The dive team had had several weeks to get to know one another on the maiden voyage from Cutter Cay to the Mediterranean. Callie was the odd one out.
After he’d made his big announcement and shown her what he claimed to be orichalcum, they went downstairs together. She could contain herself until tomorrow, when rest and a clear head would ensure she saw what Jonah wanted to show her with a scientist’s eye.
Jonah gathered the members of the dive team on the second deck to make introductions. He wasn’t quite as conspicuous among them, most of whom were shirtless and in shorts. “Some of you met Dr. West when she arrived this morning.”
The problem was, Jonah was … he was more. More good looking, more commanding. More sexy. More everything than anyone else. It was as though everyone else were in faded sepia, and Jonah in Technicolor. It was odd and, frankly, disconcerting as hell. She smiled at the group, seated around a large teak table, with comfortable rattan chairs. “Callie, please.”
Jonah introduced the deeply tanned, athletic-looking blonde in her early thirties as Leslie Scott. The flirty Matthew McConaughey look-alike, Brody Turner, she’d met when she arrived, as well as Saul. A hugely tall, dark-haired guy named Vaughn Leader, who seemed the quietest of the bunch, gave her hand a shake with paws as big as hams. Callie wondered how he’d ever found scuba gear to fit.
A compact, dark-haired young woman, wearing the white shorts and golf shirt of the Stormchaser crew, came out on deck carrying a tray of sliced fruit and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. “I’ve brought sustenance,” she said cheerfully, indicating where she wanted the platters placed on the table.
Jonah smiled. “One of the most important members of the crew, this is our chef, Tina Hamilton. Anything you need as far as food and drinks go, she’ll find for you. You’ll meet our captain, Maura Sennett, and our first mate, Gayle, at dinner. Okay, now that the people are squared away, and everyone about to be fed and watered, let’s recap for Dr. West so she’s up to speed.”
Jonah reached behind his chair, pulling out a wide, shallow drawer from the crisply painted white sideboard behind him. Callie enjoyed the play of muscle under his smooth bronzed skin as he moved. She realized she was staring and jerked her attention to his hands. But that didn’t help the heat coursing through her body much.
She crossed her arms to hide the peaks of her nipples.
God, she was a mess. This hyperawareness was disconcerting and uncomfortable and, damn it, wrong six ways from Sunday. It felt as though her blood were hot as it pumped erratically through her veins. This was a complication she’d never dreamed of.
Please God, let her be over it by morning. Or sooner. Because attraction to the enemy was not only unprecedented—she wasn’t prepared for it—but also the very last emotion she wanted to feel for a Cutter.
She didn’t do well with out-of-whack emotions. Not anyone’s and especially not her own. She tried to anticipate chaos and did everything in her power to master it. She’d corralled, as best she could, all the drama her parents had thrown at her. She’d learned their triggers; she’d figured out how to minimize the madness.
She’d never—not in a million years—considered herself a sexual being. Sex with Adam had been good. Sometimes really good. But … calm. Rational. Never in her life had she experienced this heightened awareness, this kind of visceral reaction to a man, when she thought of nothing else but sex.
Even the tantalizing prospect of discovering an ancient city wasn’t enough to redirect her thoughts. Unprecedented on every level.
Oblivious to her chaotic thoughts and rampaging hormones, Jonah spread out a nautical chart. The location of the Ji Li wreck circled.
“X marks the spot.” He grinned, then unrolled a hydrographic chart on top, weighing the corners down with four leather paperweights to deter the gentle breeze drifting beneath the awning.
The breeze played with his too-long hair. Damn it. She wished he’d at least pull on a shirt.
“And this is our girl.” Everyone shifted in the seats to lean forward for a better look as he layered a sheaf of color photographs on top. “The Ji Li is a Chinese junk. She’s pretty much intact.” He slid out each photograph and pointed. God. He had gorgeous hands. Strong, long fingers, mouthwateringly masculine. Just looking at his tanned hands made Callie practically feel the skim of them learning her body. Shut up!
