“Fuckin’ hell,” he cursed for the third time.
Chapter 5
7:22 p.m.…
If Bran’s thigh wasn’t barking like a bitch in heat, he was sure he would appreciate the feel of the plump ass wiggling beneath him. As it was, he couldn’t stop himself from growling impatiently, “Maddy! Stop squirming around, damnit!”
He was beginning to imagine himself a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bull. And if she kept gyrating, it wouldn’t be long before his eight seconds were up.
“Get off me, Bran!” she howled, her sweet breath brushing his lips when she turned her head to look at him. “If you get yourself killed bein’ all heroic and brave, I swear on my granddaddy’s grave I’ll murder you!”
He would have pointed out that what she said didn’t make a bit of sense—How do you murder someone who’s already dead?—but he felt Mason skid to a stop beside him, kicking cool sand onto the backs of his calves.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he heard the big Bostonian grumble.
Fuckin’ hell is right. That’s exactly where this plan of theirs had gone.
“They made it into the fort,” Mason said. “Which means in about two minutes they’ll gain the high ground and we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Roger that,” Bran agreed as he pushed away from Maddy. He immediately missed her soft, feminine warmth. And his eyes automatically pinged down to the…ahem…not insubstantial derriere that’d been giving him such fits.
So sue him. He was a guy, after all. And for a petite woman, Maddy had an ass that wouldn’t quit, the kind to make all the ’hood girls green with envy. Or as that pop singer Meghan Trainor liked to say, Maddy was bringing booty back.
Amen to that!
“Cut her loose,” Mason said, pulling the matte-black Smith & Wesson Tanto blade from the clip on his waistband and moving toward the park ranger still face-first in the sand.
Bran shook away thoughts of Maddy’s incredible ass and grabbed the K2 tactical folding knife from the sheath he’d strapped around his calf. Before he could put his blade to use, however, Maddy flipped on her side and pushed up to her knees, facing him. Her forehead and cheeks were speckled with blood.
If it was possible for a man to live after having his beating heart ripped out through his chest wall, Bran was doing it.
“You’re hit!” he croaked at the same time she screamed, “He shot you!”
Her chin jerked back when she registered what he’d said. She looked down at herself, trying to locate her injury, then shook her head angrily. “I’m not hit, damnit! You’re the one who’s hit!”
“That’s your blood on her face, numbnuts,” Mason whispered.
“Oh, thank God.” Relief hit Bran so hard he felt dizzy. When he let his head fall back, the stars overhead spun in lazy circles.
“Thank God?” Maddy said. He lowered his chin to find her eyes blazing. “Thank God? Are you crazy? For the love of… Someone cut me loose!”
Before Bran could gather himself, Mason did the honors, skirting around Maddy to slice through her restraints. The minute she was free, her little hands landed on Bran’s face.
The hairs on his arms lifted when her cool fingers smoothed over the skin of his cheeks, his lips, his chin. “Bran.” His name sounded sweet on her tongue. “Oh, my sweet Jesus!” Her Texas twang turned the word my into an adorable-sounding mah.
Before he could suck in a breath, she gripped his thigh on either side of the deep furrow cutting through his flesh. A little pool of his blood was gathering on the sand, mixing with the blood of the man he’d eighty-sixed.
“What do I do?” she cried, her eyes beseeching. “Tell me what—”
“It’s just a flesh wound,” Mason said from beside them, having given the laceration a cursory glance.
“And who are you?” Maddy demanded, turning on the poor guy with a look hot enough to set his face on fire. “Monty Python?”
It hit Bran then. “Man, I really like you,” he blurted.
Maddy turned to him, upside-down mouth hanging open in a little O that was far more tempting than he would have thought possible at a time like this. “I—” She hesitated. “I really like you too, Bran.”
“You got a satphone in that ranger’s station?” Mason asked the young ranger, ignoring them.
Bran was still absorbing the fact that Maddy had admitted to liking him, really liking him—But she doesn’t know the real you, he reminded himself. She doesn’t know what you have inside you or what that means you’re capable of—when her fear-tinged expression turned to desperation.
“The ranger’s station? But the girls!” She searched the exterior curtain wall as if she hoped to see the teenagers there. “We have to go get them!”
“First we hafta get off this beach,” Bran told her, hating the way the pulse was hammering in her throat, hating that she was caught in the middle of a hostage situation. Again. “They could start taking potshots at us any minute, and storming the fort to save those girls will be a lot easier if Mason and I are both alive.”
“Storming the fort will also be easier once we stop your bleeding,” Mason added.
“Right.” Maddy turned back to Bran. “Can you make it? You’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig.”
He responded with a smirk. “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
“Would you stop doin’ that?” She curled her plump top lip like Elvis. It was a gesture he remembered well. One that made strange things happen to the butterflies that had recently taken up residence in his stomach.
“Doing what?”
“Quotin’ bad movies at a time like this!”
He gasped exaggeratedly. “You think Predator is a bad movie?”
Before she could answer, Mason told the park ranger, “Lead the way. But stay low.”
