Free Vortex (Cutter Cay) by Cherry Adair

No skin off your nose, right?”
    The loud mechanical noise of the helicopter rising from beneath decks halted their conversation for a few minutes, then the whop-whop-whop of the rotors starting up blocked out conversation for a few more. The sound changed as Cooper lifted off. The chopper skimmed overhead, whipping up the water, and their hair, as it hovered low before ascending.
    Logan watched them skim over the water toward Lima until the sound of the rotors faded. He leaned over, hanging his wrists over the rail, and turned his head as Jed continued the conversation as if there hadn’t been a break. “If she’s lying, why not jettison her before things get even more complicated?”
    “I want to see how this unfolds.”
    “That makes two of us, Wolf, my man.” Jed’s eyes lit up. “In the meantime, if you’re determined to hold her at arm’s length, may I say dibs?”
    “Don’t be an ass,” Logan told his best friend coldly. “She’s on board my ship, and until I decide otherwise, under my protection.”
    Jed’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “For the duration?”
    Logan narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to piss me off?”
    Jed had the audacity to grin back. “Is it working?”
    “Not at all.” Logan pushed away from the rail and went back to the table and sat down, stretching his legs out beneath the table. Where his damned dog should be.
    Jed followed. “Can I at least flirt a little? I’m getting out of practice. Remember flirting? You used to be pretty good at it until you went all serious on my ass.”
    The past year, his brothers had had … issues, which, because they were so close, affected them all. But worse, and more immediately, his nemesis Rydell Case had recently ripped off one of his salvage teams near Cape Town, South Africa, to the tune of seven million dollars and change.
    Right now Logan had the bastard tied up in court there. Not nearly satisfying enough as far as he was concerned. Case should be thrown in jail, and the key tossed in the sea. If he’d sent Annie, Logan wanted to know why.
    Logan acknowledged that juggling ninety-nine things at once was his norm—he liked making order of chaos. He ran pretty much every aspect of Cutter Salvage, dealing with the numerous headaches, large and small, that went into running a multimillion-dollar business with employees and investors.
    Usually he thrived on the disorder of life’s curveballs. But the last few days he’d been feeling—inexplicably—flat. He tried blaming it on not finding the treasure this trip, but knew that wasn’t really at the bottom of his listlessness.
    His brothers depended on him to be a rock. Unmovable. Always there. He took his job as the oldest seriously. Maybe sometimes he went a little overboard, but his family and friends always knew that his word was his bond, that he would shoot straight on any issue. That his integrity, unlike his old man’s, was one thousand percent there when they needed it. There was no room in his life to play.
    “Life is serious. People depend on me.”
    “This is unfortunately, and too frequently, true.” Jed sobered. “Okay, what do we do if and when we find the boat she was on?”
    Logan bypassed the carafe of coffee in the center of the table, and reached over to snag an iced bottle of water from the cooler. He missed having Dog at his feet, damn it. If anyone needed a bodyguard it was himself. Annie’s braless state had about given him brain freeze. He didn’t need her here to remind him he hadn’t had sex, not with anything other than his fist, in almost a year. Jesus. He needed shore leave himself.
    “Work backwards” he told Jed, trying to shove the image of her small, plump, unbound breasts out of his usually bland imagination. “Find out who else was on board, start digging, get some answers, dig for more. The gash on her head is real. Her being in the water for hours is real. The rest is up for conjecture.”
    “What