Breathless Encounter

“Negative. We are exactly at the last coordinates the girl transmitted, though.”

Aiden frowned. The sexy female voice had been making periodic calls throughout the day asking for assistance with her marooned vessel. He’d been annoyed at having to break off his mission to respond to the call, but it wasn’t as if he had any choice. He was one of the good guys, after all.

“Large vessel off to port,” Steig announced. “Must have responded to the New Dawn’s distress call, too.”

Aiden snorted. Every vessel within a hundred miles had probably set course at full speed toward that girl’s sensuous voice coming across their radios. Sailors were nothing if not a lonely bunch.

He swung his binoculars around to port. It was a dark night, but he made out the bulk of a good-size ship. “That vessel’s moving fast,” he commented, frowning. Looked to be pushing twenty-five knots or more. Why would a ship searching for a small boat be tearing along like a bat out of hell? Wouldn’t they be trawling slowly like the Sea Nymph, searching the waters quadrant by careful quadrant?

He swung his binoculars to the next quadrant of his search, in front of the speeding boat, and lurched. He thought he’d caught a glimpse of—

He swore as the Nymph rolled and he momentarily lost his target. He scanned left and right with the binoculars and caught sight of it again. A small vessel bobbing like a helpless cork in the swells directly in front of the racing ship.

“Sweet Mother of God,” he breathed. “Those bastards are going to ram her.”

Steig swore beside him. “They’re going to smash her boat into matchsticks at that speed.” He reached for the throttles and threw the sleek yacht’s twin diesel engines to full power.

Aiden shouted into the radios, “Unknown rider, alter course! You are about to collide with a small craft. I say again, alter course immediately!” But the black hulk in front of him either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Or worse, it knew good and well that it was about to sink the disabled cabin cruiser that could only be the New Dawn.

Aiden watched in helpless horror as the blacked-out ship slammed broadside into the smaller boat. With a terrible grinding noise audible even from here, the big ship’s prow crashed through the New Dawn’s hull. The little boat lifted up in the air like a toy in a bathtub and then all of a sudden disappeared underneath the larger ship, dragged below the water like flotsam in the ship’s path.

The girl with the sexy voice was on that boat!

He kicked off his deck shoes frantically and reached for the swim goggles that were always in his pocket.

“Don’t do it,” Steig bit out. “The water will be full of debris and it’s too dark to find her.”

“This is what I do. Who I am.”

“But, sir—”

He was already shirtless, so he merely tore off his pants and dived directly off the bridge of the yacht to the sea below.

“Aiden!” someone shouted behind him as his body knifed through the air and into the welcome embrace of the sea that was his true home. He swam with powerful strokes toward the last position of the New Dawn. The silence and pressure closed around him, and with them came the peace he always found in the ocean. A jagged piece of white-painted timber came into view.

He surfaced near where the boat went down and shouted, “Hello! Where are you?”

No response. The Sea Nymph’s spotlights came on, illuminating the wreckage in harsh light. He made a quick visual search of the debris field. No sign of any human clinging to a piece of the New Dawn. He took a big breath and dived under the surface. His ears popped as he reached a depth of fifteen feet or so, but the rest of his body absorbed the crushing weight of the water with something resembling relief.

No sign of the girl. He swam in a wide circle that encompassed most of the debris field. She had to be here somewhere. He kept a time count in a corner of his mind. Two minutes. Three. He widened his search area, worry setting in. If he didn’t find her soon, it wasn’t going to be a search and rescue anymore. It would be a corpse recovery.

He kicked harder. Spotted a flash of white waving softly in the current like a piece of fabric. He pulled powerfully toward it. A shirt. A pale face flashed in the scant light from overhead.

The girl. Unconscious and drifting down toward the depths. Angling deeper, he came up underneath her, catching her slender body in his arms and kicking mightily toward the light above. Four minutes.

He swore mentally. If she’d been down here four minutes, she could be very close to brain death. He stopped kicking to plaster his mouth against hers tightly. Angling her head down so he was directly below her, he blew into her mouth enough to clear the water out. Then, he exhaled hard into the air pocket he’d created, forcing air into her lungs. Underwater mouth-to-mouth wasn’t exactly the ideal way to prevent drowning, but he couldn’t just hold her in his arms and let her die!

