by Nora Roberts
Only once did she even come close to breaking away from him. Ky simply banded his arm around her again, more tightly, until she had a choice between submitting or cutting off her own air.
When they broke the surface, Kate drew in breath to shout, but even in this, she was out-maneuvered.
“Idiot!” he shouted at her, dragging her to the ladder. “One day off your back and you jump into forty feet of water by yourself. I don’t know why in hell I ever thought you had any brains.”
Breathless, she heaved her tanks over the side. When she was on solid ground again, she intended to have her say. For now, she’d let him have his.
“I take my eyes off you for a couple hours and you go off half-cocked. If I’d murdered Marsh, it would have been on your head.”
To her further fury, Kate saw that she’d boarded the Vortex. Marsh’s boat was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s the Gull?” she demanded.
“Marsh had the sense to tell me what you were doing.” The words came out like bullets as he stripped his gear. “I didn’t kill him because I needed him to come out with me and take the Gull back.” He stood in front of her, dripping, and as furious as she’d ever seen him. “Don’t you have any more sense than to dive out here alone?”
She tossed her head back. “Don’t you?”
Infuriated, he grabbed her and started to peel the wet suit from her himself. “We’re not talking about me, damn it. I’ve been diving since I was six. I know the currents.”
“I know the currents.”
“And I haven’t been flat on my back for a week.”
“I was flat on my back for a week because you were overreacting.” She struggled away from him, and because the wet suit was already down to her waist, peeled it off. “You’ve no right to tell me when and where I can dive, Ky. Superior strength gives you no right to drag me up when I’m in the middle of salvaging.”
“The hell with what I have a right to do.” Grabbing her again, he shook her with more violence than he’d ever shown her. A dozen things might have happened to her in the thirty minutes she’d been down. A dozen things he knew too well. “I make my own rights. You’re not going down alone if I have to chain you up to stop it.”
“You told me to get another diver,” she said between her teeth. “Until I do, I dive alone.”
“You threw that damn business arrangement in my face. Percentages. Lousy percentages and a daily rate. Do you know how that made me feel?”
“No!” she shouted, pushing him away. “No, I don’t know how that made you feel. I don’t know how anything makes you feel. You don’t tell me.” Dragging both hands through her dripping hair she walked away. “We agreed to the terms. That’s all I know.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?” she demanded. Tears brimmed for no reason she could name, but she blinked them back again. “Before I slept with you?”
“Damn it, Kate.” He was across the deck, backing her into the rail before she could take a breath. “Are you trying to get at me for something I did or didn’t do four years ago? I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know what you want from me or what you don’t want and I’m sick of trying to outguess you.”
“I don’t want to be pushed into a corner,” she told him fiercely. “That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to be expected to fall in passively with someone else’s plans for me. That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want it assumed that I simply don’t have any personal goals or wishes of my own. Or any basic competence of my own. That’s what I don’t want!”
“Fine.” They were both losing control, but he no longer gave a damn. Ky ripped off his wet suit and tossed it aside. “You just remember something, lady. I don’t expect of you and I don’t assume. Once maybe, but not anymore. There was only one person who ever pushed you into a corner and it wasn’t me.” He hurled his mask across the deck where it bounced and smacked into the side. “I’m the one who let you go.”
She stiffened. Even with the distance between them he could see her eyes frost over. “I won’t discuss my father with you.”
“You caught on real quick though, didn’t you?”
“You resented him. You—”
“I?” Ky interrupted. “Maybe you better look at yourself, Kate.”
“I loved him,” she said passionately. “All my life I tried to show him. You don’t understand.”
“How do you know that I don’t understand?” he exploded. “Don’t you know I can see what you’re feeling every time we find something down there? Do you think I’m so blind I don’t see that you’re hurting because you found it, not him? Don’t you think it tears me apart to see that you punish yourself for not being what you think he wanted you to be? And I’m tired,” he continued as her breath started to hitch. “Damn tired of being compared to and measured by a man you loved without ever being close to him.”
“I don’t.” She covered her face, hating the weakness but powerless against it. “I don’t do that. I only want…”
“What?” he demanded. “What do you want?”
“I didn’t cry when he died,” she said into her hands.
“I didn’t cry, not even at the funeral. I owed him tears, Ky. I owed him something.”
“You don’t owe him anything you didn’t already give him over and over again.” Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair before he went to her. “Kate.” Because words seemed useless, he simply gathered her close.
“I didn’t cry.”
“Cry now,” he murmured. He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Cry now.”
So she did, desperately, for what she’d never been able to quite touch, for what she’d never been able to quite hold. She’d ached for love, for the simple companionship of understanding. She wept because it was too late for that now from her father. She wept because she wasn’t certain she could ask for love again from anyone else.
Ky held her, lowering her onto the bench as he cradled her in his lap. He couldn’t offer her words of comfort. They were the most difficult words for him to come by. He could only offer her a place to weep, and silence.
