Page 26 of Spencer

“Listen,” he argued. “I’m still conscious and I’m not convulsing, so if anything, I might have amildcase of the bends. I’ll be fine.” He brushed them off.

“Be fine? How about not keeling over and dying,” the skipper glowered, having returned at a run with Pietro on his heels.

“I don’t think we have to worry too much. Yet. But your man definitely has signs of decompression sickness,” the second of the Coasties announced, ignoring Spencer’s sour look. “How far out is our cutter?”

“I just checked,” the captain told him. “Ten-minute ETA.”

“That’s good.” The older of the two Coastguardsmen took over. “Captain, you wouldn’t happen to have any pure, breathable oxygen on board with a mask?” he asked hopefully.

“We do,” the captain confirmed.

“Good, Get it.”

The skipper hurried away and the Coastie turned to Pietro. “My man here will also need water. Lots of it,” he barked. “For the lady too,” He eyeballed her with a certain amount of concerned suspicion, but she quickly reassured him.

“I’m fine. I promise.”

The Coast Guardsman nodded after a long perusal, finally turning his attention back to Spencer. “You,” he snapped. “Lie flat.”

“Okay, uh, Mister…Sir……” Spencer began to ease backward to the deck. “Okay. What am I supposed to call you and your friend?”

“I’m Shrinker, and this is Pupfish.” The man indicated his buddy then frowned. “And don’t even think to ask how I got my handle.”

Yeah. Ithadbeen on Spencer’s tongue to question the “Shrinker” nickname, but since it seemed like a touchy subject… There had to be a doozy of a story behind it, but Spencer could wait.

Right now, hewasactually short on energy, so he didn’t have the gumption to go against orders.

Spencer laid down, flat, just as he’d been advised, because his body was telling him he wouldn’t have been able to stay upright for much longer, anyway. He wiggled to get comfortable on the hard deck, trying to relax and tell himself his condition wasn’t that bad. He wasn’t having any chest pains, and he wasn’t experiencing any heightened anxiety now that Tabitha was safe.

Tabitha…

Without needing any encouragement, she came down to lay next to him while continuing to hold his hand.

Her presence went a long way toward keeping him calm.

“Don’t worry about me,” he rasped. “I’m not confused or anything, and even if I was in dire straits, ten minutes isn’t that long to wait for the cavalry to arrive.”

“I know,” she told him. “I’m really only alittlebit concerned. I actually experienced what you’re going through when I took diver training in the Navy,” she revealed.

“You did?” Spencer didn’t like the sound of that. The armed services, all branches, were normally damned careful to follow protocol and avoid scenarios such as the one he’d just experienced, during trainingandexercises.

“Uh, huh,” she confirmed. “One of my teammates who was nicknamed Ghillie didn’t like a woman being part of his unit. He’d already done a bunch of stupid things to make me look incompetent, but luckily, I was always one step ahead of him.Then he tampered with my dive-computer so my timing was off when I was coming up from a hundred-foot dive.”

Spencer’s immediate and unrealistic response was to sit up to defend her, but Tabitha must have intuited that. She threw an arm across him, keeping him prone.

“It’s fine,” she assured him. “After I spent a couple days in the hyperbaric chamber, I found out that my superiors had checked surveillance cameras to see what had happened, and they saw Ghillie messing with my equipment. To say they were pissed is an understatement. He was thrown in the brig, then eventually he was court-martialed and given a bad conduct discharge.”

“Fuck,” Spencer swore. “He should have been given prison time.” The growl that came out of him was almost feral.

By the dark looks on Shrinker and Pupfish’s faces as they’d listened in, the pair agreed.

“It was several years ago, now,” Tabitha demurred. “He said at the time that he’d make sure I regretted getting him fired, butthatwasn’t exactly my call, and Ghillie must have eventually figured that out, because nothing more ever came of it, so… Water under the bridge.” She shrugged.

And speaking of water, the conversation was interrupted when Pietro hustled over with two large water bottles in hand, proffering one to each of them. Pupfish immediately got behind Spencer, leveraging him up a few inches so he could access the water.

Spencer and Tabitha both drank long and deep, after which Spencer let everyone know that it had been helpful.

“That’s good,” he said, having chugged half the bottle. “It helped.”

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