by Cindy Dees
“Why would the government do that?”
Aiden answered drily, “They have a mandate to combat piracy. An American citizen was kidnapped by pirates, and Uncle Sam was well within its rights to mount a rescue operation followed by a small cleanup operation.”
Friends in high places, indeed. She couldn’t even imagine the influence Winston Enterprises must have to be able to ask Uncle Sam to drop a few bombs as a favor. “Where does Jeff Winston get that much power from?” she asked.
“The government is very grateful that we’re doing the stem-cell research for them and saving them the controversy of doing it themselves.”
“Grateful enough to drop bombs?” she demanded, her journalist’s instincts kicking in hard.
Aiden gestured at the fading glow on the horizon. “The thing speaks for itself, does it not?”
She just shook her head.
“And by the way,” Aiden added gently, “you never saw anything tonight. For all you know, that could’ve been some local village shooting off fireworks.”
Given the fact that Uncle Sam had just taken out the men who’d kidnapped her and tried to kill her and Aiden, and that she would sleep immeasurably better knowing those thugs were dead, she could work with the firework story.
“Got it,” she replied briskly. “Too bad we weren’t close enough to enjoy the fireworks more fully.”
Everyone on the bridge grinned.
“Tired?” Aiden asked her.
“Beyond exhausted.”
Steig commented, “I’ll be posting armed guards outside your stateroom tonight, Aiden. I’d appreciate it if the two of you both stayed there so I can consolidate my shipboard security around a single location. I hear the sofa bed in your stateroom is quite comfortable.”
“Mmm. Quite,” Aiden retorted drily.
Sunny whacked him on the arm as he grinned at his friend.
“And I don’t care what Leland Winston’s privacy policy is,” the Swede declared, “tomorrow I’m having cameras installed in the hall outside that room and on the private deck.”
Aiden’s grin faded. “I concur. Enough is enough. And while you’re at it, shall we set sail for the coordinates of Sunny’s film?”
“My film!” she wailed. “The Russians stole it and Uncle Sam just blew it up!”
Grisham piped up from across the bridge. “Begging your pardon, Miss Sunny, but I have digital copies of all your footage stored in my computer. I burned them onto my backup drive when I was digitally enhancing them.”
She gave the guy a huge hug. “You’re a lifesaver!”
Aiden cleared his throat behind her and everyone laughed. She turned the embarrassed sailor loose and gladly headed down to Aiden’s stateroom to crash. True to his word, Steig already had a man stationed in the passage outside, toting a wicked-looking gun.
As she snuggled close to Aiden, her ear pressed against his chest. “I don’t hear any wheezing in your lungs,” she murmured sleepily.
“Gemma’s going to be thrilled to find out that pressuring me up fixes my asthma so quickly. I have visions of spending the next year in a hyperbaric chamber while she tests the effect ad nauseam.”
Sunny’s eyes drifted closed as exhaustion dragged her under. “Can I go with you? I don’t ever want to be apart from you again.”
“Me, neither.”
And those were the last words as she finally gave in to the urge to close her eyes and wish it all away. Except for Aiden. Never Aiden.
* * *
His last words to Sunny the night before still ringing in his ears, Aiden slipped out of bed late the next morning while she slept on. He gazed down at her in his bed, her hair spread out over the pillow and half-covering her face, one bare shoulder peeking out from under the sheets. There was nowhere else on Earth he’d rather have her than in his bed, looking totally at home.
But yesterday had been a grim reality check. She was more than a weakness for him. She was his own personal Achilles’ heel. And in his line of work, he couldn’t afford to give anyone the capacity to harm or manipulate him through her.
As much as he loved her—hell, because he loved her—he had to walk away from her. He didn’t dare let her stay in his life. He couldn’t ever put her in that kind of danger again. And as long as he was tangling with bad people for a living, his enemies would keep coming after her.
Although how he was going to explain all that to her, he hadn’t a clue. How do you tell someone, “I love you, therefore, I have to leave you?”
As he’d expected, Gemma insisted on running every test in her lab on him and a few new ones he was sure she thought up on the spot just to torture him. The good news was it tied him up for most of the afternoon. It was an easy enough matter to avoid private conversation with Sunny by lingering with the crew after dinner in the salon. Chef had prepared a celebration feast that everyone had gathered to enjoy, and the wine and laughter both flowed.
Sunny looked at him expectantly as the hour grew late, and he mentally cringed. If he’d thought forcing himself to keep running past exhaustion and nearly past the point of losing consciousness had been hard, it was nothing compared to forcing himself to face Sunny and break her heart.
But as the salon emptied and Sunny came over to stand beside him, the moment of truth was upon him. He stood and offered her his arm. He was most certainly not doing this in public in front of the security cameras that now bristled all over the yacht.
“Sunny, we need to talk.”
Her face lit up. “Great! What’s up?”
“In private, okay?”
Her eyes sparkled. Crap. Did she think he was going to propose? Oh, Lord. He was going to break her heart even worse than he’d realized.
