by Zoe Chant
“You look like a maraschino cherry,” Destiny said.
“Good enough to eat?”
“I guess I set that up. Let me re-phrase: you look like a five-alarm fire.”
“Smoking hot?”
She kicked his ankle. “Shut up and finish your cobbler.”
They finished theirs in record time, paid and said goodbye to Aunt Lizzie, and headed outside. The cool of the night made Ethan even more conscious of how hot he felt. His heart was pounding. He reached out for Destiny’s hand, and was rewarded by a grip that he already felt like he knew by heart: small and strong, soft and warm.
“How about we find a nice stretch of deserted woods to park the car?” he suggested.
“Yeah.” Her voice was husky, almost a purr. He’d never heard a woman sound like that before, and it set him on fire inside. “Yeah, let’s do that. Not here, though. I don’t know this area, and we might end up accidentally parked in Aunt Lizzie’s backyard. Let’s get a bit farther out of town. There’s a bunch of dirt roads going nowhere that would be perfect.”
She took the wheel, driving with one hand on his thigh. It felt like a hot coal, burning through his camo pants. He put his hand on her thigh, feeling her bare skin and soft curves. Ethan hoped he wasn’t distracting her as much as her hand was distracting him, because if he was, she’d go off the road.
“You want me to move it?” he asked.
“Nah.” There was that purr again. It made him so hard, he didn’t know how he was going to be able to stand the entire fifteen minutes or whatever he’d have to wait before she pulled over. “Nah, you leave your hand right where it is. You put it in my space, so it belongs to me now.”
Ethan barely stopped himself from blurting out that all of him could belong to her, if she’d take him.
Too soon, he told himself.
That other voice inside him, the one that had pointed out that he couldn’t be a Recon Marine forever, said, Yeah. Wait a couple days. Or at least till tomorrow.
She got back on the freeway and drove until the fields yielded to forests. Ethan breathed in the pine-scented air. Only twenty-four hours ago, he’d been humping a sixty-pound rucksack through Afghanistan, hot and dirty and exhausted but unable to relax in case he missed the signs of an ambush. He’d been so focused on the danger, he’d actually forgotten that he was going to go home the next day. Now he was driving through the woods, with the taste of peaches still in his mouth, to make love to the most incredible woman he’d ever met. And after that… who knew?
All it takes is an instant for your life to change forever, he thought. One gunshot. One look into a pair of brown eyes…
A movement in the rear-view mirror jolted him out of his musings and into full combat-readiness. A gun barrel had just poked out from the passenger window of the car behind him.
“Duck!” Ethan’s hand slapped against his hip, instinctively reaching for his gun. Only then did he remember that was in his duffel bag in the trunk of the car.
At the same moment, Destiny yanked her hand off his thigh and swerved the car off the freeway, flinging him into the side of the car. “Get down!”
The familiar crack of a rifle sounded, and an equally familiar zing of metal told him that the car had been hit. To his immense relief, Destiny was unharmed. She floored the car along the rough mountain road she’d pulled on to. Ethan twisted around, with difficulty due to the jolting from the rough road, and saw that the shooter’s car had followed them off the freeway.
Another rifle shot. This one missed.
Destiny had said she had a Sig Sauer in her purse. He rummaged inside, found and loaded the gun, and hit the button to roll down the passenger window.
“You drive,” he said. “I’ll shoot.”
“Sounds good.” Destiny whipped the car around a hairpin curve.
Ethan hoped the other car would go off the road, but it too had a skilled driver, and stayed on their tail. He leaned out the window, trying to steady his hand enough to hit something while the car was jolting over rocks or into ruts every few seconds. He fired, mentally crossing his fingers, and felt a rush of primal satisfaction when he saw the other car’s windshield explode.
But the car kept coming at them. Just as he took aim to fire again, he heard another shot, followed almost instantaneously by a second bang. Their enemy had blown out their tire.
