Windswept (6 page)

She slammed on the brakes. Not going there. Not after a day like she’d had. And certainly not after a day in which Ryan had saved her so often, she was losing count.

She rocked on her heels and watched the clock tick. Lucky disappeared into a back office with another pair of officers, and she wondered if he was a suspect now, too.

At some point, a shadow appeared in the doorway from the inner offices, and it took her muddled mind a minute to process that it was Ryan standing there. Ryan, looking worn and tired and very, very pissed off.

It took her another long minute to realize the reason his arms were suddenly around her was that she’d practically tackled him into a hug that came out of she-wasn’t-sure-where. Only that it felt good, getting him back again.

Whoa, Nelly. You haven’t gotten anyone back again,
the prudish part of her snapped.
You never wanted to see him again, remember?

Right now, though, holding him felt right. Important, somehow. For a split second, she even felt his knees buckle before he steeled himself and went back to tough guy again.

He cleared his throat and jutted his chin to the door. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, let’s.”

Stepping out of police headquarters was one thing. Deciding what to do next was another. The sun had just set, the streets were dark, and her head was spinning from a crazy afternoon.

“You can come to my house. Gerta and I will take care of you,” Hans offered, standing in a way that made it clear the invitation was targeted at her, and her alone.

“I’m good,” she insisted. “I need to get back home.”

“Home?” Ryan’s left eyebrow arched.

“To my boat.”

Now both his eyebrows shot up. “Your boat?”

Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d held back some personal information.

“My boat.” She nodded.
“Serendipity.”

He nodded slowly but his eyes were wide.

“It’s a long story,” she sighed. “Where are you going?”

Ryan looked at her, expressionless. Which, she knew, was a sure sign of trouble. The stronger Ryan felt about something, the less he’d let show it on the outside. She wanted to stomp a foot and wring the words out of him.

“Your dinghy is tied up at the town dock,” Hans broke in. “And your boat is moored all the way across the bay. I won’t let you do that alone.”

“I’ve dinghied across the bay lots of times,” she protested.

“Not after a day like today,” Hans pointed out.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, hugging herself unconsciously, then immediately straightening. But damn it, in trying to avoid Hans’ eyes, she made the mistake of latching on to Ryan’s.

You don’t have to go alone,
his green eyes said.

Don’t be ridiculous,
she wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come. Her tongue flat-out refused to form them, and her lips were on strike, too.

“And anyway, it’s nighttime,” Hans went on.

Ryan didn’t move or change expression in any way, but there they were, those unspoken words.
You don’t have to go alone.

“I go at night all the time,” she tried, but she was wavering. Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe she didn’t have to go alone. Maybe she didn’t have to prove anything tonight. Maybe…

Please,
his eyes said. Like he needed her to say yes. Desperately. Like it wasn’t just about a trip home but about something much bigger than that.
Please. Please let me explain.

A moped hummed past. Jazz music played from a bar somewhere down the street. Hans was still insisting on giving her a ride to his place. A waxing moon shone down from above, palms rustled overhead, and Ryan kept looking at her like
that
, saying,
Please.

She’d nearly died that afternoon. Didn’t she owe him this much?

“And anyway, don’t worry,” she finally managed, cutting Hans off. “I won’t be alone.”

Ryan caught his lower lip with his front teeth and held it, waiting.

“What?” Hans asked.

She jabbed a thumb toward Ryan, trying to play it cool. Like it was only a ride she was giving him and not a second chance.

“I won’t be alone,” she repeated. “He’s coming with me.”

A tiny smile played at the corners of Ryan’s mouth, and if it had been a smile of triumph, she’d have shoved him away then and there. But his shoulders dipped at the same time, and she saw it for what it was: sheer relief.

“Now, wait a minute—” Hans started in exactly the same tone her dad might have used a couple of years ago, back before he finally accepted that his daughters were all grown up.

“Thanks, Hans. For everything,” she said, giving him a quick hug. “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

Hans, she could tell, was glaring over her shoulder at Ryan.
One wrong move, young man, and I’ll—

She broke off the hug and steered Hans back toward the police building. “I wonder what’s taking Lucky so long. Maybe you should check.”

