Florida is largely a rootless place, full of people who still think of themselves as natives of other states and countries. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play Chicago, the stadium is full of locals—most of them Bears fans from way back. And where else outside Wisconsin can you find a sports club that is unrepentantly dedicated to the Green Bay Packers?
I've fallen in love with this place and its sheer unexpectedness. And I love the sea. The Gulf of Mexico, with its sparkling waters and white sand beaches, draws me almost mystically.
Unfortunately, the Gulf disappointed me. When I set out to write my next boo, After I Dream, I planned to set it here in the Tampa Bay area. Several chapters into the book, I went to get a bathymetric chart of the coastal waters. I needed to find a place within state coastal waters that was deep enough for the events in this book.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that there is no place off the west coast of Florida that's much more than thirty meters deep yet still within the coastal waters.
It's shallow out there! The Florida escarpment goes out a hundred miles or more before it drops precipitously into deep water.
This was a major catastrophe. It also turned into a great vacation. Looking at the maps, I realized that the place I needed was in the Florida Keys. I'd been there once on business years ago and hadn't been particularly impressed. This time we packed up and went with a different purpose in mind.
I will always be grateful that this little kink showed me a side of the keys I had never imagined. I spent a weekend in Old Town an Key West, in a charming cottage in the back yard of two princely gentlemen I plan to uisit often. I wandered the streets an foot, watched the sunset celebration at the dock, soaking up flavor — and same pretty good food. I wandered off onto the other Keys and found exactly the setting I was looking far.
And I found same of the Floridians who aren't rootless. There aren't rootless. There aren't many of them left down there, but same of those Canchs go back a long way.
The sun and the heat and the slow pace got to me. I'm a diehard convert to the Conch Republic (as the lower Keys refer to themselves) and hope to visit many ties and write many books set there. It's a place full of possibilities, where the sea and the sun create a world all their own.
Following is an excerpt from
Alter I Dream
my first uisit to the Conch Republic. It was a wonderful book to write, full of my dreams. I hope you'll find echoes of your own dreams there, too.
With best wishes,
Rachel Lee
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The day was wrong.
Tom Akers stood on the deck of the
Lady Hope,
enjoying a pipe as he waited for the divers to finish their work. As captain of a salvage vessel, he took his moments of peace where he could find them. Most salvage operations he and his crew performed were risky bits of business conducted in bad conditions and under immutable time constraints if they were to save a troubled vessel and its occupants. By comparison, waiting for divers to finish exploring a sunken yacht was a Cakewalk, and Tom was perfectly willing to enjoy the calm.
Except that it was too calm.
Tom had spent the majority of his forty years at sea, and the sea spoke to him in a language he understood as well as his native tongue. He needed no radio weather advisories to warn him something was wrong.
Unease crawled along the cradle of his scalp and it bothered him that he couldn't pin it down. The morning had started out almost painfully dear, with sun glinting off the waves of the Atlantic in splinters of light that hurt the eyes. But since the divers had gone below, the day had gradually changed.
Becalmed.
The word floated up out of his subconscious, some genetic memory from ancestors who had gone to sea in wind-driven vessels. A sailor in these days of powerful engines had no need to fear the absence of wind.
But Tom found himself fearing it anyway. The Atlantic was never this quiet and still, not even here at the edge of the continental shelf. Stretching away from the
Hope,
the sea was as smooth as glass. Too smooth. And the sky had grown hazy, an unsettling green-tinged haze unlike anything he could remember seeing this far from land. The sun was still up there somewhere, but the light had become so flat that he had no sense of direction. The
Hope
might have been cast adrift in some alien world where sea and sky were one.
He didn't like it.
Standing there, he reminded himself of his engines, his radio, and his global positioning system, advantages his ancestors hadn't enjoyed. As long as they didn't swamp, he could get his ship home.
But modern technology and rationalization weren't quite enough to soothe the soul of a sailor. Like most of his kind, he had a superstitious streak, and right now he was trying to remember if they were in the Bermuda Triangle. if asked, he would have said he didn't believe in such tripe, but deep inside he couldn't quite shake a gut feeling no logic could touch.
His pipe was out, and he tapped it on the railing to shake the dottle into the sea below. The sound echoed in the strange silence, too loud, as if they were caught in a fog bank. But this was no fog, at least no ordinary fog.
The sea had a life of her own, and Tom respected it. He knew her moods as well or better than he had known the moods of his late wife. In his heart of hearts he felt that the sea tolerated his ship on her surface, and in some part of him he always wondered when that tolerance would end.
Today? Perhaps it would be today. It was as if she were reaching up over their heads, surrounding them in this grayish green cocoon, and at any moment she would take them down into her eternal embrace.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he muttered, appalled by the turn of his own thoughts. He shook himself and decided this was not a good day to stand by himself at the bow, thinking thoughts that were as mad as any dream he'd ever had.
A shout from amidships caught his attention. Forgetting his strange meanderings, he headed swiftly toward the two men who were monitoring the divers.
“What's wrong?” he demanded as he reached them. Other crew members gathered, too.
“One of the divers is in trouble,” said the man who was monitoring the sound-powered phone the divers were using to talk to the ship.
“What happened?”
