A Risky Proposition (40 page)

Just her luck, they both looked like supermodels.  She inhaled the brisk salt-air and turned away to stare out at the fathomless aquamarine water, determined to enjoy her adventure with or without the attention of the handsome boat captain.

As the boat coasted to a halt, she peeled off her shorts and top, bending to retrieve her fluorescent orange snorkel vest and mask.  She sucked in a breath as she rose in time to see the mouth-watering captain casually pull off his shirt, revealing a wide, well-defined chest and abs with just a hint of a six-pack.  The pair of women beside him appeared to appreciate the view as well.

Violet refused to join them in their ogling, doubting he needed his ego inflated further.  When he began instructing them on water safety, however, he drew her attention once more.  He had the loveliest voice, with that rich Irish brogue of his, and his sea-green eyes sparkled with warmth when he smiled. 

He caught her gaze for a moment, holding it as he finished his speech, almost as if he was speaking to her alone.  He seemed to start toward her, and heat rose to her already flushed cheeks.  Flustered, she looked away and hurried to the back of the line to await her turn to descend the ladder into the water.

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Doyle forced a smile at the scantily clad young woman sitting in front of him.  She was tracing a manicured fingertip over her glossed pink lips in what was obviously meant to be an enticing manner.  She and her giggling, gum chewing friend had rushed to sit by him as soon as they’d boarded the boat. 

“Brittany and I were giving each other belly button shots at the bar last night.  It was a blast.”  She gave him a coy look from beneath lashes thick with mascara.  “You should come hang out with us tonight.  If you buy the shots, we’ll feed them to you.”

Brittany giggled and Doyle laughed politely.  “That’s quite an offer, ladies.”

They were certainly pretty enough, but he met the same type of girl day in and day out.  He’d enjoyed his share of them, taking advantage of what they were only too willing to give, but he wasn’t in the mood for another meaningless romp with a tourist. 

It was his last snorkel trip of the day and he was eager to be done with it.  He loved his business, but he was wiped out from the brutal heat and his four earlier groups.  It wasn’t so bad when he had a turn in the water and his partner, Manny, stayed on the boat to supervise the scene from above.  But it was Manny’s turn to swim. 

He’d never thought anything could make him miss Ireland’s wet, aching cold until he experienced mid-summer in the subtropics.

The flirtier of the two girls leaned into him.  “That’s not all I have to offer, handsome,” she whispered on a drawn out breath.  The cloying aroma of smoke and cloves nearly made him choke.  “Come swimming with me and I’ll show you.” 

Doyle gave a noncommittal chuckle and hid a grimace.  Maybe sweating on the boat was the better alternative after all.  He reminded himself that he couldn’t complain.  He’d said he wanted sun and sand, and he had it in spades here in the Florida Keys.

He’d never regretted his decision to leave Ireland.  Although he wasn’t sure his poor parents would ever get over the shock of it.  That he’d chosen to venture so far from home was only a part of their dismay; it was more that he’d bucked convention and decided to live in the
human
world.  Because, despite appearances, Doyle wasn’t human.

I wonder if knowing that would be enough to make these two leave me alone
, he thought dryly.  But he would never reveal his secret, the satisfaction of chasing away overbearing tourists notwithstanding.  He hadn’t even told Manny, and they’d been friends and business partners for ten years.  

Doyle steered the boat alongside the reef, giving his first-mate a nod to indicate they were stopping.  Manny winked in salute as he dropped anchor, the wiry muscles of his arms and bare chest shifting beneath summer-darkened skin that had started out a deep, Costa Rican brown.  Doyle stripped off his t-shirt with the
Ocean Magic
’s logo, ignoring the increased giggling from the college girls, and began to give his rote safety spiel before he sent the group into the water.

He almost stumbled over his words as his eyes fell upon the beautiful young woman watching him solemnly from the aft railing.  He’d been busy piloting the boat and fending off advances from the ‘girls gone wild’, but he couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed
her
. 

She had a solitary air, standing apart from the couples who were helping each other with their lifevests, and not joining in the laughter of the other clustered groups of passengers.  But she didn’t look like she minded being alone.  Her posture was selfpossessed and confident, though a veiled sorrow seemed to linger beneath the tranquility of her expression. 

