Thirty-five

Thank God for physics, Annie thought. The resistance of the water gave her the time she needed to evade the knife blow that was meant for her neck.

Sofie reached for her, swiping with the knife again, but Annie pushed off against her, sending them both backward in opposite directions. Annie felt one of the metal walls behind her and knew she had to think of something fast. Sofie had dropped the knife in the struggle, but she was reaching for something.

Oh God, a gun. They were about ten feet apart. Annie had watched a MythBusters episode where they’d shot a couple of different-sized bullets underwater. One had died in three feet and one in eight feet. She wasn’t going to count on the right equation of distance, depth, and caliber.

She’d lost hold of the finger spool in the struggle, but located it quickly. Swallowing the fear, she reached for the line with one hand while diving to the debris on the bottom to stir it up.

An instant later, the water filled with silt, cutting off visibility completely. It was like being in a pool of mud.

This was how people died, she thought to herself. A silt-out could create terror and panic in even the most experienced divers. Even with the line in her hand, Annie felt fear crawling up her throat, and her heart racing to escape.

But she forced it back and slowly used the line to guide herself out of the wreck.

Every second, she half expected Sofie to come lurching out of the murky water toward her.

She really needed to stop watching scary movies.

She thought she could sense someone flailing around near her, but she couldn’t be sure.

She reached the end of the line and knew the broken windows were above her. The visibility was better, and she was able to feel around to find the opening.

She started to go through but quickly realized she’d made a mistake. It was the wrong opening—a smaller one—and now she was stuck.

But that wasn’t the only disaster. What she’d thought was panic whistling in her head was actually the sound of escaping air. She lifted her air pressure gauge to see the needle dropping way too fast. Her air tube had been cut or damaged. Sofie must have nicked it with the knife.

She kicked again, trying to untangle herself or force her way through. But she could only move a few inches in either direction. Her tank was hooked on something.

Don’t panic. Don’t think about how much air you have left. But the “stay calm” reminders weren’t working. She tried to reach around to untangle herself, but her efforts only seemed to make it worse.

How long would the silt take to settle? Would it matter or would she already be out of air? Bullet or suffocation, in the end it didn’t matter.

She fought against the urge to take deeper and deeper breaths of air, but she knew she was running out of time.

She was going to die.

The panic was harder to keep at bay, which was why at first she thought she imagined the person swimming toward her.

She had to be imagining it because the person wasn’t wearing a wet suit.

It was only when he was close enough for her to look into his mask that she realized she wasn’t imagining anything.

It was Dan.

Dean, she corrected. He was here. He’d come back. He’d found her.

If she had any air left, she would have exhaled with relief. But she was literally sucking on fumes.

He was trying to ask her what was wrong, but she was too panicked to remember any hand signals. Fortunately he grabbed her pressure gauge and figured out what was going on.

Pulling the regulator from his mouth, he handed it to her. In her haste she almost took in a mouthful of water along with the air that she greedily sucked in. She tried to hand it back to him, but he shook her off and went to work on her tangled equipment.

He unbuckled the waist belt and helped her shrug off the vest, eventually slipping the tank off her shoulders.

Why hadn’t she thought of that? Panic had prevented her from thinking straight.

He pulled her through the opening, and she was free. The relief was overwhelming. A million questions were racing through her mind, but the only thing she could think was that he was here, and she’d never been so glad to see anyone in her life.

She handed him the regulator again. He took a quick breath this time, shaking his head when she tried to force him to keep it for longer. He looked totally calm. Totally in control. As if he could hold his breath and go without air indefinitely. Maybe he could.

SEALs, she thought ruefully. They were inhuman. And maybe that wasn’t always a bad thing. The world needed men like him. She needed him. Without him she’d be dead. Maybe there was something to be said for superheroes after all.

The water was his territory. She knew SEALs were trained to be just as comfortable underwater as they were on the surface, and she was seeing proof positive of that.

He made a few signals with his hand, and her head had cleared enough to know what he was asking. He wanted to know where the other woman was. Annie pointed down in the ship and put her hand in front of her mask, hoping to indicate a silt-out.

He nodded, and they started to swim away from the wreck toward the surface. Dean was at her side, holding her arm as if he wasn’t ever going to let go of her—which was pretty much fine by her.

