14. Knox

Knox had seen a hundred turtles over the past four days. He'd learned what they ate, how long they lived, and more than he ever wanted to know about their mating habits. Put a green turtle next to a loggerhead, and he stood a reasonable chance of telling the two species apart. But nothing compared to seeing a hawksbill in the wild for the first time.

Especially when that hawksbill was hanging motionless in the water, a vicious hook piercing its mouth.

Fuck.

The dive had started out well, or at least as well as could be expected when his dive buddy wasn't speaking to him. Caro swam sedately twenty feet ahead. This wasn't exactly a hardship seeing as she looked good from any angle, and despite her refusal to converse on land, she did keep checking on him as any good buddy should. Scowling through her dive mask, eyes narrowed, tendrils of buckeye-brown hair escaping from her ponytail and floating around her face.

She tapped her slate. Right. They were meant to be working.

Knox studied the profile of the bay, where a curve of sand sloped gently to a steep drop-off forty yards from shore. They'd agreed that they wouldn't be venturing any farther—for every thirty-three feet, they'd be under an additional atmosphere of pressure. At a hundred feet down, they'd go through air four times faster than they did on the surface.

Rocks dotted the sandy bottom, each a mini ecosystem with coral and fish clustered around. He tried making a quick sketch. Damn, it looked more like a banana. He'd have failed art classes in high school if the teacher hadn't been twenty-three and up for a quick fuck in the supply closet. Adult Knox wasn't the type of man a woman would take to meet the family, but if a girl had brought teenage Knox home, her daddy would have been waiting on the porch with a shotgun.

He added rocks, and now the sketch looked like a banana with fungus, so he gave up and snapped a few photos instead. If there was a test, he could just attach those to his report. Ditto for the fish. He quit trying to count blue tangs and took a picture of those as well. Still no sign of any turtles, and…fuck, where the hell was Caro? She'd been beside him ten seconds ago, watching a cowfish as it swam slowly around. Knox turned a full circle, watching for a flash of pink, but there was nothing.

Nada.

Which left only one place she could be. He kicked hard for the drop-off, the steep wall where the reef disappeared into the blue, cursing in his head because she should know better than to go below their agreed maximum. When they got back on dry land, he'd curse her out in person and?—

That was when he saw it. The thin line, almost invisible as it disappeared over the edge of the reef wall. A couple of the jagged barbs attached to it still had bait on them, and when Knox swam into the blue, the horror story unfolded beneath him, written in blood. Four turtles were caught on the line, floating lifelessly in the gentle current, their eyes cloudy. Caro was thirty feet farther down, her leg tangled in the line as a fifth turtle hung beneath her.

Knox's pulse ratcheted up a notch as he dove. He and Caro had both spent years of their lives around water, but while he'd been drilled through every hellish scenario imaginable until he basically became amphibious, she hadn't been pushed to extremes. Her panic was all too evident in her jerky movements.

Calm down, babe. I'm coming.

Her timing sucked, but she'd finally broken her habit of watching her back, and as he got close, a flailing arm knocked off his dive mask. Fucking fantastic. His vision blurred, and it took him two attempts to grab the sinking mask, another five seconds to put it back on and purge the water. Caro was still freaking out, and Knox grabbed her wrists, holding her arms still as he fought to gain control of the situation. For once, she didn't try to do him bodily harm.

Their gazes met, her eyes wide and terrified, and she was sucking in lungfuls of air. Wasting lungfuls of air. They were a hundred and thirty feet down now, and they'd need every breath to get out of there safely.

Knox released a hand and pointed two fingers at his eyes. Watch me. He'd dropped his dive slate, and there was no easy way to communicate. There were no hand signals for this shitshow of a situation. Trust me, he tried to tell her. Trust me, and I'll get us out of here.

After a long second, she nodded.

Her breathing slowed.

Knox reached for the knife strapped to his leg. The five-inch titanium blade had been a birthday gift from Slater—Knox and Ryder's colleague and housemate—along with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a stripper. At the time, he'd preferred the stripper, but today, he changed his mind on that. The serrated knife edge sliced through the mess of line easily, and the instant Caro was free, she slipped out of Knox's grip and dove after the sinking turtle.

