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Almost before the anchor flukes of Ice Hunter had taken bite of the bottom, representatives from Ruppert & Saunders had departed their aircraft and boarded a Zodiac for the trip from shore. Within minutes they climbed aboard the lowered gangway and quickly climbed to the bridge, where Pitt, Dempsey and Giordino awaited them. One man cleared the steps three at a time and pulled up short, surveying the three men standing before him. He was big and ruddy and wore a smile a yard wide.
"Captain Dempsey?" he asked.
Dempsey stepped forward and extended his hand. "I'm he."
"Captain Ian Ryan, Chief of Operations for Ruppert & Saunders."
Happy to have you aboard, Captain."
Ryan looked apprehensive. "My officers and I are here to take command of Polar Queen."
"She's all yours, Captain," Dempsey said easily. "If you don't mind, you can send back my crew in your boat once you're aboard."
Relief spread across Ryan's weathered face. It could have been a delicate situation. Legally, Dempsey was salvage master of the cruise ship. Command had passed to him from the dead captain and the owners. "Am I to understand, sir, that you are relinquishing command in favor of Ruppert & Saunders?"
"NUMA is not in the salvage business, Captain. We make no claim on Polar Queen."
"The directors of the company have asked me to express our deepest thanks and congratulations for your efforts in saving our passengers and ship."
Dempsey turned to Pitt and Giordino and introduced them. "These are the gentlemen who found the survivors on Seymour Island and kept your company's ship from running onto the Danger Island rocks."
Ryan pumped their hands vigorously, his grasp strong and beefy. "A remarkable achievement, absolutely remarkable. I assure you that Ruppert & Saunders will prove most generous in their gratitude."
Pitt shook his head. "We have been instructed by our boss at NUMA headquarters, Admiral James Sandecker, that we cannot accept any reward or salvage monies."
Ryan looked blank. "Nothing, nothing at all?"
"Not one cent," Pitt answered, fighting to keep his bleary eyes open.
"How bloody decent of you," Ryan gasped. "That's unheard of in the annals of marine salvage. I've no doubt our insurance carriers will drink to your health every year on the anniversary of the tragedy."
Dempsey gestured toward the passageway leading to his quarters. "While we're on the subject of drinks, Captain Ryan, may I offer you one in my cabin?"
Ryan nodded toward his officers, who were grouped behind him. "Does that include my crew?"
"It most certainly does," Dempsey said with a friendly smile.
"You save our ship, rescue our passengers and then stand us a drink. If you don't mind my saying so,"
said Ryan in a voice that seemed to come from his boots, "you Yanks are damned odd people."
"Not really," Pitt said, his green eyes twinkling through the weariness. "We're just lousy opportunists."
Pitt's movements were purely out of habit as he took a shower and shaved for the first time since before he and Giordino took off to find Polar Queen. He came within an eye blink of sagging to his knees and drifting asleep under the soothing splash of the warm water. Too tired even to dry his hair, he tucked a bath towel around his waist and stumbled to his queen-sized bed-no tight bunk or narrow berth on this ship-pulled back the covers, stretched out, laid his head on the pillow and was gone.
His unconscious mind didn't register the knock on his cabin door. Normally alert to the tiniest peculiar sound, he did not awaken or respond when the knock came a second time. He was so dead to the world there wasn't the slightest change in his breathing. Nor was there a flutter of his eyelids when Maeve slowly opened the door, peered hesitantly into the small anteroom and softly called his name.
Mr. Pitt, are you about?"
Part of her wanted to leave, but curiosity drew her on. She moved in cautiously, carrying two short-stemmed snifter glasses and a bottle of Remy Martin XO cognac loaned to her by Giordino from his private traveling stock. The excuse for her barging in like this was to properly thank Pitt for saving her life.
Startled, she caught her reflection in a mirror above a desk that folded from the wall. Her cheeks were flushed like those of a young girl waiting for her date to the high school prom to show up. It was a condition she'd seldom experienced before. Maeve turned away, angry at herself. She couldn't believe she was entering a man's quarters without being invited. She hardly knew Pitt. He was little more than a stranger. But Maeve was a lady used to striking out on her own.
Her father, the wealthy head of an international mining operation, had raised Maeve and her sisters as if they were boys, not girls. There were no dolls or fancy dresses or debutante balls. His departed wife had given him three daughters instead of sons to continue the family's financial empire, so he simply ignored fate and trained them to be tough. By the time she was eighteen, Maeve could kick a soccer ball farther than most men in her college class, and she once trekked across the outback of Australia from Canberra to Perth with only a dog, a domesticated dingo, for company, an accomplishment her father rewarded her for by pulling her out of school and putting her to work in the family mines alongside of hard-bodied male diggers and blasters. She rebelled. This was no life for a woman with other desires.
She ran away to Melbourne and worked her way through university toward a career in zoology. Her father made no attempt to bring her back into the family fold. He merely abolished her claim to any family investments and pretended she never existed after her twins were born out of wedlock six months after a wonderful year she spent with a boy she met in class. He was the son of a sheep rancher, beautifully dark from the harsh outback sun, with a solid body and sensitive gray eyes. They had laughed, loved and fought constantly. When they inevitably parted, she never told him she was pregnant.
Maeve set the bottle and glasses on the desk and stared down at the personal things casually thrown among a stack of papers and a nautical chart. She peeked furtively into a cowhide wallet fat with assorted credit cards, business and membership cards, two blank personal checks and $123 in cash.
