The Reef

  “I guess I do.” Hoping he was unaware of how much courage it took, she shifted closer. “I’ve been analyzing why you were so angry after you kissed me.”

  “I wasn’t angry,” he corrected evenly. “And you kissed me.”

  “I started it.” Determined to finish it, she kept her eyes on his. “You changed it, then you got mad because it surprised you. What you felt surprised you. It surprised me, too.” Lifting her hands, she spread them on his chest. “I wonder if we’d be surprised now.”

  He wanted, more than anything he could remember, he wanted to swoop down and plunder that fresh and eager mouth. The hunger to taste it came in swift, sharp waves, and made his hands rough as they snagged her wrists.

  “You’re moving into dark water, Tate.”

  “Not alone.” She wasn’t afraid any longer, she realized. Why, she wasn’t even nervous. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “No, you don’t.” He shoved her back, arm’s length, hardly realizing his hands were still cuffed around her wrists. “You figure there aren’t any consequences, but there are. If you don’t watch your step, you’ll pay them.”

  A shiver worked up her spine, deliciously. “I’m not afraid to be with you. I want to be with you.”

  The muscles in his stomach twisted. “Easy to say, with your mother in the galley. Then again, maybe you’re more clever than you look.” Furious, he tossed her hands down and strode away.

  The implication brought a bright bloom to her cheeks. She had been teasing him, she realized. Taunting him. To see if she could, needing to know if he felt even half of this draw toward her that she felt toward him. Ashamed, contrite, she hurried after him.

  “Matthew, I’m sorry. Really I—”

  But he was over the side with a splash and swimming toward the Sea Devil. Tate let out a huff of breath. Damn it, the least he could do was listen when she apologized. She dived in after him.

  When she dragged herself onto the deck, he was popping the top on a beer.

  “Go home, little girl, before I toss you overboard.”

  “I said I was sorry.” She dragged wet hair out of her eyes. “That was unfair and stupid, and I apologize.”

  “Fine.” The quick swim and cold beer weren’t doing much to scratch the itch. Hoping to ignore her, he swung into his hammock. “Go home.”

  “I don’t want you to be mad.” Determined to make amends, she marched to the hammock. “I was only trying to . . . I was just testing.”

  He set the open beer on the deck. “Testing,” he repeated, then lunged before she could draw in the breath to gasp. He hauled her onto the hammock atop him. It swung wildly as she clawed at the sides to keep from upending. Her eyes popped wide with shock when his hands clamped intimately over her bottom.

  “Matthew!”

  He gave her a quick, not altogether loving tap, then shoved her off. She landed in a heap on the butt he’d just explored.

  “I’d say we’re even now,” he stated, and reached for his beer.

  Her first impulse was to spring to attack. Only the absolute certainty that the result would be either humiliating or disastrous prevented her. Mixed with that was the lowering thought that she’d deserved just what she’d gotten.

  “All right.” With calm and dignity, she rose. “We’re even.”

  He’d expected her to lash at him. At the very least to blubber. The fact that she stood beside him, cool, composed, touched off a glint of admiration in his eyes. “You’re okay, Red.”

  “Friends again?” she asked and offered a hand.

  “Partners, anyway.”

  Crisis avoided, she thought. At least temporarily. “So, do you want to take a break? Maybe do some snorkeling?”

  “Maybe. Couple of masks and snorkels in the wheelhouse.”

  “I’ll get them.” But she came back with a sketchbook. “What’s this?”

  “A silk tie. What does it look like?”

  Overlooking the sarcasm, she sat on the edge of the hammock. “Did you do this sketch of the Santa Marguerite?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s pretty good.”

  “I’m a regular Picasso.”

  “I said ‘pretty good.’ It would have been great to see her like this. Are these figures measurements?”

  He sighed again, thinking of amateurs. “If you want to try to figure out how much area the wreck covers, you’ve got to do some calculations. We hit the galley today.” He swung his legs over until he was sitting beside her. “Officers’ cabins, passengers’ cabins.” He laid a fingertip on the sketch at varying points. “Cargo hold. Best way is to imagine a gull’s eye view.” To demonstrate, he flipped a page and began to sketch out a rough grid. “This is the seafloor. Here’s where we found the ballast.”

  “So the cannon is over here.”

  “Right.” In quick deft moves, he penciled them in. “Now we dug test holes from here to here. We want to move more midship for the mother lode.”

  Her shoulder bumped his as she studied the sketch. “But we want to excavate the whole thing, right?”

  He glanced up briefly, then continued to draw. “That could take months, years.”

  “Well, yes, but the ship itself is as important as what it holds. We have to excavate and preserve all of it.”

  From his viewpoint, the ship itself was wood and worthless. But he could humor her. “We’ll be in hurricane season before too much longer. We could be lucky, but we concentrate on finding the mother lode. Then you can afford to take as much time as you want on the rest.”

