She nestled against him and bent her knee over his thigh, drawing him within the cradle of her body. She rolled onto her back pulling him with her, driven to feel the weight and strength of him on top of her.
Bracing an arm on the ground, he looked down at her. His expression grave, he smoothed back the tendrils of hair that clung to her forehead. “I thought I had lost you,” he said.
His deep voice fell to raspy whisper that caught at her heart and brought a lump to her throat. They had already endured so much separation, so much heartache. Had she been snatched into the stone, they could have lost each other forever.
“Promise me you wilna go there again, Coira.”
Tears pricked her eyes. Even after what they had experienced, she could not imagine refraining from worshipping within the circle. “The stones are a part of me, Braden. I canna promise not to go there.” Her hand cupped his beard-roughened cheek as her gaze probed his.
His frown grew harsh, his mouth a thin hard line. “You could have died, Coira. Do you not know that? Can you not feel it in your heart?”
“I know ‘tis the truth you speak. But ‘tis my church, Braden. ‘Tis where I must go to cure the sick and ease their suffering. What power I have ties me to the stones, and them to me. You can ask me to forsake them for myself, but you canna ask me to forsake them for the others.”
He swore again and dropped his head on his forearm. His weight pushed down on her and his muscles trembled with tension. She felt the rage and frustration in the clenching of his stomach muscles, in the tight banded muscles of his thighs pressed against hers. For all the violent rage he exuded, she clung to him, sensing a shift in her world that frightened her. When he raised his head, lines of strain dug deep around his eyes and mouth. His green gaze held resignation and a hint of sadness.
“I would fight the very devil for you, Coira, but I canna fight this calling you have. ‘Twould change the lass you are if I did. But I fear for you, so much I canna breathe.”
Her stomach grew hollow with guilt and regret. A jolt of alarm left her heart racing. “What would you have me do, Braden?”
He shook his head. “There is nothing to be done. If I demand you stay away, ‘twill come between us, if I dinna do so, it may do so as well,” he said, his voice soft. “What would you have me do?”
She did not have an answer any more than he did. “Love me,” she said, her voice hoarse with emotion.
His features softened. “I do, lass.” He bent his head to brush her lips with his. “More than my life.”
Her world had already tilted out of control once this day and she felt it doing so again. She ran her hands down his back to cup his buttocks. Desperation made her voice shake. “Come inside me, Braden, so we may be as close as we can be.” Her hands trembled as she fumbled to unlace his braes and push up the long tail of his shirt. She ran her palms up the long length of his back.
His smile appeared only a little forced. “That I can do,” he said. He dragged the fabric of her surcoat and kirtle aside, bunching it between them until they lay stomach to stomach. His cock laid stiff and thick against the inside of her leg and she breathed a sigh of relief for the evidence of his desire.
His eyes appeared moss green, smoky with emotion. As he lowered his mouth to hers, she raked the fingers of one hand through the tangled mass of curly black hair that fell around his face. The same desperation that coursed through her was mirrored in the way he kissed her, caressed her. The way he thrust himself inside her before she was completely ready for him. The sting of it faded, and the familiar pleasure spiraled and built, driven by the thrashing intensity of their coupling. But fear laced their movements as Braden ground his hips against her and she pushed back in more than a bid for sexual release. A desire to share each other’s skins, to hold onto the oneness they had discovered together, pulsed between them.
Braden’s features took on a look of intense concentration as desire rode him hard, but the shadow of other emotions clouded his eyes. “Dinna let them come between us, Coira. Dinna let them destroy us.”
“Never,” she said on a gasp as he pushed into her harder and harder, bringing her to the edge of completion and shoving her over it. She held him tight as he pulsed inside her and his heartbeat pounded into her.
She prayed the vow she had just given him would not be tested.