She poured herself a glass of lemonade and held the pitcher aloft to see if anyone wanted some. Vaughan took it from her, poured a glass over ice, and passed it to Brody, leaving Callie to take a long draft of the tart, frosty drink. It quenched her thirst at least.
“The poopdeck is in one piece, just as it was in 1252. The long rudder is whole, too. She’s resting on—” There was an infinitesimal pause. “—on a bed of lava and pumice. Other than her sails, it’s as if she went straight down and is beautifully preserved, just waiting for us.” He grinned, encompassing his team in his excitement.
What, Callie wondered, would their reaction be if they knew he’d been about to say, resting on the Lost City of Atlantis?
“Except for a massive hole in her hull,” Saul said drily, grabbing five cookies as if they’d disappear in seconds. “We have no record of survivors. From a written account of someone on the island over there”—he pointed to a small smudge off to the north.
Jonah picked up the answer. “The volcano erupted, spewing lava and ash. Everyone aboard must’ve been asphyxiated by the ash. The hole is probably from a projectile from the volcano.”
“What volcano? The closest active, or even inactive, volcano is thousands of miles away. Are you talking about a submarine vent?” Callie asked Saul, her gaze skimming briefly over Jonah sitting between them. His dark hair was tousled as if he’d just slunk out of some woman’s bed.
“There’s a small extinct volcano on the island here.” He leaned back, taking the filled glass Leslie handed him. He took a drink, his strong throat working as he swallowed. Callie’s temperature spiked. “We believe it last erupted seven hundred years ago, sinking our junk.”
Sinking his junk sounded obscenely suggestive to Callie, who’d never had an erotic thought before meeting Cutter. She picked up her glass and rubbed the condensation across her forehead.
It was pretty handy that the wreck and the underwater city were in international waters. The Cutters were a sneaky bunch, and Callie had no doubt that Jonah hadn’t shared his information with any of the authorities who should be informed. They could dive out here, in the middle of nowhere, for months, without anyone being the wiser.
“Who was she registered to?” she asked, adjusting her depth of field so he was a blur.
“China, but sold to Greece, so provenance is in dispute,” Jonah shrugged his broad shoulders. There was nothing soft or vulnerable about this man. He exuded strength and a raw masculinity that should’ve infuriated her, but instead turned her on. Even blurry.
“The purchase paperwork is being thoroughly researched. We’ll take our cut and Greece and China can fight over ownership long after we’re gone.”
Color her surprised. “You’ve filed paperwork?”
“China, Greece, and Turkey, hell, even Spain is making noises,” he informed her. “Everyone wants a chunk of whatever we find.”
“You don’t seem particularly concerned by it.”
He shrugged again. “That’s what lawyers are for. We’ll do a fantastic job, retrieve and preserve, and enjoy the hell out of the experience.”
He wasn’t being blasé or altruistic. Ji Li wasn’t his focus. The city was.
“To a fun and lucrative salvage!” Leslie toasted.
“Hear hear.” Everyone clinked glasses. Their excitement and enthusiasm expected at the start of a salvage.
Callie pulled one of the large photographs toward her on the table. “She’s resting on what looks like a magma flow, but the rock formations here can be deceptive.” She frowned. “One volcanic eruption below her, and another brought her down? Doesn’t seem—” She looked around the table. “So she was unfortunate enough to be caught in a volcanic eruption, and just coincidentally also happened to sink on top of another? Call me skeptical, but that kind of coincidence is highly unlikely. All we have are vague references to an eruption, possibly at the time she sank.” She took another sip of her drink, then put her glass on the table. “Nothing before. Not localized here.”
The divers just stared at her as if she’d spoken in tongues.
“I know a volcanologist,” Callie said into the silence, her tone conciliatory. “I’ll check with him, see what the likelihood of that was.” If Jonah was right, the volcanic rock and pumice beneath the Chinese junk correlated to the Thera eruption that was purported to have felled Atlantis.
