Romancing the Alpha: An Action-Adventure Romance Boxed Set (40 page)

The sense of unease she’d experienced on the boat returned. “Let’s position ourselves to maximize the power of our combined lights,” she said, struggling to stay calm. “We’ll look around in a circle, then up.”

They repeated this exercise a couple of times, but to no avail.

“Our time is running out,” Dex said in a hoarse tone. “We’ll have to start our way back to the ship. I’ve sent a distress signal to the boat. I can only hope it makes it.”

“But we can’t leave Mark down here. Can’t we—”

“We can’t stay down here without air, Katy. We swim to the surface. That’s an order.”

While the journey up never held the same excitement as the descent, Katy had never felt more reluctant to reach the surface. Every meter that brought them closer to the boat represented time that was running out for Mark.

Katy and Dex swam as quickly as they dared and took the bare minimum for decompression breaks. It still wasn’t fast enough.

When they reached the ship, Rick hauled Katy aboard. He’d changed out of his deck clothes into a diving suit. He stared at her in shock, his normally ruddy complexion ashen.

“Did you get Dex’s distress signal?” she gasped, pulling off her helmet.

“Search and rescue are on the way. I didn’t wait for clarification.” He looked over her shoulder to the water. “What happened? Where’s—?”

At that moment, Dex hauled himself up the ladder and slumped onto the deck. “Mark,” he managed between heaves. “Mark’s still down there.”

Con the skipper appeared on deck, visibly shaken. “We need to move over to the buoys and collect Mickey and Bill.”

Rick nodded his assent. “I’ll suit up and dive down to look for Mark.”

Katy blinked. “Are you sure that’s wise? We’re supposed to dive in pairs.”

The expedition leader’s lined face was grave. “There’s no time to wait.”

“You have a dive buddy.” Dex pulled himself to his feet and grabbed the last rebreather from the equipment stash. “I’ll go with you.”

Katy started in alarm. A second dive so soon after the first wasn’t smart. Her eyes met his, and he gave her a tired wink before refitting his helmet. “See you soon, cupcake.”

The next few hours were the bleakest in Dex’s adult existence. Halfway down to the seabed, his lights picked out Mark’s lifeless body. In silence, he and Rick joined forces to carry their teammate back to the surface where Con and the rest of the team were waiting for them aboard the
Neptune
.

When Dex broke water, Katy was leaning over the side of the boat. Her pale face was tense and leached of color.

“Oh, thank goodness,” she said when she saw him. “Is Mark—?” She broke off, her gaze focused on the body in his arms. “Oh, God, no.”

Con and Bill appeared at Katy’s side. Between them, they managed to haul Mark’s body onto the boat and lay it on the deck.

Dex swung over the side of the boat, stripped off his breathing apparatus, and dropped to his knees. “Where’s the first aid kit?”

Katy grabbed a red case from the table in the center of the deck and handed it to him. “Here.”

“Thanks.” He sounded as though he’d sandpapered his vocal chords. If he hadn’t already suspected that CPR would prove hopeless, he would have known the instant he removed Mark’s helmet and stared into his unseeing eyes. Dex’s stomach twisted and he tasted bile.
Come on, mate. Please don’t be dead.
Swallowing hard, he willed himself to go through the resuscitation routine again and again until a warm hand squeezed his shoulder.

“Leave him,” Katy said softly, her voice breaking on a sob. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

“Maybe he’s just unconscious.” A note of hysteria flavored Bill’s high-pitched tone. “The coast guard is on the way. Surely they can resuscitate him if Dex can’t.”

“Mark’s gone, Bill. There’s nothing anyone can do.” Rick ran a trembling hand through his wiry gray hair. The man looked as though he’d aged ten years over the past couple of hours. “I’ll call the coast guard and tell them to meet us at Ballybeg harbor. There’s no point in them heading out here now.”

Katy handed Dex a towel and a steaming cup of tea. “In the meantime, you need to dry off and warm up.”

“Thanks, Katy.”

He went below deck and stripped off his diving suit. Rubbing a towel over his cold body, he felt numb and weightless. The situation had a dreamlike quality but it was tainted by the knowledge that this nightmare wouldn’t end when he next woke up.

