Blue Moon (7 page)

As for this unaccustomed case of man-alert setting off her female radar, she didn't know what to think. Jeanne turned the creaky shower control, bracing as the nozzle overhead pelted her with cool water. With a shiver-ridden “Brrr!” she crossed her arms over her chest and did a quick 360-degree turn before turning off the cold water. It might have been tapped from one of the many freshwater rivers riddling the underbelly of the peninsula, but it felt as if it came from an Arctic pipeline.

Seizing her lower lip to keep it from trembling, she worked in her shampoo, the same scent as her shower gel—lavender.
Just like
Gabe's dear old mother. Something so silly it really shouldn't bother me
, Jeanne thought, bracing once more as she reached for the shower control.

But it did.

The morning started with a soft rain, but by the time breakfast had begun, the sun dominated a blue, cloudless sky. Gabe, his deckhand, Manolo Barrera, and Nemo joined Jeanne and her team in the dining room for the morning meal. Wearing cutoffs and a faded chambray shirt with the sleeves ripped out to reveal studly biceps, the captain flirted with Lupita, who was twice his age, to win his canine companion her permission to remain in the dining room.

“Since there is no one but you and your friends, how can it do harm,
no
?” the cook said.

“You are as kind and as lovely as the flowers on your dress,
señora
,” Gabe lifted the cook's wrinkled hand and kissed it. Lupita twittered in delight and fiddled with her time-salted black hair where it twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck.

“Besides,” Gabe went on, “I think you like to see Nemo bring in the laundry.”

“Nemo, he is so smart,” Lupita said to the others. “He brings in
Señor
Gabriel's socks and drops them in my laundry pot.” She pointed to a large, dented aluminum pot in the corner of the room. “No way,” Stuart said, his brow arched with skepticism.

“Give Nemo one of your socks,” Gabe challenged good-naturedly. “
Sí
, give the dog a sock,” Lupita chimed in.

“You do laundry in a
cooking
pot?” Remy looked at his food with even more distrust than before.

Lupita flashed him an indignant look. “
Cómo no
? The hot water does not come always from the pipe.”

Stuart pulled off a sock and held it out to the Lab. “Here, Nemo. Laundry detail.”

Thrilled with the attention, Nemo trotted over and seized the sock.

“I seriously question his smarts if he puts Stuart's sock in his mouth,” Mara observed, earning a playful kick across the table from the young man.

“Such a smart dog,” Lupita trilled as the pooch promptly went to the pot and dropped it in. She gave Nemo a rewarding rub on the head. “Not even my husband is so smart to pick up his own clothes.” “Will he fetch it back?” Stuart asked.

Gabe shook his head. “Don't confuse him. You can sneak it out when he's not looking.” Giving Nemo another piece of tortilla as a reward, he turned his attention to Mara. “So tell me, Mara, how is it that you became interested in the preservation of relics?”

The man did have an incorrigible charm to which no woman— old or young—seemed immune. At the attention, Mara lit up like a Christmas tree.

“I love history, and I thought working in this field could make it an adventure too.”

“What about you, Gabe? What was it like on your first excavation?” Nick asked, shepherding the conversation toward Gabe's diving adventures.

“You mean
salvage
, gentlemen,” Remy intervened. “Archaeologists excavate. Treasure hunters plunder.”

“I
plundered”—
the word dripped with Gabe's sarcasm—“fifteen million in bullion and jewels from a pirate ship off the Bermuda coast—or what the
teredos
had left of one. And of what the worms didn't eat, the government took half.”

At the touch of Nemo's wet nose on his elbow, he handed another piece of tortilla to the animal. The Lab wolfed it down with a gulp and emitted a satisfied burp.

Remy sniffed in repugnance. “Dogs have no place in a public establishment,” he complained under his breath, “especially one that runs around with filthy socks in his mouth.”

“Half ?” Stuart marveled, still hanging with the thread of conversation about pirate treasure. “That stinks. They didn't even know it was there.”

Gabe chuckled. “I'm with you, lad.”

“So you're a millionaire?” Mara's incredulity made Gabe grin. “Then why are you living on that, that . . .” At a loss to find an inoffensive adjective, she finished with a lame “boat?”

“Easy come, easy go.” He gave Nemo a hearty rub on the head. “Isn't that right, boy?”

Mara had had some of the same concerns as Remy about the seaworthiness of the
Fallen Angel
until she'd learned that the boat had passed a recent inspection.

Stuart scowled. “How did you spend that much money so fast?”

“The sea is great hole into which millions have been sunk, retrieved, and sunk again,” Gabe answered. He winked at Mara, bringing a becoming pink to her pale complexion.

“Aw, dude,” Stuart commiserated, rolling his eyes toward the high, vaulted thatched ceiling where fans turned slowly overhead.

“Before you three novices become too enthralled with our captain, you should know that he not only sunk his fortune in treasure hunting, but a promising career in—”

Appalled, Jeanne kicked at the professor's foot under the table. “A sound boat and reliable captain is all that matters to this expedition.”

The narrowed slit of his squint made it hard to say whether Gabe appreciated her running interference or not, but its blitz into her own made her heart flutter like a startled butterfly. Fortunately the roar of a big engine and shifting of creaky gears drew her attention outside, sparing her from further arrhythmia.

Erupting in a bark, Nemo started to charge for the door, but Gabe grabbed his collar.

“Whoa, boy. Sit,” he cajoled. “No business of yours.”

Through the wide screened window of the dining room, Jeanne watched a large truck pull into position to maneuver its trailer near the dock. Easing around it, a van found its way to an out-of-the-way parking space and came to a stop. She recognized Don Pablo Montoya, Genesis's Mexican partner and CEDAM representative, and Ann Mills, a former college classmate of Jeanne's and current photographer for
World Geographic
magazine, as they emerged from the van.

