Windswept (2 page)

“Ryan,” she managed.

“Mia,” he replied, equally tight-lipped.

The camera swung between them, and she might just have swatted it away if Mother Nature hadn’t intervened.

“Dolphins!” someone cried, and everyone jumped up to look the other way.

Everyone but Mia, who kept up her death stare, and Ryan, who maintained his unwavering gaze.

“Have you come all the way to Bonaire to embarrass me some more?” she muttered above the noise of the outboard.

Ryan jerked his head from side to side. “I’ve come all the way to Bonaire to apologize.”

She barked a humorless laugh and leaned over him. Good thing she was standing and he was sitting; it was easier to pretend she was imposing that way.

“Right. Apologize. Do it,” she dared him.

“I’m sorry, Mia.”

He said the words solemnly, but she just scoffed.

“Great. A quiet apology, so nobody notices. Try it loud sometime, Ryan, so everyone can hear. Lay yourself bare. Embarrass yourself as badly as you can, and you still won’t know what it was like for me. How humiliating.”

She’d never considered heaving a guest overboard, but she sure as hell was tempted now. And with all the adrenaline rushing through her system, she probably could lift his hundred and eighty pounds of muscle over the rail.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he murmured, and damn it if his voice didn’t stir something inside.

“My humiliation was public, Ryan.” She tried to control the shake in her voice, because he didn’t deserve to affect her like that. “Out there for everyone to see. To laugh at.” Her gut lurched just at the memory.

His eyes flashed and the lines on his brow drew tight. “Believe me, they stopped laughing real quick.”

“Oh, yes? When was that? I didn’t hear you protesting at the time.”

“Mia, I—”

She put a hand up. “I’m not listening to this. I’m finished with your games.” She smacked her hands together right in front of his face. “Finished.”

“I don’t play games.”

“Sure. Except with my heart.”

His lips tightened, and his back went ramrod straight. Good. Maybe the man had feelings, after all. Maybe he could be made to suffer just a little bit, like her.

“Mia, I—”

She turned her back and started checking dive tanks while the others squealed at the cavorting dolphins.

“Look!” Brenda cried. “The dolphins are going right over to that ship!”

“What is that funny boat?” Marc asked.

Mia kept her eyes down, fighting tears. Who cared what that funny boat was?

“That’s
Neptune’s Revenge,”
Hans said, gesturing toward the rust-streaked ship. “It’s the flagship of one of those extreme environmental groups, The Knights of Neptune.”

“The kind that stop whalers?” Brenda asked.

“Whalers, oil rigs, you name it,” Hans said.

Mia took another step forward. Another step away from the last man she ever expected to see here. But damn it, her legs were slow to obey, like they were still trapped in his magic spell. Being around Ryan always seem to turn off the thinking part of her mind. Her body was hot all over, her nostrils flaring as if to capture his scent and possess that little bit of him one more time.

Maybe she could sic
Neptune’s Revenge
on Ryan. Maybe that would do the trick.

She moved in short, jerky steps that had nothing to do with the gentle motion of the boat until she finally reached Lucky at the bow.

“Everything good, Mia?” As usual, Lucky hadn’t missed a thing.

“Peachy.”

Situation normal, she decided. All fucked up.

Sorry.

So easy to say, so difficult to convince somebody of.

Ryan pulled in a deep breath, just as he had the last time Mia turned her back on him, a month earlier in New York. Every muscle in her lean body was stiff, her fists clenched. He’d been hoping four weeks would wear the edges off her anger, but maybe she needed a little more time.

Say, another sixty or seventy years.

The anger was just the surface part, though. Under that was pain, and that’s the part he couldn’t live with. He hadn’t just pissed Mia off, he’d hurt her. It didn’t matter that the terrible words she’d overheard weren’t meant the way she took them, because the damage was done.

He raked his fingers through his hair, watching Mia hurry away. With the bounce gone from her step, her blond ponytail barely swayed. Her finely chiseled swimmer’s shoulders were stiff, but even so, he couldn’t rip his eyes away. She walked the way she swam: smooth and silent, toned arms and long legs gliding gracefully along. A class of their own: that was Mia.