Despite his extensive experience with deep sea diving, often in risky waters, this was the first time Dex had encountered a fatality. He’d barely known Mark but he’d liked the man. No one deserved his fate.

A sense of unease settled between his shoulder blades. He’d had to swap his kit for one of the expedition’s spare units before their first dive. Today Katy’s had been broken and Mark’s had presumably malfunctioned. Rebreathers could be fiddly, but three causing issues in such a short space of time was unusual. And there was the matter of the note…

By the time Dex had changed into dry clothes and gone back on deck, the
Neptune
was pulling into the harbor. The coast guard, the police, and an ambulance were waiting on the pier. The paramedics immediately began working on Mark, but apart from officially confirming his death and transporting the body to the morgue, there was nothing they could do to help.

A grim-faced Seán was accompanied by a young police officer with red hair and big ears and an older man wearing a coast guard’s uniform.

Seán stepped forward to shake hands and make introductions. “This is my partner, Sergeant Brian Glenn, and Ciaran O’Hare from the coast guard. Any idea what happened to your colleague?”

“We’re presuming his breathing apparatus malfunctioned,” Rick said gruffly. “Mark was an experienced technical diver. I doubt he made a mistake with his kit.”

His brother gave a stiff nod. “All the same, we’ll need to examine the kit and take statements from all of you.”

“Does that need to be straight away?” Rick demanded. “The team is cold and in shock. At least let us warm up first.”

Seán’s eyes narrowed but he shrugged. “Fair enough. Ballybeg Garda Station is in the process of being rebuilt and we’re in temporary digs. There’s not enough room for all of us to fit in. You’ve rented a conference room at the library, right?”

Rick scratched his head. “Yeah. It’s covered with papers and files, though.”

A wry smile broke through Seán’s stern expression. “I doubt it’s messier than our current accommodation. Let’s meet there in an hour. That’ll give the coast guard a chance to examine Mark’s kit.”

As Seán and the younger policeman were helping the coast guard to pack up Mark’s equipment, Katy grabbed Dex’s arm and squeezed.

“What’s the matter?” he asked and followed the direction of her gaze. Her eyes were fixed on Mark’s rebreather and she was breathing heavily.

“I need to go back on the boat to check something. Go on to the library with the others. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

“But Katy—” he began, but she was already sprinting down the pier toward the
Neptune
.

Twenty minutes later, Katy stormed into the library and pounded up the stairs to the room the expedition team had been allocated.

She stopped outside the door, breathing heavily, fists clenched. One of those motherfuckers had tried to kill her. She knew it with every fiber of her being, but hadn’t a shred of proof to back it up.
Goddamnit.

She hit the corridor wall with her fist and hot tears of hollow rage coursed down her cheeks. Mark had been wearing the kit intended for her. Her brain had registered his lucky yellow stripe when she’d removed her equipment after the dive, but she’d been too shocked over Mark’s disappearance to process the significance. Amid Rick’s bellowing this morning, they must have gotten their kits mixed up.

A simple mistake and bad luck might be a rational explanation for Mark’s rebreather malfunctioning, but Katy didn’t buy it. Someone had deliberately cut the strap on her own kit to force her to exchange it for a spare.

Back on the
Neptune
, she’d checked the storeroom below deck. It was tiny and so packed with equipment that Mark would have had to reach in to grab the nearest spare rebreather. Placing the sabotaged one to the front would have been a simple task. Her nails cut into her palms. When she got her hands on whoever did this, she’d draw blood.

Dragging air into her lungs, she willed herself to remain calm. She had to maintain a shocked and shaken appearance when she entered the room. Until she had proof that Mark had been murdered, it wasn’t safe to show the perp she knew the kit had been sabotaged.

Adopting her military poker face, she shoved the door open and stepped into the conference room. The entire team was there, including Jack and Moira. She’d toyed with eliminating them from the list of suspects because they’d spent the day at the museum. However, they could have loosened the strap on her kit the night before, as well as tampered with the spare. Besides, she thought savagely, punching Moira would be fun.

Katy moved around the table and slid into a spare chair at the back of the room. She scanned her colleagues’ faces but could glean nothing of relevance. All she knew was that one of them had tried to kill her and had succeeded in killing Mark. When she found the rat, she’d kick his or her ass before turning them over to law enforcement.