For the love of fuck…

One good kick, and Knox grabbed her inflator hose. He put enough air into her BCD that she began rising to the surface, not so fast it was unsafe, but rapidly enough that she shot daggers from her eyes as she scrambled for the release valve. He slashed a hand through the water. Cut it out. Of course, she ignored him, and he had to grab the toggle out of her hand. She shook her head. He spat out his regulator and glared.

"Up!" he mouthed.

She removed her own regulator, and he figured she was going to try arguing, but what she actually did was start choking. Knox put another blast of air into her jacket, and then she was too busy trying to breathe to fight him again.

The turtle was sinking, but as Knox got closer, he saw it was still alive. A fin was moving, and its eyes were clear. One of those eyes focused on him as he grabbed the end of the line, and in that moment, he felt it. A connection. In the SEALs and then with Blackwood, he'd battled his way out of some pretty hairy situations, and at times, he was sure that only the determination flowing through his veins had gotten him home. And that's what he saw in the hawksbill before him. Determination.

The creature was three feet long, wrapped in the thin nylon rope that had led to the deaths of at least four of its kin. He cut away what he could, then wrapped the remains of the line around one hand. He used the other to inflate his BCD, but it wasn't enough. The creature was a deadweight. He checked his air. Fifty bar left—he should be on the beach by now—but he wasn't letting the turtle go. Knox kicked hard, sending silent thanks to Emmy and her insistence that her team spend an obscene amount of time keeping fit.

Slowly, slowly, he inched toward the surface, his dive computer beeping warnings about air consumption and ascent rate and—since it was a Blackwood custom model—probably flashing a message from Emmy telling him to stop acting like a twat.

He should show the message to Caro because as he rose, he glanced up and saw her coming toward him, fast, too fast. For fuck's sake, couldn't she get the message? She'd emptied her BCD to descend, then run out of air, so now she was sinking with eight pounds of lead strapped around her waist. Knox caught her as they drew level and pointed at his spare regulator—every diver carried one in case of emergency.

Maybe it was the fact that he'd brought the injured hawksbill with him, or maybe it was his "fuck with me again, and I'll drown you myself" expression, but the fight went out of her. Caro gripped his arm as he used a lungful of precious air to inflate her BCD manually using the backup tube. Then he checked his dive computer, relieved beyond measure when it said "No stop." They didn't have the air for any more delays. The message scrolling across the screen said "Get out of the water, you fuckwit," and Knox spent the remaining ascent time getting a handle on his temper. Caro hadn't only endangered her own life; she'd risked his too.

"What the fuck?" he asked as soon as they hit the surface.

"I couldn't leave her down there to die alone."

"So you thought you'd go join her in the afterlife?"

"I wasn't trying to die."

Knox supported the turtle so she could take a mouthful of air and then resumed the argument.

"Well, sweetheart, I guess you just have natural talent. What the hell are we meant to do with this turtle?"

"We need to get her onto the beach and untangle her, and depending on how badly she's injured, we might need to take her to the sanctuary. And the dead turtles…" Caro hiccuped a sob, the first time Knox had seen any emotion other than anger or irritation from her. "We have to get them too."

"No, no, no. We're not diving again today. We didn't make a safety stop, and neither of us has time to get treated for decompression sickness. Are you feeling okay? Any dizziness? Nausea?"

He studied her closely. She'd gone pale and her breath came in pants, but she hadn't vomited, so Knox took that as a good sign.

"Why do you even care?" she asked.

"It's my job to care."

That sounded better than telling her he liked her in a weird "I want to fuck your tits because I have masochistic tendencies" sort of way, which would have been totally inappropriate under the circumstances. Under any circumstances, in fact. But it was the truth, or at least, the only truth Knox allowed himself. Deeper feelings were dangerous.

"I thought you were a Navy SEAL? Isn't it your job to shoot people?"

"Common misconception, but being on a SEAL team is about solving problems, not leaving a trail of bodies in your wake. Which brings us back to the turtle. Should we lift her out of the water?"

Caro shook her head. "Not yet. Picking her up by the shell could do more damage. There's a board in the truck—we can lift her on that."

"Stay with the turtle while I get it."

"No, I'll go. I need to call Franklin and tell him what happened." Caro wiped a hand over her eyes. It might only have been seawater on her face, but Knox was ninety percent sure it was tears. "Four turtles, gone. Leaving baited lines is illegal here. What kind of psycho would do that?"

What kind of psycho? Knox had a feeling he didn't want to know the answer to that question.