After I Dream Read online

  “YOU… TERRIFY ME,” CALLIE SAID.

  Right now she was terrifying him. His white-knight impulse had never been stronger. She needed help, and he wanted to give it, but there was danger here.

  He should back away right now, he told himself. Let go of her, step back. But he could no more have let go of her than he could have stopped the beating of his heart. He felt almost as if he were welded to her, and ripping away would cause terminal damage.

  A breeze moved, skimming over the water and stirring its surface, shattering the mirror of moonlight. It caught the back of his head, ruffling his hair, and gently pushing him toward Callie. Carrying away his last sane thought.

  He bent his head, saw her face lift toward him, recognized that she wanted this as much as he…

  “Rachel Lee is a master of romantic suspense.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat read.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Caught

  “Gripping…. Action packed…. Anyone who enjoys fast-paced romantic intrigue will want to be caught by Ms. Lee’s terrific tale.”

  —Harriet Klausner, Amazon.com, on Caught

  Also by Rachel Lee

  Before I Sleep

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 2000 by Sue Civil-Brown

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2673-0

  Contents

  “YOU… TERRIFY ME,” CALLIE SAID.

  Also by Rachel Lee

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  A Preview of WHEN I WAKE

  For my darling, who packed up the van and headed

  south on a moment’s notice to make the setting for

  this book possible.

  PROLOGUE

  The day was wrong.

  Tom Akers stood on the deck of the hundred-foot-long ship Lady Hope, enjoying a pipe as he waited for the divers to finish their work. As captain of a salvage vessel he took his moments of peace where he could find them. Most salvage operations he and his crew performed were risky bits of business conducted in bad conditions and under immutable time constraints if they were to save a troubled vessel and its occupants. By comparison, waiting for divers to finish exploring a sunken yacht was a cakewalk, and Tom was perfectly willing to enjoy the calm.

  Except that it was too calm.

  Tom had spent the majority of his forty years at sea, and the sea spoke to him in a language he understood as well as his native tongue. He needed no radio weather advisories to warn him something was wrong.

  Unease crawled along the cradle of his scalp, and it bothered him that he couldn’t pin it down. The morning had started out almost painfully clear, with sun glinting off the waves of the Florida Straits in splinters of light that hurt the eyes. But gradually, since the divers had gone below, the day had changed.

  Becalmed. The word floated up out of his subconscious, some genetic memory from ancestors who had gone to sea in wind-driven vessels. A sailor in these days of powerful engines had no need to fear the absence of wind.

  But Tom found himself fearing it anyway. The Atlantic was never this quiet and still, not even here at the edge of the continental shelf. Stretching away from the Hope, the sea was as smooth as glass. Too smooth. And the sky had grown hazy, an unsettling green-tinged haze unlike anything he could remember seeing this far from land. The sun was still up there somewhere, but the light had become so flat that he had no sense of direction. The Hope might have been cast adrift in some alien world where sea and sky were one.

  He didn’t like it.

  Standing there he reminded himself of his engines, his radio, and his global positioning system, advantages his ancestors hadn’t enjoyed. As long as they didn’t swamp, he could get his ship home.

  But modern technology and rationalization weren’t quite enough to soothe the soul of a sailor. Like most of his kind, he had a superstitious streak, and right now he was trying to remember if they were in the Bermuda Triangle. If asked, he would have said he didn’t believe in such tripe, but deep inside he couldn’t quite shake a gut feeling no logic could touch.

  His pipe was out, and he tapped it on the railing to shake the dottle into the sea below. The sound echoed in the strange silence, too loud, as if they were caught in a fog bank. But this was no fog, at least no ordinary fog.

  The sea had a life of her own, and Tom respected it. He knew her moods as well or better than he had known the moods of his late wife. In his heart of hearts he felt that the sea tolerated his ship on her surface, and in some part of him he always wondered when that tolerance would end.

  Today? Perhaps it would be today. It was as if she were reaching up over their heads, surrounding them in this grayish green cocoon, and at any moment she would take them down into her eternal embrace.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, appalled by the turn of his own thoughts. He shook himself and decided this was not a good day to stand alone at the bow, thinking thoughts that were as mad as any dream he’d ever had.

  A shout caught his attention. Forgetting his strange meanderings, he headed swiftly toward the two men who were monitoring the divers from amidships. The Hope was a large vessel, crewed by ten, and it took him a minute or so to get back there.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded as he reached them. Other crew members gathered, too.

  “One of the divers is in trouble,” said the man who was monitoring the sound-powered phones the divers were using to talk to the ship. He and his companion were employed by the insurance company that had hired Tom and his ship.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” The man looked at him, but then his eyes slid away, as if he were somehow a strange part of this strange day.