“Hail, hail, the gang's all here,” she sang, abandoning the table to greet the last of her crew. “Come on, Remy,” she called over her shoulder as she pushed her way through the screen door to the veranda. “Let's see what they brought.”

If all was well, the diving gear, the compressors, and all the detection devices, along with their computer, software, and printers were inside the trailer parked as close to the edge of the dock as the bait shack and market would allow.

“Don Pablo,
hola
,” Jeanne called out, bounding down the path toward the new arrivals.

A short bear of a man with a veritable bush of mustache under his nose, Pablo Montoya was as responsible for the project's success to date as Jeanne. A master diver, accomplished artist, and cartographer by trade, not to mention serving on the organization's executive board, he would be invaluable for mapping out the dive and sketching the artifacts.

“
Buenos dias
,
doctora
.”

“Jeanne,
por favor
,” Jeanne insisted, offering her hand.

“Then I am Pablo,
solamente
.”

“
Muy bien
,” she agreed. “And my colleague bringing up the rear is Dr. Remy Primston, chair of the marine archeology department at my alma mater, Texas A&M Galveston.”

“Remy,” Remy said, shaking Montoya's hand. “Our Jeanne wants us all one big happy family.”

“And I am
only
Ann,” her friend called from the side door of the van where she wrestled three camera bags onto her sturdy shoulders. Ann used to kid that she was built like a workhorse, short and stocky with more muscle than fat, while Jeanne's slight, long-legged build was that of a racer.

Jeanne rushed around the van and hugged Ann, cameras and all. “I can't believe you're sharing my dream,
Only
Ann,” she mimicked, backing away. “I feel like I have to pinch myself every two or three minutes, just as a reality check.”

“I'd have come along if I had to take time off to do it,” Ann quipped in her characteristic dry manner. “But getting paid to do it makes it better.” With short blonde hair that would spike when she removed her ball cap, Ann looked ready for anything. “So where do I bunk in?”

Jeanne made a little face. “
Hammock
in, I'm afraid.” Despite her adventurous nature, she'd hardly slept all night for fear of breaking her neck. The hammock was sound, but Jeanne liked to sleep on her stomach, which was a no-no in a sling.

“Ah,
that
I already anticipated,” Don Pablo said. “Which is why there are cots in the truck. It does not do well for divers to work without a good night's sleep,
no
?”

“I don't even have to ask, and God takes care of our needs,” Jeanne exclaimed to no one in particular.

“I've a bed on its way from Merida,” Remy informed him. “Temperamental back, you see.”

Ann whistled as she caught sight of Gabe approaching the group, Nemo at his heel. “And I had to get married,” she observed, feasting her mischievous blue-gray eyes on Gabe's sun-bronzed biceps.

“You always did have a thing for the five o'clock shadow guys,” Jeanne shot back beneath her breath.

Gabe extended his free hand. “Pablo, good to see you again,
amigo
, but did you have to bring company?”

Bewildered, Jeanne followed Gabe's nod to the mouth of the small cove where another vessel approached, its pristine exterior gleaming eggshell white and polished chrome against the clear blue water.

“The
Prospect
,” Pablo said, the name crushing the earlier enthusiasm from his demeanor. “I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid of what?” Jeanne asked, definitely out of the gloom-and-doom loop that had encircled Gabe and Pablo.

“I kept everything as low-key as possible,” Pablo explained, more to Gabe than to Jeanne. “But filing for the permit and putting together a supply list—”

Gabe cut him off. “I know how it is,
amigo
. And we had to be cleared through the organization.”

“What's the deal here, gents?” Jeanne folded her arm across her chest, chilled by the scowl she saw building on Gabe's face.

“The deal is,” he began, letting Nemo go, “we've been found out.” Pivoting toward the van, he flung open the back doors as the dog raced down the dock to greet the new arrival. “I
hate
politics.”

“We now must work twice as fast,” Pablo explained further. “Or the
Prospect
and her crew will jump our claim on the
Luna Azul
.

” Jeanne took a step back, glancing at the sleek sports fisherman gliding toward the marina. “It could be coincidence, couldn't it?”

“And dreams
could
come true,” Gabe said, hauling a reel of blue nylon rope out of the van. “But when Marshall Arnauld is involved, my bet's on a nightmare.”

CHAPTER SIX

The
Prospect
was top of the line, Jeanne noted later that afternoon as she led the Genesis crew down the dock to where the yacht had tied up. Sporting a yachtsman's cap on silver-shot brown hair, Marshall Arnauld stood at the head of an aluminum gangway that rose and fell with the tide. His pressed linen slacks and a navy silk shirt, open at the collar, revealed the thick, but trim build of a man who was physically active.

“Come one, come all,” he called out magnanimously.

When Arnauld had issued an invitation for dinner aboard his yacht earlier that day, Gabe had told the Genesis crew a little about him. A scion of an American financial empire with more money than a man had a right to—Gabe's sour description—he'd become enamored of treasure hunting. Once bitten by the gold bug, not even the family fortune was enough. Arnauld wanted glory to go with his money—and would spend any amount to get what he wanted, both above and below the table of the law.

Mum must be the word of the day with regard to their project, Gabe had warned.

“Dr. Madison.” Arnauld extended his hand to Jeanne as she scaled the incline of the gangway. “What a pleasure to meet you. I've heard some impressive things about your rise in the world of marine archaeology, but I must say, they are only exceeded by your beauty.”

“I've heard a lot about you as well, Mr. Arnauld,” Jeanne answered, her polite handshake thwarting her host's attempt to lift her hand to his lips. “How kind of you to invite me and my colleagues to dinner on your yacht. We're missing just one—our photographer has begged off, after taking a red-eye flight from Alaska last night.”