“Sure is. Something like that, anyway. If it had come closer, one of us would have bumped it on the nose with a dive light. They don’t like being bumped on their noses.”
Liam Hinnerman was up by then. “Hey, kid, do you know where we got the word shark?”
Darlene shook her head.
“It came from the German word
“Hey, that’s cool!” Brad laughed.
“Yeah,” Darlene agreed.
“And it’s not going to stop you from diving, right, sweetheart?” her father said. Lew Walker looked at Sam as he spoke. “Especially when you can go down with Miss Carlyle and see the underwater world through her eyes.”
He was looking at her peculiarly, Sam thought.
Sharks.
She felt for a moment as if she was surrounded by greedy parasites. Who was innocent? Who was not?
She glanced at Adam.
Even Adam had a peculiar look about him. Perhaps the most peculiar look.
Just who was this “private concern” he was working for?
She shivered suddenly, looking around. Liam Hinnerman—hammerhead. Jim Santino—tiger shark. Joey Emerson—white tip. Sukee—mako. Lew Walker—a blue.
And Adam…
If Adam was a shark, he would be a damned great white. Deadly.
And the way he was looking at her now…
She was definitely surrounded by sharks.
Adam remained in an odd mood as they docked and left the
He remained close by her side, but he seemed completely withdrawn.
“I know what you found,” she told him as they entered her cottage.
“What?” he demanded, startled, staring at her, his gray eyes sharp.
“You disappeared for a long time. You must have found the
“No, I didn’t find the
“Then…”
“I went exploring the sides of that coral shelf. It plunges down at least another thirty feet, you know.”
She nodded. “Yes, but there’s nothing to see there, just sand and rock and water. No pretty vegetation. Just…nothing.”
“You have nitrox on the island, don’t you?”
Sam frowned, studying him. Sport divers never used pure oxygen; at depths past thirty-three feet it became toxic. Generally sport divers used a mixture of compressed air that was twenty percent oxygen and eighty percent nitrogen. The nitrogen, however, could produce a narcotic effect at depths of a hundred feet or more. Nitrox was a combination air that prevented that hallucinatory buildup. Sam never used it for the cylinders the guests used, but she and Jem sometimes used it when they went to greater depths with experienced friends who came to the island.
“Do you have it or not?”
“Of course.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“I was thinking of making a few deeper dives.”
Sam hesitated. “You did find the ship.”
“No, I didn’t find the ship.”
He said it so strangely.
“Adam, what the hell is going on? Are you lying to me? Did you find something connected to that damn ship?”
“I’m not lying. I didn’t find the ship.”
“You think you can find her, though.”
“I don’t know. I’d just like to dive a little deeper, that’s all.” He stared straight at her. “I think I’ll shower.”
She arched a brow. “This is my cottage, you’re refusing to tell me what’s going on, and now you think you’ll shower.”
“Okay, then, you go ahead and shower.”
Baffled and irritated, Sam left him in the hallway.
“I’ll make some coffee,” he called after her. “When we’re all set, let’s head over to the main house and your father’s office. I want to read through some of those diaries and logbooks again.”
She slipped out of her suit and turned on the water in the shower. The fresh warmth rinsing away the salt from her body felt delicious. She dimly heard that Adam had turned on the news. She closed her eyes, leaning back, just feeling the water.
Why was he acting so strangely?
Why was he lying to her?
Her eyes flew open when she felt him step in behind her, sweeping his arms around her, drawing her close against him. The water splashed over her breasts, then over his hands. He rubbed his palms sensually down her rib cage and her belly, fingers splayed. Lower down over her abdomen, the gentle pressure became sweetly erotic. Step away, she told herself. Protest intimacy without honesty.
But then he spoke.
“I wonder if you ever knew just how deeply I was in love with you?” he said.
“Ah. But you were also in love with Becky.”
“I was seeing Becky. I was involved with Becky. I told you I was no innocent. You were determined to win whatever you set out to get in those days. What you wanted was me. You didn’t ask questions, and when you got answers anyway, you didn’t want them.”
“You could have—”
“I could have what? I wondered at the time if I was some kind of practice for you. Look at him, full-grown, definitely male. Test your powers. Look, touch, crook a finger. Get what you want. Use him. Then just shoot him when he doesn’t turn out to be exactly what you thought.”
He was saying these things to her, bitterly, with his hands still on her.
She closed her fingers around his. Wanting to stop their movement. Wanting to stop wanting him.
He held her more tightly against him. “I really was in love, you know. I didn’t want to be. I resisted.”
“Like hell. I wasn’t that good, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“You know that’s a lie—”
“I know I was your first experiment. You had damned good instincts.”
“You could have said that you were living with someone.”
“We weren’t actually living together at the time. We’d had a fight. She’d gone to her sister’s.”
“It was hard to tell you’d been fighting when she arrived on the island. The first time I saw her, she had her tongue down your throat. And that wasn’t an hour after…”
“An hour after,” he mused, his voice very strange. “An hour after. Everything so perfect, and then…Well, perfect can change quickly, can’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
“If you’d wanted to explain something to her, don’t you think it would have been a lot easier if your mouth