Apparently Mason wasn’t of a mind to hang around and discuss the merits of one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s better movies. Considering their current situation, Bran couldn’t blame him.
Grabbing the dead man’s weapon from where it had fallen on the beach, Bran slung the strap over his shoulder before reaching for his M4 and tactical blade. Once he’d shoved the latter into its sheath, he lumbered to his feet and offered a hand to Maddy. When her palm landed in his, he felt a jolt of awareness, like two wires on a car battery suddenly making a connection.
“Are you sure you can make it?” she asked again. Er…demanded, really. With her eyebrows pulled in a vee and her hands balled on her hips, it was definitely a demand. An adorable, adorable demand.
Before he could reassure her, Mason barked, “Go, go, go!” and they were all suddenly on the move.
Bran lifted his rifle, keeping his sights aimed at the fort and the large embrasures—the openings built into the side of the garrison to allow cannon fire—that peered out at the island and the surrounding waters like dark, malevolent eyes.
The short trip to the little cottage that was the ranger’s station seemed to take an eternity. Bran figured that was partly due to the burning pain in his thigh. But it was also due to his acute—we’re talking absolute—awareness of every move Maddy made. He sensed every stutter in her step. Was attuned to every breath she took. He imagined if he listened really closely, he could probably hear her heart beat.
This was how he remembered her, this…hyperawareness. And it was just one of the many reasons he hadn’t wanted to come tonight.
In the three months since he’d last seen her, he’d been able to convince himself he had imagined everything. Chalked up his overwhelming reaction to her to the extreme circumstances under which they’d met. But now that he was back by her side? There was no denying it. That pull, that draw was still there. Still thick in the air between them like a cloud of superpowered pheromones or some shit.
When they finally made it to the ranger’s station, the quiet shuffle of feet scurrying up the stone step
s sounded behind him. “Got you covered,” Mason said. “Up and in.”
When Bran turned to make his own way into the ranger’s station, it was to see two things. The first was Mason on the little porch, leaning against the rail that could really use a coat or two of paint—the salty sea air was hell on exteriors—M4 raised and at the ready to provide cover fire should Bran need it. The second was Maddy’s luscious ass at eye level. Had Bran not already been sporting a battlefield boner—adrenaline tended to make a man’s stick and stones perk up—he would have sprung wood at the sight. Her hips swung back and forth with an enticingly feminine tick-tock when she hustled through the front door.
“Bran?” She spun around in the threshold. “Hurry!”
To jostle his brain around enough that it could tell his eyes to stop bugging out of their sockets, he had to shake his head like a dog shaking off water.
Oh man. He was in so much trouble. And only some of it was from the dick-lickers in the fort.
* * *
7:23 p.m.…
Alexandra Merriweather didn’t know which was worse. The horrifying sound of a real, live, honest-to-goodness gun battle, or this. This oppressive, almost malignant silence that seemed to be spreading with each passing second.
“The silence is worse,” she said aloud, just to hear her own voice and not feel so alone.
When Mason and Bran had armed themselves to the teeth before diving overboard, she’d thought she’d be fine on her own. But now, in the midst of the eerie quiet, the solitude was starting to get to her. The vastness of the sea was daunting. The soft clink, clink of the rigging lines against the steel mainmast sounded strangely sinister. And the warm, humid air had become oppressive, pushing in on her until it felt like her lungs were caught in a vise.
“You wait here,” Mason had told her before donning a pair of swim fins, his huge back flexing as he bent at the waist. “The minute we know what’s happening and take control of the situation, we’ll send up this flare.” He’d shown her the flare stick before shoving it into a pocket of his cargo shorts. Then he’d slipped two large…er…what she thought were called magazines full of bullets into another pocket. Just…easy-peasy, as-you-pleasey. No biggie. Gulp.
I mean, come on. I knew they were Navy SEALs. But the relevant word here is were.
“When you see it,” he said, straightening, “you sail on over and get us. You got me?”
She nodded vigorously, unable to talk. Which might’ve been a first.
He searched her eyes then, seeming to hesitate. In those few seconds, she was able to locate her voice. “I got you,” she told him, her tone full of bravado she certainly didn’t feel.
“But if you see another boat,” he continued, his South Boston accent dropping the r sound off the end of the word another. “And I mean any boat headed your way, you start the engines and sail straight back to Wayfarer Island. On account of we don’t know who’s out here, and who’s friend or foe. You don’t take any chances—”
“But you and Bran—”
“No buts,” he insisted, his eyes like flames. “You don’t worry about us. We can handle ourselves.”
She wanted to argue, unable to stand the thought of turning tail and running, leaving them all alone to face whatever fate waited for them on Garden Key. But arguing wasted precious time. Time when who knew what horrors were being perpetrated on that island. So she nodded and squared her shoulders. But inside she was saying, This can’t really be happening. This can’t really be happening. This can’t really be happening.
When Mason chucked her on the chin with a scarred knuckle, she was forced to admit, Okay, so it’s really happening. Crap on a cracker!
