In Too Deep

Chapter One (Scene 1)

In Too Deep (Blurb)

Piper Harland does the one thing she swore she’d never do—return home. Her brother’s financial difficulties can’t be ignored, so she heads for her tiny island hometown where Ryan ‘West’ Westlake crushed her heart just days before her father drowned while they were out diving.

Piper is tough, resilient and a little wild—much like the remote and beautiful Stewart Island where she grew up. As a cop who’s part of the elite New Zealand National Police Diver Squad, bringing the dead back to their families won’t stop the guilt she feels over her father’s death, but at least she’s doing something to atone for her mistakes. Now nine years later she’s obligated to return to a hostile community as the outsider, and forced to work with the man who was once her best friend and first lover.

West is an Island man, through and through. He was raised there and works at the hotel he’s turned into a thriving business. Surrounded by family and friends, he can’t imagine living anywhere else. West refuses to ever fall for a woman like his flighty mother – except at twenty he forgot his rule when his friendship with Piper blossomed into something else. Their relationship couldn’t last because Piper had a dream to become a cop, and her dream meant leaving him and everything else behind. So he ended it and let her go.

But now she’s back for an unexpected six week visit to help her brother and his best mate. Maybe West wants her a little bit, maybe he can’t resist the temptation to tease and touch her, but fall in love with such a flight risk? Never. He won’t make the same mistake twice.

Chapter One

When death revealed a pale hand to Piper Harland, she didn’t turn away, but kicked toward it and grabbed hold.

Sixty-five feet below Lake Tikitapu’s crystal blue water, she found the seventeen-year-old water-skier who’d disappeared yesterday evening. Now that they had pinpointed his location, Piper would return the boy to his grief-stricken family, huddled above on the shore of one of New Zealand’s most picturesque lakes.

Through her face mask she examined the body, while tugging on her swim-line to signal the rest of the squad that she’d found their objective. And right now she needed to be objective. Sucking air from the regulator, her gaze returned to the boy’s waxen skin. Her heart clenched, stuttered, and raced faster and faster. Under the neoprene wetsuit, an icy shiver skittered down her spine.

C’mon, Pipe. Forget the past. Don’t you dare lose it.

A movement to her left and the familiar bulky outline of Senior Constable Tom Carpenter, her dive buddy, finned to her side. His eyebrows lifted above steady brown eyes, his gloved thumb and forefinger forming a questioning “O”. She nodded, mirroring the signal.

She was okay, dammit.

Piper hadn’t made the elite National Police Divers Squad two years ago by allowing on-the-job stress to shake her, and she wasn’t a rookie freaking out on her first body recovery dive. She’d been trained to deal with the dead.

But—the teen beside her bore a slight resemblance to a younger Ryan Westlake, her first love. She tried to shrug it off. She hadn’t thought of Ryan “West” Westlake in years. Well, maybe months. Okay, weeks.

Piper glanced again at the boy, his shaggy, dark hair waving in the current like fine strands of kelp. Blood thrummed thickly in her eardrums as the regulator rasped, and she inhaled a quick gulp of air. And then another.

—No. She wouldn’t allow her mind to go there.

But the momentary bolt of panic was enough to render her smooth, coordinated kicks to fumbled thrashes of her fins in order to remain neutrally buoyant. Sediment billowed behind her and swept forward over the body, momentarily obscuring its features.

Behind the face mask Tom’s gaze sharpened, and he pointed at the rapid belch of bubbles escaping from her regulator, a clear indication she was breathing in and out way too fast. He made a thumbs up, a mute instruction to ascend.

Crap. She wasn’t fooling anyone. Least of all herself.

The victim’s lifeless eyes focused through the deep blue to the sky above set her heart slamming against her ribs. Tom tapped her arm and signaled again, this time with more emphasis. She released her grip, placing the boy’s wrist in Tom’s capable hands.

She had to get out of there. Right now.

Relying solely on her years of training, Piper followed the line upward, keeping a check on her dive computer. She made the mandatory three-minute safety stop sixteen feet below the lake’s sparkling surface. Seconds dragged as she attempted to steady her breathing. The mask dug into her face, the bottled air bitter on her tongue. For the first time, she understood at a gut level the panic that drove some divers to risk the bends as they thrashed away from the claustrophobic depths.

Piper waited out her one hundred and eighty crawling seconds with her gaze fixated on the hull above, drawing on every hour of intensive training, every hard-won skill, to remain static.

She was okay, dammit.

Bursting into bright sunshine, she swam to the boat and didn’t look back.