Blue Moon (13 page)

Gabe handed the extra food over to Manolo. “I'll take over now. You can take the tower watch.”

The tower was actually a second bridge atop the enclosed salon, large enough to hold six people comfortably.

“I say we all go out on the town if we find some cannon before it's time to head in,” Stuart said, his attention shifting fully to the zigzag graph of the needles on the monitor in front of him.

Gabe chuckled. “If we find cannon today, I'll buy.” At Jeanne's surprised expression, he shrugged. “Hey, I know a safe bet when I make one. And even if the kid wins,” he added, “I've seen the town. How much could it cost me?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“We're maggin'! Great googamooga, we are maggin',” Stuart shouted. “You owe us a night out.” Stuart gave Gabe a gotcha grin.

A nostalgic smile playing on his lips, Gabe remained steady at the wheel, watching the monitor that showed the painstaking pass as he made it. “Keep on watching, son. There are hundreds of sunken ships around this reef. Got the coordinates, Pablo?”

As restrained as Gabe, Pablo looked up from the chart. “
Sí,
amigo
, I have marked it so.”

Gabe cut back the engines to make a sweeping turn so that Manolo could place a marker over the spot.

“Aren't we even going to take a look?” Nick exclaimed incredulously.

“This will be the first of many hits, Nick,” Pablo told him. “We can only mark their location and reading for now, until we see which are the most likely prospects. It is those that we will examine first.”

“Yeah, but we only have a few hours left,” Nick protested. “Seems like we ought to have a little time after this grid is mapped.”

“Methodology is everything, Nick,” Gabe insisted, keeping a taut rein on his own feelings. He'd been right where Nick was.

The weird thing was, when he'd found the
Gitano
, Gabe had just been playing around on vacation from his laboratory work at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. He hadn't really been looking for a specific vessel, yet he'd done the unheard-of when the magnetometer he'd bought from a bankrupt salvage company made a direct hit on the wreck site of the
Gitano
, an eighteenth-century pirate vessel.

The treasure that Gabe and a company of friends had brought up proved it was a successful one. Bitten hard by gold fever and just as eager to escape what had become an unbearable situation at work, Gabe had abandoned his promising career to become a treasure hunter. His parents, both noted marine biologists, were disappointed.

In the long run, finding the
Gitano
was probably the best—and, perhaps, the worst—thing that ever happened to Gabe. The obsession with sunken treasure was almost as devastating to what had been his bright future as the academic backstabbing that had kept him from submitting the doctoral thesis and earning the right to tack “PhD” at the end of his name. The thesis contained a potential medical breakthrough that even today was being developed by pharmaceutical companies. Gabe had done the initial research, documented it, and his professor had stolen the credit.

“Why bother to mark it, when we have the GPS fix, then?” Nick objected, drawing Gabe back to the present. “I mean, if you're worried about someone stealing our site from us, it seems to me that leaving a marker is like leaving a flag saying ‘this marks the spot.'”

“Even with the GPS tracking there's a margin of error that could cause us to miss the main hit that will lead us to the wreck,”

Gabe explained. “Leave no stone unturned . . . or unmarked, as it were.” Gabe gave himself a mental shake before his recollection of the past resulted in a dash for the stash of Corona in his refrigerator. It wouldn't be the first time he'd obliterated his bitterness at himself and at Marshall Arnauld with alcohol. But Gabe needed his wits about him. Besides, the solution of having
a hair of the dog that bit
you
curing one's condition bit both ways: one might forget the past for a while, but too many such
hairs
could rob a man of what little self-esteem remained.

Life after the
Gitano
had been one big party for both Gabe and Pablo, who'd attended college with Gabe, before BSSR, as under-grads at the University of West Florida. They'd joined forces on Pablo's vacation for the search for the
Laurens,
a French brigantine sunk off the Keys. For all their magging the area with the best equipment the money from Gabe's
Gitano
find could buy, their fes- tive approach to the expedition had made them sloppy. Six months after giving up the search, a Key West salvage outfit found the
Laurens
exactly where Gabe and Pablo had searched and overlooked it
,
making nautical archaeology history.

“Besides,” Gabe continued. “If we check out every tweak on that thing, we'll be circling around here for months.”

Once Manolo had placed the marker over the spot that had first registered the presence of metal, Jeanne slipped slender arms around Stuart and Nick's shoulders. “Okay, guys, let's fill that chart with hits.”

“And the sooner the better,” Gabe reflected aloud. He spun the wheel to make another sweep. “The last thing we need is to be diving after some twentieth-century freighter while a competitor sweeps in and nabs the treasure for himself.”

“Is that the voice of experience too?” Jeanne asked.

Concentrating on his instruments, Gabe nodded. “But then, you're not interested in the
commercial
side of treasure hunting.”

“Oh, spare us the paranoia,” Primston drawled, as though it were more sickening than the movement of the sea beneath them.

Gabe swelled with antagonism, but kept it just in check. “Know what, Prim? I hope to heaven that I
am
just paranoid.”

Jeanne intervened before the professor could respond. “Remy, Gabe obviously has reason for his concern . . . even if he carries it to overkill,” she added, popping Gabe's fleeting bubble of reprieve. “But that was yesterday, guys. Today we have a ship to find, so let the past stay there, please?”

Gabe clenched the wheel in frustration. How could someone as smart as Jeanne be so naïve?
Today we have a ship to find.
That cheerleader enthusiasm and willingness to forgive and forget, whether directed at Primston or himself, bothered the dickens out of Gabe, enough to sharpen his voice.

“It's a dog-eat-dog business, Jeanne. The sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be.”

“Not among academics,” Remy objected with a hallmark lift of his chin, the highest he'd managed all day.

