Chapter 20
Rick either didn’t know they’d been inside or didn’t expect them to live long enough to escape.
As Fletcher and Waylon rushed into the belly of the storm, Rick hesitated, startled, before bringing his ridiculous Mad Max gun to his shoulder. Aiming. “You aren’t welcome here,” he shouted. “Are you illiterate? The sign was right there.”
“Just leaving!” Fletcher called back.
A malevolent wind thrashed as Fletcher and Waylon bypassed Rick, diving beneath the jungle canopy. Gunpowder swirled through the petrichor as a few blasts fired. Missing them. Badly. A couple disgruntled toucans flapped through the treetops. One even let out a little nervous squawk.
Waylon shot ahead. “This way. I know a place where we can wait out the storm.”
“Please tell me it’s bulletproof,” prayed Fletcher.
On cue, another stray bullet whizzed past them, too far left to do any bodily damage, but it still managed to crack a tree limb overhead. The branch splintered, cracked. Above, a pair of macaws bristled, darting after the toucans as the branch broke away from the trunk.
Waylon leaped forward, but Fletcher startled back, seconds away from blunt force trauma.
Slam! The bough crashed against the wet earth.
Cold mud splashed up her calves, her thighs, over the threads of her skirt.
Everywhere. With Rick trekking after them, a stain was hardly the gravest of her worries.
Fingers lacing around her hips, Waylon hoisted her up and over the branch.
If they weren’t running for their lives, she might have registered the flutter of endearment at his touch.
The way his nearness no longer repulsed her.
They raced forward, never straying too far from the other.
Always within reach. Close enough to catch.
Being that Kent had monopolized Fletcher’s romantic life for the last decade, she had never been exposed to the horrors of New York’s dating culture.
Didn’t know the terrors of swiping right on a cute guy only to get stood up in the pouring rain outside a restaurant she never could have afforded.
All she had were Ford’s stories, and he wasn’t exactly a reliable narrator.
But as Waylon set her down gently, she wondered what it might have been like to get to know him under ordinary circumstances.
Dinner. Drinks. The downtown lights illuminating everything around them.
Wanting that from Waylon used to be so far off the table, it splattered on the floor.
But now? Would it be so bad to admit she did—that she always had wanted it? To be with someone who actually saw her when he looked at her, and not whatever manic pixie farm girl Kent wanted her to be? Even if that someone was the last person on earth she ever expected.
It didn’t matter.
In the city, Waylon had only ever been an enemy, and they weren’t splitting an overpriced appetizer right now.
Rick had been only momentarily deterred by the consequences of his terrible aim.
His mud-wet footsteps thundered behind them, and with a peek over her shoulder, Fletcher watched as he planted a hand on the fallen limb and heaved himself over.
Rage contorted Rick’s face. A sneer, a snarl. The same bloodred hunger she’d seen in his eyes in the sitting room before he shot his manager, but this time Fletcher recognized it as greed.
Right now, Fletcher and Waylon were just obstacles between him and a billion-dollar company.
“What Opal said about Eliza,” Fletcher started as she pumped her arms to keep up with Waylon. The words scraped up her throat, both from the fear of knowing and the Usain Bolt pace she was trying to keep. “Is it true?”
“Is now the best time for an oral history?” Waylon asked. Another shotgun blast shook through the canopy.
Fletcher ignored him. “Is it true?”
Waylon made a noise that was half scoff, half self-deprecating laugh. The truth was buried in it. “What, that she dumped me? Or that she only wanted to marry me for my father’s name and my father’s money and my father’s influence?”
Fletcher’s stomach pitted.
“That I was young and in love?” When Fletcher didn’t immediately respond, he asked, voice deep with vulnerability, “Or that I had a heart to break?”
They ducked beneath a wiry limb, green with new growth, and Waylon dragged it with them. When he let go, the branch slingshotted back, lashing toward Rick with an angry whack. It slowed the rabid salesman, but it didn’t stop him.
Fingerling branches swiped at Fletcher’s skin, cuts stinging in the rain. Finally, when they met the murky waters of the river, she asked, “What happened?”
“We’d been together for six months, engaged for three.
My dad wanted me to move through the company ranks, but it was really just his way of keeping me under his control.
” The storm winds blew faster, as if spun by Dyer’s undead hand.
Still mad postmortem that he hadn’t gotten his way. “I wanted out.”
“But she wanted in,” Fletcher finished.
“When I turned down the chief marketing officer job because I wanted to do my own thing, Eliza told me she didn’t think it was going to work out between us.”
