She yanked her zipper up on her wet suit. She shouldn’t be looking at him. So what if he’d turned into a hottie sometime between the age of ten and thirty? He was still Cal, the eternal pain in her butt and the man who thought he could snag the contract she’d worked so hard for.
“You told me to be here,” he pointed out, all Mr. Logic.
“At the slip in the marina.” She slapped her dive harness on. “Thirty minutes ago.”
“You didn’t wait for me.” Now he sounded amused.
“You were late.”
The amused crinkles at the corners of his eyes said he wasn’t so sure. “Did you time me?”
Carla snorted behind her but kept her mouth shut. Wise woman.
“You’re not in charge, Piper,” he said softly.
“Neither are you.” Finished gearing up, she switched her attention—or as much of it as she could, at any rate—to checking the gauges on the steel tanks.
He shrugged. “We have to figure this out.”
He sounded so calm. So logical. While she, on the other hand, wanted to knock him overboard with one of the dive tanks. He’d been like that for as long as she could remember, always the golden boy, so responsible and mature.
“You coming in?” She made a show of checking his boat. “Oh. Too bad. You seem to be missing a dive buddy. I guess I’ll have to get started without you.”
He grinned. “Ladies first. I thought we’d established that.”
Dive checks complete, she rolled backward over the side of the boat, keeping a hand on her mask. Knees up, she floated to the surface and flashed Carla the okay sign.
* * *
AS SOON AS Carla entered the water, Piper bent at the waist, then drove her arms over her head, straightening her legs as she stroked downward with her arms. Her fins flashed briefly and then she slipped beneath the surface. No splash. Just here and then gone. Damn if that wasn’t Piper all over again.
She was a force of nature.
She’d also made it perfectly clear how she felt about working with him. He didn’t know how he felt about it himself, but it was a prerequisite for winning the Fiesta contract, so he’d do it.
He eyeballed the water. Recreational diving had nothing on combat diving. He’d led covert missions to scope enemy beaches and catalog the ocean floor for natural obstacles and land mines that might impede the navy’s landing craft. Executed midnight rescue swims that had ended in gunfire. Rappelled out of choppers, and, yeah...there’d been one memorable occasion when he’d almost planted fins first on a shark in the Indian Ocean. A site like Rose Wall shouldn’t pose any problem.
But...it did. The smooth surface taunted him. He didn’t want to get in and he definitely didn’t want to go under. If he couldn’t do it, however, he wouldn’t win the contract. And that was hardly the worst problem. Nope. Something in his head was broken beyond all repair, and yet he was under the gun to fix it.
Piper’s shadow disappeared from his line of sight. The boat suddenly seemed a whole lot emptier now with her gone. Which was what he’d wanted, he reminded himself. He didn’t need an audience for this next part. He was a U.S. Navy SEAL: he got in the water and he went under and he did his job. All too often, life and death had ridden on the success of his ops. He’d spent his life rescuing other people from the ocean.
Too bad he was the one who needed rescuing now.
Damn it.
He stood up, tugging his mask down and into place. The boat rocked gently, mockingly, as he took one large step off the side of Piper’s boat and let go, exhaling sharply. One second. Water rushed over his head as he went under. Don’t think. BUD/S training included drown-proofing. Arms and legs tied together, he’d voluntarily dropped down into a thirteen-foot pool only to release his air and power back to the surface. Over and over. Two seconds. If he could do that repeatedly, he could do this once.
Three seconds.
And yet the panic was there. Some part of him wasn’t convinced he wasn’t neck-deep in the Indian Ocean, diving in churned-up, debris-filled water while he looked for Lars and came up empty-handed. He’d failed that day.
Hell, he was still failing.
Four seconds.
He broke the surface, tearing the snorkel from his mouth and sucking in long gasps of air. The sunshine and the ocean’s flat surface mocked him. No Blackhawk chopper hovered overhead, its rotors churning the water’s surface into a blinding froth. No basket. No rope ladder up. Just him and a beginner’s dive he couldn’t cope with.
He needed to dive. Once he got back into the saddle, everything would be fine. If he had even one good dive under his belt, he’d be closer to fixing the mess he was in. He had to hold it together. Too bad his body hadn’t gotten the memo.