Chapter 4
FOUR
Austen just couldn’t wrap her brain around the ludicrous idea that Declan might be a criminal.
And she didn’t want to. Maybe she wanted to believe that he was exactly the man he seemed to be as he sat on the sofa beside her, the stars soft in the night sky, the waves lapping against the boat.
A kind, generous, determined man she could count on.
The rush of heat that had crested over her as she clung to him on the boat had washed away, leaving a residue of disbelief. Gratefulness.
According to Elise, when she’d loaned her clothing, Declan had pushed the yacht to its full capacity, running it at thirty knots for over twenty-four hours, using all the fuel reserves on board.
Hadn’t even slept as he tracked her PLB signal.
Had everyone on deck searching for her after her monitor vanished.
“He definitely cares about you,” Elise had said, leaving Austen in her stateroom.
And what a stateroom. Queen bed, private head, Italian tile, with a sitting area and port windows that overlooked the blue ocean, now dark and pinpricked with light.
Austen had washed off the salt of the sea, stripping off her wetsuit and warming her body. Had pulled on the yoga pants and T-shirt, wrapped herself in the bathrobe, and decided that maybe Stein didn’t know what he was talking about.
Criminal? Whatever.
Then, this dinner. Simple, and yet perfect. She sat across from Declan, watching the wind comb his dark hair, trying to understand what might be behind those blue eyes.
And then he’d changed the subject. Offered to drop her off in the DR, and maybe—probably—that was a good idea, given her brother’s inevitable frantic search. But according to Declan, he’d updated her brother, so...
So maybe she’d just stick around and... what? Sleuth through his private papers? Listen in on his phone calls?
And then he actually received a phone call, and she didn’t intend to eavesdrop, except he deliberately turned away from her and cut his voice low and...
Aw. See? Stein had put stuff in her head, and now everything Declan did seemed suspect.
Which wasn’t fair, and even as he spoke on the phone, she knew she had to prove it to Steinbeck. He was simply wrong.
Yes, by the time she got off this boat, she intended to prove that Declan was every bit the hero he seemed to be, right down to his core.
And maybe in the meantime she’d enjoy some of Camille’s French cooking and...
Okay, Declan’s company.
It wasn’t torture to sit out by his fire table, on a padded sofa, watching the stars float by, a balmy ocean wind caressing her skin.
Even less torture to sit across from Declan, his back to the wake, the firelight warming his handsome face.
A thin layer of dark whiskers added a ruggedness to his otherwise polished aura, and she could trace out the Marine in him.
The guy who wouldn’t give up looking for her.
So maybe the swell of affection hadn’t completely dissipated.
“Everything okay?” she asked, taking a sip of hot cocoa. It touched her bones, heated her, and the ordeal in the ocean faded to a distant nightmare.
“Yes. Just a business call.” He leaned back, his arms spread across the sofa, and crossed his leg, his ankle on his knee.
“It’s late for a business call.” Why did she ask that? Felt too... invasive.
But he shrugged. “I’m working on a project, and the guy in charge wanted to update me. So, you never told me what you were looking for during your dive.”
Was it suspicious that he’d changed the subject? Maybe not.
“I was looking for wreck debris from an old Spanish galleon that went down off the northern coast of the DR. It went down in the early 1500s, so the wreck’s been scattered all over the shoal. People are still finding silver coins, copper dishware, and even sometimes gold ingots.”
“Did you find anything?”
“A copper mug. But not what I was actually looking for.” She took a sip of the cocoa and watched as one brow went up in question.
“I’m trying to find a black marble statue of Santa María de la Paz. It was on the way to Santo Domingo when the boat went down. It was a gift to a monastery.”
“And you think it’s down there.”
“It’s what my college roommate, Margo, thought.
Her father was a treasure hunter off the coast of Florida, and after he died, she took up his hunt.
” She looked past him into the darkness, the moonlight tipping the waves.
“After she died too, I just...” She swallowed. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“How’d she die?” He spoke softly, a small frown on his face.
Her mouth pinched, and she drew in a long breath. “A diving accident.”
And for a second, she was back on Alvaro’s boat, watching Margo collapse, her body shutting down right there in the aft deck, Alvaro shouting, Austen dripping wet, helpless. “She got DCS after her equipment failed and she did a fast ascent from sixty feet down.”
“The bends.”
