Pushing off, he started swimming, pulling hard against the current. He kept his head up (chicken, his brain accused), his hips sinking correspondingly lower in the water. He was in, he reminded himself. The sooner he touched those rocks on the point, the sooner he could head back, and this would be over for today. The ocean dragged at his lower body. If he dropped his head even a few inches into the water, the resistance would ease up, but not even Armageddon would get his head underwater voluntarily today.
Twenty minutes later, he neared Daeg—who’d started his return trip—as he pulled close to the point. The other man had already touched and turned, switching sides to pull for the shore.
“Don’t you get tired of buying?” Daeg’s gaze swept over him, but he didn’t stop. He was a neat swimmer, almost no splashing from his feet. Cal had a bad feeling his former teammate knew far too much about Cal’s predicament. They were both pretending everything was okay, however, which counted for something.
Cal kicked hard for the point, turning in a smooth arc. It would have been faster to somersault and push off the rocks like a competitive pool swimmer but yeah...turning underwater was apparently off-limits to him, as well. As soon as his head went underwater, all hell broke loose in there and he panicked. Pushing down the self-disgust—he had hours of non-water time in which to revisit it—he slowly turned and headed for shore.
It looked as though he’d be buying the beer again tonight.
8
PIPER KILLED THE motor and coasted toward the dive buoys scattered across the surface of the water. A good dive would clear her head, and yesterday’s bombshell from the good folks at Fiesta had certainly gone a long way toward making things muzzy. She needed to focus on the game because there was too much at stake not to give it 100 percent. Or 200 percent. She grinned. Cal wouldn’t know what had hit him.
Rose Wall wasn’t one of the better-known dive sites dotting the ocean around Discovery Island, but it was one of her favorites. Nice and shallow, the location didn’t have a whole lot of currents to trip up a novice diver, and the colors here were gorgeous. The site had earned its name from the gorgeous kelp forest stretching floor to surface. Bright pink-and-orange anemones peeked out through the green fronds, like flowers in an underwater garden.
And...go figure. Her arch nemesis had beaten her to the punch. The Dive Boat I bobbed lazily in the water, already tied up to one of the buoys. She’d sent Cal a brief text announcing her intentions of working this dive site into their joint demo. When he hadn’t shown up at her boat slip at the time she’d mentioned, however, she’d left without him. Happily and without giving him so much as an extra second, but she’d made the offer.
Working with Cal ranked way down on her to-do list, right there with having a root canal or filing her taxes. He’d want to be in charge. He always did, and if she was being honest, he was good at it. Cal always had a plan, and he had a way of issuing orders that made other people happy to comply. Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t other people. Unfortunately for both of them, however, the Fiesta guys had been perfectly clear on one thing. The two of them had to put together a diving demo. Together.
Apparently, Cal wasn’t taking the grade school approach of one group member doing all the work and the rest simply scrawling their names on the project when it was time to turn the work in. His being here wasn’t a surprise, but as far as she could tell, he was alone. The cardinal rule of diving was no one dived alone. Cal treaded water on the surface, although the dive marker was in the water, indicating a submerged diver. She did a quick scan of his boat and all of the dive tanks were present and accounted for. Something was off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it, so she fell back on her old standby. Fighting with him.
“Trying to get the jump on me, Brennan?” She brought the boat in, and Carla snagged the mooring line, tying them up to the buoy and dropping the anchor over the side.
He slicked the water back from his face. “Do I need to define the word partners for you?”
He reached the Feelin’ Free in a few swift strokes, the muscles in his arms flexing as he pulled himself out of the water. Water ran down his chest and over the muscles of his abdomen. How was any woman supposed to ignore all the gorgeousness? Piper herself lacked the willpower. Her brain was too busy trying to imagine him in one of those barely there Speedos favored by the island’s European guests. She’d bet it would be a good look for him. Almost as good as the wet look.
He popped his fins off. “The deal was we worked together.”
“Which is why you’re making yourself at home on my dive boat?”