Breathless Encounter: Breathless EncounterThe Dark Side of Night

by Cindy Dees

  Aiden was speaking again. “...have only explored a tiny bit of the volcano’s face. Is there any way we could have Winston Ops check to see if anything of interest to the Russians might have gone down in these waters recently? Then I might have some idea of what I’m looking for. It’s a hell of a big haystack to search for a needle when you don’t even know what the needle looks like.”

  The line of bodies parted, and without warning, she was face-to-face with Aiden. “Hi,” she murmured.

  “Hello.”

  She frowned. Wow. That sounded...formal.

  “Everything okay?” she asked tentatively.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “What’s up? Why the dinner-at-the-White-House formality?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Oooh-kay. Stonewalling her, was he? What on earth was going on? “Aiden, stop acting like this and tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Later,” he bit out.

  Her temper flared. “No. Not later. Here and now.”

  He looked uncomfortable, but ultimately faced her squarely. “All right, then. Here’s the thing. I changed my ways when I agreed to take Gemma’s shots. And now, my work has to come first. I care about you too much to risk your safety while I do it.”

  “How is my safety at risk because you do stupid things like dive three hundred meters deep and stay down too long?”

  “Because I have enemies. And I’ll make more of them. They may not be able to get to me, but they can get to you.”

  Panic erupted in her breast. He was breaking up with her! She said frantically, “They haven’t gotten to me so far.”

  “Next time we might not be so lucky. I’m sorry. I won’t take that risk.”

  And with that, he brushed past her and jogged up the steps to the companionway. His shoulders retreated down the hall while she stared. Shock and dismay combined in a toxic sludge in her stomach to make her ill.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, he’d just dumped her. And furthermore, he’d done it in front of a good chunk of the crew. Hot tears welled up in her eyes, stinging worse than salt water, and spilled over onto her cheeks. She would dissolve into a full-blown, snotty sob fest any second. Humiliation joined the roiling mess in her stomach. She ought to make a run for her room. Except her feet were rooted to the deck, her knees locked, her entire body, all the way to her soul, frozen in place.

  Steig spoke quietly from beside her. “He’s got to be exhausted. And he’s not the kind of man to show weakness in front of anyone, especially the woman he loves.”

  That had been a moment of weakness? That had been a moment of no-holds-barred cruelty and no-question-about-it kicking her to the curb. Why was it everyone else on the ship was so convinced he was in love with her? Hadn’t they just seen him slice her to ribbons without so much as batting an eyelash?

  As hurt as she was, she couldn’t just retreat to lick her wounds. She had to know why he’d really done it. This whole business of needing to keep her safe was just a smoke screen. But was it meant to blind her...or to blind him? It was probably an act of sheer self-

  mutilation to push him to give her the real reason he didn’t want to be with her, but she was too panicked, too staggered, to do anything else.

  If he was trying to avoid her, she’d just have to put herself in his path until he had no choice but to explain himself. Thankfully, the Sea Nymph was a finite space in which to hide. He couldn’t avoid her forever. She headed for his stateroom and hunkered down to wait. She had to break through his walls. This had to work. Her entire life rode on it.

  She waited. And waited. But he never came. She was almost desperate enough to go searching for him, except it was just a tiny bit more humiliating than her bruised pride could stand to admit to the crew that he didn’t want to even speak to her. He might die for her, but he clearly didn’t want her for a girlfriend...or anything more.

  Oh, God. More. She’d been so certain they were going to have it all. But obviously, she’d misread his signals. Maybe she’d pushed too hard, too fast. Or maybe she’d been the only one sensing some kind of special connection between them. Maybe she’d been a casual roll in the hay for him, after all. Maybe in her loneliness and need for someone to love her, for an anchor in her life, she’d glommed on to him and freaked him out. Or maybe she just wasn’t good enough for him.

  She thought she’d lost just about everything when her boat had been sunk with her worldly goods on it. And when the United States had blown up her camera and film and last personal possessions in Africa, she’d been sure there was nothing left to lose. But oh, how wrong she’d been. She hadn’t yet lost her heart. Or her pride. Or her soul. Heck, she didn’t even have any tears left to shed.

  Now she truly had nothing left.

  Chapter 13

  “What the hell are you doing, Aiden?” Steig demanded low and angry. “That girl is head-over-heels in love with you.”

  He glared at the Swede and snapped, “Stay out of it. It’s complicated.”

  “No. It’s not. You love her. She loves you. Go be with her. Tell her you’re crazy about her and want to spend your life with her.”

  “But that’s just the thing!” he burst out. “I can’t! She’s a weakness. I can’t afford to have her in my life. She’s a chink in my armor that can be exploited.”

  “That’s rubbish. What’s the real reason you won’t let yourself have her? Do you feel so much guilt for how you’ve treated women in the past that you won’t let yourself have her now?”

  Aiden answered flatly, “Stay out of it.”

  The captain shook his head and stalked out of the salon, where Aiden had been trying to get some damned sleep on the damned couch before the Swede had tracked him down and barged in to give him some damned dating advice.

