Читать книгу Deception Island - Brynn Kelly, Brynn Kelly - Страница 9

Chapter 3

The capitaine lowered Holly to her feet, next to a heap of bags. The ground tilted, and she tipped onto hands and knees. Whoa. Their escort laughed. The capitaine barked orders, and he stuttered something and jogged off toward the plane.

“You’ll be okay in a few hours, princess.”

She rolled onto her back, gripping the rocking earth, swallowing bile. “You know I’m not royalty, right?”

He strode to the bags and hauled something out. “The daughter of the future American president? Closest I’ll get to a princess, princess.”

Correction: the furthest. He was Captain Calm again—the hint of tension erased from his face. She should have tried to chuck him out of the boat when she had the chance.

“You want to change out of those wet clothes?”

She shook her head. The dampness shielded her against the pulsing heat. And she wasn’t about to strip for him.

He held up a long-sleeved jumpsuit. “Time to suit up.”

“What do I need that for?”

He threw it to her, pulled her running shoes out of her backpack and dropped them on the ground. “Warmth, mostly. It’s cold up at 15,000 feet. And tie your shoelaces tight.” Why did his mouth twitch, as if he was hiding something? “Can you get it on by yourself, or do you need help?”

“I’ll be fine.” She snatched the jumpsuit. “As long as I don’t have to stand up.”

The suit was big enough for a gorilla. She wriggled it on while sitting on the ground as he pulled one on himself, followed by a harness. Were they going to clip themselves to the plane? He shouted something to his crew, then knelt beside her. “Don’t zip up your jumpsuit yet,” he hissed.

He hauled her backpack toward them, and pulled a rope and harness from his shoulder.

“No need to tie me up,” she said, lying back down. “I won’t be running anywhere.” Yet.

“It’s not for that.” He glanced at the plane and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Nerves? “Sit up. Stay still and be quiet.”

She pushed herself up to sitting, her breath shallow. He knelt and slipped his hands down each side of her neck and along her shoulders, pushing the jumpsuit off again. Her face chilled. What the hell did he intend to do?

He fiddled around inside the backpack and pulled something out—her sweater, with the rectangular outline of her laptop and sat phone inside it. “I need you to carry this.” Placing it firmly on her chest, he looped a strap in a figure eight around her shoulders, holster-style, and tied it tight. He pulled the jumpsuit back up her shoulders and zipped it to her neck. Hands a blur, he jammed and zipped other bits of electronic equipment in her pockets, his gaze darting over her shoulder to the spot the men’s voices drifted from.

He didn’t want them to know what he was doing. Why? I need you to carry this, he’d said. Like he was asking a favor, like they were in this together. He pushed the harness under her legs. Lifting her hips, she let him slide it under her bottom and up over her back and waist, her body fizzing with awareness of his touch. Ridiculous. She sure had a talent for being attracted to the wrong man. Evidently her mind and body hadn’t learned a thing since Jasper had sucked her in when she was nineteen and spat her out four years later, right into the eager hands of the Feds. You’re sworn off men, remember?

She allowed the capitaine to pull her to her feet. The sat phone was hers—now she just needed a few minutes to fire it up and get out a message. He leaned in to adjust the harness and check the clips.

“I don’t get it. What’s the harness for?”

“Safety.” His forehead was etched with concentration as he yanked tight the straps on her shoulders.

The man who’d been waiting in the shadows sauntered up and spoke. He was nearly as big as the capitaine and wore a grubby pilot’s cap. The capitaine’s gaze flicked up to catch hers for a second, eyes hooded in warning, then he calmly turned, picked up her backpack and threaded it onto his chest. The man grabbed it and yabbered something, sharply. The capitaine shrugged and muttered a reply, pulling off the bag and unzipping it. He held it out in offering. The man reached in and pulled out a bottle of shampoo, then dug around thoroughly, emerging with a bra. He held it up and grinned a gap-toothed smile.

