Wickedly Wonderful (Baba Yaga, #2)(19)
Beka narrowed her eyes, and Fergus stifled a laugh, turning it into an unconvincing cough.
“I don’t think so,” she said in an unruffled tone. “If it is safe enough for you to go out, then it is safe enough for me. The water’s much calmer under the surface anyway.”
Marcus gritted his teeth. Why did the woman always have to be so difficult when he was just trying to keep her safe? “Maybe it will be calmer for you, but what about poor Fergus here? He’ll be stuck in a tiny dinghy with no place to hide from the storm, if it comes. Surely you don’t want to put him in danger.”
To his surprise, Fergus gave a loud, barking laugh, sounding for all the world like one of the seals who often greeted the boat on its way out of the harbor. “Oh, don’t worry about me, lad. I’m not afraid of getting a little wet.”
Beka snickered, although Marcus didn’t see anything funny about the two of them risking their lives for some sunken treasure that almost certainly didn’t exist.
Fine. He’d tried being reasonable. Now he was just going to be himself. He hadn’t led dozens of men across a war-torn country just to be thwarted by a skinny blond surfer girl in cutoffs and a curve-hugging red tee shirt.
“Forget it,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and blocking their way onto the ship. “You’re not going out with us today and that’s final.”
“What’s final?” his da asked, appearing over his shoulder like the ghost of fishing trips past. The older man’s face was paler than ever, with a pasty green undertone that owed more to chemotherapy than it did to the choppy water of the harbor. “What the hell is the holdup? We were due to cast off five minutes ago.” Bushy white brows waggled aggressively in Beka’s direction. “I told you, girl. You slow us down, you can’t come.”
Beka beamed at the old curmudgeon, as unimpressed by his bluster as always. “Hey, don’t blame me, Mr. Dermott. I got here right on time.”
She tilted her head in Marcus’s direction. “Your son seems to think he gets to say who does and doesn’t get to ride on your boat.” She gave Marcus a sly look out of the corner of her eye. “Is that true?”
Oh, nicely played. Dirty pool, but nicely played. Marcus could feel the muscles in his neck tighten as the situation slid out of his control.
“No, he damned well does not get to say who comes on my boat,” Marcus Senior growled. “Get the hell out of the way and let the girl come aboard, Mark-boy. We’re burning daylight.”
Marcus glanced dubiously at the sky, where any kind of light was in short supply, but he knew when he was beaten. “Fine,” he muttered, putting out a hand for Beka’s gear. “But if we get to the spot where you want to dive and I don’t think it’s safe, you’re staying on the goddamn boat.”
Beka shrugged tanned shoulders. “We’ll see.” She looked past him to where Chico and Kenny were standing, watching the show. “If it’s too rough to dive, Fergus and I will just help around the ship.” She cast Kenny a particularly sunny smile, and the poor kid almost fell overboard. “I’m a pretty quick study; you guys just point to where you need me, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”
Marcus watched in amazement as Chico’s weathered face split into a grin. Kenny he understood; the kid was young, and Beka looked like a mythic goddess risen from the sea. But Chico was a grandfather, slow moving and even tempered. He sent most of his wages to his family back in Mexico, and Marcus had never seen him even so much as glance at any of the half-naked women who decorated the beaches and piers of Santa Carmelita. But one smile from Beka and the ugly old bandito just twirled his long mustache and cleared off a place for her to put her gear as they motored slowly out of port.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say she’d cast a spell on all of them—his crabby father, the taciturn old Hispanic, and the starry-eyed young twerp currently gaping at her with a face like a guppy. Thank god Marcus was immune, or they’d all be in a world of trouble.
*
TWO HOURS OUT of port, the seas were rougher, the skies were darker, and the rain had turned from drizzle to deluge. Marcus tried one more time to convince his father to turn around and take them back in, but the stubborn old man had only said, “You catch more fish in bad weather than good, boyo,” and went off to sit in front of the sonar screen, glaring at it grimly as it continued to reflect an empty ocean. At least that way he was in the cabin, out of the chilly rain, Marcus thought, and went to deal with his other problem.
Surprisingly, Beka hadn’t put up much of a fight when they’d reached her proposed dive site and Marcus had insisted that the water was too wild for her to go in. She’d just raised an eyebrow at Fergus, who had taken a long, hard look over the side and slowly shaken his head.
“Well, crap,” she’d said with a shrug. “At least I tried.”
Marcus tried not to be put out that she’d paid more attention to one headshake from her pal Fergus than to a whole slew of reasonable arguments from him. And then he’d tried not to be even more annoyed by the way she and Fergus had both pitched in as promised, helping to batten down everything on deck and prepare the nets in case a school of fish miraculously appeared out of the wind and mists. As with her diving, her movements were controlled and efficient, and she seemed to have no trouble keeping her footing on the slippery, wave-swept deck.