"I told you not to call me that."
She made us stand on the dock while she wrote out terms in a dive log. Not metaphorically—she pulled a notebook from below and wrote, in handwriting that managed to be both exacting and slightly unhinged, a numbered list of conditions for the partnership.
Cal read the list with the careful neutrality of a man who'd negotiated hostage releases and found this equally demanding.
"Item six says I'm not allowed to 'reorganize, alphabetize, or otherwise impose military structure on her system.'"
"Non-negotiable," Marley said.
I looked at the system in question: research held down by coffee mugs, a geological hammer, and what appeared to be a petrified granola bar serving as a paperweight on the dive log. Every instinct I had revolted quietly.
Cal signed the dive log. I watched the head of Salt and Steel Security put his signature in a waterproof notebook on themarina planking at eight in the morning, and I decided this was the most Cal Hayes thing I had ever witnessed.
"We start tomorrow," Marley said. "First dive at oh-six-hundred."
"I'll be here at oh-five-thirty."
"Of course you will." She said it flat, but the corner of her mouth did something it probably hadn't intended to do.
Cal left. Marley went below to put her research back together, and I offered to help, and she told me she'd handle it herself. I waited on the planking anyway, because the job now required my presence and for no other reason than I was prepared to articulate.
The morning had turned fully hot by now. Sweat collected at my collar and along the waistband of my cargo pants, and the dock creaked under me with the slow expansion of wood baking in full sun. Late May on a barrier island, and the insects were just getting started. By mid-June they'd own every square inch of air between the water and the tree line.
Through the companionway I could hear her working. Putting things back where they belonged, muttering to herself in a running commentary I caught in fragments: dates, coordinates, a reference to a harbormaster's log from 1864. She was converting the violation of her space into fuel for what came next. Taking it apart and rebuilding.
I watched her through the hatch. She'd pulled everything back to the console and was reorganizing by date, her hands moving fast and certain, her focus absolute. The pencil had fallen out of her hair and her braid hung loose around her face. She held a creased printout up to the light from the porthole, studied it, smoothed the crease with the flat of her palm. Her expression shifted into a concentration so deep it burned off everything else. The tank top had ridden up at her hip, and the light from the porthole caught the curve of her waist, the line ofmuscle along her side, and I felt it in my hands—the pull to close the distance, the physical weight of wanting to touch someone you have no right to touch. My breath caught, and I made myself look away.
I should have been building the security overlay for tomorrow's dive. I was doing none of those things.
MY BOATHOUSE SAT ONstilts at the end of a private dock on the south side of the island, where the tidal creek widened before it met the Intracoastal. At night the water moved underneath with its own rhythm: tidal, unhurried, constant. I'd bought the place three years ago from a crabber who'd died without heirs, and I'd spent six months renovating it myself. New planking, new wiring, a kitchen I'd built from scratch and barely used. The floors were reclaimed heart pine that glowed honey-gold in the right light. Bare surfaces. Minimal furniture. One bookshelf, half dive manuals and half paperback thrillers I'd read twice. The bed made tight enough to bounce a quarter off, because some habits don't retire when the man carrying them does.
The place suited me. It was quiet, and it was mine, and it sat on the water in a way that meant I could hear the tide change from any room. At high tide the creek lapped the pilings and I could feel the faintest vibration through the floorboards. At low tide the mud flats opened up and the fiddler crabs came out in armies. Egrets stood motionless in the shallows, waiting for whatever the receding water revealed.
I leaned against the railing with a beer and the water stretched out in front of me going silver under a moon just past half. The tide was turning, and the water pushed through the spartina grass with that low rushing sound I'd grown up falling asleep to. An owl was hunting somewhere past the tidal creek.The air held salt and jasmine and the quiet that settles on the Lowcountry after the heat finally breaks for the night. Lightning bugs had started their season in the last week, drifting through the saw palmettos along the bank, blinking their slow green code at nothing and everything.
The plan was solid. Cal had the new terms squared away. I had a security overlay roughed out. Tomorrow I'd run the full approach assessment, set up dive rotation, coordinate with Deputy Ty on the law enforcement side. Protection detail with a maritime component. I'd run dozens of them.
Except the woman I was protecting had spent that morning staring down a threat most people would've run from, and the last image I had of her was the concentration on her face as she rebuilt everything they'd torn apart—and the curve of her waist in the light from the porthole that I was still trying not to think about.
I finished the beer. The owl caught something in the marsh; a brief sharp protest from whatever it had been, then nothing.
I was thinking about tomorrow. I was also thinking about her. The second one was winning, and it had been winning since she'd told me where to put my paperwork.
Yeah. Knowing better and doing better were turning out to be two different things.
I rinsed the bottle and leaned against the counter in my kitchen with its blank walls and empty surfaces and a silence I'd chosen on purpose. It had felt right for three years, the absence of complication, the clean geometry of a life kept deliberately small. Tonight it had the feel of a room waiting for someone to walk into it carrying maps and arguments and a kind of chaos these walls had never seen.
Tomorrow at oh-five-thirty, I'd be on that dock. Sharp. Focused. Ready to do the job Cal was paying me for and nothing beyond it.
I turned off the light and went to bed.
Chapter Three
Marley
SIXTY-TWO FEET OF WATERwill forgive almost anything except inattention.
I’d been diving since I was fourteen, and the ocean had taught me that lesson in increments. A ripped wetsuit here. A missed decompression stop there. One very educational encounter with a bull shark off Hilton Head that I still couldn’t discuss without my voice climbing an octave. But I had never trusted someone else’s attention underwater the way I was trusting Beau Rutledge’s on the morning of our first dive together.
