Devil and the Deep (The Deep Six) (10 page)

“You gotta get off my shoulders,” Bran told Maddy. “But I want you to stay between me and the fort wall. Be careful of the barnacles.” Because those could do almost as much damage as the fish.

“Did I hear y’all mention somethin’ about a barracuda?” she asked, not budging an inch.

“Could be,” Mason said. “Feels like it every time it rubs against me.”

Great. Way to reassure her,
gavone.

“Hey,” he said, trying to offer some comfort. “Barracuda attacks aren’t usually deadly. Not like shark attacks can be.” Of course, with a set of dagger-like teeth made for digging into prey and ripping away chunks of flesh, the fish could score some serious devastation. Just
thinking
about what the creature could do to Maddy’s soft, perfect skin…

He was suddenly sick, the Gatorade he’d had earlier turning sour in his stomach.

“Good, great,” Maddy said, slipping off his shoulders and quietly splashing into the tepid water. “All the same, what do you say to us blowin’ this Popsicle stand and gettin’ our asses inside the fort?”

“You sure you can do this?” he asked.

“Does the Tin Man have a sheet-metal dick?” she responded.

Brave…

Once again the word whispered through his head. Because contrary to what some people believed, bravery wasn’t about
not
being afraid to do something. It was about
being
afraid to do something and still doing it anyway.

He would not have thought it was possible for his estimation of Maddy to grow any more. But right then and there, it did. Madison Marie Powers, oil heiress, philanthropist, Texas tornado disguised in a tiny teacup package, was one of the most courageous individuals he’d ever met. Which was saying something considering he’d made a career of working with the bravest sonsofbitches on the planet.

And then something else occurred to him. It wasn’t
just
his estimation of her that had grown, so had his feelings. What he’d thought were simple
lust
and
like
abruptly felt bigger. Wider. Deeper.
More.

8:04 p.m.…

“Mason first. You second. And I’ll be the caboose on this train,” Bran said, and Maddy tried with her whole heart to project courage even though she was feeling about as yellow as mustard with half the bite.

It wasn’t the upcoming swim that gave her the willies. It was the thought of the barracuda that had her blood running through her veins in a river colder than a cast-iron commode—another of Grandma Bettie’s faves.

It’s in here. With us. And it’s hungry.

When her teeth threatened to chatter, she clenched her jaw so tight she reckoned she heard a molar crack.

She glanced into the water, trying to see the silver flash of the fish. And barring that, she hoped to get a gander at the crack in the foundation of the fort. Unfortunately, neither worked. The barracuda was probably hanging back, suspended in the water, completely motionless in that terrifying way only predators of the deep could pull off.
Brrrrr.
And the tunnel? Well, it was down there. Somewhere unseen beneath all that dark water. And was it her imagination, or was it suddenly whispering up at her, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”

“Use your arms to pull yourself along,” Mason instructed, his Beantown accent making it sound like
use yah ahms ta pull yahself along
. He could’ve stepped into a scene in
Good Will Hunting
without missing a beat. “And if you get scared down there, just keep going. Don’t turn back. Turning back is the worst thing you could do.”

“Got it,” she managed around the Rock of Gibraltar-sized lump that had grown in the back of her throat. “Use my arms. No turnin’ back.”

Holy moly. That last part sounds ominous.

“Ready?” Bran asked. He was paddling behind her, providing a barrier between her and the waiting barracuda. She was so grateful she could kiss him.

Oh, wait. I already did that. And it was better than good, it was gggrrrreat!
In fact, she was determined to repeat the exercise. Repeatedly. But preferably under less dire circumstances.

“I was born ready.” She was pleased to discover her voice wasn’t shivering like the rest of her.

Bran flashed his pirate smile. “Woman, you got more guts than—”

“You can string on a fence,” she finished for him.

“What?” He cocked his head.

“It’s somethin’ my daddy always says to me. ‘You got more guts than you can string on a fence.’” She made a face. “What’s
implied
there is that my bravado usually outweighs my brains.” Not waiting on either Bran or Mason to agree or disagree with the sentiment, she continued, “That being the case, let’s make like a stump-tailed cow at fly time, and get busy gettin’ it done.”

“I know that last part was English.” Mason frowned. “But I’m not sure I understood it.”