“Maybe I should,” Hans said, though he barely budged.

“I’m exhausted,” she said, because suddenly, she really was. “I need to get home. Thanks for everything, Hans. Tell Lucky the same.”

She turned for the short walk to the waterfront, and Ryan fell into step at her side, so close and so comforting, she could have reached for his hand.

Her fingers warmed on something, and crap, she really had reached for his hand.

And double crap, her body leaned against his without her permission. Again.

Ryan got to wishing the town of Kralendijk was a bigger place, because he wouldn’t have minded walking along like that a lot longer before getting to the dock. They hadn’t done a lot of this sappy hand-in-hand thing back in New York, but damn, maybe they should have. The way their shoulders brushed, the way her fingers settled between his in a custom fit. It was kind of nice.

Okay, really nice.

Of course, he’d had a day of near-misses, and that had a way of doing weird things to a guy’s head. Maybe tomorrow he’d think this was goofy. Maybe tomorrow he’d get his head screwed on right.

Or maybe tomorrow would feel as good as right now.

He’d been steaming back there in police headquarters. In New York, it would have been an hour, tops. But three hours of questioning? Small-town cops had way too much time on their hands. Small-town cops with big-world problems, like a terrorist bombing a boat in the harbor.

A terrorist, not him. He’d tried getting that point across again and again.
I’m just here for the diving… Saw Mia swim after some guy… A guy who took out a knife and…

He closed his eyes and let her lead him through the dim streets. He didn’t need to replay that scene. Didn’t need to ruin the calm that settled over him the minute she took his hand.

So they’d taken his passport. The Dutch authorities here would check his record out, and by morning, everything would be fine. Yeah, everything would be fine. He should take his cue from the upbeat pastel colors of the colonial buildings they passed and make the most of his first trip outside the US in a couple of years, right?

“God, there he goes again,” Mia muttered.

They were passing Rick’s, a dockside, open-air bar where the dive boat had met its passengers that afternoon. Several members of the dive group were there, turned to a giant television screen where Stanley was showing his footage from the day.

“I was born in Holland, but I swear I’ll die on Bonaire!” Hans said in the video clip.

“No, wait, let me fast-forward to the right place,” Stanley broke in, leaning over his camera.

Ryan couldn’t help pausing to watch the crazy day zip past in triple time. There was Mia, introducing the crew and passengers, looking happy as a lark until she’d realized he was there. He caught a glimpse of himself looking at her, and damn, why was his face that grim? What had he been thinking, giving her that cold stare?

Then the camera jumped over to dolphins and underwater views of the wreck and Brenda’s cleavage and colorful fish until finally it surfaced and panned and…
Boom!

Everybody watching flinched as if the ship were being blown up again. Mia shuddered then turned to speed-walk down the dock, and he followed.

Two figures leaned over the railing, watching the yellow lights of salvage boats working around
Neptune’s Revenge
. It was listing badly but still afloat.

“A miracle they’ve managed to contain the oil…” said one.

“A miracle no one was killed,” said the other.

The night was warm, but his blood ran cold. What if someone had been killed? What if it had been Mia?

Mia, he noticed, kept her eyes studiously away from the wreck. She knelt by a tangle of lines, slipped off her shoes, and maneuvered her way into a small rubber dinghy.

“Hop in.”

The minute he got in, she pushed off from the dock, started the outboard with an expert yank on the starter cord, and took off, speeding into the night. There was about an inch of water in the bottom of the dinghy, but she didn’t seem worried about that. She just picked up a cutoff milk container and started bailing.

“I got it.” He took it from her hand and got to work. Scoop, splash. Scoop, splash. A cupful of water at a time, he got it back overboard where it belonged as they chugged onward.

The wind whipped Mia’s hair as she looked forward, one hand steering the outboard, and damn if she didn’t look as much at home as she’d been stepping into a subway car in New York.

“Why the purple outboard?” he asked, trying to melt the ice.

She shrugged. “My cousin Seth painted it to discourage thieves. He and—” She stopped abruptly and slapped her thigh. “Shit.”

A word that could have applied to just about every part of his day, except maybe the moment she’d taken his hand.

