Alex's Atonement (Midnight Sons Book 2)

by Carmen DeSousa

She waved him forward.

  Back in front of Kevin, Alex stooped down again. “Yo, Kevin!” He tapped his right cheek. “Kevin, I’m not looking forward to carrying your ass. Wake up, dude!”

  Nothing. Irene wasn’t looking forward to carrying him either, but she couldn’t help but smile. Kevin was just irritable enough that he might be faking. Maybe he didn’t want to have to explain himself to some guy he didn’t know who kept yelling at him.

  “Would you stop already?” Irene stepped to Kevin’s other side and stooped. She tossed the trench coat she’d covered him with over one arm, then draped the man’s arm over her shoulders.

  Thankfully, Alex stopped his interrogation and wrapped Kevin’s other arm over his shoulders and lifted. Together, they dragged the unconscious pilot across sand and seaweed the couple hundred yards to Alex’s plane.

  At the plane, Alex motioned her to open the door. “I got him.”

  She untucked herself from beneath Kevin’s dead weight and stared up at the seagulls that covered the cliffs, boulders, and every inch of sand beyond twenty feet of wherever she stood. “Do they ever stop?”

  Alex lifted his free arm. “Who?”

  “Them …” She waved a hand at the millions of white birds. “Those nonstop-squawking feathered things. Ugh! I might go insane.” Yeah, she was used to them on Saint Paul and the beaches surrounding San Fran. But never so many in one spot.

  “Probably not.” Alex shook his head. “This is their home, after all. We’re the invaders here. This guy’s a bit heavy. Do you mind grabbing the door?”

  Irene ran to the rear passenger door of the plane and unlatched it. Then ran back to help heft Kevin into the back seat.

  After Alex buckled him in, she nudged him aside so she could tuck the trench coat around him.

  Alex shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe she cared about keeping the man warm, but then opened the front passenger door for her. She almost made a wisecrack about his courteous action after he’d been so gruff, but she held her riposte and simply said, “Thank you.”

  He responded with a grunt, then ran back in the direction they’d come from. Before she could decide whether she’d be of any help, he’d already reached the bags.

  Minutes later, he was stuffing the black bags in the back, and then he ran back for her purple suitcases, and then the blue crate.

  He opened the back door, and she turned in her seat. “I’m sorry my bags are so heavy. I would have offered to help, but I figured I’d be in the way.”

  He offered her another grunt, then trotted to a thick rope latched around a boulder.

  The feathered onlookers flapped their wings, flying only feet away before landing again, and then proceeding to squawk louder, as if miffed by the intrusion.

  Alex wound the rope into a circle and draped it over one shoulder, then proceeded to push the plane backward.

  “Do you need me to help —”

  He waved off her question. “Stay where you are.”

  What did I see in him last night? He’s awfully snippy today. She tried to conjure up physical images of their evening together. That wasn’t so hard to do, not with watching him push the front of the plane. The wide smile he’d flashed her several times joined the image of his unbuttoned shirt.

  The plane bobbed and, within seconds, Alex was splashing through the surf and entering via the pilot’s door. His eyebrows lowered, but then a smile accompanied his quizzical brow. “What’s funny?”

  “Umm …” she stuttered. “I wasn’t laughing.”

  He buckled himself in. “You were smiling.”

  “I was?”

  He nodded and then reached for the key on the dash. “You were. Now, how ’bout saying a prayer?”

  “A prayer?”

  “Yeah, that Old Betsy starts.” He paused a couple seconds, looked up at the roof, then turned the key.

  CLICK.

  He turned the key back, then tried again.

  CLICK. Nothing. Dead air.

  He stroked the dashboard. “Please, baby, one more time. For me.”

  Irene gulped, then realized he was talking to the plane. Pray? she silently questioned his request. She hadn’t prayed since she received the cancer diagnosis. Not that her prayers had done any good. Well, that wasn’t completely true. The cancer had been operable, and she’d woken up from the operation, so at least something had gone well. She wasn’t convinced she could give the prayer credit, since she’d begged for the biopsy to come back benign.

