Night Diver: A Novel (2 page)

It doesn’t matter. The contract they signed is a guaranteed loser for Moon Rose Ltd. Even if they discovered the richest galleon ever, the Brits would get it all and the Donnellys would get expenses plus three percent of the net profits.

And the net is determined by the Brits. Articles given to museums aren’t part of the net, because they are donated, not sold.

She couldn’t believe Larry had signed such a punitive contract.

While she cleaned her condo—she hated coming back to a mess after a long trip—she mulled over the ways she might be able to help her family. By the time she had finished, showered, and set her alarm, she was fighting to stay awake. She was asleep before her head touched the pillow.

And she dreamed.

The sun was brilliant over the turquoise water and white sand. Lazy waves surged and rolled, making the boat lift and fall with the languid grace of a dancer. Laughter from below, her parents teasing one another as they checked dive gear . . . teasing sliding into screaming and the water closing around, sun overcome by night, wind and water bleeding into darkness and screams.

Her screaming while her parents kept sinking, sliding from her grasp, she was spinning, screaming, reaching, the night sea devouring them, her, screaming no no NO NO . . .

Kate awoke in a cold sweat, throat tight from remembered screams, heart racing, breathing almost impossible, her radio alarm shrill in her ears.

Just a dream,
she told herself.

Just another nightmare.

She should be used to them by now. She’d had them since the night her parents died. Since she hadn’t been able to save them from the ravenous sea.

Night diving was dangerous.

And now she was headed back to her greatest failure, her greatest fear.

H
OLDEN CAMERON SURVEYED
the interior of St. Vincent’s modest airport with the eyes of a world traveler who had lived and worked in war zones. Instinctively he searched for danger in the body language of the people around him. He didn’t expect any, but had learned that the unexpected was a killer.

You’re medically retired now,
he reminded himself.
You’re a bloody consultant.

And you’re walking into a family of thieves.

A smart man would be wary. Holden hadn’t survived this long by being dumb. And if he needed any reminder, the stabbing ache in his left thigh obliged. The scar from the shrapnel wound had faded somewhat, but pressure changes caused by flying or especially diving played merry hell with him.

Idly he rubbed his thigh and wondered which one of the Vincentians who eddied through the arrival lounge would be his native guide. Most of the people were dressed in loose, colorful clothes that allowed them to be comfortable in St. Vincent’s unvarying heat. The only exception was the silver-haired, transparently pale Englishman who had boarded the plane with him at Heathrow.

Poor bastard will get heatstroke. Canary Wharf suits don’t work well with St. Vincent’s climate, but appearances have to be kept up whilst living among the natives and all that utter rot.

With faint amusement, Holden’s glance moved past the man, searching the faces of the people who were searching the faces of the people getting off the plane. Nobody seemed interested in him. He stepped aside from the main flow of traffic. Back to a wall, he watched and waited for someone to care, never taking his attention from the people milling about.

Almost everyone in St. Vincent’s airport had hair as black as his, but considerably more curly. With it came the many shades of skin that resulted from hundreds of years of intermarriage between Europeans and the Africans who had once been slaves. What genetics began, the tropical sun burnished. The music in the voices was soothing, like the lapping of the sea on a moonlit shore.

The glow of deep auburn hair caught his attention. The woman was casually dressed and subtly anxious. Her hair was sleek, pulled back into a ponytail, and looked natural rather than dyed. Wisps of hair curled gently in the humidity, clinging to her face and neck. Her curves would have done credit to an exotic dancer. Her skin was pale, with just enough freckles to tempt him into touching and tasting.

Though Holden liked women of all shapes, colors, and sizes, he’d always had a weakness for redheads. Eyes that were the luminous turquoise of tropical shallows glanced at him, hesitated, then moved on, still searching.

Pity,
he thought, looking at the redhead from behind his mirrored sunglasses.
I’d love to spend a few weeks lazing on the island with her, discovering and licking each freckle. But I’m here to oversee a scurvy lot of divers who appear to be keeping more than they should.

Human greed, as reliable as gravity.

Shifting to ease the weight off his bad leg, he waited, watching. If nobody showed up, it would be one among many demerits in the file of Moon Rose Ltd.

The crowd swirled, shifted, and eddied like richly colored water.

Kate kept searching for a pale-skinned Brit, but saw no likely candidates.

Did he miss the plane?
she thought, then instantly rejected the idea.

Accountants were precise. It came with the job. More likely, Larry had fouled up the arrival hour, or even day. Divers had their own way of keeping time. She and her brother had been born and raised aboard the
Golden Bough,
but she was able to shift gears to match whichever culture she found herself in. Larry . . . well, Larry liked the idea that time was divided into later, much later, and never.

Again she searched among the Europeans who had arrived. The man leaning against the wall, watching the crowd through mirrored sunglasses, was too fit and had too much physical presence to make a convincing accountant. The man in the tropical suit and big belly was speaking what sounded like Russian, not London English. Another man had a flashy playmate hanging from his arm, English speaker by way of the Bronx. The pale, thin man in the heavy suit was diffident, searching for someone, and looked old enough to be her grandfather.

Her attention kept wandering back to the man leaning against the wall. He had drawn a lot of female glances, but he greeted no one. His dark blue shirt was short-sleeved and square at the bottom, meant to be worn outside his khakis pants. Two waterproof duffels lay at his feet. Without moving, he dominated the place. His features were an unusual mixture of strength and refinement, his face oddly Celtic, his skin a silky dark honey.

Wonder what color his eyes are,
she thought.

