Suzanne Mcminn - Deep Blue

“My name is Cade Brock,” he answered finally.

She hugged her arms around her waist. “So are you the police or what?” Cade Brock. The name buzzed at the back of her mind. Think! She had to think.

Her brain felt as if it had balls bouncing around inside of it.

“Not exactly.” He negotiated the dark, wet road like a professional driver.

“What are you exactly, then?” And where were they going? “Is there a police station in Key Mango?”

“We’re not stopping in Key Mango.”

She cut her eyes to his face again, a nervous twist in her stomach.

Cade Brock. A small gasp escaped her. It all hit her at once. “I know who you are,” she breathed harshly, adrenaline rushing her again.

Oh, God. She’d found a magazine in Sabrina’s apartment, folded over to an article about treasure hunters. There’d been a photograph of Cade Brock. He was a treasure hunter—a renegade treasure hunter, and some of the quotes in the article had suggested without outright accusation that he was the sort who lived outside the law, sabotaging, scheming and pirating his way into a fortune.

Her head reeled again. Sabrina had said she was afraid of someone, a man. Was it Cade Brock? He was looking for Sabrina. He’d thought she was Sabrina. He might have thought her name was Tabitha, but he’d certainly recognized her.

She moved to grip the door handle. The idea of rolling out of the car at this speed, possibly to her death, wasn’t appealing.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said.

Did he read minds, too?

“What do you want with my sister?”

“I want to help her.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then that makes two of us, because I’m not sure I believe much you’ve said so far either. But I saved your life, so that’s one point for me, don’t you think? And I plan to save Sabrina’s life, too. But first I have to stop her.”

“Stop her from what?”

“Have you ever heard of the wreck of the Santa Josefa? Ramiro’s globe?”

Oh, God. She felt hot and cold at once, sick. Hurting. She didn’t want to even think about the Santa Josefa and what the search for that shipwreck had done to her family. Ramiro’s globe was the legendary artifact discovered by Spanish explorers in the 1700s and, according to survivor reports, carried aboard the doomed Santa Josefa as the ship headed back to Spain. Shaped like a globe held up by an outstretched hand, the stone artifact would prove early man once knew the world was round and point to the possibility of ancient interstellar visitors who, legend had it, created it and mapped on its surface the original configuration of earth’s tectonic plates. Shipwreck explorers had been looking for the Santa Josefa for years.

“Our father used to search for treasure. It was his life.” It was his death, too. “Sabrina had all of his old charts and readings. But I don’t understand—”

“Did your father find the Santa Josefa?” Cade demanded suddenly.

She swallowed hard. “I think so.”

For a second, she could almost believe all the air had been sucked out of the car by the intensity of the gaze he burned on her.

“What do you mean you think so?”

“I don’t know! We did find something that day. I think it was the globe. But we never brought it up, and then—”

The car seemed to close in on her. Bone-deep grief contracted her chest. Deep blue water, strobe light dancing through the gloom, fan grass swaying through coral. The globe in her hands. Then the blood— Pain streaked through her temples.

“What does it matter? We were diving for it that summer. Looking for it. My father was sure we’d found the Santa Josefa, that’s all I know.”

“You said you couldn’t swim—”

“I can’t swim! Not anymore.”

“Can’t swim or won’t swim?” His expression turned hard, his eyes slicing her.

Was there a difference? She’d have drowned back in that lagoon but for him. Immediate hysteria, that was her reaction to water now.

“What is this about?” she demanded.

The wet, dark night kept spinning past the car windows. Inside, in the glow of the dash, the man beside her, the very strange and frightening man beside her, suddenly looked more like some kind of warrior than a rich playboy.

“Your sister was looking for someone to help finance an expedition to find the Santa Josefa. And short of that, she was looking for someone to buy the charts, buy the information. And she was dealing with some very dangerous people.”

Sienna sucked in a painful breath. This was so much worse than she’d imagined. “I want to go back to Raleigh,” she said. “I want you to take me to the airport. Or take me to a bus station or a police station. I don’t care what. I want to go home.”

She didn’t know how to get in touch with Sabrina now. The last cell phone number she’d had for her sister had been out of service for a week, and her own was at the bottom of the lagoon. She’d left it in the car. But she couldn’t stay in Key Mango. Maybe if she went home, Sabrina would call her there.

“You can’t go home,” he pointed out. “They have your overnight bag, don’t they? Did you have some identification in there?”

She nodded mutely.

“And some papers I found in Sabrina’s apartment in Raleigh. Our father’s charts, with all the sites he’d searched that last summer.” She’d found them and brought them with her, intending to confront Sabrina and try to shake some sense into her. “So if that’s what they wanted—”

“They want Sabrina,” he cut in. “She claimed she knew which site on the chart was the Santa Josefa.”

“She doesn’t know! She wasn’t with us that day!”

His look hardened even further. “They don’t know that. And they’re going to want you now, too. They think her name is Tabitha Donovan, but they’ll use your identification to track you back to North Carolina. They’ll figure out that her real name is Sabrina Parker, and they’ll figure out you’re her sister.”

Her life was over. He was telling her that her life was over. If she went back to Raleigh now, she’d be hunted down by thugs who wanted to get their hands on that information. And the ironic thing was, she’d looked at those charts and she still had no idea which one had been the Santa Josefa. That was fifteen years ago. It might as well have happened to someone else. She’d woken up that day in the hospital and they’d had to tell her what had happened to her father. The slices of horrific memory had come later, but never the whole summer, only bits and pieces.

And she’d never wanted that summer to come back. She’d never wanted to remember.

“Who are these people?” she asked. “Treasure hunters?”

“Foreign terrorists.”

He might as well have said they were flying pigs. “What?”

“They’re people who blow up buildings and trains and kill people like you and I breathe. They think they can use Ramiro’s globe to pinpoint hidden weaknesses in the earth’s tectonic plates and set off strategically placed bombs to wipe out the eastern seaboard.”

“That’s crazy!” The sick feeling clawed her middle now.

His laser gaze pinned her in the night. “That’s not the point now, is it? The fact is, you have two choices right now. You can go back to Raleigh and put yourself in their hands, or you can stick with me and stop your sister before she ruins not just her life, but maybe a whole lot of other lives as well.”

He drew to a stop at the one light on the main strip of Key Mango. The businesses were dark, closed, except for a restaurant and a gas station.

Was he really giving her a choice?

What if she got out right now and walked into that gas station and asked for help? Terrorists. If she believed that. And right now she didn’t know what to believe.