LITMIR.BIZ

      Leslie J. Wainger

      Executive Editor

      Her Passionate Protector

      Laurey Bright

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      LAUREY BRIGHT

      has held a number of different jobs but has never wanted to be anything but a writer. She lives in New Zealand, where she creates the stories of contemporary people in love that have won her a following all over the world. Visit her at her Web site, www.laureybright.com.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Prologue

      A skeleton isn’t an unexpected thing to find under the sea near a sunken ship, and this wasn’t the first one Brodie Stanner had come upon. But when he saw the whitened rib cage rising from the sand and a small, gleaming fish shooting out of one of the shadowy eyeholes of the skull, he felt a chill of instant gooseflesh inside his wet suit. The sound of his breath, amplified by the air valve of his scuba tank, was suddenly louder.

      Twenty minutes ago, with his diving buddy Rogan Broderick, he’d stepped from the deck of the Sea-Rogue into the warm embrace of the Pacific Ocean, emptied air from his buoyancy compensator, and began to glide down in the tropical water, the tank on his back becoming weightless. Some distance away the uneven wall of the reef shimmered with color—purple, blue, orange, green, red—corals and sponges and layered sea fans crowded together in fantastic shapes; seaweeds and giant anemones weaving gently in the current while iridescent jewel-like fish darted in and out among them. Rogan was at his side, a stream of tiny glittering air bubbles from his breathing apparatus expanding as they floated upward.

      The water became almost opaque, then cleared. The divers swam up an incline toward the reef, skimming above white sand littered with dead pieces of coral, shells and less recognizable objects encrusted with marine growths. Huge crabs danced daintily over the seafloor, and a bright orange starfish stirred its arms, raising a small puff of sand.

      A low curve arched from the seabed, and even before Rogan pointed, Brodie recognized part of a ship’s side, studded with barnacles and festooned with seaweed, the rest of the wreck covered in a blanket of soft sand.

      They tried with gloved hands to sweep away some of the sand, perhaps identify the bow where there was a slim chance the ship’s name might still be visible, but in the time they could safely stay underwater they hadn’t made much progress before Rogan indicated they should surface.

      The current was stronger than Brodie had realized, carrying them to the reef and some way along it. Then he’d seen the unmistakably human bones huddled by the coral wall.

      The lower part of the skeleton was either buried in sand or missing, but the rib cage seemed intact, as was the skull with its huge, empty eye and nose-holes and macabre death-grin. When he paused and waved a hand over the pathetic remains, disturbing the sand, a gleam of white arm bone showed before the cloud of grains started settling again.

      One last look, then he finned upward to join Rogan at the first decompression level on their buoy line. They made the remainder of the ascent, taking a couple more decompression stops on the way to clear nitrogen from their systems and prevent the dreaded bends—which could cripple or kill a diver—from attacking them when they surfaced.

      Back on board, Brodie took his mouthpiece out and said, “Did you see the skeleton down there?”

      Rogan lowered his air tank to the deck and fastened it into a storage clip. “The Maiden’s Prayer went down with all hands. We might find a few more skeletons, even after a hundred and fifty years.”

      “It doesn’t look right.”

      “Someone died.” Unzipping his wet suit, Rogan gave him a quizzical look. “That never looks right. Of course your skeleton might not be from our particular wreck. This reef would have caught quite a few ships over the centuries, specially before it was properly charted.”

      The clippers carrying nineteenth-century miners and their newly acquired wealth from the Australian gold fields home to America hadn’t had modern navigation instruments and satellite systems to guide them. The Maiden’s Prayer wasn’t the only one reported sunk without a trace, taking a fortune in gold and goods to the bottom of the sea.

      Brodie and Rogan finished mapping the site of the wreck as far as they could define it with their sonar and

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