The Angel rose and fell at anchor in the gentle swells near the bar, the Margarita tied off the port side. At the stern, Jeanne watched as Gabe swam to the side and climbed up the portable swim ladder. He’d been so worried, he’d not even bothered to spend time suiting up. He and Tex had been free diving over the side, checking the boat’s bottom. So far, so good.
“Well?” Jeanne asked as he stepped onto the deck, water running in rivulets off his chest.
Gabe held her gaze. “You’ve made a believer out of me.”
“There’s no damage?”
“It’s a miracle . . . a tarnfounded miracle,” Tex exclaimed, breathless as he followed Gabe up out of the water. “Nothin’ more’n a paint job and a bent wheel from what I could see. Why both wheels weren’t twisted to kingdom come is beyond me.”
“You mean we’re not sinking?” Visions of the Titanic had flooded Remy’s imagination ever since they’d struck the reef. He’d remained stationed at the bilge hatch, backing Manolo up as they looked for any sign that the ship was taking on water.
“I guess the tide was just right,” Tex remarked. “An hour later an’ we’d be sitting high and not so dry.”
Not caring what anyone thought, Jeanne gave into her joy. Reaching toward the heavens, she did a little seafarer’s jig. “Praise the Lord!”
Across the deck, Pablo crossed himself to the ensuing chorus of “Amen!”
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Gabe reminded them. A storm had gathered just beneath the surface of his stoic features, although the reason eluded her. After all, he’d just said she was making a believer of him.
“What does the bilge look like, Manolo?”
“Bueno, muy bueno, amigo.” Manolo was usually shy, but after Gabe had given him holy what for in rapid-fire Spanish for not watching the bow during their approach, shame compounded his withdrawal.
Jeanne placed her hand on Gabe’s arm. “Is something else wrong?”
Darkness closed in on his expression. “Yes. Those buoys didn’t move themselves.”
“But who on earth would want to move our markers?” Remy asked.
“I can think of one feller,” Tex volunteered.
Jeanne glanced at him. “Surely you don’t think Marshall Arnauld would do this?”
Gabe shook his head. “No, he never does his own dirty work.”
“But—” Jeanne protested.
“Think about it, little lady,” Tex said. “The Angel gets stove up, your project runs over budget, and you run out of time. Guess who’s waitin’ in the wings to sweep in and claim your prize after we done all the work?”
Jeanne digested the situation in disbelief. It was like something out of an adventure novel, not real life. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Gabe touched the side of her cheek. “That’s part of your charm, sweet. You believe the best of everyone, but you are going to have to trust us. Something isn’t right here.” He turned to Pablo.
“While we’re changing the wheel, Pablo, you take Nick, Stuart, Rico, and Primston in the rubber raft and reset those markers.”
“You have a spare wheel?” Jeanne echoed in surprise. God was so good, she thought at Gabe’s nod. She’d envisioned having to return to Punta Azul, losing another day.
“Bueno. Vamanos amigos,” Pablo said to the others. “Let’s go.”
While Ann filmed the men changing the bent wheel—“Just another part of the adventure,” she said—Jeanne left Mara curled up on the bridge with her nose in a book and went below to make some coffee. Since the wind made the low-seventies temperature feel much colder than it was, a cup of something hot and invigorating would be just the thing.
As she poked around until she found where Gabe stowed the pot and a canister of coffee almost too big to fit on the narrow counter, she debated whether or not to call her brothers. Popping off the lid, she savored the rich smell of the ground beans.
Blaine and Mark would know what to do, she thought, digging around for the scoop. Or at least they would know where to find out what could or should be done. Although, another voice countered, if they knew someone was willing to wreck the Angel on a reef, risking the lives of her and her crew, her brothers would call the whole thing off—even when the project was so close to finding the treasure.
Lord, like David said in the psalm, you are my light and my salvation, so whom shall I fear? You’re the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
Her mind tumbling with pros and cons, she found a receptacle and plugged the pot in. But since God had clearly saved them from the reef, maybe her answer was in her paraphrased scripture. Or was she rationalizing because she wanted so badly to find the treasure and make a success of the mission?
God, why can’t You just spell it out for me like you did Moses? I need help. I need Your wisdom—
“Dr. M,” Mara said from the steps of the companionway. “Need help?”
“Lots of it,” Jeanne admitted, although Mara wasn’t what she expected. “If those buoys were moved, then I have the lives of my crew to worry about as well as finding the gold. What kind of a person would do something like that?”
