As the sun slipped below the treetops in the west, the dense and variegated greens of the jungle darkened to pitch black. Aside from the dim lanterns of the ecolodge compound, the only other light was that of fireflylike insects darting about in the darkness. Flashlight in one hand and a fishnet tote containing a towel and clothing in the other, Jeanne headed down the winding path through vegetation that had been cut back short of enveloping the walkway.
Cicadas and frogs owned the night, their chorus interrupted from time to time by the caw of a bird or howl of a monkey. At least, that’s what Jeanne hoped howled out there in the darkness. The couple who managed the place, Lupita and Carlos, assured the expedition party at supper that the jaguars, noted for their reign of the Yucatán jungle, shied away from the civilization that had developed along the coast.
Jeanne prayed that they were right. If not, there was nothing between Jeanne and the jungle to protect her. Nothing but a flashlight. A cryptic smile pulled at her lips as she brushed past a low-growing fan palm and headed for the bathhouse door.
Yea, though I walk in the jungle of the big cat, I shall fear no—
“Watch it, there’s no warm wa—”
Jeanne shrieked, her feet doing a little run in place, at the sound of the voice from the darkness.
“Easy now, I don’t bite.” A chuckling shadow moved toward her with a stealthy grace that left doubt niggling at the back of Jeanne’s rattled mind. In the light of the single bulb by the bathhouse door it became a flesh-and-blood Gabe Avery.
“That’s what they all say.” How the game reply got past the heart beating in her throat was a mystery.
Wet dark hair slicked away from his face and sinewy torso clad in dark jog shorts, Gabe could well be a human version of a jungle predator, except for the amusement on his face. “You know, if I had been a jaguar, you’d not have gotten very far doing that little dance thing,” he teased, mimicking her startled footwork.
“That’s the thing,” she replied. “Whatever was about to pounce would see that and think I was far braver than I looked.” A mental flash of what she must have looked like spawned a bubble of laughter. “What can I say? You scared me witless, and I do sea much better than jungle.”
Gabe tossed a damp towel over his bare shoulder, grinning. “I was trying to warn you that there’s no hot water. Don Rudolfo said it would be here today, but you know how the Mexican mañana doesn’t specify which tomorrow.”
“You saw the owner?” From what Jeanne had discerned from Lupita and Carlos, Don Rudolfo was as scarce as the jaguars, especially when work needed doing.
“He stopped by the bait shack for a beer after picking up your check, so I brought up the hot water issue. Rudolfo assured me that he would motivate himself to see to it tomorrow immediately.”
Jeanne laughed at Gabe’s literal translation. “Even so, a cool shower sounds heavenly . . . and to be free of eau de Deep Woods Off, even if only for a few minutes.” She hated the idea of having to spray her squeaky-clean skin again, but unless she wanted to become a giant walking welt, there was little choice.
“Careful now. The insects will love that perfume of yours . . . lavender, isn’t it?”
Gabe recognized her perfume? The revelation left her shaken and not a little stirred. What was it her man-crazed college girlfriends used to run on about pheromones? “It’s, um . . . it’s my shower gel,” she stammered.
“Lavender’s very soothing,” he said. “My mother uses it.”
Jeanne scowled. Great, she reminded him of his mother.
“Honestly, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Jeanne forced the strange voice out of her head with brightness. “No, no, you’re forgiven,” she assured him. “I wasn’t sure if I brought my scrubby.”
“Your scrubby?”
Just dig a deeper hole, why don’t you? She drew her tote containing the item a little closer as though he had x-ray vision. “Kinda like a loofah . . . those nylon scrub things we use with shower gel.”
“Like a pot scrubber?”
“Something like that.” He was definitely a soap-on-a-rope guy. Worse, she was standing at the jungle’s edge beneath a starry sky, talking about her bathing habits with him. The moon wasn’t in evidence— perhaps it was a new moon—but in the absence of manmade light, the stars shone with a brilliance that shot the sea with slivers of silver light and highlighted her companion’s chiseled features. “And since tomorrow is likely to be a long day, I’d best get showered and to bed . . . or rather hammock,” she added. Talk about a nightmare—not hers, but Remy’s. As for the rest of the crew, they were like Jeanne, ready for the native experience.
