After I Dream

by Rachel Lee

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

THE DEVIL, THE DEEP BLUE SEA... Psychologist Callie Carlson lives in the lush Florida Keys. Some call it paradise. Callie, a young woman who fears the sea, calls it hell. Now her brother has found a mysterious boat adrift off the coast -- and has been charged with murdering its crew. He faces the death penalty unless a desperate Callie can find a way to prove his innocence. AND DESIRE Former Navy SEAL Chase Mattingly lost his nerve after a near-fatal diving accident. Investigating for Callie is his chance to prove he still has guts. And a heart. But soon someone is trying to stop them both. And as a killer stalks by night, only an act of love and courage can save Callie and Chase: a dive to perilous depths where truth -- or death -- is waiting... With over four million books in print, Rachel Lee has captured readers' imaginations with edge-of-the-seat thrills. Here she holds us spellbound once again with a tale of deep emotions, wild hungers, and chilling suspense...

Release date: October 14, 2009

Publisher: Forever

Print pages: 332

Sample

The day was wrong.

Tom Akers stood on the deck of the hundred-foot-long ship Lady Hope, enjoying a pipe as he waited for the divers to finish their work. As captain of a salvage vessel he took his moments of peace
where he could find them. Most salvage operations he and his crew performed were risky bits of business conducted in bad conditions
and under immutable time constraints if they were to save a troubled vessel and its occupants. By comparison, waiting for
divers to finish exploring a sunken yacht was a cakewalk, and Tom was perfectly willing to enjoy the calm.


Except that it was too calm.

Tom had spent the majority of his forty years at sea, and the sea spoke to him in a language he understood as well as his
native tongue. He needed no radio weather advisories to warn him something was wrong.


Unease crawled along the cradle of his scalp, and it bothered him that he couldn’t pin it down. The morning had started out
almost painfully clear, with sun glinting off the waves of the Florida Straits in splinters of light that hurt the
eyes. But gradually, since the divers had gone below, the day had changed.


Becalmed. The word floated up out of his subconscious, some genetic memory from ancestors who had gone to sea in wind-driven vessels.
A sailor in these days of powerful engines had no need to fear the absence of wind.


But Tom found himself fearing it anyway. The Atlantic was never this quiet and still, not even here at the edge of the continental
shelf. Stretching away from the Hope, the sea was as smooth as glass. Too smooth. And the sky had grown hazy, an unsettling green-tinged haze unlike anything he
could remember seeing this far from land. The sun was still up there somewhere, but the light had become so flat that he had
no sense of direction. The Hope might have been cast adrift in some alien world where sea and sky were one.


He didn’t like it.

Standing there he reminded himself of his engines, his radio, and his global positioning system, advantages his ancestors
hadn’t enjoyed. As long as they didn’t swamp, he could get his ship home.


But modern technology and rationalization weren’t quite enough to soothe the soul of a sailor. Like most of his kind, he had
a superstitious streak, and right now he was trying to remember if they were in the Bermuda Triangle. If asked, he would have
said he didn’t believe in such tripe, but deep inside he couldn’t quite shake a gut feeling no logic could touch.


His pipe was out, and he tapped it on the railing to shake the dottle into the sea below. The sound echoed in the strange
silence, too loud, as if they were caught in a fog bank. But this was no fog, at least no ordinary fog.


The sea had a life of her own, and Tom respected it. He knew her moods as well or better than he had known the moods of his
late wife. In his heart of hearts he felt that
the sea tolerated his ship on her surface, and in some part of him he always wondered when that tolerance would end.


Today? Perhaps it would be today. It was as if she were reaching up over their heads, surrounding them in this grayish green
cocoon, and at any moment she would take them down into her eternal embrace.


“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, appalled by the turn of his own thoughts. He shook himself and decided this was not
a good day to stand alone at the bow, thinking thoughts that were as mad as any dream he’d ever had.


A shout caught his attention. Forgetting his strange meanderings, he headed swiftly toward the two men who were monitoring
the divers from amidships. The Hope was a large vessel, crewed by ten, and it took him a minute or so to get back there.


