Читать книгу Deep Blue - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 6

The water was dark, swirling with shadows and one big, fearsomely powerful man. Sienna felt light and heavy, panic and shock so familiar now. A nightmare that would never end, that’s what she was living.

Crazy strangers with guns above.

Crazy stranger holding her captive below.

Below water.

She was going to die. She was going to drown. He was drowning her. And she was going to have a full-blown panic attack. No way could she think straight. She felt sick, afraid of dying, out of control. She burst to the surface, clawing wildly at the water.

Her feet couldn’t touch bottom. She flung her arms desperately, fighting hysteria. Then something pulled her back down, under the surface, and her mind screamed even as she held onto the gulp of air she’d gotten in that second above the water, and for a sickening moment, she didn’t know what had gotten hold of her.

All she knew was that she was going to drown because whatever had her, it was pulling her down, deeper, and she couldn’t stop it.

Something hit her feet, and she realized with a shock that it was sand. It was the bottom of the lagoon. She contorted her body, fighting frantically, and something pulled her tighter, held down her flailing arms. She was slammed against a hard wall.

No, a chest. A very powerful chest. Him. The man who’d called her Tabitha then shoved her into the water even as he claimed he was saving her life. And there was no way she was going to break free of his grip.

She lifted her head, stopped fighting, knew she was going to die now because she couldn’t hold her breath one more second, and her eyes locked with a fierce liquid gaze that stunned her, it was so near, and then it was even nearer. Something touched her lips—

His lips.

And in complete, unthinkable shock, she opened her mouth—that was it, she was going to drown—and his mouth closed over hers and suddenly…she was breathing.

She was breathing.

She forgot the water that had been suffocating her a second before. Forgot the deadly men on the bridge, the attacker at the apartment. Forgot that she’d almost been killed more than once in the past twenty minutes.

How could she be breathing?

Then she realized his strong arms had slid around her back and he was stroking her, comforting her, calming her down with efficient control. The sudden gentleness of his hold struck her, and the shocking intimacy of his mouth breathing life into her mouth had her gasp against him, and her tongue touched something warm and sweet. His tongue swept inside her mouth even as he continued to stroke her back, her arms, her shoulders, and she clung, desperate for his air, his amazing, mysterious safety.

Safety that made no sense. She’d been running from him moments before! And yet—he was everything she knew in this dark, wet world, everything keeping her alive. All the pain and fear and panic receded into a surreal vortex as he sweetly and tenderly claimed the last shred of her sanity.

Maybe she was delirious. It was all she could think of. In reality, she was drowning. This couldn’t be happening. Her arms were clinging to him, absorbing his unbelievable warmth, her body pressed up against him. She was—oh, God—she was kissing him back and it was like nothing else existed except this hard, wet man holding her at the bottom of the lagoon.

And that realization shocked her so, she jerked back, and the look in his eyes through the dark water made her realize that he was as shocked as she by what had just happened. She held the last breath he’d given her, her heart clanging furiously in her chest, fear returning full force.

He reached up, touched his warm finger to her mouth, and cocked his head, as if listening. Listening to what? All she could hear was the blood pounding in her ears.

Then he placed his mouth on hers again, gently pushing her to open her lips. Oh, God. She did. And her stomach left her body for one more tingling mindless beat. He breathed another breath into her and let go.

A strange energy hummed from him, or maybe it was her. She didn’t know anymore.

How could this be happening?

When he pulled away this time, he gave her a long look, nodded as if assuring her of something, grabbed her arm and together they shot upward through the water. Then she was on the surface, and he was pulling her up, onto a bank crowded with weeds and sand. She coughed and fell limp on the dark shore near the bridge.

She lay there, gasping in the air, heavy rain pummeling her—as if she could get any wetter. Then she turned her head and saw him standing over her. Sharply aware of him, she stared up, watching the droplets slide down his cheeks and cascade off his soaked hair and shoulders, the sky darkly wild above him.

His lips were hard, unsmiling, his jaw uncompromising. She felt odd inside, loose and hollow, and he looked utterly, fearsomely, in control. He looked like a tough, dangerous action movie star who was as deadly as his weapons. And yet she wasn’t afraid of him now.

Or, at least, not as afraid.

He’d just saved her life. For the second time.

“They’re gone,” he said. “We were down there long enough that they’ll think we either ran away or drowned. Either way, we need to get out of here.”

