Chapter 8
Gemma weaved around tree trunks, but overgrown ferns prevented any kind of walking path. A glance over her shoulder assured her the parachute was still in sight. Not too far, but she couldn’t trek any further this way. At least not safely.
Pressure tightened her chest. She inhaled, focusing on the scent of the damp dirt, but nothing settled her nerves. Animals called around her, offended by her intrusion. “I’m sorry,” she called, her voice shaking. “I’m just lost. I promise I won’t hurt you or your home.”
Great. She’d lost it now.
Still, on the off chance a deadly predator had understood her, the words had been worth the gamble of her sanity. She hummed loudly as she backtracked to her landing spot. Tears burned her eyes.
God, why hadn’t she dressed properly? She needed pants and a long-sleeved shirt to avoid getting eaten alive by bugs or rubbing her bare skin against something poisonous. Most people wore rubber boots in the rainforest to prevent snake bites. Her hiking boots that just reached an inch above the ankles wouldn’t do much. Trepidation made her skin itch as she peered into the thigh-high foliage she’d just about stepped into.
She summoned a deep breath and cupped her mouth with her hands. “Eli! Dallas!”
Back at the spot where she’d fallen, she stood under the backpack and turned in a circle. She checked her watch. 10:48a.m. A good hour since they’d jumped.
Maybe she could find the plane. If the radio still worked, she could call for help. Wouldn’t a search party come out after Eli’s Mayday call?
New fear rattled her spine. Would the men who’d shot at them come looking? What if—
Was that a human voice she’d heard? She stopped pacing and listened, straining to hear the specific noise over the constant jabber of the jungle.
She could have sworn someone had called her name...
She walked a few paces in the direction she’d just avoided. Birds cawed and monkeys gossiped but—
“Gemma!”
She gasped and clapped her hands around her mouth again. “Dallas! I’m here!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
She waited, wetting her lips.
Please, let him hear me.
She opened her mouth, but the sound of her name split the air again. This time the voice was closer. Her heart leaped into her throat. “Dallas!”
Movement in the ferns caught her eye. A stick cut through the foliage, and Dallas barged through the vines. Relief made her knees tremble. She grabbed a tree, not wanting to chance running through the ferns and getting bitten by a snake. She waved her free hand and Dallas’s eyes widened.
His lips parted and he picked up the pace, chomping through anything in his path with the long stick he clung to.
Gemma pressed a shaking hand to her abdomen. Tears welled in her eyes. He was here. He’d survived the jump. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t going to die.
Lord, Gemma. Don’t you dare cry.
Dallas sprinted through the brush, his large, muscular form as prominent as a rescue plane above an endless green ocean.
“Gemma,” he wheezed, as he trampled over the living floor at his feet and swooped her into his arms. He crushed her chest to his and carried her firmly against him as he traipsed the rest of the way out of the foliage and to the bare spread on which she’d landed an hour ago.
“Holy shit, holy shit,” he said, over and over in her ear. His sweat dampened her neck and shirt, but she didn’t give a damn.
She let out a choked laugh. “I thought you were dead,” she said, through the tears coursing down her cheeks. So much for not crying.
He set her on her feet and covered her cheeks with his dirt-smeared hands. “I told you I’d find you.”
She brought the back of her hand to his jaw. His face was beet red, and scratches covered his arms beneath a smattering of dirt. “Are you hurt? You look winded. And your arm is bleeding.”
He grunted and swiped his forehead with his short sleeve. “I’m fine. It’s just a cut from a branch. I’ve been running the last little bit, trying to cover more ground.”
To find her. Her heart pitter-pattered in her chest. She brought her arms around his waist and exhaled. “We need to find the plane. We might be able to radio for help and I have water and food in my bag.”
“Mmm. Me too. And my gun would be really fucking dandy right now.” His voice was thick with angst.
“Did something happen?”
“Yeah. Ran into a boa.”
She jerked her head back. “Oh my god.”
“It’s fine. We just need to be really careful.”
She nodded and pulled away to stare at the mess of trees, vines, and miles ahead. She dragged her fingers through her ponytail and pushed down the sense of doom that wanted to suffocate her. They could do this. They had to. “I feel like the plane crashed north of where I landed. But I can’t be sure. I was spinning around and not exactly cognizant.”
Dallas closed his fingers around her wrist. “I think you’re right. Stay behind me and watch where you step.”
His fingers released her, and he led the way through the jungle. Animals continued to bellow, probably to alert their companions to the intrusion. If she and Dallas made it out of here without getting mauled by a jaguar or bitten by a poisonous snake, it’d be a freaking miracle.
Twenty minutes later, Gemma’s feet screamed. She wasn’t going to be the first one to complain, but sweat coated her skin and something about her aroma was attracting mosquitos to her like ants to sugar water. She swatted another one away and huffed.