“What’s wrong?” he demanded as he reached them. Other crew members gathered, too.

“One of the divers is in trouble,” said the man who was monitoring the sound-powered phones the divers were using to talk
to the ship. He and his companion were employed by the insurance company that had hired Tom and his ship.


“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” The man looked at him, but then his eyes slid away, as if he were somehow a strange part of this strange day.

Tom felt his unease blossom into vines of ice that wrapped around his spine. “What makes you say something is wrong?” he asked
again, slowly.


“He says there are monsters in the water.”

The icy vines clamped Tom’s spine. “Monsters?”

“Hallucinations,” said the man tending the safety lines. “He must be having hallucinations. It can happen on a deep dive.”

But not usually to experienced deep divers, Tom thought.
He’d known Chase for years, but the other diver wasn’t as familiar to him. Just some guy the insurance company had hired.


“The other diver can’t see anything,” the phone man agreed. “It’s got to be nitrogen narcosis.”

Tom objected. This was something he knew a little about. “But their tanks don’t have Nitrox. They’ve got a helium and oxygen
mix.”


The phone man shrugged. “He had some nitrogen in him from breathing regular air when he went over the side.”

Enough for this? Tom wondered. Fearing trouble, he asked one of his sailors to get the medic they’d brought with them, a man
experienced in treating diving emergencies.


Then out of the speaker came the tinny voice of one of the divers. Unidentifiable, because some of his voice was being converted
to electrical power for the phone, squawky from the helium in his air mix. Let it be Chase, Tom prayed.


“I can’t… get near him,” the voice said, sounding like a cartoon character. “God… knife… out!”

“Stay back, stay back,” said the first dive master into his microphone. “We’re going to bring him up.”

“He’s…” The diver’s words were broken, many of them distorted past Tom’s ability to recognize. “Christ, he… thinks… sees something…”

The winch was already turning, bringing the troubled diver up a few safe feet. How long? Tom wondered. How deep were they?
He hadn’t really paid any attention to the details of the dive. It was out of his bailiwick. All he was supposed to do was
keep his tender here until the work was done. He had no idea how long it would take to bring the man to the top safely.


“I’m… alongside him,” the diver said. “Bring me up… Oh, Jesus! He’s trying… helmet off! Get him up! Get him up! Get him up!”


The two dive masters exchanged glances, then looked at Tom. “The bends…” said the man operating the winches that controlled
the safety lines.


Tom might know little about diving, but he knew about the bends. When a diver descended, the increasing pressure condensed
the gas bubbles in his blood, making them smaller, small enough to get into places they wouldn’t usually go, into tissues
and nerves. If the diver ascended too quickly, those bubbles would expand before they could work their way out of the tissues,
causing serious damage and even death.


“We’ve got the decompression chamber,” Tom said. “Preventing the bends won’t matter a raindrop in a hurricane if he pulls
his helmet off down there!” He was surprised he even needed to say it.


“Get him up!” yelled the diver. “Get him up, he’s… mask, for the love of God get him up!”

The dive master slammed one of the winches to top speed. For Tom, a lifetime seemed to pass before the diver finally surfaced
alongside the vessel. He was still flailing, making it difficult to winch him over the side. At least he’d lost his knife
in his rapid ascent, so they only had to deal with his struggles as they hastened to unhook him from the safety line.


Helping hands were plentiful. As soon as they had the diver unhooked, they carried him as quickly as they could to the hyperbaric
chamber that the insurance company had ordered bolted onto the Hope’s deck specifically for this deep dive. As if someone had known…


The thought crossed Tom’s mind, then washed away on the tide of horror as he helped put the diver on the cot in the chamber.

Oh, God, he thought as he glanced at the face inside the mask. Oh, God, it was Chase.


Chase, his friend of many years. Chase, a drinking buddy since their navy days. Oh, dear Mary, Mother of God…


He stood outside the chamber, watching through the small, thick window, as the compressor labored to raise the pressure to
sixty feet below sea level. He wanted to steam full ahead for the shore, but they couldn’t budge until they safely brought
up the other diver. He watched as the bends gripped his friend and twisted his body into impossible shapes. He listened to
the muffled screams.


