Treasured Heart

Chapter 4

A/N: Thanks so much for reading/reviewing! Now, this chapter will jump ahead and get us to present day.  

Huge thanks to my beta, Heather, for her insight and fixing my errors.

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...............Fifteen Years Later ..............

"Yo, Little B! You gotta see this!" Emmett yelled at me as I walked down the hall past his office, and I rolled my eyes at his exuberance. Emmett was always loud, but when he was excited about something, he cranked up the loudness to ten.

"What, Em?"

"Check this out!" he said, a huge grin on his face as he showed me his latest project.

Emmett McCarty and I both worked for the Poseidon Marine Exploration Group. It was an organization comprised of archeologists, biologists, professional divers, historians, and more scientists than I could count. Our objective was to find and salvage deep-water shipwrecks as well as to educate people through various workshops and programs that we held. There were ten teams within the group, each with seven to ten people, and we all worked on different projects across the U.S.

I'd only been with the group for a little over a year, but I loved what I did. I'd just finished my Ph.D. in Maritime Archeology, so when Poseidon had offered me a job, I'd grabbed ahold of it.

"What is it?" I asked Emmett as I looked at the strange robot like thing in front of me.

"My very own underwater drone," he said, his voice ringing with excitement. Emmett was one of the best robotic engineers in the field, and he'd left a highly lucrative job with NASA to come work for Poseidon. I'd never asked why, but I was insanely curious as to why anyone leave NASA to come work here.

"Oh, that's cool," I said as I took a closer look at the device.

"Yeah, it is. It can go up to four knots, although I think I can make it faster, it's got twelve LED lights, and —" I tuned out the rest of what he was saying because it was all robot speak, and it just confused the hell out of me.

He rambled on for a few more minutes before realizing that I was lost.

"Yeah, my bad. I love my robots!" he said with that big grin of his.

"I know you do," I said with an answering grin. "I have to head out though. I've got a meeting with Jasper in ten minutes about some new project."

"It had better not be digging up yet another wrecked riverboat," Emmett mumbled, and I let out a snicker.

Eight months ago, Jasper, who was the head of our team, had gotten it in his head to uncover Civil War riverboats that had been sunk. It hadn't been awful, but it hadn't been that exciting either.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in Jasper's office as he finished up a phone call.

"Bella, what do you know about the Sirène?" he asked as he turned around to face me, and I went pale as I stared at him, but he was busy typing something on his computer so he didn't notice.

"Bella? Dr. Swan?" he asked again, and I shook my head to clear it.

"The Sirène was an eighteenth century French ship that was returning to France after delivering some goods in what is now known as the British Virgin Islands. The ship never made it back to France, and it's assumed that it sank during a violent storm," I told him, trying to keep my voice steady.