“Chinese records describe an eruption in the late seventeenth century BCE, and document the collapse of the Xia dynasty there due to a ‘dim sun, then three suns, frost in July and famine’—indicating volcanic action. But that was thousands of miles away from where we are currently anchored.” Callie glanced—briefly—at Jonah. “Are you planning to move us?” Was he playing some kind of elaborate shell game to distract anyone from stealing his thunder?
Callie wondered if the Ji Li crossed the known world, not to deliver silks and spices, but to search for Atlantis? The possibility was intriguing.
“No. We’re staying put,” Jonah assured her, his impossibly blue eyes glittering with the secret knowledge they shared. Callie damn well didn’t want to be in on the secret.
“What does your husband think of you being away for months on end?” the athletic blonde asked with more-than-casual interest. Leslie. Actually glad for the non sequitur, Callie automatically twisted the plain gold band on her finger and shrugged, aware of Cutter’s intense blue eyes watching her from across the table.
“He knows I love what I do, and appreciates me when I come home.” Adam had loved her, and whatever fulfilled her and made her happy had made him happy. He’d have totally understood why she continued wearing her wedding ring four years after his death. And why she was doing this for his brother. Rydell had been more like a father to Adam, even though the brothers were only three years apart in age. Like Callie, Rydell had been the one in charge of his family. He’d taken her under his wing, too.
“How long have you been married, then?” Leslie asked.
They’d been married for six years. Adam had died four years ago. “Our tenth anniversary is in a couple of weeks.”
“Any kids?”
God, the woman was like a dog with a bone. “No, not yet.” Not ever. Plenty enough bonding for Callie. “That reminds me, I need to call him to let him know I arrived safely.” Shoving her chair back, she got to her feet. “Excuse me.”
Not running, but walking at a fast clip, Callie climbed several ladders and stairs to get to the top deck where she and Jonah had been earlier. A quick glance showed that no one was around to overhear her. She punched Ry’s number on speed dial.
“Are you on board?”
“Just got here.” She hesitated. “Are you okay? You sound … strained.”
“Just a shitty connection. I’m good, honey.” She didn’t expect Ry to say anything else. He took stoic to a whole other level. “Are you going to be all right to do this?”
“I told you I would,” she assured him. “I don’t know how you figured it out, Ry,” she said when he didn’t respond. “But you were right to send me. Jonah Cutter claims he’s found the Lost City of Atlantis. If it’s true, I’ll tie it up in a bow and deliver it to you on a silver platter.”
* * *
Otherworldly.
Spellbound, Jonah observed the sinuous descent of Dr. West as she floated down from the shimmering surface a hundred feet overhead in their first, early-morning dive. Lithe grace, smooth powerful strokes, lean silhouette of a mermaid. Sunlight shimmered through the dappled ceiling of their silent blue world, illuminating long tendrils of dark hair drifting over her head and wrapping around her body like seaweed—okay, the floating hair was a figment of his imagination.
The good doctor had all that shiny dark hair tucked away and pinned, he was sure, within an inch of every strand’s life. Still … a man could fantasize, couldn’t he?
She was covered from head to toe in skintight black neoprene. Fins, not a fishtail, but watching the glide of her body through the water conjured up some pretty racy thoughts. She paused above him, then slowly floated down to the rocky seabed about fifty feet from his position.
Aw, hell, everything about her challenged and aroused him, which wasn’t good. He reminded himself that she was skeptical, uncooperative, and cold.
And, go figure, he wanted her anyway.
Sand puffed around the tips of her fins to hang in the clear water as regulator bubbles climbed toward the surface. Not so much as a wave in greeting. Her people skills could do with a little work. But with the way she moved in the water? He’d bet she warmed up just fine.
Jonah couldn’t quite get a bead on her. Not much of a sense of humor, but he’d seen suspicious glimpses of drollness, so maybe it took her a while to relax around new people. She seemed a little too buttoned-up to blend well with his rowdy dive team, which was something of a disappointment. Spending long days together was easier if the team meshed. Time would tell. He pointed to the ocean floor with a thumbs-up.
