The Reef

expertly and hauled herself over the rail. She caught a faint whiff of fish.
    Gear was carefully stowed and secured. But the deck needed washing as much as it needed painting. The windows on the tiny wheelhouse where a hammock swung were smudged and smeared with salt and smoke. A coupleof overturned buckets, and a second hammock, served as seats.
    “It’s not the Queen Mary. ” Matthew stored his tanks. “But it’s not the Titanic either. She ain’t pretty, but she’s seaworthy.”
    He took the bag from her and stored his wet suit in a large plastic garbage can. “Want a drink?”
    Tate took another slow look around. “Got anything sterilized?”
    He flipped open the lid of an ice chest, fished out a Pepsi. Tate caught it on the fly and sat down on a bucket. “You’re living on board.”
    “That’s right.” He went into the wheelhouse. When she heard him rattling around, she reached over to stroke the sword he’d laid across the other bucket.
    Had it graced the belt of some Spanish captain with lace at his cuffs and recklessness in his soul? Had he killed buccaneers with it, or worn it for style? Perhaps he had gripped it in a white-knuckled hand as the wind and the waves had battered his ship.
    And no one since then had felt its weight.
    She looked up, saw Matthew standing at the wheelhouse door watching her. Furiously embarrassed, Tate snatched her hand back, took a casual drink from her Pepsi.
    “We have a sword at home,” she said evenly. “Sixteenth century.” She didn’t add that they had only the hilt, and that it was broken.
    “Good for you.” He took the sword, settled with it on the deck. He was already regretting the impulsive invitation. It didn’t do much good for him to keep repeating to himself that she was too young. Not with her T-shirt wet and molded against her, and those creamy, just sun-kissed legs looking longer than they had a right to. And that voice—half whiskey, half prim lemonade—didn’t belong to a child, but to a woman. Or it should have.
    She frowned, watching him patiently working on the corrosion. She hadn’t expected those scarred, rough-looking hands to be patient.
    “Why do you want partners?”
    He didn’t look up. “Didn’t say I did.”
    “But your uncle—”
    “That’s Buck.” Matthew lifted a shoulder. “He handles the business.”
    She propped her elbows on her knees, her chin in the heels of her hands. “What do you handle?”
    He glanced up then, and his eyes, restless despite the patience of his hands, clashed with hers. “The hunt.”
    She understood that, exactly, and smiled at him with an eagerness that ignored the sword between them. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Thinking about what could be there, and that you might be the one to find it. Where did you find the coin?” At his baffled look, she grinned and reached out to touch the disk of silver at his chest. “The piece of eight.”
    “My first real salvage dive,” he told her, wishing she didn’t look so appealingly fresh and friendly. “California. We lived there for a while. What are you doing diving for treasure instead of driving some college boy nuts?”
    Tate tossed her head and tried her hand at sophistication. “Boys are easy,” she drawled, and slid down to sit on the deck across from him. “I like challenges.”
    The quick twist in his gut warned him. “Careful, little girl,” he murmured.
    “I’m twenty,” she said with all the frigid pride of burgeoning womanhood. Or she would be, she amended, by summer’s end. “Why are you out here diving for treasure instead of working for a living?”
    Now he grinned. “Because I’m good. If you’d been better, you’d have this, and I wouldn’t.”
    Rather than dignify that with a response, she took another sip of Pepsi. “Why isn’t your father along? Has he given up diving?”
    “In a manner of speaking. He’s dead.”
    “Oh. I’m sorry.”
    “Nine years ago,” Matthew continued, and kept cleaning the sword. “We were doing some hunting off of Australia.”
    “A diving accident?”
    “No. He was too good to have an accident.” He pickedup the can she’d set down, took a swallow. “He was murdered.”
    It took Tate a moment. Matthew had spoken so matter-of-factly that the word “murder” didn’t register. “My God, how—”
    “I don’t know, for sure.” Nor did he know why he had told her. “He went down alive; we brought him up dead. Hand me that rag.”
    “But—”
    “That was