  But okay … Dear God, please …

  “Please, baby,” Alex said again and turned the key. A high whine sounded, then the propeller slowly started to turn. “Thank you! Good girl, Betsy!”

  Irene smiled again. There was the Alex she couldn’t keep her hands off at the hotel. And more importantly, the plane was moving. She watched as Alex worked the different controls.

  Her heartrate sped up as they left the shoreline. In front of them was wide-open sea. Alex navigated away from the island and headed north. She looked out the window at the waves crashing over the skids — or floats, she guessed. Dozens of seals barked as they bounded from rocks, crisscrossing one another in their haste to reach open water.

  She found herself looking from window to window, wary — and excited — about what she might see. The farther they moved from land, the more anxious she felt. At least on land they had snow as a water source, and possibly eggs to eat — She jumped when something touched her leg, but looked down to see Alex’s large hand on her knee.

  “Relax, Irene. It’s a beautiful day. We’ll be fine. The gust that took down your plane must have been a fluke. It’s quite common here, especially in the winter months.”

  Fine? She wasn’t accustomed to things going fine. She’d had to work for everything in her life; things didn’t just fall in her lap. If anything, hurdles always seemed to pop up. So, sitting in a plane with zero control over her surroundings didn’t offer her much confidence that things would be fine. She looked over her shoulder, expecting something to go awry. A great white shark maybe? That’d be her luck. Still, she’d promised herself not to worry about the things she couldn’t control. She needed to let go.

  She pulled her gaze from the windows and stared into Alex’s golden-brown eyes. “Are you sure?”

  He moved his hand from her knee to the grip. “I’m sure. There’s a bay around the other side of the island. We’ll be fine.”

  The occasional wave rolled beneath them, pushing them forward. At the end of the island, he made a wide arc and headed south, staying far enough offshore to avoid the crashing waves. A quarter of the way down the coastline, he turned east again, approaching the shore from the west.

  She saw the area he’d described, a bay created by a naturally formed jetty of rocks, which protected the beach from the crashing waves. He centered the plane and motored right up on shore.

  As soon as the plane beached, she jumped out, thrilled to be back on solid ground. “You did it!” She ran around the back of the plane and embraced Alex.

  He stepped back and flashed a quick smile. “It was nothing. Just had to know it was here. I’ve flown all the waters of Alaska. I’m guessing Kevin is new to the area …” Alex trailed off as he turned away and walked toward the end of the beach, to where high reeds of golden grass and sand dunes replaced the soft sand. As she stepped beside him, he nodded to the plane where Kevin hadn’t moved. “Maybe new to the drug-running trade too. That plane of his was brand-spanking new.”

  Irene bit her lip as she scanned the dunes. “Yeah, he did seem nervous.”

  With the excitement, she’d momentarily forgotten their predicament. They were still on a deserted island with no radio, no plane, no food, and illegal drugs that someone would probably be looking for soon. And they had to somehow manage to climb these dunes, she guessed, the reason Alex was scouting the area. Or maybe he just wanted to put distance between them and Kevin before speaking, since she could see a structure at the far end of the jetty. At least
they would have shelter.

  “We better get going,” Alex said. “We have a long walk, especially since we have to haul him.”

  “Long walk? What’s wrong with seeking shelter there?” She pointed to the behemoth structure on the cliff.

  “We can’t camp in that rust bucket; it’s completely open on the top. That’s the S.S. Colebrook, a cargo ship. Only birds live there. Too dangerous. One scratch on the rusted metal would quickly turn into a nasty STAPH infection.”

  Irene stared at the rusted structure, which now she could clearly see was the ship she’d spotted from the air. But it didn’t compute. “How did the ship get all the way up there?”

  “When the captain beached the ship, it was in water. But in 1964, an earthquake caused the island to uplift twelve feet. The only shelter will be in the middle of the island, about two miles away.”

  She shook her head. “You’re like a walking version of Wikipedia, you know that?”