The gunmen. The gunmen were gone. Good thing, since if they were still here, they’d have to kill her where she lay because she felt like one big piece of overcooked spaghetti.

“Who are you?” she breathed. “What are you?”

And then she was sure she must be delirious because for a second she thought he was going to say something like, I’m your worst nightmare. Only maybe that wasn’t true. Under the lagoon, he’d been downright fantasy-like, and the memory brought a renewed, inappropriate prickling of sensual heat, and more confusion.

They couldn’t have been underwater that long. He couldn’t have been breathing air into her lungs. That wasn’t possible.

She gathered her wits, jerked her loose-limbed, disobedient body into gear and pushed to her elbows. The adrenaline started flowing again.

“Who are you?” he grated in return, and he moved swiftly, took hold of her elbow and lifted her to her shaking feet.

For once, he was listening. He was giving her a chance. She grabbed it, desperate.

“Sienna Parker. I’m Sabrina’s sister. That was Sabrina’s apartment. She’s on sabbatical from the university. We both work there. Sabrina—” She stopped. How much did she really want to tell this stranger?

She knew nothing about him. He wanted to take Sabrina somewhere with him, and he’d been prepared to take her against her will.

“Are you some kind of…. police, or—” How much trouble was Sabrina in?

“Sabrina’s sister,” he repeated, ignoring her question, watching her, those steely liquid blue eyes of his searing her to the bone. He reached up with one hand and his warm, wet finger slid across her cheek. Something crackled inside her. He dropped his touch abruptly. “Twin sister?”

She nodded.

“Where is Sabrina?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“Where is she?”

“I said I don’t know! I don’t know what’s going on. But if she’s in trouble, I want to know.”

“Oh, she’s in trouble,” he said.

His eyes on hers were so bright, so sharp, they almost hurt.

“You’re scaring me again!” Dammit, what had made her admit that?

“Good.”

He was making her angry, too.

“Let’s go,” he said. “My car.”

It didn’t sound like an invitation. It was an order.

And dammit, she followed. What other choice did she have? Walk back to Key Mango, hope she didn’t run into any gun-toting lunatics along the way?

That option wasn’t exactly viable.

The van was gone. Sienna scrambled into the passenger side of the stranger’s sedan. He slammed into the driver’s seat. Inside the car, the muted sounds of rain and wind tapped and blew. They were both soaked to the skin and she shivered despite the warmth of the island summer night. Shock.

She was in some kind of shock. She was shaking all over.

“You’re bleeding,” he said. “Your forehead’s cut. I’ll pick up a first-aid kit somewhere or that’ll get infected.”

She hadn’t even realized. She touched her head, pulled her fingertips away gleaming red in the dim light from the glowing dashboard inside the car. He started the engine and headed the car back toward town.

Her head reeled just a little. What had happened here? She’d gone to Sabrina’s apartment, been attacked, chased, run off a bridge, nearly drowned—twice. Now she had willingly gotten into this stranger’s car for lack of any better alternative.

This day was so not going well. Her head began to throb and she couldn’t stop shaking.

“Why is Sabrina in danger? What did those men want?” What did he want? “Who are you?” She couldn’t tell a lot about him in this light, but his hair was dark, clipped short, his eyes a fearsome blue. His shoulders seemed to fill the car and he scared her to death at the same time as he made her feel oddly safe.

“My name is Cade Brock,” he answered finally.

She hugged her arms around her waist. “So are you the police or what?” Cade Brock. The name buzzed at the back of her mind. Think! She had to think.

Her brain felt as if it had balls bouncing around inside of it.

“Not exactly.” He negotiated the dark, wet road like a professional driver.

“What are you exactly, then?” And where were they going? “Is there a police station in Key Mango?”

“We’re not stopping in Key Mango.”

She cut her eyes to his face again, a nervous twist in her stomach.

Cade Brock. A small gasp escaped her. It all hit her at once. “I know who you are,” she breathed harshly, adrenaline rushing her again.

Oh, God. She’d found a magazine in Sabrina’s apartment, folded over to an article about treasure hunters. There’d been a photograph of Cade Brock. He was a treasure hunter—a renegade treasure hunter, and some of the quotes in the article had suggested without outright accusation that he was the sort who lived outside the law, sabotaging, scheming and pirating his way into a fortune.

Her head reeled again. Sabrina had said she was afraid of someone, a man. Was it Cade Brock? He was looking for Sabrina. He’d thought she was Sabrina. He might have thought her name was Tabitha, but he’d certainly recognized her.

