Hours to Cherish Read Online Free PDF Page A

power that assailed her, it would shortly release her.
    She was in no more than forty feet of water, but she had never before descended to such a depth without her lungs being filled with air. Don’t! her mind screamed in warning, don’t fight, don’t flail.
    It felt like hours that the sea gripped her, interminable hours in which the blood began to pound viciously in her head, the “liquid light” of the water became a swimming black. But it wasn’t hours. It was doubtful that it was more than a minute. Cat felt the water release its hold. The pressure in her lungs was becoming unbearable, but she still fought against panic. She had neared the bottom of the harbor, she couldn’t just rush upward. She could cause herself inestimable damage. Cat forced herself to begin a smooth ascent.
    She was startled, as her vision began to clear, to find the stranger streaking toward her. He was so strange-looking, hair whipping away from his temples, features so tense, the tiny lines around his eyes emphasized in the distortion of the water. His eyes, she thought, seeing them for the first time. She was growing giddy with lack of air. A less experienced swimmer would have drowned. She was still near panic and might open her mouth to fill her lungs with the sea and she was noticing a man’s eyes. … But they were familiar … disturbingly so.
    His arm slipped around her and she didn’t protest. She couldn’t have. Besides being so dizzy, she was fast losing her reserves of strength.
    It was a powerful kick of his legs that brought them to the surface. His arms stayed around her until they reached her Hobie Cat, listing ever so slightly after having righted itself. His hands came around her rib cage beneath her breasts and she was hoisted high out of the water. Her mouth opened; her lungs, starved for oxygen, sucked in. She coughed. A thunderous slap hit her back—one she was vaguely sure would hurtle her again into the water. But her cough desisted—she was gulping for air again, and this time it filled her lungs smoothly. Hung over the fiberglass with the man behind her, Cat let her head go limp and rested her chin, thinking of nothing else but filling her lungs until the mad heave of her chest slowly gave way to a quiet, easy sound. She became aware of the lap of the sea around her, of his flesh against hers. …
    “Are you all right?”
    Cat nodded to the anxious question and tried to twist to see the face of the stranger. His position would allow no such thing, and rather than accommodating her by moving back, the stranger pressed closer. She glanced at the arms that came around over hers. Well-built arms, she thought, lightly freckled, tufted with dark hair, so sinewed, she doubted if the skin could be pinched.
    Familiar.
    Just as the eyes, so strange in the sea, had been familiar.
    “You are all right,” he ascertained. Cat felt a little quiver race oddly down her spine. She couldn’t see the man’s face, but she had felt the touch of his lips, the velvet whisper of his voice against her ear. … God! She could feel him! Wrung out as she was, she could feel him … quiver at that brush of his lips. …
    He was suddenly gone. She sensed him move out, inhale and hold a deep breath, and then smoothly jackknife his sleek form back into the crystal-clear water. He repeated the gesture several times. Cat kept breathing, vaguely wondering what the hell the idiot was doing.
    He reappeared by her side—dark glasses beaded and dripping with water but firmly back in place. “Lost them when I plunged in after you,” he explained briefly, adding, “My eyes are sensitive to light.”
    It was a lie. Cat knew it was a lie. An obvious lie! But she still didn’t have the strength to tell him he was a liar and demand that he remove the glasses. He was unlikely to do so at her command, and she was in no position to remove them herself.
    She just kept breathing and hanging on to the fiberglass, watching him with eyes that clearly