Then she mentally shook herself. She had only been on the island long enough to get her baggage and stow it in the old VW pickup Larry had left in the parking lot. Yet she already had succumbed to the lazy sensuality of St. Vincent, where the language was music, the temperature was made for bare skin, and the surface of the sea was always warm.

The sea.

Kate rubbed the cold bumps that rippled over her skin. Abruptly she made her choice. The pale man might be older than she had expected, but the rest of the package looked right. He was standing about ten feet from the intriguing man with the two duffel bags.

The gray-haired, gaunt man was beginning to look worried. His eyes were a vague blue. The weight of his suit appeared on the edge of taking him down.

“Welcome to St. Vincent, Mr. Holden,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Kate Donnelly, from Moon Rose Limited. I was told to meet you here.”

The gentleman pressed her hand lightly and smiled. “Very kind of you, but there seems to be a mistake. I am meeting my daughter-in-law here.” He scanned the crowd briefly. “Ah, there she is.”

Bemused, Kate watched as an ebony-skinned woman embraced the smiling Englishman. He returned the hug and began asking eagerly after his grandchildren.

Okay. Wrong guy,
Kate thought.

“Pardon me,” said a deep voice from behind her. “I couldn’t help but overhear.” The accent was upper-class British with something else just beneath. “I am waiting for someone from Moon Rose Limited.”

She turned around and reminded herself to breathe. It was the man who didn’t look at all like an accountant. “I’m Kate Donnelly. Moon Rose is owned by my family.”

“At your service.”

If only,
she thought. But what she said was, “You’re the accountant from the British government. Are you here to replace the other Brit aboard?”

“Not quite. My understanding is that Farnsworth is to remain on hand to catalog the results of each dive. I am a consultant on dive projects. My job is to see that everything is in good order.”

“My mistake. Good to meet you, Mr. Holden,” she said, taking his offered hand with a firm American shake and quick release. She had learned that it was expected in business.

And this was business all the way.

Then he took off his sunglasses and she forgot about proper office manners. He had the most striking eyes she had ever seen, like shards of blue and green and gold crystal had been turned in a kaleidoscope and then frozen in place.

“The name is Holden Cameron.”

It took her a moment to understand. “Sorry. I was just given the name C. Holden. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cameron.”

He shrugged slightly and put on his sunglasses again. “Pity that pleasure and business don’t mix. But they don’t, and there it is.”

All righty,
she thought.
Business and only business. You could use that voice to refrigerate the entire island.

“Any luggage beyond the duffels?” she asked.

“No. I’ll be here only long enough to see whether I should recommend shutting this project down.”

“You might be surprised at how well the dive is going,” she said, lying coolly, covering the fear that she had arrived too late to do any good.

All he said was, “Shall we begin?”

It was an order, not a request.

Kate set her teeth. The first man she had seen in ages who might tempt her out of sexual hibernation had blood the temperature of the ocean one hundred feet down.

“Sooner begun, sooner ended,” she said under her breath. Then, “Follow me.”

As she headed for the door to the sunbaked parking lot, she wondered how the British ice cube with the startling eyes would stand up to conditions on a dive ship.

That’s Larry’s problem.

And I can’t wait to hand it to him.

Without looking back to see if the “accountant” was coming after her, she cut through the diminishing clumps of people and headed toward the parking lot.

Holden found it easy to follow the woman with flame in her hair and beautiful, wary eyes. She had a motion to her walk that brought every one of his male senses to predatory alert. He wondered if she might be a red herring meant to distract him from getting to the bottom of whatever lay beneath Moon Rose’s sketchy accounting and pitiable salvage recovery. The idea appealed—sex was a useful weapon.

But the more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. She had been friendly in a casual American way, yet when he had gone into his right-British-bastard routine, she had retreated with a finality that put paid to any flirtation.

Pity my job requires that I be a stiff prick,
Holden thought ruefully,
but divers are a hard-shouldered lot. They don’t respect any man who isn’t like them.

Holden should know. He was one of them.

Or had been.

He followed Kate’s gently swaying hips outside where the air was hot, humid, and heavily scented with a mix of tropical plants and petroleum fumes from idling taxis. Violently green shrubs overflowed with pink and purple flowers. Stands of palm trees framed the colorfully painted airport building, filtering sunlight through crisply cut, fanlike leaves.

The partial shade was short-lived. Holden was sweating before he reached the bleached gray asphalt of the parking lot. While the temperature wasn’t nearly as hot as the deserts of northern Africa, the humidity was an unwelcome blanket. He knew he would stop noticing the humidity after a few hours or days, so he ignored it now. Sweat was a fact of life, like the ache in his thigh or his uncommon eyes.

“Throw your duffels in the back,” Kate said.

He eyed the unimpressive transportation. He wasn’t surprised that the doors were unlocked and the windows rolled down. No self-respecting thief would steal the ancient truck. The hood was a different color from the truck bed, the tires were bald, the tailgate was missing, the doors were mismatched, and the whole lot was as faded as the asphalt.

Kate’s smile was all teeth. “Grandpa only puts money into things that float or dive.”

Holden lifted both black eyebrows, lowered his bags into the back of the truck near a smallish, rusty toolbox that had been welded to the truck bed. He searched for cargo straps, but the best he could find was a rope that had once seen hard duty at sea. With a few deft knots, he secured the duffels.

She saw what he was doing, thought about telling him that she wouldn’t be going fast enough to shake anything out, then simply got into the steaming cab and started the engine. After four tries, the engine backfired a cloud of diesel smoke and settled into a reliably uneven rhythm.