He’d made her feel like that before, but somehow she knew this was different.

He’d come for her.

She felt a swell of happiness rise inside her before it was harshly jerked back. Someone had her by the fin.

•   •   •

Dean didn’t need to tell himself scary stories—he lived through enough real ones—but he couldn’t stop thinking what would have happened had he been a few minutes later.

He could have lost her. He hadn’t. But knowing how close he’d been . . .

He had a sick feeling in his chest that moved between panic and wanting to throw up. He was surprised to feel anything through the bone-numbing cold. He needed to get out of this water soon. His hands were already like clubs.

The unbearable cold coupled with the overwhelming sense of relief at finding her turned his operational awareness to shit. That was how one minute Annie was at his side, and the next she was yanked from his hold.

He looked down to see the wild-eyed face through the mask of the woman from the photo. She was clearly in a rage and dragging Annie down with one hand while waving a gun through the water with the other.

Oh, fuck. She’s going to shoot.

That was the only thought he had as he dove between them, putting his body between the gun and Annie.

He heard the shot and then felt the impact. But he didn’t feel pain, and realized from a pinging sound that the bullet had hit his tank. As the tank didn’t shoot off like a missile—or explode if you believed Jaws—the bullet must not have penetrated the metal.

He pushed Annie out of the way as the woman waved the gun around wildly toward him again. But he’d already reached for the gun he’d tucked in his pants.

It wouldn’t have been a contest if he wasn’t so fucking cold, but his icy fingers and frozen brain made it closer than he would have liked. His bullet hit her right between the eyes a split second before she fired. She might have hit him, if Annie hadn’t distracted her. Annie had lunged toward the woman with her dive knife, but it was too late. The last signs of life were already fading from the woman’s frozen-forever-in-surprise eyes.

Dean quickly located the regulator and held it out to Annie. She took a few breaths before pushing it back toward him. He’d been without air for a couple of minutes and didn’t argue.

He forced himself to breathe normally. Having been here too many times before was the only thing that prevented him from sucking it in. He handed it back to her and slowly they ascended, stopping once to trade breaths.

When they finally broke through the surface, Dean half expected them to be surrounded by police. He was relieved to see that they were alone. His “borrowed” transportation had floated toward a small islet, but the dive boat and Annie’s fellow divers had returned to shore. He could see why. The police chopper had finally arrived and must have radioed the kid to come get them to bring them out.

But Dean didn’t give a shit about the police. He yanked off his mask, tossed it in the water next to him, and pulled her into his arms.

She was alive. That was all that mattered.

Thank God, he’d arrived in time. But it would be some time before the image of her gasping for breath and trying not to panic faded from his memory. He was too torn up to say anything—emotion stuck in his throat like a logjam.

He was glad that she’d lifted off her mask, because it made it easier when he kissed her—kissed the hell out of her. It was as if all the emotion, all the bundled-up tension, all the panic and fear gave loose in a fierce—savage—explosion of need. He’d almost lost her, and he wasn’t ever going to let that happen again.

She was kissing him back with the same ferocity. A tangle of lips, tongues, and salt water. Frigid salt water.

He wanted to go on kissing her forever, but he had to get out of this water. He pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Hit pause until we get on the boat.”

Her eyes flew open. “Oh my God, you must be freezing. I wasn’t thinking . . .” Her voice cracked. “How did you know I was in trouble?”

“I’ll tell you everything when we get on that boat.”

Normally he could swim the distance of a football field in just under a minute. But the fifteen minutes or so that he’d been in the icy water had sapped his strength and turned his limbs to bricks. The increasingly choppy waters didn’t help, either. It was a good five minutes before he was climbing the ladder onto his borrowed speedboat and reaching down to help Annie up.

But her head was turned toward the pier. The dive boat had just left the harbor and was making its way toward them, presumably with the police on board.

She turned back to him and shook her head, refusing to climb aboard. “You have to go, Dean. You can’t let them find you.”

“I’m not going to leave you—” Suddenly he stopped, staring down at her in shock. “How do you know my name?”

