Rolling in the Deep: Hawaiian Heroes, Book 2 (23 page)

Ah, Kanaloa, he was a fucking goner.

He was saved by a riff of slack-key guitar that cut clearly through the quiet house. Claire started visibly, raising one arm to cover her breasts, the other hand darting between her thighs to cover her mons, her wide gaze on the open door.

“My phone.” Only family, a few friends and business associates had his number. And since most of his business associates were Ho’omalus, that left family and a few friends.

He could have let it go to Messages, but instead, to escape from the power of that sea-blue gaze, he rose in one lithe movement and sauntered across the sun-warmed tiles to where the burbling phone lay on a small table.

The name displayed was
Dennis Ho
. A retired biology teacher, married to one of the Ho’omalu cousins, he took his boat out a few days a week, fishing for ono, ahi and the other deepwater fish favored by the local restaurants.

“Dennis, whassup?”

“Hey, Daniel. I just got back from fishing—went out about six miles today, off Nawea, you know?”

Daniel grunted encouragingly. “Yeah, good catch?”

He reached down to adjust himself and realized he was still wearing the used condom. Oh, real smooth.

Phone to his ear, he strode back to the bathroom.

“Yeah, ono were running today. Great catch. But, y’know, weird thing happened,” the older man said in his ear, a rumbling boat motor in the background indicating he was idling into the harbor. Dennis liked to run out of Honaunau, the small bay north of Nawea that was also popular with snorkelers. “As I was coming back in, I followed the shoreline up from your family’s place at Nawea. Got something on my fishfinder—something really big, like a…a whale.”

With one hand, Daniel used a wad of toilet paper to deal with the condom. Then he froze, gazing unseeingly at the large carving of a whale breaching by his huge shower. “Big as a whale,” he repeated. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up. “Was it moving?”

“Yeah, it was. Sounds crazy, I know.
Koholā
are in Alaska fattening up. I guess one could have strayed back here, but…”

“Not real likely,” Daniel finished for him. And whatever it was, if it belonged to the Helmans, it was not merely a submersible container. It was a submarine vehicle of some kind. But he couldn’t tell Dennis that. “Couldn’t have been a navy sub? One of those little experimental jobs?”

Dennis Ho chuckled. “Yeah, you know, that’s probably what it was. It’s just…navy subs don’t come in as close as this thing was. They stay deep, out of the way of fishing nets and lines. Weird, yeah?”

“Yeah. Where were you again?”

“Right off Nawea. I could see the house. You know how it slopes down right off there and then flattens off, kind of a shelf? I was out about a hundred yards.”

“Which way was it headed?”

“South, toward Na’alele Caves.”

“All right. Mahalo, man. I’ll check it out.” Shit! Right off Nawea. The bastards had brought their filth into his family’s front yard—again.

“Okay, it’s probably nothing, yeah? I just thought you folks would like to know. If the navy’s running tests out there, you don’t wanna scare your guests.” Dennis said good-bye, and Daniel clicked his phone off. Then he turned and stalked back out into the entryway, heedless of his nudity.

Claire was on her feet, bending over to step into her little bikini bottoms. He watched, caught by the graphic display and by the intimacy of watching a sexy wahine put her clothes back on after he’d had her. She shimmied her hips to settle the little straps on her rounded hips, and lust fired again in his groin, his cock twitching.

“You betta go back to Nawea,” he said abruptly. Damn, she could heat him up fast. He moved restlessly, feeling as if an invisible net were closing around him. “I got something I gotta do.”

She froze for an instant and then bent over again, her back still to him, to settle her breasts in the flimsy cups of her bikini top. Then she picked up her sarong, stepped into her flip-flops and sauntered out his open door without once looking back. As if what they’d done, what she’d let him do to her, was
mea ‘ole,
nothing much.

The muted light of the stormy afternoon poured over her, gilding her satiny skin with gentle gold, her tousled hair with a sheen like the creamy foam on a breaking surf.
‘Ui nani.
So pretty
.
So dangerous. She’d taken everything he’d given her and asked for more.

He wanted to follow her, grab her hand and ask her to stay, be here when he got back. He clenched his hands into fists at his sides to fight the temptation.

“See you around, Ho’omalu,” she threw over her shoulder.

