The towering white clouds brushed the blue into the sky. The sea roared and foamed, comforting in its consistency, with a deep green warning glint of danger. And she—she was thin, too thin, with a straight and supple spine and long legs. She was young, glowing with color, her dark hair wild where she’d rolled with him on the blanket. He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. So free. So joyous.

How could she do it? Return to the ocean that had robbed her of her life and take such pleasure in a simple pursuit? He didn’t understand that kind of resilience, courage.

He thought he had recovered from his childhood and used his experiences to make a living where no one else dared. But she said he’d been pursuing a goal, saving his mother, and failed. Failed because he’d been set up to fail. Yes, he would always bear responsibility for those deaths on the Amazon, but was it time to put it all behind him and go on? Use his gifts and his skills to help others? Release the past and find happiness...with Elle?

With her, he sensed life, realized for the first time in too long that he was more than a shell empty of emotions. He now had no choice: he wished as fervently as a child blowing out birthday candles that they could be together forever. Forever!

He came to his feet, intending to go to her, talk seriously about—well, not forever, he hadn’t changed that much that quickly. But about their options, and with so many unknowns, there were a lot of options, some of them even hopeful.

The waves rolled in, rose, foamed, divided on something—a rock or a log—and there she stumbled and fell.

He headed toward her.

She got up, bent down into the waves and tugged at something. A wave knocked her backward. She disappeared into the ocean.

He ran.

She bobbed up twenty feet from where she started and waded determinedly back.

He paused and watched.

She seemed to grope with her feet under the foam, then she reached down, grabbed something and tugged again, working hard. She had a grip on it, and although she strained, she hadn’t the strength to raise her discovery. She dragged it bit by bit up onto the dry sand.

He caught the first glimpse of her find. As he suspected, she’d found a piece of a ship long-lost off the coast. A piece moved by currents and earthquakes onto this beach.

She knelt beside a single side of the steel prow, the bowsprit thrusting forward and broken off. The metal was corrupted, eaten by salt and water currents and years of work laboring through the sea before it sank beneath the waves.