“The hell with what I have a right to do.” Grabbing her again, he shook her with more violence than he’d ever shown her. A dozen things might have happened to her in the thirty minutes she’d been down. A dozen things he knew too well. “I make my own rights. You’re not going down alone if I have to chain you up to stop it.”

“You told me to get another diver,” she said between her teeth. “Until I do, I dive alone.”

“You threw that damn business arrangement in my face. Percentages. Lousy percentages and a daily rate. Do you know how that made me feel?”

“No!” she shouted, pushing him away. “No, I don’t know how that made you feel. I don’t know how anything makes you feel. You don’t tell me.” Dragging both hands through her dripping hair she walked away. “We agreed to the terms. That’s all I know.”

“That was before.”

“Before what?” she demanded. Tears brimmed for no reason she could name, but she blinked them back again. “Before I slept with you?”

“Damn it, Kate.” He was across the deck, backing her into the rail before she could take a breath. “Are you trying to get at me for something I did or didn’t do four years ago? I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know what you want from me or what you don’t want and I’m sick of trying to outguess you.”

“I don’t want to be pushed into a corner,” she told him fiercely. “That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want to be expected to fall in passively with someone else’s plans for me. That’s what I don’t want. I don’t want it assumed that I simply don’t have any personal goals or wishes of my own. Or any basic competence of my own. That’s what I don’t want!”

“Fine.” They were both losing control, but he no longer gave a damn. Ky ripped off his wet suit and tossed it aside. “You just remember something, lady. I don’t expect of you and I don’t assume. Once maybe, but not anymore. There was only one person who ever pushed you into a corner and it wasn’t me.” He hurled his mask across the deck where it bounced and smacked into the side. “I’m the one who let you go.”

She stiffened. Even with the distance between them he could see her eyes frost over. “I won’t discuss my father with you.”

“You caught on real quick though, didn’t you?”

“You resented him. You—”

“I?” Ky interrupted. “Maybe you better look at yourself, Kate.”

“I loved him,” she said passionately. “All my life I tried to show him. You don’t understand.”