Humor tugged at the corners of Gabe’s mouth. “I suppose Dr. Prim is ready to abandon the project and head home?”
“Shame on you. You sound almost hopeful,” Jeanne told him. “But rest assured, Remy is in for the duration. A bed is on its way from Merida as we speak.”
She waited for Gabe to move out of the narrow path, but he remained still, his features scored by an obviously compelling thought.
“Just what is this guy to you anyway? It’s obvious the bloke is miserable outside his air-conditioned classroom. We don’t need him, as I see it.”
Jeanne’s hackles rose at the disdainful dismissal of her colleague. “We? Captain, there is no we, only the company, some of which was funded by Dr. Remy Primston, who is not only one of our sponsors, but a good friend and . . . well . . . he’s been my mentor ever since I entered this field. I owe Remy a lot.”
“So you feel obligated to take him from mediocrity to limelight with you on this excavation.”
“I’d hardly call a man with doctorates from three universities mediocre! Now if you’ll excuse me—” Jeanne forced her way by him, her arm brushing against his bare and muscular abdomen. A frisson of awareness enveloped her, prickling at her flesh from head to toe as she pushed toward the entrance marked Damas. Okay, she’d felt tingles of attraction to the opposite sex before, but they were mere whispers compared to the I’m-definitely-a-woman shouts ringing from sense to sense like a pinball machine on full tilt.
Grabbing at indignation like a lifeline, Jeanne cleared her throat as she drew up to her full and woefully inadequate height. “And if you find that intimidating, Captain, you’ll have to get over it.”
There. Now all she had to do was hang on to her outrage for long enough to get inside before she had another pinball attack.
It was exactly fifteen paces to the bathhouse door. Inside, Jeanne padded over to one of the three shower rooms in her flip-flops and slammed down the tote. Of all the nerve, she fumed, tugging off the red top that had formed a second skin to her sweat-dampened body. If that gorgeous jock thought she was going to dump Remy because the poor man was miserable in and unaccustomed to this climate, and out of sorts as a result, then the jerk had another thing coming.
As for this unaccustomed case of man-alert setting off her female radar, she didn’t know what to think. Jeanne turned the creaky shower control, bracing as the nozzle overhead pelted her with cool water. With a shiver-ridden “Brrr!” she crossed her arms over her chest and did a quick 360-degree turn before turning off the cold water. It might have been tapped from one of the many freshwater rivers riddling the underbelly of the peninsula, but it felt as if it came from an Arctic pipeline.
Seizing her lower lip to keep it from trembling, she worked in her shampoo, the same scent as her shower gel—lavender. Just like Gabe’s dear old mother. Something so silly it really shouldn’t bother me, Jeanne thought, bracing once more as she reached for the shower control.
But it did.
The morning started with a soft rain, but by the time breakfast had begun, the sun dominated a blue, cloudless sky. Gabe, his deckhand, Manolo Barrera, and Nemo joined Jeanne and her team in the dining room for the morning meal. Wearing cutoffs and a faded chambray shirt with the sleeves ripped out to reveal studly biceps, the captain flirted with Lupita, who was twice his age, to win his canine companion her permission to remain in the dining room.
“Since there is no one but you and your friends, how can it do harm, no?” the cook said.
“You are as kind and as lovely as the flowers on your dress, señora,” Gabe lifted the cook’s wrinkled hand and kissed it. Lupita twittered in delight and fiddled with her time-salted black hair where it twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.
“Besides,” Gabe went on, “I think you like to see Nemo bring in the laundry.”
“Nemo, he is so smart,” Lupita said to the others. “He brings in Señor Gabriel’s socks and drops them in my laundry pot.” She pointed to a large, dented aluminum pot in the corner of the room. “No way,” Stuart said, his brow arched with skepticism.
“Give Nemo one of your socks,” Gabe challenged good-naturedly. “Sí, give the dog a sock,” Lupita chimed in.
