LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER TWO

      TWO INSTRUCTORS, EIGHT STUDENTS. At the dock Nicola did a quick final head count before zipping her dive skin up to her neck. Much to her annoyance, her mind was still on the chiseled god she’d encountered on the road—and the furtive, hopeful glances she kept throwing at arriving students irked her even more. She really did need to get out more.

      “Tanks are ready to go,” said Zach, her fellow instructor, reaching past Nicola to set the last two metal cylinders on the boat. Nicola smiled her thanks to him. As far as she knew, Zach was one of only a handful of island staff members who had actually been born on Moretta. Raised the son of one of the estate’s chefs, Zach had grown up in the tiny staff quarters behind the house and been homeschooled by his mother—just the inspiration Nicola had needed to start tutoring some of the island kids once per week. She didn’t think she’d ever become accustomed to the huge class chasm that separated the island natives from the residents who’d taken it over.

      “Hi, Miss Nicola,” said a quiet voice. Nicola turned to see one of her students, Raia, peeking out at her shyly from around the corner of the shack.

      Nicola smiled at her. “Back to school this week,” she reminded Raia with a mix of anticipation and longing. It wasn’t lost on Nicola that if she were back in LA right now—back in her old, normal life before it all went crazy—she would be welcoming her first-grade class to their first day of school today. The memory of the children she’d been forced to leave behind two months before the end of the school year still stung.

      After Zach and her students had piled onto the boat, Nicola stepped onto the boat herself and started to mentally prepare for the upcoming dive. The fact that she’d been scuba diving since she was thirteen and instructing since she was nineteen, when she’d used it as a part-time job to put herself through college, did nothing to make her take the sport less seriously. It only served to heighten her awareness of its dangers, because with the rising popularity of scuba diving, people tended to lose sight that it was an extreme sport. If done properly it was almost always safe, but there were many things that could potentially go catastrophically wrong.

      She ran the upcoming dive through her head, planning the traverse around the reef she would lead her students on. Then she ran through her four students’ abilities, assessing each one for potential weaknesses or panic triggers. By the time the boat geared down, pulled up alongside another dive boat and dropped anchor at Sinkhole Reef, Nicola was feeling ready.

      “Okay, everyone,” she said, pulling her mask and snorkel over her head and letting it rest around her neck. “This will be an easy one. We should have excellent visibility, and we’re going for a max depth of seventy feet. You’ll see lobsters, stingrays, moray eels, possibly a few nurse or reef sharks. Lobsters hang out in pods, so don’t be freaked out if you come across a den of fifty or so. Just keep your fingers to yourselves! Remember to practice neutral buoyancy and keep your fins off the reef. Stay with your buddy at all times, and ascend—slowly, remember—before you have no less than 200 PSI left in your tank.”

      She walked around to her students to be sure their tanks had been turned to the open position, getting each of them to test their regulators in turn. Then she put on her fins, weight belt and buoyancy control device. Shuffling backward on her fins toward the edge of the boat, she put her regulator in her mouth. Then she held her mask on her face and fell backward to demonstrate a back fall-in. “Now your turn. One at a time,” she called to her students once she’d resurfaced.

      Focused solely on the safety of the four people under her charge, Nicola was barely aware of the sound of bodies splashing into the water as divers from the neighboring boat began to drop in at the same time.

      * * *

      Alex had thought he was doing okay. On the boat ride he’d run through his entire lesson book in his head, followed by everything he’d learned on the eight pool dives he’d completed back in LA.

      He could do this. People did it every day. Hell, there were teenagers on his boat who didn’t look the least bit concerned that they may very well be taking their last-ever breaths.

       Quit it. Not every kid who goes into the ocean has a near-death experience.

      After he’d talked himself somewhat off the ledge, he took a deep, calming breath and followed his instructor’s orders—tank open, regulator in, mask on. He was standing up, ready to walk backward to the edge of the boat when his instructor pointed at his waist. “Forgot your weight belt,” Rusty said. “You won’t get far down without that.”

      Alex groaned. His weight belt—of course. Shit, he was a mess, and his persisting thoughts of that Sienna Miller look-alike on the road this morning weren’t helping matters.

       Focus.

      As he sat down again and unfastened his BCD, Rusty walked over to inspect Alex’s belt. The man was huge, which gave Alex a small measure of reassurance—even though his brain told him he’d be practically weightless underwater, if anything went wrong it was comforting to know this guy could probably carry him to the surface on one finger.

      Rusty picked his belt up and gave it a heft. “Twenty-two pounds? You’re a big guy. I think you’ll want another fiver on there.”

      “You sure?” Alex asked as a vision of himself sinking to the ocean floor like a rock flashed through his head.

      “Yep.” The instructor grabbed a weight from the crate near his feet and handed it to Alex. “Just thread it through your belt and you’re good to go.”

      Alex did so, then hefted the belt around his waist and fastened the airline-seatbelt-like closing. It slipped down a little when he stood up, so he tightened it. It slipped down again. Was it supposed to feel this loose? Probably—what the hell did he know? All he was certain of was that he was used to being in control, being the one to show others how things were done, and he was tired of looking like a rookie fool. It was this departure from his comfort zone as much as the ocean he was about to jump into that was causing his anxiety.

      In any case, it was go-time. There was no backing out now. Alex got himself ready and fell backward into the open water.

      The surface was crowded, as it looked like another group of divers had just dropped in at the same time. It took Alex a minute to locate his buddy, because everyone was unrecognizable to him with their masks and snorkels on. After they inserted their regulators into their mouths, his buddy counted down with his fingers. Holding their inflator controls above their heads, they

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