by Alice Ward
Well, yes to two of those things. I’m fine, I assured her. Up until that moment, I wasn’t sure I could’ve said that. But just having contact with the outside world, I felt better. Like this wasn’t the start of some Lifetime Movie Network disaster movie where everyone either dies at the end or ends up with body parts amputated. Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon.
Love you, girl. Please. Take care of yourself.
I ended the call and put the phone in my pocket. Then I let out a sigh of relief.
This would be okay. Everything would be okay. She’d call Wyatt Enterprises, and they’d ping Wyatt’s phone, and find our coordinates. They’d call the Malaysian version of 9-1-1 and send out their rescue crews, which would happily come to collect us, bringing us cold soft drinks and Goldfish for our troubles. We’d be home by nightfall.
I blinked as sweat poured into my eyes. Or maybe it was tears. My vision bent. My stomach clenched with hunger. I was so weak and I was getting dizzy. My blood sugar was plummeting. Soon, I wouldn’t be able to take another step.
I couldn’t wait. I needed to eat something. Just a little something.
I crouched in the center of the road. Opening the cooler, I took out one of the cartons, the one marked “Atlee.” I opened it to find vegetables consisting of pea pods and green peppers and sprouts mixed with a bluish rice. It wasn’t the most magazine-cover-worthy thing, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t be bothered with utensils. I took a handful of it in my dirty palm and shoved it into my mouth.
Then I fell back onto my ass, trying to get my strength back. I sucked down water, finishing my bottle, and grabbed one of the extra ones Wyatt had brought.
Somewhere, down the road, was he feeling just as shitty as I was?
Maybe worse. I’d left him without water. But he was stronger than me.
If anything happened to him, it was my fault. My own stupid fault.
Damn, my temper. My horrible emotions. Who cared what his motivations were for having sex with me? Who cared about his business practices? No matter what he did or didn’t do, he didn’t deserve to die.
Right then, I wished more than anything, that he was with me.
I closed the cooler, my vision clearing as my blood sugar began to stabilize, and looked around. The animal sounds had quieted. That was weird. Had all the animals gone to sleep? Maybe I’d scared them away with the sound of my voice, which had to be pretty foreign to them.
Or maybe they were hiding. From a real predator.
My mind strayed from The Jungle Book to all the millions of other animals that would likely pounce on me from behind and make me their next meal. I loved animals of all kinds, but I hadn’t properly researched indigenous Malaysian animals because… I’d expected to stay in the city. I hadn’t expected to be here. In a real jungle. Stranded.
In my mind, the creatures didn’t have names. Just lots of teeth. And a thirst for human blood.
Suddenly, a loud screech jarred me from my thoughts. An animal swooped overhead, rustling through the palms. A bat? From somewhere in the trees, a bird cawed, and insects hissed in a mating call.
In the distance, an animal let out a deep, menacing roar, like a vicious predator about to attack something.
Or someone.
Oh, god.
Wyatt.
I needed to stay quiet, but in my head, I screamed his name as I frantically scanned the densely packed forest.
But all I saw, clearer and clearer now, was the frightening reality: I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t run fast. None of these trees even looked climbable. And couldn’t most animals climb trees?
I was the easiest target ever.
The cooler felt like a thousand pounds at this point, and every one of my muscles had turned soft, like rubber, but I hefted the load into my arms and took off.
This time, running.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wyatt
Ah, Atlee. I had about a dozen choice words I could’ve flung in her direction, but I bit my tongue.
A tongue that still tasted of her.
I could still feel her sweat-slickened naked hips in my hands, feel the hot friction of our bodies crashing together. It had been a long time, if ever, that I’d fucked like that, so hard that all I wanted to do was lie there and sleep for days.
And here I was, fifteen minutes later. Alone in a jungle and totally, thoroughly fucked, the way I’d fucked her.
Turnabout was fair play, after all, wasn’t it?
Fifteen minutes turned into an hour. I kept moving along the road, climbing dusty, rutted roads for what seemed like miles without seeing another soul.
Without seeing Atlee, up ahead in the truck, waiting for me, engine running.
I had to admire her tenacity. I’d expected her to feel guilty by now, to turn around and come back for me, apologizing, saying that she couldn’t find her way out of the jungle without my help.
But I should’ve known from the way she’d leeched onto me in front of the resort yesterday. She was the most stubborn and strong-willed woman I’d ever known. I just didn’t know quite how far she was willing to go.
By the time I reached the base of the second hill, my clothes were soaked through with sweat, and my throat was dry and scratchy. I tasted Atlee’s sweet flavor, still on my tongue, but it turned out that I couldn’t live on pussy alone. I’d have killed for one of those bottles of water I’d packed. Literally killed.
If there was anyone around to kill for it.
To the right of me, off the road a few meters, I spotted a narrow stream winding its way down a hill. The cacophony of animal noises drowned out any sound of trickling water. I stood there, listening for it, thinking there was no way I was going to let Atlee Young get the better of me. When she came back again — and she would come back — I was determined to be absolutely fine.
That meant I needed water.
Whistling more of that Clint Black tune, I decided to go for it.