Apparently he didn’t care to be enlightened because he sank low in the water, only his face above the gently lapping surface. She watched him blow out a big, blustery breath and suck in an even larger one. Then he just…disappeared. Allowed the water—the
inhabited
water—to swallow him up.

“Your turn,” Bran said.

She nodded, ignoring all the inner bells and whistles warning her that what she was about to do was completely, totally, utterly bonkers. It wasn’t too difficult, considering she’d been ignoring those inner bells and whistles most of her life.
Leap before you look.
Her father said she should have the phrase tattooed across her forehead. Maybe after tonight, she’d take the suggestion seriously.

Mimicking Mason’s moves, she kicked away from the side of the fort and allowed herself to sink into the moat until the warm water covered everything but her face. With her ears submerged, the
glug-glug
of the liquid moving against the side of the structure was both muted and strangely amplified.

Blowing out a huge breath, she then sucked in as much air as she could. Sucked until her lungs couldn’t hold another drop. Sucked until her nose was filled with the distinctly ocean-y smell of the barnacles clinging to the side of the fort wall: fish and shells and algae and…death.

She hoped that last bit wasn’t portentous of anything as she dove beneath the surface, kicking hard to propel herself downward, her hands gently rubbing along the rough masonry in search of the opening. She wasn’t sure why she kept her eyes open in the stinging salt water. It’s not like she could see anything. But then, suddenly, she did. An inkier blackness within all the blackness, right before her probing fingers sank into a hollow.

Here goes
, she thought as she pulled herself into the narrow tunnel.
This one’s for the girls.

It was a mantra she repeated as she hauled herself along, finding handholds in the bricks and the slimy sea life that made its home in the craggy walls. Maddy didn’t
begin
to want to know what was slipping beneath her fingers. Nor did she want to contemplate the seconds ticking by.

Twenty feet? Really?
It was beginning to feel more like two hundred.

Then again, time flies when you’re havin’ fun!

She redoubled her efforts, adding a few soft kicks to the work her arms were doing. She
softly
kicked because she didn’t want to smack into the walls of the fissure. The tunnel was tighter than a skeeter’s butthole—she couldn’t imagine how Mason and Bran were able to shoulder their way through—and no telling how stable the centuries’ old brickwork was. Lord knows, she didn’t want to trigger a cave-in. Also, she didn’t want to boot Bran in his handsome mug.

She couldn’t feel him. And she certainly couldn’t see him. But he said he’d be right behind her, and Bran was nothing if not a man of his word. It gave her the confidence, the calm to keep pushing ahead.

At least for a while.

Five seconds stretched to ten. Ten seconds quickly became twenty. The water inside the tunnel was cooler than that in the moat. It softly brushed against her cheeks and hair, slipping down the collar of her T-shirt to slide across her breasts and belly like intrusive, chilly hands.

Come on. Come on…

Where was the cistern? Why hadn’t she reached it? Surely she’d gone twenty feet by now.
Surely!

Her lungs burned. Her heart rate spiked, trying to push oxygen that wasn’t there through her bloodstream.

Did I take a wrong turn? Could the tunnel have forked?

She kicked and pulled, kicked and pulled, her motions becoming more desperate as oxygen deprivation set in. All her instincts yelled at her.
Turn back!
But she fought them off, pushing, pulling, propelling herself forward. Ever forward.

Where’s Bran? I took a wrong turn! Somehow I—

Space…

Big, beautiful, wide-open space. She was free-floating in the cistern.
Finally!

She kicked toward the surface with all her might. Her fingers became claws, tearing at the water. The beat of her heart was a ferocious roar in her ears. Her lungs spasmed, desperate to suck in air.

Uh-oh. Had she gotten mixed up in all that cool, wet blackness when she exited the fissure? Was she swimming down instead of up?

Oh Lord! Oh shit! Oh—

Her mouth opened in a silent scream. Briny water rushed in, triggering her gag reflex. Spots of light flashed in front of her unblinking eyes, but they weren’t bioluminescent sea creatures. They were hallucinations conjured up by her under-oxygenated brain as her synapses misfired.

She stopped to turn around. Surely she was swimming down. She had to be. She would have reached the surface by now! But before she could switch directions, a hard arm came around her middle.

In an instant she was propelled through the water. Bran’s muscled legs kicked. His free arm stroked. He was a human torpedo dragging her along for the ride. Good thing, because she was done.

Out of juice.

Out of air.