  For himself, he’d take his share and split. With gold jingling in his pocket, he could afford the time to build that boat, to finish his father’s research on the Isabella.

  To find Angelique’s Curse and VanDyke.

  “I guess that makes sense.” She glanced up, startled by the hard, distant gleam in his eye. “What are you thinking about?” It was foolish, of course, but she thought it looked like murder.

  He shook himself back. Here and now, he thought, was what mattered most. “Nothing. Sure it makes sense,” he continued. “Before long, word’s going to get out that we’ve found a new wreck. We’ll have company.”

  “Reporters?”

  He snorted. “They’re the least of it. Poachers.”

  “But we have a legal claim,” Tate began, and broke off when he laughed at her.

  “Legal don’t mean jack, Red, especially when you’ve got the Lassiter luck to deal with. We’ll have to start sleeping as well as working in shifts,” he went on. “If we start to bring up gold, Red, hunters will smell it from Australia to the Red Sea. Believe me.”

  “I do.” And because she did, she hopped down to fetch the snorkeling equipment. “Let’s check on Dad and Buck. Then I want to get that film developed.”

  By the time Tate was ready to go ashore, she had a list of errands in addition to the film. “I should have known Mom would give me a grocery list.”

  Matthew hopped into the Adventure’s little tender with her, cranked the engine. “No big deal.”

  Tate merely adjusted her sunglasses. “You didn’t see the list. Look!” She gestured west where a school of dolphin leapt before the lowering sun. “I swam with one once. We were in the Coral Sea and a school of them followed the boat. I was twelve.” She smiled and watched them flash toward the horizon. “It was incredible. They have such kind eyes.”

  Tate rose as Matthew cut speed. She timed the distance to the pier, braced her legs and secured the line.

  Once the boat was secure, they started across the strip of beach. “Matthew, if we hit the mother lode, and you were rich, what would you do?”

  “Spend it. Enjoy it.”

  “On what? How?”

  “Stuff.” He moved his shoulders, but he knew by now generalities wouldn’t satisfy her. “A boat. I’m going to build my own as soon as I have the time and means. Maybe I’d buy a place on an island like this.”

  They moved by guests of the nearby hotel as they baked
lazily in the lowering sun. Staff with flowered shirts and white shorts strolled across the sand with trays of tropical drinks.

  “I’ve never been rich,” he said half to himself. “It couldn’t be too hard to get used to it, to live like this. Fancy hotels, fancy clothes, being able to pay to do nothing.”

  “But you’d still dive?”

  “Sure.”

  “So would I.” Unconsciously she took his hand as they walked through the hotel’s fragrant gardens. “The Red Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, the North Atlantic, the Sea of Japan. There’re so many places to see. Once I finish college, I’m going to see them all.”

  “Marine archeology, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  He skimmed a glance over her. Her bright cap of hair was tousled by the salt and wind. She wore baggy cotton slacks, a skimpy T-shirt and square, black-framed sunglasses.

  “You don’t look much like a scientist.”

  “Science takes brains and imagination, not looks or fashion sense.”

  “Good thing about the fashion sense.”

  Unoffended, she shrugged. In spite of her mother’s occasional despair, Tate never gave clothes or style a thought. “What’s the difference, as long as you’ve got a good wet suit? I don’t need a wardrobe to excavate and that’s what I’m going to spend my life doing. Imagine getting paid to go on treasure hunts, to examine and study artifacts.” She shook her head at the wonder of it. “There’s so much to learn.”

  “I never thought a whole lot of school myself.” Of course, they had moved around so much, he’d never had a choice. “I’m more a fan of on-the-job training.”

  “I’m certainly getting that.”

  They took a cab into town where Tate could drop off her film. To her pleasure, Matthew didn’t seem to mind when she wanted to poke around the shops, dallying over trinkets. She sighed for a while over a small gold locket with a single pearl dripping from its base. Clothes were for keeping out the weather, but baubles were a nice, harmless weakness.

  “I didn’t think you went in for stuff like that,” he commented, leaning on the counter beside her. “You don’t really wear any bangles.”

  “I had this little ruby ring Mom and Dad gave me for Christmas when I was sixteen. I lost it on a dive. It really broke my heart, so I stopped wearing jewelry in the water.” She tore her eyes away from the delicate locket and tugged on his silver piece. “Maybe I’ll take that coin Buck gave me and wear it as a charm.”

  “Works for me. You want to get a drink or something?”

  She touched her tongue to her top lip. “Ice cream.”

  “Ice cream.” He thought it over. “Let’s go.”

  Sharing cones, they strolled along the sidewalk, explored narrow streets. He charmed her by plucking a creamy white hibiscus from a bush, tucking it carelessly behind her ear. While they shopped for Marla’s essentials, he had her gurgling with laughter over the story of Buck and Blackbeard’s ghost.