  He tossed and turned on the sofa until he was so irritated he finally gave up and got up. His watch said it was nearly 4:00 a.m. His entire being yearned to head down to his stateroom. To slip under the covers and draw Sunny into his arms. To make love to her until there wasn’t any question in her mind about how he felt about her. Stubbornly, he turned his steps to the bridge. Maybe Winston Ops or the NSA had something for them.

  The bridge was surprisingly active for this time of night. Grisham was poring over what looked like the images Sunny had filmed. Steig was hunched in front of a computer terminal typing busily, and everyone jumped when he walked into the room.

  “What’s the news?” he asked tersely.

  “NSA confirms that Sunny filmed a Russian spy ship. And they were definitely using downward-

  scanning sonar to search for something,” Steig reported.

  Grisham added, “They also said the equipment the Russians were using was so powerful it would kill the fish in the area. They wanted to find whatever they were looking for real bad.”

  “Any idea what it was?” he asked. “Did they find it?”

  Steig looked up grimly. “Yes to the first, and Uncle Sam would like us to figure out if they found it or not.”

  Adrenaline surged through him, and interestingly, his body reacted as if he were deep underwater. His heart rate slowed, and his fingers and toes went cold and numb as the veins and arteries in his extremities constricted to hold blood in his vital organs. He really was turning into a fish.

  Steig was talking. “...days before Sunny filmed that spy ship, a U.S. surveillance satellite came down in this neighborhood of the ocean.”

  He frowned. “Don’t satellites break up into tiny pieces and mostly burn up on reentry?”

  “They do if they’re not hardened against laser and EMP attacks from the ground or from other satellites,” Steig replied grimly.

  “And I gather this one was hardened? How big a piece of the satellite are we talking, here?”

  “NASA thinks it came down almost entirely
intact. They’ve had submarines out here looking for it, but they didn’t find it. If the Russians found it, the United States has a problem. The satellite had the latest in our surveillance technology on it.”

  Aiden frowned. “If the Russians were looking down from the ocean’s surface, they wouldn’t be able to paint caves and anomalies on the volcano face. A submarine could look into the big caves with its sonar, but it wouldn’t be able to see into the smaller ones. How big was the satellite?”

  “Twelve feet in diameter. About fourteen feet long. The antennae will have ripped off during reentry, of course. But the cameras and the power source are what the U.S. is worried about.”

  “How’d it come down?” Aiden asked.

  “The guys at NSA got real quiet when I asked the same thing. I got the impression it wasn’t a planned obsolescence.”

  “It was attacked?” Aiden exclaimed. “That might explain why the Russians are so hot and bothered to find it. If there’s evidence they shot it down, they may want to hide that.”

  “That’s above my pay grade to know,” Steig answered. “We’re just tasked with finding it if we can.”

  “Any progress on identifying the ships in the area?” Aiden asked.

  “I’ve still got three unidentified targets moving in this direction. The good news is the U.S. Navy has a high-speed vessel scheduled to pass through the neighborhood today. They’ve agreed to divert it this way to check in on us and provide any assistance we might need.”

  That was good news. A little backup from a heavily armed military ship was never a bad thing. Aiden

  nodded. “All right, then. As soon as it gets light, I go back down and find us a satellite.”

  * * *

  Sunny groaned when she caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror in the morning. Her eyes were red and swollen, her skin blotchy. She looked like hell. She felt worse. He’d never shown up last night. Someone must have warned him that she’d headed for his room, and he’d slept elsewhere rather than face her. She’d never taken him for a coward before.

  A determination to tell him that, and that she was disappointed in him as a man, filled her. Great. She’d moved on to the second stage of grieving her dead hopes and dreams. First denial, then anger. What came next? Oh, yeah. Bargaining. Gee, that ought to be fun.

  She could so picture herself begging him to take her back. It would be so easy to promise to be whoever or whatever he wanted if he’d just stop giving her the cold shoulder and love her. She silently vowed not to do it, but as surely as she made the promise to herself, she was going to break it. Love officially sucked.

  She stepped onto the bridge where, if Aiden wasn’t actually there, they would most certainly know where he was. She wasn’t above guilting the crew into helping her corner him. And given the sympathetic looks everyone had been giving her last night when he dumped her, she thought they might be willing to help.

  Steig got up out of his chair when he spotted her. He strode over and actually gave her a hug. It was big and warm and comforting, but he wasn’t Aiden. “How are you doing this morning, Sunny?”

  “I’ve been better. Where is he?”

  “Where else? Diving.”

  She swore mentally. He was already off the ship? So she had another long day of waiting in store for her, then. “Is there anything I can do to be of help to you guys?” she asked Steig. “I’m going stir-crazy just sitting around.”

  “I can imagine” was the Swede’s dry response. Gifted in the art of understatement, that man was. “How are you at reading sonar images?”

  “Not half-bad, actually. I used sonar to find fish when I was filming.”

  In short order, the crew had her set up at one of the computer monitors, scanning gray blobs on a black screen. Some sort of automatic search pattern had been set up for the ship’s sonar emitters, so all she had to do was watch the slowly scrolling images go past. It was boring work, but it kept her mind off topics she’d rather not dwell on for the next eight or ten hours.