“Skipper? Bill’s aboard.”

Only then, with a heart as heavy as lead, did Tom order the Lady Hope to make full speed for port. Only then did the wind and waves return, carrying away the eerie haze.


The sea had exacted her toll.




Night blanketed Lower Sugarloaf Key, surrounding the cottage and threatening to bury it.


Chase Mattingly looked at the 9mm Beretta sitting on the table in front of him. He took it out from time to time to clean
it, then sat staring at it with a mixture of loathing and need. Sometimes he came perilously close to putting the barrel to
his head, but so far it had been enough just to know it was there.


Tonight was one of those nights when he was coming close. Every light in the cottage was burning brightly to hold the night
outside at bay. He couldn’t stand the darkness anymore. Out of the dark came the twisting, evil things to torment him. Out
of the dark came monsters that had been spawned by a nightmare that had nearly killed him.


As long as the lights were on, he could cling to the edges of reality. As long as the lights were on, he could stare at the
Beretta and know that relief was only one short act away.


He scorned himself for it. He scorned his weakness in needing that gun and needing the lights that drove the demons back.
He scorned himself for not being strong enough to put a bullet in his brain.



Hell, he more than scorned himself. He hated himself.


So he sat staring at the pistol while the night whispered around the walls of the cottage, and he tried not to think about
the pain that gnawed at him with hungry jaws.


There was a bottle of painkillers in his medicine chest. Two tablets would dull the pain and send him over the edge into sleep.

But he didn’t dare sleep while night ruled the world. In dreams, he found himself clamped in the icy black grip of the merciless
sea. While he slept, not even the lights and the locked doors could keep the night outside. It crept in, clawing at his sleeping
mind with icy fingers, pressing the breath right out of his body until he woke screaming and gasping for air.


The monsters had followed him back from the depths of the sea. Now they inhabited the depths of night. They had almost killed
him once, and he couldn’t escape the feeling that they would never quit until they succeeded.


The doctors told him he was being irrational, and he knew they were right. They told him he had suffered some weird kind of
stroke or embolism that had caused hallucinations while he was diving, and he believed them. His mind believed them. But in the depths of night, his gut ruled, and he knew with absolute certainty that demons had tried to kill
him, and were only awaiting a chance to finish the job.


The gun wouldn’t work on them, but it would work on him. So he sat with it for company, drinking coffee until his nerves buzzed,
waiting for the night to find some crack by which it could creep in and attack him.


He clung to his pain because it kept him awake, and he needed to stay awake.

He listened to the clatter of palm fronds in the sea breeze, and heard taunting laughter. He listened to the wind rattle
the windows and shutters, and heard the night trying to break in. The darkness had shape and form and evil intent.


And he didn’t believe it, but he couldn’t stop believing it. He was mad, and despised himself for it. Before, he had always
believed that the insane didn’t know they were insane. Now he knew otherwise. There was no such mercy in madness.


Alone with his insanity and his gun, he struggled to hold on to reality. He forced himself to hear the sounds of the night
and put natural interpretations on them. He forced himself to pay attention to the pain throbbing in his hip and his back,
a pain that was almost as solid as the chair on which he sat.


And with every cell he strained for the sounds that would herald his release from terror for another day.

At last he heard a boat engine turn over, then chug in the restless air of the inlet. Without looking, he knew that the first
pink streamers of dawn were driving the night back from the eastern rim of the world. Pushing back from the table, ignoring
the grinding pain in his hip, and the stabbing pain in his back, he limped to the door and threw it open.


Night was recoiling, vanquished as always by the approach of day. In the dim light, the taunting shadows were beginning to
resolve into normalcy. He could see the Carlson boy across the inlet, jumping from the dock onto the battered thirty-foot
fishing boat he shared with a friend. The two of them dreamed grand dreams of making enough to buy a good deep-sea fishing
boat one day, something they could charter to tourists. He’d heard them spinning their dreams not too long ago as they’d worked
on their old wood-hulled boat, fighting age and the elements to keep it seaworthy.


