The Reef

throat. Grimly, she swallowed it, gritting her teeth until the nausea and dizziness passed. She heard her mother gasp, but when she turned, her movements slow and sluggish, Marla was moving forward briskly.
    “We need blankets, Tate. And towels. Plenty of towels.Hurry. And the first-aid kit. Ray, I radioed ahead. They’re expecting us at Frigate Bay. You’d better take the wheel.” She pulled off her blouse beneath which she wore a pretty white lace bra. Without a wince she used the crisp cotton to staunch the blood at the stub of Buck’s leg.
    “Good girl,” she murmured when Tate ran back with armloads of towels. “Matthew, pack these around the wound. Hold them firmly against it. Matthew.” Her voice was dead calm and with enough steel to have his head jerking up. “He needs lots of pressure on that leg, understand me. We’re not having him bleed to death.”
    “He’s not dead,” Matthew said dully as she took his hands and pressed them to the towels she’d packed against the wound. There was already a sickening pool of blood welling on the deck.
    “No, he’s not dead. And he’s not going to be. We’ll need a tourniquet.” Her eyes stung as she noticed Buck was still wearing his left flipper, but her hands were quick and efficient. They never trembled as she fixed the tourniquet above the gory stump of his right leg.
    “We need to keep him warm,” she said calmly. “We’ll have him to the hospital in a few minutes. In just a few minutes.”
    Tate covered Buck with a blanket, then knelt on the bloody deck to take his hand. Then she reached for Matthew’s and linked the three of them.
    She held on as the boat flew through the water toward land.

C HAPTER 7
    M ATTHEW SAT ON the floor in the hospital corridor and tried to keep his mind blank. If he let down his guard, for even an instant, he was back in the bloody swirl of water, staring into the doll’s eyes of the shark, seeing those wicked rows of teeth slice into Buck.
    He knew he would see it hundreds, thousands of times in his sleep—the blinding scream of bubbles, the thrashing of man and fish, the blade of his own knife plunging and hacking.
    Each time the scene rolled through his brain, what had taken only minutes stretched hideously into hours, each movement slowed into horrible clarity. He could see it all, from the first bump when Buck had shoved him out of the shark’s attack path and through to the rush and noise of the emergency room.
    Slowly, he lifted his hand, flexed it. He remembered how Buck’s fingers had tightened on it, gripped hard on that race to the island. He’d known then that Buck was alive. And that was somehow worse, because he couldn’t convince himself that Buck would stay that way.
    It seemed that the sea delighted in taking the people he cared for most.
    Angelique’s Curse, he thought on a wave of guilt andgrief. Maybe Buck had been right. The fucking necklace was down there, just lying in wait for a victim. The search for it had taken two people he’d loved.
    It wasn’t going to get another.
    He opened his hand, rubbed it hard over his face like a man waking from a long sleep. He thought he must be going a little crazy, thinking this way. A man had killed his father, and a shark had killed Buck. It was a pitiful defense against his own failure to save them that had him blaming an amulet he’d never even seen.
    However bloody that ancient necklace and the lore surrounding it might be, Matthew knew he couldn’t point the guilt at anyone or anything but himself. If he’d been quicker, Buck would still be whole. If he’d been smarter, his father would still be alive.
    As he was alive. As he was whole. He would have to carry that weight for the rest of his life.
    For a moment, he rested his brow on his knees, fought to clear his head again. He knew the Beaumonts were just down the hall in the waiting room. They’d offered him comfort, support, unity. And he’d had to escape. Their quiet compassion had all but destroyed him.
    He already knew that if Buck had even a slim chance of survival, it wasn’t due to him, but to Marla’s quick, calm and unflinching handling of a crisis. It was she who had taken control, even down to remembering to grab clothes from the boat.
    He hadn’t even been able to fill out the hospital forms, but had only stared at them until she’d taken the clipboard from him, gently asked the questions and filled in the blanks herself.
    It was frightening to discover that he