Exhausted as she was, Bree vowed never to forget what had happened to Daria. But what had happened? At least that man said he would help. He said “we” would find Daria. She should know who he was, but she could not recall. She felt both fearful and furious, so the doctor must be right about her moods, but she could not have amnesia, not about Daria.
Though Bree was afraid if she closed her eyes again she’d see the horror of the sea, the sharks, she pressed her eyelids tightly closed. Amazing how these bright lights hurt her eyes and how she could hear even the shuffle of the nurses’ feet on the floors. Other people’s voices and moans, cries of pain. Was she really hearing those or were they deep inside her?
The occasional screech of the curtains’ rings across the metal rods almost deafened her. She could hear the man ask Amelia for her cell phone and then take it outside the curtain to make a call to the coast guard to tell them about Daria and their dive boat.
Exhausted, sick, she felt so strange, but Bree knew then what she had to do, even if that man had promised to look for Daria, even if he was calling for help. When Amelia and the doctor weren’t looking, she had to get out of this bed, get another boat and go find her sister somewhere out on the dark, devouring sea.
4
It seemed to Bree that the nurses tried to keep her awake all night, not that she had time to sleep anyway. She wanted to get out of bed, find her clothes and find Daria. But nurses came in to check her eyes, shining pinpoints of light into them. They took her blood pressure and checked her drips. She heard them come and go, heard one chewing gum. And always, she thought she heard the roar of the wind and waves.
Despite her desire to stay awake and get up, each time they walked away, Bree slept the sleep of the dead. Had they drugged her? Had someone drugged Daria, too? Had she seen drug dealers trying to make a drop and they knew they had to silence her? Had the horrible people who brought in women for the twentieth-century slave trade called human trafficking come upon her and taken her prisoner, too? Daria would never desert her. Bree knew Daria as well as she knew herself, didn’t she?
Fighting a riptide of fear, she swam from nightmare to nightmare, but was suddenly aware that someone sat by her side. A woman. Amelia, when Bree wanted it desperately to be Daria.
“So strong, the water,” she said, once in the midst of a waking dream in which she was trying to tell her handsome rescuer what had happened. She was safe in his arms, huddled against him for protection. She never thought she’d need or want a man that way. Who was he? Shouldn’t she remember?
“Just a minute. I’ll get you some water,” Amelia said, evidently thinking she’d asked for a drink. She held up a glass with a straw to her lips. Bree saw that it was barely dawn and she was in a private room. Light poured through the window as bright as noon sun.
“Any news? Did they find her?” she asked, then drank greedily. She knew one of the tubes in her arm was to hydrate her, but her throat was so dry.
“They’re going to do a wide search at first light, so that’s right now. The coast guard’s starting with the coordinates your boatman gave them and did an initial sweep of the area last night.”
Manny. If only Manny had been with them as usual, this never would have happened…and then Daria’s sudden toothache…Bree ached all over.
“My boatman’s name,” she told Amelia, exhausted from the little effort of drinking, “is Manuel Salazar—Manny. Please call and tell him I’m okay.”
But what was the name of that other boatman, the sailor? She felt she should know him—wanted to know him.
“They’re going to do an air search, too,” Amelia went on, hovering over her. “I’m sure they’ll find Daria with your boat. I’ll bet the motor didn’t work, the anchor line broke and the storm drove her into the Ten Thousand Islands. They’ll find her.”
“Thanks for being here with me.”
“Where else would I be when you or Daria need me? I’m sorry if it took this accident for you to realize that.”
That edge to her voice, so familiar. When it came to Amelia, Bree remembered too much she’d like to forget. Amelia was six when their mother died of eclampsia in childbirth, delivering her twins. Now, as adults, they understood how their older sister could dislike them, even blame them. Their widowed father had thrown himself into rearing his twins, whom everyone oohed and aahed over. Amelia, a timid soul and a real little lady at heart, though she could be snippy, felt left out when Dad took the younger girls fishing and taught them to swim and dive. He’d always tried to include Amelia, but she’d have no part of it and ended up spending a lot of time with her maternal grandmother while the tomboy twins went to sporting events or dived with Dad.
“Amelia, what’s the name of that man who helped me? I know I’ve met him. I’m just a little foggy on some things—a few recent things.”
“You may have a concussion, or maybe that lightning did scramble your internal wires a bit. You’ve just got to relax or they’ll have to give you a sedative, as soon as they rule out a concussion. That will calm your anxiety and make you forget how traumatic it must have been to—”
“I don’t want to forget! Of course, I’m anxious, because we’ve got to find Daria! I’ve got to go help find her!”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Amelia told her, gently patting her arm as if she were a child. “They’re going to run some brain function tests today with a specialist from Fort Myers before you can be released. But the knight in shining sailboat who rescued you is Cole DeRoca, who serves on the Clear the Gulf Commission with me.”
Amelia went on, explaining that the commission was meeting today and that the twins’ accident would be the talk of the group and she wouldn’t be there to answer their questions.
Yes, Bree thought with a little flutter in her belly. Cole DeRoca, the guy who worked with rare woods and specialized in installing custom-made yacht interiors. Bree had been scraping barnacles off a hull in the marina when he’d been working on the same huge yacht, and he’d shared a sandwich and some wine from the galley with her.
She’d found him shockingly handsome in a rugged way. His deep voice had seemed to vibrate into the very core of her being. When she was working, Bree usually gave little thought to clothes, hair or makeup, but she’d wished that day she’d done better than an old, tight wet suit and saltwater-soaked hair yanked back in a ponytail. Cole had worn faded jeans and a black, sawdust-speckled T-shirt but still managed to look like an ad for owning a yacht, not working on one. His angular, hard body was sun-bronzed; he made her perpetual tan look pale. When he smiled or laughed, he got a cheek dimple and narrowed his dark eyes under thick but sleek eyebrows. Even as he’d chatted amiably, he’d managed to look her over thoroughly and she could still feel the impact of that down to her toes. If she could recall all that and Cole’s initial impact on her, didn’t that prove her head and body were still working well?
Other details of their brief time together came cascading back. He’d said he worked alone, measuring, ordering, cutting and fitting the imported woods. He loved being hands-on, he’d told her with a devilish grin. He’d told her his wife hadn’t wanted him to work with his hands and had a fit at a party when he called himself a carpenter instead of a yacht interior designer. And he’d said he was getting divorced, didn’t he?
“I already talked to Manny at your shop,” Amelia was saying, “but I had some trouble understanding him. He has a really thick accent. No wonder you took all those Spanish classes. You and your Hispanics.”
“If you’re including Cole, his grandfather was a boatbuilder from Portugal,” Bree told her as even more images and snatches of their conversation came back to her from that hour they’d spent together months ago. Yes, she was remembering him so distinctly that there was no way her brain could have been short-circuited by a lightning strike. But why hadn’t she placed him instantly when she saw him yesterday?
Granted,