Destiny didn’t panic as the car began to skid toward the cliff. Nor did she yank on the steering wheel, which would have made it worse. Instead, she took her foot off the gas and steered into the skid, obviously meaning to gently guide the car away from the edge once she had it under control. Even in the midst of the danger, Ethan couldn’t help admiring her cool under fire.
But she was faced with an impossible task. There wasn’t time to regain control of the car. It fishtailed, hit a rut, and skidded over the edge.
“Brace!” Ethan shouted as the car tumbled through the air.
An instant later, it landed with a tremendous crash, shattering the windshield. The force of the impact made him lose his grip on the Sig Sauer, which went flying through the broken windshield. Ice-cold water flooded in as the car began to slowly sink down. In the second it took him to realize that they must have fallen into a river or lake, the water inside the car was up to his ankles and rising.
He turned to Destiny. A fear colder than the freezing water gripped him when he saw her slumped over the steering wheel. If she’d been shot…
He felt for her pulse, and was tremendously relieved to find it strong beneath his fingers. Ethan lifted her gently, and saw blood dripping from a cut at her temple, and a matching smear of blood on the steering wheel. She must have hit her head in the crash.
The water was up to his thighs now. There was no time to waste. He unsnapped her seatbelt and his own, climbed on to the hood of the car, and lifted her into his arms. Her lower body was soaking wet and cold, but the rest of her was still warm.
He crouched atop the hood, looking and listening. By the bright light of the moon, he saw that they were in the middle of a lake in the woods, with trees obscuring the road they’d skidded off. As far as he could tell, they were as impossible to see from above as their enemies were to see from below. But the fall had been short, so it might not be hard for them to climb down.
Ethan desperately wished for a weapon, but the Sig Sauer was at the bottom of the lake and his own gun was in the locked trunk of a car that was sinking fast. He could retrieve his gun or get Destiny to safety, but not both. At least, not both before the car sank. Ethan took the keys out of the ignition and stuffed them in his pocket. He’d get her to shore, then dive for his gun. He looked for her purse in the hope of finding her cell phone, but it looked like her purse had also been thrown through the windshield when they’d crashed.
Carefully, he draped her across his shoulders. With his left arm, he held her arms and legs across his chest. Then he slipped into the icy water and began to swim, keeping himself more-or-less upright so she’d stay as dry as possible. She probably already had a concussion. It would be bad if she got hypothermia on top of it.
Ethan reached the shore, shivering. Maybe he should be worried about hypothermia. Well, if it came to that, he could make a fire by rubbing twigs together. Maybe. His wilderness survival training, not to mention his actual wilderness survival experience, had taught him that you could generally hike to somewhere with matches in the time it would take to light a fire without them.
He hurried into the woods until he was far enough in that he was sure he couldn’t be seen from either shore or above, then laid Destiny down on a bed of moss and checked her again. The dappled moonlight showed him that the cut on her temple had stopped bleeding, and when he put his ear to her chest, he could hear that she was breathing steadily.
Relieved, he straightened up and considered his options. Scoop her up and start hiking? Leave her here, run back to the lake, dive for his duffel bag, and cross his fingers he got it out before the enemies returned?
It was only then that he realized that he didn’t even know who the enemies were. He’d fallen back into combat mode so easily that it only now struck him how weird the whole thing was. They weren’t in a war zone, and gangs didn’t hang out in the middle of nowhere. He and Destiny didn’t have anything valuable, so far as he knew, except maybe the car. But carjackers wouldn’t shoot out the tires. Ethan didn’t have any personal enemies, at least none who’d try to murder him rather than punching him in the face, and he couldn’t imagine that Destiny did either.
But she was a bodyguard. She might have made some impersonal, work-related enemies. And then there were the gangsters Ellie was going to testify against. She’d told him they’d all been arrested, but had they really? Murdering the brother of a witness seemed like the sort of thing that could happen with organized crime, to send a message about the price of testifying.
Destiny’s eyelashes fluttered. She put a hand to her head, then struggled to sit up. “Owww.”