Mara shrugged, tossing her book on the dinette table and sliding into the booth. “A pathological jerk.” Leaning on one elbow, she twirled a blonde ringlet with her other hand. “I just love my hair . . . and I wouldn’t have had the nerve for a perm, if it hadn’t been for you and Ann.”
“I noticed that you and Lupita’s nephew were having a grand time.”
Mara turned as fuchsia as the bougainvillea spilling over the rails on the lodge veranda. “I felt like Cinderella . . . with three princes! I mean, Nick and Stuart . . . well, Nick mainly. Stuart was in love with the burger vendor. It was cool because I could dance with all of them. I think Nick finally realizes that a girl can be a bookworm and a woman at the same time.” She paused to get her breath. “Just like Gabe realizes you can be hot and a doc at the same time.”
Jeanne nearly dropped the thermal carafe she was filling with water. “Now, don’t—”
“Everyone,” Mara said the word as if it encompassed all of Punta Azul, “can see he’s got a thing for you . . . and vice versa. Ann says—”
“Ann thinks she was born a cupid,” Jeanne told her, lifting the top of the coffeepot to fill the holding tank. “She thinks because she’s in a state of marital bliss that everyone she knows should take the leap as—”
“How can you not love Gabe?”
Jeanne wondered the same thing. But was what she felt toward him love? The physical attraction was undeniable. And he seemed to be changing, opening his mind, at least to God.
“There’s just more to a lasting love than a little chemistry,” she answered, turning to lean against the counter. “And when I fall, I want it to be last—”
“Omigosh!”
Jeanne spun round in time to see the coffeemaker spreading water like a garden sprinkler over the counter and down the cabinet fronts.
“You have to put the grounds holder in first.”
“Now you tell me.” Jeanne grabbed for the roll of paper towels and yanked off a handful, pulling the entire roll off the springy holder and onto the flooding area.
The more levelheaded Mara unplugged the pot and moved it into the sink, but the cord knocked the open coffee canister over and onto the floor, spilling what seemed like more coffee than Juan Valdez had picked in a lifetime.
“I don’t understand it,” Jeanne huffed, mopping for all she was worth. “My coffeemaker at home holds the water until I turn it on. Is it broken or what?” The knees to her jogging pants were soaked from where she’d dropped to mop up the water. “Although I think we’ve discovered a new law of physics.”
Meanwhile, Mara looked like a teen from one of those old horror films, the kind that stood there frozen while a living blob inched its way toward her. “Huh?”
Jeanne stopped long enough to toss her the wet roll of paper towels. “When something is removed from its original container, it promptly becomes three times bigger than its original size.”
“Yeah, kind of like dirty clothes. They fit in the case when you pack it, but—”
“Won’t go back when it’s time to go home.”
Jeanne pulled herself up on the cabinet, bemused by the latest fickle hand that fate had dealt her. “What are we going to do with all this coffee?”
“How about if I scoop what grounds haven’t gotten wet or touched the floor back into the container and finish making the coffee?”
Jeanne nodded, although her yen for coffee no longer existed. “Deal. And I’ll clean up the mud.”
After all, it was her mess. Although if she hadn’t been so distracted talking about Gabe, it wouldn’t have happened. And if Gabe had bought a normal size coffee container instead of one large enough to give all of Punta Azul a caffeine high. . . . A smile formed on her lips. That’s it. It was Gabe’s fault.
When the galley was once more spotless, Jeanne and Mara loaded a tray of the fresh coffee for the men working topside and took it up to them.
“How’s it going?” Jeanne asked as she descended from the bridge.
Ann, still in her wetsuit, shrugged. “I couldn’t get any decent footage. The water kept muddying up with this gritty stuff.” She held up the rag with which she cleaned her camera. “Looks like coffee grounds.”
Jeanne checked her step. The trash can had been full and with no place to dump the wet coffee, she’d flushed it down the head . . . a logical choice at the time. “Ohhh.”
“What?” Ann looked at her, blank at first. But as she spied the coffee on the tray in Jeanne’s hand, her lips began to twitch. “You flushed coffee down the toilet?”
At the stern, Tex whooped and slapped his side. “Well now, that explains a whole lotta things. I didn’t want to seem indelicate, but I was wondering what in tarnation was goin’ on down there. Every time the water’d clear up, whomp-whomp, whomp-whomp, and it’d cloud all over.”