He pitched himself overboard. And she was left with nothing to do but watch him sink beneath the surface of the waves and contemplate the fact he’d willingly touched her for the very first time, and that their conversation had been the longest and most cordial of their acquaintance. Both struck her as unaccountably sad. Why did it take fully automatic weapons fire and a true life-and-death situation to make them stop taking digs at each other?
It was a question that filled her with a million conflicting emotions. On the one hand, Mason McCarthy was sullen and cantankerous and prone to growling at her like a lion with a thorn stuck in his paw. On the other hand, she couldn’t ignore the appeal of his handsome face.
Oh, not handsome in the traditional sense. His forehead was too heavy, not to mention perpetually furrowed. His nose was too wide and listed slightly to the left—evidence of a break he had never bothered to fix. And his jaw? Well, his jaw was a mile wide. And if it were any harder or more angular, it’d need to be carved from granite.
But then there are his eyes. They were crystal blue. Like the water around Wayfarer Island on a sunny, windless day. And his hair. She sighed just thinking about it. It was thick and shiny and inky black.
And that’s before you get to his body. Whoa, momma, what a body. He was so roped with muscle he could’ve been a contender for the WWE. She could easily imagine him throwing an opponent against the ropes or choking out an adversary with his beefy forearm. In short, Mason McCarthy cut a hard, forbidding figure. It was like he’d been built for destruction.
Or something far more pleasurable.
See? Conflicting. That one word precisely described their relationship.
Or in more expansive terms, her girl parts were super interested in his boy parts. But every time he opened his mouth—which, let’s face it, wasn’t very often; a rock communicated more than he ever did—her brain became very annoyed with him.
“Come on, Mason,” she grumbled, lifting the binoculars he’d pressed into her hand. Field glasses he’d called them. Through the magnified lenses, she could just make out the back of the fort—Mason had instructed her to sail the boat nearly two miles out to sea. Now she scanned the redbrick expanse for movement. But there was nothing. Not a damn thing.
“Come on, Mason,” she said again, grimacing at the hitch in her voice. When she felt something hot and wet slip down her cheek, she hastily brushed it away. Unfortunately, another drop replaced the first, and that’s when she realized she was crying.
That’s also when she realized just how much she’d come to care for the guys of Deep Six Salvage in the short time she’d been living and working with them. Not only were they men of rare courage and honor, but they were also incredibly…good.
That was the best way she knew to describe them. They were all good men—Mason’s obvious aversion to her personality aside.
The truth was, they’d shown her more respect and consideration than she’d ever received from anyone. In grade school, she’d been teased unmercifully because she never played Red Rover on the playground, preferring instead to sit quietly under a tree and devour the stories in her history book. And my Carrot Top hair, Casper the Ghost complexion, and Coke-bottle glasses didn’t help, I’m sure.
In high school, she was the butt of jokes because she was the latest of late bloomers. She didn’t sprout breasts until she was nearly eighteen. And it’s not like they’re anything to write home about even now.
She thought she would find her tribe in college. But there weren’t many girls—or any, really—who wanted to learn to read centuries’ old scripts. And since she’d never gotten why keg stands were fun, she’d once again found herself the odd man…er…odd woman out.
Graduate school had proved to be a bit more accepting, filled with academic types who didn’t begrudge her interests in antiquated documents and historical minutiae. But even so, her professors thought she was nuts to waste her time and the integrity of her doctoral dissertation trying to help a bunch of hairy, tattooed guys find a four-hundred-year-old fortune that had eluded treasure hunters for centuries. Her advisor had gone so far as to say, “If you were twice as smart, you’d still be an idiot for throwing in your lot with these men.”
That hadn’t stopped her from hopping on the first plane headed south. And she’d been surprised by how easy it’d been to convince the guys of Deep Six Salvage not only to let her stay, but to take her word for it when she said she thought they—and everyone who’d come before them—had been looking in the wrong place for the Santa Cristina. They hadn’t called her crazy. They hadn’t batted an eyelash at her youth or inexperience. Instead they’d sat down, listened to her arguments, and trusted her judgment.
And earlier, when they’d matched the hilt LT and Olivia found with Captain Bartolome Vargas’s cutlass? Well, she’d crowed with victory not because she’d been proved right, but because she’d been beyond relieved that she hadn’t steered these good men wrong. Even now, even scared out of her wits, a smile tilted her lips at the memory of LT swinging her around in a circle while Meat barked happily and L’il Bastard cock-a-doodle-doo-ed from his favorite spot on the porch railing outside the kitchen window.
It was strange, she realized, but at twenty-seven years old, and with a group of grizzled guys on a remote island, she finally, finally felt like she belonged. And it was killing her that she was twiddling her thumbs while two of those grizzled guys were risking their necks.
Grrr. Sitting tight, sitting still had never been something she excelled at.
Maybe I could just sail a little closer. If I don’t use the engines, no one will hear me. Or…the Gulf Stream current blew by this side of the little island, right? And if she remembered correctly from the current map she’d taken a peek at two weeks ago, it should push her closer to Garden Key without her having to do more than pull anchor. By her recollection, the average speed of the current was four miles per hour. She was two miles away. So, in thirty minutes she could be setting foot on the island.
Devil and the Deep (The Deep Six) Page 6