Ethan lifted her gently, letting her lean against his chest. Softly, he said, “Take it easy. The car went into a lake.”
Destiny also spoke quietly as she asked, “The people shooting at us—where are they?”
“No idea. Gone, I hope, but I’m not counting on that. Any idea who they are?”
She shook her head, then winced. “Might be the same gangsters who went after your sister. But we’ve got other enemies. Where’s my Sig Sauer?”
“At the bottom of the lake. Sorry. I could dive for it. But I think it’d be easier to get my gun. It’s in my duffel bag. Which is also at the bottom of the lake, but in the trunk of your car, so it’d be easier to find.”
“And my purse?”
“Also at the bottom of the lake.”
Her eyes widened in alarm, and her hand flew to the neckline of her low-cut dress. She felt around her left breast, then pulled out a packet of pills sealed in plastic. Destiny peered at them, shook them, and looked relieved when she saw that they were still dry.
“What are those?” Ethan asked.
From her expression, it was obviously some private medical thing. Before he could withdraw the question, she said, “Female problems. You don’t want to know.” She stuck the pills back into her dress—into her bra cup, he realized belatedly—then felt up her right breast.
“Ah-ha!” Destiny pulled out a tiny black thing, fiddled with it, then stuffed it back into her dress and grinned at him. “It’s a mini-pager. Waterproof. I just sent an alarm to the entire agency. We should get some backup in…” She glanced upward, and an odd expression crossed her face. Then she shrugged, apparently trying not to laugh. “Possibly very soon.”
That made him feel a lot better. Dismissing whatever in-joke she’d decided not to tell him—it was probably something about one of her teammates that would take way too long to explain, and then not be funny unless you already knew him—he said, “What’s the soonest ETA, and what’s the latest?”
“Soonest…” She again glanced up. “Twenty minutes, maybe. Latest, probably not more than forty-five. Hmm. That’s not so good.”
Forty-five minutes—twenty minutes—even two minutes—was a very long time when the enemy was armed and you weren’t.
“I’d better try to get my gun,” Ethan said. “Do you want to stay here, or come with me? I’m honestly not sure which would be safer.”
“Come with. I’ll keep watch from the shadows while you dive.” Destiny looked down at herself, let out a soft groan of dismay, then said, “Well, it’s pretty much ruined anyway.”
Working quickly, she scooped up handfuls of mud and smeared them across her sequined dress, then over her silver shoes. Ethan watched in disbelief for a moment, then realized that it was camouflage. Otherwise she’d stand out like a woman-shaped glitter ball. He grabbed a palmful of mud and applied it to the hard-to-reach parts of her back.
“Thanks,” she said. “I guess. That was my favorite dancing dress. ‘Was’ being the operative word.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” he offered.
She rolled her eyes at him. “How much do you think a dress like this costs?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. It was your favorite and I helped destroy it. I’ll work some overtime if I have to.”
She snickered. “Okay, then. We’re going shopping when we get back. Maybe you can get a makeover while we’re at it.”
He helped her up, and was glad to find that she was much steadier on her feet than he’d expected. The cut on her head had stopped bleeding, and was smaller than he’d initially thought.
Destiny looked down at herself and sighed. “You plotted this entire thing as the lead-up to a mudpuppy joke, didn’t you?”
“I plotted it because I thought it’d be hot,” he said. “Mud is the new wet T-shirt.”
She nailed him with a handful of mud, straight to the chest. “There. Now we’re both hot.”
As they walked through the woods, he noticed that she could move as silently and stealthily as he could. Not only that, but she made herself blend in with the shadows until he felt like if he looked away for a single second, he wouldn’t be able to spot her when he looked back. That wasn’t a skill he’d known they taught to military police, or to bodyguards for that matter. Maybe she’d done a whole lot of extra training on her own time and dime. Or maybe she was just that good. And she was doing it injured, and in high heels and a mud-plastered dancing dress.
