Wearing an apron over his polo shirt and shorts, Remy Primston met the excited crew at the door of the ecolodge that night like an angry housewife. “Not only have I been frantic with worry, but the exquisite meal I have prepared is ruined, absolutely ruined.”
Gabe might have laughed if he wasn’t so tired and vexed over the situation.
“Remy, we found gold,” Jeanne squealed.
“And you have no idea what I have been through to find fresh, fly-free meat in this armpit of a place.” He hesitated, bending closer. “Did you say gold ?”
“Prim,” Gabe rumbled in a threatening voice. “It’s been a long, eventful day. Can we discuss it over this fly-free meat?”
With a sniff that Gabe had yet to identify as being due to allergies, delusions of superiority, or both, Remy backed inside. “Well, if the treasure has waited over three hundred years, I suppose a few more minutes won’t matter much.”
The table was set with silverware rolled in paper napkins on each plate instead of waiting in a pile, cafeteria-style, for the diners to pick up on their own. Place cards seated Remy at the head of the table, with Jeanne to his right and Pablo to his left. Gabe and Manolo, riffraff that they were in the professor’s jaundiced eye, were relegated to the far end.
At Remy’s clap of the hand, Lupita entered the room with a tray of platters containing shish kebabs of beef and vegetables with a side of pasta in a pink sauce. Her displeasure set stonelike on her face, she served from his end of the table toward Gabe and Manolo.
“Remy, what a delightful surprise,” Jeanne complimented him. “I didn’t know you could cook.”
Oozing with delight, the professor chuckled. “There are many things you’ve yet to discover about me.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Gabe said, drawing every eye at the table. “If I had a drink, that is.”
“He uses all my vinegar,” Lupita ground out, snatching up her tray. With a face that looked as though it had been pickled in fury, she marched toward the kitchen for the remainder of the platters.
“I had to pay the wench to use her kitchen,” Remy hissed under his breath as he took his seat.
“So don’t you want to hear about the gold?” Jeanne asked. “We’ve got good news . . .”
“And bad news,” Pablo put in, countenance growing grim.
With the all-too-familiar eagerness of a protégé trying to impress her mentor, Jeanne told Remy about the find. “The coins that Ann, Mara, and Nick found washed up and buried on the beach are all dated from the 1670s to 1700. We checked them all.”
Gabe clenched his teeth, fuming. As if the man could make them any more valid by his simple say-so. Gabe had been there. And now he was living through it all again—through her. Although Dr. Riall had not possessed Primston’s annoying personality, he’d been a far worse mentor: he’d encouraged Gabe to pursue his theories, and then stolen the credit.
“Why, that’s . . . well, then,” Remy stammered, “this has to be our ship.”
Our ship. Similar words from the past came back to Gabe. Our project. His appetite slipped away.
“You must excuse the beef being well-done,” Remy announced when Jeanne had filled him in. “It was perfect when I removed it from that flat stone of hers.”
“He uses my comal,” Lupita complained, referring to the flat stone placed over live coals for cooking. “It is for my tortillas. I have that to use the frit . . . fryer.”
“A grill is a grill, my dear.”
“And using my laundry pot will throw that sauce to lose,” the cook warned, jerking her finger at the pasta.
Around the table forks were checked in midbite, including Gabe’s.
“I washed it thoroughly with boiling water,” Remy hastened to explain under the questioning faces turned his way. “My greatest concern was having to use dried ”—he said the word with a shudder—“ pasta instead of freshly made. Such a waste for gourmet Napoli sauce.”
“Both the beef and the pasta are delicious, regardless,” Jeanne assured him. In a show of support, she twisted a forkful of the latter. “Now, can we get back to the Luna Azul ?” she asked, popping it into her mouth.
Gabe watched the way Jeanne’s mouth moved as she savored the cuisine, and he noticed the golden flecks glittering like Aladdin’s treasure in her dark amber gaze. Catching himself staring, he forced himself to focus on Pablo Montoya’s explanation of what he and Gabe had already discussed on the way back to Punta Azul.
The majority of the wreckage appeared to have settled in the lagoon, which meant diving directly from the ship was out, unless they could find a channel somewhere in the reef deep enough for the draft of the Fallen Angel. Even then, it was risky to his ship.
“Do we have a barge available?” Jeanne asked Don Pablo, voice filled with an unsinkable hope.
“I am sorry to say, no. Those we have are in use,” Pablo replied.
“Could we dive from the rubber raft?” Stuart suggested.
“Too rough. Couldn’t support the hookah unit with any reliability,” Gabe told him.
Elbows resting on the table, Jeanne rested her forehead on clasped hands. The hookah’s long air hoses provided a continuous flow of air enabling the divers to remain below longer without cumbersome tanks strapped to their backs. “So what do we do?”
“The captain and I discussed an idea,” Pablo said, handing the conversation off to Gabe.
“What?” Jeanne asked. Gold aside, the renewed hope in her expression was enough reason for Gabe to take on the risk like a knight in shining armor at full tilt.
