The Reef

face had him keeping the flow steady.
    The final letter came clear so that the monogram read TLB. She’d barely had time to consider the oddity of that when the plate, whole and miraculously undamaged, slipped effortlessly free.
    Stunned, she nearly dropped it. With it held between her and Matthew, she could see the play of her own fingers under the base. The plate, so fine, so elegant, had once graced a gleaming table, she imagined. It had been part of a cherished set, carefully packed for the voyage to a new life.
    And hers were the first hands to hold it in more than two hundred years.
    In wonder, she looked up at Matthew. For an instant they shared the silent and intimate thrill of discovery. Then his face changed, became remote. They were only professionals again.
    Sorry for it, Tate swam clear to set the plate beside the broken sword out of the range of fallout. She studied the two pieces lying side by side on the sand.
    They had been on the same ship, through the same storm, had been tossed, then buried by the same sea. Two different kinds of pride, she mused. Force and beauty. Only one had survived.
    What whim had chosen between them? she wondered.Snapping steel and leaving the fragile undamaged? Mulling through it, she went back to the chore of sifting debris.
    Later, she would ask herself just what had made her look up and around at just that moment. There’d been no movement to catch her eye. Perhaps there had been a tickle at the back of her neck, or that visceral sensation of being watched.
    But she looked up through the murk. The steely eyes and toothy grin of the barracuda gave her a jolt. Amused at herself for the reaction, she reached into the fallout again. And again found herself looking where the fish continued to hover—patient and watching. And familiar.
    Surely it couldn’t be the same fish that had joined them daily on their excavation of the Marguerite ?
    She knew it was foolish to think so, but the idea of it made her smile. Wanting to get Matthew’s attention, she reached for her knife to rap on her tanks. Suddenly something flew out of the fallout and landed less than an inch from her hand.
    It glittered and pulsed and gleamed. Fire and ice and the regal shine of gold. The water seemed to heat around her, move around her and grow clear as glass.
    The ruby was a spreading of blood, surrounded by the iced tears of diamonds. The gold was as polished and bright as the day it had been fashioned into those heavy links and ornate setting.
    There was such clarity to it that she could read the French inscribed around the stone perfectly.
    Angelique. Etienne.
    The roar in her head was her own blood singing. For there was no sound at all in the sea. No hum from the pipe, no clatter from the stone and shells that rained over her tanks. The silence was so perfect, she could hear her own words echo in her head as if she’d spoken aloud.
    Angelique’s Curse. We’ve found it, and freed it, at last.
    With numbed fingers, she reached down for it. It was her imagination, of course, that made her think she could feel heat radiating toward her. An invitation, or a warning. When she held it in her hands, it was only fantasy thatmade it seem as though the necklace vibrated like something alive taking a long greedy breath.
    She felt a terrible grief, and anger and fear. Almost, the wild flood of sensation made her drop it again. But there was love welling through all the rest, a fierce and desperate love that tore at her heart.
    Tate closed a hand around the chain, another around the stone and absorbed the war of emotion.
    She could see the cell, the thin light through the single barred window set high in the thick stone. She could smell the filth and the fear, and hear the screams and pleas of the damned.
    And the woman in a dingy tattered dress, her red hair dull and chopped off rudely at her neck, sat at a tiny table. She wept, and she wrote while around her thin throat, the amulet hung like a bleeding heart.
    For love. The words drifted through Tate’s mind. Only and always for love.
    Fire swept up greedily and consumed her.
    Matthew. It was her first coherent thought. Tate had no idea how long she had clutched the necklace while debris fell like rain around her.
    He was working steadily, his face angled away. Here it is, she thought. What you’re searching for is right here. How did you miss it? Why, she thought with a shiver, didn’t you see it?
    She knew she should signal to him, show him what