Visibility was incredible but would be shot once they started running the blower. For now Jonah enjoyed the crystalline view. Did the doctor appreciate the scenery? Or was she going to remain all-business?
Ji Li, a worn stone path, mostly hidden beneath sediment and rock, and the bonus of the mermaid. Yeah. A good day to be diving. An even better day to be sitting on top of the discovery of the millennium.
Yesterday, after Calista left the meeting to call her husband and then retire to her cabin for the night—at two in the afternoon!—due to jet lag, Jonah listened to the crew’s opinion of her. Excited to have someone of Dr. West’s credibility, and willing to put her lack of personality down to sleep deprivation, was the vote.
While they talked he’d had his drafting table and other crap moved back to the larger owner’s cabin, and her one bag moved into the smaller cabin. Problem was, he’d slept in that double bed the night before, and when he climbed into his king-sized bed, all he could do was imagine Dr. West sprawled in the same bed—
Crazy.
Married.
Verboten.
Yeah. He got it. Too bad his body wasn’t getting the memo.
Maybe it was precisely because she was out of bounds that he found Calista West so damn appealing. Still, it was like being attracted to a prickly sea urchin. Pretty to look at, but a lot of pain if touched.
Since his attraction to Dr. West was a non-issue, Jonah put it aside. He reminded himself that it was good to want things one couldn’t have. It built character. He suspected his character was going to be muscle-bound and ready for the Ironman Triathlon by the end of this salvage. He grinned behind his full face mask. If the worst thing that happened on this trip was being attracted to an unattainable woman, he was golden. Turning her back on him, she swam over to the others—again, without a wave or any sort of communication. Should he join them? He loved scuba diving. Diving, hunting for ancient treasure: It was in his blood. His father had taught him when Jonah was almost too young to walk. His heart did its usual ping of pain when he thought about the dichotomy of how his father had been with him, and how that same father had been with his three legitimate children. Night and fucking day.
Not his fault. Still—Jonah found himself constantly trying to make up for his father’s lack of—everything—with his half brothers Zane, Nick, and Logan. It was as though their father bad been two completely different men. A loving, hands-on family man with Jonah and his mother, a drunken dickhead, cheating son of a bitch with his legal wife and sons. And never the twain should meet. His marriage to Jonah’s mother was, of course, invalid. But they hadn’t given a shit. Well, his mom probably gave a big shit, but she’d never said anything after she’d discovered that he had another family halfway around the world.
Jonah’s and Nick’s birthdays were only a few day apart. Same month, same year. Good old Dad had been a busy man.
Not here, not now, Jonah reminded himself. Atlantis was going to be his Holy Grail offering to his brothers. His payment for the shit they’d endured while he reaped the benefits of their father for all those years.
Callie did a graceful flip and joined Vaughn and Saul near the wreck where they were reconnoitering for the first time. A look-see before work began.
Ji Li was some four hundred long and sixty feet wide. She lay on her starboard side half on, half off a ridge of rough lava rock, coral, and pumice, and about a hundred feet away from where Jonah had been taking pictures of an amazing floor, inlaid with something shiny, that looked like gold.
The doctor broke away from the others to swim around the square bow, then drifted up to circle the poopdeck, using her hands as well as her eyes to explore, the way he did. Some things were just meant to be touched.
The azure water was top-lit with barely penetrating rays as Jonah breathed easily through his regulator, admiring the scenery. It had taken months and months of paperwork, permissions, legal crap, and putting this team together—but he’d been patient and methodical. It was all about to pay off.
Dr. West had been the last piece of the puzzle. A piece, unfortunately, that he didn’t feel quite fit the rest of his carefully vetted group. She’d alluded to not being a team player, and while he was all for being innovative and daring, he was now a little skeptical that his marine archaeologist was the right woman for the job. What if her cynicism wouldn’t allow her to see what he saw? What if she wasn’t willing to go the extra mile and suspend her disbelief?
