The Reef

“And, he drew maps. A map,” Ray continued, “from an eyewitness who places the Isabella several degrees south-southeast from the wreck of the Marguerite. She’s there. Waiting.”
    Matthew rose to take the map. It was crude, and sparse, but he recognized the points of reference—the whale’s tail of the peninsula of St. Kitts, the rising cone of Mount Nevis.
    An old, almost forgotten need surged in him. The need to hunt. When he looked up, the grin he flashed was the one from his youth. Bold, reckless and irresistible.
    “When do we leave?”
     
    Tate couldn’t sleep. There was too much racing inside her head, swimming in her blood. She understood, and struggled to accept, that the momentum was out of her hands. There would be no stopping her father from taking on this quest. None of the logic nor the personal doubts she used would sway him from partnering with the Lassiters.
    At least the timing worked. She’d just tossed an enormous career advancement aside for principle. That gave her some satisfaction. And it also gave her the opportunity to help launch the expedition for the Isabella.
    At least if she was there, right on hand, she could keep her eye on everyone. Matthew in particular.
    So she was thinking of him when she stepped outside to face the moon and the wind that washed through the top of the pines.
    She had loved him once. Over the years, she’d told herself it had been merely a crush, a young woman’s infatuation with wild good looks and an adventurer’s heart.
    But that was a coward’s lie.
    She had loved him, Tate admitted, and tugged her jacket tighter against the night’s moist breeze. Or had loved the man she’d thought he was, and could be. Nothing and no one had embraced her heart so completely before him. Just as nothing and no one had ever broken it so totally, and so callously.
    She tugged a leaf from a fragrant bay laurel, spun it under her nose as she walked toward the water. It was a night for reflections, she supposed. The moon, nearly full, rode a sky crowded with hot stars. The air was full of perfume and promise.
    Once she would have been seduced by that alone. Before her romantic side had been sliced away. She considered herself fortunate that she could now appreciate the night for what it was, and not spin dreams around it.
    In a way, she knew she had Matthew to thank for opening her eyes. Rudely, painfully, but he’d opened them. She understood now that princes and pirates were for young, foolish girls to dream of. She had more solid goals than that.
    If she had to put those goals aside for a time, she would. Everything she was, everything she’d accomplished, she owed to her parents’ support and belief in her. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to protect them. Even if it meant working shoulder-to-shoulder with Matthew Lassiter.
    She stopped near the water, downcurrent from where the boats were docked. Her parents had built up the bank here with duck weed and wild grasses to fight erosion. Always the water stole from the land. Always the land adjusted.
    It was a good lesson, she supposed. Things had been stolen from her. She’d adjusted.
    “It’s a nice spot, isn’t it?”
    Tate’s shoulders tightened at the sound of his voice. She wondered how she hadn’t sensed him. But for a man who spent his life at sea, he moved quietly on land.
    “I thought you’d gone to bed.”
    “We’re bunked down in the boat.” He knew she didn’t want him beside her, so perversely he stepped forward until their shoulders nearly brushed. “Buck still snores like a freighter. Doesn’t bother LaRue. But then, he sleeps like a corpse.”
    “Try earplugs.”
    “I’ll just string a hammock out on deck. Like old times.”
    “These are new times.” She took a bracing breath before she turned to him. As she’d expected, perhaps feared, he looked magnificent in the moonlight. Bold, exciting, even dangerous. How lucky she was that such traits no longer appealed to her. “And we’d better lay out the ground rules.”
    “You were always more into rules than me.” To suit himself he sat on a bale of duck grass, patted the space beside him in invitation. “You go first.”
    She ignored the invitation, and the half-empty bottle of beer he offered. “This is a business arrangement. As I understand it, my parents are fronting the bulk of the expenses. I intend to keep an accurate account of your share.”
    Her voice still carried those lovely liquid vowels of the south, he