Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

through life when she’d been taught from birth to seek out a goal and work for it to the exclusion of all else. It was that very different outlook on life that set them poles apart.
    Perhaps he had decided to take on some responsibility in his life with the restaurant, Kate decided. If he had she was glad of it. But it couldn’t make any difference. They were still poles apart.
    She chose the calm, the ordered. Success was satisfaction in itself when success came from something loved. Teaching was vital to her, not just a job, not even a profession. The giving of knowledge fed her. Perhaps for a moment in Linda’s cozy, cluttered home it hadn’t seemed like enough. Not quite enough. Still, Kate knew if you wished for too much, you often received nothing at all.
    With the wind whipping at her face she watched the rain begin far out to sea in a dark curtain. If the past had been a treasure she’d lost, no chart could take her back. In her life, she’d been taught only one direction.
    Ky never questioned his impulses to walk on the beach. He was a man who was comfortable with his own mood swings, so comfortable, he rarely noticed them. He hadn’t deliberately decided to stop work on his boat at a certain time. He simply felt the temptation of sea and storm and surrendered to it.
    Ky watched the seas as he made his way up and over the hill of sand. He could have found his way without faltering in the dark, with no moon. He’d stood on shore and watched the rain at sea before, but repetition didn’t lessen the pleasure. The wind would bring it to the island, but there was still time to seek shelter if shelter were desired. More often than not, Ky would let the rain flow over him while the waves rose and fell wildly.
    He’d seen his share of tropical storms and hurricanes. While he might find them exhilarating, he appreciated the relative peace of a summer rain. Today he was grateful for it. It had given him a day away from Kate.
    They had somehow reached a shaky, tense coexistence that made it possible for them to be together day after day in a relatively small space. The tension was making him nervy; nervy enough to make a mistake when no diver could afford to make one.
    Seeing her, being with her, knowing she’d withdrawn from him as a person was infinitely more difficult thanbeing apart from her. To Kate, he was only a means to an end, a tool she used in the same way he imagined she used a textbook. If that was a bitter pill, he felt he had only himself to blame. He’d accepted her terms. Now all he had to do was live with them.
    He hadn’t heard her laugh again since the first dive. He missed that, Ky discovered, every bit as much as he missed the taste of her lips, the feel of her in his arms. She wouldn’t give him any of it willingly, and he’d nearly convinced himself he didn’t want her any other way.
    But at night, alone, with the sound of the surf in his head, he wasn’t sure he’d survive another hour. Yet he had to. It was the fierce drive for survival that had gotten him through the last years. Her rejection had eaten away at him, then it had pushed him to prove something to himself. Kate had been the reason for his risking every penny he’d had to buy the Roost. He’d needed something tangible. The Roost had given him that, in much the same way the charter boat he’d recently bought gave him a sense of worth he once thought was unnecessary.
    So he owned a restaurant that made a profit, and a boat that was beginning to justify his investment. It had given his innate love of risk an outlet. It wasn’t money that mattered, but the dealing, the speculation, the possibilities. A search for sunken treasure wasn’t much different.
    What was she looking for really? Ky wondered. Was the gold her objective? Was she simply looking for an unusual way to spend her holiday? Was she still trying to give her father the blind devotion he’d expected all herlife? Was it the hunt? Watching the wall of rain move slowly closer, Ky found of all the possibilities he wanted it to be the last.
    With perhaps a hundred yards between them, both Kate and Ky looked out to the sea and the rain without being aware of each other. He thought of her and she of him, but the rain crept closer and time slipped by. The wind grew bolder. Both of them could admit to the restlessness that churned inside them, but neither could acknowledge simple loneliness.
    Then they turned to walk back up the dunes and saw each