Vortex (Cutter Cay) Read online

  She looked down at the bowl. “This is lovely,” she murmured, trying to regroup. The artifact was stunning. The size of a large shallow teacup, it was as if it was made to fit in the palm of her hand. Heavy for its size and delicacy, it weighed over three pounds. Carved, she knew, from the original five-pound lump of emerald straight out of the ground in Muzo.

  Its three short legs, pared from the solid piece, were fanciful fish. Emeralds were soft stones, and the bowl, once glass smooth, was now pitted by time. The ring of ships carved in beautiful, and delicate, bas relief circling the outside, were still easy to identify.

  Nuestra Señora de Garza. La Daniela, San Isidro, and Conde del Mar.

  “Yeah, it is.” She glanced up to see him watching her intently. His steady, penetrating gaze made her feel transparent. It was as if he could see right into her lying, mouse-in-a-maze brain. “He attacked you, then threw you overboard?”

  Daniela forced herself to maintain eye contact. Once, lying had been practically unknown to her. These days, she was becoming quite proficient at it. Practice made perfect.

  She smiled slightly. Project calm, cool, honest. “No. I attacked him, and jumped overboard.” She swore that when she discovered which idiot had clocked and almost killed her, before tossing her into the water, she was going to kick his ass.

  His lips twitched. “Brave woman.”

  “Desperate woman,” she corrected as Dog rolled over on his side, legs spread out in front of him, paws crossed. “Look,” she told his owner. “Obviously I don’t have any money on me, hell, I don’t even have shoes. But can I stay on board for a little while?” Two weeks four days, to be precise.

  The cousins might’ve forced her into this situation, but being on board Cutter’s ship served her purpose as well. Might as well use it to her advantage. “Until I’m sure he’s long gone at least? I’d be happy to work for my passage in any capacity. Except in your bed, of course,” she tacked on calmly, just in case her story gave him any ideas.

  “Of course.” Cutter’s tone was Sahara dry. Daniela would’ve preferred if he didn’t watch her as if she were a bug under a microscope. “It would be no hardship to carry an extra passenger, we’ve got the room. Sounds like with your experience, you’re a Jill of all trades. You’re welcome to stay on the Sea Wolf until you deem it safe to”—he paused—“go back to your life. I’m sure we can find something for you to do. But go ahead and take a couple of days off first. How does that sound?”

  “Fantastic, thanks. That’s very nice of you. I haven’t had a vacation in years. It will be nice not to be at someone’s beck and call morning, noon, and night.” And wasn’t that the truth?!

  “Are you and your friends on vacation?” she asked casually. “What are you doing out here? Game fishing?”

  “We eat what we catch.” His smile was electrifying. Had he decided to believe her? Or was that the same smile a shark gave when circling closer and closer to dinner?

  “The Sea Wolf is a salvage ship. We’re searching for a four-hundred-year-old Spanish galleon. Nuestra Señora de Garza.” He leaned back in his chair. The sunlight beaming through the open window highlighted the blade of his nose and made his eyes look eerie and otherworldly. “She was returning home to Spain, loaded with gold and emeralds, but sank after a storm incapacitated her, leaving her to be finished off by a fierce battle with local pirates. A double whammy.”

  “She was obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Wrong ship, buddy, but the right load. Now, just turn around and head south down the coast.

  Daniela stroked her thumb over the smooth surface of the carved ships on the emerald bowl. The Nuestra Señora de Garza in front, followed by the three smaller gunboats like a mother hen by her chicks.

  A little buzz of warning rang in her brain. Wait a minute—There was absolutely no way a man like Cutter, and she didn’t even know him well, would give a total stranger that information. Tell someone he didn’t know, who happened to be stuck on his ship, that there was the potential of scoring what amounted to millions of dollars in booty?

  Either he was stupid. Which she was sure he was not.

  Or very trusting. His eyes said not.

  Or he was telling her so he could see what she would do next.

  Playing cat and mouse could be exhausting. She’d thought she was done with it.

