by Taryn Belle
Stop it.
But she couldn’t. Judging from the length of his bent muscular legs, he was at least six foot three—perfect for her, as at five foot nine, she felt too tall around many men. One last look between his legs revealed an impressive bulge that she could imagine undressing, stroking, until he was rock-hard, and then...
Enough!
She was thinking like a sex-crazed teenager, probably because she hadn’t actually had sex since long before she moved here. Everything that had gone down in LA hadn’t exactly worked wonders for her libido.
“I’m happy walking,” she lied, and then started doing just that to prove it. She could feel his eyes burning into the side of her face.
“Suit yourself,” he said, shrugged and then drove away.
* * *
Really, it was a good thing she hadn’t accepted the ride, because Alex was pretty sure there was no way she wouldn’t have noticed the swelling under his swimming trunks. Jesus, she was fucking beautiful. Trim, toned figure, long blond hair and those eyes...the same shade as his. Though if she’d noticed that, she certainly hadn’t let on. He wasn’t sure why she’d been so standoffish with him when he was just asking innocent questions, but he figured it might have something to do with the fact that she looked familiar. Like almost everyone else on this island, she was a someone, and she wanted to be sure to send the message that she was way out of his civilian league. Not to mention that a woman as hot as her was most likely off the market.
Alex shook his head, trying to clear it of the image of the glistening sweat between her breasts, the tanned slice of tummy he’d spied between her tank top and shorts, the heavy breathing that had made him think of only one thing. He wanted to hear her breathe like that again, but this time because of his cock driving into her again and again, her nipples thrusting upward to meet his hungry mouth...
Get yourself together. You’re about to be sixty feet beneath the surface with nothing between you and a lungful of killer water but a couple of rubber tubes.
Right. He needed to focus. He had come here for two reasons—to close a deal and to once and for all conquer his childhood fear of the ocean, and he wasn’t about to be distracted from either of those goals by any woman.
No matter how fucking hot she was.
CHAPTER TWO
TWO INSTRUCTORS, EIGHT STUDENTS. At the dock Nicola did a quick final head count before zipping her dive skin up to her neck. Much to her annoyance, her mind was still on the chiseled god she’d encountered on the road—and the furtive, hopeful glances she kept throwing at arriving students irked her even more. She really did need to get out more.
“Tanks are ready to go,” said Zach, her fellow instructor, reaching past Nicola to set the last two metal cylinders on the boat. Nicola smiled her thanks to him. As far as she knew, Zach was one of only a handful of island staff members who had actually been born on Moretta. Raised the son of one of the estate’s chefs, Zach had grown up in the tiny staff quarters behind the house and been homeschooled by his mother—just the inspiration Nicola had needed to start tutoring some of the island kids once per week. She didn’t think she’d ever become accustomed to the huge class chasm that separated the island natives from the residents who’d taken it over.
“Hi, Miss Nicola,” said a quiet voice. Nicola turned to see one of her students, Raia, peeking out at her shyly from around the corner of the shack.
Nicola smiled at her. “Back to school this week,” she reminded Raia with a mix of anticipation and longing. It wasn’t lost on Nicola that if she were back in LA right now—back in her old, normal life before it all went crazy—she would be welcoming her first-grade class to their first day of school today. The memory of the children she’d been forced to leave behind two months before the end of the school year still stung.
After Zach and her students had piled onto the boat, Nicola stepped onto the boat herself and started to mentally prepare for the upcoming dive. The fact that she’d been scuba diving since she was thirteen and instructing since she was nineteen, when she’d used it as a part-time job to put herself through college, did nothing to make her take the sport less seriously. It only served to heighten her awareness of its dangers, because with the rising popularity of scuba diving, people tended to lose sight that it was an extreme sport. If done properly it was almost always safe, but there were many things that could potentially go catastrophically wrong.
