Page 63 of Doyle

“It was a beautiful plan.”

He stopped. “It worked too. She came home over Christmas, called me, and told me she’d broken it off with the other guy. We were back together by New Year’s. And I had life planned out. I proposed the minute I graduated from undergrad, and she pushed off the wedding until after she graduated too. And then until I finished my internship. Longest three years of my life. I passed my initial exam for my medical license and had gotten an offer to start residency that summer at the University of Minnesota. So we scheduled the wedding for Thanksgiving.”

He’d parked himself facing the ocean, staring out at the night, his hands in his pockets, the wind pressing his shirt against his body. Something in his gaze seemed to search the horizon. “It was perfect. Everything. My life... planned out all the way to the happy ending. And then...” He sighed, ran his hand across his mouth. “She didn’t show up for the wedding.”

Tia had stopped too, of course, and now stood a little away, watching him in the glow of the moonlight. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then took a breath. His voice softened.

“I stood there at the front of the church, waiting. Feeling like an idiot. And fearing that she’d changed her mind, and all the time, something gnawed inside me like... something wasn’t right. It just kept growing, even as I stood there.” He sighed. “I should have listened to my gut. I even called her, but it went to voice mail. I thought, I hoped she was just running late. Twenty minutes went by, and I wasn’t the only one worried. I went looking for her. Stein went with me, and we drove out to her house. It had snowed the night before. The roads were glass. We found the accident on a country road. A truck had hit the limo head-on. The limo went off an embankment and was half submerged in a lake. The limo driver was dead, and she and her dad were trapped—their doors locked from the front. Her dad had a severe head injury and was in shock. She told me to get him out first.”

He looked over at Tia. “I did. Stein and I pulled him out, and by then, EMS was arriving and I went back for Juliet. We’d jostled the car enough that it started to settle in the water, and it was almost completely submerged by the time I got there. That’s when I realized that she’d been caught by a piece of the door, speared into her back. She couldn’t get free—the car pulling her under.” He took a breath. “If I got her free, she’d bleed out—and if I didn’t, she’d drown.”

Tia wanted to reach out, to touch him, but he had closed his eyes as if replaying it, and she couldn’t intrude. Her throat burned, her eyes hot.

“I didn’t know what to do. And then the car went under and I just... I just panicked. I yanked her free and she went limp. I got her out, but the dress—it dragged us both under. If it hadn’t been for Stein...” He opened his eyes, glanced at her, then away, shaking his head. “I nearly drowned too. By the time we got her to shore, we had to do CPR. But... she’d already bled out so much... She died in the snow.”

He wiped a finger across his cheek. “The last thing she said to me was to keep following the call.” He lifted a shoulder. “Hard to do when your entire life has been shattered.”

And now Tia did touch him, just lightly, on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded, shrugged. “Five years. Seems like I should be over it by now.”

“Over losing your true love? Please. You don’t get over grief. You might learn to get back up faster after it hits you, but you don’t get over losing someone. You just bear it better.”

He nodded. “It took me the better part of a year to even get back up. And maybe I am bearing it better.” He met her eyes then. “I came here to... to start over. Maybe try to hear that calling again.”

The waves lapped between them, his gaze again in hers.

“I came here to start over too,” she said. “Maybe stop listening to my fears.”

He took a step toward her, lifted his hand, ran his fingertips across her face, then pushed her hair behind her ears. He smelled of sand and surf and coconut oil and maybe exotic, impulsive fresh starts. “Juliet will always be with me. But... maybe this is a good place to start over.” He ran his hand behind her neck, and her skin tingled under his touch. “Sunshine, beach, ocean, a little near-terror every day?”

She laughed then, and one side of his mouth hitched up.Oh,he was a beautiful man, with an early-evening scrub of whiskers, those eyes, now a dark blue, hued with something...

Oh. He took a step closer, caught her face with his other hand.

Well, then.She put a yes into her eyes, her expression, then touched the hollow of his neck. “Maybe we try to cut down on the terror.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said, and lowered his head.

Her lips parted.

“Mr. D!”

He jerked up at the voice, took a breath, then turned.

A couple boys ran up the beach toward them in the darkness. Elias and Jamal, out of breathing hard.

“What’s going on?”

“I tried to stop them—” This from Jamal, who seemed almost in tears. “But they went anyway.”

Doyle put his hands on Jamal’s shoulders. “Slow down. What are you talking about?”

“It’s Rohan. And Gabriella and Jaden—they went looking for the treasure.”

He stilled, and Tia caught her breath. Then she bent and met Jamal’s eyes. “Where did they go?”

He turned, pointed back toward the monastery, up the mountain. “The caves.”

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