“We can find the best approach and blast our way into the site.” Blasting a path through the living world of coral went against Gabe’s grain, against everything he’d learned as a marine biologist, but if it was the only way, gold trumped coral every time. Coral would grow back . . . eventually. “And,” he added after allowing time for the shock to thaw, “I know just the man to do it. We can take depth readings tomorrow. If everything looks right, Jeanne and I will fetch our expert on our date in Akumal Sunday.”
The word date swiveled attention from all directions to Jeanne, but hers pinned Gabe to his chair with the deadly precision of a knife-throwing act he’d seen in Vegas.
“Not really a date,” she clarified.
“What”—Remy paused—“trip, then, if you will?”
“Dinner,” Gabe answered. “And while we are there, we can look up a man who could blast the plaque from your teeth and never crack the enamel.”
“You agreed to go to dinner with w-with him?” the professor stuttered.
Gabe waited, wondering if she’d fess up to the reason.
“That-that muscle-bound Popeye?” Remy blustered.
“Yes, I did,” Jeanne clipped each word, stung by the censorship in the professor’s countenance. With a delightful little wriggle in her seat as though gathering steam, she met it head-on. “Do you have a problem with that?”
The standoff was a sight to behold. Taken aback, the professor shrugged. “If you wish to while away a day with someone who possesses the personality and IQ of a shark, so be it.”
Gabe feigned a wounded expression, hand to his chest. “Here now, that hurt. No need to insult the shark.” Jerk, he added in silence.
“This is gettin’ good,” Stuart said in a stage whisper.
Mara peered over the rim of her glasses at him. “Grow up, Stu.”
Gabe’s restraint paid off. Jeanne pushed her chair away from the table and rose. “You disappoint me, Remy.”
Manolo nudged Gabe with his knee. “Tha’s your girl.”
“I expected more from you than the captain. I see I was mistaken. And for the record this is strictly a business trip.” Her flashing hazel eyes came to rest on Gabe. “Strictly business.” With a flip of her salt-stiffened ponytail, she started for the door. “I’ll see you all early tomorrow.”
“But Jeanne . . . Jeanne,” Remy objected, hurrying after her. “You haven’t had dessert yet.”
Gabe smiled as the door slammed in Primston’s face. He liked a gal with spunk.
In spite of Remy’s profuse apology and Gabe’s obvious attempt at restraint when Remy sought to voice his professional opinion as to how he and Pablo might find the easiest path into the reef, the tension was so thick on the Fallen Angel the next day that it could have been cut with the knife Ann offered Jeanne in the galley.
“You could always put one of them out of their misery,” she suggested.
Jeanne winced more than smiled and began cutting the sandwich wraps in half.
“Must be nice to have two men at each other’s throat over you,” Mara observed from the galley hatchway. “Need any help?”
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the young woman was wounded over Gabe’s interest in Jeanne.
“In the first place, the professor’s only interest in me is professional . . .” She trailed off as Ann broke into a fit of feigned coughing. “Well, it is,” Jeanne insisted.
“Get a grip, Jeanne. Remy is a fool for you.” Ann stabbed the air with her index finger for emphasis.
“I think Ann’s right. The professor can’t take his eyes off you.” Mara plopped down on the dinette seat with a sigh big enough to reflect the burdens of the world.
Remy as anything more than her friend and mentor was more than Jeanne could fathom. “You both are being silly. Remy has been like that ever since I can remember. He’s a gentleman’s gentleman, nothing more.”
“Still,” Mara said, unconvinced. “It must be nice to be attractive to someone.”
“Hey, kid,” Ann objected. “It looked to me like Nick was just about breaking his neck to help you carry my khaki drawers full of coins the other day.”
“Not even close. He thinks I’m one of the guys. The nerdiest, no less.” She tucked a limp strand of her blonde hair behind her ear.
“Next weekend—” Jeanne blurted out, recalling Gabe’s suggestion to help Mara ramp up her feminine style. Anything to shift the conversation away from herself.
Her companions looked at her, bemused.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ann said. “Next weekend what?”
“Next weekend, we could have a girls’ day. . . .You know—salon, manicurist, facial—glam it up.”
“Oh yeah, I’m qualified for that,” her friend snickered, pulling at her short, spiked tresses.
Jeanne fingered a baby-fine lock of Mara’s hair, giving Ann a get with it look behind the young woman’s back. “Most people spend a fortune on boxed coloring just to get this shade.”
“And your eyes are so pretty,” Ann said, catching on. “Just a little liner and they’d be hey-look-at-me gorgeous.”
Mara grabbed a stainless pot lid from the shelf behind her and stared at her image as if to validate Ann’s observation. “I thought they were just faded green.”
Ann pinged the lid with her finger. “Like I said, toots, a little liner and we’re talking jewels.”
“You really think you could do something with my hair?” Mara asked Jeanne. “I mean something that I can still clip up for work?”
Jeanne nodded. “I’ll scout out Akumal tomorrow. If they don’t have a decent salon, we’ll drive to Cancún.”
Excitement tamped down Mara’s shy uncertainty. “I can hardly wait,” she said, taking another look at her reflection.
Jeanne held up her hand, high five up. “So is it a plan?”
“It’s definitely a plan,” Mara answered, slapping it palm to palm. “Definitely.”
Ann joined in the high-fiving, grinning. “Then it’s unanaminous.”