  Alex shrugged and strolled back toward the plane. “It’s just stuff you pick up when you work search and rescue. Little tidbits here and there that come in handy in a situation like we’re in.”

  Irene ran to catch up. The man had such long legs. And when he moved, he moved quickly, as if he were always in a hurry. “Alex, do you really think there will be shelter and food … and fuel?”

  He stopped and stared down at her. His eyes were soft, but his stance was all business. “We’ll be fine, Irene. If we’re lucky, there might even be a working radio, but …”

  “But what?” she filled in his empty air.

  “But … we have an unconscious drug runner we need to attend to, and his colleagues will obviously be here eventually. Maybe he was supposed to radio them after he dropped the shipment. If that’s the case, we might have some time to figure out our situation.” He started walking again.

  “Alex,” she said, and he stopped again. “No matter what happens, thank you for landing and saving me.”

  He nodded, then dropped his head, but not before she saw sadness in his eyes. Yes, they were on a mostly deserted island and out of fuel, but he rescued people for a living. He knew what to do in an emergency. Finding a way home should be a challenge for him, a chance to flex those macho-itis muscles, as he’d done earlier.

  So why did Alex seem more upset than she felt. What was she missing?

  Chapter 5

  ~ Alex ~

  Alex glanced at his watch, then the sun. They had less than two hours to carry a two-hundred-pound man up an embankment, over unstable dunes, and then nearly two miles up an unkempt road to shelter.

  No way would he have time to come back and get their luggage … or the drugs. Not that he wanted to haul around two duffle bags of drugs, but if he could stash them away, he might have leverage when the owners showed up. Not happening, though, so better to let the incoming surf crash the plane against the rocks and carry the pieces out to sea. With any luck, if he stuffed the bags deep beneath the seats, they’d go down with the fuselage instead of ending up on some beach.

  He grabbed his emergency pack and a back-up pack out of the cargo area.

  He handed one to Irene. “Stuff this with any life-saving gear or food and the warmest clothes you have.”

  She offered him a slow blink, her way of telling him she didn’t want to comply, he’d noticed. “You expect me to leave all my things here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s either your luggage or your pilot; take your pick. Don’t take too long to decide, though. The tide is coming in, which means this beach will be covered by eleven feet of seawater in the next few hours. He might be okay in the plane, but if the winds pick up, I doubt —”

  “Oh, cut it out!” she barked. “Obviously I’m not going to choose my clothes over a human being, even if he is a drug-running P.O.S.” She opened the latches on one of her purple suitcases. “Can’t we at least take them up to where they’ll stay dry? Those dunes don’t look as impassable as the cliff on the other side did.”

  “Be my guest. But not until we find shelter. The closest building is nearly two miles away … and then we have to break in … find a generator —”

  She raised her hand to stop him. “I get it. Survival mode.”

  “Exactly.” Alex sifted through his own luggage. A lot of good a tux would do him here. And now that he wasn’t dead, he’d have a hefty sum to pay if — when … he returned to the mainland. Thankfully, he had been wearing a sweatshirt the previous day.

  He pulled out several pairs of socks and undergarments, and then checked the side pockets for anything he might have left from a previous trip. His fingers found plastic. Ooh … food. He always kept a few protein bars in his emergency pack, but he doubted Irene had brought anything, so the more the better.

  He peered down at the plastic-wrapped squares. Not food, but if they were going to be stuck on the island alone for a few nights, they might come in handy.

  Hopefully, Vince wouldn’t wait more than three days to send a search team.

  Alex stuffed all the items in the backpack, then sifted through each of the duffle bags before shoving them under the seats. “Damn.”

  Irene looked up at him, each of her hands full, as if she were weighing different articles of clothing. “What happened?”

  “I was hoping there might be a weapon in his bags.”

  Instead of one slow blink, she blinked rapidly. “As in a gun? I thought there wasn’t anything but rabbits and seals on the island.”

  He nodded to the unconscious pilot, still not wanting to mention his suspicions in the event the man was faking.

  Ohhh … she mouthed.

