Authors: Tracey Alvarez
Tags: #romance, #romance series, #romance sexy, #romance small town, #romance reunion, #romance adult contemporary, #romance beach, #romances that sizzle, #romance new zealand, #coastal romance
In Too Deep
In Too Deep
Due South Book 1
Tracey Alvarez
Icon Publishing
New Zealand
In Too Deep (Due South Book
1)
Copyright © 2013 by Tracey
Alvrez.
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of
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Publishing
PO Box 45, Ahipara, New
Zealand.
www.traceyalvarez.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product
of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes
used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people,
living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions,
or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout ©2013
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In Too Deep (Due South Book 1)/
Tracey Alvarez -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-473-27215-9
Contents
For my mum. You
were gone by the time I started writing this book but there are
traces of you in it and my grief over losing you when I was so
unprepared. Love you, Mum.
I hope you’d be proud.
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Chapter
1
When death
revealed a pale hand to Piper Harland she didn’t turn away, but
kicked toward it and grabbed hold.
Sixty-five feet below Lake
Tikitapu’s crystal blue water, she found the seventeen-year-old
water-skier who’d disappeared yesterday evening. Now that they had
pinpointed his location, Piper would return the boy to his
grief-stricken family, huddled above on the shore of one of New
Zealand’s most picturesque lakes.
Through her face mask she examined
the body, while tugging on her swim-line to signal the rest of the
squad that she’d found their objective. And right now she needed to
be objective. Sucking air from the regulator, her gaze returned to
the boy’s waxen skin. Her heart clenched, stuttered, and raced
faster and faster. Under her neoprene wetsuit, an icy shiver
skittered down her spine.
C’mon, Pipe. Forget the past.
Don’t you dare lose it.
A movement to her left and her
dive buddy, Senior Constable Tom Carpenter, finned to her side. His
eyebrows lifted above steady brown eyes, his gloved thumb and
forefinger forming a questioning “O.” She nodded, mirroring the
signal.
She was okay, dammit.
Piper hadn’t made the elite Police
National Dive Squad two years ago by allowing on-the-job stress to
shake her, and she wasn’t a rookie freaking out on her first body
recovery dive. She’d been trained to deal with the dead.
But the teen beside her bore a
resemblance to a younger Ryan Westlake, her first love. She tried
to shrug it off. She hadn’t thought of Ryan “West” Westlake in
years. Well, maybe months. Okay,
weeks
.
Piper glanced again at the boy,
his shaggy, dark hair waving in the current like fine strands of
kelp. Blood thrummed thickly in her eardrums as the regulator
rasped, and she inhaled a quick gulp of air. And then
another.
No. She wouldn’t allow her mind to
go there.
But the momentary bolt of panic
was enough to reduce her smooth, coordinated kicks to fumbled
thrashes of her fins as she struggled to remain neutrally buoyant.
Sediment billowed behind her and swept forward over the body,
momentarily obscuring its features.
Behind the face mask Tom’s gaze
sharpened, and he pointed at the rapid belch of bubbles escaping
from her regulator, a clear indication she was breathing in and out
way too fast. He made a thumbs up, a mute instruction to
ascend.
Crap. She wasn’t fooling anyone.
Least of all herself.
The victim’s lifeless eyes,
focused through the deep blue to the sky above, set her heart
slamming against her ribs. Tom tapped her arm and signaled again,
this time with more emphasis. She released her grip on the boy’s
wrist, placing it in Tom’s capable hands.
She had to get out of there. Right
now.
Relying solely on her years of
training Piper followed the line upward, keeping a check on her
dive computer. She made the mandatory three-minute safety stop
sixteen feet below the lake’s sparkling surface. Seconds dragged as
she attempted to steady her breathing. The mask dug into her face,
the bottled air bitter on her tongue. For the first time she
understood at a gut level the panic that drove some divers to risk
the bends as they thrashed away from the claustrophobic
depths.
Piper waited out her one hundred
and eighty crawling seconds with her gaze fixated on the hull
above, drawing on every hour of intensive training, every hard won
skill, to remain static.
She was okay, dammit.
Bursting into bright sunshine she
swam to the boat and didn’t look back.
***
Nearly twenty-four hours after
returning to the city where she lived and worked, Piper remained
trapped at Wellington’s Central Police Station. She collated a
report for the coroner’s inquiry and then endured a dour-faced
psychologist picking through her brain—because Tom’s suspicions had
been aroused thanks to her near freak out. And worse? She couldn’t
blame him. Her reaction could’ve jeopardized the whole
team.
