Read Online The Reef by Nora Roberts - Free Book Online

won’t be jinxed by it. Don’t want to see anything happen to them.”
    â€œThey’ll be fine.” Matthew unzipped his jeans, peeled them off.
    â€œRemember that picture I showed you? All that gold, the rubies, the diamonds. Doesn’t seem like something so beautiful could be evil.”
    â€œBecause it can’t.” Matthew stripped off his shirt, tossed it after his jeans. He slipped Buck’s glasses off his nose, set them aside. “Get some sleep, Buck.”
    â€œMore than two hundred years since they burned that witch and people still die. Like James.”
    Matthew’s jaw set, and his eyes went cold. “It wasn’t a necklace that killed my father. It was a man. It was Silas VanDyke.”
    â€œVanDyke.” Buck repeated the name in a voice slurred with sleep. “Never prove it.”
    â€œIt’s enough to know it.”
    â€œIt’s the curse. The witch’s curse. But we’ll beat her, Matthew. You and me’ll beat her.” Buck began to snore.
    Curse be damned, Matthew thought. He’d find the amulet all right. He’d follow in his father’s footsteps until he had it. And when he did, he’d take his revenge on the bastard who had murdered James Lassiter.
    In his underwear, he stepped out of the cabin into the balmy, star-splattered night. The moon hung, a silver coin struck in half. He settled under it in his own hammock, far enough away that his uncle’s habitual snoring was only a low hum.
    There was a necklace, a chain of heavy gold links and a pendant etched with names of doomed lovers and studded with rubies and diamonds. He’d seen the pictures, read the sketchy documentation his father had unearthed.
    He knew the legend as well as a man might know fairy tales recited to him as a child at bedtime. A woman burned at the stake, condemned for witchcraft and murder. Her final promise that any who profited from her death would pay in kind.
    The doom and despair that had followed the path of the necklace for two centuries. The greed and lust that had caused men to kill for it and women to plot.
    He might even believe the legend, but it meant only that the greed and the lust had caused the doom and despair. A priceless jewel needed no curse to drive men to murder.
    That he was sure of. That he knew, too well. Angelique’s Curse had been the motive behind his father’s death.
    But it was a man who had planned it, executed it.
    Silas VanDyke. Matthew could conjure up his face if he needed to, the voice, the build, even the smell. No matter how many years passed, he forgot nothing.
    And he knew, as he had known as a helpless, grief-ravaged teenager, that one day he would find the amulet, and use it against VanDyke.
    For revenge.
    It was odd, that with such dark and violent thoughts hovering in his mind as he drifted to sleep, he would dream of Tate.
    Swimming in impossibly clear waters, free of weight, of equipment, slick and agile as a fish. Deeper and deeper, to where the sun could no longer penetrate. The fans waved and toothy clumps of colors gleamed like jewels and carried bright fish in their pockets.
    Still deeper, to where the colors—reds and oranges and yellows—faded to cool, cool blue. Yet there was no pressure, no need to equalize, no fears. Only a bursting sense of freedom that mellowed into complete and utter contentment.
    He could stay here forever, in this soundless world, with nothing on his back, neither tanks nor worries.
    There. There below him, a child’s fairy-tale image of a sunken ship. The masts, the hull, the tattered flags waving in the current. It lay tilted in the bed of sand, impossibly whole and impossibly clear. He could see the cannons, still aimed against ancient enemies. And the wheel waiting for its captain ghost to steer it.
    Delighted, he swam toward it, through swirls of fish, past an octopus that curled its tentacles and ballooned away, under the shadow of a giant ray