  Daniela leaned forward, the green bowl, worth more than a king’s ransom, held loosely in her hand as she lobbed the ball back into his court. “You’re a treasure hunter? Wow. How cool is that?”

  “Usually I’m a treasure finder,” he said dryly. “But my prize this time around is proving to be elusive. We found our wreck, and some debris field—three miles of it—but not the treasure. We were going to move to another location this morning, but fishing you out of the water delayed us while we decided just what to do with you.”

  Lovely; she was like a lost and found package. “There’s no reason to stick around here if you want to go somewhere else. I’m pretty good at unraveling puzzles. Maybe I can help you find your big fish.” She smiled and held up the bowl. “Are you following this map?” Her question sounded innocent, she hoped, but it felt loaded and weighty to her. There was no subtle way to work that into the conversation.

  Of course he wasn’t following the damned map. If he was, he wouldn’t be hundreds of miles off course, parked in the wrong place, and she wouldn’t be sitting here with a painful egg on her forehead, and a dog the size and weight of a moose cutting off the circulation in her feet.

  “I have a copy of the ship’s log, and from all our research the Nuestra Señora de—” He frowned slightly at the non sequitur. “What map?”

  Daniela tilted the bowl so he could see the lines and markings scored inside. “This appears to be a map to … something.” To my namesake, La Daniela.

  His frown deepened, and so did the suspicion that she’d been too caught up in her own fabrications to heed the warning in his eyes. “What makes you think it’s a map?”

  She pretended to inspect the swirls and notations carved on the inside. “Maybe it isn’t? That’s disappointing. Well, it looks like a map—Longitude and latitude right here, landmarks, et cetera.”

  She’d never seen the bowl, but she’d heard her fill about it all her life. Her side of the family had never had possession of it. Generations of the bowl’s owners had, for various reasons, never managed to retrieve the treasure for themselves. Instead, they’d passed along the story until it had reached mythical proportions.

  Even when her cousins had told her they’d gotten the bowl into Cutter’s hands, she hadn’t been sure if they’d handed him a Tupperware container or the real deal.

  The real deal, apparently.

  She looked up and pulled a disappointed moue. “Probably not. I was reading something just last month in National Geographic about how hundreds of years ago, people used whatever they had to make maps so their descendants could find hidden treasures.”

  His smile disappeared. A shiver raced across Daniela’s nerve endings. He wasn’t going to go for any of this. Maybe if she’d had some damned heads-up that she’d be sitting here chatting with the man this morning, she would’ve come up with a smoother transition. Right now she was winging it.

  It had all made sense when she’d lain there last night, just a few feet from a sleeping stranger, and concocted a story that now had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. But if she didn’t keep dropping hints, Logan Cutter would head off in an even more wrong direction, or worse, give up the search and move on to something else, and she’d be quite literally sunk.

  “Wouldn’t it be incredible if this was the key to finding the wreck you’re looking for?” She let her voice trail off doubtfully.

  It was an emerald off the treasure of Nuestra Señora de Garza, given for safekeeping to the captain of the gunship La Daniela to take home to Spain with a fortune of gold and emeralds, right under the noses of unsuspecting pirates.

  The smaller ship had slippe
d away from the pirates pursuing the larger ship, exactly as planned, with no one, including Logan Cutter, the wiser. Only to encounter El Niño hundreds of miles south, which had dashed it against the rocks. There’d been only one survivor. Her great, great, great whatever. A thief, a scoundrel, and oh, yeah. Probably a liar.

  “That would be a one in a million chance and a hell of a coincidence.” He held out an elegant hand. “May I?”

  It was no coincidence, and it had apparently taken weeks of planning and attention to detail to get the damned bowl into his hands. Although, having interacted with the men responsible, Daniela wouldn’t have thought to put “careful” or “planning” of any kind into their vocabulary.

  They’d sold Cutter the bowl. Then waited. And waited. For him to change course. For him to head to where the bowl indicated La Daniela had gone down. For him to get a freaking clue. So far, nothing had gone according to plan. She hadn’t wanted to be involved in this harebrained scheme in the first place. So they’d taken the choice out of her hands.