“Give that back, you pervert.” Holly stepped forward. The capitaine shot out an arm and she tumbled into it, forced to grab his shoulder to keep from falling.

“Easy, princess.” He yanked the bra from the man’s hands, stuffed it into the bag, zipped it and pulled it back onto his chest. He strode a few yards to a larger bag she hadn’t noticed—not the one he’d pulled the jumpsuits from—and lifted it onto his back, fiddling with clips and straps.

The pervert strolled toward Holly, thumbs tucked in his belt loops, buggy eyes checking her out like she was dessert. She shuffled backward, not trusting herself to take large steps. He pulled up inches from her, his breath stinking like fish oil, and reached for her hair. “Miss America,” he whispered, in a murky accent.

She ducked away, fighting to keep her balance. If he made a play for her, what could she do? She could hardly stand up straight, let alone defend herself.

Suddenly, he lurched sideways and sprawled onto the ground. He snapped out several words, anger flashing in his eyes. The capitaine stood over him, drawn up to full height, chest massive, jaw set, arm still outstretched from shoving him. Playing good cop, bad cop?

No—she’d been caught in that game enough times to know this was for real. He was protecting her, all right. Just what was the dynamic here?

The capitaine spoke, quiet and dangerous. The pervert’s eyes narrowed. He scrambled to his feet and spat on the ground, an inch from her foot, but maintained his distance. She exhaled. Thank God that wasn’t about to happen, at least.

The man unleashed a series of bitter words and held out his hand to the capitaine, palm up. The capitaine slapped a mobile phone into it. So that was why he was so keen on her equipment—he wasn’t allowed his own. Someone else had to be pulling the strings, leaving him to do the dirty work. Was he a hired gun? His bearing and commanding tone weren’t those of a lowly henchman. This was a man accustomed to leading, a man who didn’t trust whomever he was taking orders from. That conflict could work to her advantage, as could his evident protective instinct, if she played it right. And if she was good at anything, it was playing people.

The pervert fiddled with the phone and held it up. The flash seared her eyes. Taking photographic evidence she was alive? How long did they plan to keep her that way?

* * *

Half an hour later she sat cross-legged on the cold metal floor at the back of the plane, g-forces churning her stomach and spinning her head. If her balance had been warped before, it was tied in knots now. The seawater soaking her clothes felt like it was snapping into ice in the chill of the altitude. Fat lot of use the jumpsuit was.

And what was with the transparent plastic roller door on one side of the plane? What kind of scrap-heap plane had a door like that, and no seats? The wiry man sat beside it, gun slung over his shoulder, beady eyes staring at her. Only a finger-width of metal and a pervert pilot at the controls separated her from a couple of vertical miles of nothing, with a sudden stop at the bottom. At least the roar of the engine was muffled by the helmet the capitaine had eased over her head. But why the goggles and harness? He hadn’t clipped her to the plane, so what was the point? Or had the whole getup been an excuse to find hiding places for the electronics?

She struggled for breath, the thinness of the air escalating the growing panic of watching her window of escape close. She swallowed, hard, to equalize her ears. Her body might have given in—for now—but her mind certainly hadn’t. The electronics equipment digging into her ribs was as good as an escape pod.

The capitaine eased up behind her. She flinched. He cradled his legs around hers, his knees splayed either side of her waist. “Time to strap up,” he shouted. “We’re approaching the dro...” The thundering engine engulfed his words.

“The what?”

He fastened a series of clips at her shoulders and waist and pulled on the straps, yanking her spine hard up against the backpack strapped to his chest. They were clipped together? He stretched out his legs so they rested, hot and solid, either side of her thighs. Her heart sped up. Okay, this was getting weird.

“When we open the door, wrap your legs around the undercarriage of the plane.”

“When we what? Are we landing?” She hadn’t noticed a drop in altitude.

“When we jump, I need your chest out, legs curled back and head up. You know this, yes? Like a banana. A banana with its arms out.”

“Jump? Are you shitting me?”

“Hold tight. The plane will turn.”