As the tears began to pass, she kept her face against his shoulder. There was such simplicity there, though it came from a man of complications. Such gentleness, though it sprang from a restless nature. “I couldn’t mourn for him before,” she murmured. “I’m not sure why.”
“You don’t have to cry to mourn.”
“Maybe not,” she said wearily. “I don’t know. But it’s true, what you said. I’ve wanted to do all this for him because he’ll never have the chance to finish what he started. I don’t know if you can understand, but I feel if I do this I’ll have done everything I could. For him, and for myself.”
“Kate.” Ky tipped back her head so he could see her face. Her eyes were puffy, rimmed with red. “I don’t have to understand. I just have to love you.”
He felt her stiffen in his arms and immediately cursed himself. Why was it he never said things to her the way they should be said? Sweetly, calmly, softly. She was a woman who needed soft words, and he was a man who always struggled with them.
She didn’t move, and for a long, long moment, they stayed precisely as they were.
“Do you?” she managed after a moment.
“Do I what?”
Would he make her drag it from him? “Love me?”
“Kate.” Frustrated, he drew away from her. “I don’t know how else to show you. You want bouquets of flowers, bottles of French champagne, poems? Damn it, I’m not made that way.”
“I want a straight answer.”
He let out a short breath. Sometimes her very calmness drove him to distraction. “I’ve always loved you. I’ve never stopped.”
That went through her, sharp, hot, with a mixture of pain and pleasure she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. Slowly, she rose out of his arms, and walking across the deck, looked out to sea. The buoys that marked the site bobbed gently. Why were the
re no buoys in life to show you the way?
“You never told me.”
“Look, I can’t even count the number of women I’ve said it to.” When she turned back with her brow raised, he rose, uncomfortable. “It was easy to say it to them because it didn’t mean anything. It’s a hell of a lot harder to get the words out when you mean them, and when you’re afraid someone’s going to back away from you the minute you do.”
“I wouldn’t have done that.”
“You backed away, you went away for four years, when I asked you to stay.”
“You asked me to stay,” she reminded him. “You asked me not to go back to Connecticut, but to move in with you. Just like that. No promises, no commitment, no sign that you had any intention of building a life with me. I had responsibilities.”
“To do what your father wanted you to do.”
She swallowed that. It was true in its way. “All right, yes. But you never said you loved me.”
He came closer. “I’m telling you now.”
She nodded, but her heart was in her throat. “And I’m not backing away. I’m just not sure I can take the next step. I’m not sure you can either.”
“You want a promise.”
She shook her head, not certain what she’d do if indeed he gave her one. “I want time, for both of us. It seems we both have a lot of thinking to do.”
“Kate.” Impatient, he came to her, taking her hands. They trembled. “Some things you don’t have to think about. Some things you can think about too much.”
“You’ve lived your life a certain way a long time, and I mine,” she said quickly. “Ky, I’ve just begun to change—to feel the change. I don’t want to make a mistake, not with you. It’s too important. With time—”
“We’ve lost four years,” he interrupted. He needed to resolve something, he discovered, and quickly. “I can’t wait any longer to hear it if it’s inside you.”
Kate let out the breath she’d been holding. If he could ask, she could give. It would be enough. “I love you, Ky. I never stopped either. I never told you when I should have.”
He felt the weight drain from his body as he cupped her face. “You’re telling me now.”
It was enough.
CHAPTER 11
Love. Kate had read hundreds of poems about that one phenomenon. She’d read, analyzed and taught from countless novels where love was the catalyst to all action, all emotion. With her students, she’d dissected innumerable lines from books, plays and verse that all led back to that one word.
Now, for perhaps the first time in her life, it was offered to her. She found it had more power than could possibly be taught. She found she didn’t understand it.
Ky hadn’t Byron’s way with words, or Keat’s romantic phrasing. What he’d said, he’d said simply. It meant everything. She still didn’t understand it.
She could, in her own way, understand her feelings. She’d loved Ky for years, since that first revelation one summer when she’d come to know what it meant to want to fully share oneself with another.
But what, she wondered, did Ky find in her to love? It wasn’t modesty that caused her to ask herself this question, but the basic practicality she’d grown up with. Where there was an effect, there was a cause. Where there was reaction, there was action. The world ran on this principle. She’d won Ky’s love—but how?
Kate had no insecurity about her own intelligence. Perhaps, if anything, she overrated her mind, and it was this that caused her to underrate her other attributes.
He was a man of action, of restless and mercurial nature. She, on the other hand, considered herself almost blandly level. While she thrived on routine, Ky thrived on the unexpected. Why should he love her? Yet he did.
If she accepted that, it was vital to come to a resolution. Love led to commitment. It was there that she found the wall solid, without footholds.
He lived on a remote island because he was basically a loner, because he preferred moving at his own pace, in his own time. She was a teacher who lived by a day-to-day schedule. Without the satisfaction of giving knowledge, she’d stagnate. In the structured routine of a college town, Ky would go mad.
Because she could find no compromise, Kate opted to do what she’d decided to do in the beginning. She’d ride with the current until the summer was over. Perhaps by then, an answer would come.