His chest tightened. It was too late to find someone else with her excellent qualifications. Hell, her exact qualifications. He wanted her.
Wanted? Hell no, needed her.
Dr. Calista West’s stamp of approval on this salvage was paramount.
After all her papers insisting that Atlantis didn’t exist, her report on the finding was going to be what kept the world’s attention riveted on this find as no fly-by-night rumor but the genuine article. If he was right, and he’d bet everything he had that he was, they’d need more investors. Dr. West’s word would bring that weight to bare.
He envisioned their salvage and observations taking years. How was a woman going to be separated from her husband for that long? Hadn’t she said something about children? He couldn’t remember. He’d been too sucked into looking at how his team interacted with her to listen to every word.
He started swimming to join the others.
He was being ridiculous.
He didn’t have to like her; the dive team and crew didn’t have to like her. Sure, it made life easier, but they could all be professional. He’d be happy as a pig in shit if she did her job. Period. The rest was immaterial.
For a moment he suspended his qualms about her and gave into the fantasy. He was intrigued by his strong physical response to her, because she wasn’t particularly beautiful or out of the ordinary. Attractive, yes. But so were hundreds of other women he’d met in his travels.
He enjoyed the rush of adrenaline he felt when she was nearby. He enjoyed the hell out of the smell of her, something both ocean and mountain. Fresh. He liked looking at her. He liked all that. Attraction without a payoff in sight was something new, and rather intriguing, for Jonah.
Bringing the underwater camera up to his mask, he clicked off a dozen shots of her, his artistic eye framing her against Ji Li.
Maybe not a traditional beauty, but damn, she had an engaging face. He adjusted the focus on the camera for a close-up. She turned her head, saw what he was doing, and scowled directly into the camera. Jonah grinned, turned on by her clear annoyance.
Suddenly a sharp, bone-shattering buzz sounded, sending an electrical current jolting through his entire body. It sounded, weirdly, like giant pistons, getting louder and louder and more intense, as if a train were speeding overhead.
“What the fuck?” He had no idea where the sound was coming from, just that there was stunning high-volume noise and pressure as if someone were taking a plunger to each ear and pushing in and out.
Sand swirled up from the seafloor. A school of small silver fish flashed by, the sand and fleeing fish obscuring his divers for a moment.
The startling physical reaction to Dr. West was followed immediately by a loud, tooth-jarring noise that seemed to come at him in surround sound. The far-too-close, extremely loud noise of a large engine rattled his bones. Jerking his gaze away from his high-priced marine archaeologist, he looked up to see if Stormchaser was in trouble. Or about to come plummeting down to join the Ji Li on the rocks, since he was pretty sure there wasn’t a train anywhere about.
He’d been so busy fantasizing about wrapping that long hair around his … Shit. Had he screwed up and inadvertently floated directly up under the giant propellers?
Nope. He was still levitating a few feet above the sand. He bit back a half laugh. Honest to God, for a nanosecond there he’d thought his attraction to her had caused the sensation.
Idiot.
He cast an all-encompassing look through the blue world at his team, all of whom floated nearby. They were looking around nervously as well, so clearly they heard and felt whatever it was. They weren’t reacting to their new team member.
“Earthquake,” Dr. West said calmly into the lip mike inside her dive mask and therefore directly into Jonah’s ear. The comm crackled with interference. “Surface now.”
Her husky voice sent a different kind of vibration through Jonah, but he didn’t like it any more than the one a few seconds before. “It’s over,” he pointed out as his observation and the cessation of the bone-buzz and the hellishly loud noise vanished, to be replaced by the rhythmic-Darth Vader saw of his own breathing.
“And there could be another, stronger quake any moment,” she said unequivocally, heading to the surface. This close up and personal, her voice sounded far too sexy and way too intimate.
He had a strong aversion to being told what to do, and when. But he wasn’t going to argue with an expert, especially if it meant putting his people at risk.
