Vortex (Cutter Cay) (26 page)

Daniela sat on the couch in the common room, Wes attached to her hip. She was flipping through the channels; reception in the middle of the Pacific was iffy, and she paused whenever a relatively clear program came on. As much as she didn’t want to know, burying her head wasn’t going to prepare her for Victor’s next move. At least if she saw him on the news, she’d know where he was.

Four T-FLAC men faced the windows, forming a blockade of wall-to-wall muscle. There was nothing out there but water as far as the eye could see. What a boring job. She prayed it
stayed
boring. Unfortunately, she felt as though a nest of spiders was crawling inside her clothes. Or Victor’s other Italian Testoni dress shoe was just about to drop.

Logan had reluctantly left her to dive. His team had found something “unbelievable and amazing” that he
had
to see. He’d only agreed to go because there were plenty of people to keep watch over her—more than half of them highly-trained special ops personnel with more firepower than an army—and she’d insisted.

“You don’t have to hang around,” she told Wes, not quite able to meet his eyes yet. Dear God, she’d never been so embarrassed in her life. And while he hadn’t seen more than her naked back, she knew that
he
knew what was going on behind Logan’s desk.

His head rested on the back of the sofa, his feet up on the table, hands folded on his belly. The very picture of relaxed. Except that energy pulsed off him in waves, and his eyes kept slewing to the window where the rest of the team was gathered.

“I’d rather be in here with you, watching infomercials for—what
is
that stuff? Bacon grease?”

“Face-lift in a Jar.” She kicked his thigh as she changed channels. “Liar.
Go.
I’ve got all these—” She stopped short with a small intake of breath.

Wes jerked upright at the sound. “What?!”

Transfixed, Daniela turned up the sound. “… with Stamps’s standing falling as other candidates surge—” Victor’s face filled the screen, and her hearing went dull. “… was a candidate in serious contention for a nomination,” the pretty blond anchor said as they flashed a picture of Victor and herself at a White House Christmas party. “May be jeopardized by his search for his fiancée, DC gallery owner, twenty-seven-year-old Daniela Rosado, who has been missing for sixty-three days. No ransom demands have been made, but Senator Stamps holds out hope that she is still alive. Anyone knowing—”

Daniela knew if she moved, she’d vomit on Logan’s nice wool area rug. She pressed a fist to the churning acid in her stomach, squeezing her eyes shut, taking measured breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth to quell the nausea.

She felt a familiar hand on the back of her head, and heard Logan say calmly, “Put your head between your knees. There you go. I have you.” Something cold dripped down her cheek. She buried her face against her knees, trembling as if she stood in a high wind.

“—four front-runners and seven switches in the lead seen in Gallup polling since May. He falls short of the—”

“Turn that crap off,” Logan instructed, and she felt someone—Wes?—take the TV remote from her lax fingers. Then there was blessed silence. Her pulse throbbed in her ears. Cold, clammy sweat sheened her skin.

The sofa cushions beside her dipped, throwing her sideways against Logan’s body. The fabric of his wet suit felt rubbery and slick against her bare arms, and it was still wet. Hot and cold prickles raced along her skin like fire ants swarming on honey. Nausea pushed up the back of her throat, and she swallowed convulsively as her mouth filled with saliva.

Daniela buried her face against the hard plane of Logan’s chest, and he wrapped his arms tightly around her. “Talk to me,” he said quietly.

“His poll numbers are down,” her voice was muffled by his chest.

“He can’t get to you, sweetheart.”

Logan got it. Victor was already determined to find her, and with his poll numbers down, he had to find her even
faster.
Either to march back to DC with her on his arm as a prize, or with the news of her tragic death. Either would shoot up his numbers. Right now it appeared as if public opinion was divided between sympathy and suspicion.

She shifted her head to bury her face against his warm neck. He smelled of the sea. “I’m screwed.”

He touched her hair with his lips. “Only by me.” For several minutes they stayed that way, her face pressed to his warm, Logan-scented neck, his arms around her.

He dropped a kiss on her temple. “Want to see what the guys discovered?”

