She loved him. It was something she murmured in the night when she was sleepy and caught close against him. She wasn’t a woman to use words unless they had meaning. Yet with the love he offered and the love she returned, she’d begun to hold something back from him, as though he could have only a portion of her, but not all. Edged with frustration, he cleared more ballast. He needed and would have, all.

Marriage? Was he thinking of marriage? Kate found herself flustered and uneasy. She’d never expected Ky to look for that kind of commitment, that kind of permanency. Perhaps she’d misread him. After all, it was difficult to be certain of someone’s intention, yet she knew just how clearly Ky and she had been able to communicate underwater.

There was so much to consider, so many things to weigh. He wouldn’t understand that, Kate mused. Ky was a man who made decisions in an instant and took the consequences. He wouldn’t think about all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the maybes. She had to think about them all. She simply knew no other way.

Kate watched the silt and sand blowing away, causing a cuplike indentation to form on the ocean floor. Outside influences, she mused. They could eat away at the layers and uncover the core, but sometimes what was beneath couldn’t stand up to the pressure.

Is that what would happen between her and Ky? How would their relationship hold up under the pressure of variant life-styles—the demands of her profession and the free-wheeling tone of his? Would it stay intact, or would it begin to sift away, layer by layer? How much of herself would he ask her to give? And in loving, how much of herself would she lose?

It was a possibility she couldn’t ignore, a threat she needed to build a solid defense against. Time. Perhaps time was the answer. But summer was waning.

The force of the wash made a small object spin up, out of the layer of silt and into the water. Kate grabbed at it and the sharp edge scraped her palm. Curious, she turned it over for examination. A buckle? she wondered. The shape seemed to indicate it, and she could just make out a fastening. Even as she started to hold it out for Ky an other, then another was pushed off the ocean bed.

Shoe buckles, Kate realized, astonished. Dozens of them. No, she realized as more and more began to twist up in the water’s spin and reel away. Hundreds. With a quick frenzy, she began to gather what she could. More than hundreds, she discovered as her heart thudded. There were thousands of them, literally thousands.