Dying Dreams (Book 1 of Dying Dreams Trilogy) (14 page)

Reynolds had spoken to him as he was leaving work. She’d reassured him that Liza would be partnered with him, if she was found to be suitable for the position. She’d also warned him to stay away from Liza until her new status was confirmed.

He stretched his arms over his head, working the kinks out from the workout he’d managed to fit in before he’d gone out to the marina. His muscles would be shaky for the dive, but he’d needed to de-stress. Fritz, the owner of the gym, had offered him a job there, again, and that evening, for the first time, it hadn’t sounded like such a bad idea. He’d said no to the gym job, of course, but once Liza was on her feet and okay…

“Hi.”

He spun around and saw Liza standing on the dock. He hadn’t heard the boards creak under her approaching steps. She smiled at him, her face a bit pale, her legs a bit shaky, but her smile was open and genuine, and his heart cracked, just a tiny bit. He could love this woman, he realized, and that scared him as much as anything else. He fought the urge to comfort her, and straightened up. Their relationship had to be business, all the time. That’s why he didn’t even look at her long, lean legs beneath her tiny, polka-dotted shorts. He didn’t look much, anyway.

“Hi,” he said. “Thank you for meeting me here.”

“Of course, are we going back out to talk to the mermaids?”

“We aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “Reynolds asked us to drop the case and to avoid all contact with the mermaids. I wanted to let you know in person that Louella is dead.”

Liza flinched and looked away, but not before he saw her eyes go glassy. “I think I knew that already. You aren’t really going to stop investigating the mermaid case, are you?”

“What I’m going to do doesn’t matter. You should stay away from the mermaids and from me until we start working together as partners.”

He saw hurt cross her face, replaced quickly by a steely rage. “No.”

He couldn’t help his smirk. The idea of her challenging him was laughable. “No to what part?”

“No to all of it,” she said. “You are
the
only person I trust in this whole mess. I’m not walking away from you and I’m not walking away from the mermaids. I want to help you find out who killed them.”

“I’m flattered by your devotion,” Sloane said. “But you’d be smarter to walk away. If I don’t get in trouble for helping the mermaids, it will be something else.” And he knew it was true. He was tired of playing by the rules and seeing people he cared about hurt. He was tired of kowtowing to procedure in a broken system. “We should only associate at work.”

“I guess you’ve forgotten that I live by my gut, by my instinct. I won’t be able to live with myself if I walk away from helping those mermaids who died, and I won’t be able to live with Fulsom or someone else as my partner when you take the fall for breaking the rules. I’m your partner and you’re stuck with me.”

He shrugged and tried not to think about or question the relief that flooded him at her decision. “I don’t want to be responsible for ruining your life any more than I already have.”

She smiled, aware she’d won. “I’m walking into this with eyes wide open. Anything that happens from here on out is on me.”

He nodded and stepped on to the boat, a sail boat he’d bought years ago and fixed up himself. He loved being out on the water, but it was a treat he reserved for only the most necessary of times. He feared the way his affinity to the water felt like an addiction, and he didn’t ever want to be dependent on anything. Dependence made a man weak.

Liza stepped on the boat behind him and looked around. “She’s beautiful,” she said. “When I saw you wanted to meet at the marina, I hoped we’d be going out.”

“Did you have any problems getting here?”

She shook her head. “I saw an agent when I walked out of my building, so I went the opposite direction and took the long way around. Then I stopped at a friend’s place, changed clothes and put on this hoodie.” She flipped the hood over her head and Sloane smiled at her disguise. If he’d been tailing her, he’d have known her even with her face covered, but Fulsom had gotten one of his witchy ex-girlfriends to put a glamour on her, so he was confident she hadn’t been followed.

“Good.” They could work on her disguise techniques later. He unmoored the boat and steered it away from the dock. “We’re going out to see what Louella saw before she died,” he told her. “You dive certified?” He figured she was, being in marine biology.

“Yes. Need to see my certificate?”

“No. We don’t have to go out too far and the wind is in our favor tonight. It won’t take us long to get out there. There’s a suit that should fit you on the seat.”