“Eli made a Mayday call before we went down,” she said. “How long do you think it will take for a search party to come?”
Dallas shrugged. “Could be hours. Could be never.”
Her chest deflated. They were in the middle of the darn Amazon. Hours or days from civilization on foot. “Do you think we’re close to Ecuador? Maybe it would be wise to head back toward the airstrip,” she said, panting.
“You mean where the guys shot at us?”
“Okay, cranky. You don’t need to bite my head off.”
“I’m not biting your head off.” He struck a vine out of the way, his arm muscles bunching with the movement. Blood still coated his arm, but it appeared to have at least stopped flowing. “We don’t even know who the fuck is after us.”
“I’m not a genius or anything, but maybe it has to do with your work.”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow hoisted. “My work? Yours is the work that killed a dozen people yesterday.”
“Yeah... but if the CIA wanted me dead, I don’t think they’d send Hummers of dudes with machine guns. They’d probably send one hitman or something. It’s not like I’m a terrorist.”
“No. But you have intel regarding their involvement in a bombing. That would cause serious problems for the government, don’t you think?” He continued on and she stomped over the terrain behind him.
She chewed on her lip. She couldn’t go there. The thought of the CIA wanting her dead was too much.
Her toe caught a tree root and she hit the ground. Her knees throbbed, and she let out a curse. Dallas seized her biceps and lifted her to her feet. “You okay?”
He bent to brush off her knees. The skin hadn’t broken, but the flaming heat of pain made the anxiety inside her that much more volatile.
Hysteria bubbled up inside her, threatening to transform her into a sobbing mess. She chose anger instead. “This is stupid,” she said, throwing her arms out to the sides. “We’re going to die here.”
Dallas straightened. “You got a better idea?”
She balled her hands at her sides and let out a low scream of frustration. She tunneled her hands in her hair and turned away. He wasn’t the one she was pissed at. If she’d handled things differently with Charlene, maybe ignored the hunk of hot manly muscle’s enticing ticket out here, she could be sitting in a cushy hotel waiting for a commercial flight.
Or not. Like Dallas had said earlier, whoever had found her at the hotel could find her again. She was in deep shit and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but her own. She could never outrun her damn past.
A warm, damp hand clamped around her shoulder. “Hey.” Dallas’s eyes were soft, tired, and alert all at the same time. “I’m not going to let anything happen to us, okay? Yeah, this sucks. But we’ll get out of here.”
She nodded slowly.
He wrapped his arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “Hang tight. And if you need to lose your shit, do that too.”
She chuckled. “I wasn’t looking for permission.”
He gave her one more squeeze.
“If we could just get to a damn phone we could—”
He froze. “Holy shit.” He patted the pockets of his cargo shorts and unbuttoned the one near his knee. “I have my satellite phone.”
She perked up, rising to her tiptoes.
He dug out a clunky black device with a thick antenna and a screen similar to that of a smartphone. “I thought I put this in my backpack, but I didn’t,” he said, his voice full of awe. He waved the phone at her.
Her mind spun frantically. “Do we call the authorities? A rescue?”
Dallas shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not that easy. We don’t know who we can trust. But there’s a good chance we’ll be able to locate the plane.” He tapped the screen, oblivious to the insects landing on his face.
“How?”
He pressed the device to his ear. “My brother.”
***
Dare answered onthe second ring and Dallas had never been so relieved to hear the asshole’s voice.
“I need your help.”
“Seems you need my help a lot lately,” Dare said with a snicker.
Dallas let the words roll off his back. The least annoying but also the grumpiest of his brothers was his twin, Cole, but the chances of Cole returning his phone call in the same day were slim to none. The guy liked to pretend he was dead.
“Our plane crashed in the Amazon jungle. Gemma and I jumped with parachutes, along with the pilot.” No use pretending he wasn’t with the woman Dare had helped him locate last night.
“Jeez, dude. You ever hear of taking a relaxing vacation? So what do you need me for?”
“We need to get back to the plane. My iPhone’s there, in my bag. If it isn’t burned to shit, I’m hoping you can trace it and give me coordinates.” He rarely had to use his satellite phone for emergency situations, but right now he was damn glad he’d bought one that had GPS capability—like a smartphone only better because it didn’t rely on networks.
“All right. Hold on while I do that. You’re lucky I’m home right now.” Rustling sounded in the background. “I’ve got your number punched in,” Dare said, a minute later. “Send me your coordinates, just in case, while I wait for the software to locate your phone.”
Dallas quickly acquired his location and texted it to Dare. “Done.”
“Okay, I’ve got your phone tracked. Can’t say for sure if the plane is with it.”