Once, he’d been like them. He’d had dreams… dreams that weren’t filled with terror and pain.


Looking up, he saw the red streaks of dawn stretching across the sky like bloody gashes. Idiots, he thought, watching the
boys’ boat as it chugged out of the inlet toward the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean. Jerks. A sky like that
in the morning shouldn’t be ignored.


Then he turned and went back inside. The sun had driven the night back into the depths of the sea.

Now he could sleep.

Calypso Carlson opened her eyes with the certain sense that something was wrong. Another person might have called it foreboding,
but she had spent many years rooting out that kind of mystical garbage from her thinking. She was a psychologist, and she
knew too much about the mind’s workings to fall prey to such intuitions.


What was wrong—the only thing that was wrong—was that she and her brother Jeff had been up half the night fighting. She simply dreaded opening another
round with him this morning.


With a groan, Callie rolled over and tried to talk herself into going back to sleep. This was the first day of her monthlong
vacation, and there was no reason to drag herself out of bed. What was she going to do? Argue with Jeff again about how he
should go to college and save his dreams of owning a charter service until after he had a degree?


She snorted into her pillow and wondered why she even bothered. Jeff had hit the nail on the head when he’d accused her of
being afraid of the sea ever since their father had been lost out there. As far as he was concerned, that made her reasoning
about college suspect.


And maybe it was, in part. God knew, the sea had taken enough from her.

But she couldn’t stay in bed any longer. The morning sun was hammering on the walls of her bedroom, making it hot
and stuffy, but not yet warming the rest of the house enough to make the air-conditioning turn on. But it wasn’t the stuffiness
that drove her to get up, though she told herself it was. It was the lingering, troubling sense of doom.


Groaning again, feeling far older than twenty-eight, she climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of white shorts and a blue
T-shirt. Coffee. Maybe Jeff had a pot going. For that she would forgive him anything.


A cloud scudded across the sun, darkening her room. She felt an inexplicable shiver of apprehension and forced it aside. Lack
of sleep was making her ditzy, that was all.


In the kitchen she found coffee, but Jeff had pulled the plug, leaving it to grow cold. Impatient, she poured some into a
mug and put it in the microwave to heat. She didn’t remember whether he was supposed to go to work at the hardware store this
morning, so she wandered over to the refrigerator to check the schedule he kept posted there, held in place by two magnets,
one shaped like a whale, the other like a dolphin.


No, he wasn’t supposed to go in until three this afternoon. The microwave pinged but she didn’t hear it. Her uneasiness overwhelmed her.


Hurrying through the house, she ran out onto the front porch and looked toward the dock.

The Lily, named for their mother, wasn’t there. And worse, storm clouds were building on the horizon.


The sea had called to her brother, and he had gone.

She forced herself to cook breakfast, grits and cheese, and made a fresh pot of coffee. It occurred to her that she was trying
to distract herself by keeping busy because she wasn’t at all hungry. She ate anyway, forcing the sticky grits down with orange
juice, ignoring the way the food sat like lead in her stomach.


Jeff, what are you doing?


She’d asked her brother that question many times over the years she had raised him, and she wanted to ask it again right now.
Maybe he only meant to do a little fishing before it was time for work, but with those storm clouds out over the water, the
waves and wind would be strengthening. It was not a good day to put out to sea.


She turned on the weather radio and listened to marine advisories that warned small craft of approaching squalls. Finally,
she used the marine radio to try and raise the Lily, but in answer to her calls she heard only the crackle of static.


She felt a surge of anger and frustration. It would be just like Jeff to ignore her calls so she couldn’t yell at him. When
he got back later, she was going to have this out with him once and for all. If he wanted to ignore her pleas to come home,
that was one thing, but at the very least he ought to respond to her radio calls so she could know he was alive!


She walked out to the mouth of the inlet, marching along the path that wound through the mangroves, along her neighbor’s seawall,
and sometimes emerged onto sandy shore. Standing on the high ridge of limestone and caprock that reached out into the water,
she used binoculars to peer out over the sea and try to pick out any small speck that might be the Lily.