She ran the upcoming dive through her head, planning the traverse around the reef she would lead her students on. Then she ran through her four students’ abilities, assessing each one for potential weaknesses or panic triggers. By the time the boat geared down, pulled up alongside another dive boat and dropped anchor at Sinkhole Reef, Nicola was feeling ready.
“Okay, everyone,” she said, pulling her mask and snorkel over her head and letting it rest around her neck. “This will be an easy one. We should have excellent visibility, and we’re going for a max depth of seventy feet. You’ll see lobsters, stingrays, moray eels, possibly a few nurse or reef sharks. Lobsters hang out in pods, so don’t be freaked out if you come across a den of fifty or so. Just keep your fingers to yourselves! Remember to practice neutral buoyancy and keep your fins off the reef. Stay with your buddy at all times, and ascend—slowly, remember—before you have no less than 200 PSI left in your tank.”
She walked around to her students to be sure their tanks had been turned to the open position, getting each of them to test their regulators in turn. Then she put on her fins, weight belt and buoyancy control device. Shuffling backward on her fins toward the edge of the boat, she put her regulator in her mouth. Then she held her mask on her face and fell backward to demonstrate a back fall-in. “Now your turn. One at a time,” she called to her students once she’d resurfaced.
Focused solely on the safety of the four people under her charge, Nicola was barely aware of the sound of bodies splashing into the water as divers from the neighboring boat began to drop in at the same time.
* * *
Alex had thought he was doing okay. On the boat ride he’d run through his entire lesson book in his head, followed by everything he’d learned on the eight pool dives he’d completed back in LA.
He could do this. People did it every day. Hell, there were teenagers on his boat who didn’t look the least bit concerned that they may very well be taking their last-ever breaths.
Quit it. Not every kid who goes into the ocean has a near-death experience.
After he’d talked himself somewhat off the ledge, he took a deep, calming breath and followed his instructor’s orders—tank open, regulator in, mask on. He was standing up, ready to walk backward to the edge of the boat when his instructor pointed at his waist. “Forgot your weight belt,” Rusty said. “You won’t get far down without that.”
Alex groaned. His weight belt—of course. Shit, he was a mess, and his persisting thoughts of that Sienna Miller look-alike on the road this morning weren’t helping matters.
Focus.
As he sat down again and unfastened his BCD, Rusty walked over to inspect Alex’s belt. The man was huge, which gave Alex a small measure of reassurance—even though his brain told him he’d be practically weightless underwater, if anything went wrong it was comforting to know this guy could probably carry him to the surface on one finger.
Rusty picked his belt up and gave it a heft. “Twenty-two pounds? You’re a big guy. I think you’ll want another fiver on there.”
“You sure?” Alex asked as a vision of himself sinking to the ocean floor like a rock flashed through his head.
“Yep.” The instructor grabbed a weight from the crate near his feet and handed it to Alex. “Just thread it through your belt and you’re good to go.”
Alex did so, then hefted the belt around his waist and fastened the airline-seatbelt-like closing. It slipped down a little when he stood up, so he tightened it. It slipped do
wn again. Was it supposed to feel this loose? Probably—what the hell did he know? All he was certain of was that he was used to being in control, being the one to show others how things were done, and he was tired of looking like a rookie fool. It was this departure from his comfort zone as much as the ocean he was about to jump into that was causing his anxiety.
In any case, it was go-time. There was no backing out now. Alex got himself ready and fell backward into the open water.
The surface was crowded, as it looked like another group of divers had just dropped in at the same time. It took Alex a minute to locate his buddy, because everyone was unrecognizable to him with their masks and snorkels on. After they inserted their regulators into their mouths, his buddy counted down with his fingers. Holding their inflator controls above their heads, they slowly released air from their BCDs to start the descent to the reef. Alex felt the water close over his head, and then he saw bubbles rise in front of his mask as he exhaled.
He was doing it! He was under the surface of the ocean, and he was okay! Ridiculously, he felt an urge to let out a whoop, then quickly reminded himself of how stupid that would be.