  Tom felt his unease blossom into vines of ice that wrapped around his spine. “What makes you say something is wrong?” he asked again, slowly.

  “He says there are monsters in the water.”

  The icy vines clamped Tom’s spine. “Monsters?”

  “Hallucinations,” said the man tending the safety lines. “He must be having hallucinations. It can happen on a deep dive.”

  But not usually to experienced deep divers, Tom thought. He’d known Chase for years, but the other diver wasn’t as familiar to him. Just some guy the insurance company had hired.

  “The other diver can’t see anything,” the phone man agreed. “It’s got to be nitrogen narcosis.”

  Tom objected. This was something he knew a little about. “But their tanks don’t have Nitrox. They’ve got a helium and oxygen mix.”

  The phone man shrugged. “He had some nitrogen in him from breathing regular air when he went over the side.”

  Enough for this? Tom wondered. Fe
aring trouble, he asked one of his sailors to get the medic they’d brought with them, a man experienced in treating diving emergencies.

  Then out of the speaker came the tinny voice of one of the divers. Unidentifiable, because some of his voice was being converted to electrical power for the phone, squawky from the helium in his air mix. Let it be Chase, Tom prayed.

  “I can’t… get near him,” the voice said, sounding like a cartoon character. “God… knife… out!”

  “Stay back, stay back,” said the first dive master into his microphone. “We’re going to bring him up.”

  “He’s…” The diver’s words were broken, many of them distorted past Tom’s ability to recognize. “Christ, he… thinks… sees something…”

  The winch was already turning, bringing the troubled diver up a few safe feet. How long? Tom wondered. How deep were they? He hadn’t really paid any attention to the details of the dive. It was out of his bailiwick. All he was supposed to do was keep his tender here until the work was done. He had no idea how long it would take to bring the man to the top safely.

  “I’m… alongside him,” the diver said. “Bring me up… Oh, Jesus! He’s trying… helmet off! Get him up! Get him up! Get him up!”

  The two dive masters exchanged glances, then looked at Tom. “The bends…” said the man operating the winches that controlled the safety lines.

  Tom might know little about diving, but he knew about the bends. When a diver descended, the increasing pressure condensed the gas bubbles in his blood, making them smaller, small enough to get into places they wouldn’t usually go, into tissues and nerves. If the diver ascended too quickly, those bubbles would expand before they could work their way out of the tissues, causing serious damage and even death.

  “We’ve got the decompression chamber,” Tom said. “Preventing the bends won’t matter a raindrop in a hurricane if he pulls his helmet off down there!” He was surprised he even needed to say it.

  “Get him up!” yelled the diver. “Get him up, he’s… mask, for the love of God get him up!”

  The dive master slammed one of the winches to top speed. For Tom, a lifetime seemed to pass before the diver finally surfaced alongside the vessel. He was still flailing, making it difficult to winch him over the side. At least he’d lost his knife in his rapid ascent, so they only had to deal with his struggles as they hastened to unhook him from the safety line.

  Helping hands were plentiful. As soon as they had the diver unhooked, they carried him as quickly as they could to the hyperbaric chamber that the insurance company had ordered bolted onto the Hope’s deck specifically for this deep dive. As if someone had known…

  The thought crossed Tom’s mind, then washed away on the tide of horror as he helped put the diver on the cot in the chamber.

  Oh, God, he thought as he glanced at the face inside the mask. Oh, God, it was Chase.

  Chase, his friend of many years. Chase, a drinking buddy since their navy days. Oh, dear Mary, Mother of God…

  He stood outside the chamber, watching through the small, thick window, as the compressor labored to raise the pressure to sixty feet below sea level. He wanted to steam full ahead for the shore, but they couldn’t budge until they safely brought up the other diver. He watched as the bends gripped his friend and twisted his body into impossible shapes. He listened to the muffled screams.

  “Skipper? Bill’s aboard.”

  Only then, with a heart as heavy as lead, did Tom order the Lady Hope to make full speed for port. Only then did the wind and waves return, carrying away the eerie haze.

  The sea had exacted her toll.

  CHAPTER 1

  Night blanketed Lower Sugarloaf Key, surrounding the cottage and threatening to bury it.

  Chase Mattingly looked at the 9mm Beretta sitting on the table in front of him. He took it out from time to time to clean it, then sat staring at it with a mixture of loathing and need. Sometimes he came perilously close to putting the barrel to his head, but so far it had been enough just to know it was there.

  Tonight was one of those nights when he was coming close. Every light in the cottage was burning brightly to hold the night outside at bay. He couldn’t stand the darkness anymore. Out of the dark came the twisting, evil things to torment him. Out of the dark came monsters that had been spawned by a nightmare that had nearly killed him.

  As long as the lights were on, he could cling to the edges of reality. As long as the lights were on, he could stare at the Beretta and know that relief was only one short act away.

