Chapter 1 – Dani
The dolphin calls blaring from the speaker of my cellphone meant the sun would be up in fifteen minutes. It also meant that I had less than that to get my butt out of bed and get ready for a day of snorkeling lessons and excursions with local tourists.
“Fuck me,” I mumbled, grabbing the phone and killing the alarm. A little too much rum and too little sleep was not productive for early mornings. It didn't seem to matter. I knew that I would be doing the same thing tomorrow morning and the next. This was island life and no matter how much I hated it at that particular moment, I loved it.
The mutt of a dog I'd saved from a shelter seven years ago lifted his head off the bed for all of two seconds to watch me. Riptide, or Rip for short, was something mixed with a Labrador and he had zero cares about me getting out of bed that morning. I knew that by the time I returned home from work that afternoon he'd be wagging his tail with excitement. He was the only one who understood what loyalty was.
I shuffled my feet across the cold tile floors of my tiny little shack—the sand I'd carried in from the beach over the course of five years stuck to my skin. I hit the brew button on my coffee pot and jumped into the shower. The cool water cascaded over me and I wished I’d set my alarm for earlier. As it was, there wasn’t even enough time to let the water heat up. The cold water jarred me half-awake and washed the remnants of the day before from my body. It served its purpose. Besides, I'd be in the warm ocean water and wide awake in no time.
Taking tourists on tame excursions wasn't the goal I'd had in mind when I first became a diver, but at least I was in the ocean. Every trip I took and every paycheck I put in savings got me one step closer to buying my own boat and doing what I really wanted to do—treasure hunting.
I didn't waste time dwelling on the past or the fact that I'd had all the necessary equipment to find La Noche Estrellada not so long ago. I didn't dwell on feeling like I'd lost the only family I'd ever really known and now it was just me. Or the fact that a certain someone had shattered my heart into a million pieces when he decided to leave and dash the dreams I'd had since I was a little girl. Nope. Didn't dwell one damn bit...
As soon as I was out of the shower, I threw on one of the seventy-eight swimsuits I owned, tossed some cut-off jeans shorts and a Reef Seekers tank over it, let Rip out to do his business, grabbed my coffee, and was out the door. My hair was still damp and already starting to curl a bit from the humidity that constantly hung in the air. I breathed it in, welcoming the sea, salt, and sand.
My cell phone buzzed from the back pocket of my shorts. I half-expected it to be one of my bosses. Reef Seekers was the small operation I was hired by when The Spindrift left me high and dry. It wasn't the greatest place to work, especially considering the idiot brothers that owned it, but I did what I had to do. Thankfully it wasn’t either of them texting me. Small miracles.
Cal: Meet me for dinner tonight. I have something you need to see.
Me: This had better not be some sad attempt to get me to sleep with you.
Callum and I had struck up a friendship when we'd worked together on The Spindrift. Despite our mutual attempts at flirtation over the past few years, the two of us had never veered off of our platonic path. We should have. We were both single and attractive. Cal might just have been the island's most eligible bachelor, not that he noticed.
But as long as I'd known him he'd always been about the hunt. About the shipwrecks. About the history. He might afford himself a random hookup from time to time, but it was never more than that for him. He was unassumingly handsome with sandy blond hair and always wearing at least a day’s worth of stubble. He was kind, funny, in great shape—none of which was lost on me. He was the perfect package, complete with a sexy British accent that had every girl on the island practically dropping her bikini bottoms when he spoke to them.
Cal and I would have made perfect sense, but it would never be. We were better as friends. Something I think both of us valued more than anything else. My love life was practically non-existent as it was. Not that I was interested in anyone in particular, but if they were from Islamorada, there was a good chance they knew my ex. If they did, there was an even bigger chance that they'd steer clear of me. My hook-ups were limited to tourists.
Dylan McKendrie may have left town, but his presence was still alive and well on our little island. I'd somehow been branded Dylan's girl during our brief time together and no matter how much I tried to prove otherwise, the locals didn't forget.
Cal: You wish.
Me: Get over yourself.
Cal: I promise that what I have will turn you on even more. ;-)
Me: Fine. I'll meet you at eight. Mad Dog's?
Cal: Perfect.
My schedule was full and I barely had five minutes to wolf down a sandwich between tours. But the entire time I was leading newlyweds and retirees around the reef—pointing out blowfish and making sure they didn't drown—I couldn't stop thinking about what Cal had to show me. I was going to be thoroughly pissed if it wasn't something worth his teasing. He knew how serious I was when it came to shipwrecks. Well, one in particular. There was one that I wanted more than any other.
La Noche Estrellada.
There wasn't much that I took from my family. I never knew my mother, so she had contributed nothing besides the nine months it took for me to grow. She'd handed me off to my father and bailed as soon as the doctor signed the discharge papers.
My father tried to give me more. He was part Spaniard and part whatever ethnicity had muddled our genealogy over the years. He was a good man with some very bad habits that eventually landed him in some hot water with some very bad people. The last time I saw him he told me that he loved me and left me in the care of my grandmother. I always wondered what happened to him because he never came back. My grandmother gave me a good life, but when I was seven she passed, leaving me alone with a couple of Spanish souvenirs—my coloring and my name, Daniella Alvarez. A name that made me seem a lot more Latina than I was. In all actuality, I was just a run of the mill Midwestern girl raised in Chicago with dark hair and a fiery attitude who was known as Dani to most.
