but as a human interest piece, the local museum would love it.

  He was relieved when dinner at the Cottage Café was over and he and Katy drove back to Seán’s apartment. They needed to talk, and he’d rather get it over with before the next dive.

  After putting an old Motown record on Seán’s record player, Dex got them each a beer from the fridge. “So, Miss Katy, talk to me.”

  She jumped in her seat, eyes widening, then narrowing to slits of suspicion. “Talk to you about what?”

  Dex flopped into an armchair adjacent to the sofa and eyed her speculatively. “About whatever it is you don’t want me to know about.”

  Her tongue poked out her cheek. “That covers a lot of ground.”

  “Let’s start with why you took this job. We both know why I took it. Rick got a tip-off about Alfred Vanderbilt carrying valuable jewels on the ship. After lining up a backer, he was determined to snag this expedition. And he managed to—with a couple of caveats.”

  She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Which were?”

  “Not which but who.” He popped the cap off his beer and took a sip. “One of the sponsors of the expedition insisted Moira and Jack be part of the expedition team.”

  “Interesting.” Katy’s brow was furrowed in thought. “Any idea who this sponsor is? All I was told was that money was cobbled together from various sources, including the Irish government.”

  “A wealthy American businessman called Alec Darling. He’s bankrolled a number of wreck dives over the last decade, and he’s rumored to have acquired several valuable items through salvage.”

  “Who’s backing you and Rick?” Katy’s expression grew sly. “Lemme guess. That slippery dickhead James Taylor?”