CHAPTER 3
Quinn floated a few feet from the diver atop the stone. A small stream of air bubbles rose from her regulator then stopped. He shook his head. The body would lose the gases suspended in its lungs once he started his ascent with her. His stomach clenched. Don’t think about it. He hated body recovery and all the awful details that went with it. He had to hurry things along and start his decompression.
Quinn slanted the light down her body. No wires, ropes, or twine were visible. How had she tied herself to the stone? The dark neoprene material of her dry suit blended into the slime layer on the rock. Her tanks hung in position and nothing seemed caught around them. The light, looped about her wrist, still shone a weak beam upon the mud packed surface to one side of the stone. A shiver trailed up his spine.
He turned the underwater torch at an angle so the light wouldn’t reflect off the glass of her mask and grasped her arm to give the body a tug to pull it free. She turned her head to look at him. He jerked his hand back, a startled cry erupting from beneath his regulator. She couldn’t be alive. She blinked her eyes, as though coming awake from a nap, and shielded her vision as he shined the light directly into her facemask.
He grabbed her pressure gauge. How could she have any gas left? There was precious little. If she ran short of air, they could buddy breathe until they reached the deco station. He had to get her back to the vertical line so they could make their ascent.
He turned the face of the gauge in her direction and motioned with his light to get her attention focused, then pointed in the direction of the ship.
She signaled her understanding with a bare hand, bone white, her movements sluggish. Jerking her glove free from her weight belt, he shoved it at her. She put it on, and then signaled thumbs up.
How long had she been at seventy meters? Had she had a seizure? The possibility of brain damage ran through his mind. He wrote a question on his wrist slate and turned it in her direction.
She focused the weak beam of her dive light at her watch and went still. She signaled thirty minutes. Shite. She’d been unconscious for part of that time. She should be dead.
He grasped her arm and tugged her in the direction of the guideline. They stopped for a moment atop the drop-off at one hundred and twenty-five feet. He watched her for any signs of embolism or seizure. She pulled a grease pencil from the wristband slate on her arm and wrote a word then turned it for him to view.
Henry?
He pointed back the way he had come.
She nodded, pressing a hand to her chest in a signal of relief.
He stayed close by her side until they reached the vertical down line secured beneath Grannos’s stern. Following the rope up to the forty-six meter mark, they leveled off and grasped the structure of the PVC deco station he had lowered over the side before leaving the ship. Emergency tanks hung from the platform by rings in case just such a situation arose. He watched as she switched regulators to the emergency tank. He helped her remove the tanks and harness she wore and secure the other.
Raising the computer that hung against his chest, he calibrated his decompression times. He watched as she did the same. Her face looked grayish white behind her mask as she turned the face of her computer toward him so he could read it. Bugger. She’d be decompressing while the storm blew in. And it would be dark before she surfaced. Fuck.
She rubbed clear the wrist slate and wrote her decompression schedule on its surface. She turned it toward him. He nodded his understanding. She obviously knew what she was doing. What had happened?
His deco stop wound down. He had to leave her. If he did so, and she experienced any number of the p
roblems possible, he would not be there to help her. Anger lodged in the back of his throat. She had been bloody foolish to stay so long. More than bloody foolish. Sodding suicidal. He found the possibility of losing her, after finding her alive, unacceptable.
He was still vacillating about a course of action when she signaled him to go. His movement’s jerky with frustration, he checked the heavy, welded O ring to which she had hooked herself and exchanged his freshly charged torch for hers. She put her thumb and forefinger together making a signal for okay. He returned the signal. Worry nagged him as he swam upward.
*****
Tears burnt Regan’s eyes as the diver propelled himself up the down line. It had taken all her control not to give into the panic rippling through her. It stole her breath and made her heartbeat thrum in her throat. She had to stay calm. She’d managed this long. She could do it.
