He jerked on the rope twice. The signal he’d arrived safely on the bottom. Waiting, he counted off the seconds.One. Two. Three. F— A double bump on the loop of rope attached to his weight belt told him Wolf had received his message and was standing by.Good. Even though Wolf was thirty feet above the cutoff point where it was safe to breathe regular oxygen, it was still possible to suffer nitrogen narcosis—what divers referred to as “rapture of the deep.” It made you feel stoned, impairing your reactions and decision-making abilities. But Wolf’s quick response told him the man was A-okay, good to go.
Leo puffed out a breath of relief, bubbles emerging from his regulator to trickle over his cheeks and into his hair. He detached the handheld flashlight from his gear belt and flipped on the switch. A thick beam of light blazed through the water, cutting through the gloom like a shooting star through the night sky.
There. Ten yards away.The rusting hull of the tangos’ sunken boat—it looked like an old recreational trawler—rose like a phantom from the ocean floor. An intruder in this alien world. He swam in its direction, managing his breathing and carefully reeling out the loop of rope attaching him to Wolf as he went.
The trawler had landed right-side up. A blessing. Because Olivia suspected the only reason the tangos hadn’t been able to get to the capsules before the vessel had sunk was because they’d stored them in the cabin or the engine compartment. And he hadn’t welcomed the thought of having to wiggle his way between the boat and the sand in an effort to access the entrance to either room.
Olivia… He would swear he could still taste her on his tongue, that salty mix of woman and passion. And the way she smelled…musky and sweet, all health and life and sexual heat. She’d been so wet for him, so swollen for him, so unbelievably soft… And yet,not.The strength of her inner muscles clamping down on his fingers when she’d climaxed had surprised him, left him breathless, anxious to feel those same muscles squeezing the head of his dick when he—
Oh great. Now I’m hard. In a wet suit. Nearly two hundred feet beneath the surface. In search of three capsules of deadly chemical weapons.
He blew out a breath of self-disgust and adjusted his goggles. It occurred to him as he hovered above the trawler’s deck that being in love with a spy came with more than its fair share of complications. She was going to disappear on him for weeks, sometimes months, on end. She would keep secrets, tell lies by omission. Not because she wanted to, but because shehadto. It was going to be hard. Heknewit would be hard. But if there was any man on the planet who would understand, who wouldn’t push for answers, Lord knew it was him. He’d been there. Done that. And he had a Navy SEAL Budweiser pin to prove it.
Of course, now he just had to convince her to give him, givethema shot. Her body was already his for the taking. There was no mistaking the way she responded to him, with such unabashed longing and desire. The question was how to make her head and heart follow suit. But he suspected he knew where to start.
He was grinning around his regulator when he pushed open the warped wooden door to the trawler’s main cabin. A plastic cup floated slowly past him, followed by a bright-orange life ring, trailed by a few other pieces of buoyant whatnot. He waited until the debris cleared and then ducked through the door, careful to keep his tanks and hoses from hitting the frame.
Panning his flashlight around the interior, he looked for the stainless-steel case Olivia had described.Aboutthesizeoftwobriefcasesstackedatoponeanother.But there was nothing on the console. Nothing sitting on the floor. Letting out more rope, he swam farther into the cabin. His grin disappeared when he saw the body.
In the far left corner, beneath a table surrounded on three sides by a cushion-less booth, protruded a pair of hairy legs. The skin over the limbs looked gray and waterlogged. Crabs had already begun to feast on the corpse, and they scuttled away from the beams of his headlamp and flashlight.
Wheretherebedrownedtangos, there be chemical weapons, he thought in his best pirate’s voice.
And sure enough, when he swam over, he saw what he was looking for. The case was wedged beneath the table. He tried to pull the tango’s body out so he could get to it, but the corpse seemed to be stuck. He swept his flashlight over the drowned man, trying to figure out what was holding him there.Ah.The dead man’s belt loop was hooked on a rusty screw sticking out from one of the table legs.