I waded into waist-high brush to get to it and found myself climbing through mud as thick as I imagined quicksand would be up to my calves. I sloshed in, until I found the water.
It was stagnant and smelled foul.
I wasn’t desperate enough to drink that. There were worse things than dehydration, and one of them was dysentery, a very real possibility with foul water like this. There were water purification tablets in my bag inside the truck, little good they were doing me now.
Instead, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. I soaked it in the water, rang it out, and draped it over my neck to cool me down. I’d find water somewhere else.
I climbed back to the road and started to walk again, swallowing again and again until there was no liquid left in my mouth to swallow. And that point, I began to feel like shit. Sweat leaked into my eyes, and my vision blurred.
I swatted at a mosquito, thinking I should reapply my bug repellant, and I would… if I’d had it with me. But mosquitos were the least of my problems right now. I looked up through the vegetation to see clouds gathering up above. The sun was sinking, and something told me that since even the rays of the sun were having a hard time making their way down to the jungle floor, nighttime would be dark as hell. There’d be predators out here too. And I’d heard on the news about some crimes that happened out here, in the middle of nowhere, where it was nearly lawless. I hadn’t paid attention to them, because it’d never applied to me.
Lucky me.
Still, I had to focus on one thing at a time. First: finding water before I passed out from dehydration.
Bamboo stalks were abundant, and I’d heard somewhere that there was water inside. I found a group of them growing near the road, grabbed my penknife from my pocket, and hacked into the hard shoot, again and again. Water dribbled out. I tried to collect as much as I could in my hands, slurping it from my palms.
It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.
Throat lubricated, I kept walking, reaching the top of the hill.
No Atlee.
I’d kill her. Once I made sure she was all right, I’d kill her.
I shouldn’t have done what I’d done, distracting her from the destruction with a kiss, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time. And I’d wanted it. Damn, I’d wanted it, so I let that part of me take over. I didn’t blame her for reacting that way, as in hindsight it was a shitty thing to do. I’d let things go way further than I’d meant them to.
But could I help it? The kiss… her body under mine… everything about her was fucking incredible. I couldn’t stop thinking of the way her skin felt. How warm and perfect it was to have my tongue inside her, fucking her as she squirmed over me, letting out those little mewls of excitement. And then when I’d entered her from behind like that, sliding into such a sublime place that it seemed perfectly made for me . . .
It didn’t feel wrong at the time. But I guessed a lot of things didn’t.
I’d taken her where we shouldn’t have gone. I knew that. Still, I already wanted to go back there.
And that wasn’t like me. I’d had plenty of women before, but rarely twice. And I never let any of them get the upper hand. Oh, they’d tried. In high school, I’d had a girl try to wheedle her way into the family fortune by claiming I’d gotten her pregnant. After a DNA test claimed otherwise, I knew I had to be more careful.
So I’d never had a relationship. Not ever. After that incident in high school, I made it clear. I’d go to places where the women wouldn’t know about my family, and I didn’t spend more than a night with the same woman. Bars. Clubs. Ryan called me the king of the one-night stand because I was so good at dropping women after I got what I wanted, finally, and with no ambiguity. I didn’t even date. That was too risky. Even though I wanted a family someday, I’d never found a woman who made me want to stick around. If they found out who I was, a billionaire CEO, things always changed. They tried too hard, like they wanted to impress me.
Atlee didn’t, though.
She may have been the only woman I knew who didn’t give a shit about that.
I’d gone about things the wrong way with her, though. Treating her like one of my one-night stands, fucking her hard in the middle of the jungle. She wasn’t some easy fuck I’d picked up at a club. She was more than that.
Yeah. I’d fucked things up. It was probably only right that I was stuck here.
As if offering absolution, suddenly, the sky opened up, and it began to rain.
Not just rain. Sheets of water fell from the sky, blurring the landscape, bleeding all the colors together. Instantly, my feet sank into the softening dirt, puddles gathered at my feet, everything around me sagged, and the thick, pungent smell of earth and decaying vegetation hit my nostrils full force.
I lifted my mouth to the sky and let the water rain down my throat, drinking it up, letting it soak me. It was warm, almost hot. Instantly, I was drenched.
I thought the shower would make me feel more comfortable, but it didn’t. It didn’t cool me off in the least. It just made walking more difficult.
And then I felt a strange, stinging pain in my calf.
I looked down at my legs. My pants hung low, weighted by water, my hiking boots still covered in mud from my wade through the stream, but that was quickly washing away.
The pain hit me again, not sharp, but just enough to annoy. A pinprick. A bee sting.
And then it was joined by another, farther up my leg, on my shin. And another, on the other leg.
Crouching, I rolled my pants up and pushed my socks down, spotting them at once. Dozens of slimy gray creatures were attached to the front of my shin. Attached everywhere.
Land leeches.
Fucking hell.
There were hundreds of the little suckers, about the size of my fingernail, wiggling in my hiking boots, trying to find a place to latch on. Dozens already had. I swiped at them, wincing as I watched blood trail down my shins and ankles, mixing with rainwater. I ran my hand down my calf, finding several more. Too many to count, all growing thick and happy on my blood. They popped off, leaving me bleeding, as I swiped them into the growing puddles at my feet.