  Daniela rose without disturbing Dog, and leaned over the desk to hand Cutter the bowl. Their fingers brushed. An electrical shock zinged up her arm, and she sat down on the chair with a thump. Holy Mother of God, what was that?

  He turned the bowl between his hands. Stroked a finger inside, along the ridges and swirls. His face was obscured as his hair fell forward, but she read excitement in his shoulders, and the reverent way he cradled the bowl. “Interesting.”

  He placed it gently on the desk. “Stranger things have happened on the way to great finds.” He tapped several keys on his keyboard.

  Daniela held her breath.

  * * *

  She looked better this morning. Much better, Logan thought. Her eyes were her best feature, long-lashed and amber brown, the color somewhere between chocolate and aged whiskey. Her nose had a little bump on the bridge as if it had been broken, but it didn’t detract from how appealing she was.

  Her olive complexion shone with vitality and good health, and looked temptingly smooth and strokable. Her shoulder-length hair was the rich color of bitter chocolate, and slightly wavy. The bump on her forehead was covered by a sweep of glossy dark hair that brushed her long eyelashes.

  Even in borrowed jeans a few sizes too large and a cotton T-shirt, she looked as if she wore designer clothes. She hadn’t arrived wearing a bra, and she wasn’t wearing one now. Her breasts were small and firm, her nipples small peaks against the gray fabric. Not that he was looking.

  There was something defiant about her bearing, as if she was waiting for someone to challenge her. Was that a normal characteristic for her? Was she used to people doubting her? Was she a pathological liar and therefore expected people to doubt what she said? Or was her attitude a by-product of her fabricated story?

  Or—stranger things could happen. He shifted his attention from her breasts to the bowl. The story was just preposterous enough to be true. She was exactly who she claimed to be, and her story was the real deal.

  And he believed in happy endings and unicorns.

  He pulled up the charts for the coastline of Peru on his computer, taking his time while he mulled over this latest development. Miss Annie Ross had brought a lot of questions on board with her.

  Nuestra Señora de Garza was said to have first encountered El Niño, and then, when she’d been left vulnerable with her sails shredded, she’d been hit by pirates.

  The Sea Wolf was experiencing La Niña now, the meteorological opposite of the El Niño that had sunk Logan’s Spanish galleon hundreds of years ago. She was characterized as normal, even drier weather than usual, with stronger offshore winds and a return of colder water offshore.

  Annie’s story wouldn’t be that hard to validate. If the ship she’d been on went into port, they’d have to register. Someone would know which ship and where. Piet would find out everything necessary about the shipping traffic in the time frame Annie could’ve been thrown, or jumped, overboard.

  This whole business with the bowl had come out of left field. He’d known it was carved from a grapefruit-sized emerald; the pitting in the soft surface of the gem was unmistakable. He’d paid a couple of hundred bucks to a persuasive seller on the wharf in Lima when he’d arrived last month.

  A pretty artifact, he’d thought. A look through his jeweler’s loupe later had surprised the hell out of him. The stone was a high-quality gem, very old, and without a doubt, out-of-the-stratosphere valuable. Clearly the seller had had no idea of the value of what he’d sold.

  Logan had immediately put out discreet feelers to see if the bowl had been stolen. It was beyond price, and worthy of gracing any reputable museum. But as of yet he hadn’t heard anything about it one way or the other.

  Then in walks a woman he doesn’t know, with a suggestion that the same artifact was a map. Call him a skeptic, but that stretched the bounds of coincidence to a whole other level bordering on science fiction.

  He liked pretty things, and his new guest was certainly that, with her soft mouth and wealth of shiny dark hair. How much of her story was true? If she was lying, she was good. A trait Logan didn’t find commendable.

  He didn’t give a shit if the lie was important, or to cover someone’s ass. He demanded straight talk from his business associates, employees, friends, and family.

