Between Roc and a Hard Place by Heather Graham

Author:Heather Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497674004
Publisher: Open Road Media

Chapter 8

The next day they explored the same area again. Melinda seemed drawn to it, Roc realized, and though they still hadn’t found anything, he was more than willing to go with her instincts.

So far, she’d found the only real clue to the Contessa.

She was ahead of him today, moving with tremendous ease and grace before him in the fascinating if sometimes eerie world of the sea. The coral shelf to their left housed a wild variety of creatures. Huge, slow groupers—two of them, maybe four hundred pounds apiece—were staring at them with glassy eyes. Just beyond the big fish there was a plateau of anemones, with pretty, bright orange and white clownfish—tiny as fingertips—darting swiftly within their hosts’ wavy fingers, luring prey for the anemone that supported the fish.

They passed a pair of yellow tangs, brighter than sunlight. Yet even as they passed the tiny creatures, Roc suddenly became aware of something much larger looming in the water.

Instinctive wariness held him still as he watched, but experience told him the creature wasn’t a shark. Just ahead of him, Melinda, too, had gone still, watching, waiting.

Then the creature came into full view, and Roc grinned around his mouthpiece. They were being visited by a dolphin.

That the curious mammal was swimming near them was not an unusual experience. Dolphins were common in these waters—both the mammal, like their friendly visitors, and also the very edible, much smaller and brightly colored dolphin fish—but as often as Roc had seen them swimming near him before, he had never seen one behave quite like this. The animal swam straight to Melinda.

He saw her eyes widen behind her mask. She arched a brow to him, then reached out.

Just like a puppy or a kitten, the dolphin seemed to want to be scratched.

Melinda’s hand moved gently, knuckles stroking down the creature’s throat and downward to its belly. Her air bubbles rose around them both. The dolphin arched its body and plummeted in a smooth dive beneath Melinda. Roc swung around just in time for it to come up on his other side, staring at him with dark eyes, like a precocious youngster who had managed to trick his parents.

He’d swum with dolphins before, having studied them as part of his major in school. They were, in his opinion, absolutely incredible creatures, amazingly intelligent and definitely capable of affection. In captivity, those individuals born and raised with human interaction could display a startling ability to form friendships with man. But in all his days of diving on the ocean floor, he’d never seen one come quite so trustingly close in the wild as this fellow was doing.

He wondered if perhaps the animal hadn’t belonged to an aquarium or private study facility, then somehow found its way to the ocean, because it wasn’t just being friendly, it wanted to move right in.

Roc reached out a hand, too, touching the dolphin. It edged closer to him, accepting his touch, moving just as if it wanted to be scratched once again, like a cat curling up on its master’s lap before a roaring fire.

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