I did a quick visual inspection but still felt like they were there, sucking away. They were probably in my boots as well, but I couldn’t chance taking them off to check.
I was definitely going to kill Atlee if I saw her again.
When. Of course, when.
I slowed to an abrupt stop when I saw something on the road, way off in the distance, half-hidden by the foliage. Atlee?
No. This thing was too small and loping, too surely and happily, across the jungle, comfortable, like it belonged there.
Holding my hand over my eyes, I blinked away the curtain of water.
I took another step, stopped, and my breath came out at once. A monkey. And not just any monkey. An orangutan.
Atlee would’ve kicked herself for not sticking around to see that. She loved nature. I admired her big heart when it came to those things, and yes, even her convictions. She’d cried when she spoke to the camera earlier, and my heart nearly burst for her. Obviously, she loved animals, too, since she’d had that SAVE ME shirt on when I first met her. I smiled as I thought about how her nipples had looked like horns on the animal’s forehead.
I flashed back to kissing her, sucking on her nipples until they peaked under my tongue.
Fuck it. What was wrong with me?
It was the damnedest thing. Maybe I should have hated her for stranding me out here. But I probably deserved it. No, all I felt now was an acute, overwhelming need for her. Not my supplies, my water, my food. I’d find a way to survive out here without them, if I had to. What I really wanted here was her.
The orangutan loped past me, into the jungle, wrapping its arms around a tree and hoisting itself up, swinging onto a limb. The rain was falling now in a way that made me think of Chinese water torture, not slowly but still destined to make me batshit if it continued. I loved the outdoors, which was why Ryan and I had planned to spend almost all six months of our Australia trip in a tent, rather than searching out hostels or inns to spend the night.
But this, right here? Utter misery.
I threw back my head, ready to hurl curses into the sky when I caught a glimpse of something nearing me on the road.
This was Atlee.
I blinked rapidly to make sure.
It was, and damn me if my heart didn’t contract and expand all at once.
She was walking toward me, her dark drenched hair pressed against her face, carrying the blue cooler.
Where was the truck?
Didn’t matter. She was here. In the gorgeous flesh, her pale legs moving toward me.
“Hey!” I shouted, waving at her.
She broke into a jog. When she got about ten feet away from me, she slowed to a stop. She was just as soaked as I was, her tank top damn near useless, considering how it showed off her tits as perfectly as if she were naked. There was a purple bruise on her forehead — when had that happened? The lenses of her glasses were speckled with rainwater. She stood there, holding the cooler in her hands, a guilty look on her face.
“What happened to you?”
Without a word, she dropped the cooler into the mud with a splash and threw herself into my arms.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into my chest, almost incoherently, gripping onto me for dear life. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m glad to see you too,” I said, wrapping my arms around her wet and trembling body.
She sniffled and looked up at the sky, blinking as the drops of rain assaulted her. “Want your water?”
I burst out laughing. A smile began to break on her face, until I said, “Where’s the truck?”
She clenched her teeth, covered her mouth with her hands. “Funny story about that… I… may have driven it into a ditch.”
“A…” I started to repeat it, but that bore no repeating.
A ditch. We didn’t have a way home.
Hilarious.
My first
instinct was to call it a day. We were fucked. I hadn’t seen a living soul out here unless you counted that monkey. And the headquarters we’d been at earlier was likely ten miles across untamed jungle in a general southwesterly direction. The sky was dark with rainclouds, but we probably had a couple hours left of daylight, tops. Not enough to get where we needed to go.
I let out a sigh, fighting the urge to give her shit for this because it was obvious she was shaken up. “And you got this.” I touched her forehead. “It hurt?”
“It’s not too bad.”
“Anything else hurt?”
She shook her head.
“That’s the most important thing. All right,” I said, trying not to show her I was riled. “Where’s the truck?”
She pointed down the road.
“How far?”
“Maybe… three miles? Or thirty. I’m not very good at determining distances.”
I sucked in a breath. “Okay. Let’s head back that way.”
She nodded as I took the cooler from her and followed along wordlessly. I didn’t speak, either. The rain all around was so loud, like a drum, so I listened to that as we trudged through the ankle-deep mud.
After a moment, the rain started to let up, and she said, “You have to be pissed at me.”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“And?”
I shrugged. “And what? Right now, I have bigger things on my hands then giving you shit for what you did.”
“Well, I guess I appreciate that,” she murmured. “What are we going to do?”
“First? We’re going to get back to the truck and assess the damage. If I can’t fix it, I think we’ll have to make ourselves comfortable here. I haven’t seen a soul since we left headquarters, but there’s no way we can hike there now.”
“Oh! But I was able to get a signal. It wasn’t strong enough for a call but I got some text messages through.”
I whirled to her. “You did? When?”
“Yes. A little while ago. I got in touch with my roommate, Emily.”
“And?”
“I told her to call your company and tell them that we were stranded in a jungle in a plantation somewhere outside of Chiku and needed someone to look out for us. So if we stay near the truck, someone should be out to tow us soon. I’m sure there’s—”