  At least Irene understood simple gestures. As a rescuer, he was accustomed to his team knowing what he needed without having to spell out demands. When he’d spoken with Irene at the bar, she told him she was a journalist. When he’d mentioned only life-saving gear, food, and warm clothes, she’d responded with survival mode, which made him wonder what type of journalist she was.

  Later, he thought. If they made it to shelter, they’d have plenty of time to talk. Maybe then he could figure out why this woman intrigued him so. Was it just the fact that he’d thought it was his last night on earth, or was there something else about Irene that he found hard to resist? Great timing, Alex. Now you think about more than a one-night stand.

  “Ready!” Irene sounded chipper, as if she were going off on an adventure.

  He looked up to see that she had strapped on the pack, covered her head with a knit hat, and for whatever reason, had a smile on her face. She was ready for an adventure.

  Oddly enough, her attitude directly affected his. Since they were here, they might as well enjoy it. If only Kevin weren’t here …

  And just that quickly, his mood turned again.

  He stared up at the embankment and then at the incoming tide. “We need to go!”

  Irene crawled back into the plane, reaching beneath one of the rear seats, as if she’d spotted something. “I said I was ready, sourpuss! What happened to that fun guy I met?”

  Alex pulled on his pack. “I just want to get up that embankment before a rogue wave drenches us. Thanks for getting ready and understanding the need to limit what we bring.”

  Irene peeked up at him from the floor. “They’re only things, Alex. Things are replaceable; our lives aren’t.” Crinkling sounded from beneath the seat. “Ahh … I found a hidden treasure.” She lifted her bounty, showing off her find. “Protein bars! These will definitely come in handy.”

  “Definitely. Every nugget of food will make three days — or more — bearable,” he said solemnly, thinking about her … They’re only things statement. Her comment had stabbed him in the gut. Hours ago, he’d been prepared to give away his life. Not over things, but over integrity … and pride … and if he were honest with himself, guilt.

  Things … Was his life just a thing? Was his life replaceable with money?

  As Irene dug into the pockets behind the co-pilot’s seat, Alex sighed and reache
d for the buckle that held the pilot.

  He gasped and then stared up wide-eyed when he realized the buckle wasn’t latched. He hadn’t been paying attention to Kevin because his mind had been on Irene.

  Instead of seeing the closed eyes of an unconscious pilot, Alex saw a fist heading right toward —

  Alex fell back, his head connecting with something hard. He blinked, but the asshole had hit him so hard he saw nothing but stars. Blinded and pissed, Alex struggled to his feet. It wasn’t the first time he’d received a sucker punch. Hell, he’d upset a few men when their ladies had preferred his company. Sam and he had tangoed a few times too. But with Sam, there’d never been anything at stake other than his pride. He knew Sam would never really hurt him. All he could think about now was what Kevin might do to Irene if he lost this battle.

  “I … rene, run —” Something hard hit his chest. He tried to blink away jagged stripes of gray and white that flashed in front of his face. His vision finally cleared enough to see Kevin throwing a purple suitcase in his direction while his other arm was wrapped around Irene’s neck.

  Alex pushed off in the soft sand, dodging the second purple missile by mere inches. “Let her go, Kevin!”

  Kevin pulled Irene to the cockpit the same time he pulled a gun from inside his jacket. “Get back.”

  Irene, her skin paler than usual, clawed at Kevin’s hands, but to no avail. Her attacker had at least a hundred pounds on her.

  Pissed that he hadn’t checked the man’s coat, Alex lifted his hands.

  Kevin released Irene long enough to shove her into the co-pilot’s seat.

  She gasped for air, then groped for the door handle.

  Kevin elbowed her back. “Move from that seat and I’ll shoot him, Irene!” The whine of the engine started the moment he turned the key.

  Figures Old Betsy would start when Alex didn’t want her to start. “Kevin,” Alex said calmly, “you won’t make it —”

  “Shut up! One more word and I’ll shoot you right now!”

  Alex splayed his hands in front of him, palms down, a gesture that usually worked on humans and animals alike. “You can take the plane, Kevin. I don’t care. Just let Irene —”