The diver hooked himself to the vertical line for his next decompression stop. His large, dark form twenty feet above her looked so close, yet so far away. He was angry with her, had every right to be. She was angry with herself. She wasn’t an amateur diver. She knew the dangers, understood how unforgiving a liquid environment could be. But the things that had happened, the experience she had just had, couldn’t be explained by nitrogen narcosis, or oxygen toxicity. She hadn’t imagined the electric surge that had shot through her body. She hadn’t dreamed everything she had seen or felt afterward. That she hadn’t drowned while in such a state was a miracle. Had he not come for her, she would have.
A tremor shook her. Had it been narcosis, or something more? Fear clawed at her heart and made it difficult to breath. She’d been fine before—just jet lagged. The chances it had been something more deep-seated, more emotional than physical, were slim. I’m nothing like Evelyn. Nothing. Besides, her troubles had been caused by drugs. She’d fried her brain with drugs.
Thoughts of what she had nearly put her parents through tormented her. Her father would have worried how he had failed to impress on her the diving rules. Her mother would have been devastated. She hadn’t wanted her to come to Scotland. Had argued it was too far away.
She’d abused their trust in her. They deserved better than what she’d just given them. She’d allowed her need for success to temper her decisions and placed herself, and Henry, in jeopardy. She hoped Henry’s would be the first face she saw, so she could thank him for sending help. Her stomach cramped with anxiety. Was he really okay?
Regan checked her watch and looked up to see the diver had moved on to his next decompression stop. Unhooking herself from the line, she swam up to the twenty-five meter mark. The minutes passed slowly allowing her too much time for self-recrimination and evaluation.
At the twelve-meter mark, the light above died and a strong current threatened to pull her from the deco station. She tethered herself to it to maintain her depth, but it was like playing snap the whip with a boa constrictor. Keeping her breathing even was next to impossible. To fight the forces at work above and below her, she wrapped one arm and leg around the line like an acrobat and held on.
She swam up to the six -meter mark, and was relieved to find the water growing progressively calmer. Her mouth tasted dry as dust from breathing the compressed gas. Visions of water poured over a tumbler of ice cubes tormented her. When next her roommates offered her a beer she’d take it, and thank them.
Exhaustion cramped her muscles, and she turned on the dive light intermittently, just to banish the dark now and then. She had never done a night dive, and after this experience, she never would again.
The ship’s running lights switched on as Regan surfaced to find the sky streaked with lightning and rain falling in diagonal sheets. Her movements clumsy with fatigue, she swam to the diver’s platform at the stern and shoved the light as far back on it as she could. A man’s head and shoulders covered by a hooded yellow rain slicker appeared over the railing. He removed a section of the aft bulkhead and stepped out on the platform. Regan scrambled to get her flipper-encased feet on the steps as he grabbed her tank harness. By sheer brute strength, he lifted her onto the scaffolding. Panting, she lay still, waiting for the buoyant feeling of submersion to recede. She released the small pony tank clipped to her harness she hadn’t used, and handed it to him.
Lightning cut a jagged path across the sky that left an after image on the back of her eyelids when she blinked. She jerked as a boom of thunder came almost on top of the flash.
“If you don’t move your arse t’will be fried American I’ll be scraping off m’platform.” Impatience gave his deep voice a huskiness that at any other time she might have found attractive. His Scottish brogue was as thick as shortbread.
Aware of the danger, she focused on trying to remove her flippers and get her feet under her. She rolled onto her hands and knees, the metal platform, rough and cold. Grabbing the chrome railing, she heaved herself up. In her weakened state, the tank on her back felt like a boulder.
The man grabbed her arm, saving her from toppling backward into the water. Her legs shook like jelly as she stepped onto the deck. Had she not been so dehydrated she might have wept with relief.
“Water.” The one word came out a weak croak. She shoved her mask upward and jerked it from beneath her waterproof hood.
A second man appeared at her side. “Did you not fancy slacking your thirst in the loch while you were swimming about in it then?” He grasped her other arm. Lifting her off her feet, the two escorted her beneath the awning mid ship. The men’s slickers dripped water. Their pant legs clung to them, dark and wet. They had obviously been standing out in the deluge waiting for her to surface. She owed them. More than she’d ever be able to repay.
