Thom shrugged. “After watching a megalodon swim by when I was a hundred feet below the surface, mad pirates don’t seem much of a threat.”
Unless they pointed a gun at Georgie. Even a giant armored shark couldn’t terrify him as much as seeing her in danger.
Smiling, she took the nearest chair. The sun shining through the porthole caught the reds in her hair like sparks of fire and deepened the shadow beneath her soft bottom lip. Her gaze fell to his arms. “So they truly were a gift?”
“Yes. Ivy said it was in trade, too.” Though they were worth far more than any help he’d given.
“She sounds very generous. And amiable.”
“She’s both.”
“The rumor is that she’s a little mad, too.”
“Considering that she gave me these arms for nothing, I’d say there was some truth to that,” he said, and her laugh in response lifted through him. “Though I never put much stock in rumors.”
“I don’t, either.” Her smile faded. Steadily, her gaze held his. “But it’s sometimes difficult to ignore them, when a rumor is the only news of your husband that you receive.”
Throat suddenly thick, Thom nodded. He’d done wrong by her in that. The easy excuse had always been that he couldn’t read and write, anyway. But he could have had a message sent. Thom just hadn’t been able to make himself tell her that he still had nothing. And the longer he’d gone without a message, the harder it had become to send.
But that soft admonishment was all she said of it. “And these coins? How did you find them?”
“While I was in Port Fallow, working with Ivy on that submersible, I ran into Lady Corsair again. We met on Mad Machen’s ship and she invited me up to her skyrunner for a dinner.”
Georgiana stared at him. “You had dinner with Lady Corsair.”
With a grin, Thom nodded. The disbelief in her voice wasn’t that of someone wondering whether he lied. His wife was wondering whether he’d gone mad, too. Maybe for good reason. A mercenary, Lady Corsair’s reputation was even more ruthless than Mad Machen’s.
“And while we were eating, Archimedes Fox told me—”
“Archimedes Fox!” Now she laughed. “He’s not a real man. He’s a character in those adventure stories.”
“All of them based on his salvaging runs.” Though it wasn’t the type of salvaging that Thom did. Instead of recovering recent wreckage, Fox risked the zombies in the abandoned cities of Europe, searching for treasures. That risk had paid off for him, too. “Much of it’s true. Especially the bit about his colorful clothes—I nearly go blind every time I look at him.”
She laughed again. “Truly?”
“Yes,” he said. “His sister writes the stories. She lives in Fladstrand.”
Not far from Skagen. Georgiana’s eyes widened slightly. “I heard that Lady Corsair flew into that town a few times—and that Fox’s sister was kidnapped last year. But I thought it was all part of another story.”
“They didn’t tell me anything about that. Fox was more interested in talking about a wreck that might be worth diving. It was more than two hundred years old, and he said it was just waiting for any man who could dive deep enough for it—and that in a wreck so old, I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone claiming ownership of anything I found.”
He’d also said that others had died searching for it. But Thom hadn’t thought there was anything to lose by trying.
He’d been wrong. Though he’d found the treasure, there’d been everything to lose.
“How deep was it?”
“Fox didn’t know for certain. Just deep enough that no one had found it yet, though his research had given him a good idea of its location. But it was just over three hundred feet.”
“Three hundred feet!” Georgiana shot out of her chair, her hands flying to her head as if to keep her brains from exploding. “Thom! What the hell were you thinking?”
She was right to be angry. That dive had hit him harder than any other, making him dizzy under the water, and feeling as if every joint in his body would snap apart after he’d come up, despite a slow ascent. In her place, he’d have been shouting, too.
But foolish or not, his answer was the same. “I was thinking that I had new arms, but that I didn’t have anything else to bring back to you. It seemed worth the try.”
Her lips compressed and she turned away from the table, arms crossing beneath her br**sts. Those soft mounds rose and fell sharply a few times before she nodded. “Where was it?”
“Off the eastern coast of Ireland.”