“I don't know.” The man looked at him, but then his eyes slid away, as if he were somehow a strange part of this strange day.
Tom felt his unease blossom into vines of ice that wrapped around his spine. “What makes you say something is wrong?” he asked again slowly, trying to make this man understand him.
“He says there are monsters in the water.”
The icy vines clamped Tom's spine in a death grip. “Monsters?”
“Hallucinations,” said the man tending the safety lines. “He must be having hallucinations. It can happen on a deep dive.”
But not usually to experienced deep divers, Tom thought, his heart squeezing.
“The other diver can't see anything,” the phone man agreed. “It's got to be nitrogen narcosis.”
Tom objected. “But their tanks don't have Nitrox. They've got a helium and oxygen mix.”
The phone man shrugged. “He had some nitrogen in him from breathing regular air when he went over the side.”
Enough for this? Tom wondered. Fearing trouble, he asked one of his sailors to get the medic they'd brought with them, a man experienced in treating diving emergencies.
Then out of the speaker came the tinny voice of one of the divers. Unidentifiable, because some of his voice was being converted to electrical power for the phone, squawky from the helium in his air mix. Let it be Chase, Tom prayed.
“I can't … get near him,” the voice said, sounding like a cartoon character. “God … knife … out!”
“Stay back, stay back,” said the first man into his microphone. “We're going to bring him up.”
“He's …” The diver's words were broken, many of them distorted past Tom's ability to recognize. “Christ, he … thinks … sees something …”
The winch was already turning, bringing the troubled diver up a few safe feet. How long? Tom wondered. How deep were they? He hadn't really paid any attention to the details of the dive. It was out of his bailwick. All he was supposed to do was keep his tender here until the work was done. He had no idea how long it would take to safely bring the man to the top.
“I'm … alongside him,” the driver said. “Bring him up … Oh, Jesus! He's trying … helmet off! Get him up! Get him up!
Get him up!”
The two tenders exchanged glances, then looked at Tom. “The bends …” said the man tending the winches that controlled the safety lines.
Tom might know little about diving, but he knew about the bends. When a driver descended, the increasing pressure condensed the gas bubbles in his blood, making them smaller, small enough to get into places they wouldn't usually go, into tissues and nerves. If the diver ascended too quickly, those bubbles would expand before they could work their way out of the tissues and would cause serious damage and even death.
“We've got the decompression chamber,” Tom said. “Preventing the bends won't matter a raindrop in a hurricane if he pulls his helmet off down there!” He was surprised he even needed to say it.
“Get him up!” yelled the diver. “Get him up, he's … mask, for the love of God get him up!”
The tender slammed one of the winches to top speed. For Tom, a lifetime seemed to pass before the diver finally surfaced alongside the vessel. He was still flailing, making it difficult to winch him over the side. At least he'd lost his knife in his rapid ascent, so they only had to deal with his struggles as they hastened to unhook him from the safety line.
Helping hands were plentiful. As soon as they had the diver unhooked, they carried him as quickly as they could to the hyperbaric chamber that had been bolted onto the Hope's deck specifically for this deep dive. As if someone had known …
The thought crossed Tom's mind, then washed away on the tide of horror as he helped put the diver on the cot in the chamber.
Oh God, he thought as he glanced at the face inside the mask. Oh, God, it was Chase.
Chase, his friend of many years. Chase, a drinking buddy since their navy days. Oh, dear Mary, Mother of God…
He stood outside the chamber, watching through the small, thick window, as the compressor labored to raise the pressure to sixty feet below sea level. He wanted to steam full ahead for the shore, but they couldn't budge until they safely brought up the other diver. He watched as the bends gripped his friend and twisted his body into impossible shapes. He listened to the muffled screams.
“Skipper? Bill's aboard.”
Only then, with a heart as heavy as lead, did Tom order the
Lady Hope
to make full speed for port. Only then did the wind and waves return, carrying away the eerie haze.
The sea had exacted her toll.
R
ACHEL
L
EE
has over four million books in print and has won numerous awards for her bestselling romantic fiction. The author of Silhouette's number-one miniseries, Conard County, Rachel Lee also writes lighthearted contemporary romances under the pseudonym Sue Civil-Brown. Now she joins Warner Books with this exciting tale of romantic suspense, filled with authenticity, sensuality, and unforgettable characters— all the reasons
Romantic Times
calls Rachel Lee “an author to treasure forever.”
Five years ago Carey Justice was a young prosecutor who helped convict an innocent man. Today she's the hottest talk show host on radio and won't rest until he is cleared— no matter what it costs her. She has exactly three weeks to save John William Otis from the electric chair … but first she must convince her old lover, Seamus Rourke, to join her in her crusade.
A detective on the Otis case, Seamus suspects Carey's motives. Wary and still hurt from their last encounter, he hesitates … until a copycat killer sets his sights on Carey. Now, as the days slip away, the countdown is on to save a blameless man from certain death—and give two passionate hearts their last chance for love.
Nationally bestselling author Rachel Lee keeps us on the edge of our seats with her signature style of nerve-shattering suspense … and, like no other author today, exposes the hidden passions, secret dreams, and unstoppable power of a woman's heart.