Still slightly sick to her stomach with nerves, she lifted her head and said brightly, “I’d love to.” Anything to distract her from the hideous reality clutching at her throat.

He got to his feet and held out his hand. Wes had disappeared, and the guys standing around ignored them as they went outside. It was surreal to see that the sun was shining, that clouds danced across the sky on the wind, and that the ocean around them maintained its same brilliant blue. It all looked so normal, so totally and utterly normal. She felt like a fake standing on deck with Logan making small talk when she wanted to race down to his cabin, triple-lock the doors, and hide under the bed.

“You look very sexy in that getup,” she told him, eyeing the close-fitting black wet suit. “You can’t hide a thing in that, can you?” she asked wickedly. It was a little forced as she struggled to regain her equilibrium.

“We can turn right around and go down to my office,” he said. “I have something big and important to show you there as well.”

“Where’s the latest and greatest?” She glanced at the table and down onto the dive platform where the guys were gathered. Dog jumped off the edge with a happy bark. He was wearing a life vest and his neon red harness.

“Do you want to learn how to dive?” Logan raised his voice over the dog’s excited barking as he swam in circles, trying to bite the water, his paws and tail thrashing happily.

“Not really. I used to love to swim when I was a kid.” She bit her lip, then met his eyes. Tone dry, she said, “Now I’m not that fond of having my head under the water.”

He nodded in acknowledgment of what she’d left unspoken.

“Different animal altogether, I promise. It’s magical down there. Quiet enough to think, and beautiful enough to make you forget what’s going on up here.”

She stood on her toes to whisper in his ear. “We could see something magical in your cabin too.”

Logan slid his arm around her waist. “We’ll go there later. Come down and see my world. I want to share it with you.”

Daniela could only nod. Logan called Wes and two of the black-clad men to accompany her to and from her cabin where she changed into the bikini Wes had bought for her in Lima. She wrapped a towel around her body before going back into the hallway where the three men waited.

“You know this suit is for a malnourished eight-year-old, right? Didn’t they have grownup swimsuits at that store?”

“Logan won’t think you look like a malnourished eight-year-old in it, I can assure you,” Wes told her. “It’s not too small, it’s your size. And you’ll be covered by a wet suit, so don’t worry about it.” They took the stairs down.

When they got to the landing, Wes took her arm. “I’ve salvaged with Logan for eight years, and in all that time, I’ve never seen him show affection for a woman in public.”

“He has a protective streak a mile wide, I know.”

“Yeah. He does that.” Wes grabbed an apple from the buffet Hipolito had set up and held it out. Daniela shook her head. After seeing Victor’s face, coupled with the prospect of her first dive, her stomach didn’t need any more assaults.

“I see the way he looks at you. Hell, I see the way you look at him.”

Daniela figured their heated glances were pretty obvious to everyone. And the fact that they couldn’t be in the same room without touching was a big tip-off. “I get it. You’re watching out for your friend’s interests. I like him. A lot. But when this is all over”—
and if I’m still alive
—“I’ll go back to my life in Washington, and he, if he thinks of me at all, will remember this as a … holiday fling.”

“I don’t th—”

“There you two are.” Logan was halfway up the ladder from the dive platform. “Ready?” he asked, his eyes level with her thighs. She felt that look straight to her core, and was surprised the ladder didn’t melt in his fingers.

She eyed his hands, tightly fisted on the top rung. “As I’ll ever be.”

He climbed back down, and then stood at the bottom and assisted her. By gliding his hands up her legs from ankle to knee, and knee to thigh. She made a grab for the towel, but that was a lost cause as he slid his hands onto her hips, and then closed his fingers around her waist to lift her down the last few feet.

“I need to give Wes a raise.” His voice was husky as she turned around in his arms and he got the full impact of her in the lipstick-red bikini. There wasn’t much to it. The solar flares in his midnight eyes were enough to heat Daniela’s skin and make her forget her inhibitions. She could lose herself in the infinite depth of that look, and never come back to the surface. Nobody else existed in the world. “I had no idea he had such great taste.”

“Am I going to wear one of those?” She indicated his wet suit, but she didn’t move away.

“Eventually.”