“Why would you flush coffee down the toilet?” Clearly Ann had a problem with the concept.
“Because I spilled all the coffee in the world all over the galley and I didn’t know what else to do with it.” Embarrassment spread like wildfire from Jeanne’s head to her toes.
“Mara, take that tray before someone wears the brew too,” Ann commanded.
“It is organic” Jeanne pointed out. Not that those poor men changing the wheel knew what was coming out of the boat.
Rico giggled. Tex guffawed until she thought she’d have to do CPR. Jeanne wished she could sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and never come up again.
But this was too good for her buddy Ann to let go. “Don’t anyone ever let her loose in a kitchen. We had a rule in college. If it’s not safe for toddlers, it’s not safe for Jeanne.”
“I can make chocolate chip cookies,” Jeanne said in her own defense.
“Okay,” her friend conceded. “I’ll give her that much. Jeanne makes a mean chocolate chip cookie—as good as her mama.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Jeanne turned to see Gabe emerging from the water—Adonis in a wet suit.
“I’m a sucker for chocolate chip cookies and pretty women who make them,” he added, as Nemo, who’d kept a lazy eye on work topside, got up to meet him. Once on deck, he ruffled the dog’s ears. “What do you say, boy?” Gabe grinned over the dog’s head at its answering bark.
And Jeanne was a sucker for that grin. The problem was, she was a sucker for almost everything about Gabe.
“Just don’t expect coffee with them,” Ann quipped, suddenly engaged in cleaning her camera, innocent as a lamb.
But that was all anyone else needed. The laughter started once again, even louder than before, at Gabe’s befuddled expression.
“Gabe, I am so sorry,” Jeanne said when the amusement reached a level where she could make herself heard. “I spilled that big can of coffee and I . . . I just wasn’t thinking.” About coffee anyway. “I didn’t know what to do with it, so I flushed it down the head.”
One brow arched up at her. “I see.”
Jeanne wasn’t certain that he did. Unlike the others, he didn’t laugh. But he wasn’t angry either. Impassive, he unbuckled his tanks, shrugged them off, and put them on the deck next to his fins, all the while avoiding her gaze. It wasn’t until he peeled off the top of his dive suit that his mischievous eyes sought her out. And they were twinkling above an expressionless face.
“Well then, that solves one mystery,” he announced, his Bermudian accent chipper. “I’d say that, given the circumstances under there, that’s good news indeed.” Still dripping, he sidled up to Jeanne and put an arm around her. “And at the moment, I could use a cup of whatever is left.”
“I’ll get it,” Mara volunteered.
“In the meantime, sweet”—he pulled her even closer, close enough that the cold water soaking into her clothes could have turned to steam—“we need to chat. We all do.”
Over lunch, it was decided that from this point on, the site should not be left unattended. Pablo reported that the lines holding the markers had been cut and the buoys relocated to intentionally guide the Angel onto a rocky underwater bar covered in coral. Since someone wanted to play dirty with the project, Jeanne gave everyone on the team a chance to quit. No one took her up on it. Stuart and Nick even went into a rousing version of “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest,” beating their chests in a show of machismo. More reserved, but just as committed, Pablo insisted that he call the Mexican authorities to alert them to the mischief and ask that a coast guard patrol boat periodically check the island and their claim.
“That’ll be a first,” Gabe remarked after the call had been made, shooting a meaningful glance at Tex. “This time the government’s on our side.”
While the others prepared to start work—the Margarita on the first site the Genesis team had magged and the Angel on the one they’d had to leave before the storm, Jeanne was left with KP duty—tossing the paper plates, drink containers, and napkins in a bag. She had to admit that with all the excitement of the morning, she was a little tired, so she decided to catnap on the bridge. She’d no sooner lain down than she was fast asleep—until she heard the first of the buckets of coral hit the deck.
Near the day’s end, the deck was littered with coral debris from which she, Remy, and Mara had retrieved a myriad of buckles, buttons, knife hilts, a pair of glasses frames, and assorted ceramics. Nothing to get the blood pumping, which was just as well, given the dull headache that had returned. She’d gone below to take something for it when she heard the Margarita approach and cut her engines.
At the gentle thud of the boat against the bumpers protecting the Angel’s side, she could hear an excited mix of Spanish and English. But it was Remy’s ecstatic “Oh glorious day!” that brought her topside at a run.