She swayed in time with the capitaine as the plane banked, then corrected. The thin man gave the thumbs-up and rolled up the plastic door. Wind whistled into the plane, flapping the guy’s bandanna. Holly clutched for a handhold on something, anything. All she found was the capitaine’s thighs. His quads clenched into rock under her gloves. Her belly lurched. They were parachuting? He pushed forward. She resisted, but he had all the power. She tried to twist away. He grabbed her arms and straightened her.

“If you want to live, do what I say,” he shouted into her ear. “If you fight this, if you grab for me, I might not be able to pull the cord and we’ll both die. Best thing you can do right now is relax.”

Relax? What kind of a psycho was he? He slid forward, shoving her ahead of him. Her stomach churned like a washing machine.

“Don’t be so tense, princess. I’ve done this a thousand times.”

“Pushing your luck then, aren’t you?”

Another shove and her legs dangled out the door. Nothing but thin air lay between her shoes and the ocean. A whole lot of thin air. The water shone silver in the moonlight, interrupted by patches of darkness, like black holes. She retched, and clamped her mouth shut. Vomit would only spray right back into her face.

“Best not to look down.”

No kidding. She snapped her focus straight ahead. Death was not in her game plan. As the man said, she had no choice but to trust him, for the next few minutes, at least. Just as well he was a 250-pound slab of muscle.

No. That made no sense, right? Wouldn’t his weight just mean they’d hit the ground with a bigger smack? Would she hit first, or would he? Physics had never been her thing.

“Don’t forget, wrap your legs backward,” he shouted. “Rest your head back on my shoulder and look up. When we’re in the air, keep your arms extended and curl your legs back. Banana, remember?”

Holy Moses. She was really going to do this. Wind buffeted her jumpsuit, flattening the fabric against her. She didn’t need encouragement to wrap herself into him. If she could nail their bodies together, she would. He’d obviously done this before, and right now the more immediate threat was the deep blue sea—or worse, the land. She closed her eyes, tried to block her thoughts. Banana, banana, banana.

Her stomach plummeted. Air rushed at her exposed cheeks. Her eyes flicked open. A shadow loomed overhead, retreating. The plane. Oh man, they were falling. Her sinuses pinched. Her nerves pelted panicked messages into her brain. Even through the goggles, she struggled to keep her eyes open. A piece of fabric flapped against her cheek like a jackhammer. What was she supposed to do again? Arms back, legs extended? No, the other way around. They righted and stretched out parallel to the earth as wind buffeted her jumpsuit. The pull of the harness suggested the capitaine was still attached, at least.

The pain behind her eyes intensified, as if someone was shoving needles into her skull. Was something about to pop? This couldn’t be healthy. An hour or so ago she was being rocked to sleep by a gentle ocean swell, and now this?

She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing her mind to imagine herself skimming over the water in a yacht, as she had every endless night in prison, returning her to the happiest time of her life: the three years she’d spent working at the sailing school in Los Angeles, trading honest labor for a place to crash and a chance to sail. But then she’d fallen for the wrong man and got suckered into running cons for him by her desperation for love and money and survival. Yada yada yada.

Pressure thumped into her chest, and something yanked them upwards. Oh, God. What had gone wrong? She opened her eyes. A red parachute stretched above them. The rush of the wind had silenced, leaving her panting the only sound. They’d stopped dead, as if suspended.

“Holy crap,” she said. People did that for fun?

“How was that?” He sounded as if he was grinning.

“Terrifying, you jerk. You could have warned me.”

“Anticipation only makes it worse. Do you trust me now?”

“Even less.”

“An hour ago you probably thought that wasn’t possible.”

Was it only an hour since they’d left the inflatable? How far could a small plane fly in half of that? In the hull, in the darkness, she’d had no grasp of their direction. “Where are we?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Because you don’t know?”

“Oh, I know just what I’m doing.”