Acid permeated Gabe's laugh. “A thief is a thief, Prim. The only difference between the likes of Arnauld and academia is a fancy certificate with initials after the name.”

Instead of a night on the town, a night in the lodge awaited the crew of the
Fallen Angel
. The hours spent “mowing the lawn”— running the boat back and forth along an invisible grid—resulted in two major hits marked on Pablo's map, with a string of smaller ones scattered between. While the young men tried to hold Gabe to his wager, the captain had good-naturedly pointed out that the readings only indicated the presence of a mass of metal.

“It could have been someone's old refrigerator dumped overboard,” he'd teased the brash, freckle-faced Stuart.

“Yeah, well, when we come back and find out it's a cannon, you owe us a night on the town,” Nick shot back.

Their supper of steak-kabobs, traditional black beans, salsa, and tortillas over, Nick, Stuart, Ann, and Mara played table tennis in the corner of the dining hall. Remy had skipped the meal altogether, setting up his videocamera to record the lagoon and turning in early on the twin bed he'd ordered from Cancún, while Manolo took Nemo and walked into town to call his family.

Her thrill over the accomplishments of the day undaunted by the captain's old refrigerator theory, Jeanne remained at the table, chatting with Pablo and Gabe.

“Judging from the debris field to date, it should continue in this direction . . . eastward,” Gabe theorized. “Not a bad day's work.”

Jeanne pushed away her half-finished dessert—a banana-chocolate
chimichanga
.

“So we're going to find the ship tomorrow?”

“
If
this is the only elbow-shaped island off the coast of the Yucatán,” Gabe pointed out. “It usually doesn't happen this fast, sweet.”

“O ye of little faith,” she countered.

“
Pues
,” Pablo said, rolling up the charts. “I have faith
abundante
for the both of us.
Buenas noches, amigos.”

“That's it for me, too, folks,” Ann announced from the Ping-Pong table.

“Gabe, will you be my partner?” Mara asked.

Before Gabe could answer, Jeanne spoke up. “Hey, how about a moonlight swim?”

Gabe's hand shot up. “I'm in.”

The idea caught on like wildfire. Nick and Stuart slammed down their paddles and abandoned the table.

“Meet you at the beach,” Nick said, darting for the door, Stuart in his wake.

Mara wasn't as quick, but was just as enthusiastic. “I'll go get my swimsuit on,” she said, solely for Gabe's benefit, judging by the worshipful look she gave him.

Gabe jumped up to pull Jeanne's chair out as the door slammed behind the girl. “Milady,” he said, with a flourish of his hand.

Jeanne managed a smile, though she was ensnared in a tumble of thought. Gabe was a lady's man, undoubtedly. And he seemed to dole his attentions equally, she conceded. But Mara's enchantment with him worried Jeanne.

“Gabe?” she said as he held the door for her to go out on the veranda.

“Yes?”

He placed a hand to her back, an act as natural as breathing for him, but it sent Jeanne's thoughts into a whirl. What exactly was she going to say? Don't seduce a starry-eyed grad student?

Jeanne measured her words. “Gabe, be careful with Mara.”

A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “Ah, my shy girl.”

“
Your
?”

He dropped his hand. “Well, not literally.” Cocking his head at Jeanne, he searched her face. “She's only a child, Jeanne.”

“So was that pregnant girl you gave money to at the cantina.” Jeanne bit her lip as soon as she realized what she'd said, but the words were already out. That girl was none of her business. Mara was.

Righteous indignation seared Gabe's Romanesque features, leaving a darkening cloud in its wake. “Hang on,” he declared. “You think that I—” He broke off, his cheeks billowing with the incredulous breath he released. Or was it steam?

“Mara is . . . unsophisticated,” Jeanne went on quickly. “An—”

“First, that pregnant girl in the cantina . . . I can't believe you think that I . . .” Gabe spun around, staring at the screen door with fury enough to melt the mesh. “She is Manolo's eldest daughter,” he said, wheeling about to face Jeanne again. “Her husband works inland on a
ranchero,
and she needed money for food. Manolo was busted, so I gave her some.”

Embarrassment beat a hot path to Jeanne's cheeks. What had her concern for her protégé caused her to do? “I'm so sorry, Gabe. I . . . I . . . ” Jeanne groaned inwardly, looking in desperation for the right words to dig herself out of this major faux pas. “I had no right to judge, even if that had been the case. It's none of my business anyway,” she rambled on, “but Mara—”

“Mara
is
unsophisticated, and very unsure of herself as a woman,” Gabe conceded. “I was just”—he ran his hands over his dark hair, searching for the right words—“just trying to make her feel good about herself . . . and maybe alert her knucklehead mates to the fact that she's smart and only needs a little attention to bloom.”

Jeanne's humiliation gave way to a meltdown of the heart. If he was for real, Gabe Avery was good, very good. And if not, he was good, but very bad.

“It's just that I was like her,” she blurted out, “and I know how a little attention can make a girl think there's more to it than it really is.” Jeanne moaned inwardly. She did not want to go there, back to her undergrad days and a humiliation she'd not even shared with her closest friends.

Gabe crossed his arms across his chest in challenge. “No way.”

But there was no coming back now. “Yes way. I wore dark, plastic-framed glasses and whatever was clean in the closet. But as soon as I landed my first real job, laser surgery took care of the glasses, and I had to dress smart for travel and presentations . . . and convincing people to fund this expedition.”

“So what happened that makes you wary of a little attention directed at the girl?”

And she thought she'd put the anguish of her first and only crush long behind her. “I was two grades ahead of my age group in college. He was a grad student, and I misunderstood his help and attention until he showed me the engagement ring that he'd bought his
real
girlfriend. I got hurt. End of story.”