She was pissed. Well, that made two of them. She’d gotten to him, even though he’d promised himself he wouldn’t break, wouldn’t give in to her brand of temptation. And he didn’t dare take time for this k
āne
-wahine shit. He had to call Tony on the boat, and then he had hunting to do.

Chapter Fourteen

Stepping out onto his lanai, Daniel watched Claire until she disappeared through the trees on the path to Nawea. Then he walked naked down to the tiny semicircle of sand that built up this time of year in the lava basin. His phone in his hand, he punched a familiar number.

“Hilo,” he said. “I need Tony’s cell number.”

Hilo’s nephew was headed south from Honok
ō
hau. He and Daniel reviewed his instructions, and then Daniel hung up and stowed his new phone on a high rock, well away from the waves.

Avoiding the lava boulders half-buried in the sand, he waded into the foaming surf, waited for the big wave to surge up into the bay, then launched himself straight into it.

The water rose up around him, surrounding him, cool on his hot skin, buoying him in its liquid cradle. The tension inside him coalesced, focused, hummed through his blood like a silvery stream that connected him to everything around him, above and beneath.

Once again he hunted. And now he knew what he was hunting for—a submersible of some kind. Dennis’s phone call was a major breakthrough. He could feel it.

He’d heard of the South American cartels using homemade submarines. They built a small fleet at the staggering cost of nearly a million dollars apiece and sent them off to Florida loaded with cocaine and heroin. Some malfunctioned and sank, taking their unlucky pilots with them. Some were discovered by the Coast Guard and their cargos confiscated. But, even if only one made it through, the street value of the cargo turned the whole venture into a massive windfall for the cartel.

Daniel suspected this was a lone sub, probably towed over behind the
Hypnautique
. And the reason Denas Helman had cruised to Hawaii when he could have flown in a fraction of the time.

Kicking his long legs, buttocks and torso in a powerful dolphin kick, Daniel swam out through the gap in the lava and down, into the clear, turquoise depths through the reef, startling a rainbow-hued parrotfish, scattering a school of silver threadfins hovering over a sandy patch, and on over the dark lava beds where a large honu cruised slowly.

Daniel turned slightly, west and north, paralleling the shore in front of Nawea Bay. With family and guests at Nawea, he kept a lookout for snorkelers but saw nothing but a pair of spotted eagle rays sailing along, their fins flapping as gracefully as the wings of their namesakes.

When he was past Nawea, he turned, following the shoreline, searching all the indentations in the lava flows big enough to camouflage a submersible. There were several, as a hot lava flow could cause a boiling cauldron of waves, forming the lava into fantastical shapes as it cooled and hardened. These old flows had been built on by sea creatures such as coral and were now reefs teeming with life and color. The more recent flows here had been slower, the lava simply sliding out into long shelves on the seabed.

Daniel swam easily, using his arms as well as his powerful kick to propel his body through the water.

He heard the far-off drone of a small boat, the deeper thunder of a large one. The clicks and whistles of a pod of nai’a, fishing in the distance. The deep rhythmic sigh of the sea around him. His heartbeat slowed, deepened in tune with the ocean…with Kanaloa’s home, his preserve.

He called to the nai’a, but they were too far away to hear him or too busy hunting to answer. Never mind, if they’d sighted the bad hard again, they’d let him know.

He swam on. But although he searched until the sea around him grew murky with the passing of the sun, he found nothing. There was a trace of some foreign substance in the water, a faint taste in his mouth, but it was probably just fuel leaking from a passing boat. The sea concealed many secrets.

He swam back south along the shore, and home. He realized now that he was hungry. He hadn’t worn trunks, finding them a hindrance on a long swim, so he couldn’t surface at Nawea. Mustn’t shock the guests with his bare
ule
.

He swam into his little bay, shaking water from his face and eyes. After looking for visitors, he swam in on a big wave, landing on his feet on the semicircle of sand and walking up onto the rocks. He stood for a moment, getting his land legs and letting the salt water stream off him. He was tired, but it was a good tired—sex and a long swim—ono, very fine.

His mood was not so relaxed. If the sub did belong to the navy, it would be gone, back to the ship from which it had come.