“I was supposed to go food shopping today.” She sighed. “My sister is going to kill me.”

So her sister was on the boat. Good thing? Bad thing? He wasn’t sure.

“I’m sure she’ll cut you some slack after you tell her what happened.”

Mia throttled down and looked at him so fiercely, he leaned back. The moon cast her face in black-and-white shadows as she snapped, “Do not tell her what happened. Do not!”

He blinked at the sudden outburst.

“She’ll flip out,” Mia said. “She already thinks diving is dangerous, and I get enough lectures from my parents about that. No way am I telling her what happened. No way. Got it?”

He put his hands up. “Got it, got it.”

She nodded firmly and got back on course, throttling up again. He kept his mouth shut and watched the water ripple by, because Mia was Mia, and he’d do as he was told, if only to prove she could trust him.

If she ever would. But she’d trusted him this far, so that was something, right?

The outboard was only a little four-horsepower thing, so the dinghy wasn’t setting any speed records, but from that close to the waterline and in the dark of the night, it still felt fast. A little like his whole day — zipping by in a blur of shadows and shapes.

“Where’s your boat?”

“Over there.”

“Where?”

“Way over there.” She motioned into the darkness, marked only by dots of masthead lights.

“You didn’t tell me about the boat,” he murmured, trying not to let it sound like an accusation.

She shrugged. “You didn’t you tell me about your job.”

Yeah, he hadn’t told her about a lot of things.

They chugged along in mutual silence, listening to the hum of the engine.

“We’d been planning it for a while, my sister and I.” Mia started talking so quietly, he nearly missed her first words. “This trip.” She let a second tick by before continuing. “I gave my job in Boston notice and everything.” She paused again, and he had the sense that every sentence could have been a chapter in her life. “We were all set to fly to the Caribbean, but Seth and Julie — my cousin and his girlfriend, who were sailing the boat — got delayed bringing
Serendipity
across from Panama to here. So suddenly, we had another seven weeks to kill. A friend tipped me off about the short-term job in New York, so I took that to earn a little extra for this trip.”

It was just like she’d said back then.
I’m only in New York short-term.

Now it made sense: why she’d showed up out of nowhere at the pool where he swam laps, and why it’d been so hard to track her down after she left. Your average woman left New York for Philly or Chicago or some place like that, not a sailboat in the Caribbean.

“Is it your cousin’s boat?”

She shook her head. “It’s all of ours. My grandfather left it to all of us cousins.”

He looked at her, wondering. When his grandfather died, he got a watch.

“Where are you sailing to next?” he asked, for lack of a more intelligent response.

“Grenada.” She pointed like she had an internal compass and the place was just over there. “Three hundred ninety-five nautical miles.”

He was still getting his jaw back into place when Mia jutted her chin toward the salvage operations, changing the subject. “Would that be the kind of thing you take care of?”

Ah, the long-avoided topic of his job.

He considered the scene. “We don’t do salvage, but we’d secure the scene. Dive for evidence, check the hull. That kind of thing.” And if they were lucky, preventing this kind of disaster.

She shook her head. “What’s it like, diving in New York Harbor? I mean, diving there regularly. For work, not for fun.”

“It’s not like this, that’s for sure.” If New York had the crystal-clear water Bonaire did, everyone would want his job.

“So why do you do it?”

He’d heard the question a thousand times and had never really come up with an answer. Hadn’t ever really tried. Either people got what it meant to be part of an elite squad doing important work, or they didn’t. Mostly, they didn’t.

He sure hoped Mia did. He searched for an answer. “I like how it’s different, every day. I like the challenge.”

“Like being in the Navy?”

He nodded. “Kind of like that.” A lot like that, actually. Just closer to home, which was his whole point in leaving the Navy. Six years felt like enough time to be in a constant flux of shipping out or shipping in, and the police dive squad seemed like it would be a good fit. And it was. It was just that he was a little…not exactly burned out, because a good soldier didn’t get burned out. He was just a bit…tired. Lately, he’d even been tempted to move on to Plan B: going civilian by taking an old Navy buddy up on the standing offer of a partnership in a dive salvage business down in the Florida Keys. Until Mia came along and put the spark back into things.