“Yeah. We needed financing for our search, so Margo hooked us up with a guy named Alvaro Cortez. He was a rabid collector of wreck artifacts and financed a trip to the Silver Bank to search for the statue. Even gave us DPVs—diver propulsion vehicles.”
“I’ve seen those.”
She finished her cocoa, sat cross-legged on the sofa, the bathrobe tucked over her. “We shouldn’t have dived that day. The current was too strong. But we had the DPVs, so we thought we’d be fine...”
A moment passed, and another as she tried to shake out of the grip of watching?—
“Our DPV batteries died. Dead in the water, a hundred feet down. And the current had really carried us out. We had to ditch the DPVs and swim back, and that’s when Margo realized that she’d drained too much of her air—more than I had.
The seal on her tank had malfunctioned, and we had to buddy breathe.
Except, with all the exertion of swimming, I’d drained more air than usual too.
” She met his eyes, fierce, rapt, horrified.
“By the time we got to our deco stop, my air had nearly drained out.”
She ran a finger under her eye, caught a tear.
He swallowed, then uncrossed his legs and leaned toward her. “You don’t have to?—”
“I do. I’ve never really... Even Margo’s brother Mo doesn’t know the details. Doesn’t know that she looked at my low O2, dropped her emergency octo, and quick ascended to the surface.”
“She did that to save your air.”
Austen nodded. “Worst seven minutes of my life—the deco stop at sixty feet and the safety stop at fifteen. By the time I got aboard the boat, they had her on the deck, and she’d gone into a sort of paralytic state, her brain fighting the air pocket.
Cortez called in a chopper evac from Key West, but they.
.. by the time they got her into a deco chamber, she was brain dead. ”
She’d said it without curling into a ball, and that was an improvement. Still, her eyes, already chapped by the salty ocean, throbbed, raw.
And that’s when Declan got up and came over to sit by her.
Oh no.
But yes, because he sat next to her, then put his arms around her and pulled her to himself, and just like before when he’d yanked her from the water, she let herself lean in.
A beautiful, transitory moment when the grief couldn’t wash her out to sea.
“You dive to honor her,” he said quietly. “I get that.”
She pushed away then, looked at him. He wore a softness in his gaze. “You do?”
“I did mention that my boat was sort of named after my mother, right?” He smiled.
See? A guy who talked about his mother in such a way couldn’t be an underworld criminal.
“Did Cortez take any responsibility for his faulty equipment?”
“No. He said it was an accident, but I would have never gone down in that current if he hadn’t guaranteed that the DPVs were safe.”
Declan smelled good, the scent of the sea on his skin, and kept his arm on the sofa behind her. Close. Protective.
“I never trusted him. He seemed too driven by the treasure.” She didn’t meet Declan’s eyes when she said it, in case it felt too pointed.
But Declan wasn’t like that. Really. He would never put his agenda over someone’s safety.
“When did she die?”
“Four years ago. And yes, I know that terrible accidents while diving happen, but?—”
“But she died to save you.”
She looked at him then and gave a tight nod, her throat thick.
“There’s no time limit on grief, Austen.” A strand of her hair had come loose in the wind, and he caught it and tucked it behind her ear.
Sweet. Gentle.
“He’s a criminal, Austen.”
No. No, he wasn’t. Still, maybe she should just settle down .
“I was doing just fine until I moved back to the Keys two years ago. I sort of dodged the grief for the first couple years—moved away to Hawaii and studied shark behavior with the Hawaiian shark research institute.”
“So, something safe and comforting.”
A beat, then she smiled.
He did too.
“Yeah. Well, like you said, it was a distraction.”
He gave her a grim nod.
“That’s when I started looking for the statue again. I don’t think I’ll ever find it, but...” She sighed.
“It gives you purpose.”
She met his gaze, then nodded. “It keeps me moving forward. I keep thinking that finding it might give closure.”
“Or redemption.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Because you blame yourself.”
She shrugged.
He said nothing. Around them, the night breeze stirred up the ocean smells, salty, briny, the fire flickering.
“You’re not to blame for other people’s choices.”
“Maybe. I try not to think about it. Or talk about it.”
“She made a choice, Austen. Although I get it—that’s the hardest part, right? Letting go of the things you can’t control to find peace in the outcome.”
She couldn’t look away, his words, his gaze, riveting her.
He touched his fingers to her cheek. “My mother used to say that every day is a new day of grace.” He drew in a breath. “I think that’s how you start healing.”
And that just sealed it, didn’t it? A criminal didn’t talk about grace. Or mercy. Or redemption.