She nodded and he went back to steering the boat. A few moments later, she stepped up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder that sent an electric charge through him. It felt so good he almost groaned aloud. He was going to have to man up and ignore the affect Liza had on him. “You want me to steer, while you change?”

He stepped away and let her take over, not looking at the way the wetsuit clung to her curves. “Just keep heading north,” he said, his voice gruff.

She nodded and took over. “No problem.”

He changed quickly, leaving his gun with his clothes on the deck, and returned to the wheel, but they were already closer than he’d expected. He used the depth finder and the GPS to avoid the multiple objects that still rested on the ocean floor since the rise of the seas. He also used the depth finder to look for the drill, but realized he didn’t need it. He saw a metallic glint in the moonlight and knew they’d found it. A metal buoy marked the spot. With Liza’s help, he fixed the rudder, backed the jib to windward, and eased the mainsail so that the sloop was hove to and unlikely to move too far from their current position. He got the rest of his gear on and showed Kelsey where they would dive.

“What do we do if they’re people down there?”

“The idea is to stay hidden behind the rocks and get as a good a look as we can.” He showed her a high-tech underwater camera. “I’ll get some pictures. If we do run into anyone, we tell them we were out for a moonlight dive and we get the hell out of there.”

“Nice camera. You steal that from the office?”

He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to tell her the truth about the camera. He didn’t share much of himself with other people, and making it known that he owned an underwater camera, a hard to find device, revealed his love of the sea. It revealed that he spent his free time diving and photographing the world under the surface. If his attachment to the sea, his need for it, was a weakness, then letting others know about his love of diving and the pictures he took was giving them knowledge of that weakness. Liza had put herself in danger, had pledged her loyalty to him back on the dock, and he had no desire to lie to Liza or hide his weaknesses from her. “It’s mine.”

“Cool,” she said, her face open and accepting, as it always was. He would need to teach her to close herself off more, or she’d never survive as an agent. “So do you really need all that gear? Can’t you breathe under water?”

“I can’t breathe under water, I can just hold my breath for a really long time. Fifteen minutes or so. Are you ready to dive or do you want to chat about my camera and my fae abilities all night?” He knew he sounded touchy, but he suddenly felt that bringing Liza along might have been a mistake.

She laughed. “I think I might prefer to stay up here, but you’re right. We should dive.”

“You could stay up here,” Sloane said. “Maybe you should. We could make a quicker getaway with you up here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Please don’t go all chivalrous on me now. I’m supposed to be your partner. That means I go where you go.”

He could think of a million arguments, but she was right. “Okay, let’s go.”

Together, they sat on the edge of the boat, backs to the sea and slipped into the water. As always, it felt like coming home. He held on to his camera and motioned for Liza to follow him. She moved through the water as easily as he did and he knew, just from that, how comfortable she felt there and how much she loved it. Except for his grandmother and the mermaids, he’d never met anyone who shared his love of the sea. His mother had hated it for all the ways it made her different from humans, and she’d hated that Sloane loved it.

They swam up behind some big rocks and Sloane heard it, a grinding sound that grated on him like nails on a chalkboard. Together, he and Liza peered over the rock and saw the drill. A mammoth structure that might have looked artistic if it hadn’t been digging into the sea floor. He snapped a bunch of pictures of the drill and the guards around it, being careful to stay out of sight. When he glanced over at Liza, he saw that her face was pale, but she scanned the area in front of and behind them, looking out for any trouble. He considered swimming around for a different angle on the drill, but didn’t feel like pressing his luck. He’d gotten enough.

Together, he and Liza swam back up. He saw the lights before his head broke the surface and he knew they were in trouble. Three larger, hybrid boats surrounded Sloane’s boat, with spotlights shining on him and Liza as they surfaced. He didn’t see the Coast Guard insignia anywhere and he wished he had his gun. Next to him, Liza’s eyes were wide and her face was paler than before. He pushed his mask onto the top of his head and smiled at her. He swam to the boat, climbed on and helped her up. “Act natural,” he whispered.

“Hi, there,” he said to the guys on the boats around them. “Everything okay?”

