Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

closeted himself in his hotel room, reading book after book that he brought with him from the mainland library. He’d been researching even then. She was sure he’d continued that research in the following summers when she had refused to go back. Refused to go back, Kate remembered, because of Ky Silver.
    Ky had asked her to believe in fairy tales. He asked her to give him the impossible. When she refused, frightened, he shrugged and walked away without a second look. She had never gone back to the white sand and gulls since then.
    Kate looked down again at her father’s papers. She had to go back now—go back and finish what her father had started. Perhaps, more than the house, the trust fund, the antique jewelry that had been her mother’s, this was herfather’s legacy to her. If she filed those papers neatly away, they’d haunt her for the rest of her life.
    She had to go back, Kate reaffirmed as she took off her glasses and folded them neatly on the blotter. And it was Ky Silver she’d have to go to. Her father’s aspirations had drawn her away from Ky once; now, four years later, they were drawing her back.
    But Dr. Kathleen Hardesty knew the difference between fairy tales and reality. Reaching in her father’s desk drawer, she drew out a sheet of thick creamy stationery and began to write.
     
    Ky let the wind buffet him as he opened the throttle. He liked speed in much the same way he liked a lazy afternoon in the hammock. They were two of the things that made life worthwhile. He was used to the smell of salt spray, but he still inhaled deeply. He was well accustomed to the vibration of the deck under his feet, but he still felt it. He wasn’t a man to let anything go unnoticed or unappreciated.
    He grew up in this quiet, remote little coastal town, and though he’d traveled and intended to travel more, he didn’t plan to live anywhere else. It suited him—the freedom of the sea, and the coziness of a small community.
    He didn’t resent the tourists because he knew they helped keep the village alive, but he preferred the island in winter. Then the storms blew wild and cold, and only the hearty would brave the ferry across Hatteras Inlet.
    He fished, but unlike the majority of his neighbors, herarely sold what he caught. What he pulled out of the sea, he ate. He dove, occasionally collecting shells, but again, this was for his own pleasure. Often he took tourists out on his boat to fish or to scuba dive, because there were times he enjoyed the company. But there were afternoons, like this sparkling one, when he simply wanted the sea to himself.
    He had always been restless. His mother had said that he came into the world two weeks early because he grew impatient waiting. Ky turned thirty-two that spring, but was far from settled. He knew what he wanted—to live as he chose. The trouble was that he wasn’t certain just what he wanted to choose.
    At the moment, he chose the open sky and the endless sea. There were other moments when he knew that that wouldn’t be enough.
    But the sun was hot, the breeze cool and the shoreline was drawing near. The boat’s motor was purring smoothly and in the small cooler was a tidy catch of fish he’d cook up for his supper that night. On a crystal, sparkling afternoon, perhaps it was enough.
    From the shore he looked like a pirate might if there were pirates in the twentieth century. His hair was long enough to curl over his ears and well over the collar of a shirt had he worn one. It was black, a rich, true black that might have come from his Arapaho or Sicilian blood. His eyes were the deep, dark green of the sea on a cloudy day. His skin was bronzed from years in the sun, taut from theyears of swimming and pulling in nets. His bone structure was also part of his heritage, sculpted, hard, defined.
    When he smiled as he did now, racing the wind to shore, his face took on that reckless freedom women found irresistible. When he didn’t smile, his eyes could turn as cold as a lion’s before a leap. He discovered long ago that women found that equally irresistible.
    Ky drew back on the throttle so that the boat slowed, rocked, then glided into its slip in Silver Lake Harbor. With the quick, efficient movements of one born to the sea, he leaped onto the dock to secure the lines.
    “Catch anything?”
    Ky straightened and turned. He smiled, but absently, as one does at a brother seen almost every day of one’s life. “Enough. Things slow at the