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inconsistent with his precise life-style.
    So he’d been looking for gold, Ky mused. All theseyears the man had been digging in books and looking for gold. If it had been anyone else, Ky might have dismissed it as another fable. Little towns along the coast were full of stories about buried treasure. Edward Teach had used the shallow waters of the inlets to frustrate and outwit the crown until his last battle off the shores of Ocracoke. That alone kept the dreams of finding sunken treasures alive.
    But it was Doctor Edwin J. Hardesty, Yale professor, an unimaginative, humorless man who didn’t believe there was time to be wasted on the frivolous, who’d written these notebooks.
    Ky might still have dismissed it, but Kate was sitting across from him. He had enough adventurous blood in him to believe in destinies.
    Setting the last notebook aside, he picked up his beer again. “So, you want to treasure hunt.”
    She ignored the humor in his voice. With her hands folded on the table, she leaned forward. “I intend to follow through with what my father was working on.”
    “Do you believe it?”
    Did she? Kate opened her mouth and closed it again. She had no idea. “I don’t believe that all of my father’s time and research should go for nothing. I want to try. As it happens, I need you to help me do it. You’ll be compensated.”
    “Will I?” He studied the liquid left in the beer bottle with a half smile. “Will I indeed?”
    “I need you, your boat and your equipment for a month, maybe two. I can’t dive alone because I just don’t knowthe waters well enough to risk it, and I don’t have the time to waste. I have to be back in Connecticut by the end of August.”
    “To get more chalk dust under your fingernails.”
    She sat back slowly. “You have no right to criticize my profession.”
    “I’m sure the chalk’s very exclusive at Yale,” Ky commented. “So you’re giving yourself six weeks or so to find a pot of gold.”
    “If my father’s calculations are viable, it won’t take that long.”
    “If,” Ky repeated. Setting down his bottle, he leaned forward. “I’ve got no timetable. You want six weeks of my time, you can have it. For a price.”
    “Which is?”
    “A hundred dollars a day and fifty percent of whatever we find.”
    Kate gave him a cool look as she slipped the notebooks back into her briefcase. “Whatever I was four years ago, Ky, I’m not a fool now. A hundred dollars a day is outrageous when we’re dealing with monthly rates. And fifty percent is out of the question.” It gave her a certain satisfaction to bargain with him. This made it business, pure and simple. “I’ll give you fifty dollars a day and ten percent.”
    With the maddening half grin on his face he swirled the beer in the bottle. “I don’t turn my boat on for fifty a day.”
    She tilted her head a bit to study him. Something toreinside him. She’d often done that whenever he said something she wanted to think over. “You’re more mercenary than you once were.”
    “We’ve all got to make a living, professor.” Didn’t she feel anything? he thought furiously. Wasn’t she suffering just a little, being in the house where they’d made love their first and last time? “You want a service,” he said quietly, “you pay for it. Nothing’s free. Seventy-five a day and twenty-five percent. We’ll say it’s for old-times’ sake.”
    “No, we’ll say it’s for business’ sake.” She made herself extend her hand, but when his closed over it, she regretted the gesture. It was callused, hard, strong. Kate knew how his hand felt skimming over her skin, driving her to desperation, soothing, teasing, seducing.
    “We have a deal.” Ky thought he could see a flash of remembrance in her eyes. He kept her hand in his knowing she didn’t welcome his touch. Because she didn’t. “There’s no guarantee you’ll find your treasure.”
    “That’s understood.”
    “Fine. I’ll deduct your father’s