In Too Deep (30 page)

“
The Due South polo-shirt, right?”
Her swallow was a dry click in the small, enclosed space. “No one
sees me back here and it’s not like I’m really part of the
staff—”

West traced a slow finger from the
dent in her throat to the “v” of her shirt, stopping when he met
the resistance of her bra. Her heartbeat thudded under his
fingertip.

“
I was thinking more along the
lines of some short-shorts instead of jeans. Mix it up a little.”
Removing his finger from her neckline, he brushed his hand down her
ribs then gently gripped her hip. Her breathing ceased for a
moment—if his other hand wasn’t holding her in place would she
bolt?

Time to find out.

“
You’ve got the hottest legs,
Pipe.” He released her hip and stroked his knuckles partway down
her thigh.

Piper didn’t move but she didn’t
meet his gaze either, her focus off to the right, like she opted to
study the row of cans on the wall shelf.

“
I want to see more of them.
Preferably when they’re bare and wrapped around my
hips.”

A soft moan escaped from her lips
and her head thunked back on the door. He hardened further. He’d do
her against the pantry door right now if she made another noise
like that. He leaned in to kiss her—just a little kiss, maybe sneak
in some tongue if he played it right—when a splayed hand, still
damp with dishwater, clamped across his mouth and
shoved.

“
Not the time or place,” Piper
rasped. “Your parents are right outside.”

Damn. He was all riled up and
she’d nearly melted in his arms. A couple of wet and wild kisses
would take the edge off. She did that lip licking thing and he
nearly kissed her anyway—even though her hazel eyes sparked a
warning:
touch me and I’ll ensure you walk funny for the rest of
the day.

“
Pipe.” He delivered his best
c’mon-baby smolder.

“
Your mother is on the other side
of this door, West—your
mother
. Do you need more of an
incentive to keep your lips to yourself?” She darted under his arm
and fled to the chest freezer at the end of the pantry—in case the
threat of his parents catching him with his tongue down the
dish-hand’s throat wasn’t enough to make him behave.

West shoved his hands into the
pockets of his business pants, pulling them away from his
groin—which still hadn’t received the update that hot sex in Due
South’s pantry wasn’t a go. They watched each other, wary as two
cats squaring off for a backyard battle. He waited until his pulse
settled back into a halfway normal rhythm before
speaking.

“
So why did you drag me in
here?”

Piper folded her arms. “I saw the
way you looked at Bill and Claire, like you were about to chew them
both out.”

Exactly what he’d been about to
do.

Not that he’d admit it. And
thinking of the sappy look on his dad’s face—anything other than a
scowl on Bill’s face was sappy—his annoyance spilled over. “I
should chew them both out, her especially—taking advantage of a
sick old man who’s not thinking straight.”

Piper dismissed him with a toss of
her head. “There’s nothing wrong with your father’s mind, and how
is Claire uprooting herself to come look after him taking
advantage?”

“
I don’t know, yet,” he said. “But
she’s up to something. Fussing and fawning over him. Making him
smile, for God’s sake.”

“
They still care about each other,
West, and it shows.” She moved across the pantry and stood toe to
toe with him, gently drilling a finger into his chest. “That’s
what’s bugging you, isn’t it?”

West wrapped his hand around hers,
pressing her palm flat. “She walked out thirteen years ago. She
can’t just waltz back in and act like she didn’t abandon
him.”

Abandon them both.

“
I know you and Bill are close,
but whatever’s going on with him and Claire is not your
business.”

Piper’s fingers curled on his
chest and sent shivers skittering over his skin. She stared up at
him, stared until he was half convinced her intense gaze peeled
back his protective layers until every secret inside him split open
to her scrutiny.

Could she see the unhealed scars
of the boy he’d been? The boy who’d thought himself too old for
tears, yet cried for his mother and little brother, hating every
moment of his weakness. Piper’s sympathy rolled over him like a
soft blanket, but it suffocated him, made him want to push her
away.

Again.

Sympathy was a blink away from
pity and he couldn’t stand the idea of her pitying him.

“
My business or not, I don’t have
to like it, and I don’t want to see my father devastated when she
goes back to LA.” He removed her hand from his shirt and let it
drop.

“
It doesn’t sound like LA’s where
she wants to be at the moment.”

“
She made her bed.”

Piper huffed out a sigh and
dragged her fingers through her hair, leaving the strands in short
spikes, which he itched to smooth down. He forced the impulse away
by grabbing the door handle.

“
Haven’t you ever had to make a
choice where there were no good outcomes?” she said. “Where no
matter what you did, someone got hurt?”

West thought of the morning he’d
broken it off with her and the night two days after Michael died
when he’d tried to take it back. Piper had stared at his face for
five solid seconds before quietly closing the door. He thought of
her in the rain at Michael’s memorial up on the cemetery hill,
standing a short distance apart from her family. Of Piper wearing
her backpack and walking to the ferry. And him, hiding in the
shadows, not saying a word. Making a choice to let her
go.

“
Yeah.”

“
Then cut your parents some
slack.”

He nodded. Who was he to judge
Bill when he stood on the precipice of making the same mistake with
Piper?

So he said, “Back to work,” and
flung open the pantry door, stepping through it before Piper could
see that mistake written all over his face.

***

With the honeymoon couple out of
the way for three hours on a deserted beach toting a picnic lunch,
Piper tugged on her wetsuit and cursed a blue streak.

Yeah, she’d kinda agreed to be
West’s safety diver. Okay, she
had
agreed, as long as he
followed her rules—but agreeing to a theoretical situation was one
thing. It was another to arrive at a sheltered cove in Paterson
Inlet and have him announce his intention to dive.

