Chapter Thirty-Six
Isla
I heard the muffled talking outside my door, but I didn’t move.
I listened.
The two voices were too deep to distinguish any individual words, but I still knew it was Nix and Ares.
Then the talking stopped, and I heard the faintest click of a lock unlatching before the whisper-soft movement of the door moving over carpet.
Pretending I was still asleep, I kept my breathing even despite my heart jumping a mile, then deciding to slam against my ribs for sport.
There was a soft thud, then the sound of the door moving repeated before the latch clicked again. Except this time, the faint catch of lock tumblers followed.
That bastard.
Listening hard, I waited thirty seconds.
No breathing, no footsteps, no nothing except the low hum of the boat’s engines that’d slowed way down over the past half hour.
To be safe, I counted down from thirty.
Then I slowly rolled over like I was just coming awake and opened my eyes.
No SEAL.
Just the muted light of a cloudy morning and my backpack sitting against the wall by the door when it’d been by the bed last night.
A distant sound of a ship horn drew my attention to the windows, and I glanced out.
Land. More importantly, a port.
And we were heading right for it.
Shoving off the soft comforter, still naked from the waist down, I grabbed my bikini bottoms. More than a little humiliated in the light of day, cursing myself for even thinking of waiting for him all night, I hated how I could still feel where his fingers had been.
Ignoring my traitorous hormones, I quickly retied the sides of the bottom of my swimsuit. Then I went for my backpack and pulled out a shirt, pants, socks and my hiking boots.
Dressed in under a minute, ignoring how my journal was right on top of all my things inside my backpack when I usually kept it in an interior pocket, I grabbed my small toiletries bag.
Fishing out the container I kept tampons in, I reached into the bottom and grabbed two of the paperclips I kept in there.
Screw a SEAL who stole my barrette.
Putting everything back into my pack except the paperclips, I zipped it up and shouldered it.
Then I went to the window and watched as the giant boat gently floated toward the docks as if it were drifting instead of being expertly navigated.
Bending the paperclips, I waited.