The waves were high, she noticed, and the Intracoastal Waterway, calm on sunny days, was beginning to look dark and angry.
The storms out at sea were causing the waves to chew up the bottom and toss all kinds of debris onto the shore. The distant
thunderclouds were closer now, and with senses finely honed from years of living on the water, she could feel the changing
barometer, could smell the approaching squalls.


Damn it, Jeff! Come home!

Thirteen years ago she had stood on this point, a girl of
fourteen, awaiting her father’s return from sea in the days after her mother’s death. For the better part of three days she
had stood here, paralyzed by grief, needing her father as desperately as she had ever needed anyone or anything. She needed
desperately for him to be there so she wouldn’t be alone with her grief. Jeff, only six at the time, had not really grasped
that their mother was dead, and he had played at her feet while she watched and waited as the women of seagoing families had
watched and waited since the dawn of time.


Ten years later she had stood on this same point, watching her father’s boat return from a six-week shrimping trip, impatient
to tell him that Jeff had dropped out of school. But their father had never come home. He had been washed overboard at sea
and his crew had returned the boat to her with sorrowful faces.


Her mother, her father, and now she was waiting for her brother. When she looked at the ocean now, she felt something akin
to revulsion and hatred. It was far more emotion than an inanimate body of water deserved, she told herself. The sea had done
nothing to her. It couldn’t do anything. It didn’t think, or breathe, or feel. It was just a force of nature.


But she hated it anyway, and never looked out over it without remembering her losses.

Two more times in the next several hours she walked out to the headland to look at the increasingly restless water and the
threatening shapes of dark gray clouds. It was two o’clock now, and there had been no sign of the Lily, not even through the binoculars that hung heavy around her neck.


As she walked back to her house, she had to pass the cottage that faced her house across the inlet. This time a rough voice
startled her.


“You’re worrying about the boy.”

Looking up from the path along the seawall, she saw the man who had recently moved into the A-frame cottage some
snowbird had built years before. It looked out of place amidst palms planted by previous owners and the tropical foliage of
the Florida Keys, as if it had been plucked from some alpine valley and accidentally dropped here.


He was sitting on his redwood deck, one leg propped out before him on a small wicker table. Now that she was only a few feet
away, she could see that his face had been gouged by life, leaving deep cuts around his eyes and mouth. He had the permanently
bronzed look of someone who lived with the elements, but beneath that burnt-in color, he looked pale. Dark, shaggy hair reached
his collar, and his eyes were the color of a stormy sea. A diamond twinkled in his left earlobe, even though he sat in the
shade of his porch.


He looked, thought Callie, like a pirate.

“I saw him sail out this morning,” the man said. “The sky looked bad. I’m surprised he went.”

Without warning, it all burst out of Callie. “When he gets back, I’m going to kill him. He has less than an hour to get to
work.”


A laugh issued from the man, and he nodded as if he understood her feeling. “He’s young.”

“He’s foolish! The marine advisories have been worsening all day. If he stays out there much longer—” She broke off, unwilling
to give voice to the possibilities. All her efforts to pluck superstition out of her life had apparently failed. She didn’t
want the sea to hear her speak her worst fears.


He nodded toward the radio antenna rising beside her house. “Have you tried to raise him?”

“He’s not answering.” The anger went out of her as she tacitly admitted her worst fear of all.

“He’s probably ignoring you,” the man said almost kindly. “He knows what you’re going to say.”

“Probably.” She turned from him and looked back toward
the mouth of the inlet. The tide was rising, and the waves were stiffening, becoming whitecapped even in this protected cove.
The storm was still far out, but she had no idea how far out Jeff himself and his friend Eric might have gone.


“We fought last night.” The memory filled her with guilt now, because it might be the reason her headstrong brother had sailed
out that morning. Lead settled in her stomach.


“About what?” the man asked.

“I want him to go to college. I think he should get his degree and see what else is available out there before he throws his
life away on fishing boats.”