And it was another matter entirely
when West emerged from his cabin in a painted-on silver and black
wetsuit. With a normal wetsuit, some areas, some
things
,
were left to the imagination. Not so much with a free-diving
wetsuit. Thinner and super-stretchy, the material clung to every
inch of his body bar his feet and head.

Every. Single. Inch.

West looking so damn hot wasn’t a
bad thing, though. It distracted her from the heavy slab of fear
constricting her chest at the thought of him free-diving. She
scuttled into her cabin to change before she did something really
dumb, like offer to adjust his fancy outfit with her
lips.

She zipped up her wetsuit and
faced the mirror.

C’mon Pipe, get it
together.

She was a highly trained
professional with hundreds of hours of experience under her weight
belt. She wasn’t eighteen, West wasn’t her dad, everything would be
fine.

“
A cakewalk,” she told her
reflection.

Her pale face stared back at her,
unconvinced. A small vein pulsed in her temple and she raised a
shaky hand to press a fingertip against it.

A rap of knuckles on her cabin
door. “Let’s go, daylight’s wasting.”

Piper took a last look in the
mirror before she walked out of the cabin, punched a smirking West
in the bicep, and headed for the equipment locker.

She was okay, dammit.

Thirty minutes later and sixteen
feet below the surface, West’s silhouetted legs churned lazily
above her by the anchor line as he prepared to dive. He’d use the
line to guide himself down to the predetermined depth of
ninety-eight feet, then follow it back up to the surface. Her job
was to track his ascent and react quickly if he displayed any signs
of a shallow water blackout.

The draw from her regulator rasped
in her ear as she breathed and the chill of the water pressed in on
all sides. But still, she remained steady—on task and in
control.

In one smooth action, West folded
at the waist and glided down in a series of calculated but graceful
motions, like ballet executed underwater. He didn’t acknowledge her
as he dropped below her position, so focused on each precise
movement of his arms and legs.

But no more focused than she was
on him. Piper’s gaze didn’t deviate off his streamlined body.
West’s legs flexed again in a frog kick and then returned to
complement the straight line of his torso. He held his arms relaxed
at his sides, negative buoyancy now causing him to fall
weightlessly into the deep. Hypnotic to watch, the power of it
combined with the memories of her father training, stung her
eyes.

Visibility closed around him and
he slipped from her view. Now the hard part—trusting he’d return.
She checked her dive watch again. Counted off the seconds. Talked
herself out of diving down another thirty feet after him. Checked
her watch again.

By now West would’ve reversed
direction at the end of the line, no longer falling, but reliant on
pure muscle and determination to propel him upward. But things
often went wrong in the ascent. Push the body too hard and
air-hungry lungs would suck the oxygen right out of a person’s
blood—then buh-bye consciousness.

West reappeared out of the murky
dark, his black swim-capped head arrowing smoothly through the
water, not too slow, not too fast. She finned closer, close enough
to make eye contact for those last crucial moments. His gaze fixed
on hers as they swam in parallel synchronization. No emotion
filtered through his steady gaze, his mind turned inward to master
his lungs’ crippling need for air.

With a short distance to go,
bubbles exploded around his face, obscuring his mask and
catapulting her heart into frantic overdrive. West’s body arched as
his head broke the surface, but almost immediately he sank back
under, and plummeted—straight into Piper’s arms.

No time for panic. No time for
accusations. Only response, action, training.

She hauled West to the surface,
supporting him under his arms and twisting him awkwardly onto his
back.

She yanked her regulator out and
tugged off his nose clip. “C’mon, West. C’mon now.” Piper blew
gently across his face and patted his cheek.

Ice blue eyes popped open and he
coughed, blinked, and swore. After a short pause he tore off his
mask and rolled over until he trod water beside her. His brow
creased and he shook his head, water flicking off his face in tiny
droplets. “Pipe?”

You blacked out. You could’ve
died.

The words crowded her throat but
wouldn’t form out loud. She labored even to breathe, just gawking
at him with her vocal chords frozen.

“
Pipe?” He wheezed, sucked in more
air. “Shit.” Gasp. “You okay?”

That should’ve been her line, but
she couldn’t say a damn thing, transfixed by West’s face, the rise
and fall of his chest as he sucked in air.

Piper’s lungs refused to work
smoothly. Her father’s face, grey and motionless with water
spilling from his slack mouth, superimposed over West’s. No longer
West’s fancy black and silver suit beneath her fingertips, but
Dad’s. Dad’s bulk, as she battled to keep his head above water.
Dad’s eyes, that didn’t blink when she tore off his mask, when she
blew on his stubbled cheeks. When she sobbed his name over and over
and over.

She had to get out of the water.
Now.

She clamped her trembling lips
shut and swam the short distance to the boat’s ladder. Splashes
from behind and he shouted her name, a string of four-letter words
chasing it. Her arm muscles had the same tensile strength as
overcooked pasta as Piper hauled herself aboard. Nearly there,
nearly there.

More water sluiced onto the deck
as West climbed up the ladder after her. “Hey—”

She kneeled on the deck and
stripped off her inflatable vest and tank.

“
Talk to me, please.” He crouched
beside her.

Piper kept her head down and
unclipped her weight belt, letting it fall off her waist. She still
couldn’t look at him—didn’t trust herself to speak. One glance at
those baby blues and she’d lose what little control she had
left.

Her cabin, that’s where she needed
to go. A place where she wouldn’t use the dive knife strapped to
her thigh to take West’s head off. Yeah, after a hot shower, her
temper, primed by a mix of the adrenalin and terror flooding her
system, would dissipate enough for her to have a rational
conversation.