“You do laundry in a cooking pot?” Remy looked at his food with even more distrust than before.
Lupita flashed him an indignant look. “Cómo no? The hot water does not come always from the pipe.”
Stuart pulled off a sock and held it out to the Lab. “Here, Nemo. Laundry detail.”
Thrilled with the attention, Nemo trotted over and seized the sock.
“I seriously question his smarts if he puts Stuart’s sock in his mouth,” Mara observed, earning a playful kick across the table from the young man.
“Such a smart dog,” Lupita trilled as the pooch promptly went to the pot and dropped it in. She gave Nemo a rewarding rub on the head. “Not even my husband is so smart to pick up his own clothes.” “Will he fetch it back?” Stuart asked.
Gabe shook his head. “Don’t confuse him. You can sneak it out when he’s not looking.” Giving Nemo another piece of tortilla as a reward, he turned his attention to Mara. “So tell me, Mara, how is it that you became interested in the preservation of relics?”
The man did have an incorrigible charm to which no woman— old or young—seemed immune. At the attention, Mara lit up like a Christmas tree.
“I love history, and I thought working in this field could make it an adventure too.”
“What about you, Gabe? What was it like on your first excavation?” Nick asked, shepherding the conversation toward Gabe’s diving adventures.
“You mean salvage, gentlemen,” Remy intervened. “Archaeologists excavate. Treasure hunters plunder.”
“I plundered”—the word dripped with Gabe’s sarcasm—“fifteen million in bullion and jewels from a pirate ship off the Bermuda coast—or what the teredos had left of one. And of what the worms didn’t eat, the government took half.”
At the touch of Nemo’s wet nose on his elbow, he handed another piece of tortilla to the animal. The Lab wolfed it down with a gulp and emitted a satisfied burp.
Remy sniffed in repugnance. “Dogs have no place in a public establishment,” he complained under his breath, “especially one that runs around with filthy socks in his mouth.”
“Half ?” Stuart marveled, still hanging with the thread of conversation about pirate treasure. “That stinks. They didn’t even know it was there.”
Gabe chuckled. “I’m with you, lad.”
“So you’re a millionaire?” Mara’s incredulity made Gabe grin. “Then why are you living on that, that . . .” At a loss to find an inoffensive adjective, she finished with a lame “boat?”
“Easy come, easy go.” He gave Nemo a hearty rub on the head. “Isn’t that right, boy?”
Mara had had some of the same concerns as Remy about the seaworthiness of the Fallen Angel until she’d learned that the boat had passed a recent inspection.
Stuart scowled. “How did you spend that much money so fast?”
“The sea is great hole into which millions have been sunk, retrieved, and sunk again,” Gabe answered. He winked at Mara, bringing a becoming pink to her pale complexion.
“Aw, dude,” Stuart commiserated, rolling his eyes toward the high, vaulted thatched ceiling where fans turned slowly overhead.
“Before you three novices become too enthralled with our captain, you should know that he not only sunk his fortune in treasure hunting, but a promising career in—”
Appalled, Jeanne kicked at the professor’s foot under the table. “A sound boat and reliable captain is all that matters to this expedition.”
The narrowed slit of his squint made it hard to say whether Gabe appreciated her running interference or not, but its blitz into her own made her heart flutter like a startled butterfly. Fortunately the roar of a big engine and shifting of creaky gears drew her attention outside, sparing her from further arrhythmia.
Erupting in a bark, Nemo started to charge for the door, but Gabe grabbed his collar.
“Whoa, boy. Sit,” he cajoled. “No business of yours.”
Through the wide screened window of the dining room, Jeanne watched a large truck pull into position to maneuver its trailer near the dock. Easing around it, a van found its way to an out-of-the-way parking space and came to a stop. She recognized Don Pablo Montoya, Genesis’s Mexican partner and CEDAM representative, and Ann Mills, a former college classmate of Jeanne’s and current photographer for World Geographic magazine, as they emerged from the van.
“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” she sang, abandoning the table to greet the last of her crew. “Come on, Remy,” she called over her shoulder as she pushed her way through the screen door to the veranda. “Let’s see what they brought.”
