Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(69)
He had one leg of a suit bunched up and was about to start pulling it on, but he looked at her, flashed her the side-eye. “How long’s it been since you went in the water?”
She flushed. “Years. I had an irrational fear.”
He straightened, giving her all his attention. Putting that entire lean body back on display. “I do remember. Are you going to be able to handle this? We could wait till morning, scrounge around for a dinghy or inflatable or something…”
“No, we’re doing this tonight,” she said, forcing herself to look anywhere but his bod. With a huff of breath, she tugged her shirt up and over her head and then folded it neatly and stacked it on the hood. “We lived near the ocean, and Daniel disbelieved in fear, had no patience for it, so he put me through dive training until I stopped having stupid panic attacks. I’m good. I was just asking because, you know, wet suits and unintentional hair removal and ouch.”
“Ah. These suits ain’t neoprene,” Kellen said slowly, still distractingly naked and so comfortable with it that her hands flexed toward him, completely of their own accord, longing to touch. “They’re smartfabric. They’ll filter out the toxins, make it so we don’t start glowing in that stew out there, and plus, they’ll ventilate once we get on board. Biometric sensors help them regulate temperature, and they smell a helluva lot better than the older kind. But it ain’t the suits bothering me right now. You do know fear, as a thing, isn’t related to how smart you are, right?”
She picked up the smaller suit. Light fabric, almost slippery and still holding the heat from the car’s vents. She couldn’t find any device pouches. Was the technology built into the fabric? Like her gloves, just for all-over body protection? Soft too, pliable. The suit smelled like decaf coffee.
She tugged one leg of the suit up under her skirt, then the other. Ooooh. No, these suits were nothing like those things she’d worn during dive training. This was like burrito-ing herself in warm satin. She suddenly coveted a whole closet full of these things. In all different colors. This could become an addiction worse than shoes.
“Of course fear is stupid,” she said. “Any time you know intellectually that a thing is safe but you run from it anyway, that is stupid.”
“See now, it ain’t, though. The difference between bravery and cowardice doesn’t have anything to do with brain capacity,” he said. “It’s more about trust. Faith. That kind of thing.”
The smartfabric dive suit slid on a lot easier than older kits, but it still took her a few minutes to get the longjohns up, then step out of the skirt. She folded that item, too, and went around to the passenger side to set her dry things in the car and fetch a couple of items she wanted to take in her dry pack. Yoink watched her avidly but didn’t so much as nose her for a pet. Suspicious cat, possibly judging her.
When Angela came back around to the glare of headlamps, Kellen was already working the diagonal press seam across his chest.
All covered up again. Bummer.
But also, he was watching her with the kind of intensity that made her wonder briefly if the dive suit was electrified. Certainly, when their gazes met, she felt a jolt of something hot and wild sizzle through her body.
“I trust you,” she told him in a voice that had gone husky. “And those dolphins. Let’s go.”
? ? ?
The thing “the intruder” had wanted Yoink to do, the thing that freaked the poor kitty out so hard, was to put her furry little body in the water and carve out a diving path for her two humans.
Clearly, whoever was out there in a submarine talking to dolphins didn’t know shit about cats and water. Especially this cat. Yoink was cool under most pressure—hell, could fly above the ionosphere deck in that spaceplane without a single complaint. But she was not going into the ink-black, death-filled ocean. Not one hair on her fluffy feline ass.
And Kellen didn’t blame her one bit.
Truth was, Kellen wasn’t looking forward to dunking himself in there, and he sure as hell didn’t want Angela to go in. She never had liked the water, and he watched her closely for signs that it still made her nervous.
He had guessed, based on her tight-lipped remark, that Daniel Neko had been a proponent of the flooding technique of getting over phobias. Not Kellen’s favorite process. He didn’t want to think of Angela shoved into a fear cage and kept there till she learned to calm herself. He wouldn’t do that to an animal and sure as shit not to a person. No less the woman he loved.
But if she said she was good to go now, he had no choice but to believe her. She’d used the t-word again. Trust.
Now, he had complete faith in the ocean critters to warn him of any danger, but Angela? She wouldn’t know about all that going on beneath the water’s surface. All she knew was what he’d told her, what he’d implicitly promised. And she had believed him. She trusted him.
Lord, don’t make me a liar. Only let this go off good.
He’d done dive training years ago, for rescue missions, but he didn’t go underwater that much, certainly not for fun. He felt like a novice out here, press-seaming a serious-looking suit they’d bought used from one of Dead Fester’s buddies. He also felt like a fraud forced to play expert to a suddenly calm Angela.
Come to think of it, a way too calm Angela. Eerily so. Like she’d tucked a tranquilizer meltaway under her tongue while he went back to fetch their gear. She’d just stood there staring while he got changed, and for a minute, he worried he’d have to dress her himself like a doll.