Piper slammed her locker door,
glaring at it while buttoning her jeans. She adjusted her tee shirt
and tugged on her battered leather jacket, feeling half clothed
without her pressed uniform blues and heavy stab-resistant
vest.
Her pocket vibrated, and she
yanked out her phone. The text from her sister said, “Call me when
you get home. IMPORTANT.”
Hell, what else could go wrong
today?
She shoved the phone back in her
pocket, snatched up her backpack and left the locker
room.
“
Hey, Piper?” Tom strolled along
the corridor toward her. “You ready to tell me what
really
happened at Tikitapu?”
She froze.
“
You gave me the rose-colored
version at yesterday’s debrief by the lake. Now I want the
non-prettied up version.”
“
Nothing happened. I’m fine.” She
swung the backpack onto her shoulder and folded her arms across her
diaphragm.
“
Fisher the shrink doesn’t think
so.” He leaned against the wall opposite, a six-foot-three chunk of
solid muscle with a soft side few knew about—except perhaps his
wife and twin baby girls. “How long have we worked together, kid? I
know when you’re dodging bullets.”
“
I’m not a kid—ah, crap.” She
raked shaky fingers through her hair, pulling the short strands
until her scalp stung. “Fisher stood me down from the squad
today—effective for two weeks. Two weeks back to the normal daily
grind of paperwork and patrol.”
Tom shoved his hands into the
pockets of his regulation pants. “Well, you knew we were a part
time squad when you applied. You did normal duties before you
became a dive cop and you continue to do it daily unless we get a
call out—be thankful we’re not pulling someone’s seventeen-year-old
kid out of a lake every day.”
“
Sound like a whiny cow, don’t I?”
Piper grimaced.
He sighed. “Look, Fisher gave me a
heads-up a few minutes ago that you’d failed the assessment and I
hate to say he’s right—” his voice gentled “—but it’s not the first
trouble you’ve had on a body recovery, is it?”
When she glared at him, he
shrugged. “Look Piper, you work like a woman possessed, so why not
treat this as a holiday. Even better, go south and see your
relatives. It’s, what, eight years since you’ve been
home?”
Home. Stewart Island. Bush-covered
hills, cold azure ocean, and abundant birdlife.
A lump of hardened grief and loss
amassed in her belly.
“
Nine.” She planted her feet wide
apart on the pitted linoleum floor. “But it’s not like I don’t keep
in touch. I talk to Shaye and Mum all the time.” If she counted
text messages and stilted phone conversations with her younger
sister and mother as keeping in touch.
“
Kid, you don’t talk, really talk,
to anyone.” Her chin lifted higher and Tom tugged on his earlobe
with a sigh. “It’s unnatural for a woman not to yatter on about her
feelings.”
“
Try saying that in front of your
wife, boss.”
“
Well, my ear’s here if you wanna
use it. You got a little squirrelly, but we all do at one time or
another. Still, you did good. We gave the boy back to his
family.”
“
I know.” She couldn’t meet his
gaze as the old familiar ache rose in her chest.
She did what she’d been trained to
do, achieving the goals she set as an eighteen-year-old cadet
entering Police College. She recovered the dead this time, but nine
years ago she’d been unable to return her own father to the
family.
She fastened a fat, false smile on
her lips. “Maybe I will take that holiday. Seats to the Gold Coast
are on sale this week. See you ‘round, boss.”
Tom shook his head as she
sauntered past. “Not if I see you first.”
***
Off the southernmost tip of New
Zealand, Piper clung to the ferry’s handrail as it wallowed across
Foveaux Strait to her hometown, Oban, on Stewart Island. Sea spray
splattered onto her face, salt stinging the corners of her slitted
eyes.
She was about to throw up.
Repeatedly throw up. And afterward she’d have to drag her weakened
carcass under a bench and curl into a fetal ball to die. The
manufacturers of useless seasickness pills had better watch out,
because she’d be haunting their asses.
God, she hated this stretch of
water.
Unpredictable and often dangerous,
the churning grey waves of the Strait reflected the gathering storm
clouds above. Another howling southerly squall on the way. Perfect.
She could be sunning herself without a care on the Gold Coast, but
instead she’d taken a call from her panicked sister two days ago
and used up all her accumulated leave to head south. Now she
endured a near-death experience to try and save her older brother
Ben from losing his house and business—not that he’d thank her for
it.
“
Just six weeks,” she muttered as
the ferry roiled into the small harbor, the anchored boats bobbing
and tossing so violently she closed her eyes. “Anyone could do six
weeks.”