Quickly unhooking the material, Leo grabbed the tango’s waistband and yanked. The body floated from beneath the table, slowly drifting by him. He studiously ignored the gaping black holes that used to be the man’s eyes—the bottom-feeders always went after the most tender parts first—and gently hauled the steel container from its hiding place. He set it atop the table.
Andjusttomakesure… Because Olivia had insisted he do so.
He flipped up the latches and lifted the lid. Inside, three canisters about the size of two-liter soda bottles were nestled in a bed of foam, all neatly in a row, all looking completely innocuous. Yet they were anything but…
The hairs on his arms lifted, and since they were flattened inside his wet suit, the resulting sensation was that of a mass of millipedes crawling over his limbs. Thesssskkkk, sssskkkksound of his breathing increased, and pockets of bubbles gathered in a strange living glob against the ceiling of the cabin. He shuddered at the thought of what could have happened had the terrorists actually found a way to combine and aerosolize the stuff.
Carefully closing the lid and securing the latches, he hauled the case from the cabin. He avoided the floating corpse and reeled up the rope attaching him to Wolf. Once he was clear of the boat, with his fins sunk deep into the silt and sand at the bottom of the Straits, he detached a set of bungee cords and carabiners from his gear belt.
Tying the bungee cords around the case like the ribbons on a Christmas present, he secured the container to the rope with the carabiners. Then he attached two lift-bags to the bungee cords. It took less than ten seconds to inflate them using the compressed CO2canister he pulled from his belt. And then the case with the chemicals was drifting up the rope, climbing toward Wolf and ultimately the buoy at the surface.
Leo watched until it was out of sight. Then he dropped his weights, checked his dive computer, and inflated his high-capacity BC—buoyancy controller. The sound of the tube filling with air was a loudhissssssin the water around him. With a subtle kick of his fins, he was headed upward toward the light, toward the woman who turned him inside out and upside down.Andaroundandaround!
All right, so he’d run the gamut from David Bowie to Diana Ross. The pressure and the isolation were obviously getting to him. Or maybe he was just going a little crazy because he’d beensecondsaway from sinking into Olivia’s wet heat when Bran had interrupted them.Again.The man was just itching for an ass-kicking, no doubt about it.
However… Leo smiled around his regulator again when he realized there’d be no more interruptions. The radicals were dead. The chemicals were safe. There was nothing left to do but…Olivia.
Anticipation burned through him as he made his first safety stop, allowing the gases in his tissues and blood to adjust to the lessening pressure. He pictured Olivia laid out on his queen-sized bed back on Wayfarer Island. Her black hair fanned over his pillow. Berry nipples pointing toward the ceiling. Smooth, tan thighs spread wide so that he could see her wet, pink center and—
Oh, perfect. Now I’m hard again…
* * *
4:43 p.m.…
“She’s goin’ to wear a hole through the deck.”
Bran pulled his gaze away from the deep-sea fishing boat passing about a mile and a half off their starboard side to glance over at Olivia. She was pacing back and forth across the yacht’s teakwood swim deck, chewing on her lip and wringing her hands. He’d never seen someone actually do that…wring their hands. Had sort of thought it was just a figure of speech. But Olivia looked close to snapping off a finger.
He wasn’t in much better shape. His stomach was in knots while he waited for his friends to emerge from the drink, to pop up beside the bright-white positional buoy they’d launched next to the wreck. And, yo, Leo was the most experienced, most intuitive diver Bran had ever seen. Still…accidents happened in the deep. The pressure played havoc on equipment—breaking hoses, causing regulators to wig out, keeping buoyancy compensators from inflating. The list was endless. Not to mention what the inert gases inside a guy’s body could do to him if worse came to worst and proper safety stops couldn’t be observed during an ascent.
“She’s worried about him,” he told Maddy Powers, who was leaning on the rail next to him.Worriedandprobablyriddledwithguilttoo.And wasn’t that just peachy? There were too many goddamn recriminations floating around for his tastes, what with Olivia being beside herself because of the catastrophe that had become this pisser of a mission and Leo blaming himself for what the sinking of theWayfarermeant to their futures.Shit.Bran really wanted a do-over. Where was good ol’ H. G. Wells’s time machine when he needed it?