The mood in the room was subdued. Even Moira was too shocked to engage in hysterics. Bill folded his lanky frame into the chair beside Katy’s and clutched his untouched coffee cup so tight his knuckles turned white.

“I don’t understand it,” he said and shook his head. “Of all of us, Mark was the person most familiar with diving equipment. He was thorough about checking everything before a dive.”

Katy glanced down the row at Dex. His eyes met hers and she read sympathy in them. He quirked an eyebrow in question. “Okay, Katy?”

She nodded and began to shake, no longer needing to feign the side effects of shock.

He pulled a hip flask from his backpack and unscrewed the cap. When he brought it to her, he crouched by her chair. “Take a shot of this and tell me what’s the matter,” he said in a low voice. “What was so urgent that you needed to go back to the boat?”

Damn.
Why did he have to mention her trip back to the
Neptune
? She took a swig of whiskey and considered how to play the situation. If she pretended she hadn’t gone back to the boat, the killer would get suspicious. As one of her trainers in the Navy had always said, the most effective lies are the ones that stick closely to the truth.

“It should have been me,” she said softly, not needing to feign the strain in her voice.

Dex dropped a kiss onto her trembling hand. “Don’t be daft, Katy. It
could
have happened to any of us. It
should
have happened to none of us.”

She grabbed his wrist with fingers ice cold from shock. “You don’t understand. Mark was wearing
my
rebreather.”

This statement drew startled stares from the entire company.

An expression of unease flickered across Dex’s handsome features. “I don’t understand. Your rebreather was broken. Mark gave you one of the spares.”

“He went below deck and brought up his rebreather and a spare one for me. I remember him telling me that the one with the yellow stripe was his lucky pack.” She gave a bitter laugh. “As it happens, the luck was all mine. The spare rebreather, the one I was supposed to wear, had a small orange stripe on the side. When I took off my equipment, I registered a yellow stripe on the rebreather I’d been wearing, but I was in shock. The significance didn’t sink in until I saw your brother and the others with Mark’s kit. I went back to the boat to check the kit I’d been wearing to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.”

Dex’s face turned chalky white. “
Jaysus.
It might have been your body we brought to the surface.

“So you see what I mean? I was supposed to die, not Mark.”

“No, sweetheart.” He cradled her in his arms and stroked the nape of her neck. “You got the packs mixed up when Rick was yelling his head off about the day’s plan. What happened today was a tragic accident.”

“It was no accident.” Seán’s voice boomed from the doorway, making everyone swing round. The policeman’s face was hard as granite and his eyes burned with steely determination. Beside him stood the young policeman, equally rigid and suspicious.

“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident?” Rick demanded. “Of course it was. Fatal mistakes can happen on dives.”

Seán looked around the room, focusing on each of them in turn. “This wasn’t a mistake. Mark’s rebreather was deliberately sabotaged. He was murdered.”

Stunned silence descended over the room. With a pounding heart, Dex looked at each of the expedition team members in turn. One of them had killed Mark.

Then Moira began to wail. “Murdered? Who killed him?”

“That’s what I intend to find out,” Seán said in a grim tone.

“Wait a minute.” Rick’s laugh rang hollow. “You can’t think we had anything to do with it.”

Seán fixed him in place with a hard stare. “You all had ample opportunity to tamper with the equipment. What we need to find out is who had a motive to kill Mark.”

Dex looked at Katy and their gazes locked for a beat, unspoken words passing between them.

“Sergeant Glenn and I will take statements from all of you,” Seán continued. “Because Dex is my brother, I’ll have to hand the case over to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation if he emerges as a suspect.”

“Thanks, bro,” Dex said dryly, but Seán’s expression remained grim.

“It shouldn’t take too long, provided everyone cooperates.” Seán’s gaze moved around the room again, making the expedition team squirm. “Unless there’s something one of you would like to tell me?”

“I do,” Katy said with quiet determination. “I received an anonymous note telling me to watch my back. I’ve been trying to figure out if it was meant as a warning or as a threat. Given today’s events, I’m inclined to think it was a threat.”