If he did, he sure didn’t sound happy about it. Islands were scattered beneath her feet—dark patches among the silver, with not a light in view. Uninhabited? Dang. What body of water could it be—Andaman Sea, Indian Ocean, Strait of Malacca? The land forms didn’t look familiar from any maps she’d studied. She heaved in a breath. At the movement, something poked into her ribs. The GPS unit. It could pinpoint her location. She could get a message away on the sat phone with her coordinates and threaten to go to the media if the senator didn’t rescue her. She gritted her teeth. For now, she’d play the helpless victim. If the capitaine wanted a princess, he’d get one. But the second he let his guard down, she’d be gone.

* * *

Rafe steadied his breath to clear the adrenaline of the 200-kilometer-per-hour free fall, and pulled the toggle to ride the wind to the northeast. Once they’d dropped another three hundred feet, the air currents would take them northwest. His coordinates had been smack on, but Penipuan Island was only twelve square kilometers, and the biggest clearing was smaller than a football field. If he didn’t read the conditions right, they’d wind up snared on a tree—or worse, bobbing in the ocean. At least there wasn’t some insurgent with an AK-47 taking potshots, like the last time he’d fallen from the sky. Tonight he was in far better company.

The heiress raised her gloved hand to her ribs for the third time in as many minutes.

“Has the comms gear slipped?” he said.

“The way you strapped it on? I hardly think so.”

He raised his eyebrows. She was coping surprisingly well. He’d been prepared to knock her unconscious if she’d freaked out about a parachute drop in these conditions, but she was far tougher than he’d expected—and she had a sense of humor. She might need one, to spend a week with him.

And he might need to watch his back. She wouldn’t be the pushover he’d counted on—and with Michael and Uriel gone she was all his responsibility. She turned her head, and the skin of her cheek caught the moonlight, smooth as satin. Tough and beautiful. He grimaced. Tu agis sans passion et sans haine. You act without passion and without hatred. He’d recited the line every day of his nineteen years in the Legion, but it’d never resonated as strongly as it did now. He must put aside his anger toward Gabriel and even his fear for Theo, and treat the heiress honorably. She was a prisoner of war, not a woman to covet. The objective of his mission must remain clear: save his son.

He frowned. The Legionnaire’s Code of Honor hardly applied. If his commandant got wind of this he’d be out of a job and in a French prison quicker than he could say Honneur et Fidélité. Outcast from an outcast’s army. The commandant was already suspicious about Rafe’s claim to be on bereavement leave. Who would a widower, an orphan and a loner mourn? But Rafe had been tied to the Code of Honor so long—after too many years without one—that he couldn’t shrug it off, whatever the circumstances.

Instinctively, he calculated the distance and time to ground. “When we come in to land, raise your legs straight out ahead of you, knees slightly bent, and let me do the work. For you, it’ll be like easing into an armchair.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

He followed the direction of her finger to the dark oval of land beneath them. The breeze warmed with every foot they descended. The coolness at altitude had been a relief after days of gagging humidity. “That’s it.”

“There are no lights. Is no one meeting you?”

“It’s uninhabited.”

“So it’s just you and me?”

Her tone carried a note of hope. “You and me and thousands of miles of ocean. No boat, no helicopter, no airstrip. We’re a hundred kilometers from the nearest inhabited island, nowhere near a shipping lane, and pleasure boats don’t come this way.” Gabriel had chosen well. They were imprisoned by water. But now, he had comms. He just had to figure out what to do with them.

“They stay away because of pirates?”

“Currents and reefs, mostly. But yes, pirates, too. Don’t worry, ma chérie, I will protect you.”

“Before or after you cut off my ear?”

He flinched, and the chute lunged, forcing him to make a hasty correction. He’d forgotten his empty threat, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to believe he was capable of it. “Do exactly as I say and you won’t be harmed. We’ll be on the ground in two minutes.”

“And who will protect you from me?”

He eased the parachute into line for the final approach. He was beginning to wonder that, too. “I don’t need protection.”

Outside the Legion, the only person on Rafe Angelito’s side was Rafe Angelito. Same as it had always been. Same as it would always be.