Free The Reef by Nora Roberts Page B

of the hammock. “Did you do this sketch of the Santa Marguerite? ”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s pretty good.”
    “I’m a regular Picasso.”
    “I said ‘pretty good.’ It would have been great to see her like this. Are these figures measurements?”
    He sighed again, thinking of amateurs. “If you want to try to figure out how much area the wreck covers, you’ve got to do some calculations. We hit the galley today.” He swung his legs over until he was sitting beside her. “Officers’ cabins, passengers’ cabins.” He laid a fingertip on the sketch at varying points. “Cargo hold. Best way is to imagine a gull’s eye view.” To demonstrate, he flipped a page and began to sketch out a rough grid. “This is the seafloor. Here’s where we found the ballast.”
    “So the cannon is over here.”
    “Right.” In quick deft moves, he penciled them in. “Now we dug test holes from here to here. We want to move more midship for the mother lode.”
    Her shoulder bumped his as she studied the sketch. “But we want to excavate the whole thing, right?”
    He glanced up briefly, then continued to draw. “That could take months, years.”
    “Well, yes, but the ship itself is as important as what it holds. We have to excavate and preserve all of it.”
    From his viewpoint, the ship itself was wood and worthless. But he could humor her. “We’ll be in hurricane season before too much longer. We could be lucky, but we concentrate on finding the mother lode. Then you can afford to take as much time as you want on the rest.”
    For himself, he’d take his share and split. With gold jingling in his pocket, he could afford the time to build that boat, to finish his father’s research on the Isabella.
    To find Angelique’s Curse and VanDyke.
    “I guess that makes sense.” She glanced up, startled by the hard, distant gleam in his eye. “What are you thinking about?” It was foolish, of course, but she thought it looked like murder.
    He shook himself back. Here and now, he thought, was what mattered most. “Nothing. Sure it makes sense,” hecontinued. “Before long, word’s going to get out that we’ve found a new wreck. We’ll have company.”
    “Reporters?”
    He snorted. “They’re the least of it. Poachers.”
    “But we have a legal claim,” Tate began, and broke off when he laughed at her.
    “Legal don’t mean jack, Red, especially when you’ve got the Lassiter luck to deal with. We’ll have to start sleeping as well as working in shifts,” he went on. “If we start to bring up gold, Red, hunters will smell it from Australia to the Red Sea. Believe me.”
    “I do.” And because she did, she hopped down to fetch the snorkeling equipment. “Let’s check on Dad and Buck. Then I want to get that film developed.”
     
    By the time Tate was ready to go ashore, she had a list of errands in addition to the film. “I should have known Mom would give me a grocery list.”
    Matthew hopped into the Adventure’ s little tender with her, cranked the engine. “No big deal.”
    Tate merely adjusted her sunglasses. “You didn’t see the list. Look!” She gestured west where a school of dolphin leapt before the lowering sun. “I swam with one once. We were in the Coral Sea and a school of them followed the boat. I was twelve.” She smiled and watched them flash toward the horizon. “It was incredible. They have such kind eyes.”
    Tate rose as Matthew cut speed. She timed the distance to the pier, braced her legs and secured the line.
    Once the boat was secure, they started across the strip of beach. “Matthew, if we hit the mother lode, and you were rich, what would you do?”
    “Spend it. Enjoy it.”
    “On what? How?”
    “Stuff.” He moved his shoulders, but he knew by now generalities wouldn’t satisfy her. “A boat. I’m going to build my own as soon as I have the time and means. Maybe I’d buy a place on an island like this.”
    They moved by guests of the nearby hotel as they baked