When Alex’s feet hit the ocean floor, he spun around in a slow semicircle toward the reef. Then it was right in front of him, and all he could do was blink in amazement. The reef was so much more incredible than any photograph could capture. It was covered in every imaginable shape and color of plant and animal life—waving pink sea fans, purple and yellow tubes of coral—all forming a backdrop for the many animals that called it home. Sea stars of purple, orange and yellow shared space with spiky sea urchins on the coral. A spotted moray eel poked its head from its den, a turtle nipped at a plant, a grouper the size of a coffee table cruised by and a school of tiny blue fish flashed in synchronicity. Beyond it an underwater meadow of seagrass spread into the distance.
Alex turned to look to his left. There, much too close for Alex’s comfort, the ocean floor fell sharply away to create a cavernous, eerie-looking dark blue space: the sinkhole the reef was named after. Alex shivered, imagining himself stepping off the edge and falling down, down, gathering speed as the air in his BCD compressed, struggling to swim upward...slipping beneath the surface and sinking while his brother laughed onshore—
Stop it.
He was doing so well; the last thing he needed to do right now was send himself into a panic over something that had happened nearly two decades ago. He tore his eyes away from the sinkhole.
Alex’s group was starting to move along, so, remembering his pool dives, he put a little air into his BCD until his fins lifted from the ocean floor. Then he did his best to get himself horizontal—he could only imagine what a newbie he must look like, but at this point he was almost beyond caring—and started swimming after his buddy.
* * *
Of all the incredible things to see underwater, Nicola’s favorite was probably the very common trunkfish. With their clown-like faces, boxy spotted bodies and you-don’t-scare-me attitudes, they practically made her laugh into her regulator every time. She was pointing one out to a student when she noticed another diver swimming past her.
Many divers had trouble identifying people when they were suited up underwater, especially if they were in matching equipment, but Nicola had a knack for it. She could tell this diver wasn’t from her group, or even from her boat, and that he was very inexperienced. That was fine—everyone had to start somewhere—but what wasn’t fine was that he was on his own with no buddy or instructor in sight, and worse, headed directly for the sinkhole.
What the hell? What was he doing, and why was he on his own?
Checking quickly to make sure her students were all fine, she started going after him. This diver may not have been experienced, but he was very tall, making for a fast swimmer. When he reached the sinkhole, he didn’t slow down but cruised right over it, staring down into it as if mesmerized. Then he suddenly stopped, suspended above it.
Nicola was still about fifty feet away from him. She swam harder, not letting him out of her sight. Judging from this diver’s behavior, she had a suspicion of what was going on. It was unusual for it to happen at this depth, but certainly not unheard of: nitrogen narcosis. She’d seen it several times in her diving career—a state of euphoria and invincibility, much like that caused by narcotics, induced by breathing air at a higher pressure than the atmosphere. It was imperative that she get to him before he got any bad ideas—like letting all the air out of his BCD so he could swim to the bottom of the sinkhole, for example.
Forty feet away...thirty-five—
Nicola saw something from around the diver’s waist drop into the abyss. Her heart stopped.
The diver’s weight belt had slipped off, she realized, and now one of two things could happen. Either he would rocket straight for the surface and get a life-threatening case of the bends, or he could panic and very likely spit out his regulator. She hoped upon hope it would be option number two, because then at least she’d have a chance to get her spare air supply into his mouth before he drowned. Muscles burning and heart galloping, she put on a burst of speed, knowing that she still had to keep her breathing under control. If she sucked in too much air, she wouldn’t have enough left in her tank to get both of them safely to the surface.
Twenty feet—
Nicola watched the diver’s body language as he registered surprise, confusion—he was starting to rise upward—but then the best thing possible happened. She saw his arm shoot out to grab his inflator control, which meant he was doing what he was supposed to—removing the air from his BCD to keep himself from rocketing up to the surface.
Ten feet—
But oh, God, no—he’d hit the wrong button. This, too, was something she’d seen happen before—the buttons were different shapes but close together, so sometimes in a panic a diver would hit the fill button instead of the expel button.
