He would just enjoy this afternoon on his turf with Darcy. He'd learned young to make the most of every moment before the next move. Ignore the rest.
Seventy feet down, Darcy slowed. A cautious diver.
Good. Only pros should dive below a hundred feet where nitrogen narcosis, rapture of the deep, kicked in fast. He didn't need a doped-up Darcy on his resistance-weak hands.
Darcy paused to stare at yellow coral fingering out of denser pink bunches, giving a wide berth to the red coral that held skin-burning poison in its spines.
Max pointed toward the looming aircraft. Darcy nodded. He clasped her hand and tugged her with him, kicking, propelling them through the maze of corals painting a Technicolor path ahead of them.
Technicolor?
Where the hell had that freaking poetic notion come from? From seeing the same damn stretch of water he'd covered countless times the past week in a new light.
Through Darcy's unjaded perceptions.
The depths became about more than a workplace full of hidden secrets. Her eyes smiled through the mask at a blue starfish. When had he forgotten about blue starfish? Long before Eva.
Darcy swam in the midst of a streaming school of spotted grouper, then alongside with a manta ray until the four-foot batlike creature finally glided away. Dozens of times he'd kicked through these same waters right past this same wreckage and never once had he thought to stop and explore. Not until now. With Darcy.
He'd narrowed his focus for so long while Darcy flung open doors, inviting him into her world. And damned if he could stop himself from joining her, even if only for one day.
Darcy sprawled on the sandbar, diving gear on the beach, their boat bobbing in the distance. Max beside her.
She was in serious trouble.
The late-afternoon sun cooked her as surely as the time with Max had fried her brain. Something had happened between them underwater, some surreal connection. He'd watched her with such intensity, his eyes all but searing her through his mask until she'd felt linked to him.
She'd been attracted to his body, to his intelligence, even to the boy who watched old sitcoms and played with dolphins to combat loneliness.
Today she'd met the real man in his world. All the elements of Max Keagan pulled together into a total package that touched her. Here, alone on their patch of sand away from the mainland, the boundaries stayed down and she couldn't scavenge the will to resurrect them.
She was weary with fighting the pull between them. Maybe the time had come to take an even bigger risk.
Time to talk. Really talk. "How long has it been?"
Max turned his head along the sand toward her. "What?"
Darcy forced herself to ask the question that would hurt both of them but needed to be voiced. "Since you lost her?"
He didn't look away, blue-green eyes deepening to the color of a storm-tossed sea. "Two and a half years."
"Time doesn't always help."
"No, it doesn't." His chest pumped a half pace faster. The ocean crashed up the shoreline, tipping their toes. Waves drowned out the world and eroded the sand beneath them so walls didn't have a chance of being resurrected. "She was pregnant."
Shock stung Darcy like the spines of poisonous red coral. The sun gleamed off Max's bronzed skin, but his body seemed frozen in ice.
Darcy rolled to her side and let her hand fall on his chest. "I'm so sorry."
He didn't move or touch her back, other than the forceful slug of his heart under her hand. "I went a little crazy that first year after Eva and the baby..." He swallowed. "I did some things I'm not proud of before I found focus."
"To lose someone you love is horrible, but to lose your child, the promise of a family at the same time— you had a right to go more than a little crazy." What would it be like to be loved so fully, passionately by this intense man?
Max jerked upright, her hand falling away. "The baby wasn't planned, but I wanted it. Eva hadn't decided whether or not to take on me and my j—'' he paused, frowned "—my lifestyle permanently."
His lifestyle? What was wrong with marrying a professor? Eva lost serious points in Darcy's book if the woman hadn't been able to see beyond the beach bum facade to the serious man beneath.
"Hell, maybe she was right." He hooked his elbows on his knees and stared out at the sun sinking into the horizon. "Who knew what kind of father I would have been? Failing at a relationship is one thing. Failing a kid...I had to get it right. A child deserves more than a father who communicates with grunts." Max shot Darcy a wry smile. "Maybe I have more in common with my old man than I thought."