Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

hadn’t been near the marriage mart since, and he sure as hell wasn’t easy in his mind about opening himself up to a woman who hadn’t shown even that much interest.

Caleb was the only one of the three of them that could be said to have a ‘way with women’ anyway. Ian was nearly as hopelessly inept at wooing a woman as he was, and for pretty much the same reason—having been kicked in the teeth one time too many.

And Joshua didn’t have any damned experience to draw from. The closest he’d been to a woman was the brothel, and two or three half hour sessions with a prostitute, which he knew had to be the most Joshua could ever have afforded on his salary, wasn’t experience.

If what he’d heard about Caleb was true, though, several prostitutes had actually been known to offer him discounts to entice him up to their rooms. He didn’t think he would’ve swallowed it if it had come from Caleb himself. It was hard to discount it, though, when he’d had to break up several brawls in the brothel because some of the men had overheard the offers and set out to rearrange his face.

Anna appeared at the door of her house almost on the heels of that thought, glanced around guiltily, and headed for a tiny, two-seater paddle boat he saw moored at the edge of her yard. He narrowed his eyes, certain, at first, that he must be mistaken.

From what he’d seen of Anna thus far, she could be a little on the ditzy side on occasion, but even she wouldn’t totally fuck up their cover by coming to them!

“You may have been right after all,” Ian said sardonically. “Unless I’m mistaken, that’s our little pigeon paddling this way.”

“Jesus!” Simon growled. “She wouldn’t!”

“I’m afraid she would.”

* * * *

It had taken Anna a full day to come up with a reasonable excuse to head out to the sub where Joshua and Caleb were and another day to work up the nerve and arrange to have a paddler delivered that she could use. She certainly couldn’t swim out!

She’d toyed with the idea for a while of simply ordering it and paddling around as if she was going about some task related to her research and then ‘accidentally’ stumbling upon the sub. She’d finally discarded that idea, though. She didn’t think she could actually carry it off convincingly. It was better, she decided, to approach them boldly with the excuse of bearing gifts to show her appreciation and relieve the tedium of stale food.

There was one problem she hadn’t been able to resolve satisfactorily. She thought arriving with gifts for them would work well enough from their standpoint, but she didn’t think it was a good idea to head out in broad daylight and give away their watch post. If she had to sneak out after dark, though, and anybody else did see her—like her neighbors—she needed a ready excuse for why she’d taken the notion to paddle around at sea in the middle of the night. Collecting specimens for research might work if she did it during the day. Nobody really knew what it was that she was researching, but she couldn’t make it not look suspicious that she’d decided to go out at night to do it.

Since she hadn’t been able to come up with anything that sounded the least bit believable to her, she’d finally decided that she would be careful not to be seen instead.

She’d ordered a dark blue paddler—which had taken a while to find since most of them were canary yellow, apparently. It was the color of the sub, though, and that was virtually invisible in the dark unless one knew it was there and searched for it. That should also make the paddler hard to see. To top that off, she’d found dark clothing and a dark knit cap to stuff her hair into. Her hair was closer to brown than blond to her mind, but she was afraid it might still be light enough to reflect moonlight.

She supposed it would’ve been safer to venture out before the moon rose or after it set in the sense of greater exposure, but she was afraid she might lose her way in the dark.

She was a bundle of nerves when she carried her goodies out and carefully them, but her need to see Caleb, even if it was just a few minutes, overrode her anxieties about being seen and her cowardice in approaching men in general that she was attracted to, and him in particular.

She couldn’t relax. Even the effort of paddling and trying to guide the damned boat, which wasn’t nearly as easy as she’d thought it would be, failed to wear down her tension. In point of fact, the closer she came, the tighter the knot in her stomach.

Doubts surfaced about halfway between her house and her goal. Maybe she was just putting way too much into Caleb’s interest in her? Maybe he wasn’t actually interested in her at all and he’d just been horny and decided she would be an easy mark since she’d practically swooned when he’d kissed her the first time? It didn’t help that she’d thought so at the time. Just because she’d convinced herself since then that it might be more or that he might at least be interested enough to repeat the experience, it didn’t necessarily follow that he would be.

Maybe he’d be pissed off at her obvious pursuit? She didn’t know a hell of a lot about men, granted, but even she knew they preferred to be the hunter. They didn’t like pushy women. Most of them didn’t seem to, anyway. She’d always thought that was probably at least one