Page 98 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

Damn, he loved her.

CHAPTER 34

JEZEBEL

“Cole, would you be interested in a trip in theTide Pod?” Dr. Blaylock asked. “Clint wants to switch to scuba with Jon and Witt this afternoon.”

I understood now why nobody visited this area. Today, we were anchored to the north of Skeleton Cay, off an uninhabited island called Windjammer Bank, home to a small forest, a few rocks, and hundreds of creepy plastic dolls. According to Dr. Blaylock, a container had fallen off a ship several years ago, and dolls, fly swatters, lawn chairs, bottles of hair product, and car parts had been washing up on beaches ever since.

Anyhow, unless you were a fan of swimming, tanning, or sleeping, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do in the western outpost of San Gallicano. I’d tried reading a novel from the mini library in the saloon, but I’d given up fifty pages and thirty-seven factual inaccuracies later. No, there were no soldiers in the US Navy. Was the government hiding aliens at Groom Lake? I couldn’t possibly say. Okay, fine. I had no idea. It stood to reason that there was something interesting out there—a number of the folks who worked at the basewere really fucking weird—but even Echo hadn’t managed to get into those files. Yet.

Cole glanced sideways at me. “Could you take Bella instead?”

“Certainly, if she wants to go,” Dr. Blaylock said in that agreeable manner of his.

Wait a second—Cole was fascinated by the sea and everything in it. “You should go.”

“Nah, I have to clean up in the galley.”

A lie, and I knew what he was doing. He was doing something sweet. Bastian would have waved as he hopped into the submersible, but Cole seemed to care more about my happiness than his own. Which was…weird.

And I actually liked the idea of taking a ride in theTide Pod. Dr. Blaylock had spent one of our dinners on board theCrosswindexplaining the technical details of the craft, so I was comfortable from a safety perspective. Plus we wouldn’t be going too deep, and in an emergency, I could shoot out the glass and perform a controlled emergency swimming ascent.

I had one more try at convincing Cole to go. “I can clean the galley.”

“Not your job, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? Huh. I’d once shot a man who called me “sweetheart.” I mean, that wasn’t the only thing he’d done, but it was definitely a factor. When Cole used the nickname, it didn’t have the same anger-inducing effect, though.

“We might be able to fit in an extra trip later,” Dr. Blaylock said.

Cole waved a hand in an “off you go” gesture, and I grinned. Then realised I was grinning and turned that shit down immediately. Then wondered why I’d been grinning and found that I felt…happy? But a different kind of happy. Not the sense of satisfaction I usually experienced after the successful completion of a job, but something lighter.

I didn’t hate it.

No, I forced the smile back again, paused to brush my lips across Cole’s cheek, and followed Dr. Blaylock downstairs for a briefing.

My first thought as theTide Podsank into the water? Sin would hate this. Small spaces weren’t her thing, and the interior of the submersible was tiny.

My second thought? Wow. Few things awed me these days—I’d seen too much and done too much—but experiencing a hidden world in a different way than I usually did was fascinating. An octopus swam past, legs stretched out behind its body, and I followed its path as it dove under a distant rock. Visibility was excellent today, around a hundred feet.

“Octopi are fascinating creatures, don’t you think?” Dr. Blaylock didn’t wait for an answer. “Masters of camouflage, armed with ink and venom, and much smarter than most humans give them credit for.”

“I’ve only seen them swim like that once or twice before.”

“Swimming exhausts them. They have three hearts, you see—two that pump blood to the gills and one for the organs. When they swim, the organ heart stops beating, so they tend to prefer crawling.”

I never usually got this sort of commentary while diving. “If they’re venomous, I’m glad about that.”

“The only genus that poses a danger to humans is Hapalochlaena, the blue-ringed octopi. They’re found in thePacific and Indian Oceans. And Caribbean reef octopi rarely swim deeper than sixty feet, so that’s probably the last one we’ll see today.”

“How about conchs? Will we see those?”

“Again, they tend to stay shallow. As they get older, they move a little deeper, but they rarely venture below a hundred feet. Keep an eye out as we pass the seagrass bed ahead—there might be one or two around.”

“When I went to get my sweater, I heard Clint say they’d seen hundreds of conchs. A Spanish Dancer and a nurse shark too.”

Maybe they’d found the breeding ground mentioned in that journal I’d seen? Before Dr. Blaylock offered a ride in his high-tech toy, I’d suggested to Cole that we make a quick dive to check it out, and I felt regret that he was stuck on the boat.

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