She was several inches shorter than he, with a firm but curvaceous body.  Her breasts and hips were full and ripe, her pale golden skin clear and sun-blushed.  Her long, dark hair fell in waves to frame a soft face with extraordinarily blue, almost purple, eyes.  She locked gazes with him as he finished speaking, and he began to move toward her, as if in a dream.  But at the last moment she turned away and joined the queue to get in the water.

Disappointed, he faltered to a stop, oblivious to the giggling blonde who threaded her arm through his and asked if he would be her snorkel partner.  He mumbled something about having to stay on the boat as he disentangled himself, earning a pretty pout. 

Absorbed with thoughts of the mysterious brunette, and determined to introduce himself on the return ride, he picked up the clipboard with the passenger roster and tried to guess her name.  As he scanned the page, he smiled in triumph.  Hendrickson, Violet.  The name reflected the color of her eyes.  And she was the only passenger traveling alone.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Violet admonished herself for being foolish as she waited, her mask looped around her wrist and fins dangling from her fingers.  The captain was far too good-looking for his own, or her, good.  Out of the corner of her eye she saw one of the blondes hanging on his arm, and she turned away, shoving him resolutely from her mind.  What had she been thinking?  There was no way he’d been about pass up that free lunch to come talk to
her
.

She reached the ladder and was soon lowering herself into the warm, soothing water; all other thoughts forgotten as the buoyant swells welcomed her into their embrace.  She had forgotten how good it felt to be out here in the middle of the ocean.  It was far different from swimming near the shore with the rolling whitecaps crashing onto the beach.  Here it was like another world, with only an unbroken expanse of blue-green serenity as far as the eye could see.

She quickly donned her snorkel mask and fins, and worked her way out over the jumble of pitted and maze-like corals that made up the reef.  Lacy sea fans waved lazily in the currents and multitudes of colorful fish flitted every which way.  She lost herself in exploring the teeming marine life, following a couple of parrot fish that were chasing each other for a while, and then stopping to admire a large anemone with purple-pink tentacles.

She floated past a school of butterfly fish, flashing silver and yellow in the water-muted sunlight, and held her breath to dive down for a closer look at a huge grouper that she’d nearly missed.  Its mouth gaped open and its fins barely moved as it hovered in a dark crevice, waiting for prey.  Trigger fish darted by as she returned to the surface to clear out her breathing tube.

Violet’s gasp of delight sounded hollow inside her snorkel as she caught sight of a sea turtle in the distance.  She hurried toward it, trying to minimize her movements so as not to startle the creature.  A large shadow moved past, and she blinked, jerking her face around to see what it was. 

Something smacked hard against the side of her head and her vision went grey.  She was stunned for a moment, and then pain crashed over her.  She realized suddenly that she could no longer breathe.  Her mask was filling with water, blinding her, and something was dragging her down, down, away from the air and the light.  She panicked, struggling and flailing against its merciless pull. 

Her lungs burned and tightened until they felt as if they would implode.  No longer able to stop herself, Violet inhaled seawater.

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Doyle paced from stern to bow in frustration.  The group had dispersed out over the reef, and from this distance he couldn’t tell who was who.  They were just a collection of bright orange blobs.  They would be floating around out there for another half hour before he would get the chance to talk to the lovely Violet Hendrickson.

Who was she?  And why would someone like her be vacationing alone?  With his luck, she had a fiancée waiting for her back at her hotel room.

He continued his pacing, staring moodily out over the water, and then he went stock still. 
That was odd.
  He could have sworn he’d just seen a merrow’s tail break the surface out beyond the reef, its large, silvery green scales sparkling in the sunlight. 

The merrow were mer-folk, and notorious for keeping to themselves.  There had been tales of sailors spotting them throughout history, but he’d never seen a hint of their existence in all his years in the Keys.  It was strange that one would be anywhere near a place that was so populated by humans.  His eyes scanned the water, searching for another glimpse. 