But if it belonged to a clandestine group such as the Helmans, it would most likely be lurking somewhere, hiding from passersby until called to meet at some
hālāwai
, rendezvous. They wouldn’t dare bring it into one of the public harbors like Kailua or Honaunau—they’d certainly be seen.

Tomorrow morning, he’d be out looking again—this time to the south. And he would summon the nai’a to help him. For to the south lay a long stretch of wild coastline, including the Na’alele sea caves.

He called Tony back. The younger man reported that he was still off Nawea, patterning his way back and forth along the shoreline, but so far had seen nothing out of the ordinary on his sonar. Since it was twilight, Daniel told him to head back to Honok
ō
hau and come back first thing in the morning.

He needed to talk with his father and Hilo. David would be back tomorrow, too. Until then, Daniel was not going to bother him.

After rinsing off in the outdoor shower under one of the massive fig trees, he walked up to the house and inside, the lights coming on as he passed. The automatic controls he’d had installed meant he didn’t need to hunt for light switches when he came in from a night swim.

He dried his hair a little by squeezing his braids in a clean towel. Considering his open closet, he chose a pair of blue shorts and a gray T-shirt with blue-and-white waves breaking in a stylized design across the chest and back. He eyed himself in the full-length mirror and shrugged. One big, scary moke, with or without clothes. His looks hadn’t scared Claire off, and that was what mattered.

Shoving his feet into the custom-made leather sandals that were all he wore on his feet most of the time, he set out for Nawea Bay, food, drink and the company of one sexy wahine. Who was likely still pissed off at him. He’d been pretty abrupt—hell, now that he thought about it, he hadn’t even said good-bye.

Shit. He didn’t treat women that way—never had before, anyway. For some damn reason that he didn’t care to examine too closely, Claire Hunter brought out both the best and the worst in him. He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. She might be a tough tita, but she was still a wahine. They liked pretty words after sex. Maybe even more so after rough sex.

Well, he’d do what he had to do. He could take her sarcastic tongue if she wanted to give him a few lashes, although with her, talking smack was practically foreplay.

A slow smile of sheer anticipation lit his face.

Claire was royally pissed off, as well as hurt. How dare that big Hawaiian take her with such single-minded passion, thrilling her with his absolute and utter concentration on
her
…and then brusquely order her back to Nawea as if she were nothing but a—a whore? Only her pride had held her head high, her shoulders back as she walked away from him.

However, she was not about to let the emotions roiling inside her spoil her evening, especially not when she was on her second delicious mai tai. In fact, if she just looked at the situation like a guy, she’d gotten laid, and she sure didn’t have to put up with a clingy partner.

Meanwhile, here she was on the beach lanai, the sun setting in a bank of heavy clouds colored with improbable purples, while the sky shaded from pale pink to deep blue above, near the looming Mauna Loa.

The warm air was perfumed with the plumeria that ringed the guesthouse lawns and with the scent of the damp earth and the sea. Lights were beginning to twinkle on up the coast toward Kona and above on the mountainside, limning the Mamalahoa Highway. A fishing boat motored by just offshore, headed north, the running lights glimmering in the dusk.

Another boat had been moored at the dock. A long, wicked length of blue just darker than the sea. The craft rocked gently on the small waves lapping around her like a racehorse at rest. Long streamers of greenish blue ran along the sides, interspersed with white curls like breaking waves. Through it all ran a gold metallic streak like a lightning bolt with a symbol in the center—a series of concentric circles with cross members bisecting the circle into six sections.

So this was Daniel’s boat, and the explanation for the thunder she’d heard earlier, on her way over to his house. Now that she’d seen the boat, she wanted a ride in it more than ever.

Nearer at hand, the tiki torches edging the lawn flickered over the beach lanai, highlighting the tanned bare skin and glossy hair of the people lounging around the long table.

Claire took another sip of mai tai, savoring the fresh taste of pineapple and mango edged with rum. She smiled at Bella, who looked like a native in her red-and-white-flowered halter dress, a hibiscus in her dark hair. Claire wore her new blue shorts and a halter top batiked with blue-and-white plumeria, a matching blossom tucked into her swept-up hair. Sara wore another expensive little dress, this one green. Even Grace had gone islander in a flowered orange halter dress. She looked more relaxed than she had since they landed.