It was the family stories my grandmother often told me—one in particular—that I was grateful for. The story of my ancestor, Francesca Alvarez. She was the daughter of a Spanish admiral who, like me, had grown up without her mother. She'd sailed with her father on a ship called La Noche Estrellada, translation: The Starry Night. A ship that was only ever mentioned by my grandmother; who on her best day, might still have been deemed loco en la cabeza. I believed her though—even if she was talking about a ship that was completely fictitious as far as experts were concerned. I knew it was real. It had to be.
The Spanish Fleets that sailed around the world collecting treasures in the eighteenth century had unaccounted ships join them all the time. The ship my grandmother had mentioned could have very well been real. According to her stories, Francesca and her lover had stolen the ship out from under her father's watchful eye and sailed off to spend their lives together, taking the excess of the King's bounty with them. Gold, rubies, emeralds and other riches that I couldn't even begin to imagine. It just so happened that they sailed off together into a hurricane that sank the majority of the 1733 fleet a few days later.
I'd succumbed to the idea that even if I never found it, at least Francesca and her boat had led me to the one thing, the one place, that I loved more than anything.
Bouncing from foster home to foster home to, eventually, a group home as a kid in the inner city of Chicago, not too many folks were supportive of the idea that I wanted to be a deep sea diver. I was always that little girl holding her breath in the bathtub, trying to beat her previous time, or the one that refused to get out of the public swimming pool. Everyone thought I was crazy, but when I turned eighteen and set off for The Keys, I knew I was going to be exactly what I'd said. And I did it. Scuba certified in no time at all and in the ocean where I belonged. The salt water was in my veins, seasoning my blood permanently.
After I finished work for the day, I hopped in the shower again and then pulled on a loose fitting, white linen dress over a turquoise bikini. I was always prepared to go in the water, like most of the people who called Islamorada home. Flip-flops and swimsuits were our uniforms. And if my night ended with me wanting to take a midnight dip in the ocean, I was ready. I couldn't remember the last time I'd worn a bra and panties. The constricting thought made me shudder as I walked along the pier to meet Callum. I was a free spirit. Going in any direction with no rules and little regulations. I was the ocean.
Mad Dog's was a small bar and grill that sat on the east side of the island. A tourist trap on most days, but it was off-season so it wasn't as crowded. Just locals and a handful of vacationers that were brave enough to stay here during hurricane season.
“This had better be good,” I told Cal, forgoing a formal greeting, and wanting to get down the point.
His sun bleached hair and tanned skin definitely contradicted his bookworm mentality. It was good to see that he hadn't been spending his every waking hour in the stacks of old books and documents he was always eager to comb through. He'd been hired to run the museum started by a salvage team that had put their findings on display. He was often cataloging already found treasures and giving spiels about ships that you could Google and get your fill of, but during his time off he searched for something—anything—that provided information about the boat no one believed existed. The boat we'd all spent the better part of two years trying to find.
“Oh it is,” he said with a warm smile as I pulled out a chair and joined him at the corner table he'd secured for us. I wondered why he didn't just grab us a couple stools at the bar. The two of us didn't usually sit at a table. “I'll explain it all just as soon as...” His words trailed off with his eyes. I followed his line of sight to the very reason we were sitting at a table. We weren't a party of two. We were a party of three. Party of four if you counted the tension that followed Dylan McKendrie across the bar.
A hot sensation ran from my head to my toes as I watched him walk towards us. I assured myself it was anger, but the tightening in the pit of my stomach said it could have been something else altogether.
“What is he doing here?” I mumbled in Cal's direction as Dylan approached. He didn't have time to answer before the timber of Dylan's voice sent an icy shiver across my heated skin.
“Let's get this over with.”
His hair and eyes were hidden by a weathered ball cap with The Spindrift logo emblazoned on the front it, but I could feel him staring at me. The tight stretch of his T-shirt across his chest and toned arms said he was still in the salvage game.
For a split second, I pictured him in all his masculine glory running the deck of The Spindrift. His firm grip on the steel cord of the wench, hauling up whatever it was he'd found on the ocean floor. The muscles of his back and shoulders flexing as he directed metal and iron effortlessly out of the water and onto the boat. I could practically feel the heat radiating off of him as I envisioned him sticky from sweat and seawater. My mouth on the other hand was as dry as the Sahara.
I bit down on my bottom lip, trying to ward off any fantasies I had about watching Dylan McKendrie work. I knew what his hands were capable of and my body was quick to remind me that I'd thoroughly enjoyed being manhandled by those very same hands at one time in my life.
His lips were just as full as I remembered, but missing the sun-scorned pink I was used to. His skin wasn't nearly as tanned and his hair, what little I could see of it, seemed darker. He was the same, yet different. The cold Northern air had hardened him. I really wished it had made him less attractive, but unfortunately he seemed to be able to pull off the look of any climate.
When he reached up and tilted his hat back enough to lock his gaze on mine I swallowed hard. The same ocean blue eyes that I used to think could see into my soul stared back at me. This time laced with contempt.
What the fuck?
He had a lot of damn nerve coming back to my island and looking at me like I did something wrong. He was the one who left.
“Oh, hey... good to see you, Cal. How have you been man?” Cal said as he tried to dilute the situation with humor, but I could tell by the nervous laugh that followed that he knew it wasn't working. “It would be nice if at least one of you would act like you were happy to see me.”
“Whatever it is that you have to show me better be worth it,” I seethed at Callum while tearing my attention from Dylan. I waved at the waitress to let her know I was ready for a drink. Maybe ten. “Let's get on with it.”
“Okay. Okay.” Cal shook his head, pulling a rolled up piece of paper from his back pocket and smoothing it across the table that Dylan and I were settled on opposites sides of. Dylan's arms crossed his chest as he stared intently at what Callum had asked us here to see. “I think I found a lead on our ship.”