Chapter 32

Around Stefan, the crowd burst into spontaneous laughter and applause.

"What a dismount!" breathed a woman beside him, awe thick in her voice. "Honey, did you see that?"

"She looked like she fell," the little girl said, and her mother snorted.

"You don't fall with that much precision—at least I don't. That was planned."

Stefan was inclined to agree with the child. He pulled the camera off his shoulder and stalked to the edge of the water, ignoring the shouts and cheers of the other spectators for the remaining athletes. He didn't want to draw attention to Nicki if she wasn't harmed, but he had no problem jumping into the bay with the entire lifeguard brigade if he thought there was anything wrong with her.

Something had definitely been wrong.

She'd started well enough—slightly tense, perhaps, getting her footing with the unfamiliar board and sail. The other instructors had pivoted and pirouetted around her, their bodies as lithe and built for movement as Nicki's. But then something had changed. He pinpointed it to after she'd gotten the harness from Josef, a freestyle apparatus that allowed her to angle her body more dramatically off the board. At first, she'd seemed fine with it—but she'd kept staring down at her board, at first with curiosity and then with something approaching distress.

Then she'd grasped the boom of the sail hard and from that point on, he couldn't tell what had been intentional and what had simply been her falling with precision and then being tossed back up again, as if the waves were part of the performance.

As if the waves….

Poseidon, what are you up to?

There was no response from the god of the sea, but a chorus of sea nymph chatter erupted from the waves, carried on the wind—laughter, worry, delight, tears. The tears added some urgency to his pace and he jogged up the beach, his eyes on Nicki as she floated for a few moments, her sail arcing out beside her. She'd pulled herself onto the board and her face was turned away from him. At this distance, it appeared as if she was merely taking a break to watch the other athletes flip and whirl, more of them coming off their boards with each turn. The demonstration was winding down.

A few of the surfboarders managed a dismount while angling their boards toward shore, a simple procedure that nevertheless generated applause from the appreciative crowd. Nicki would have done that too, he suspected. She wouldn't have done a flip into the water, no matter what, not with so many kids watching. She would have been more careful.

As if hearing his increasingly concerned thoughts, Nicki finally turned the craft toward shore. With a few quick strokes, she positioned it so she could easily stand in the water and push the entire apparatus forward. Other dismounted boarders were doing the same thing, only a few demonstrating a water mount to guide their boards in.

She took her time, then clearly noticed him standing at the shoreline. A bright, bold grin flashed across her face, and something hard and ugly unclamped from Stefan's chest. For the first time in ten minutes, he drew in a deep breath, and his hands unclenched from their fists as he proceeded casually down to the shoreline.

"You'll get wet," Nicki protested, waving him back. Her smile remained fixed on her face, but her voice sounded thin, thready.

"I'll survive." As the sea nymphs hooted and sang with delight, their distant cries audible to no one but him, Stefan waded into the water and took the edge of the sail. Nicki let him, floating backward as he maneuvered the board and sail around.

"This is all part of the demonstration," he said to her over his shoulder. "Showing how easy it is to pull the unit onto the beach. Go with it."

She didn't respond and he forced himself to focus on the board, the sail, safely bringing the unit out of the water to line up neatly with the other athletes' equipment. As he walked, he scanned the board, and he paused when he noted where the mast foot was secured to the wide, colorful board.

Stefan hadn't spent a lot of time on these toys, but he knew enough to know the mast foot was almost disconnected.

He dropped the board, turning back to the water, and Nicki was beside him. Someone had draped her in a brightly colored beach towel that proclaimed the name of Josef's camp, and she followed his gaze to the mast foot.

"Did it break mid-run?" he asked, as the chorus of sea nymphs changed cadence, becoming more mournful now that their playmate was no longer in the sea. "Or was it damaged when you started?"

Nicki didn't respond for a second, pulling her towel closer as if it was protection. "It didn't break as fully as some I've been on. It just sort of lost connection—it stayed attached, see? But not tightly."

"Right. And how did that affect your sailing?"

"Why, did I look bad?" She turned to him, disappointment evident in her face. He found himself shaking his head quickly, willing to do anything—say anything to reassure her.

"Not at all," he said. "The proof will be on the video footage later, and you can review it for yourself. There was a lot of spray at the end, when I suspect you had trouble with the mast. But it seemed you were in a controlled spin."

"A controlled spin, that's awesome." Nicki's laugh sounded shaky, and her color was off—not as warm or high as he would have expected, following her exertion in the water. "I totally fell at the end, though," she said with a candor that surprised him. "No way around that."

"It was artful enough to leave the question of whether or not you did it on purpose." He shrugged, falling in line with her as they headed back toward the main crush. "Do you need to rest? Are you hurt?"

"Nah. Beat up a little, shook up too, I guess." She shrugged. "I saw that mast foot issue and I could have kicked myself for not checking and rechecking the equipment more thoroughly. Josef's crew is the best, and they work with kids. They're hyper-vigilant. But it's my job to check their work. I'm the one in the water."

Her irritation sounded more like Nicki's normal voice, and Stefan's nerves quieted another few degrees as they re-entered the crowd. Fortunately, Nicki was one of several athletes, and while the older teen girls gravitated toward her, she emerged on the other side of the crowd relatively unscathed. Josef was surrounded by tourists asking questions, and Stefan suspected that she wouldn't tell him of the machinery issue until he was out of earshot of the curious crowd.

"Ambassador Mihal, Miss Clark. You saw much, yes? You have more for your tourism video."

Nicki blinked, but Stefan filled in smoothly. "We have a great deal of footage. You'll be very pleased with the final result."

"Good! Good." Omir scanned up to the ridgeline, his gaze drifting to the southern ridge and the excavation, prominently obvious from this distance. "I think we go ahead and do the tour this evening, as the sun is setting. That will give you good light?"

He slanted a glance to Nicki. It would provide terrible light, but she brightened immediately. "Oh! The light would be absolutely beautiful then," she said. "The sunset views from that location I suspect are stunning, and we could do some fun things with shadows since it's a centuries-old site."

"More than centuries," Omir said, puffing his chest out. "The foundations go back thousands of years. We are only now beginning to uncover its treasures."

"It sounds fascinating." And to her credit, Nicki apparently believed what she said, moving up to her toes as she stopped clutching the beach towel so tightly. "When would be convenient for you to show us?"

"After most of the day's work is done," Omir said, his gaze shifting up to the ruins again. "I will send a car at six p.m.—we'll have time to tour what we can and see the sunset. It will be a sight you will never forget, I assure you."

Nicki nodded enthusiastically, even as Stefan grimaced.

It was certainly a sight he'd never forget…especially if it led them to Ari.