Warrior (Navy SEALs Romance Book 5) (6 page)

E
mily was
at home in the water, more than she felt on land most of the time. Being submerged sometimes felt like a welcome retreat from life above, like she was wrapped in an aqua blanket and could forget everything that troubled her on land.

This time was no different. She was on a research boat with someone she didn’t know or trust all that well, along with his equally untrustworthy companion. But even worse, she’d had a glimmer of hope in a date with a great guy, and now even that seemed doubtful.

The bubbles from her regulator clouded her vision for a moment as she looked left and right for any sign of the shrimp traps Macmillan had told her to look for. Shrimp weren’t traditionally caught in traps, they were caught with harmful dragnet fishing, but she wasn’t going to argue with his instructions.

Emily stopped to check the air in her gauges. She had about thirty minutes left, having been down searching from post to post for over an hour.
Hmmmm, there should have been more air than that
, she thought with a frown that wrinkled the skin around her mask.

Rather than risk any complications, Emily began to slowly surface as she moved forward, still searching for the required traps along the way. When she finally reached the shimmering layer that separated the ocean from the air, she broke through and dropped her regulator from her mouth. At first she didn’t see anything but the choppy water, but when she turned around to look back towards the boat, it was gone.

* * *

“
W
here is she
?” Angel roared before even reaching the ground, climbing out of a news helicopter from a station in San Diego.

“Dude, calm yourself before you do something you regret,” Tanner said, holding up his hands and preparing himself to keep a fight from escalating. “But this wasn’t our call. We didn’t ground the choppers, and we didn’t decide to leave her behind. That was all Madison’s idea. And I sure as shit didn’t start this fire in the first place, so just keep your head in check, okay?”

Angel took a deep breath and tried to control his anger. He’d had the whole flight over here to think rationally, to remind himself that his teammates were some of the best trained rescuers on the planet. But none of that mattered when he landed and caught sight of them lounging around, doing nothing.

“If anything happens to her…” he began in a quiet voice.

“Nothing’s gonna happen. They only grounded us because the choppers were fanning the flames over the flight path. She’s in a safe place, and she’s guarding a dozen little kids. Can you think of their parents for a second?” Tanner jerked his head behind him slightly, trying not to call attention to them.

Angel looked over Tanner’s shoulder and his face softened. At least twenty people stood clustered together in a taped off area, some of them clinging to each other, some of them obviously praying.

“Shit, dude. What do we need to do?”

“Well, it would have been helpful if you’d stayed back at command and issued orders, but I see that ship has sailed,” Tanner said with a light laugh. “But don’t worry, they’re clearing us to take off again soon, they think within the hour. You really didn’t have to race over here like this.”

“Yeah, I did. I can’t talk about it… but yeah.” Angel hung his head and grabbed the back of his neck.

“You mean because Madison’s pregnant and you’re scared to death about it?”

Angel jerked his head up and glared fiercely at Tanner. “What are you talking about? Who told you?”

“Nobody! You just did, I was only kidding! Holy shit, you’re gonna be a dad!” Tanner punched Angel in the shoulder over and over, laughing and grinning until Angel couldn’t help but smile. “But hey, congratulations. Just remember, Tanner’s an awesome name for a boy or a girl!”

“Yeah, I’ll try to remember that,” Angel answered sarcastically before turning serious. “I guess I have some apologies to make, huh?”

“You might. But I’m sure the guys are gonna understand where you were coming from if you just told them the truth.”

“I can’t. I want to, I mean it. But Madison made me swear I wouldn’t say anything. She’s just got it in her head that something’s gonna go wrong, and she doesn’t want me to tell anyone yet.”

“I get it. But she didn’t say I couldn’t tell them, right?” Tanner grinned wickedly, then took off running. Angel caught up to him and grabbed him by the sleeve, turning him back around.

“Hey, there’s something you gotta know… I’m sending Mike back. Knox will take over as pilot and you’ll fill in as co-pilot. It’s gonna leave us without someone at command, since Mike won’t be going back to headquarters.”

“You’re the boss this week, so it’s your call. But what’s up?” Tanner wrinkled his brow and waited.

“If there’s really a God, then it’s nothing. But if not, I think his new girl’s in trouble. There was a call about a man overboard on a research vessel, and the intel said it was a young marine biologist out of the university who headed out this morning on a project.”

