again, looking straight ahead. In her peripheral vision, she saw the cart crawling along beside her. “Keep driving in any direction. You can’t really miss it.”
“Of course. The, uh—the main beach, I guess I meant. In the town center.”
“Not much of a town, but keep going straight and you’ll be there in about a minute.”
“Thanks.” He paused, and then, “You looked like you were in a bit of a hurry. Can I offer you a lift?”
Nicola turned to look at him again, setting her face in a firm expression of disinterest that belied the flutter she felt in her belly.
God, he was beautiful.
He was wearing swimming trunks and an old gray T-shirt with a rip in the neckline, a flaw in his clothing that only served to highlight the perfection of the body beneath it. She couldn’t help herself—she followed the line of his smooth biceps down to his large hands to check for a ring. Now more than ever, married men were a definite deal breaker for Nicola. But his fingers were bare, allowing her to imagine them sliding up her thighs, tugging on the ties of her bikini bottom and...
Stop it.
But she couldn’t. Judging from the length of his bent muscular legs, he was at least six foot three—perfect for her, as at five foot nine, she felt too tall around many men. One last look between his legs revealed an impressive bulge that she could imagine undressing, stroking, until he was rock-hard, and then...
Enough!
She was thinking like a sex-crazed teenager, probably because she hadn’t actually had sex since long before she moved here. Everything that had gone down in LA hadn’t exactly worked wonders for her libido.
“I’m happy walking,” she lied, and then started doing just that to prove it. She could feel his eyes burning into the side of her face.
“Suit yourself,” he said, shrugged and then drove away.
* * *
Really, it was a good thing she hadn’t accepted the ride, because Alex was pretty sure there was no way she wouldn’t have noticed the swelling under his swimming trunks. Jesus, she was fucking beautiful. Trim, toned figure, long blond hair and those eyes...the same shade as his. Though if she’d noticed that, she certainly hadn’t let on. He wasn’t sure why she’d been so standoffish with him when he was just asking innocent questions, but he figured it might have something to do with the fact that she looked familiar. Like almost everyone else on this island, she was a someone, and she wanted to be sure to send the message that she was way out of his civilian league. Not to mention that a woman as hot as her was most likely off the market.
Alex shook his head, trying to clear it of the image of the glistening sweat between her breasts, the tanned slice of tummy he’d spied between her tank top and shorts, the heavy breathing that had made him think of only one thing. He wanted to hear her breathe like that again, but this time because of his cock driving into her again and again, her nipples thrusting upward to meet his hungry mouth...
Get yourself together. You’re about to be sixty feet beneath the surface with nothing between you and a lungful of killer water but a couple of rubber tubes.
Right. He needed to focus. He had come here for two reasons—to close a deal and to once and for all conquer his childhood fear of the ocean, and he wasn’t about to be distracted from either of those goals by any woman.
No matter how fucking hot she was.
TWO INSTRUCTORS, EIGHT STUDENTS. At the dock Nicola did a quick final head count before zipping her dive skin up to her neck. Much to her annoyance, her mind was still on the chiseled god she’d encountered on the road—and the furtive, hopeful glances she kept throwing at arriving students irked her even more. She really did need to get out more.
“Tanks are ready to go,” said Zach, her fellow instructor, reaching past Nicola to set the last two metal cylinders on the boat. Nicola smiled her thanks to him. As far as she knew, Zach was one of only a handful of island staff members who had actually been born on Moretta. Raised the son of one of the estate’s chefs, Zach had grown up in the tiny staff quarters behind the house and been homeschooled by his mother—just the inspiration Nicola had needed to start tutoring some of the island kids once per week. She didn’t think she’d ever become accustomed to the huge class chasm that separated the island natives from the residents who’d taken it over.
“Hi, Miss Nicola,” said a quiet voice. Nicola turned to see one of her students, Raia, peeking out at her shyly from around the corner of the shack.
Nicola smiled at her. “Back to school this week,” she reminded Raia with a mix of anticipation and longing. It wasn’t lost on Nicola that if she were back in LA right now—back in her old, normal life before it all went crazy—she would be welcoming her first-grade class to their first day of school today. The memory of the children she’d been forced to leave behind two months before the end of the school year still stung.
After Zach and her students had piled onto the boat, Nicola stepped onto the boat herself and started to mentally prepare for the upcoming dive. The fact that she’d been scuba diving since she was thirteen and instructing since she was nineteen, when she’d used it as a part-time job to put herself through college, did nothing to make her take the sport less seriously. It only served to heighten her awareness of its dangers, because with the rising popularity of scuba diving, people tended to lose sight that it was an extreme sport. If done properly it was almost always safe, but there were many things that could potentially go catastrophically wrong.
She ran the upcoming dive through her head, planning the traverse around the reef she would lead her students on. Then she ran through her four students’ abilities, assessing each one for potential weaknesses or panic triggers. By the time the boat geared down, pulled up alongside another dive boat and dropped anchor at Sinkhole Reef, Nicola was feeling ready.
“Okay, everyone,” she said, pulling her mask and snorkel over her head and letting it rest around her neck. “This will be an easy one. We should have excellent visibility, and we’re going for a max depth of seventy feet. You’ll see lobsters, stingrays, moray eels, possibly a few nurse or reef sharks. Lobsters hang out in pods, so don’t be freaked out if you come across a den of fifty or so. Just keep your fingers to yourselves! Remember to practice neutral buoyancy and keep your fins off the reef. Stay with your buddy at all times, and ascend—slowly, remember—before you have no less than 200 PSI left in your tank.”
She walked around to her students to be sure their tanks had been turned to the open position, getting each of them to test their regulators in turn. Then she put on her fins, weight belt and buoyancy control device. Shuffling backward on her fins toward the edge of the boat, she put her regulator in her mouth. Then she held her mask on her face and fell backward to demonstrate a back fall-in. “Now your turn. One at a time,” she called to her students once she’d resurfaced.
Focused solely on the safety of the four people under her charge, Nicola was barely aware of the sound of bodies splashing into the water as divers from the neighboring boat began to drop in at the same time.
* * *
Alex had thought he was doing okay. On
