Salt, SEAL, and Sin (Tidehaven SEAL Romance #3)
Chapter One
Marley
THE SONAR READING WAS still burned into my retinas when I eased Reckoning back through the channel markers at six forty-seven in the morning.
Something was down there. Not debris, not geological noise, not another false hit that would send me scrabbling through charts for three days only to find a chunk of ballast stone and my own desperation staring back at me.
This was a shape with edges where the ocean floor didn't have edges, sitting at sixty-two feet in a current that should have scattered anything that wasn't bolted to the continental shelf.
I'd run the transducer over it three times, adjusted the frequency, run it again, and gotten the same result on every pass.
Two years. Four maxed-out credit cards. A PhD that had earned me exactly one marketable skill: the ability to distinguish a shipwreck from a rock formation on a five-inch screen while running on three hours of sleep and gas station coffee.
Today, the coffee had been worth it.
I cut the engine and let Reckoning drift the last thirty feet to her slip, reaching for the cleat with a muscle memory my body had earned the hard way.
The hull kissed the bumpers. I killed the electronics and peeled my rash guard away from my stomach where it had fused with salt and sweat.
Then I stood on the deck with the morning sun hitting my face and the whole Atlantic at my back.
The sky was that particular shade of late-May blue that this coast does better than anywhere else on the eastern seaboard, clear and deep and so bright it hurt to look at directly.
My hands were shaking. Not fear. Adrenaline, running hot through my fingers and my chest, the kind that meant I was close and my nervous system knew it before the rest of me caught up.
Tidehaven was waking up around me. Shrimp boats were already chugging through the inlet, outriggers folded, engines grumbling that low diesel complaint that meant the tide was right and the catch was waiting.
A pelican dropped into the channel twenty yards out, folded its wings, and came up with breakfast. Down at Nettie's Bait that was public record. The fact that he'd bothered. Most enforcement contacts showed up with a badge and a directive and zero interest in whether the person on the receiving end had earned the right to be where they were.
"Then you know I'm not some tourist with a metal detector and a treasure map."
"I know you're diving without authorization in a federally recognized heritage zone, and I know the state wants it stopped." He paused. "What I think about your research isn't part of my contract."
"But you have a thought."
His jaw shifted. The faintest movement. "I have a contract."
A shrimp boat horn sounded from the inlet, low and mournful, and a gust off the water caught my braid and threw salt across my lips.
The heat was climbing up my neck now. Sunburn or fury, and I was choosing fury.
"You want to know what's in that heritage zone, Rutledge?
The Lady Defiance. A Confederate blockade runner that went down in 1864 carrying cargo that could rewrite half of what we understand about wartime supply logistics along this coast. I've spent two years correlating shipping manifests, harbor records, and bottom surveys to narrow the search area, and every month I don't have proper access is another month the current shifts sediment over the site.
So you can take your forty-eight hours and your contract and your maritime specialist credentials and understand that the person you're trying to shut down is the only one within five hundred miles who can document that wreck properly. "