Sea Haven 01 - Water Bound

constant, always beautiful and always very treacherous if one didn’t pay close attention to her.
    She had to be careful to focus on work rather than on the beauty of the sea life around her. The colorful anemones and starfish always captured her attention. One could easily get lost in the vivid world and forget the passage of time, always crucial underwater when one needed air to breathe.
    She began raking sea urchins into her net, losing herself in the rhythm of her work. Curious fish drifted around her, but nothing disturbed her and she was able to get her net filled quickly. The current seemed stronger than 223

    usual, but the series of storms had prevented her from diving for a couple of weeks and the rivers had filled and were dumping into the sea.
    By the time she’d filled her first net and hooked it and was working on the second, she was getting tired. Out of shape . Or maybe she was exhausted from making love so often. Lev and she had been holed up in their house for days. Each evening one of her sisters brought dinner by, but that was the only time they saw anyone else. They spent each day together doing the silliest things and then making love. Talking and making love. Exploring the house and making love. They’d had sex in every single room a dozen times.
    Lev was insidious. He just sort of snaked his way into her world and had already become a part of it. And somehow, he’d managed to wheedle his way onto her boat. She’d lived with that reminder for almost a week. Now he was up there, probably touching her equipment. She raked faster, her arms aching.
    She sent the first bag to the surface and hooked the second one, allowing it to float up as well. She followed at a more leisurely pace. Lev had been paying attention when she’d given him instructions because he was slowly pulling in the hose, and her with it. After working alone for so long, it was an odd sensation to have someone else helping. She wasn’t positive she liked it. Relying on herself was easier and safer. If she depended on someone else, eventually, in a crisis she might hesitate, and seconds counted under water.
    When she’d worked with Daniel, he’d owned the boat. They’d dived together, and they’d done cleanup together. They’d been diving buddies, but Daniel, because the boat was his, had been the captain. He shared the work with her and they never had so much as a squabble. But when she was diving, even with him, she’d totally relied on herself. The few times she’d tried working with a tender, her need for an exact routine had always made it impossible.
    Nearing the surface, she caught a glimpse of something exploding out of the rock as if shot from a gun, rocketing toward her through the water. A huge lingcod with a mouthful of wickedly sharp teeth had emerged from a dark crevasse in the rock and charged straight at her. It came right between her legs and she rolled over in an effort to get away. The mottled fish had to be a good fifty inches in length and weigh in at sixty pounds. With eighteen large teeth coming at her, she whipped around to keep a wary eye on it.
    The cod continued on past her, evidently intent on a good-sized cabazon swimming back down to the floor where it preferred to hang. The cod grabbed the cabazon, shook him three or four times as if the twenty-pounder was nothing, split him in half and spit him out. For a moment the 224

    cod watched with evident satisfaction as the two halves of the cabazon floated away. The cod ignored her and swam back to his rock.
    She stuck her head above water, hanging on to the anchor chain so the current couldn’t take her away from the boat and watching as Lev carefully pulled up the urchin nets. He followed her orders exactly, placing them in the hold and covering them. She signaled for another net. She had close to a thousand pounds and thought she might be able to pull in another three to five hundred for a good day’s work if she was lucky.
    The wind had picked up a bit and mist had begun to drift in from out at sea. She didn’t want to take any chances with Lev aboard.
    “You tired?” he called.
    She shrugged. “I’ll come in after this next haul.”
    He nodded and gave her the net. “Be careful, Rikki.”
    “I always am,” she said.
    A gull screamed and Lev turned his attention skyward. Rikki shoved her regulator into her mouth and started back down, trailing the net. She turned her head at the first sign of movement and found the cod back, this