She moved to grip the door handle. The idea of rolling out of the car at this speed, possibly to her death, wasn’t appealing.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

Did he read minds, too?

“What do you want with my sister?”

“I want to help her.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then that makes two of us, because I’m not sure I believe much you’ve said so far either. But I saved your life, so that’s one point for me, don’t you think? And I plan to save Sabrina’s life, too. But first I have to stop her.”

“Stop her from what?”

“Have you ever heard of the wreck of the Santa Josefa? Ramiro’s globe?”

Oh, God. She felt hot and cold at once, sick. Hurting. She didn’t want to even think about the Santa Josefa and what the search for that shipwreck had done to her family. Ramiro’s globe was the legendary artifact discovered by Spanish explorers in the 1700s and, according to survivor reports, carried aboard the doomed Santa Josefa as the ship headed back to Spain. Shaped like a globe held up by an outstretched hand, the stone artifact would prove early man once knew the world was round and point to the possibility of ancient interstellar visitors who, legend had it, created it and mapped on its surface the original configuration of earth’s tectonic plates. Shipwreck explorers had been looking for the Santa Josefa for years.

“Our father used to search for treasure. It was his life.” It was his death, too. “Sabrina had all of his old charts and readings. But I don’t understand—”

“Did your father find the Santa Josefa?” Cade demanded suddenly.

She swallowed hard. “I think so.”

For a second, she could almost believe all the air had been sucked out of the car by the intensity of the gaze he burned on her.

“What do you mean you think so?”

“I don’t know! We did find something that day. I think it was the globe. But we never brought it up, and then—”

The car seemed to close in on her. Bone-deep grief contracted her chest. Deep blue water, strobe light dancing through the gloom, fan grass swaying through coral. The globe in her hands. Then the blood— Pain streaked through her temples.

“What does it matter? We were diving for it that summer. Looking for it. My father was sure we’d found the Santa Josefa, that’s all I know.”

“You said you couldn’t swim—”

“I can’t swim! Not anymore.”

“Can’t swim or won’t swim?” His expression turned hard, his eyes slicing her.

Was there a difference? She’d have drowned back in that lagoon but for him. Immediate hysteria, that was her reaction to water now.

“What is this about?” she demanded.

The wet, dark night kept spinning past the car windows. Inside, in the glow of the dash, the man beside her, the very strange and frightening man beside her, suddenly looked more like some kind of warrior than a rich playboy.

“Your sister was looking for someone to help finance an expedition to find the Santa Josefa. And short of that, she was looking for someone to buy the charts, buy the information. And she was dealing with some very dangerous people.”

Sienna sucked in a painful breath. This was so much worse than she’d imagined. “I want to go back to Raleigh,” she said. “I want you to take me to the airport. Or take me to a bus station or a police station. I don’t care what. I want to go home.”

She didn’t know how to get in touch with Sabrina now. The last cell phone number she’d had for her sister had been out of service for a week, and her own was at the bottom of the lagoon. She’d left it in the car. But she couldn’t stay in Key Mango. Maybe if she went home, Sabrina would call her there.

“You can’t go home,” he pointed out. “They have your overnight bag, don’t they? Did you have some identification in there?”

She nodded mutely.

“And some papers I found in Sabrina’s apartment in Raleigh. Our father’s charts, with all the sites he’d searched that last summer.” She’d found them and brought them with her, intending to confront Sabrina and try to shake some sense into her. “So if that’s what they wanted—”

“They want Sabrina,” he cut in. “She claimed she knew which site on the chart was the Santa Josefa.”

“She doesn’t know! She wasn’t with us that day!”

His look hardened even further. “They don’t know that. And they’re going to want you now, too. They think her name is Tabitha Donovan, but they’ll use your identification to track you back to North Carolina. They’ll figure out that her real name is Sabrina Parker, and they’ll figure out you’re her sister.”

Her life was over. He was telling her that her life was over. If she went back to Raleigh now, she’d be hunted down by thugs who wanted to get their hands on that information. And the ironic thing was, she’d looked at those charts and she still had no idea which one had been the Santa Josefa. That was fifteen years ago. It might as well have happened to someone else. She’d woken up that day in the hospital and they’d had to tell her what had happened to her father. The slices of horrific memory had come later, but never the whole summer, only bits and pieces.

And she’d never wanted that summer to come back. She’d never wanted to remember.