They’d walked about halfway to his stateroom when Steig’s voice came over the ship’s intercom. “Aiden, if you could come to the bridge, we’re approaching
Sunny’s coordinates.”
Praise the Lord. Okay, so he was a coward. He admitted it. And he could live with that. Taking the escape Steig had given him with abject gratitude, he murmured, “Why don’t you go on to bed? I don’t know how long this will take.”
“Like I’m not going up there with you?” she demanded belligerently.
He sighed. “Let’s go.”
Sunny took off running ahead of him and turned it into a race. Vixen. He took off running behind her. After all the bronchodilaters Gemma had pumped into him today, he could handle one lousy sprint to put one sassy female firmly in her place. He caught her just outside the bridge and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her back to him reflexively before he could stop and think about the message it sent her. The wrong message. No wonder she was so confused and accused him of giving her emotional whiplash. He had a bad case of it himself.
She turned in his arms, laughing, her golden-brown eyes glowing like the sun she was named after. It was like holding liquid light in his arms. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, bathing him in an all that warmth and joy. He couldn’t help but bask in it until he was practically drunk on her.
God, he loved this woman.
And she was not for him.
Chapter 12
Sunny scanned the ocean beyond the Nymph. They were at the exact spot where she’d filmed the images that had apparently caused so much trouble. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to see, but this was decidedly anticlimactic. There was just water and more water glistening under a rising half-moon. “Where are the bad guys?” she demanded indignantly.
Everyone grinned and Aiden replied, “As if it would be that easy.” To Steig, he asked, “Has Winston Ops gotten back to us yet with the enhanced images from Sunny’s film?”
“I got a message saying they’d passed the images on to the NSA to have a look at.”
“
The NSA?” Sunny blurted. “As in National Security Agency?”
“The very same,” Steig answered. “And to anticipate your next question, I don’t know why. Probably because they specialize in high-caliber photo intelligence analysis.”
Grisham started a detailed radar scan of the ocean below the Nymph. They sailed slowly in ever-expanding circles in search of whatever had caused the Russians to make three attempts to kidnap or kill her.
As time wore on and the painstakingly slow search became, quite frankly, as boring as watching grass grow, her mind drifted. How weird was it that her parents had died right in this area and that the Russians would try to kill her over something she’d seen here?
That rainy day of filming hadn’t stood out as anything special in her mind. She’d known she was too far from the fishing ship and that the rain was too heavy to get any usable film. But she’d been bored to tears then, too, and had pulled out her camera simply to have something to do.
“You know,” she said suddenly, “I think that Russian ship I filmed was sailing in circles, too.”
“Searching for something?” Aiden asked quickly.
“I’m not aware of too many whales that swim in circles when being pursued by a whaling vessel,” she replied drily.
Steig nodded. “Okay. So a surveillance ship was looking for something. Were its antennae and satellite dishes pointed up at the sky or down at the water?”
She and Grisham answered simultaneously. “Down.”
“We’re on the right track, then.” Aiden nodded. “We’re looking for something underwater. As soon as it gets light out, I’m going in. Maybe I can spot something the radar missed.”
Like what, she couldn’t imagine. But he was the big expert on the underwater world. Even though Aiden looked exhausted and would no doubt spend most of the next day swimming, he declined her offer to go to bed with him sometime in the wee hours of the night. A little warning bell tinkled in the back of her mind. Was he avoiding her?
She pshawed the notion. Nearly dying together was known for drawing people closer together, right? It had a name...the foxhole effect, or something like that.
She felt a little weird passing the armed guard as she stepped into Aiden’s room, but hey, it wasn’t any secret that the two of them were together at this point. She fell asleep before he joined her. But when she woke up in the morning, his pillow was smooth and undented, the blankets on his side of the bed still neatly tucked in. He hadn’t come to bed last night? Did that mean they’d found something?
She leaped out of bed and hurried through getting dressed. She hustled up to the bridge and burst into the crowded space. A half-dozen men were up here, watching the water with binoculars.
“What’s up?” she asked no one in particular.
“Aiden’s diving,” Steig answered absently.
“Of course he is. Why the big watching party?”
“We’ve got several unidentified ships on long-range radar.”
“Incoming?” she asked tersely.
“Yup.”
“You’ve got to get him out of the water! We’ve got to get away from here!” she cried.
Steig sent her a raised eyebrow. “If you know how to convince Aiden of that, by all means, give it a go.”
“How long has he been down there?” she asked.
“Eight minutes so far this time,” someone answered casually.
Grisham commented, “I’ve never seen him go twelve, and to have done it so many times already...he’s having a heck of a good day.”
“A good day?” she exclaimed. “Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to dive for that long? And I suppose he’s alone and you guys and your binoculars are his only safety net. What if he passes out while he’s underwater? Who’s going to know to go rescue him? There should be a diver out there with him, particularly given that there are hostiles headed this way.”
“Hostiles, huh? Listen to her, getting all military,” Steig said indulgently. “Before long, you’ll actually call the front of a boat a prow and the back a stern.”
“This isn’t a boat,” she snapped. “It’s a yacht.” Chuckles sounded all round. “And quit trying to distract me. Someone should be out there with him.”
