Wicked Secrets (Men of Discovery Island 3)

Dani threw her arms around Daeg’s neck, pulling his head down to hers. Too late. With all the kissing not three feet from her, Mia was getting ideas of her own.

Wow. Good thing she had a practice fiancé of her own or she might have been envious. “It’s like working in a love nest. I assume you’ve explained the definition of sexual harassment to them both?”

A smile tugged at the corner of Tag’s mouth. “Fortunately for Daeg, he’s not paying Dani.”

She let Tag tug her to feet, curious to see what he would do next. “Horrific, isn’t it? We have to hire family now or we’d get sued for sexual harassment on a weekly basis. You don’t want to see what comes next. We’ll go grab some lunch. Hopefully, when we come back, they’ll have cleared out. Or finished.”

Daeg flipped him the bird, but he didn’t leave off kissing his fiancée—and apparently all the PDA wasn’t contagious. Tag didn’t kiss her. Of course, she didn’t want him to. They were in the office, for God’s sake. His hands-off behavior wasn’t disappointing at all.

Not in the slightest.

“What if I do? Want to see what comes next?” Shoot. Her question sounded either creepily close to the marriage ceremony or outright pervy.

“You’re full of surprises.” He sounded...approving?

Whatever. Since he was clearly waiting for her to make a move—and, equally clearly, Dani and Daeg weren’t wrapping up their marathon kissing session anytime soon—she reached under her desk for her bag.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll hit the taco truck, and then I’ll take you to get the stuff you’ll need for Sam when the two of you move into your new house.”

10

THE DEEP DIVE team spent the night searching for a missing fishing charter, which was a hell of a way to kick off the weekend. Three overdue boaters had been reported as missing to the Coast Guard by their families. Although there was no distress call, the fishermen had been due back to Discovery Island by six o’clock, and now, twelve hours later, there still hadn’t been so much as a peep from the absent men.

Looking for the twenty-seven-foot Fish Me Crazy visually was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Radar showed nothing within a twenty-mile radius of Discovery Island, and the Coast Guard’s urgent marine broadcast to other boaters had turned up no leads. Before the Coast Guard launched a jet, they’d reached out to Deep Dive to send up a rescue helicopter.

The sun had just cracked the horizon, turning everything shades of gray. It was Tag’s favorite time of day to fly, the ocean calm and peaceful on a good day, and nothing had ended badly yet because the day was young. Deep Dive had put up a team of four—one pilot, two swimmers and one hoist operator—and Tag would be first into the water if the job required it. Mentally, he divided the blue water up into quadrants, scanning one before moving on to the next. Sunlight glinted off the surface. With a decent ceiling and plenty of visibility, he was feeling good about this particular mission.

“Operations normal.” The familiar words of Cal reporting in to the Coast Guard base back on the mainland washed over him. They’d make the call every fifteen minutes until they found the missing fishermen or had to turn back because they were running low on fuel.

Thirty miles out from Discovery Island, he spotted debris in the water. Cal banked, bringing the chopper around and down until they hovered low enough over the water for a visual. What had looked like fiberglass hull from several hundred feet in the air turned out to be a semi-submerged piece of lumber and a small flotilla of plastic bottles. Not the Fish Me Crazy or pieces of her. Those were the rescues that sucked, when the mission became salvage, and there was nothing he could do but pick up the pieces and bring them back. Maybe it helped the people left behind to know what had happened. Closure and blah blah blah. He’d take survivors any day.

From the chopper, the ocean looked like one big expanse of blue, the surface broken by the occasional whitecap or shadow of a larger fish or shark passing by. Seagulls crisscrossed the sky because they weren’t so far from land, only seventy miles or so. Cal read off the gas levels over the headphones. They had another hour before they’d have to turn back to refuel.

Ten minutes later, they came up on the Fish Me Crazy. She’d flipped and was floating keel up. A quick head count, however, turned up three heads. Although the crew had gone into the water, they’d managed to don life jackets first and were now clinging to the boat. As the team drew nearer, two of the men in the water signaled for help, waving their arms over their heads.