“Oh god, so who’s handling the search?”

“Well, that’s kind of our job, isn’t it?” he asked bitterly. “Instead, we’re here, and we’re grounded. We get to sit here on our butts waiting for clearance to finish up this mission while a young woman is hopefully bobbing in the ocean miles out to sea. But it actually gets worse. There’s no official search yet. All they got was a tip that a guy went out to sea with two passengers and only came back with one. Some old lady on a fishing pier called the cops, she said they looked shifty, like they were up to something. It’s not even an official missing person ‘til the authorities go looking around some more.”

Tanner looked over his shoulder at the group leaning against the chopper, already suited up and waiting for their permission to take off. Michael looked focused but still relaxed, and that was about to change.

“So what do we do?”

“I’m sending him back. I can’t order him to do anything, we don’t have the clearance to conduct a search without official word, and without everybody present. Insurance, city regulations, all that crap,” Angel answered, his expression telling exactly what he thought about bureaucracy. “But Mike’s smart… he’ll read between the lines and do what has to be done.”

* * *

M
ichael rode
the entire way in silence, partly lost in his thoughts about Emily and partly out of sheer gratitude that the news chopper pilot was willing to help him out instead of try to get aerial footage for the news desk. He’d have to remember to send him a bottle of whiskey as thanks. Every so often, he tried her cell phone again - texting, calling, even attempting to FaceTime her in case it alerted her with a different ringtone - but she never answered. With every passing minute, he became more and more certain that she was the missing passenger, but there was a part of him that had to wonder if she just didn’t want to hear from him.

When they touched down on the roof of the television station’s ten-story building downtown, Mike shouted his thanks to the pilot and bolted from his seat in the cockpit. He tore across the small tarmac and threw open the door to the stairs, leaping down them a few at a time. He finally made his way outside and punched in the app for an Uber ride, intent on getting to the university and finding out where she had been headed.

Along the way, he Googled everything he could about local research projects. Only a handful even sounded like the kind of work Emily had vaguely described. One particular project on shrimp triggered a memory of a conversation from their very first train wreck of a date.

“Hey, do you know where the science building is?” Mike asked a cluster of students as they approached. The first few students shrugged, but others were more helpful. “I’m looking for Dr. Stanton’s office, she teaches...biology, or something.”

“Yeah, across campus. It’s the short brick building, like, three stories high,” a male in rowing team t-shirt said. He pointed in the general direction, and Mike took off at a dead sprint.

He found the building and went door to door, racing down the hallways looking for anyone who might tell him the direction Emily should have gone.

E
mily struggled
to breathe as she looked around at her surroundings. She’d used the air in the tank to inflate her BCD and unbuckled her weight belt, letting it fall to the ocean floor. But now, with no boat in sight and nothing but open water in every direction, panic began to set in and she gasped for air for a few moments.

Okay, Emily… think
, she reminded herself.
You’re smarter than this, and you know what you’re doing.

She immediately looked around at her surroundings to get the direction of the sun, preparing to use her dive watch’s face as a signal mirror if any boats passed by. There was no hope of swimming to shore, even if she knew which direction to go and where the currents were drifting her, so her only hope was to be prepared to get the attention of any vehicles that passed by. She patted the pouch secured around her wrist to make sure it was still there, the one that contained an inflatable signal tube that would hopefully be visible from far away.

This kind of thing happens
, she thought, calming herself.
There are steps to that get taken whenever someone falls overboard. The authorities are alerted, and search teams begin combing the waters. Unless…

She couldn’t finish the thought, even silently. She couldn’t start letting her imagination run wild, that there was a reason Macmillan and that weird girl had taken off and left her. What did it possibly serve to get rid of a newbie associate professor? It’s not like she was working on important research, or there could be any kind of motive.

What if something had happened to
them
? Had she survived because she hadn’t been on board? There had to be more to this, but there was no way they just left her without realizing what they were doing.

* * *

“
C
an you help me
? I’m looking for Dr. Emily Stanton,” Mike said breathlessly when he reached the second floor. A young man was seated at a desk while an even younger girl sat slouched beside him, her feet planted in his lap as she reclined and noisily chewed her gum. The girl looked unconcerned about the appearance of someone in the office doorway, but the man shoved the girl’s feet down and stood up.

