Page 122 of Her Reluctant Hero
Just as she thought, he didn’t need any help. He’d only brought her in here to razz her about Jonathan. “I doubt it.” God, she really hoped not.
“Can he even swim?”
“Why? Planning on pushing him off the boat?”
He gave her a disgusted look and turned his attention to the controls. “He seems a little nervous, keeps looking at the water. Can he?”
“I—” Truth was, she didn’t know.
“That’s something you should know about the man you’re going to marry,” he chided, reading her thoughts and pushing the throttle.
Mallory jostled a little, did everything she could to keep her balance, never easy around Adrian.
“Knowing everything about each other didn’t save our marriage,” she shot back and looked toward the stern and Jonathan, who was gripping the rail and grinning.
He loved her. She knew that much, and that was all that was important. She started to go to him but Adrian grabbed her arm, pulling her inside.
“I thought you understood I didn’t want word about this getting out.”
She blinked. He thought Jonathan was a security risk? “He won’t say anything.”
“Maybe not on purpose, but damn it, Mal, this isn’t a sightseeing trip. I can’t have him going home blabbing about what he saw here.”
She widened her eyes mockingly. “You are going to throw him overboard.”
“No, of course not,” he said quickly before he realized she was joking, then he scowled. “Just downplay it, all right? He’s a linguist, not an archaeologist, right?”
Yes, but he wasn’t stupid. Still, he wasn’t known for his discretion, and the wrong word to the wrong person could expose the secret Adrian had sacrificed so much to keep. She returned to Jonathan hoping she hadn’t destroyed Adrian’s chances again.
“So what are we looking at here?”
Jonathan crowded a little closer to Adrian to look at the computer screen, and Mallory tensed as Adrian did. She couldn’t have come up with a worse idea, or for a more selfish reason. Just because she didn’t have the courage to tell Jonathan she wanted to stay—or Adrian, for that matter—she was putting them all through hell.
“Nothing, yet,” Adrian said, and she recognized the strain in his voice. “It takes a bit for the submersible to get down there.”
“Less time than it takes us to get down there, though,” Mallory said brightly.
Both men looked at her. Jonathan gave her an indulgent smile.
She hated indulgent smiles.
God, she’d made her choice and she didn’t have the nerve to speak up.
What were her options? She had to speak up, or live the rest of her life married to a man, always wondering…
No, not about Adrian. This wasn’t about Adrian. This was about the life she’d known and loved since she was a child. The longer she stayed here, the longer she wanted to stay, the more unwilling she was to walk away.
“Are you seeing this, Mallory?” The excitement in Jonathan’s voice gave her hope, for just a moment, that he could love this life too, but he would never understand her obsession. She would do to him what Adrian had done to her, leave him behind for something she needed more.
That thought alone should have given her the courage to end it, to walk away from everything the two of them had built, the future they’d planned.
But she was a coward.
She lifted her head and forced a smile, then looked past Jonathan to the screen, where fish flitted around the camera, investigating the invader.
“Do they do that when you go down there?” Jonathan asked.
She shook her head. “No, they’re wary of us.”