“Better safe than sorry,” he told the others, indicating they follow suit. His philosophy was pretty much the opposite of better safe than sorry, but he couldn’t go off half-cocked when the lives of his people depended on him making sound choices.
As he and the rest of the team drifted to the surface, he tried not to let her voice conjure images of rumpled sheets and tangled sweaty limbs. If ever a woman was out of bounds, off limits, prohibido, it was this one.
Privately lust after? Sure. But too important to mess with.
The four of them pulled themselves up onto the dive platform, legs dangling in the water as they removed their masks and tanks.
“That was kind of freaky.” Vaughn Leader shoved his mask off his face and slicked back his long hair with one hand.
Saul undid his tank and stared out over the water, his limbs jumpy with fading adrenaline. “That was freaking cool—I’ve never been underwater during a quake before.”
Neither had Jonah. “It wasn’t that powerful,” he pointed out, standing to strip off his wet suit. He dumped it in the freshwater tank before hanging it up on the rack. It was barely eight in the morning, and the sun felt good on his skin.
“Anyone on board feel the quake?” He hadn’t factored in earthquakes, never even crossed his mind, but now that there’d been one he had to consider if this was going to impede his quest in any way.
Brody and Leslie, waiting their turn to dive on the lower deck, shook their heads, then glanced in unison not at him but at the archaeologist. “Stay put or go back in?”
Jonah told himself not to knee-jerk a response to them looking to someone else for direction. They were all working together for the first time. He had to keep his propensity to jump headfirst into things to a minimum until he’d felt his way with the team.
Sunlight gilded Callie’s lightly tanned skin and highlighted the curve of her cheek. He looked away. Over the calm water. Not a sign of the quake up on the surface, but there had been plenty of action down below. And he wasn’t just thinking of the earthquake.
“Doctor?” Leslie repeated.
Swiveling his head to see what the good doctor had to say, Jonah was grateful he still held his suit, about to hang it up. Sitting on the edge of the platform Callie was in the process of picking apart the wet strands of her braid and using her fingers to untangle her hair. Waist-length hair. There went his fantasies. Holy shit, that hair—wet and slick as melted dark chocolate—clung to her body all the way to her shapely ass and pooled on the deck. The woman had weapons that were going to make his sleep fitful to say the least.
Pulling her hair over her shoulder, she wrung out the water. “I’d give it an hour or two, just to be on the safe side. That might’ve been a precursor to a bigger one.” He wanted to bite her soft, pale mouth, with its cushiony bottom lip.
“Or a mild tremor and the end of them,” Jonah countered, rubbing his chest, feeling … antsy for no good reason. Yeah. There was a reason. He never lied to himself. He was annoyed with himself for being so drawn to her. Not to mention he hadn’t given a second’s thought to her being so strongly resistant to his Atlantis project.
For some dumb-ass reason he’d expected her to fall all over the news and be thrilled. Instead she was dismissive and argumentative, which raised his hackles. Fucking annoying as hell to have his bright new balloon pricked before he could even tie a string on it.
She shrugged, her delectable mouth unsmiling. “Or that. But why push it if there’s no hurry? There isn’t a hurry, is there?”
“Time’s money out here.” Ridiculous thing to say, and everyone turned to him with various degrees of surprise on their faces. Great. He’d known her barely a day and she’d reduced him to behaving like a horny adolescent. Not her fault. His.
“Sorry. You’re right of course.”
She’d worked on salvages before. She knew there were investors, sponsors, and assorted other people waiting for their investment to pay off, or for their museum or other institution to get some of the spoils found.
Jonah knew he had to get a grip, but he seemed to be caught in some weird sensual spell that wouldn’t let go.
“No—safety first. Since we’re waiting out another quake, let’s have a quick meeting. I have something important to share.”
He’d planned on telling the others about Atlantis the night before, but he’d wanted the doctor to be there when he told them. Once again she’d been the missing component.
They were all together now. “Ten minutes. Deck two.”