A good thing those dolphins had come along; he’d come close to knocking the video camera out of Stanley’s hand.

“You can hear them talking!” someone cried out, delighting in the dolphins’ antics.

Sure enough, he could just hear the high-pitched squeaks and clicks. A joyous sound that ought to bring a smile to a person’s face, but Mia barely seemed to notice.

Mia. Upbeat, optimistic Mia, frowning. Christ, was he the one responsible for that?

“Dolphins have a complex system of communication,” Hans said and launched into a long explanation that had Stanley swinging the camera between him and the dolphins. “They’re very empathetic, for starters.”

Mia shot a pointed glare in Ryan’s direction, then went back to checking equipment.

Yeah, he could probably learn a thing or two from dolphins. Maybe if he squeaked at Mia long enough, she’d squeak back. But she was buttoned up tight as a winter coat, so it was all up to him. Which pretty much meant he was doomed, because the only kind of communications the Navy had taught him were things like A was for Alpha, B was for Bravo, C was for Charlie and F… F was all fucked up.

A little like him.

A little like Mia, too.

She hid it so well, he’d had no clue there was an old wound there until he’d managed to reopen it and set off this whole drama. A drama that wasn’t supposed to happen, because that was pretty much the only thing they’d both made clear from the start.

I’m only in New York short-term,
Mia had said, right after their second or third kiss.

Too bad,
he’d said before diving straight into the next kiss, because a couple of touches of those amazing lips were never going to be enough.
But short-term probably works better for me, too.

Yeah, he’d been that dumb. Thinking that a couple of weeks with Mia would be enough, just like a couple of weeks with any one woman had always proven to be enough. But if Mia had been just any woman, he wouldn’t be in Bonaire right now.

In Bonaire, fucking up completely. Again.

For all that he’d planned out his apology, he still hadn’t gotten it right. He looked over the side of the boat, wondering if dolphins ever found themselves in his position. They probably kept things simple, though, like he thought he could do when he first met her.

So, what do you do?
she’d asked, that first brunch they went out to after a week of swimming laps beside each other at the local pool. A week of her kicking everyone’s ass, including his, then climbing out of the pool like it was any other Sunday. And hell, the way she swam, maybe that was her average Sunday: starting off with ninety minutes of churning laps, making the local boys look like doggie paddlers before hopping out of the water, dripping from every lean curve of her body. Never had the five-to-six a.m. time slot drawn so many eager swimmers to the pool.

He’d dragged his eyes from her animated face after that innocent question and stared into his coffee for a while. Did he really want to dwell on his job?

Work has been a little…all-consuming lately. I’d rather talk about other stuff.

It’s not that he was burned out or anything. Just that he wasn’t exactly…
not
burned out.

When Mia reached a hand across the table and put it over his, a little electric zing ran through his body like she’d just closed a high-voltage circuit and let the juice flow. And instead of starting off on some sappy girl talk about how important it was to talk things through, she’d let her summer blue eyes go soft while she started a discussion of the misadventures of a long line of basset hounds she’d grown up with. Made him grin and chuckle and laugh and all the other things he hadn’t done enough of lately.

We had Sherlock first, and he got skunked the very night we had to rush to my sister’s ballet recital…

Over the next hour, his facial muscles had gotten the kind of workout he whipped the rest of his body through six times a week.

Then we got Bella, and she had puppies, but she was the worst mother ever. Good thing she was low to the ground, because she’d get up and walk away while the puppies were nursing and they’d all drag along…

And damn if that hadn’t spurred him into talking about the time his scrappy mutt King had run off with the neighbor’s poodle and a lot of other stories he hadn’t thought about in ages. Funny things. Lighthearted things. Good things he’d somehow forgotten.

And just like that, an unspoken pact was born. They’d meet, swim their laps together, go to brunch on days they had off, and never, ever discuss work. Not his, not hers. Even when they started wrapping up brunch with a kiss instead of a wave goodbye, they didn’t talk about work. And definitely not once they started taking brunch to her place. And when brunch at her place turned into sex at her place, well, why talk shop? There was so much else to talk about, and so much else to do other than talk.

