Dark Abyss Kaitlyn O'Connor (best fiction books of all time .TXT) 📖

has two baths. It’s within our budget and it wouldn’t take much to fix it up—money or time.”

“And the bad news is?”

“He checked with a local marine biologist to get an idea about what sort of equipment she’d need for a lab. It’s way the hell out of our grasp.”

“Well hell!” Ian said irritably as they entered his office and he moved to his desk to check the reports he had waiting. “That’s no good. Any options?”

“We might be able to track down some secondhand equipment that we could afford, but the biologist told Caleb he’d be willing to time-share with his equipment.”

Ian looked at Joshua in surprise. “You don’t sound very enthused about it.”

Joshua shrugged. “She’d have to go there to use it—not very convenient—but doable, except Caleb didn’t like the man’s looks.”

Ian studied him for a long moment before that sank in. “I take it he’s single?”

“Not happily,” Joshua said dryly. “He was hinting around pretty broadly about buying in.”

Ian gaped at him in dawning outrage. “But he hasn’t even seen Anna!” he growled, knowing even as he said it that that didn’t mean a damned thing. She could have looked like a walrus and he might still have been interested. Beyond that, she’d been in the hospital. Even with the guards there was plenty of hospital staff that had seen her, plus the men who’d taken part in the raid. Anna was pretty enough to have aroused a lot of interest … and talk. It chilled him to think about the number of men that might be just waiting for them to cut her loose.

Joshua uttered an irritated huff. “Actually he has. He went to school with her.”

Chapter Twelve

There was no way to keep their purchase a complete secret until it could be presented shiny and new. None of them were happy about it. As much as it had cost them, they knew it wasn’t going to look like much to Anna before they’d had time to refurbish it.

Caleb’s inquiries had made them all extremely uneasy, though. His discovery that a local scientist, who might be supposed to have a lot in common with Anna, was interested it reacquainting himself wasn’t the only unpleasant discovery. Everyone, or so it seemed, had at least heard of her and knew pretty much her entire situation. She was a heroine to the men who’d taken part in the raid, because it was her intuition that had saved them from being blown to bits, and they hadn’t stopped at heaping gifts on her.

They’d been singing her praises to anybody that would listen, and there weren’t many that didn’t. She was beautiful. She was brilliant. She was brave and heroic. And above all, she was not taken.

There were a lot of men who saw their purchase as a clear sign that they were taking advantage of the situation to fix Anna’s interest before anybody else had a chance—which they were—and they were pretty pissed off about it—enough that the governor had heard a number of complaints. He’d summoned Simon and raked him over the coals about behaving in a manner unbecoming an officer, unprofessional, and potentially dangerous to their witness. She was supposed to be in protective custody and, although they hadn’t actually tried to keep it secret and couldn’t have, she still shouldn’t be the target of so much discussion and interest, or, to put it in the governor’s words ‘what the hell did they think they were doing fucking around with their witness?’.

He’d accepted Simon’s boldfaced lie that they’d just decided to renovate their place and it just happened to coincide with Anna’s presence there—but with patent disbelief. The governor had finally dismissed him with a warning—If the case fell through because of their mishandling of the witness, they were all going to be looking for new jobs.

Simon supposed if they hadn’t all had their heads up their asses—or more accurately, up Anna’s—they would’ve noticed before that they weren’t by any means the only Atlanteans that had cast hopeful looks in her direction. As torn as he was between his duty and his desire, though, he was as anxious to try to fix Anna’s interest as everyone else—especially when it was born in upon him that none of them were likely to get a chance after the case was tried. They finally agreed that they really didn’t have a lot of options. The purchase had set them back enough that they couldn’t afford to pay to have it remodeled and refurbished. They were going to have to do it themselves, and a little at the time.

It also didn’t seem like a good idea to bring their nest-building anymore into the public eye than they had already.

They’d all still nursed some hope that they could keep it from Anna until they’d at least cleaned it up a little, but that hope, too, went unfulfilled. Anna went into a panic the moment the new unit was attached to the anchoring column and the workers started winching it up to connect it with the rest of the house.

She grabbed two handfuls of robe—Ian’s and Simon’s since they were sitting on either side of her on the couch at the time. Her eyes widened like saucers and the color completely drained from her face. “Did you feel that? Did you hear that?”

Simon didn’t know about Ian, but all he could feel was Anna’s grip on his balls and all he could hear was the ringing in his ears from the pain. Thankfully, she let go and leapt to her feet before he passed out.

“What was that?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Caleb said soothingly. “I didn’t hear anything. Did you hear anything?”

“No. I