Two of the boats dimmed their lights and moved away, but the third stayed close and a burly, weathered guy on the deck grinned at them. “I’m with the Coast Guard, sir, and we were concerned that this boat had been abandoned, its occupants possibly drowned. We were just calling it in to find out who owned it. It says it belongs to a Molly Lettits?”

“Yes, that’s my grandmother. She let me and my girlfriend take the boat out for a night dive. We’re both fine.” Sloane had registered the boat to his grandmother as a gift, but she rarely used it and she freely shared it with Sloane.

The man’s eyes widened and his attention darted over Sloane’s shoulder. Sloane turned and saw Liza slowly stripping down to an emerald green bikini that didn’t leave much to the imagination. Aside from two triangles of fabric over her ample breasts and a third triangle between her legs, there was an expanse of tanned, toned skin that looked so touchable he took an involuntary step toward her. He forced himself to take a deep breath to calm his suddenly racing heart and his body, and blessed her mentally for the distracting the other sailor. He turned back to face the supposed Coast Guard sailor, who wore no uniform and was almost certainly a pirate. “Like I said, we’re fine.”

The man cleared his throat and tore his eyes from Liza. “You were diving in a restricted area, sir, and night diving is dangerous under any circumstances. I’m afraid I’m going to have to confiscate your camera.”

Sloane’s heart sank. Shit. He hid his disappointment and grinned at the man. “I don’t understand. I was just taking pictures of fish.”

The man raised a gun at Sloane. “This is a restricted area. I’m going to need the camera.”

Sloane’s heart rate increased a few beats per minute. He wasn’t panicking, yet, but he suspected the man with the gun would lose no sleep over shooting both of them. He’d probably get away with it, too. Piracy was a thriving business and it was unlikely their bodies would ever be found. He stepped toward the man and started to hand him the camera, but Liza shrieked and tackled Sloane. He was so shocked, he didn’t fight her when she ripped the camera from his hand. She popped out the memory card and threw it overboard. The other man now had the gun pointed at Liza, his face was red.

“Why did you destroy the memory card, Ma’am?”

“I am so sorry, but you didn’t really need our pictures of fish, did you? And there are pictures of me on that card…” She looked down at the boat deck and pretended to be embarrassed. “That are frankly indecent. I just don’t want anyone but my boyfriend to see them.”

Sloane
knew
she was acting and he was still tempted to dive over the side of the boat and retrieve that memory card just in case there were indecent pictures of her. “I apologize for my girlfriend,” Sloane said. “She’s shy.”

The man with the gun stared at Liza’s chest, leering, and Sloane wanted to cover her with a towel and then rip the man’s eyes out. Instead, he cleared his throat until he regained the man’s attention. “So there’s no reason for you to take the camera now, right?”

The man’s eyes narrowed like he suspected a trap. “I can’t risk you coming back here and taking more pictures. I’ll be taking the camera.” He had given up any attempt at sounding like a legitimate sailor, but it didn’t matter. He was the man with the gun.

“Give him the camera, sweetie," Sloane said. Liza looked at him like she wanted to argue, but he shook his head. She stepped close to the rail and handed the camera to the man. Sloane watched his five-hundred-dollar camera vanish and he knew he’d never see it again.

The man grinned at them, revealing a gold tooth, and handed the camera to another man who’d stepped up behind him. “Now,” said the man with the gold tooth. “I’m going to need to see some ID.”

Sloane never liked having a gun pointed at him, and something about the predatory hunger on the guy’s face made his heart clench with fear for Liza more than for himself. Death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, and Sloane knew the pirates who roamed those seas were a violent, amoral lot who wouldn’t hesitate to kidnap Liza and keep her as their plaything for as long as they could. “Sure.” Sloane smiled at him as he moved around the deck like he was looking for his ID and hit the rudder to a position that would aid their escape. “We’d like to see yours, as well, and a business card so I know where to go to get my camera back.”

The pirate’s grin slipped only a tiny bit, before it broadened. Sloane moved to stand closer to him and Liza moved around the boat behind him, hopefully preparing to get the sails in position. “How about you just give me your IDs and I don’t shoot you and take your girlfriend?”