Crazy for Love (16 page)

Chloe watched a beautiful old mansion slide by her window. Dark brown waterways cut the estate into a green island of manicured lawn. A sign ahead said “No Fishing from the Bridge,” but three men stood next to it, poles cutting lazy lines through the air.

“It's weird. When Mrs. DeLorn called and left messages, I thought she was going to apologize for her son. I thought she and I were close. I mean, if what we're saying is true, she may have been the whole reason for the marriage in the first place.

“At first I expected her to try to patch things up, try to explain, maybe even try to get us back together. But she was calling to remind me of all the times she'd helped Thomas financially. I didn't know what she was talking about. What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“That is weird. Maybe she feels guilty and she had no idea what to say.”

“Oh, Jesus, it doesn't matter. Whatever the hell is going on, he was right. We shouldn't have been getting married.”

In her peripheral vision, she saw the flash of Jenn's blond hair as Jenn snapped her head around to look at Chloe. “You think that's true?”

“Yeah. Look at me. I don't even miss him, do I? I miss the house, and I miss my old, normal life. But I just had a fling with a big, hot treasure hunter, and damned if I didn't love it.”

“Well, sure, but—”

“If I'd really loved Thomas, wouldn't I be a little more devastated?”

“You're still in shock.”

“I don't feel like I'm in shock. I feel like I'm
alive.” Her cell phone rang, cutting through her introspective mood. Chloe dug it out of her purse and looked at the display. “Reporter. Shit, I guess I've got more than one bar again.” A push of a button silenced the ringer, and she flipped idly through the missed calls. There were a lot of them. “Anna called last week.”

Jenn coughed loudly, then patted herself on the chest to clear her throat. “She was probably calling to check on you.”

“I'll call her soon. Let's do something fun when this is over. We'll all go out to dinner and flirt with guys.”

“Oh, yeah. But I don't know. She's been so busy…”

“Then we'll go to D.C. and stay at her hotel! She offered to get us a day at the spa one time, right? Let's plan it. I'll call her and set it up for two weeks from now. It'll be just what we all need.”

“No! I mean… I'll call her. Don't worry about it.”

“I'm not going to let you pay for anything else.”

“Okay, I'll just… Damn it, Chloe. You've got enough on your hands. Don't call Anna. I'll talk to her, all right?”

Chloe looked over at Jenn's white knuckles and nodded. “Okay, okay. Calm down. You're such a mother hen sometimes.”

Jenn's laugh held as much tension as her hands, so Chloe dropped the subject and huddled down in her seat. It was going to be a long drive.

 

T
HE AFTERNOON FISHING TRIP
had been a complete disaster. Oh, he and Elliott had caught lots of fish. Apparently, depressed silence was an excellent tool in luring fish close to a boat. And the weather had been great. Sunny and still. Perfect for women who liked to lounge in the sun in bikinis.

Max looked up as Elliott walked out of his room, toweling off his wet hair. No bikinis here, just a couple of moping, pitiful men.

“You think I should've gone with her,” Max grumbled.

“What?” Elliott asked, slinging the towel over the shoulder of his gray T-shirt, about as depressing a color as you could wear.

“You think I should've tried to help instead of letting her go.”

“Who, Chloe?”

“Yes, Chloe!”

Elliott shrugged and fell onto the couch, propping his feet up on the arm as he lay down. “I have no idea.”

“So why are you avoiding me?”

“I'm not avoiding you. We've been on a boat together all day.”

Max stalked to the fridge and popped the top off a Corona. “You know what I mean. What the fuck's wrong with you if you aren't pissed at me?” Silence.

He glared at the back of the couch. “Elliott.”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

Standing a little straighter, Max narrowed his eyes at the brown tweed. “Wait a minute, does this have something to do with Jenn?”

“Crap,” his brother muttered.

Max settled into a chair at the kitchen table, the weight of his guilt easing off a bit as he turned his mind to something else. “What happened? A fight?”