  Every now and then some large creature would move across her screen. It was probably just a good-size fish, but her heart always bumped hard with the possibility that it was Aiden.

  She’d been sitting at her screen for maybe two hours when one of the sailors working the surface radar barked, “Sir, we’ve got flash traffic from Winston Ops.”

  Steig moved over to the computer monitor the guy was sitting at, and she couldn’t see a thing past him. But the mood on the bridge went tense and alert. The Swede straightened and announced grimly, “Satellite imagery indicates that a Russian spy ship is inbound to our location at a high rate of speed. Estimated time of arrival eighteen minutes.”

  “Why aren’t we painting the vessel on radar?” someone asked.

  “Stealth technology, obviously,” Steig replied absently.

  Sunny asked urgently, “Do you have any means of signaling Aiden?”

  “No,” Steig answered. “And even if we did, if he’s on a deep dive, he won’t have time to surface and get aboard before we have to leave.”

  “Leave?” she exclaimed. “We can’t leave him behind?”

  “What would you have me do? Stay here to get us rammed or torpedoed and sunk? There are nearly forty people aboard this vessel, and I’m responsible for all of their lives.”

  “You’re responsible for Aiden’s life, too!”

  “And his best chance of survival is for us to leave the area, wait for the Russians to have a look around and leave, and then for us to circle back later to pick him up.”

  “He has limits,” she declared. “He can’t swim forever, and he’s been swimming a lot the past few days.” She thought fast. “Can we ping him with the sonar? Send an audio tone through the water to get his attention?”

  “Yes. But I need to leave in about five minutes. If he’s not directly underneath us and already on his way to the surface, it won’t do any good.”

  “Please, Steig. Do it. Give him at least a chance to get here.”

  “Three pings, please, Conn. A pause, and three more, and a second pause, and three more pings,” Steig ordered. He glanced over at her and shrugged. “Maybe he’ll figure out it’s a modified SOS and get here in time.”

  She grabbed binoculars and ran out to the catwalk to search for Aiden. The water was choppy, and it would make spotting a human head breaking the surface nearly impossible, but she had to try.

  All her anger at him evaporated in the face of a life-threatening crisis. Funny how when the chips were down, the truly important things in life emerged. She loved him. He might not love her back, but that didn’t matter right now. She’d do whatever it took to keep him safe, the same way he’d gone on a mad rescue mission to save her.

  And maybe that was the answer she’d been looking for out of him. Maybe at the end of the day, he loved her, too. But when they were safe, all the little stuff crowded in to cause him doubts. She would dearly love to latch onto the idea that he really did love her. But at the moment, finding him took precedence.

  The Nymph’s motorized sea anchor commenced retracting into the ship. C’mon, Aiden. Surface already. Where are you? She willed him to hear her. To appear next to the swim platform and pop up onto the teak deck like he always did.

  The first diesel engine revved up. No, no, no! Aiden wasn’t back yet! Any second now, the propellers would bite into the water, and they would leave him behind.

  She burst onto the bridge. “Steig, you can’t do this! You can’t just leave him!”

  “I have no choice,” he ground out. “If you want to jump overboard and go find him, be my guest.”

  That actually wasn’t a horrible idea. Except for the whole jumping-into-the-water part. “How long until we leave?” she demanded.

  “Three minutes.”

  She tore off the bridge and raced
downstairs. She screeched to a halt just inside the companionway leading to the swim deck. Where are you, Aiden? She looked around frantically for someone to help her. But she was alone. She tore open the nearest locker in search of something to help her.

  Neatly stowed scuba tanks, mask, fins and a wet suit were packed into the space. Steig’s words echoed in her ears. If you want to jump overboard and go find him...

  She couldn’t. She was terrified of the water. Although when push had come to shove, she’d been able to swim away from her would-be Russian killers a few nights ago. How was this so very different? This time the Russians were threatening Aiden and not her. It was her turn to come to his rescue, right?

  Under her feet, the second diesel engine spun up. She was running out of time. Aiden was running out of time.

  In quick decision, she grabbed the twin scuba tanks and checked the gauges quickly. They were high-

  pressure steel tanks, each filled with one-hundred-fifty cubic feet of air. In shallow water, she had air for nearly six hours. But if she had to go deep to find Aiden, she might have only an hour’s worth of air. A small pony tank was clipped to one of the bottles. It would provide enough oxygen for an emergency ascent.

  She didn’t have time for the wet suit, and the water here was warm, anyway, so she yanked the fins onto her feet, buckled on the weight belt and threw the mask around her neck. She hoisted the heavy tanks, strapping them on like a backpack.

  She felt, more than heard, the propellers start to turn beneath her feet. The metal blades bit into the water and the back end of the Nymph dipped ever so slightly. This was it. Now or never.

  She clumped backward across the deck awkwardly, staggering under nearly ninety pounds of equipment. Clearly this rig was meant for a man. A big, strong one. This was insane. She couldn’t think about it. Didn’t dare. She just jammed in the mouthpiece and flung herself backward off the ship.