“I guess you haven’t seen the paper today. The reporter doing those lost platoon stories posted a photo of her brother and a few of his friends. It was hard to make out your faces, but you weren’t wearing a shirt, and I . . . uh . . .” How the hell was she blushing in ice-cold water? “I knew it was you.”

He wasn’t going to ask her how. Not right now at least. Not while he wasn’t naked and she couldn’t show him.

“That’s why you’re hiding,” she said. “You’re part of the SEAL platoon that she said disappeared.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“I assume you have a good reason, and you’ll tell me what you can when it’s safe.” She stared up at him, her expression suddenly uncertain. “I’ll wait for you—if you want me to.”

He reached down the ladder and pulled her on board. She’d probably be pissed off later at his high-handedness, but he’d make it up to her. He thought of all kinds of ways he was going to make it up to her, and he felt a spark of warmth pulsing through his frigid veins.

“Want you to? Fuck yes, I want you to.” He pulled her in tight against his body to emphasize his point. He’d give everything he had right now to strip off his wet jeans and her wet suit. But she was right. He had to go.

For now.

“I wasn’t sure,” she admitted. “I didn’t know why you came back. How did you know I’d be in danger?”

He gave her a twenty-second recap of what they’d found out about OPF and Jean Paul’s death. She was clearly shocked.

“Short-selling? Blowing up the drillship was about money?”

He nodded. “When I learned that the woman who’d killed Jean Paul had gone diving with you . . .” He shivered—and not from the cold, though it wasn’t much warmer on this damned boat. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

She smiled. “I thought big, badass SEALs didn’t get scared.”

“Sweetheart, you scare the livin’ shit out of me.”

The confession seemed to please her enormously. She looked like a kid in the proverbial candy store—him being the candy store. “I do?”

He wasn’t going to elaborate on how much. He’d do that the next time they were alone, preferably in bed. “If anything had happened to you, it would have been my fault. I shouldn’t have left you.”

“I understand why you did now.”

“Yeah, well, I still shouldn’t have left the way I did.” His fingers caressed the side of her cheek along the edge of the neoprene hood as she gazed up at him. His voice was suddenly husky. “I should have told you something first.”

She was scanning his gaze so intently that he felt his chest squeeze. She seemed scared to ask, “What?”

They were words he’d never said to any woman before, but he didn’t hesitate. The last few hours had made him damned sure. He would figure out how to make it work. That was what he did for a living. Found solutions for the impossible. “That I love you.”

She blinked, tears suddenly filling her eyes. “You do?”

He nodded and kissed her again. This time far more gently, and unfortunately far too briefly. He hated this. But there would be time. Lots of time. He’d make damned sure of it.

“I love you, too,” she said when he released her.

“Good,” he said with a smile. “You can tell me how much next time I see you.”

He could tell she wanted to ask, but bit her lip to stop herself. That she understood how it worked—that he wouldn’t be able to tell her about what he did—was going to make things a hell of a lot easier.

He answered the unspoken question as much as he could. “Soon, sweetheart. As soon as I can.”

“How will you find me?”

He grinned. “Trade secrets.”

He reached for his backpack, glad that it was waterproof. The short swim to shore was going to be mostly underwater. The dive boat and police would be able to see them soon.

“You can’t get back in that water. Just take the boat. I can handle the cold with this wet suit.”

He shook his head. “There will be police all over the area soon. I would never be able to get away in the boat. But there are a bunch of sea caves along the shore. I’ll find one and stay there until they stop looking. Tell them I died—and be convincing. It will slow them down.”

She nodded, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Be careful. You must be close to hypothermia already.”

He was, but she didn’t need to know that. A fire would be too risky, even in one of those caves, but getting out of these wet clothes would help.

“I have to go,” he said.

“I know.”

He leaned down and gave her a quick kiss before diving in the water. He wanted to surface and tell her he loved her again, but he’d already stayed too long. He couldn’t risk the police seeing him.

But he intended to tell her again very soon. He wasn’t going to take any chances that she might reconsider waiting for him. For however long that might be.

God knew it wasn’t great timing—and he was going to do everything he could to help the LC figure out what the hell had happened so they could come out of hiding—but he’d met the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. For the first time since the missile had exploded in front of him, Dean felt hope for the future.