Night Diver: A Novel by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

cleared her throat, trying to remove the husky catch in her voice. “I was raised on a dive boat. I knew all about the difference between male and female before I was old enough to put it in words.”
    It was half true. The other half was that Holden Cameron had the kind of body that the ancient Greeks had immortalized in marble. Except he was much warmer than white marble. His skin was a bronze-gold over muscles shifting as fluidly as the sea, shadows curving across his body like a lover’s fingers.
    Don’t stare. Don’t stare. Don’t stare, she told herself firmly. God, would it be wrong to stroke him?
    Yes, it would be wrong.
    She dragged her attention from his body and said the first thing that came to mind. “I’ll bet that scar has a story.”
    Holden glanced at his left thigh, where a piece of an exploding mine had played merry hell with it. The scar was inches long. “Job hazard. Mines do have a tendency to blow.”
    She went still. “How far down were you?”
    “Not far enough to die.”
    “I’ll bet it was . . .” Horrible. Terrifying. “Painful,” she managed finally.
    “Most of the time it looks worse than it feels.” Automatically he kneaded the torn flesh. “It healed improperly, leaving a cyst. Pressure changes make it flare up until things equalize out, so I’m rather good at predicting weather changes.”
    Her eyes kept straying to his lap. She closed them for an instant, then focused on his face. “Flying must be hard on you.” Hard. Could I have chosen a less loaded word? And speaking of loaded . . .
    Kate prayed that her straying thoughts weren’t revealed on her face.
    “Smaller aircraft can be a problem in terms of pressure changes,” he said, wishing she was as stripped down as he was. Though her blouse was loose, it clung in intriguing places. He hoped he was doing a better job of keeping his glance from wandering than she was. “Larger planes are pressurized enough that it only hurts for half an hour or so at a time.”
    “I remember the weird feeling I got in my joints and lungs when I rushed too much coming up from a dive. Even when I did it right, the sensation was uncomfortable for my first few times.” She hesitated. If the lower pressures aboard an airplane hurt him, then the higher pressures of diving would be a lot worse. “You don’t dive anymore, do you?”
    “The doctors tell me they can cut out the cyst any time I get tired of it. The idea of months more physio doesn’t intrigue me, however.”
    “Physio?”
    “Therapy of the physical variety.”
    “Do you miss diving?” she asked.
    “Do you?”
    Echoes of terror, denial, rage; a tidal wave of emotions from the teenager she had been. She drew a careful breath. “No. I don’t miss diving.”
    “Odd.”
    “Why?”
    “Diving for treasure with your family as a child is the stuff of dreams for land-bound children,” Holden said.
    She forced herself to look away from his tempting golden brown skin. “It was all I knew.”
    “Normal, in a word.”
    She nodded and looked into his changeable eyes, almost gold in the low light. “When I went to college, I found it exotic and strange because everyone had an address that wasn’t just a mail drop, and classrooms didn’t float around, and I could walk all day and not end up where I started.”
    “Still, getting your allowance in doubloons must have been nice,” he said.
    She accepted his teasing with an ease that should have worried her, as if she had known him for years instead of hours. “Allowance? Why would I need something like that? I was fed, had a roof over my head most of the time, and only had to do the minimum amount of schoolwork to keep the State of Florida off our backs. What ten-year-old wouldn’t love that?”
    “But not an eighteen-year-old?”
    “You grow up,” she said with a shrug. “You realize that the thing you’ve built your life on isn’t going to last. Particularly when your competition has the resources of say, the