Treasures Lost, Treasures Found

since I was six. I know the currents.”
    “ I know the currents.”
    “And I haven’t been flat on my back for a week.”
    “I was flat on my back for a week because you were overreacting.” She struggled away from him, and because the wet suit was already down to her waist, peeled it off. “You’ve no right to tell me when and where I can dive, Ky. Superior strength gives you no right to drag me up when I’m in the middle of salvaging.”
    “The hell with what I have a right to do.” Grabbing her again, he shook her with more violence than he’d ever shown her. A dozen things might have happened to her in the thirty minutes she’d been down. A dozen things he knew too well. “I make my own rights. You’re not going down alone if I have to chain you up to stop it.”
    “You told me to get another diver,” she said between her teeth. “Until I do, I dive alone.”
    “You threw that damn business arrangement in my face. Percentages. Lousy percentages and a daily rate. Do you know how that made me feel?”
    “No!” she shouted, pushing him away. “No, I don’t know how that made you feel. I don’t know how anything makes you feel. You don’t tell me.” Dragging both hands through her dripping hair she walked away. “We agreed to the terms. That’s all I know.”
    “That was before.”
    “Before what?” she demanded. Tears brimmed for no reason she could name, but she blinked them back again. “Before I slept with you?”
    “Damn it, Kate.” He was across the deck, backing her into the rail before she could take a breath. “Are you trying to get at me for something I did or didn’t do four years ago? I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know what you want from me or what you don’t want and I’m sick of trying to outguess you.”
    “I don’t want to be pushed into a corner,” she told him fiercely. “That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to be expected to fall in passively with someone else’s plans for me. That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want it assumed that I simply don’t have any personal goals or wishes of my own. Or any basic competence of my own. That’s what I don’t want!”
    “Fine.” They were both losing control, but he no longer gave a damn. Ky ripped off his wet suit and tossedit aside. “You just remember something, lady. I don’t expect of you and I don’t assume. Once maybe, but not anymore. There was only one person who ever pushed you into a corner and it wasn’t me.” He hurled his mask across the deck where it bounced and smacked into the side. “I’m the one who let you go.”
    She stiffened. Even with the distance between them he could see her eyes frost over. “I won’t discuss my father with you.”
    “You caught on real quick though, didn’t you?”
    “You resented him. You—”
    “I?” Ky interrupted. “Maybe you better look at yourself, Kate.”
    “I loved him,” she said passionately. “All my life I tried to show him. You don’t understand.”
    “How do you know that I don’t understand?” he exploded. “Don’t you know I can see what you’re feeling every time we find something down there? Do you think I’m so blind I don’t see that you’re hurting because you found it, not him? Don’t you think it tears me apart to see that you punish yourself for not being what you think he wanted you to be? And I’m tired,” he continued as her breath started to hitch. “Damn tired of being compared to and measured by a man you loved without ever being close to him.”
    “I don’t.” She covered her face, hating the weakness but powerless against it. “I don’t do that. I only want…”
    “What?” he demanded. “What do you want?”
    “I didn’t cry when he died,” she said into her hands.
    “I didn’t cry, not even at the funeral. I owed him tears, Ky. I owed him something.”
    “You don’t owe him anything you didn’t already give him over and over again.” Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair before he went to her. “Kate.” Because words seemed useless, he simply gathered her close.
    “I didn’t cry.”
    “Cry now,” he murmured. He pressed his lips to the top of her head. “Cry now.”
    So she did, desperately, for what she’d never been able to quite touch, for what she’d never been able to quite hold. She’d ached for love, for the simple companionship of understanding. She wept because it was too late for that now from her father. She wept because she