Breathless Encounter

“Aiden. How’s your breathing?”

“Fine.” An awkward silence descended. It had been a long time since he’d had need for social niceties, but he roused his rusty skills to mutter, “Sunny, this is Doctor Gemma Jones. Gem, meet Sunny.”

The two women nodded at one another. “How’re you feeling today?” Gemma asked Sunny.

“Okay, I guess. My throat feels awful.”

“It’ll clear up in a few days.” The doctor added, “If you’ve got a little time later, I’d like to run some simple neurological tests on you.”

Sunny answered, “Give me a shout-out whenever you want to do it.”

“How about now, then?” Gemma responded briskly. Aiden scowled at the interruption of their time together. He was making good progress—

He cut off that train of thought sharply. He did not progress with seducing women anymore, dammit.

Gemma announced, “I’ll get my bag and be back in a few minutes.”

The doctor’s departure was apparently the cue for the ship’s captain to make an appearance. Aiden sighed. It was a plot to keep him from having any time alone with Sunny. Or more likely, they’d come to enjoy watching him squirm. It wasn’t often these days he interacted with women for this long. “Sunny, this is Captain Steig Carlson.”

“As in the ship’s captain?” she asked, eyeing the big blond Swede a little too appreciatively for Aiden’s taste.

Steig smiled and held out his hand to her. “That’s right, Miss Jordan.”

“Call me Sunny.”

“Only if you’ll call me Steig.”

Aiden managed not to roll his eyes, but it was a close thing. “So, Steig. I assume you tracked the ship that wiped out Sunny’s boat?”

“We followed it until it rounded an island and we lost radar contact. By the time we passed the headland, it had blended in with the other traffic in the shipping lanes. I can tell you one thing, though. It was fast. We had to push the throttles wide open just to maintain the gap between us.”

The Sea Nymph could run at thirty knots if she had to. And the other ship had been able to match that speed? Modern whaling ships could move that fast, but not too many other fishing vessels could do it. “Any idea who she was?” he asked.

Steig shook his head regretfully. “We never got visual on her again after we picked you and Sunny out of the water.”

“Did it look like a fishing boat to you?” Aiden asked.

“No. Wrong rigging for fishing. It looked more like—” the Swede frowned “—I’m not sure what. Research vessel, maybe.”

Aiden and Steig traded grim looks. They were both thinking the same thing. A surveillance ship of some kind. Why would some foreign government have it in for a lone, independent filmmaker? They both looked over at the woman leaning on the rail, eyes closed, face turned up to the sunshine. Who was she? And what in the hell had she really been doing out here?

Aiden asked in sudden recollection, “Sunny, what was in that bag you were clutching when I dragged you up to the surface?”

She frowned, then her eyes lit up. “Did my camera bag make it aboard with me?”

Aiden had no idea. He’d passed out shortly after resuscitating her. Steig answered, however. “Yes, it did.”

“Where is it?” she asked eagerly.

The captain was prevented from answering by the arrival of Doctor Jones to test Sunny’s brain function. Gemma shooed Aiden and Steig away with a promise to return their shiny new toy to them later.

As Sunny threw a startled glance in his direction, Aiden scowled at Gemma. The doctor had the social skills of an amoeba sometimes.

A sailor called for Steig to return to the bridge, and Aiden made his way belowdecks. It was a simple matter—track down the cabin where Sunny’s clothes, laundered and pressed, had been hung in a closet. Sure enough, her bag sat on the floor beneath the hangers. Steig’s crew was nothing if not efficient.

He should leave the bag alone. Let the poor girl have her privacy. The new Aiden didn’t pull stunts like this. And yet, he pulled the waterproof sack out of her closet. He needed to know if the reason she’d nearly been killed was something she’d recorded, right?

Armed with that thin logic, he dumped the contents of the bag onto her bed. A few dog-eared family photos. Cell phone. Wallet. A flash drive. An impressive array of high-tech camera gear, including memory cards for her digital movie camera. Dozens of them.

He loaded a random card into her camera and pushed the play button. The footage had been taken underwater. A school of dolphins was circling, playing with the cameraperson—presumably Sunny. Shafts of sunlight streamed down into the sea and various fish darted in and out of the light. It made him want to take off his clothes and dive overboard right now. But then, his longing for the water was never far from him.

He popped the memory card out and put in another one. The footage jolted him. It was of live sharks thrashing on the deck of a fishing vessel as their fins were sawed off. They were rolled into the ocean still alive, mutilated and bloody, to die. The waste of it was sickening. If they were going to kill a shark, couldn’t they at least harvest the entire animal for its meat?

He fast-forwarded to another set of footage, fuzzy images of ships at a distance. But the quality of the film was poor. It had been shot through rain and the visibility wasn’t great.

Without warning, the door opened behind him. “This will be your—” A steward broke off in surprise. “Oh! I’m sorry, sir …”

“That’s okay,” Aiden replied, hastily stuffing the camera back into the bag.

But he wasn’t fast enough. Sunny had spotted what he’d been doing. “Hey! That’s my camera. What are you doing with it? I didn’t give you permission to mess with my stuff.”

He winced. She was, of course, entirely right. He explained hastily, “Somebody tried to kill you. I’m trying to find out why.”

The steward backed out discreetly and closed the door as Sunny retorted angrily, “That’s none of your business.”

She was magnificent in her indignation. Her eyes sparked golden fire and her entire body vibrated with passion. Lord, to bed all that exploding energy—

Not. Happening. Chagrined on several levels, he made a lame attempt to justify himself. “If you’re going to be aboard this ship, anything that might bring danger to it is my business. I wanted to know what threat we’re dealing with.”

“If I’m such a danger, put me ashore. Sail for the nearest port and I’ll disembark. Or if you really want to get rid of me and my personal baggage, have a helicopter come get me. I saw a snazzy landing pad for one up on deck.”

His voice rose in frustration. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. I’m trying to protect you!”

“It looks to me like you’re trying to invade my privacy … and doing a pretty good job of it. I don’t need your protection.”

Was she completely without a clue as to how much danger she might be in? He snapped, “Right. That’s why your boat was run over and I pulled you from the water more dead than alive. Because you’re doing such a bang-up job of taking care of yourself.”

She snatched the bag out of his hands and clutched it to her chest in much the same way she had done underwater the night before. What was on those other memory cards she seemed so desperate to protect?

“If I’m not mistaken,” she said stiffly, “this is my room. That being the case, please leave.”

She was throwing him out? After he’d saved her life? Exasperation slammed into him. He was only trying to help, dammit. He surged to his feet and headed for the door. A citrus scent wafted to him as he passed by her. It was tart and sweet on his tongue and begged to be tasted more fully, and it only succeeded in making him madder.

He paused in the doorway and spoke, his voice sounding stiff even to him. “I’m sorry if I offended you. But since my help is obviously not welcome, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll have Steig arrange to put you ashore as soon as possible.”

Sunny stared at the door in dismay as it closed behind Aiden. She didn’t mean to make him get all angry and distant like that; she’d just been mad that he’d been rifling through her bag. Its contents were all she had left in the entire world. Literally. Everything she owned had been on the New Dawn and was now lying on the bottom of the ocean. She didn’t need some stranger—even if he was glorious to look at—pawing through what little remained of her life.

She was probably overreacting. And it didn’t help that she was already on edge. Spending more than thirty seconds in the company of Gemma Jones was enough to make any woman feel inferior and a little tense. The doctor was so intelligent it was hard to have a conversation with her; her mind worked so quickly that she leaped from subject to subject almost too fast to follow.