Romeo ended up latching onto Doc’s elbow and using his legs to catapult them both skyward, his muscles aching with the effort and with the lack of oxygen. By the time the two of them burst into the sun, his lungs were on fire and his eyesight had tunneled.
Raking in a desperate breath, he filled his chest cavity until the rush of O₂ made his head spin. As soon as he could manage a word, he turned to Doc. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving your miserable life, you stupid asshole!” Doc sputtered.
Romeo opened his mouth to come back with something appropriately macho like, Please, I could’ve stayed down for another two minutes—SEALs were nothing if not arrogant pricks, and they were especially arrogant about near misses—but he snapped his jaws shut when he heard a soft wail coming from the life raft.
Spinning in the water, he saw Mia sitting on the edge of the watercraft, her hands over her face as her shoulders shook with heartrending sobs.
“Mia?” He scissor-kicked in her direction. His heart, which had been metronome steady while treading water up from the deep, went into overdrive. When a seat cushion popped up in front of him, he shoved it aside, annoyed at anything that blocked his path to the life raft. “What’s wrong?” he demanded, spitting out a mouthful of salt water when a wave slapped him in the face. “Are you hurt?”
She lifted her head and he saw her bottomless, golden eyes were filled with tears. Never in their entire acquaintance had he heard her raise her voice, so he was shocked to his core when she yelled at him, “I thought you were dead, you asshole! What were you doing staying down there so long?”
Two assholes in the span of ten seconds. I’m really winning hearts and minds today.
“I’m sorry,” he swore, realizing he’d scared the shit out of everyone. “I wasn’t thinking.”
She reached for him when he pulled even with the raft. Even though he didn’t need her help, she gave it to him by tucking a hand under each of his arms and yanking.
She was stronger than she looked—all that diving and digging, I guess—and he was over the edge in an instant.
“Move back so I don’t get you wet,” he told her, sitting on the round rubber side of the life raft and swiping the salt water out of his face.
“Screw you,” she croaked.
His chin jerked back and he blinked at her in shock. Before he knew what was happening, she was in his lap with her arms wrapped tight around his back.
He could feel the heat of her breath where her face met his neck, smell the sweet nectar of her expensive skin lotion, made stronger because she was warmed by the sun, and appreciate how firm and round her butt was since it was cushioned against his thighs.
He was in heaven. He was in hell. He was...not thinking of her as a friend.
Chapter 6
11:56 AM...
Never thought I’d come to the point in my life where I’d need a stronger word than “fuck,” Camilla D’ Angelo thought as she watched Doc tread water toward the life raft.
Then again, she’d never been in a plane crash before.
Now that she had been, she could state with absolute certainty there hadn’t been a curse word invented that adequately captured the sheer terror and helplessness one felt when one was falling out of the sky.
Is that what happened to Carlotta before she died? she wondered, shivering despite the relentless sun beating down on the top of her head. Was my sister terrified? Powerless? Resigned to her fate?
The authorities had assured Cami the bomb that took out Carlotta’s private jet had instantly killed everyone on board.
But what if it hadn’t?
What if Cami’s sister had been conscious while she tumbled through the air? What if Carlotta had known she was living her last seconds? Breathing her last breaths? Feeling her final heartbeats pounding in her chest?
Cami realized she’d been numb with shock since the crash, because thoughts of her sister melted that numbness away. She became aware of her blood roaring through her veins, tasted the saltiness of the sea air filling her lungs, and saw how her limbs shook like the leaves on the trees in the front yard of her childhood home whenever a big nor’easter blew through.
A plane crash. I was just in a plane crash! Fuck!
See? Didn’t come close to doing the experience justice.
If Doc hadn’t thrown a muscled arm over the side of the life raft just then, she might have given into the terror and trauma and burst into tears. Just like poor Mia.
The woman had been a stone-cold rock through everything. The one to tend to Doc after he’d been knocked unconscious. The one to keep singing even after they first hit the ocean going way too fast. The one who’d helped Doc unpack and inflate the life raft with a pop and a hiss of industrial-smelling rubber. She’d even leaned over and wiped a smudge of something off Cami’s face after they’d climbed into the watercraft.
But when the plane sank beneath the surface of the sea, dragging Romeo down with it—and when he hadn’t emerged after what felt like twenty years, prompting Doc to curse and plunge into the ocean after him—all of Mia’s cool-headed poise had abandoned her.
She’d screamed Romeo’s name. Not his nickname either. His real name.
“Spiro!”
It’d been the kind of scream to shatter glass. Or shatter eardrums, at the very least.
Cami could still hear it ringing inside her head. And if someone were to ask her to describe the exact sound of horror mixed with heartbreak, she would say it was those two syllables ripped from the back of Mia’s raw throat.
“Little help here?” Doc said and Cami was quick to hook her hands under his armpits. The soles of her sandals scrabbled against the side of the raft as she fought for leverage. And when he helped her by giving one mighty kick with his powerful legs, he slipped over the edge of the watercraft like a seal sliding into the ocean.
His big, wet body landed on top of hers, and she let loose with an unladylike squawk. Warm ocean water seeped through the material of her suit, and she got a nose full of his scent—a delicious combination of pine trees and fresh mountain air that she clearly remembered from the night before.
Basically, the man smelled like a Glacier National Park commercial come to life, and she would have stolen a moment to enjoy it. You know, taken a little comfort in sucking in the scent of solid land since she’d just been in a plane crash and now she was floating in the middle of the ocean. But the weight of his chest was immense, making it impossible to breathe.