They spoke no more of percentages. Kate quietly dropped the notion of keeping her hotel room. These, she told herself, were small matters when so much more hung in the balance during her second summer with Ky.
The days went quickly with her and Ky working together with the prop-wash or by hand. Slowly, painstakingly, they uncovered more salvage. The candlesticks had turned out to be pewter, but the coin had been Spanish silver. Its date had been 1748.
In the next two-week period, they uncovered much more—a heavy intricately carved silver platter, more china and porcelain, and in another area dozens of nails and tools.
Kate documented each find on film, for practical and personal reasons. She needed the neat, orderly way of keeping track of the salvage. She wanted to be able to look back on those pictures and remember how she felt when Ky held up a crusted teacup or an oxidized tankard. She’d be able to look and remember how he’d played an outstaring game with a large lazy bluefish. And lost.
More than once Ky had suggested the use of a larger ship equipped for salvage. They discussed it, and its advantages, but they never acted on it. Somehow, they both felt they wanted to move slowly, working basically with their own hands until there came a time when they had to make a decision.
The cannons and the heavier pieces of ship’s planking couldn’t be brought up without help, so these they left to the sea for the time being. They continued to use tanks, rather than changing to a surface-supplied source of air, so they had to surface and change gear every hour or so. A diving rig would have saved time—but that wasn’t their goal.
Their methods weren’t efficient by professional salvor standards, but they had an unspoken agreement. Stretch time. Make it last.
The nights they spent together in the big four-poster, talking of the day’s finds, or of tomorrow’s, making love, marking time. They didn’t speak of the future that loomed after the summer’s end. They never talked of what they’d do the day after the treasure was found.
The treasure became their focus, something that kept them from reaching out when the other wasn’t ready.
* * *
The day was fiercely hot as they prepared to dive. The sun was baking. It was mid-July. She’d been in Ocracoke for a month. For all her practicality, Kate told herself it was an omen. Today was the turning point of summer.
Even as she pulled the wet suit up to her waist, sweat beaded on her back. She could almost taste the cool freshness of the water. The sun glared on her tanks as she lifted them, bouncing off to spear her eyes.
“Here.” Taking them from her, Ky strapped them onto her back, checking the gauges himself. “The water’s going to feel like heaven.”
“Yeah.” Marsh tipped up a quart bottle of juice. “Think of me baking up here while you’re having all the fun.”
“Keep the throttle low, brother,” Ky said with a grin as he climbed over the side. “We’ll bring you a reward.”
“Make it something round and shiny with a date stamped on it,” Marsh called back, then winked at Kate as she started down the ladder. “Good luck.”
She felt the excitement as the water lapped over her ankles. “Today, I don’t think I need it.”
The noise of the prop-wash disturbed the silence of the water, but not the mystery. Even with technology and equipment, the water remained an enigma, part beauty, part danger. They went deeper and deeper until they reached the site with the scoops in the silt caused by their earlier explorations.
They’d already found what they thought had been the officer’s and passenger’s quarters, identifying it by the discovery of a snuff box, a silver bedside candle
holder and Ky’s personal favorite—a decorated sword. The few pieces of jewelry they’d found indicated a personal cache rather than cargo.
Though they fully intended to excavate in the area of the cache, it was the cargo they sought. Using the passenger’s quarters and the galley as points of reference, they concentrated on what should have been the stern of the ship.
There were ballast rocks to deal with. This entailed a slow, menial process that required moving them by hand to an area they’d already excavated. It was time consuming, unrewarding and necessary. Still, Kate found something peaceful in the mindless work, and something fascinating about the ability to do it under fathoms of water with basically little effort. She could move a ballast pile as easily as Ky, whereas on land, she would have tired quickly.
Reaching down to clear another area, Ky’s fingers brushed something small and hard. Curious, he fanned aside a thin layer of silt and picked up what at first looked like a tab on a can of beer. As he brought it closer, he saw it was much more refined, and though there were layers of crust on the knob of the circle, he felt his heart give a quick jerk.
He’d heard of diamonds in the rough, but he’d never thought to find one by simply reaching for it. He was no expert, but as he painstakingly cleaned what he could from the stone, he judged it to be at least two carats. With a tap on Kate’s shoulder, he got her attention.
It gave him a great deal of pleasure to see her eyes widen and to hear the muffled sound of her surprise. Together, they turned it over and over again. It was dull and dirty, but the gem was there.
They were finding bits and pieces of civilization. Perhaps a woman had worn the ring while dining with the captain on her way to America. Perhaps some British officer had carried it in his vest pocket, waiting to give it to the woman he’d hoped to marry. It might have belonged to an elderly widow, or a young bride. The mystery of it, and its tangibility, were more precious than the stone itself. It was…lasting.
Ky held it out to her, offering. Their routine had fallen into a finders-keepers arrangement, in that whoever found a particular piece carried it in their own bag to the surface where everything was carefully catalogued on film and paper. Kate looked at the small, water-dulled piece of the past in Ky’s fingers.
