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.
After a few hard bangs with her fist, the glove box opened. The map to the rented house was primitive, but combined with what she had looked up online this morning, she wouldn’t get lost.
Finally her cheerless guest abandoned his baggage and got into the passenger seat. The truck settled deep into its worn suspension. Surprisingly deep.
He must be all bone and muscle, she thought. I think his kind of consultant is called a troubleshooter. Real bullets optional.
“Do you dive?” she asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you’re really solid. Divers don’t have much body fat. They burn it off.”
“Interesting,” he said.
The call of voices and piercing cry of birds filled what otherwise would have been the silence following his neutral comment.
What a fascinating conversationalist, she thought. Boy, is this going to be a fun drive. Let’s see, maybe fifteen minutes to the side of town, and another mile to the rental.
She shifted gears, let out the clutch, and drove slowly onto the airport road.
“Is it long to the ship?” Holden asked.
“Depends on Larry’s dive schedule.”
“Why?”
“He’s picking you up at the cottage the company rented for your friend. The rental itself is about a ten-minute walk from the fuel dock, chandlery, and commercial marina Larry uses. This isn’t a big island.”
The fact that Holden followed her elliptical conversation told Kate he was a lot smarter than the average diver.
“Malcolm Farnsworth is a contract employee, as I am,” Holden said. “I don’t know the man personally, much less call him a friend.”
“How unsurprising.”
Something close to a smile disturbed Holden’s features, but all he said was, “I thought Farnsworth was staying aboard the Golden Bough.”
She shrugged. “Larry would know. I just got here.”
“That explains it.”
She to
ld herself she wasn’t going to ask, but she did. “Explains what?”
“Pale skin. Hard to maintain in the tropics, unless you only go about at night.”
“Sorry to disappoint. No vampire blood in the Donnelly family.”
He looked sideways at her. “How terribly ordinary.”
“Certainly makes our lives easier. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a diving vampire.”
Something that could have been a smile changed the line of Holden’s lips. “Do you know how long it is to the rental?”
“No. But again, it’s a small island.”
Five minutes and a lot of greenery went by, broken by occasional brilliant views of the ocean.
“Is it always this warm here?” he asked.
“You’d have to ask a tourism minister. I haven’t been here for years.”
“But you’re one of the diving Donnellys, correct?”
“I don’t dive anymore.” Her tone of voice didn’t encourage questions.
Holden thought about pursuing it. Until he had met her in the airport, there had been no mention of anyone called Kate Donnelly being on the payroll or on board the dive ship Golden Bough. He would have to ask the Antiquities Office for more information.
“Couldn’t take the calloused hands and bad hearing?” he asked. “Or was it the nerve damage that put you off diving?”
“I was a careful diver. No damage.”
“You must have quit young.”
“Young enough.”
“So you won’t be suffering dysbaric osteonecrosis either,” Holden said. “A wise choice.”
“I understood about half of that,” she said. “Osteo. Bone. You mean arthritis? A lot of divers end up with it. Grandpa has his share. Are you a doctor?” She glanced at him, then back to the road.
“Diving can lead to arthritis,” Holden said. “Sometimes it just leads to a joint replacement due to bone death, hence the name ‘osteonecrosis.’ And no, I’m not a doctor, but I know my way around underwater operations. Otherwise I would be rather useless for this job.”
That this was his first and only civilian job since he’d been injured was a fact that he kept to himself. The people in Antiquities had conferred with the military doctor and deemed him competent to consult on salvage diving, especially as it had been made clear he was to find reasons to shut down the dive. No diving would be expected of him.
Holden wasn’t unhappy with that. He had been diving enough since the mishap to assure himself that the injury was manageable underwater. Hurt like a bitch, but he could dive.
Kate slowed to match speeds with a tourist bus. It was painted bright green and looked like a giant beetle crawling around the road. Sticking out of open windows, a scattering of hands waved in the breeze like flowers reaching toward the Caribbean sun.
As the silence stretched, she decided that being nice hadn’t worked, so she’d move on to direct.
“My brother wasn’t very clear about what your job is, so I don’t know what kind of information you need.”
“Call me a dive consultant.”
“Grandpa and Larry could be called dive consultants,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. “What is your specific purpose?”
“To evaluate the operation. Surely your brother mentioned that they have precious little to show for all their diving. AO—the Antiquities Office—sent me to plug the money holes, as it were. Our weather people are predicting at least one good gale within the week. There is no point to keeping a losing project on standby while the weather sorts itself out.”
“According to the receipts I’ve seen,” she said carefully, “there are no ‘money holes’ except the normal expenses of any dive.”
Holden considered pointing out the obvious—he had been sent out because incompetence or theft or both were suspected—but decided to save that little gem for another time. From the files he had been given, Moon Rose Ltd. was one buggered operation.
Too bad, how sad, and failure is more common than success, he thought. The nondiving member of the Donnelly clan could be the most beautiful woman ever born and it wouldn’t change the outcome. Every dive the department underwrites must produce profit or prestige, and profit is preferred.