Steig lifted his eyes away from his binoculars to stare at her. “I don’t have anyone who can keep up with him. He can dive deeper and swim faster than anyone I’ve got. And believe me, my men are as good as they come at underwater operations.”
“How deep is he going?” she asked, alarmed. When no one answered, she walked right up to Steig and asked him again, “How deep?”
Grisham answered reluctantly from behind him. “My radar painted him at a depth of nearly three hundred meters on his last dive.”
“What? That’s unsafe. It’s more than unsafe. It’s insane!”
“Sunny, Aiden is not a regular diver. He knows what he’s doing.”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s determined to be a hero. He’s out there taking ridiculous risks in the name of finding whatever the Russians want to hide. You’ve got to stop him. Bring him in.”
“I can’t.”
She stormed off the bridge rather than scream—or worse, burst into tears—in front of Steig and his men. She stomped down to the infirmary to find Gemma. The scientist might not be exactly a social Einstein, but at least she was a woman. She’d understand how infuriating men could be sometimes. All women had that in common.
The doctor was just finishing up checking one of the two men who’d been shot in the big firefight two nights ago when Sunny barged into the infirmary.
“Hey, Pete.” Sunny checked herself enough to ask pleasantly, “How’re you doing?”
“Right as rain,” he replied cheerfully.
“And Sykes?” Sunny asked Gemma.
“He’s stable. As long as his gut doesn’t infect, he should make a full recovery.”
Grimacing, she asked the doctor, “Have you got a minute?”
“Sure. What’s wrong?”
Nope, not a social Einstein. “In private?” she asked Gemma.
“Ahh. Of course.”
Sunny followed the woman into a tiny office and closed the door behind her. “Aiden’s going to drive me crazy, and I need you to help me talk some sense into him!” Sunny burst out.
Gemma laughed. “Good luck with that. I’ve been trying for two years to no avail.”
“But he’s going to get himself killed!” Sunny exclaimed.
“Indeed, he will.”
Wow. Not comforting. “What are we going to do?”
The doctor steepled her hands in front of her chin. “There’s not much I can do. He’s got it in his head that he has a sacred duty to use his enhanced abilities for the betterment of mankind, up to and including dying.”
“He can better mankind all he wants. I just want him to have a little care for his safety. Did you know he’s been diving three hundred meters down today and staying underwater for twelve minutes at a time?”
“Is he, now? That’s very interesting.” The doctor picked up a pen and scribbled on a pad of paper. It looked as if she was doing rapid mathematical calculations. “I wonder...” she muttered. “Supersaturating his body with bronchodilaters...twenty percent increase in maximum exposure. Another sixteen percent in tolerated pounds per square-inch pressure...very interesting, indeed...”
Sunny cleared her throat, and Gemma looked up, startled, as if she’d forgotten Sunny was there. The doctor nodded. “Thank you very much for this information. It’s fascinating.”
Sheesh. Problem focusing on the conversation much? “That’s not why I came, Doctor. I’m worried about him. You’ve got to make him stop taking crazy risks.”
“Oh, I think you’re the only one who can do that,” Gemma said vaguely.
“Excuse me? How’s that?”
“He loves you. I figure that’s about the only incentive strong enough to convince him to give up taking death-defying risks. Did you know that men’s car-insurance rates go down by as much as fifty percent when they get married? Actuaries claim it has nothing to do with the wife nagging the husband to drive safer, but studies have shown that’s the most likely statistical source of married men’s abrupt improvement in driving safety—”
Sunny stood up, interrupting the doctor’s tangent. “A) He’s never said or done anything to indicate that his feelings rise to that level, and B) I’m not at all sure it matters to him. He’s out there right now all but killing himself.”
“He’s fine. My research indicates he’ll ultimately be able to tolerate depths approaching five hundred meters and stay underwater for up to twenty minutes. It’s as much a psychological barrier as a physical one preventing him from already having done both—”
Sunny had heard enough. Gemma wasn’t going to be the slightest bit helpful. The woman was too caught up in the science of it all to see the human beings behind her research. If she wasn’t so frustrated at failing to gain an ally in her fight to stop Aiden from killing himself, Sunny might have been sorry for the woman.
She prowled the ship for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening before Aiden finally came aboard. She was waiting on the swim platform with Steig and several other men as he pulled himself wearily out of the water.
“What did you find?” Steig asked before she could open her mouth to rail at him.
“Interesting underwater rock formation,” Aiden replied. “As our navigation charts and Grisham’s radar scans showed, there is, indeed, an old volcano down there. Caldera’s at least a mile across. The rim comes within about seventy feet of the surface. It’s old. The various volcanic minerals are eroding at different rates. It’s a maze of caves and crevices down there.”
“Spot anything that would merit a Russian spy ship investigating?” Steig responded.
If she could’ve pushed through the line of big bodies between her and Aiden, she would have. And to go around them would bring her perilously close to the edge of the swim platform. After yesterday’s fun with yet more swimming for her life, she really wasn’t ever going into the water again. Next time, the Russians could just shoot her.