“No. No fight. Kind of the opposite.”

“Oh? Oh! I see. What the hell are you so depressed about then?”

“I told you I don't want to talk about it.”

Since his brother couldn't see him, Max didn't bother hiding his sudden grin. “Don't worry, man. I hear it happens to every guy at some point.”

“Fuck off. That was definitely not the problem. Again, just the opposite.”

Well, that was interesting, if a bit disturbing. “Did you take a Viagra or something?” A mud-colored pillow came sailing over the couch and hit Max square in the face. “Good aim. Now what happened?”

“Jesus Christ.” Elliott's dark voice indicated he wasn't going to tell the story, but then the words came, as rough as if they were being forcibly dragged from his throat. “Everything was going great until she started crying.”

He set the beer down with a clunk. “Crying?”

“Yes. Sobbing.”

“Er. Some women do that when they come. Did she come?”

Elliott gave a muffled-sounding growl. Max could hear the scraping sound of hands rubbing over an unshaven jaw. “I don't know. She was pretty quiet about it all. Then she said it was ‘nice.'”

“Oh. I see.” He cringed in sympathetic embarrassment. “So…”

“Yeah.
So.
”

“Well, welcome to my world of dating crazy women. How do you like it? Pretty interesting, huh?”

“I don't think this is the kind of crazy you normally date.”

“Oh, you're wrong about that. You think none of my girlfriends have ever cried during sex? Instability isn't always the best bed partner. Speaking of which… On the off chance that Jenn is off her rocker, did you use protection?”

Elliott's feet disappeared and he sat up to glare at Max. “You're kidding, right?”

“Why?” Max's blood pressure leaped to a frantic
pace at the thought that his brother had done something stupid. “You didn't?”

“You started stuffing condoms into my wallet the day I turned fourteen.”

He cleared his throat, worried that Elliott was finally going to figure out that Max had a little problem with anxiety.

“Every single time you put a rubber in there, I took it out and threw it away, and the next morning, there'd be a new one. Then you started buying me a fresh box of condoms every month. Remember? Apparently, you thought I was using them all.”

“Er…”

“I was too damn embarrassed to tell you that your expectations were a little premature. I wasn't quite the ladies' man you were. But you did start a good habit for me. I never leave home without one, so I guess I should thank you for that psychosis.”

Max inhaled, the air cool and delicious when combined with the relief rising up in his chest. Elliott thought Max's motivation had been sexual precociousness. “Good,” he said with a forcibly arrogant smile. “Glad to know I passed something useful on to my little brother.”

Elliott lay back down without a word.

“So. Do you think I should've tried to help Chloe out?”

“What, exactly, could you do for her?”

Well, that was a stupid question. He could be there to stop her from doing something foolish. Anything foolish. Like getting engaged to a mama's boy who was too much of a pussy to break up with his fiancée in a normal way. Okay, the danger may have already passed on that one, but she clearly wasn't a genius at making life decisions. “I don't know. Anything.”

“I think you should get back to being your normal self. Worrying doesn't suit you. You're not even being logical about it. I don't know why Chloe's got you so tied up in knots, but she's gone now. Let it go.”

“I could say the same thing to you,” Max snapped.

“When the hell was I ever carefree?” his brother shot back, and then they were at an impasse, because Max refused to reveal the truth.

I've never been carefree, either.

In the end, talking to Elliot was only making him feel worse. He hunched over his beer, miserable.

Still, he couldn't help sneaking a few looks toward his bedroom as he finished his beer. He'd given Chloe his number before she'd left. Working on the ship, he wasn't in the habit of keeping his phone close by. Satellite phones weren't exactly cheap, so he had to keep it clear of the water. But now he was wondering where a guy could get one of those dorky
phone clips to keep it on his person at all times. He wandered casually into his bedroom to pick it up.

The voice-mail icon on the display may as well have been made of pure, uncontained electricity, because it sent a painful shock through his body. Had something happened? Did she need him? Shit, he should never have let her sail away without him.