  He scorned himself for it. He scorned his weakness in needing that gun and needing the lights that drove the demons back. He scorned himself for not being strong enough to put a bullet in his brain.

  Hell, he more than scorned himself. He hated himself.

  So he sat staring at the pistol while the night whispered around the walls of the cottage, and he tried not to think about the pain that gnawed at him with hungry jaws.

  There was a bottle of painkillers in his medicine chest. Two tablets would dull the pain and send him over the edge into sleep.

  But he didn’t dare sleep while night ruled the world. In dreams, he found himself clamped in the icy black grip of the merciless sea. While he slept, not even the lights and the locked doors could keep the night outside. It crept in, clawing at his sleeping mind with icy fingers, pressing the breath right out of his body until he woke screaming and gasping for air.

  The monsters had followed him back from the depths of the sea. Now they inhabited the depths of night. They had almost killed him once, and he couldn’t escape the feeling that they would never quit until they succeeded.

  The doctors told him he was being irrational, and he knew they were right. They told him he had suffered some weird kind of stroke or embolism that had caused hallucinations while he was diving, and he believed them. His mind believed them. But in the depths of night, his gut ruled, and he knew with absolute certainty that demons had tried to kill him, and were only awaiting a chance to finish the job.

  The gun wouldn’t work on them, but it would work on him. So he sat with it for company, drinking coffee until his nerves buzzed, waiting for the night to find some crack by which it could creep in and attack him.

  He clung to his pain because it kept him awake, and he needed to stay awake.

  He listened to the clatter of palm fronds in the sea breeze, and heard taunting laughter. He listened to the wind rattle the windows and shutters, and heard the night trying to break in. The darkness had shape and form and evil intent.

  And he didn’t believe it, but he couldn’t stop believing it. He was mad, and despised himself for it. Before, he had always believed that the insane didn’t know they were insane. Now he knew otherwise. There was no such mercy in madness.

  Alone with his insanity and his gun, he struggled to hold on to reality. He forced himself to hear the sounds of the night and put natural interpretations on them. He forced himself to pay attention to the pain throbbing in his hip and his back, a pain that was almost as solid as the chair on which he sat.

  And with every cell he strained for the sounds that would herald his release from terror for another day.

  At last he heard a boat engine turn over, then chug in the restless air of the inlet. Without looking, he knew that the first pink streamers of dawn were driving the night back from the eastern rim of the world. Pushing back from the table, ignoring the grinding pain in his hip, and the stabbing pain in his back, he limped to the door and threw it open.

  Night was recoiling, vanquished as always by the approach of day. In the dim light, the taunting shadows were beginning to resolve into normalcy. He could see the Carlson boy across the inlet, jumping from the dock onto the battered thirty-foot fishing boat he shared with a friend. The two of them dreamed grand dreams of making enough to buy a good deep-sea fishing boat one day, something they could charter to tourists. He’d heard them spinning their dreams not too long ago as they’d worked on their old wood-hull
ed boat, fighting age and the elements to keep it seaworthy.

  Once, he’d been like them. He’d had dreams… dreams that weren’t filled with terror and pain.

  Looking up, he saw the red streaks of dawn stretching across the sky like bloody gashes. Idiots, he thought, watching the boys’ boat as it chugged out of the inlet toward the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean. Jerks. A sky like that in the morning shouldn’t be ignored.

  Then he turned and went back inside. The sun had driven the night back into the depths of the sea.

  Now he could sleep.

  Calypso Carlson opened her eyes with the certain sense that something was wrong. Another person might have called it foreboding, but she had spent many years rooting out that kind of mystical garbage from her thinking. She was a psychologist, and she knew too much about the mind’s workings to fall prey to such intuitions.

  What was wrong—the only thing that was wrong—was that she and her brother Jeff had been up half the night fighting. She simply dreaded opening another round with him this morning.

  With a groan, Callie rolled over and tried to talk herself into going back to sleep. This was the first day of her monthlong vacation, and there was no reason to drag herself out of bed. What was she going to do? Argue with Jeff again about how he should go to college and save his dreams of owning a charter service until after he had a degree?

  She snorted into her pillow and wondered why she even bothered. Jeff had hit the nail on the head when he’d accused her of being afraid of the sea ever since their father had been lost out there. As far as he was concerned, that made her reasoning about college suspect.

  And maybe it was, in part. God knew, the sea had taken enough from her.

  But she couldn’t stay in bed any longer. The morning sun was hammering on the walls of her bedroom, making it hot and stuffy, but not yet warming the rest of the house enough to make the air-conditioning turn on. But it wasn’t the stuffiness that drove her to get up, though she told herself it was. It was the lingering, troubling sense of doom.