Fifteen feet now as he floated up and away from her—
Adrenaline kicked in, but Nicola’s muscles still screamed. Her breath tore out of her lungs—not much chance of giving him air now, but she had to do something—and finally she was close enough to take a lunge at him. Reaching her hands up, she used her fins to propel herself upward and managed to close one hand around the tip of his fin. Her other hand closed around the edge of his second fin, then she clawed her way up until she could grab his ankles. She had a hold of him now, but it could still mean both of their deaths if she didn’t get to his inflator control to let his air out. She used the same arm she had locked around his legs to let the air out of her own vest by its built-in button, then used her other hand to take a slow-motion whack at the diver’s forearm. He dropped the inflator control and it floated slowly down toward her. Nicola snatched it up and pressed the expel button, doing a strong reverse frog kick with her legs to try to pull them downward.
And then she prayed.
* * *
Long, slow, deep breaths to conserve what little air she had left. Pretty much impossible at this point, but Nicola focused on it all the same to try to quell the adrenaline pumping through her veins. She still had her arm wrapped around the man’s waist with her head near his hip. She reached for her dive computer to read her oxygen level, though she already knew from her increasingly labored breaths that it was dangerously low. The number flashed at her in urgent red digits—80 PSI. Just enough to get her to the surface if she started her ascent in about one minute, but that didn’t help him any. At least they weren’t rising anymore—they seemed to have leveled out at around forty feet. Nicola employed a few more reverse frog kicks to pull them down a little farther, calculating that they’d now have to stay at this depth for about three more minutes to compensate for their initial rapid ascent. Going up any sooner put them both at serious risk for decompression sickness, a potentially lethal condition where gaseous bubbles formed in the bloodstream.
Sliding her hand up the diver’s che
st, Nicola reached behind his left shoulder and pulled her arm forward to catch the tube attached to his dive computer. She caught the device in her hand and looked down at his oxygen: 50 PSI.
It was decision time—release him to his possible death but save herself, take both of them up now come what may, or try to share what little oxygen she had left with him.
There was no question. She swept her arm backward to catch her spare air supply, then pulled his regulator out of his mouth, replaced it with hers and hit the purge button.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN ALEX’S HEAD broke the surface of the water, cold fear was still pumping through his veins. Just moments ago he had been quite certain he was about to draw his last breath. Ripping his mask off with shaking hands, the only thought in his mind was: he’d been a fucking fool to ever think he could do this. Quick on its heels, fueled by his extremely damaged ego, was the thought that he never wanted to face the person who’d been stuck with saving him. Given the choice between terror and humiliation, he chose a third option—outrage.
“What the hell happened down there?” he sputtered to Rusty after he’d yanked his regulator from his mouth. No, not his regulator, not even his rescuer’s—the device he’d just pulled from his mouth was the spare air supply that his own instructor had had to save him with. After Rusty finally got the memo that things had gone south with one of his students, he’d taken over the job and relieved Alex’s real rescuer so he or she could surface and save their own life. “You let me lose the group on my first dive? My fucking belt falls off?”
Beside him, Rusty yanked his mask down around his neck. “The important thing is that you’re all right,” he said soothingly, waving to his driver to pick them up. “Let’s get on the boat and I will explain.” The driver spun the boat in a semicircle and then backed up toward them, expertly placing the ladder within Alex’s reach. He grabbed on to it and heaved himself out of the ocean, feeling water gush down his legs as his wet suit drained. Four pairs of eyes—those of his fellow divers, comfortably seated on the benches—turned to look at him as he stumbled on deck. Great. Now he had an audience, as if he didn’t feel stupid enough. And he knew very well how he’d just sounded—like one of those pompous assholes that Alex himself hated, the ones who tried to blame everyone else for their failings. Still breathing heavily with exertion and adrenaline, Alex sat down on the bench and leaned his head forward with his elbows on his knees, trying to get himself together.