He fumbled with the buttons, briefly forgetting his password even though it was his birth date.

Finally, he pressed the phone to his ear and held his breath…then let it out on a great rush of disappointment when he heard his captain's voice.

“Hey, Max!” he said in his thick Greek accent. “Listen, you know how much I respect you, and I know how you feel about Randy Martin.”

“Aw, shit,” Max muttered.

“I don't know what went down between you two, and I don't need to know. You wanted him off the ship and so he went. But he called me up. Wants to come back. He promises not to cause trouble this time, and he's a great diver, Max. One of the best young guys out there right now. Think about it, okay?”

“Shit,” he said more loudly. The message clicked off.

“Everything all right?” Elliott called.

“Yeah, yeah.” Randy Martin, that fucking bastard. He'd shown up for the new season two years
before, a hot-shot young diver with a huge chip on his shoulder. He hadn't had any use for a safety-conscious dive supervisor and he'd made that clear. But Max's word was law on that ship; he could even override the captain when they were at a dive site. Randy had tested Max one too many times, staying down for forty minutes on a strict thirty-minute dive. He'd smirked at Max when he'd finally emerged from the water. The same smirk he offered every time he put a foot over the line. After two weeks, they'd stopped to restock in Tangier, and Randy had found himself waving goodbye to his new friends.

But the entire crew, the captain included, had bought into Max's subtle hints that it had been more than his recklessness that had triggered Max's temper. There may not have been a fight over a girl during that first night onshore, but no one needed to know that except Max.

And now Randy wanted back onboard. What a prick.

Max's first instinct was to call the captain back with a drop-dead refusal. He'd never even come close to losing a diver on a job and he wasn't going to let this bastard ruin his reputation. Or his sanity. Even if he hated the guy, Max wouldn't be able to live with that on his conscience. That was the entirety of his job: keeping people alive while they did something immeasurably dangerous.

And how in the hell had he ended up with the worst job in the whole damn world? He supervised a dozen people who threw themselves into harm's way every damn day. People who whined and argued when he set time limits based on visibility and dive depth. People who refused to rest when he ordered a day off. People who thanked him for keeping them safe, even as they cursed him for treating them like children.

He couldn't count the number of times he'd had to bite back a shout of “I won't treat you like a child if you stop acting like one!” That didn't fit with his image, after all, so Max had perfected peaceful smiles and friendly winks. And really, they weren't all bad. Most divers were educated and well aware of the dangers and respected his efforts. But there was one on every goddamn trip. And none had been as bad as Randy.

Max pulled up the captain's number, pretending for a moment that he was calling to quit. He didn't need a job. He'd received a full share of the profits made on every single dive for the past twelve years, and it wasn't easy to spend money when you spent three-quarters of your life at sea.

So he could quit. But he wouldn't. After a dozen years of being tempted by this very thing, he knew he wasn't going to walk away. These people's lives were in his hands.

“Sullivan?” the captain's deep voice said over the tinny line.

“Hey, Cap. How's Greece?”

“Lovely. I'd invite you to come for the rest of the month, but I have my daughters to think of. They are beautiful, and you are not the marrying kind.”

Max smiled. “No, I'm not.”

“Dare I ask if you're using your time off wisely?”

“Now, that would be a ridiculous question, wouldn't it?”

“Ha. You're just like I was in my youth. You'll settle down someday.”

Yeah, Max was a real party animal.

“So,” the captain said tentatively, “you got my message about Randy? Think you can set aside your differences for a few months?”

“I don't think so, Cap.”

“Perhaps if you just avoid him in port? There are plenty of women to go around.”

Max considered a few lines. Some harmless falsehoods that would cover the truth. But then he thought of how free he'd felt speaking the truth to Chloe. The captain didn't need to be manipulated in this case. Max didn't have to smile and lie. He took a deep breath. “He's reckless and he disobeyed my direct orders on several occasions. He's a danger to himself
and everyone on the team. I won't work with him again.”