“Uh… um, I’m Dr. Macmillan. Can I help you?”

“You? You’re Macmillan! You’re the guy doing the research project,” Mike began, but something about the way the color drained from the professor’s face as his eyes darted to the girl. It was the telling look of someone who knows something, but is on the verge of lying about it.

“I don’t really know what my research has to do with…”

“You went out this morning with Dr. Stanton. I know you did,” Mike growled, his voice becoming even more menacing as he stepped towards the man. Macmillan instinctively backed up, another telling sign that he knew something.

“I don’t… I mean, what would I be doing with… Look, I don’t know what you heard or who told you what. But it was just a joke.”

“WHAT was a joke?” he demanded, his fists already clenching.

“You know… our boat trip? Haze the new guy?” Macmillan said weakly, already feeling the stupidity of his words. “There’s just these pranks people play on each other in the department, and it helps to make them feel like they’re really part of the team. We thought it’d shake her up a bit, then we’d all have a laugh about it later. She’s the one who seemed like an outsider, like she didn’t want to belong with the rest of us. We just thought we’d teach her a little lesson, but all in good fun, you know? We were going back out this afternoon to pick her up, don’t worry. She’s wearing a diver tracker, we can find her again just by pinging her signal.”

“Gimme the access to her signal and the coordinates where you left her… NOW.” Michael roared at both of them, casting furious glances as he waited for Macmillan to call up some data in his phone. The professor held out the phone for him to look at, but Michael snatched it and pocketed it.

“Hey! You can’t take that. It’s department property! We’ll all get in trouble for it!” the snotty guy shouted in a whiny voice. Michael turned around so fast to face him that the professor faltered. “Look, I told you, it was just a joke. I don’t know why you’re getting so…”

The next sound was the crunch of cartilage as Mike’s fist connected with Macmillan’s face. The girl finally looked up from her phone long enough to scream and press herself back against the office wall, sneering when blood poured out from between the professor’s fingers.

“Hey! You can’t go punching people, you know. There are laws about that!” she shouted at Michael, pointing to the floor where Macmillan had crumpled.

“Oh yeah? Do you know anything about the laws regarding attempted murder, Your Honor?” he fired back, leaving the girl to stare in surprise. He posted the coordinates to his own phone along with the GPS data from Emily’s tracker, breathing a tiny sigh of relief that the information went seamlessly to the app S&R used. When he confirmed the data was reading to his phone, he drew back his arm and threw Macmillan’s as hard as he could against the office window, smiling when it shattered the glass and crashed to the pavement below.

“See? Didn’t take your phone. You should be good, right?” He laughed lightly and turned around, racing out of the office to get to Emily.

* * *

T
he sun had already reached
noon and was starting to head towards the horizon. Emily could feel the effects of the cold water on her limbs, but she willed herself not to panic. Someone would come near enough soon, and she would be ready to signal for help. The most important thing to do was to keep her spirits up and remain alert, and not give in to unnecessary fear.

But that was easier said than done. Instead, Emily thought about the people who would never know what happened to her, who would just wonder why she hadn’t contacted them. Clark might learn somehow through the university grapevine, but who would check up on him and make sure he saw the doctor? Mrs. Romero might eventually wonder in passing why she hadn’t seen that “perky” girl out for her walks lately. Emily’s parents had already passed away and they would be spared the grief, but her sister lived in Tennessee. How would she ever find out what happened?

With those closest to her checked off her mental list, Emily’s mind drifted to the image of Michael’s face. She could only hope that his connections to search and rescue work would inform him of what had happened, or whatever it was that this would be classified. The worst thing would be for him to just never hear from her again, to be left wondering if she hated him.

The hours without water had been tough, and left Emily feeling lightheaded. Coupled with the raw feeling from salt saturation everywhere her wetsuit left her skin exposed and the hunger from trying to keep herself in place for so long, the desire to fall asleep was overwhelming. Every time she tried to relax and let her head fall back against her inflated vest, she would feel her eyelids start to droop and jerk herself awake again. If she fell asleep, she would be carried even farther by the current, and she already had no idea how far she’d drifted. If she wasn’t found soon, the chances of her being tossed far outside a logical search area would be too great to think about.