Ride the Tide (Deep Six #3) - Julie Ann Walker Page 0,9

on topic is like herding cats,” Mason quickly cut in, his thick Boston accent apparent in every syllable.

What wasn’t apparent was his frown. It was tiny. Fractional even. But Alex saw it and knew its source. It was that whole peas in a pod thing.

Since she’d offered him her V-card, he’d been touchy about any and all conversations involving the two of them.

“Monsieur Monosyllable speaks!” She threw her hands in the air. “Hallelujah!”

Glaring at her—and really, the man could glare with the best of them—he ground from between clenched teeth, “Only when I got something important to say.”

She didn’t have to feign affront. Her affront was Grade A prime. “And what’s that supposed to mean? That I go around spewing verbal diarrhea? I’ll have you know a study showed that a person speaks about 16,000 words a day on average. So I’m not the weird one. You are.”

“Children, children!” Romeo patted the air again, looking exasperated. “What did I just say about breaking up fights between five-year-olds?”

Mason continued to stare at Alex. She tried to hold his gaze, but it made all her girl parts giggle. So she did the mature thing and stuck her tongue out at him.

He looked so startled, she had to laugh. That just made him glower all the harder.

“Oh-ho!” She pointed at his face. “Look how grumpy you are. Do you need me to get you a lollipop?”

“Does your level of joy go up in direct proportion to my blood pressure?” he growled at her, his accent making the end of the sentence sound more like prahpawtion to my blood preshah.

“No.” She didn’t know what possessed her, but she threw an arm around his massive shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “It’s just that being a smart-ass is how I hug.”

When she pulled back, she expected to see a you annoy me expression wallpapered over his face. So she was shocked to see something darkly hungry instead.

Was Kate Upton standing behind her?

She glanced over her shoulder. Nope. No Kate. Huh. But when she turned back, she found his hungry look gone and was left wondering if it’d ever been there at all. A second later, she decided that even if it had been there, she’d probably been mistaken about what it meant.

Maybe he was hungry. Or gassy. Or simply bored. Maybe he had a headache. A backache. Or was daydreaming about piles of BLT sandwiches.

It was just a look, she convinced herself. I’m not going to be the girl who reads a million and one emotions and motivations into a look.

And…okay…truth time. She’d lied when she told him she’d packed away all her nonplatonic feelings. In fact, right at the moment, she could easily envision him wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, a smile, and—

“Alex?” When Wolf snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, she realized she’d momentarily forgotten where she was.

“Right.” She had to clear her throat. “As I was having that second helping of biscuits and gravy, it occurred to me we might be thinking about Captain Vargas and the Santa Cristina all wrong.”

Romeo’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

“According to the evidence we copied from the archives in Seville, Captain Vargas’s plan was to sail back to Havana. Barring that, he was supposed to take shelter behind Wayfarer Island.”

“Right.” Wolf nodded. “Which is where LT and Olivia found the hilt of Vargas’s cutlass.”

“The hilt that gave me a total history-nerd boner,” Alex agreed. “Which is why we’ve been killing ourselves mapping and excavating the area. All to no avail. So what if that cutlass ended up stuck back there on that little reef because of currents or wave action? What if the captain even threw it back there?”

“Why would he do a thing like that?” Romeo asked.

She rolled her eyes. “How would I know? I’ve given up trying to figure out why you men do anything. But stick with me here. All this time, we’ve been assuming Vargas did what he said he was going to do. What if he didn’t?” She looked around at the faces staring back at her. “Or what if he couldn’t?”

The more she laid out the argument, the more she knew she was on to something. There was a feeling in her bones. The same feeling she’d had when she realized the “ringed island” mentioned in the old texts was, in fact, Wayfarer Island and not the Marquesas.

“Imagine you’re Captain Bartolome Vargas,” she continued. “You’ve been tasked by your king, your holy monarch, a man