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diver hooked himself to the vertical line for his next decompression stop. His large, dark form twenty feet above her looked so close, yet so far away. He was angry with her, had every right to be. She was angry with herself. She wasn’t an amateur diver. She knew the dangers, understood how unforgiving a liquid environment could be. But the things that had happened, the experience she had just had, couldn’t be explained by nitrogen narcosis, or oxygen toxicity. She hadn’t imagined the electric surge that had shot through her body. She hadn’t dreamed everything she had seen or felt afterward. That she hadn’t drowned while in such a state was a miracle. Had he not come for her, she would have.
    A tremor shook her. Had it been narcosis, or something more? Fear clawed at her heart and made it difficult to breath. She’d been fine before—just jet lagged. The chances it had been something more deep-seated, more emotional than physical, were slim. I’m nothing like Evelyn. Nothing . Besides, her troubles had been caused by drugs.  She’d fried her brain with drugs.
    Thoughts of what she had nearly put her parents through tormented her. Her father would have worried how he had failed to impress on her the diving rules. Her mother would have been devastated. She hadn’t wanted her to come to Scotland. Had argued it was too far away.
    She’d abused their trust in her. They deserved better than what she’d just given them. She’d allowed her need for success to temper her decisions and placed herself, and Henry, in jeopardy. She hoped Henry’s would be the first face she saw, so she could thank him for sending help. Her stomach cramped with anxiety. Was he really okay?
    Regan checked her watch and looked up to see the diver had moved on to his next decompression stop. Unhooking herself from the line, she swam up to the twenty-five meter mark. The minutes passed slowly allowing her too much time for self-recrimination and evaluation.
    At the twelve-meter mark, the light above died and a strong current threatened to pull her from the deco station. She tethered herself to it to maintain her depth, but it was like playing snap the whip with a boa constrictor. Keeping her breathing even was next to impossible. To fight the forces at work above and below her, she wrapped one arm and leg around the line like an acrobat and held on.
    She swam up to the six -meter mark, and was relieved to find the water growing progressively calmer. Her mouth tasted dry as dust from breathing the compressed gas. Visions of water poured over a tumbler of ice cubes tormented her. When next her roommates offered her a beer she’d take it, and thank them.
    Exhaustion cramped her muscles, and she turned on the dive light intermittently, just to banish the dark now and then. She had never done a night dive, and after this experience, she never would again.
    The ship’s running lights switched on as Regan surfaced to find the sky streaked with lightning and rain falling in diagonal sheets. Her movements clumsy with fatigue, she swam to the diver’s platform at the stern and shoved the light as far back on it as she could. A man’s head and shoulders covered by a hooded yellow rain slicker appeared over the railing. He removed a section of the aft bulkhead and stepped out on the platform. Regan scrambled to get her flipper-encased feet on the steps as he grabbed her tank harness. By sheer brute strength, he lifted her onto the scaffolding. Panting, she lay still, waiting for the buoyant feeling of submersion to recede. She released the small pony tank clipped to her harness she hadn’t used, and handed it to him.
    Lightning cut a jagged path across the sky that left an after image on the back of her eyelids when she blinked. She jerked as a boom of thunder came almost on top of the flash.
    “If you don’t move your arse t’will be fried American I’ll be scraping off m’platform.” Impatience gave his deep voice a huskiness that at any