She closed the distance and faced him, but the connection they’d shared was missing. She’d meant something to him, even before he met her, and she still did. Even if she forgave her mother, even if she forgave him, she would never choose to be with him after what she believed was a betrayal.
“For your niece, Braden, I’ll make that call. For my father, I’ll need your help to get him justice. To learn what happened. We work together, but when this is over, there’s nothing between us personally, if there ever was. Understood?”
Ouch.
She lifted her hand to dangle a necklace. “This locket has the coordinates, longitude and latitude, embedded in the image.”
“Where did you get that?”
“My father sent it to Evelyn before he died.”
“But how could he have had it created in that short of time?”
“I suspect he got help from a jeweler who supplied a museum store Dad once owned.” She pulled out her cell and took several photos. “I don’t know if she’ll let me keep it, but just in case someone steals it, then we have the images. This is what someone was after in her house.”
He looked at the locket closely as she filled him in on the rest. “Let’s see where this is.”
Braden entered the coordinates on an app. “It’s beyond the twelve-nautical-mile limit.”
“I figured it would be completely out of our jurisdiction and in international waters. High seas. But the contiguous zone gives the US at least limited authority.”
And why would that matter? He didn’t like where this was going. “What’s your plan?”
“We find out what’s there.”
“Cressida, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Your mother wanted me to protect you.”
A deep frown carved between her brows, and she blinked rapidly. “He said that he needed to do this ‘for his daughter,’ for me. That was his last communication to Evelyn. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
Unshed tears shimmered in her eyes. Her beautiful, gorgeous eyes. He shoved away the torture. This wasn’t the time. Emotion would distract him from protecting her and finishing this.
“Maybe he, too, wanted to protect you. What started this? I think it could have started this entire chain of events.” He still wanted to know about the article Octavia had shut down.
“Evelyn started it. She was reading one of his books and thought he could solve the mystery of what happened to her son who was sent on a covert mission.”
“Okay, but your article hit a nerve. I pressed Octavia on it and she didn’t have a response. Think about it.”
“Mom became worried mostly when I started following the rabbit trail about shipwrecks that were leaking toxins into the ocean. I don’t remember the details of my research. I’d have to go back and look at my notes.”
“Shipwreck toxins,” he said.
“Cold War stuff.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “That was what Evelyn said.”
He stepped closer and stared long and hard at her. “What comes to mind, Cressida?”
“The list is long, so I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Does the list include radioactive materials? Did the covert mission include delivering materials to make a nuclear bomb?”
Cressida lifted her chin. “Maybe it’s worse than that, Braden.”
“What could be worse?”
“An actual nuclear missile could be worse,” she said.
“And you think one could be just lying around on the ocean floor?”
“It’s not a stretch,” she said. “There have been several incidents of nuclear submarines going missing, malfunctioning, whatever, in the ocean, even recently. Again, I’d have to look at my notes.”