He closed her mouth with one hand, while his free arm went around her once more. He resumed kicking hard toward the surface and air.

After sacrificing his own oxygen reserves to the girl, he actually began to feel the burn of it in his muscles. Thankfully, his body was extraordinarily efficient at processing oxygen. Although he was getting close to his limit, he had enough gas left in the tank to save the girl.

They burst up out of the depths, and he took a long, gasping breath. He looked around frantically for something big and flat and buoyant, and spotted a portion of the destroyed boat’s hull not far away. Pinching her nose shut, he breathed another lungful of air into the girl’s mouth. Then he dragged her over to the hull and quickly up onto the makeshift raft. He clambered onto his knees beside her and commenced CPR.

“Come on,” he growled. “Don’t you die on me.”

He’d been compressing her chest for about thirty seconds when, without warning, she threw up a bunch of seawater. He rolled her over onto her side fast. She coughed and more water came out of her mouth. She drew in a rasping breath and coughed some more.

At least she was alive.

Steig had obviously seen him surface with the girl because the Sea Nymph was making painstakingly slow progress through the debris field toward them. Several of the crewmen were leaning down over the prow with long poles in the water, shoving debris aside as the yacht crawled forward. When the yacht pulled alongside, the crew lowered a backboard to him on a pair of ropes, and Aiden horsed it underneath the unconscious girl.

He was huffing hard by the time he got her strapped onto it. He swore. Not now. But he should have known. He’d just spent a long time underwater and then surfaced and exerted himself hard. That wasn’t how his gift worked. Now he got to pay the price of it. As the crew hoisted the girl upward, his chest tightened until it felt like a massive anvil was parked on top of him. He lay down on the makeshift raft.

Inhale slowly. Exhale fully. Relax. Don’t freak out. His nebulizer was just a few yards away aboard the Sea Nymph. He’d be fine in a few minutes. But in the meantime, he got to endure the mother of all asthma attacks.

He vaguely heard voices shouting from above.

“Aiden’s down!”

“… send a man to him …”

“… help him up the ladder …”

“… don’t think he’ll make it …”

And then all was darkness and silence around him.

He dreamed of a mermaid with warm brown hair streaked honey-blond. Her tanned skin was dewy and flawless, her eyes a golden-green hazel that matched the sensuous warmth of her voice. Her lips were bee-stung and rosy, her body slender but juicy enough to promise sinful delights. Her aquatic lower half was covered in golden-green scales that glittered exactly the color of her eyes.

She hovered easily in the water before him, her elegant tail fin waving just enough to hold her position. She reached for him with a dazzling smile, her slender arms beckoning him into her eternal embrace. She was the sea. And he loved it—her—more than earthbound life itself. He swam forward, surrendering himself to her.

Her arms closed around him with surprising strength, and she turned, kicking with controlled violence, shooting them downward toward the inky depths of the abyss. His lungs felt strangely tight, and the clock in his head ticked past six minutes. Seven. Eight was about his normal limit.

Nine minutes. Ten.

If she didn’t turn around pretty soon, his beautiful mermaid was going to kill him!

He struggled in her embrace trying to tear free. But she was too strong. Completely disinterested in his silent pleas to let him go. Down, down she went with him. The pressure was too much. Every cell in his body screamed for relief. For air. He thrashed violently. He had to break free or die!

“Wake up, Aiden. For God’s sake, quit flailing around! We just got your breathing settled back down.”

Disoriented, he opened his eyes. Bright lights blinded him and he squinted against the painful glare. Something plastic descended to cover his mouth and nose, and he sucked in the aerosolized bronchodilator medication desperately.

The pressure in his lungs eased. His panic receded. Exhausted mentally and physically, he sagged back against the pillows. Memory returned. “The girl?” he rasped.

The ship’s medical corpsman answered, “Alive. You got to her in time. Gemma doesn’t think she suffered any brain damage, but we won’t know until she wakes up. Gem’s got her sedated and on antibiotics.”

Aiden relaxed. Dr. Gemma Jones was the best. He took belated note of his surroundings and recognized one of the yacht’s cabins. As he recalled, it was outfitted with two twin beds. He turned his head on the pillow and spied the occupant of the other bed. He lurched.