“Mmm.” He was silent a while. “When the sea gets into a man’s blood there’s not much you can do about it.”

She turned to look at him. “He’s only twenty. He’s been like this ever since I can remember. Just before our father died he
dropped out of high school to fish. It’s been a major battle just to get him to complete his G.E.D.”


“But he did?”

She nodded, her gaze straying back to the water. Why was she telling him all this? He couldn’t possibly care.

“So he’s your brother?”

“Yes.” The rules of common courtesy dragged her gaze from the water back to him. “Sony. I’m Callie Carlson. My brother is
Jeff.”


“Nice to make your acquaintance. I’m Chase Mattingly.”

His name struck a chord deep inside her, as if she recognized it from somewhere, but other worries concerned her more. “I
guess I’d better get back to the house and try to radio him again. I can’t believe he hasn’t been listening to the advisories.”


“I can’t believe he hasn’t noticed the weather conditions,” Chase said. “He may be only twenty, but he’s a sailor.”

She nodded, fear rearing its ugly head even higher.


“I’ll come with you,” he offered unexpectedly. “Maybe if I call him, he’ll answer.”


It was worth a try. She nodded her thanks.

He lowered his leg to the floor and rose from the redwood chair like a man much older than his apparent years. Even in her
current preoccupied state, Callie recognized the repressed flickers of pain that passed over his face. “Are you all right?”
she asked impulsively, before she could reconsider.


“As right as I’ll ever be.” With a movement of his hand, he dismissed the subject. But he limped as he came down the steps
to the sand, and limped as they made their way around the inlet to her house.


“It’s a nice old house,” he volunteered, with a nod toward her home.

“My granddad built it with his own two hands out of cypress and tropical hardwood. My dad put the siding on it when I was
little to make it prettier for my mom. It needs paint.”


“Everything by the water needs paint.”

She nodded. “I’m planning to do it during my vacation.”

“If you need help, holler. It’d do me some good to work.”

She wondered about that, wondered why he wasn’t working, if he’d been in some kind of accident and was recuperating. But she
didn’t ask. He would tell her what he chose to. “Thanks,” she said. Once again she looked back at the mouth of the inlet,
hoping to see the Lily. The boat wouldn’t be there, but she hoped anyway.


A gust of wind blew, ruffling the surface of the inlet and making the palms clatter noisily. A heron flew in and settled in
the shallows a few feet out from shore, then stood as motionless as a statue.


When they reached her veranda, Chase climbed the steps carefully, as if each movement hurt. Inside, the house was
cool and silent except for the tireless murmur of the air-conditioning. Callie showed him to the radio. Then, since he seemed
to know what he was doing with it, she went to the kitchen to get them each a glass of lemonade. Three walks to the point
in the summer heat had left her feeling as parched as Death Valley.


When she returned with the drinks, she heard her brother’s voice come out of the radio. Relief washed over her so strongly
that her hands started to shake. Moving quickly, she set the glasses down on the table near the radio.


“Your sister’s worried half to death about you,” Chase said amiably into the microphone. “Have you looked at the sky lately?
Over.”


“It’s getting a little rough out here,” Jeff replied. “Tell her we’ll be back in a couple of hours. Over.”

“Hours?” Callie said, fear grabbing her again. “Hours?”

“You hear that?” Chase said into the microphone. “You’re giving her a heart attack.”

Jeff’s laugh sounded tinny but genuine. “Hey, sis, lighten up. We found a boat!”

“A boat?”

Chase looked at her and shrugged a shoulder. Leaning toward the mike, he said, “What boat? What’s going on out there, Lily? Over.”


“It’s really cool!” Jeff said enthusiastically. “We found an abandoned deep-sea fishing boat. We’re putting the pumps over
right now to salvage her. Man, she’s a beauty! Just exactly what I wanted Santa to bring.”


Callie listened with dawning horror. Her baby brother was out on rough seas attempting to salvage a sinking boat? He was risking
his neck for a boat?

She grabbed the microphone and pressed the transmit button. “Jeff, are you crazy? That boat’s sinking, isn’t it? You’re not
going to board it!”