  “We were off Ocracoke, on Buck’s birthday. His fiftieth. The idea of half a century behind him had Buck so depressed he’d finished off half a bottle of whiskey. I helped him work on the other half.”

  “I bet.” Tate chose a bunch of ripening bananas and added it to her basket.

  “He was going on about all these might have’s—you know what I mean. We might have found that wreck if we’d looked another month. If we’d gotten there first, we might have hit the mother lode. If the weather had held, we might have struck it rich. Between the whiskey and the boredom, I passed out on deck. That melon’s not ripe. This one.”

  He switched fruit, chose the grapes himself. “Anyway, the next thing I know, the engines are roaring and the boat’s lurching off southeast at a good twelve knots. Buck’s at the wheel, screaming about pirates. Scared the shit out of me. I jumped up, tripped, knocked my head on the rail so hard I saw stars. Nearly went overboard when he swung to starboard. He’s yelling for me and I’m cursing him, fighting to stay upright as he circles the boat. His eyes are about six inches out from his face and white. You know he can’t see more than three feet in front of him without his glasses. But he’s pointing out to sea and shouting all this pirate cant. ‘Avast, ahoy, shiver me timbers.’ ”

  Tate’s laughter turned heads. “He did not say ‘shiver me timbers.’ ”

  “Hell, he didn’t. He nearly capsized us doing a jig and singing ‘yo, ho, ho.’ ” The memory of it had a grin tugging at his mouth. “I almost had to knock him out to get the wheel away from him. ‘The ghost, Matthew. Blackbeard’s ghost. Don’t you see it?’ I told him he wasn’t going to be seeing anything either after I poked his eyes out. He tells me it’s there, right there, ten degrees off the forward bow. There’s not a damn thing there but a little mist. But to Buck, it was Blackbeard’s severed head, smoke curling from the beard. He claimed it was a sign, and if we dived there the next day, we’d find Blackbeard’s treasure, the one everyone else figured was buried on land.”

  Tate paid for the groceries, Matthew hefted the bags. “And you went down the next morning,” she said, “because he asked you to.”

  “That and because if I hadn’t, I’d never have heard the end of it. We didn’t find a damn thing, but he sure got over turning fifty.”

  It was nearly dusk when they got back to the beach. Matthew stowed the bags and turned to see that Tate had rolled up her pants legs so she could stand in the surf.

  Light gilded her hair, her skin. Suddenly he was painfully reminded of his dream and how she had looked aglow in the water. How she had tasted.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured. “It’s like nothing else exists. How can there be anything wrong with the world when there are spots like this? When there are days like this?”

  She was sure he was unaware that this had been the most romantic day of her life. Such simple things like a flower for her hair, a hand to hold as she walked along the beach.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t leave here, ever.” With a laugh in her voice, she turned. “Maybe we should just stay and . . .”

  She trailed off, her throat closing at the look in his eyes. They were so dark, so intense, so suddenly focused on her. Only her.

  She didn’t think, didn’t hesitate, but walked to him. Her hands slid up his chest, linked behind his head. His eyes stayed on hers, a dozen frantic pulse beats, then he dragged her against him and flashed fire in her blood.

  Yes, she’d been kissed before. But she knew the difference between boy and man. It was a man who held her, drew from her. It was a man she wanted. Eager and quick, she pressed against him, racing her lips over his face in frenzied kisses until they found his again on a sob of pleasure.

  She was so slim, so willing, so avid to accept any demand. She flowed like water under each pass of his hands, and her mouth clung greedily to his. Each hum and whimper of desire that sounded in her throat cut through him, a blade of fire that ruptured new needs.

  “Tate.” His voice was rough, nearly desperate. “We can’t do this.”

  “We can. We are.” God, she couldn’t breathe. “Kiss me again. Hurry.”

  His mouth crushed down on hers. The taste of her seemed to explode inside him. Everything about it was painful, nearly agonizing, as heat would be after cold.

  “This is crazy,” he murmured against her mouth. “I’m out of my mind.”

  “Me, too. Oh, I want you, Matthew. I want you.”

  And that struck him hard. He jerked back, gripped unsteady hands on her shoulders. “Listen, Tate . . . What the hell are you smiling at?”

  “You want me, too.” She lifted a hand, laid it gently against his cheek and almost unmanned him. “For a while I thought you didn’t. And it hurt because I want you so much. I didn’t even like you at first, and wanted you anyway.”

  “Jesus.” To gain control of himself, he let his brow rest on hers. “I thought you said you were the careful one.”

  “Not about you.” Full of love and trust, she nuzzled into him. Heart to heart. ?
??Never about you. When you kissed me the first time, I knew you were what I’d been waiting for.”

  He had no compass, no direction, but he knew it was essential to reverse course. “Tate, we have to take this slow. You’re not ready for what I’m thinking of. Believe me.”

  “You want to make love with me.” Her chin came up. Her eyes, all at once, were a woman’s, and just as mysterious. “I’m not a child, Matthew.”