Instead, he saw something that made his blood run cold despite the blazing afternoon heat.  There was a single orange jersey floating about a hundred yards off the starboard bow, like so much abandoned flotsam.

Without a second thought he dove over the side of the boat and began a furious swim toward the empty snorkeling vest.  He realized too late that he should have donned a mask, as he squinted through blurry, salt-stung eyes to gauge his surroundings.  As soon as he reached the solitary jersey, he plunged deeper. 

This was where the reef started to become the territory of divers.  The seafloor dropped and the coral became a rocky landscape of peaks and valleys, jutting out to create hundreds of miniature caves.  Many were large enough to conceal a human body.  Had some fool decided to go exploring on their own and gotten stuck?  Inadvisable though it was, he began feeling around inside the dark dens with his ungloved hands.

A perturbed moray eel shot out at him, its jagged teeth nearly clamping onto his fingers.  He jerked his hand back and moved onto the next opening, growing frantic.  The human brain could only go without oxygen for about five minutes.  It must have been at least two since he’d jumped in the water.  And though Doyle wasn’t human, whoever had been wearing that orange snorkeling vest was.  And they were running out of time.

A large, sleek shape rushed past him, creating its own wake beneath the surface.  Doyle squinted at it, thinking it was a shark.  But then he glimpsed something that seemed out of place on the seafloor below and he dismissed the creature as he lunged toward it. 

A clump of dark wisps floated at the edge of a recess of rock, disappearing into a hidden cavity beneath.  His fingers tangled in the mass, identifying the clinging strands as human hair.  He reached deeper, past the curve of an unmoving head, to grasp a lifeless body beneath the shoulders.  He tugged, and found himself holding an unconscious Violet in his arms.

He felt as if he was looking at her in slow motion.  Her beautiful face was pale and eerily still, her long hair hovering in a weightless raven cloud.  Then time caught up with him and he pushed off the rock, his leg muscles stroking for the surface. 

“There they are!” someone shouted.

Doyle barely registered the sound as he rolled onto his back, pulling Violet’s limp form with him, desperate to get her to the boat where he could perform CPR.  His arms tightened beneath her ribcage as he struggled to position her, and suddenly she was choking and sputtering as she coughed up water and gasped for breath.

Doyle didn’t think he’d ever felt such stark relief in his almost two hundred years of existence. 

His first mate reached his side and began trying to pull Violet from him.  Doyle’s grip on her tightened reflexively, some primal instinct roaring to life, unwilling to relinquish her to another.  

“Easy now,” Manny soothed.

Doyle wasn’t sure whether the calming words were meant for him or for Violet, but he relaxed his hold and allowed Manny to slide her down so that she was supported between them.

“We’ll have you out of the water soon,” Doyle assured her gently as they began working their way back to the boat.  She murmured a sound of gratitude between coughing sputters. 

The rest of the group bobbed in loose knots around them, treading water and staring.  Doyle knew they were only concerned, but it was all he could do not to shout at them to get out of the way.  He heard a faint, agitated buzz and looked up to find a distraught faerie hovering overhead, her wings sifting sparkling purple dust that scattered behind her on the wind.

She was a sprite, approximately three inches tall with dark shining hair that fell past her knees.  Her skin glowed with silvery light and her pastel dress shimmered in shades of pink, blue and yellow.  From the anxious stare she was directing at Violet, Doyle guessed that she must be the young woman’s faerie guardian.

Faerie guardians bonded with certain mortals at birth, following them throughout their lives to bring them aid and protection.  Most mortals had no idea of the existence of the faerie realm or any of its denizens.  If they had a faerie guardian helping them they simply attributed it to luck, when they noticed it at all.

Doyle had a bone to pick with this particular faerie.  Where the hell had she been when her charge was drowning, and why hadn’t she steered Violet away from the danger?

“How the devil could you let this happen, little sister?” he muttered up at her, his jaw set in a grim line.

Her tilted eyes widened a fraction.  “You’re sidhe,” she gasped in surprise.

He was just about to let loose a scathing reply, when he realized that Violet was trying to speak, her voice coming out stilted and hoarse from a throat raw with saltwater.