Then the tunnel took a steep drop. A blast of cold air hissed over her, and a terror-filled scream tore from her chest as she fell feet first into the blackness below.
Her boots hit a pool of frigid water. She plunged beneath the surface, wrenched down by the sheer force of gravity. The muscles in her chest constricted while her lungs burned at the lack of oxygen. Kicking as hard as she could, she tried to swim up, but her senses were so disoriented in the darkness, she had no idea if she was heading in the right direction.
Just when she was sure she was going to drown, she broke the surface, gasped and pulled damp air into her blazing lungs. Heart thundering, she tried to slow her breathing. Long minutes passed before she opened her eyes and peered into the darkness.
She couldn’t see a thing. The new room she’d tumbled into was pitch-black, the only sound the fall of water somewhere to her left.
Maybe caving in Jamaica hadn’t been the brightest idea after all.
With unsteady hands, she flipped on her helmet light, praying the whole time that it wasn’t damaged. Her fingers passed over dents in the metal cap, and her breath caught at the realization that without the safety gear, she’d probably be dead now.
As that lovely thought settled in, her light flickered on, and she heaved out a long sigh of relief. Not dead. Not yet anyway. She looked up and took survey of the new room.
The ceiling was at least thirty feet above, the pool surrounding her wide and vast, reflecting stalactites hanging down from above. Large columns and stalagmites jutted out of the cold liquid. A waterfall spilled from a hole in the wall at least twenty feet up and to her left.
She swallowed hard. Had she landed on one of those stalagmites, she’d have knocked herself out, drowned before Simeon figured out where she’d gone.
Don’t think about that now.
Shaking the fog from her head, she swam toward the edge of the pool and hauled herself out of the water, then sucked in a breath and shivered in the cool air.
In the fourteen years she’d been an archaeologist, she’d encountered her fair share of tight scrapes in the field—a mudslide in a trench in Asia when a wall of sediment had caved in after a torrential downpour, a rockslide in Peru that had seriously tested her resolve and almost taken her life, and an underwater accident that had made her wonder why she’d taken up scuba diving in the first place. But in each instance, she’d gotten back up and kept going, because that’s what she did. She was a woman proving herself in a male-dominated profession, and she was doing it pretty damn well.
And after all that, there was no way she was letting one measly cave in Jamaica do her in. Especially not on her vacation.
She stood on sore, achy legs, tried not to think about the throbbing cuts on her arms and back or the fact hypothermia would set in if she didn’t get out soon. What mattered most was figuring out how the heck she was going to get back up to the top of that waterfall. If she was lucky, Simeon was somewhere up there looking for her.
If, that is, she was paying him enough to stick around and haul her ass out of this dark pit.
“Dr. Maxwell!”
Simeon’s muffled voice echoed from somewhere above. Lisa was sure she’d never been as happy to hear another voice in all her life.
“Down here!”
“Thank God.” His deep voice bounced off rock and limestone. Lisa glanced toward the waterfall just as Simeon’s tense face came into view. He propped dark arms against the wall of the tunnel, kept his feet shoulder-width apart to keep from slipping. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s a big drop. Be careful.”
“I be right down. Sit tight.”
He secured the rope, braced his feet on the wall of the cave and slowly lowered himself into the room. When he was five feet above the water, he kicked his legs to get a good swing in the harness and propelled himself to the ledge of the pool. He dropped onto the flat rocks, unhooked the harness and looped the rope around a nearby stalagmite.
Lisa resisted the urge to lecture him about not touching the structures. Playing teacher wasn’t going to save her life. Instead she shifted unsteady legs forward and wove around stalagmites as she made her way to join