Overboard (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 10) by Dawn Lee McKenna

Author:Dawn Lee McKenna [McKenna, Dawn Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sweet Tea Press
Published: 2018-09-19T07:00:00+00:00

The dead man’s float went against every single instinct and every phobic synapse in Maggie’s brain, but she could not tread water indefinitely. She would wear herself out and then drown.

At first, it had taken her several minutes to stop jerking her head up to look around, or to stop treading water or curling her knees protectively toward her torso. To just hang there, suspended in the water, her face submerged for thirty to sixty seconds at a time, was monumentally challenging. Every time she wanted to lift her face too soon or start paddling, she reminded herself she would die trying to tread water all night. Eventually, it took.

She was unable, however, to force herself to close her eyes to the salt water. She was incapable of dangling there with her eyes closed, so she kept them open, despite the fact that she could see absolutely nothing. It was darker below the surface than it was above it but keeping her eyes open made her feel like she was maintaining some kind of vigilance.

Unfortunately, every time she lifted her head for a breath and opened her eyes to the night air, she realized how much of a toll the water was taking on her eyes. They burned like they were on fire, and she could feel that they were starting to swell. Every blink felt like she was dragging a piece of sandpaper across her eyeballs. She used to swim for hours and hours, never with a mask or goggles. Her eyes had burned by the end of the day, but she couldn’t say they’d actually hurt. Were they really so unaccustomed to the salt now?

Every thirty minutes or so, as best as she could judge, she allowed herself to swim slowly for a few minutes. She hated to waste the precious energy, but the exertion warmed her, and the movement made her feel more proactive.

The time she spent just hanging in the water, her eyes open to an underwater world she couldn’t see, seemed to drag on forever. The near silence also got to her mentally. That underwater quiet that wasn’t so much silence as it was a magnified lack of noise, interrupted only by the pounding of her heart.

She forced herself through it by trying to occupy her mind, by mentally being anywhere but where she was. She didn’t choose her thoughts; they seemed to choose themselves. At the moment, her brain had chosen to focus on a day in September, about three years ago. It was a year or so after her divorce, and a year or so before she and Wyatt had gone on their first date. She remembered that it was September because it had been a few days before Daddy’s birthday.

It had been a bright, hot day, and Maggie could almost feel the heat of the sun on her face, almost needed to squint against the white light of it.

“I don’t think you’re actually listening to me,” Wyatt said.

“Why do you say that?” Maggie asked, looking up from her tray of raw oysters.

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