“Who are these people?” she asked. “Treasure hunters?”

“Foreign terrorists.”

He might as well have said they were flying pigs. “What?”

“They’re people who blow up buildings and trains and kill people like you and I breathe. They think they can use Ramiro’s globe to pinpoint hidden weaknesses in the earth’s tectonic plates and set off strategically placed bombs to wipe out the eastern seaboard.”

“That’s crazy!” The sick feeling clawed her middle now.

His laser gaze pinned her in the night. “That’s not the point now, is it? The fact is, you have two choices right now. You can go back to Raleigh and put yourself in their hands, or you can stick with me and stop your sister before she ruins not just her life, but maybe a whole lot of other lives as well.”

He drew to a stop at the one light on the main strip of Key Mango. The businesses were dark, closed, except for a restaurant and a gas station.

Was he really giving her a choice?

What if she got out right now and walked into that gas station and asked for help? Terrorists. If she believed that. And right now she didn’t know what to believe.

“I’ll go to the police. Or the FBI or the CIA or somebody! Surely they can provide protection. Who do you think you are anyway?” she demanded. He was Cade Brock, playboy and treasure hunter, but that didn’t explain everything she’d seen tonight. It didn’t explain the way he’d jumped from that car at Sabrina’s apartment to shoot it out with those gunmen to rescue her, nor did it explain what had happened in that lagoon, unless she’d imagined that part. And surely she had.

The light changed. He had one eye trained on the mirror, watching the road behind as they headed for the bridge connecting Key Mango to the next key.

“You go to the police,” he said, “and your sister’s going to end up in prison for the rest of her life. It doesn’t matter whether Ramiro’s globe can really provide the sort of information they think it can—if she helps a terror group find it, she could end up charged with conspiracy, or worse. You stick with me, and maybe that won’t happen. I don’t want to hurt Sabrina. I want to help her. She’s into something bad, and she’s in it over her head. Whatever game she was playing with these people, they’re tired of it. They weren’t playing tonight.”

“Why do you want to help her?” And why had he thought her name was Tabitha? Why would her sister have been using a false identity? Because she was up to her eyeballs in something illegal.

Oh, God, he could be telling her the truth. She didn’t want Sabrina to end up in prison. And she didn’t want to end up dead. He’d saved her life twice tonight. Maybe he could save Sabrina’s and get her out of this mess before she ended up in jail.

“Are you a friend of hers?” she demanded.

“Something like that.”

Something like that. That wasn’t a real answer.

“What do you want with me?” Maybe—maybe—he was Sabrina’s friend, maybe he wasn’t the man Sabrina had been involved with, but why would he help her, too? “That was fifteen years ago. I don’t know which one of those sites could have been the Santa Josefa.”

“Did you look at those charts again?”

“Yes. I looked at them. They were my father’s original charts. There were ten sites marked.”

“Then you can duplicate them,” he said. “That’s a start.”

“So what if I help you find the globe? What then?”

“I’ll turn it over to the proper authorities.”

Would he? According to what the article had said, he was rumored to live outside the law when it came to treasure hunting. And he couldn’t know it, but he might as well have just asked her to poke a stick in her eye. The last place she wanted to go was back in time to the shipwreck that had stolen her father’s life, broken her mother’s mental health and nearly destroyed her.

But he was telling her it might be the only way she could save Sabrina’s life and keep her out of jail. He was right, she had to pick who she would trust, and she had to pick now. He’d saved her life twice. That had to mean something.

And if it didn’t, then she was about to make a big mistake.

“Shouldn’t government authorities already be involved?” she asked, thinking desperately. “If you know—”

“I know because Tabitha—Sabrina—told me. She wanted to know if I’d pay more for the information to find the globe than they were offering. But you’re right. Authorities will find out, if they haven’t already. Word gets around in the treasure hunting community. That’s why there’s no time. If we’re going to stop this thing, we have to do it now. They’ve got the charts, but they don’t have Sabrina, at least not yet. And I have you.”

She didn’t want to believe Sabrina would really do this, but he had a point. If they brought up the globe, that would be the end of it. No way could she do it on her own. But Cade Brock…

He would have all the means at his disposal. She swallowed the huge lump in her throat. Did she even care what he did with the globe? All she cared about was Sabrina.

“If I help you find the globe, are you going to help me find Sabrina?”

He cut his hard, blue-black gaze on her. “Oh, we’ll find her. I promise you that.”