If all was well, the diving gear, the compressors, and all the detection devices, along with their computer, software, and printers were inside the trailer parked as close to the edge of the dock as the bait shack and market would allow.
“Don Pablo, hola,” Jeanne called out, bounding down the path toward the new arrivals.
A short bear of a man with a veritable bush of mustache under his nose, Pablo Montoya was as responsible for the project’s success to date as Jeanne. A master diver, accomplished artist, and cartographer by trade, not to mention serving on the organization’s executive board, he would be invaluable for mapping out the dive and sketching the artifacts.
“Buenos dias, doctora.”
“Jeanne, por favor,” Jeanne insisted, offering her hand.
“Then I am Pablo, solamente.”
“Muy bien,” she agreed. “And my colleague bringing up the rear is Dr. Remy Primston, chair of the marine archeology department at my alma mater, Texas A&M Galveston.”
“Remy,” Remy said, shaking Montoya’s hand. “Our Jeanne wants us all one big happy family.”
“And I am only Ann,” her friend called from the side door of the van where she wrestled three camera bags onto her sturdy shoulders. Ann used to kid that she was built like a workhorse, short and stocky with more muscle than fat, while Jeanne’s slight, long-legged build was that of a racer.
Jeanne rushed around the van and hugged Ann, cameras and all. “I can’t believe you’re sharing my dream, Only Ann,” she mimicked, backing away. “I feel like I have to pinch myself every two or three minutes, just as a reality check.”
“I’d have come along if I had to take time off to do it,” Ann quipped in her characteristic dry manner. “But getting paid to do it makes it better.” With short blonde hair that would spike when she removed her ball cap, Ann looked ready for anything. “So where do I bunk in?”
Jeanne made a little face. “Hammock in, I’m afraid.” Despite her adventurous nature, she’d hardly slept all night for fear of breaking her neck. The hammock was sound, but Jeanne liked to sleep on her stomach, which was a no-no in a sling.
“Ah, that I already anticipated,” Don Pablo said. “Which is why there are cots in the truck. It does not do well for divers to work without a good night’s sleep, no?”
“I don’t even have to ask, and God takes care of our needs,” Jeanne exclaimed to no one in particular.
“I’ve a bed on its way from Merida,” Remy informed him. “Temperamental back, you see.”
Ann whistled as she caught sight of Gabe approaching the group, Nemo at his heel. “And I had to get married,” she observed, feasting her mischievous blue-gray eyes on Gabe’s sun-bronzed biceps.
“You always did have a thing for the five o’clock shadow guys,” Jeanne shot back beneath her breath.
Gabe extended his free hand. “Pablo, good to see you again, amigo, but did you have to bring company?”
Bewildered, Jeanne followed Gabe’s nod to the mouth of the small cove where another vessel approached, its pristine exterior gleaming eggshell white and polished chrome against the clear blue water.
“The Prospect,” Pablo said, the name crushing the earlier enthusiasm from his demeanor. “I was afraid of this.”
“Afraid of what?” Jeanne asked, definitely out of the gloom-and-doom loop that had encircled Gabe and Pablo.
“I kept everything as low-key as possible,” Pablo explained, more to Gabe than to Jeanne. “But filing for the permit and putting together a supply list—”
Gabe cut him off. “I know how it is, amigo. And we had to be cleared through the organization.”
“What’s the deal here, gents?” Jeanne folded her arm across her chest, chilled by the scowl she saw building on Gabe’s face.
“The deal is,” he began, letting Nemo go, “we’ve been found out.” Pivoting toward the van, he flung open the back doors as the dog raced down the dock to greet the new arrival. “I hate politics.”
“We now must work twice as fast,” Pablo explained further. “Or the Prospect and her crew will jump our claim on the Luna Azul.
” Jeanne took a step back, glancing at the sleek sports fisherman gliding toward the marina. “It could be coincidence, couldn’t it?”
“And dreams could come true,” Gabe said, hauling a reel of blue nylon rope out of the van. “But when Marshall Arnauld is involved, my bet’s on a nightmare.”