Out of time. And then…

“Uhhhhh!” They breached the surface just as her convulsing lungs overrode her willpower and forced her to suck in bright, brilliant oxygen…along with a fair amount of liquid.

She immediately folded in half, hacking and coughing and trying to clear the spray from her lungs. The sound of her struggle echoed through the cistern, bouncing around the brick walls. Bran slammed a wide-palmed hand over her mouth.

“Shhhhh,” he hissed, his lips moving against her ear, his hot breath burning along her cheek. “Just breathe, babe.”

Uh-huh. Breathe. Right.

Problem was, she couldn’t. Not without hacking up a lung. And if she did that, the resulting sound could resonate through the cistern and out into the parade grounds, alerting their enemies to their presence.

For Pete’s sake, Maddy! Could you
be
any more of a pain in the ass?

Going on instinct, she spun in Bran’s embrace, wrapping her legs around his waist and burying her nose in the crook of his neck. Her stomach contracted around the need to cough. Her lungs quaked. But she managed to execute a muted throat-clearing thing that she further muffled against Bran’s tough flesh. It wasn’t exactly a silent exercise. But neither was it sure to bring the bad guys down on their heads.

Again and again, she repeated the process. Each odd inhale and exhale felt gritty, like she’d pulled sand into her lungs instead of water. But after a few seconds, she was able to suck air through her nose without her diaphragm trying to send it hacking back out into the warm, dense atmosphere.

Her senses returned. She could hear the gentle
slap-slap
of the water against the sides of the brick structure. She could smell the clean, masculine scent of Bran beneath the thin layer of seawater that coated his skin. She could feel his heavy pulse beating beneath her lips, a drumbeat she could set her watch to. And even though she couldn’t see—the darkness inside the cistern was complete—she knew at some point Bran had swum them to the edge. She could sense the tall, damp walls of the water tank rising overhead. With one arm still wrapped securely around her waist, he was holding on to something that allowed them to float freely, effortlessly in the water.

For a while, she allowed herself to revel. Revel in being alive. Revel in being able to breathe. Revel in feeling momentarily safe and secure inside Bran’s embrace—she’d stuck herself to him like a whole sleeve of plastic wrap; if there was a fraction of an inch of space between their bodies, she couldn’t feel it. She closed her eyes against the darkness and simply…
was.
No thoughts. No fears. Just her. Just him. Just being. Just touching.

And then it happened…

Bran’s pulse kicked up. His chest expanded on a deep breath. And he stilled against her, all his muscles contracting at once. She knew what caused the change. It was the same thing that happened any time they touched. Sudden, intimate…
awareness
.

The smooth firmness of his skin beneath her lips tempted her to taste
.
She fought the need for a whole two seconds. It was two seconds she was extremely proud of, just to be clear. But then she couldn’t stand it. She opened her lips over his hammering pulse-point and flicked her tongue against his hot flesh.

Male.
That was the word that flittered through her brain as Bran’s sweet, salty taste exploded on her tongue. He was all man. From top to bottom. Inside and out. And when she was touching him, kissing him, she was every bit a woman. Completely aware that she had breasts and a womb. Both ached, throbbed,
yearned
.

Bran sucked in a ragged breath at the second pass of her tongue. “Maddy,” he rumbled, lowering his chin until his lips moved against her ear. The arm around her waist became a wide, warm hand that crept lower, lower,
lower
until he was palming her ass, kneading and caressing and moving her against him in that age-old rhythm that rubbed her swelling sex against the seam of her shorts.

Her nipples tightened into painful buds. Her clitoris throbbed, rejoicing in the sudden friction. And his response, his inability to pretend they were just pen pals when they were together like this, emboldened her. She closed her mouth over his pulse and sucked. Bran started to quiver. A telltale sign of what would happen next. He’d snap. Suddenly
he
would be the one running the show, not her.
He
would be the one making her moan.
He
would be the one making her shiver.
He
would be the conqueror and she the conquered. And she would love every minute of it.

But before Bran had the chance to go all…
Bran
on her, Mason cleared his throat. The sound carried from somewhere over on the opposite wall of the cistern and accomplished two things. It reminded Maddy that she and Bran weren’t alone and that they still had a very important job to do.

The girls…

Holy shit! How could she have forgotten for even a moment? But she knew. It was six-plus feet of tough-as-nails hotness that started with a
B
and ended with a
ran
. Whenever she was in his arms, she forgot she even had a name.