  He was a hard-ass about it and didn’t give a fuck if people liked his rule or not. If he caught anyone in a lie, the association was over. Done. Finished. Forever. He cut them out like a cancer and didn’t look back.

  So, liar or not, Annie Ross?

  Not too many facts to trip her up, a little self-deprecating humor, and a studious suppression of her not inconsiderable sex appeal. He couldn’t, wouldn’t let the fact that he found her sexually appealing cloud his bullshit radar.

  He was already predisposed to doubt her veracity because she’d been found floating in the ocean miles from anywhere and was strangely cagey when he’d asked how she’d ended up there.

  Yet if this was some sort of nefarious scheme, it was a pretty dangerous one. She hadn’t cried out when she was in the water. If not for Dog, Logan wouldn’t have known she was out there.

  “Well?” she asked eagerly, leaning forward.

  “I’m checking the location to see if it’s even possible.” Peru was the third-largest country on the central west coast of South America, and unless this “map” was specific, it would be like searching for a needle in a 1,500-mile-long haystack. “But if these three marks here are what I think they are…” His voice trailed off as his heartbeat accelerated.

  “What marks? The little ships behind the big one?”

  “No, inside. There are four tiny uninhabited islands several miles off the coast down south that are spaced apart just like this. With a fifth about—” He ran the tip of his finger down inside where the fifth, and smallest, island would be. He couldn’t see it on the surface, but he thought he felt a slight rough spot. “Hmm.”

  “Well?”

  Or it could be wishful thinking. “Maybe there’s another bump. But it might be a divot in the stone.” He wouldn’t tell her that the bowl was an emerald, or it might disappear. Or did she already know what it was and its worth? Was this what she’d come for? If so, it wasn’t smart to bring its importance or value to his attention this early in the game.

  “What about the ships on the outside? Do they correspond to what you know of the ship you’re looking for?”

  Logan’s lips twitched as he turned the bowl in his fingers. She was stopping just short of hitting him over the head with whatever she was attempting to convey. Not subtle. But in spite of himself he was intrigued by her game. So much so that he was curious enough to let her keep going just to see where she thought he’d follow.

  There was a galleon, followed by three smaller gunboats. His heartbeat kicked hard against the wall of his chest in excitement. He’d seen the carvings, but it had never occurred to him that the four ships depicted could be his ships. Lima was an anc
ient seaport that had seen ships coming and going for centuries. What were the chances?

  Annie was very interested, and apparently suddenly quite knowledgeable about the details on the artifact. Yes, there were markings inside, but how would she know that the rings were longitude and latitude unless she had spent time studying maps?

  Or unless she knew about the bowl before she’d been hauled aboard his ship.

  Logan smelled a con. A Rydell Case kind of con.

  He had two choices. Toss her back overboard, with a “fuck you” note pinned to her chest, for his nemesis to retrieve.

  Or keep her close and find out what kind of con was being run on him. Then he’d deliver the note himself.

  He held the bowl up to the sunlight streaming through the window. “The Nuestra Señora de Garza was protected by three gunboats. La Daniela, San Isidro, and Conde del Mar. Ninety guns apiece. All said to have been blown off course by the storm, then attacked by pirates.” There was no record of the ships splitting up. “All hands dead—”

  “Or there was at least one survivor, who grabbed a chunk of emerald and made it home.” Annie’s eyes glowed with excitement. Seemed she understood the monetary value of the bowl as well. And how could that be when she’d just seen it here in his office? How did she know it was an emerald, for that matter? Had Case told her to keep her eyes peeled for emeralds as evidence that Logan had found the treasure?

  “Maybe he carved in what he remembered of the location of the ship carrying the treasure.”

  “The Nuestra Señora de Graza.” Logan tried to make the pieces fit—which they didn’t. It was a nice fairy tale, but his ship had been sunk too far out to sea for anyone to have survived, let alone make it back to dry land. He shook his head, back to reality. “No one could have survived the attack, and certainly none of the ships were left intact after the storm hit, so even if someone had managed to escape death, there was no way they could’ve made it to land.”