The Reef by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

startled a grouper, who gave her one baleful glance before gliding off. Amused, she glanced over her shoulder. Matthew was swimming west, but was still in her line of vision. She flipped north toward the pretty soft reds and browns of the formation.
    Tate was on top of it before she realized it wasn’t coral, but rocks. Bubbles burst from her mouthpiece. If she had been above the water rather than below, she might have babbled.
    Ballast rocks. Surely they had to be ballast rocks. From her studies she knew the color meant galleon. Schooners had used the brittle gray egg rock. The ballast of a galleon,she thought with a dreamy sense of unreality. That had been lost, forgotten. And now found.
    One of the lost wrecks of 1733 was here. And she had found it.
    She let out a shout that did nothing more than spray bubbles that blurred her vision. Remembering herself, she slipped her knife from its sheath and rapped sharply on her tank.
    Turning a circle, she saw the shadow of her partner yards away. She thought he was signaling, and impatient, rapped again.
    Come here, damn it.
    She rapped a third time, putting as much insistence as she could manage into the one-toned signal. With satisfaction, and the beginnings of smugness, she watched him cut through the water toward her.
    Be as irritated as you like, hotshot, she thought. And prepared to be humbled.
    She could see the moment he recognized the stones, the slight hesitation in rhythm, then the quickening of pace. Unable to help herself, she grinned at him and attempted a watery pirouette.
    Behind his face mask his eyes were blue as cobalt, intense, with a recklessness that had her heart thudding hard in response. He circled the pile once, apparently satisfied. When he took her hand, Tate gave his fingers a quick, friendly squeeze. She expected they would surface, announce her discovery, but he tugged her back in the direction from where he’d come.
    She pulled back, shaking her head, jerking her thumb up. Matthew pointed west. Tate rolled her eyes, gestured back toward the ballast pile and started to kick toward the surface.
    Matthew grabbed her ankle, shocking her with the familiar way his hands worked up her leg as he drew her back down. She considered swinging at him, but he had her arm again and was towing her.
    It left her no choice but to go along, and to imagine all the vicious things she would say to him once she could speak.
    Then she saw and her mouth fell open in reaction. She readjusted her mouthpiece, remembered to breathe and stared at the cannons.
    They were corroded, covered with sea life and half buried in the sand. But they were there, the great guns that had once graced the Spanish fleet, defended it against pirates and enemies of the king. She could have wept for the joy of it.
    Instead, she grabbed Matthew in a clumsy hug and spun him around in what passed for a victory dance. Water swirled around them, and a school of silver fish cut around them like blades. Their face masks bumped, and she bubbled out a giggle, still holding on to him as they kicked toward the surface forty feet above.
    The moment they broke through, she pushed back her face mask, let her mouthpiece drop. “Matthew, you saw it. It’s really there.”
    “Seems to be.”
    “We’re the first to find it. After more than two hundred and fifty years, we’re the first.”
    His grin flashed, his legs tangling with hers as they tread water. “A virgin wreck. And it’s all ours, Red.”
    “I can’t believe it. It’s nothing like the other times. Someone else had always been there first, and we just puttered around what they’d overlooked or left behind. But this . . .” She tossed back her head and laughed. “Oh God. It feels wonderful. Enormous.”
    With another laugh, she threw her arms around him, nearly sinking them both, and pressed her lips to his in an innocent kiss of delight.
    Her lips were wet and cool and curved. The shock of them against his blanked his mind for a full