Dallas’s phone dinged. Gemma hugged his side, her body radiating relief. He copied and pasted the longitude and latitude coordinates Dare had sent into his GPS. A circle swirled on the screen.
He glanced up at the sky through the shroud of trees. It was too hard to tell exactly where the sun was, but it couldn’t be earlier than 2:00p.m., which meant they only had so many hours before nightfall. When they’d be much more vulnerable to predators.
The screen brought up their route. Almost six miles. He reported that information to Dare.
“That should be doable. How can I help? I don’t know anyone in Colombia right now, but I can call a search in.”
Dallas snorted. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
“I know traipsing through the Amazon sure as hell isn’t.”
“I’ll call you when we get out of here.” Dallas disconnected and brought up the GPS again.
“Six miles?” Gemma said, her breasts pressed against his forearm. “That’ll take us hours.”
“Right. So we’d better move quickly.”
She held out her hand. “I’ll navigate. You can’t move brush out of our way and keep an eye for predators while watching the screen.”
He handed the device over, and her free hand curled around his bicep in an all-too-comfortable way. Her touch sizzled along his nerve endings, reminding him of the crippling relief that had encompassed him when he’d heard her shouting back at him.
He’d been paralyzed. Had thought he’d finally gotten jungle fever. But no. She was here in the flesh, and if he didn’t watch every step they made, one or both of them might die.
He’d been in shitty situations where death was a viable consequence more times than he could count.
Never had it bothered him as it did now.
It could just be that the thought of being jaguar food was really unappealing. Or maybe that he cared more about Gemma’s survival than his own.
“Looks like we keep heading north for a hundred yards and then veer northeast.” She nodded at the tangle of vines.
He brushed away the thoughts poking his brain, hefted the stick, and swiped the thick vines ahead of them down. He’d gotten used to the squawks and hisses of enraged animals. As long as those animals weren’t poisonous or bigger than one of the little tree monkeys that watched them with curious eyes, he could take it.
What he couldn’t take was the pressing sense of danger at the back of his neck. They’d be lucky to have five or six more hours of daylight. If they didn’t get out of here before nightfall, things could get very, very bad.
Hours later, Gemma’shand had long since fallen from his arm.
“We’re not too far,” she said. Her breath was labored, and a glance behind him showed her gait had slowed.
He couldn’t blame her. His own legs were starting to tremble and his voice had grown scratchy from calling out for Eli. The only thing keeping him going was knowing they were closer to survival gear and a way out. A large rock came into sight, and Gemma weaved around him and plopped down on it.
She groaned and tipped her head back, her shoulders rolled forward. “Oh my god. I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.”
He stopped next to her and took a few slow breaths. The temptation to sit was almost overwhelming, but if he did, he’d lose his momentum. “Which is why we need to keep going. There’s water on the plane.”
She nodded and lifted her ankle to rest on her knee, massaging her calf. “I know that. But I’m dying.”
“No, you’re not,” he bit out, not hiding the irritation in his tone. “But if we stand here another minute we might.”
She made a face. “Resting for five minutes will give us the reset we need to hike another... what, three freaking hours?”
He shook his head. “Not that long. Check.”
She picked up the device from where she’d left it on the rock. He waited as she took her sweet time, probably dawdling so she could rest longer.
“Okay, that’s not so bad. An hour and a half. Oh!” She sat up straighter and thrust the phone in his direction. “Look. There’s a road not far from the plane. Once we get what we need and rest for the night, we’ll have a clear walking path to Ecuador.”
“Hmm.”
Her eyes were wide with a vibrancy he hadn’t seen in her since the previous day, when he’d grabbed her arm in the hotel lobby. Right before...
Nope. He wasn’t going there. He wouldn’t envision banging her tight pussy until he could fucking breathe and clear the adrenaline from his veins.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Her question popped his thought bubble.
He lifted a shoulder. “Yes and no. There’re people looking for us, remember?”
“Yeah. But way out here?”
He extended his hand. “Can we go now?”
She pressed her lips together. “That wasn’t quite five minutes.”
“You’ll get a whole night to rest once we get to the plane. Maybe I’ll even rub your feet.”
She slapped her palm in his. “Now you’re talking.”
He pulled her up and tucked his grin away. Her hand was so small and slight, her frame easily half the size of his, yet she’d plowed through the jungle with minimal complaint. Admiration flowed through him.
Yeah, he’d toured every contour of Gemma’s body, but he’d never had the opportunity to get to know her. Dinner and movie dates weren’t what either of them had signed up for. Their encounters didn’t even last the whole night. A little small talk, and even less pillow talk, made it next to impossible for him to see the woman who had such a fierce hold on him.
She settled into step behind him again, and they worked through the vines. This time, his stride was longer and his muscles were less shaky.
Five minutes had reset him. Not that he’d admit it.