“If there are no money holes, there is no problem for me to find,” he said.
The rest of the drive was completed in silence but for the wind rushing through open windows and the occasional cry of birds.
The rental was on land the jungle had pretty much reclaimed from whatever agricultural use had been its previous life. As required in a tropical paradise, the beach sand was a blinding white in the sun, the palms were elegantly graceful, and the sea clear and gentle. St. Vincent had quite a few black sand beaches, compliments of its resident volcano, but this rental wasn’t on one of them.
Kate stopped the rattling truck at the end of dirt ruts that served as a driveway. She made it a point not to look at the water. Smelling it, hearing the seabirds—that was enough.
Too much.
She gripped the wheel with clammy hands and concentrated on her breathing. Without driving to distract her, the reality of where she was kept pulling at her like a cold undertow.
Holden gave the scenery a sweeping glance that missed nothing, lingering over the canted floating dock and the aluminum workboat loosely moored to it. There was a faint path from the house—barely a cottage, really—to the dock. Off to the back of the property there was nothing but tangles of vines, shrubs, and trees.
The dwelling itself was rustic to the point of dilapidation. If the exterior wood had ever been painted, it had worn away. The foundation looked like a kind of cement mixed locally by unskilled labor. The roof had been shingled once; now it was a patchwork of corrugated tin pieces nailed on whenever and wherever a leak became a problem.
Without a word Kate got out, took the cartons of bookkeeping from the bed of the truck, and walked up the rocky, overgrown path to the front. The door was unlocked. She stashed the boxes inside the house. A quick look around told her that the furnishings were as shabby as the house. At least the electricity worked, if the loud hum of the refrigerator was any indication.
She shrugged. Knowing her grandfather and the financial problems of his salvage company, she hadn’t been expecting the Ritz. With a little more exploration she found two tiny bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchenette. The back door led to the jungle.
When she returned to the truck for her luggage, Holden was still studying the house and its surroundings from behind his mirrored sunglasses.
“It’s not much,” she said, “but it will get the job done. The bedroom at the back has two bunk beds. You and your fellow employee can share.”
“I’ve stayed in worse,” was all he said.
“Such confidence. You haven’t even seen the inside.”
“Irrelevant. I’ll be bunking on the Golden Bough.”
Kate hesitated, remembering her brother’s comment about how crowded the ship was. Then she decided that where Holden slept was Larry’s problem. All she cared about was that she was staying on land. Period. With a little effort and a lot of concentration on cleaning up Larry’s laughable bookkeeping, she would hardly know she was within breathing distance of her nightmare.
And if she told herself that often enough, she might really believe it.
Holden met her at the front door, holding her luggage. “Which room?” he asked.
“The one with a single bed, thank you.”
Kate watched his easy stride as he walked down the narrow hall and thought again that it was too bad such a nice package was wrapped around a block of ice. Then her eye caught the piece of paper held to the tiny refrigerator with a garish fish magnet.
Hi, sis,
Welcome back. Diving rotation got changed. Bring him to the ship, okay?
L
She read the note three times before the roaring in her ears eased and she remembered to breathe.
He can’t do this to me!
But he had.
CHAPTER 2
KATE’S FIRST IMPULSE was to grab her luggage and head back to the airport—and to hell with the family business. But she had fled once, years ago. She was still running. No matter how tempting at the moment, in the long run giving in to fear wasn’t going to get her anywhere she wanted to be.
She blew out a hard breath, breathed in deeply, and repeated until her head no longer felt like it would explode.
It’s calm and sunny. Even the trade winds have taken a vacation, just like they always do in August and September. I was operating workboats when I was eight. I can do it now. That’s one of the reasons I came back, right? To get over what happened. To stop waking up screaming in the middle of the night.
She kept breathing, waiting for it to become automatic again.
Holden walked into the kitchenette and saw Kate standing stiff and motionless, her fist clenched around what looked like a piece of paper.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Just peaches and cream,” she said through clenched teeth. I’m so going to kill my brother.
Holden raised both black eyebrows and said nothing.
“Looks like you won’t have to wait for Larry to pick you up after all,” she said, throwing the note into a small trash can. “I’ll take you to the Golden Bough now. Right now.” Before I go from fury to fear.
“Excellent,” he said.
And he wondered why she looked angry and fierce and afraid, like a cornered animal.
While he went to the truck for his duffels, she grabbed a wind shell and a sun hat from her luggage. He fell in behind her as she marched down to the dock. Although her shoulders were rigid, her ease on the uneven, wobbly dock told him that she was hardly new to the movement of water under her feet. It was the same for her graceful step from dock to the gunwale, and then down to the open cabin of the boat.
Holden glanced at the aluminum workboat. It was between five and six meters long, powered by two muscular outboard engines, and driven from a forward cabin that was little more that two bench seats with backrests and a windscreen. A fuel compartment filled the area under the stern bench. Various permanent clamps and anchors for ties studded the cargo area. Most were in use, holding down everything from compressed air tanks to fuel and food, waiting to be ferried to the Golden Bough.