“Another penance?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems like that’s not something in my future, as if I’ve lost that one chance I had.”
“That’s rubbish,” he said in a stout voice. “Don’t even send yourself down that pathway.”
She smiled at him. “You’re being very generous of heart.”
“I’ve always been a very generous soul,” he said. “I don’t suffer fools easily, and I certainly don’t like getting screwed over,” he said. “But I walked, and it was on my own cognizance that I did so,” he said, “if you remember.”
“I do,” she said. “I hated it. I slammed everybody about your behavior and who you were and why you were no good and how it wasn’t my fault.” She added, “Now, of course, I realize how absolutely wrong that was.”
“Ah,” he said. “Back to that guilt again. You’ll have to walk away from that.”
“Pretty damn hard to,” she said.
“Not really an option,” he said. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“I’ll figure it out sometime.”
He smiled, nodded, shrugged. “Yeah, every time I hear you mention it,” he said, “I’ll slam you for it.”
She laughed. “How will that be any better?”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s better or not,” he said. “If you’ve made as many changes as you seem to think you have, then it’s important for you to understand that there is an end date, where you go back into the living, where you go back to a normal life, and where you get to have the things that you always wanted but then decided that you were being punished and so denied yourself. Such as a family. Such as a husband and a house of your own and the life that you always wanted.”
“I don’t even know what I wanted,” she said. “I feel like everything I wanted was based on what my parents wanted for me.”
“I don’t think that’s all that unusual either.”
Jerricho was stunned at the maturity and the growth of the woman beside him. He thought back to all the rough times he’d had with her, and much of what she’d mentioned were the reasons that he had walked finally. He had been young enough to only see what she wanted him to see and not old enough to understand that layers were going on behind it. But now, what he had seen here was this sincere person waiting on the inside to come out.
She had said all the right words, and she certainly appeared to be a very different person than she was back then. He was all for letting bygones be bygones. At the same time, he wanted to visit the asshole who had done that to her at the wedding ceremony. Princeton deserved a good swift kick in the nuts for that. It was one thing to take your grievances public, which was already bad enough, but to do it on your supposed wedding day was terrible.
No reason why Princeton couldn’t have called Brenna several days beforehand and said, “I’m done. I’m done, and I’m leaving, and I’ll go quietly in the night.” He didn’t have to make a public spectacle out of everything in her world and humiliate her like that. That was revenge, pure and simple. And, for that, Jerricho was sorry. Because that was a shit deal for anybody to deal with.
Hearing noises around him, he shifted to look behind him. Several women were having animated discussions. He glanced at Killian, who gave him a thumbs-up, and Jerricho turned back around again, steering the boat along, watching for enemies.
“Are we still in danger, seriously?” Brenna asked Jerricho.
“Given what you know about how much trouble the men went through to get the women here and the fact that buyers are lined up already for the women,” he said, “do you really think that anybody who finds a cargo full of women won’t try to kill Killian and me and take all of you for themselves?”
“Meaning, the system will stay in effect, even though the perpetrators of the actual sale itself are not?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Not to mention that a lot more women were planned for this auction,” he said. “So we have to take into consideration that many more men and women are involved in this. We do have our guys out looking. We have satellite feeds running to track down these people.”
He checked his watch. They were down to less than two hours. But it was a nerve-fraught couple hours ahead of them. Because the closer they came to meeting with the ship, the more problems were likely to happen. And what ship was it? How safe would the women be? How would they get the women back to where they needed to go? And what happened if somebody saw them doing the transfer?
As he watched the first beams of sunrise appear on the far horizon, he studied it, checked his time, and murmured, “It’ll be tight.”
“What is?”
“We were hoping to make the rendezvous in full darkness,” he said, “but the storm’s past, and dawn is approaching.”
“And we still are one hour and forty-five minutes away from our backup?”
He nodded.
“But nobody’s out here,” she argued. “So surely nobody cares.”
“Or they just haven’t regrouped enough.”
She turned around to study their surroundings.
“It’s almost too quiet,” he murmured.
She looked at him, startled.
He shrugged. “It’s a massive waterway. I would expect to see more traffic.”
She nodded slowly. “But, as you said, with the storm and being nighttime, why would that bother anybody?”
“Maybe not, but I’m used to looking for trouble, finding spots where it’s bad,” he said. “It’s better to be prepared and have nothing happen than to have something happen and not be prepared.”
“Sounds like a Boy Scout rule,” she said.
“It’s not that so much,” he said. “It’s just part of the training. Why don’t you go back, sit down, and close your eyes for a bit? It could get pretty rough going up here. The weather, although that storm’s gone,” he said, “left a lot of high turbulence in the atmosphere, and the waves are picking up.”
She glanced around and nodded. “I wasn’t even thinking about how rough it’s getting,” she admitted.
“Go back and rest,” he urged.
She shrugged and looked at him. “I was enjoying being with you.”
“Oh, I’m not trying to stop you,” he said in surprise. “And you’re welcome to stay. I’m not trying to chase you away. I’m just worried about you being tired.”
“I’m too keyed up,” she confessed. She had her arms crossed over her chest. “Funny. I miss my family. I miss being home,” she said, “and, in the end, everything I’ve just said is in complete contradiction to that.”
“No, it’s just you’ve probably opened up a wellspring or a dam,” he said, “and now all that emotion will be pouring through you. Once you start making peace with your past, you’ll find that it’s that much harder to hold back everything.”
“Maybe,” she murmured. “At the same time, I’d like to find peace inside.”
“Aren’t you there yet?”