Like gazing into those bottomless blue eyes that could cycle through the seasons in a single day. Like watching her lope through each hour as if it might hold a wonderful new adventure. Like wondering if some things weren’t too good to be true.

They’d gone a month like that, and it was perfect. Getting to wake up with her snuggled up close. Touching her silky hair. Listening to her breathe quietly, then watching her wake up and look at him like it was perfect for her, too.

Until the morning he turned up for one of those required dive refresher courses with the squad, and surprise, surprise. Guess who was the instructor?

Mia. Mia with her long eyelashes and pink cheeks and way of tilting her head that could drive a man crazy in the very best way. But stupid him — one offhand comment and everything had fallen apart.

In the weeks that followed, he’d pushed the boundaries of police regulations to track her down, but finally, he’d figured out where she’d disappeared to. And here he was in Bonaire, trying to deliver an apology. Maybe even trying to win her back. But doing that on a dive boat with nine other people crowded around… Okay, not one of his better ideas. He puffed out a long breath.

Sorry was really not cutting it. So he’d have to try harder, right?

“Oh, look!” Brenda called. “I think there’s a baby dolphin back there!”

Everyone in the boat came rushing over, and in the excitement, Ryan managed to work his way to a new spot across from Mia, behind Lucky the driver.

“Looks like it’s gonna be a hell of a day!” Lucky said, waving a hand over the bay.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “Sure does.”

Mia counted every dragging minute up to the moment Lucky throttled down and approached the dive site. A good thing, too, because another second of Ryan’s imploring eyes on her back and she might just lose her mind.

“Stanley, get some footage of that Neptune boat.” Brenda nudged her husband. “Maybe we’ll see them on TV someday.”

Mia gave the environmental activists’ flagship a passing glance. The converted freighter had been anchored there all week, a familiar feature of the landscape by now. Just like
Serendipity,
floating serenely on the far side of the bay. If she strained her eyes, she might just be able to make out the mast. The temptation to jump overboard and swim for home was hard to resist, even if it was two miles away. She could curl into a ball in the cabin and wish Ryan away.

The distance didn’t deter her; only her pride did. That, and she had a job to do. She leaned over the side and made short work of catching the mooring ball and making the dive boat fast, trying to collect her scattered nerves.

Hans was about to start the dive brief, and all eyes jumped to him. All but the emerald green pair fixed firmly on her. Eyes that said,
Listen, Mia. Hear me out.

Except Ryan wasn’t saying anything, and she wasn’t about to listen even if he did. That tortured warrior look on his face was probably just for show, right?

Please,
his eyes begged.

She turned her back and checked the mooring line. Again.

“Okay, folks!” Hans clapped for attention. “We’ve got a hell of a dive for you today!” He took out a small whiteboard and started narrating in his light Dutch accent. “We dive here and proceed slowly to the bow end of the wreck of the
Henry Aalders,
twenty-five meters down. That’s eighty feet for our American friends.”

Stanley leaned over the rail and pointed his camera into the clear water. Even at this depth, Mia could see the faint outline of the wreck.

“We’ll follow the mooring line down and explore the deeper end of the wreck — as deep as forty meters, or one hundred and thirty feet.”

The Swiss couple checked their matching dive computers.

“That’s deep, folks. It’s critical that you stay with your divemasters — that’s me and Mia. You can’t miss us. I’m the handsome one in black neoprene, and she’s the homely one in pink.”

That drew some laughs, along with looks from the male guests that assured Mia she was anything but homely. She zipped the upper portion of her pink-and-purple wetsuit up. Way up. Yeah, she had an okay body, but that feeling of people looking — really looking — made her skin crawl. Too many bad memories from a long time ago.

And some from not so long ago, too. Her gaze slid to Ryan then vaulted away.

“We’re at slack tide now, but as soon as it starts to turn, the current will set in, and we don’t want anyone to wander away. Okay?”

“Okay!” The guests nodded. All except Ryan, who studied her with those earnest eyes.