He felt certain that he could trust her the same way he trusted his own men—that no matter what was thrown at them, she’d have his back just as much as he’d have hers. It wasn’t something he’d ever expected to feel about a woman he was also dying to get naked with. And despite her mud-plastered dress, Destiny was still ridiculously sexy.
She’s what I’ve always wanted, he thought. I never knew till now.
At the edge of the woods, they stopped and surveyed the lake. The car had sunk beneath the water, and everything looked peaceful in the moonlight. But if their enemies were lying in wait rather than gone, Ethan would be completely exposed once he left the woods to dive for his gun. And there wouldn’t be anything Destiny could do to help, as she was unarmed herself.
But he wasn’t afraid. Instead, he was filled with a cool, calm readiness. He gestured to her to stay where she was, concealed in the shadows. Then he ran out, moving as quietly as he could, and plunged into the lake.
Diving into freezing water was always a shock. But it was the sort of shock he was used to. He’d expected to have to feel around for the car, but though it was night, the water was clear and the car was cherry red. He could see it at the bottom of the lake, glowing like a coal in the refracted moonlight.
Ethan swam down to the trunk, keys in hand. This was the tricky part. If the trunk was watertight, the water pressure would keep it closed whether it was unlocked or not. But if it had filled with water, then the pressure would be equal inside and out, and he should be able to open it. He guessed. This wasn’t exactly something he’d tried before. Carefully, he inserted the key in the lock and turned it. Nothing seemed to happen, but he put the keys back in his pocket, wedged the heels of his hands beneath the trunk, and shoved it upward with all his strength.
The trunk didn’t budge. Frustrated, Ethan gave it another shove, pushing until his shoulders burned and black spots danced before his eyes. But he might as well be trying to lift the entire car. There was no way he could get to his gun.
He turned his face upward. His exertion had burned through a lot of his oxygen, and his chest hurt. As he started to kick off the bottom, he was startled by the splash of something falling into the lake. It was one of Destiny’s dancing shoes. Ethan froze as he watched it sink toward him, the mud coming off in clouds and leaving it shiny and clean.
She was warning him not to surface—and in a way that would have given away her location to any watching enemies.
He swam away as fast as he could. A second later, he heard gunshots, along with the splashes of bullets s
triking the water. They were shooting at him. Good. That meant they weren’t shooting at her. The pain in his chest became an agony, but he swam on until he reached one of the clusters of reeds that edged the lake. Once he was concealed within it, moving very slowly to avoid making ripples, he lifted his face out of the water.
What he saw filled him with a protective fury. Two men stood in the clearing by the lake, both armed with pistols. One was scanning the lake, clearly trying to spot Ethan. And the other was stalking toward the part of the woods where Destiny had concealed herself.
Ethan longed to stop the man going after her before he got anywhere near her. But neither of the enemies were close to him. He’d be seen the instant he stood up from the reeds, and he’d be shot down before he could do anything. He forced himself to take a deep breath and think. Destiny had undoubtedly moved from her original position; she was a veteran and a working bodyguard, and he’d seen how stealthily she could move through the woods. Even injured, unarmed, and missing one shoe, she was perfectly capable of concealing herself. If they both stayed hidden, they could sit it out until her team arrived.
The man at the shore ruined that idea by firing into the clump of reeds closest to him. He systematically raked that area with fire, then started in on another clump. Ethan readied himself to dive again. This time he’d hunt for Destiny’s Sig Sauer, which had to be somewhere at the bottom of the lake. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was the best he had.
A terrifying roar shattered the night. Ethan was hard to startle, but he barely stopped himself from jumping out of his skin. It was some big cat, and close. A cougar? Could they roar like that? It wasn’t as if Santa Martina had lions…
The enemy at the lakeside stopped shooting. “What the fuck was that?”
The other man, who was near the edge of the woods, took a step back. “Must be a mountain lion.”
The roar sounded again, making the enemies twitch nervously.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” said the one who’d been shooting at the reeds.