“Henry?”
“He’s asleep below. He was a wee bit distressed about the situation and found comfort in a bottle or two of McEwan.”
“’Twas more like a keg,” the larger of the two said, his tone wry.
They lowered her to a bench to one side of the hatch. Regan pulled free her gloves and hood and dropped them to the seat beside her.
“I’ll get you a bottle of water,” the shorter man said and disappeared through the hatch.
For the first time, Regan looked up at her rescuer. As he brushed back his hood, she looked into his face. Time stopped. Wet, tousled, black hair clung to his head and neck. His beard shadowed a jaw that warned of both strength and stubbornness. If he smiled creases would cut deep grooves in each cheek. Thick dark brows clapped together in a frown above his eyes. In the yellowish light, though she couldn’t make out their color, she felt certain they would be a devilish, Kelly green. He more than looked like the man she—Coira had made love with in her vision. He embodied him.
He started, his eyes widening, and his lips parted. He took a step toward her, then jerked to a stop. A fierce frown dug furrows between his brows. “Who—” He hesitated and seemed to think about what it was he wanted to say. “Are you—having any pain in your joints, lass?” he asked.
Her tongue numbed with shocked, Regan shook her head. Had she truly lapsed into some kind of nitrogen-induced coma? Her fingers trembled as she unhooked the tank harness and released her weight belt. He offered a muscular forearm for her to grasp. She grabbed it and heaved herself to her feet, then stepped out of the web of straps securing the tank around her legs. He pulled the rig free with the ease that spoke of practice and secured it to the side of the ship with other similar tanks.
“Here you go, lass.” The slighter man returned with a bottle of water and holding it by the neck, offered it to her.
Regan grabbed it, and murmuring her thanks, sank back on the seat. Twisting the cap off, she drank deeply from the container then set it aside. She ran her fingers through her hair making the short, thick curls to tumble about her face. She leaned forward to cover her eyes with her hands. What had happened to her? Fresh fear banded her throat and she swallowed with difficulty.
The wind shifted spraying rain across the deck. Lighting flashed so close Regan duck
ed and, as the crash of thunder followed on its tail, covered her ears. Quinn grasped her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“I dinna wish to be toasted by a bolt while we sit out here.”
Shoving the bottle into her hand, he guided her below and through the first door to the right. Long metal tables fastened to the floor ran in straight parallel lines on either side of a center aisle, their benches attached. A cafeteria-style service area sealed off the kitchen. At the far end of the room, a sofa and several well stuffed chairs arranged in a group sat against the bulkhead. A wooden shelf with screened doors held books and magazines. Mounted on the wall in one corner, a television flickered, tuned to a news channel, the sound muted. A dartboard hung beneath it, the darts sticking out of the cork like miniature missiles. Soft drinks, lined up with military precision, stood behind the glass door of a small refrigerator unit. An industrial size coffee pot sat on a table next to it. Cups hung from hooks under a shelf with a lip that held cups, bowls, and Styrofoam trays. Everything looked neat and hospital sterile.
Setting aside the bottle, Regan sank onto one of the benches, unzipped her dry suit, and struggled free of the sleeves. She rolled it down around her waist and pulled at the neck of the white, thermal underwear shirt she had on underneath.
The two men shed their slickers and hung them on hooks next to the door. The larger of the two strode over to once again stand close. His gaze ran over her in a way that brought a heated flush to her checks and sparked her resentment.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Quinn Douglas, SAT diver and salvage expert.” He thrust a thumb toward the other man. “This is Rob, m’ brother.”
“Thank you for coming for me.”
“It wouldn’t have been necessary had you surfaced when you became lost from your dive partner.” The brusque impatience of his tone, laced with anger, thickened his brogue.
“I couldn’t find Henry. I looked for him for five minutes, then thought perhaps he might go to the stones and wait for me there. I didn’t want to surface without him.”
Timeless Page 3
