When silence met Doc’s question, Cami realized how eerily quiet the middle of the ocean was. There were no roads, so there was no traffic noise. No trees, so there was no rattle of leaves. No chirp of insects in the grass. No hum of electrical lines strung overhead.
Just wind and water and...nothing.
“I don’t think what happened to the Otter was an accident,” Romeo finally said.
Doc stopped in the middle of fashioning himself a makeshift sling. “What makes you say that?”
“It doesn’t make sense.” Romeo shook his head. “A bird strike can cause damage to a tail section, but not so much that multiple systems fail. I think we were shot out of the sky. That, or someone planted an explosive device I didn’t see when I did my inspection.”
Fear clawed a path up Cami’s throat. Every hair on her head stood on end.
An explosive device. Just like the one that killed Carlotta...
Chapter 7
12:04 PM...
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
For a moment there, Mia had forgotten Mark Twain’s gold rule. She’d opened her mouth—and jumped into Romeo’s arms—and made a complete and total fool of herself.
Oh! How she wished she could’ve been cool like Cami, cracking jokes and passing out sunscreen. But no. She’d turned into a puddle of snot and tears, proving herself to be the biggest sniveling ninny on the planet.
The only excuse she had for her behavior was the sheer, mind-numbing terror she’d felt
while watching the Otter slip beneath the waves with Romeo still onboard.
It had been as if her soul had left her body and gone down with him. Growing heavier and heavier as the seconds ticked by until eventually, just like the plane, her soul had completely disappeared into the deep.
Her mind hadn’t been able to comprehend the notion she’d never again see the man who quieted her busy thoughts with little more than a look. The man she could watch for sixty seconds and come up with six hundred things she liked about him. The man who’d entered her life out of nowhere and had come to mean so much to her.
When he’d crashed to the surface, gloriously alive, the harsh pendulum swing from the depths of despair to the heights of happiness had been too much. Her system had overloaded and she’d lost it.
To her utter shame and embarrassment, she’d just...lost it.
And in losing it, she’d lost all the ground she’d gained in her efforts to convince him she wasn’t after anything from him but friendship.
From the corner of her eye, she watched the flex and bunch of his shoulder muscles as he rowed them toward the glimmering promise of land. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look at him full-on just yet. As if her crying jag and the name-calling hadn’t been bad enough, she’d gone and compounded her humiliation by clinging to him like a barnacle on the belly of a boat until, finally, he’d had to physically remove her from his person.
And the look on his face while doing it?
Sweet heavens, that was worst of all.
It’d been the same look he’d given her the day they flew through the storm. A look that matched his words. “You’re nothing I need, and I’m not anything you should want.”
Chagrin gave her cotton mouth, and she automatically reached for a bottle of water. She was about to twist off a cap when a thought occurred.
“I— Are we already rationing these?” She lifted the bottle and looked around the raft. Three faces stared back at her blankly. She realized none of them knew the answer to that question, because none of them knew what lay in store.
She’d been right to say those on Wayfarer Island would raise the alarm and get the authorities out searching for them when they didn’t arrive back home. But what everyone on the life raft had been thinking, and what no one had said aloud, was that it was a big ocean. Huge. And who knew how far off course they’d flown before having to ditch?
It could be days...a week?...longer?...before they were found.
It was Cami who finally spoke up. “I’m thirsty too. I say we crack the caps on a couple of these.”
“I agree.” Doc dipped his chin. “Let’s hydrate.” Then he added with a smirk, “Doctor’s orders.”
Mia twisted off the lid and tried not to gorge herself on the bottle’s contents. The water was a balm to her parched throat. And bonus, it cooled her heated cheeks. But after two long draws, she made herself stop and offer what remained to Romeo.
He dropped an oar to take the water. The feel of his callused fingers brushing against hers made her stifle a gasp. She would swear electricity arced between them, and she was astounded he couldn’t feel it too.
But he didn’t so much as flinch. Apparently, the lightning bolts were all one-sided.
Continuing to avoid his gaze, she popped the top on Cami’s sunscreen and quickly swiped lotion over her face, neck, and chest.
She would have loved to do her arms and legs too, but she didn’t want to be greedy.
“Thanks again,” she told the lawyer as she handed back the SPF. “You’re a life-saver.”
“Like I said”—Cami smiled as she tucked the sunscreen into her purse—“just paying you back for John Denver. That was pretty genius.”
“Wish I could take the credit, but that was all Romeo.” Mia hooked her thumb over her shoulder at their fearless pilot and current boat motor. “Remember how I told you he flew us through that storm? The part I left out was that he hummed “Leaving on a Jet Plane” the whole time.”
“Funny.” Cami wrinkled her nose. “And sort of sadistic.”
The corners of Mia’s mouth tilted up at the memory. “That’s what I thought too.”
When she felt a tap on her shoulder, she turned to find Romeo holding the water bottle out to her. “You finish it off,” he told her.
There was about an inch of liquid left in the bottom, but when she pressed her mouth to the opening, it wasn’t the freshness of the water sliding down her throat that occupied her mind. It was knowing her lips were in the exact same place his had been only moments earlier.
It was the closest she would ever come to kissing him.
“You got a little—” He swiped at her nose, and she realized she hadn’t rubbed in all the sunscreen.