Sally Wentworth - One Night Of Love

‘Oh, dear, was I as bad as that?’ Dyan gave him a guilty look, but there was also amusement in her green eyes.

‘Much worse,’ Oliver returned and leant back comfortably. ‘So?’

Dyan hesitated, wondering why he wanted to know. Was it out of genuine interest—or was he still checking up on her? Hoping it was the former, she said, ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the sea. When I was small we had a house near the coast. My father loved to sail and he taught me. But I didn’t want to just sail on it, I wanted to find out everything about the sea: what made the tides and the storms, what lived in it, what was down on the sea-bed. So, as soon as I was old enough, I went to college and studied oceanography.’

‘And did well, obviously.’

She admitted that with a small shrug. ‘There are four branches of oceanography. I studied all of them, but specialised in marine geology and marine ecology.’

‘What are the other two?’ Oliver asked, his eyes full of interest.

Dyan liked the way he seemed to give her his whole attention when he listened; his eyes stayed on her, he didn’t look away as people often did when she talked about her work. ‘They are the study of the physical, and the chemical components of sea-water. Marine ecology concerns the plants and animals you find in the sea, and marine geology is the study of the structure, features and evolution of the ocean basins.’ She paused. ‘I hope that didn’t sound too much like a lecture.’

‘No, it didn’t. I suppose, in your job, you find the latter discipline the most useful?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you go to college?’

‘Oxford first, then I came over to America, to California for a year.’

‘And then you applied for the job with Starr Marine?’

‘No.’ Dyan shook her head. ‘First I took an engineering course so that I’d understand about lifting gear and weight ratios, that kind of thing.’ She frowned. ‘Why are you shaking your head?’

He didn’t answer directly, instead saying, ‘Are there many women in this business?’

‘I suppose you mean out at sea, actually supervising a salvage operation?’ Not waiting for him to answer, she said, ‘I’m the only one in Starr Marine at the moment, but there are other women coming into the job in other companies.’ She gave him a direct look. ‘Are you thinking that I’m the token woman, taken on to keep the Equal Opportunities Board happy?’

He gave her a lazy kind of look. ‘Are you?’

Perhaps Dyan should have been annoyed by that question, but she had just noticed how long and thick Oliver’s eyelashes were. She paused, having to gather her thoughts again, then decided to say teasingly, ‘Maybe I am. You’ll just have to find out, won’t you?’

‘I’m always reading that, to get anywhere in a man’s world, a woman has to be twice as good at the job than the average male,’ he commented. ‘And somehow I don’t think Barney Starr would risk his reputation by taking on someone who isn’t competent to do the work just to please a pack of officials.’

‘If that was supposed to be a compliment, it was so subtle that it hardly came across.’

Oliver laughed, his eyes arrested, and Dyan knew, with a surge of pleasurable excitement, that he was intrigued by her. But the warmth of the feeling brought her up short; after the last time, when she’d been so badly hurt, she had sworn off men. And Russ hadn’t had to warn her to be careful, she had known herself that falling for the wrong man was a big mistake. But how was she to have known that Crispin had just been using her for sex, that he had lied when he said he wasn’t married?

Taking a mental grip of herself, Dyan pushed the memories back into the deepest recess of her mind; not all men were the same, they weren’t all two-timing swine. But when you’d been hurt once—well, then you were always far more cautious in the future. So she put the brakes on where Oliver was concerned, and said in a calm, almost businesslike way, ‘How about you? How did you get into your job?’

Oliver shrugged. ‘Much the same way as you. University and then one or two special courses. But insurance is humdrum compared to this. Have you taken part in many exciting salvage operations?’

So he didn’t want to talk about himself. Through modesty, she wondered, or something else?

‘Quite a few,’ she answered. ‘Especially when I was working my way up through the company. My first job was to help raise an oil-rig.’ She started to tell him about it, making it sound interesting—because it had been interesting, and exciting at moments when it got dangerous. Again he listened intently, so Dyan went on to tell him of other salvage projects that she’d been involved with, ending, ‘But once I’d served my apprenticeship, so to speak, and took on jobs of my own, they’ve all been wet salvage, like this trip.’

“‘Wet salvage”?’ Oliver’s eyebrows went up.

‘Oh, sorry. Dry salvage is when you have to rescue a vessel that’s still afloat; wet salvage is when it has already sunk.’

‘I see. And where is your base?’

‘In London. But I’m not there very often.’

‘But you have a place to live when you’re not at sea?’

Dyan hesitated briefly, then said, ‘I have an aunt who lives in Highgate, near the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried, and she lets me have a room.’ She didn’t tell him about the flat that Crispin had rented for her, where she’d lived with him in the assurance that he loved her, that they would be married one day. And which she’d walked out of the moment she’d found out that he had lied to her all along. But that was getting on dangerous ground again. ‘Do you live in London?’

‘Yes, I have a flat in Chelsea.’ For the first time he opened up a little, saying, ‘But my parents live in the country and I escape there as often as I can.’

‘Do you ever go sailing?’

‘I haven’t done much,’ he admitted. ‘Mostly on holidays. I did some when I was out in the West Indies before, when I learnt to dive.’

They talked sailing and diving for a while, and Dyan found Oliver a good conversationalist. When he opened up on a subject he made it interesting and often amusing, but she sensed that he had barriers which he wouldn’t let down lightly. But then so had she; not just barriers but stone walls with red warning signs all along the top of them.

But, when she eventually went down to the ops room to check the log, Dyan had to admit that the couple of hours she was on deck with Oliver had been the most pleasant she’d spent for quite some while. And not only because she’d enjoyed talking to him; being a woman, she’d known instinctively that he found her attractive. Whether he, as a man, had known the same about her, Dyan wasn’t so sure. She’d tried not to give him any encouragement, to put out any vibes. Once bitten had made her more than twice shy, and there was no way she wanted to go rushing headlong into another relationship, another love affair. She had thought herself head over heels in love the last time and had been much too precipitate, given herself to Crispin too soon. So she had vowed to be careful in the future, to make her head rule her heart. But her head, unfortunately, couldn’t keep her stupid heart from feeling excited and full of hope.

The rest of that day and most of the following two were spent mostly in Oliver’s company, although Dyan made sure that Russ or some other member of the crew were often with them, or else she spent an hour or so alone in the ops room. She didn’t want Oliver to think that she was monopolising him, although it was mainly the other way round; he sought her out. This was natural enough as he was a sort of guest on board and she was his host on the company’s behalf, but she knew it was more than that. The smile he gave her, his eyes warm and interested, wasn’t the same smile that he gave to anyone in the crew. And when she changed for dinner in the evenings into one of her new dresses, his appreciative glance told her a great deal.