Thunder boomed, close enough to rattle Fletcher’s single, shameful cavity.
“When?” Fletcher’s voice caught. “When did she break it off?”
The timeline scrolled behind her eyes, all the ticks lining up. Some part of her already knew the answer, but she had to hear him say it.
“Right before the charity gala. The night we met.”
That version of Waylon transposed over the one standing in front of her. Disheveled and devilish, a chilled glass in hand. Heartbroken? She hadn’t seen it then for what it was, but now it was all too obvious.
And Fletcher, stressed out and sad and ashamed of the way he made her feel, she’d rubbed his family name in his face. Accused him of being nothing without it.
A sheet of rain pummeled down from the heavens, heavier than before.
They needed to keep moving.
Fletcher picked up her pace, elbowing through the knotted lianas at the river’s edge. Behind them, Rick fussed with loading another round. Excellent.
“Keep running,” Rick called. “I love the chase.”
A bullet strayed a yard or so wide of them. A yard or so too close.
“A little to your left next time,” Waylon shouted.
Rick happily obliged. Although this shot veered way too far left, missing them by several tree trunks. Waylon skidded to a stop, spraying dirt up with his heels. In the slick mud, Fletcher only barely caught herself before plummeting into the river.
Fletcher seethed, “Are you trying to get us killed?”
A serious hand landed on her arm as Waylon turned her toward him. Droplets clung to his hair, his eyelashes, the tip of his nose. “I would never let anyone hurt you.”
Despite everything—or, maybe, because of everything—she knew he wasn’t lying. For better or worse, Waylon was a man of his word. Never said anything he didn’t mean. Never meant anything he didn’t say.
It helped that her only other option was to have Asshole Rick be the last thing she saw while trapped in this mortal coil.
“Okay.”
Which was all the answer Waylon needed to hoop an arm around her waist, drawing Fletcher to his chest. His other arm reached overhead and dragged down a vine as thick as his bicep. “Grab on.”
She didn’t exactly have much of a choice. As soon as she did, Waylon kicked off the ledge of the bank and swung them out over the water.
Water where, for the record, a couple hungry-looking crocodiles slithered.
Fletcher pinched her eyes closed, sinking into the soft folds of Waylon’s rain-drenched shirt.
Focusing on the way the crook of his neck smelled like salt and sun and the estate’s cedar soap.
How the hurried beat of his heart matched hers.
She braced for a crash landing on the opposite bank, the scrape of earth against skin.
When she peeled her eyes back open, they hadn’t moved.
Instead of George of the Jungle-ing them to the other side, Waylon had stranded them over the river’s middle.
Her fingertips ached around the vine, knuckles white from the strain. Regret simmered in her blood. “I thought you had a plan. This was your brilliant idea?”
“Yes,” he said proudly.
They were nothing better than live bait.
Something sparkled in Waylon’s eyes. Something that made Fletcher keenly aware of how close they were. “Have a little faith, honey.”
Rain knifed across Fletcher’s cheeks. Metal coated her tongue, ringing through the enamel of her teeth. Out of the underbrush, Rick’s shape emerged, gun in hand.
Behind the barrel, the blacks of Rick’s eyes had blown so wide, there was hardly any color left. Black hair dripped over his face, his forehead peeling and cheeks pink from days in the Lydell sun.
A cruel smile stretched to the corners of his mouth. “I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m really not. When you see your dad, tell him I say, ‘Thanks for nothing, you old fuck.’ ”
Adrenaline pounded through Fletcher’s head, thick and potent. Her heart slammed against her ribs, trying to break free, but there was nowhere to go. Waylon’s arm clutched her tighter. Beneath their feet, the reptiles circled.
Rick raised the shotgun to his shoulder, that absurd spear gleaming off the end.
Electricity prickled the back of Fletcher’s neck, and she made the mistake of looking up. The trees parted for the river, leaving a gunmetal stripe of exposed sky.
A blue bolt of lightning zapped down and latched on to Rick’s bayonet.
Fletcher shielded her eyes against the flash, but there was no hiding from the incinerating heat. The instant ricochet of thunder, so loud it left her ears squealing. The pungent stench of charred flesh. The unthinkable thud as Rick rag-dolled to the earth.
“Where did you say we’re going?” Fletcher asked when her lungs remembered how to breathe.
After a coordinated effort, they managed to swing themselves to the far edge of the river, narrowly avoiding the crocodiles’ serrated grins. All of their limbs were blessedly still attached. Somehow.