She ran her palms up his forearms, feeling the strength of his muscles. “You know that we have a large, fascinated audience, don’t you?”

“They’re looking for bad guys. Let’s get you suited up while I go over the basics.”

While Logan explained each piece of equipment and then helped her put on all the paraphernalia, he used every gesture to stroke and touch. To tease and torment. He explained how to use the regulator, but she was already breathless because she was so aroused by his touches.

When she was outfitted from head to flipper, he held out his hand. Daniela placed her fingers in his. It was awkward moving around with the unfamiliar clothing and tanks as they stepped to the edge of the platform.

“There’s a mic right here.” He showed her the control on the side of her mask, then put it on her, lifting her fingers to the control. “Turn it on to talk like this. You can talk normally. If you want to come to the surface for any reason, just say so. Ready?”

Nodding, she followed his lead, stepping off into the endless blue unknown.

*   *   *

“You’re breathing too fast,” Logan cautioned as they sank beneath the surface. Her bubbles rose erratically. “Just relax and breathe normally.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“We’re going for a quick tour of your namesake, then I’ll show you her treasure; it’ll blow your mind.” He took her hand, and together they descended into a blue-washed world. “Okay?”

“It’s like flying,” she said with wonder, letting go of his hand to spread her arms and legs and float. Then with a smile she did a flip before darting as gracefully as a mermaid. She was poetry in motion.

Logan didn’t let her get too far from him. He caught up, indicating where the hull of
La Daniela
lay on her side.

Logan pointed as they swam along the broken hull.
La Daniela
had sunk aft end down, so she stood upright like a crumbled wooden pillar, broken masts parallel to the seabed. “See there? One mast was still intact when it crashed against the reef. The other two broke off, and are there, and there.” He pointed, although he doubted she saw them in the gloomy blueness. “She was a
fragata
, what we’d call a frigate. Built for speed and maneuverability, unlike the more cumbersome
Nuestra Señora de Garza
, which was why they unloaded the treasure and sent her home. She carried ninety guns—we’ve already found most of them—and weighed around three hundred tons.”

He put his hand on her arm. “Stay still. Look.” A shoal of
anchoveta
curled in a silver ribbon between them and the shattered hull of
La Daniela.
Thousands upon thousands of fish in a tight stream. The fish didn’t seem concerned by the visitors in their midst and for several minutes they stayed suspended in fish territory. Logan kept them afloat, as Daniela seemed hypnotized.

“That was amazing. What were they?”

“Similar to anchovies.”

“First time I’ve seen an anchovy that I
like.
” She grinned through her mask.

“Come on. I’ll show you something you’ll
love.
”

“Hope it’s not a brussels sprout.”

“You don’t like sprouts?” He shook his head. “Well, what I have to show you
is
green. But you can’t eat it. This way. Jed and Galt are fanning the area now. Hear that? That’s what the blower sounds like down here.” The dull roar was muted under the water.

Logan announced their presence to the others and Galt turned it off. “Daniela wants a look at what you discovered.”

Jed waved an arm at the floor of the ocean. Scattered for several hundred feet on the sandy bottom were chunks of emerald, gold bars, gold coins, and snakes of gold chain. Even in the less than optimal lighting, pieces glinted as one moved, and everything was easy to see.

He heard her quick intake of breath on the mic. “Oh, my Lord. Look at the size of this! May I?” She glanced at Logan.

“Sure.”

He let her swoop down the six feet to scoop it up from the soft sand. She held up an emerald the size of her fist. “Are we going to pick everything up and take it back with us?”

“There’s more than the four of us can carry back in one trip.” More than his whole dive team could carry back to the surface in thirty or forty trips. He was going to win the ten-grand bet with his brothers with ease. “For now we’re leaving everything where it is.”

“Oh, but—Oh. Until the other thing is resolved.”

*   *   *

It was raining when they surfaced, a gentle, persistent shower. It pitted the dark blue of the water with white dots, and made everything look ethereal and otherworldly. There was no demarcation between sea and sky. The inclement weather didn’t seem to bother the security guys, who patrolled or stood guard as if water wasn’t dripping down their faces.