Chapter 6
SIX
She was running out of strength. Trembling with exhaustion too, and frankly, her dress had turned lethal, all that heavy cotton trying to drown her.
“Stay with me, Britta. Don’t stop.” He’d started to swim, pulling her along, and she fought to keep her head above water.
Oh, she wanted to stop. Wanted to sink into the water and let it take her because fighting was too hard.
But West wouldn’t let her.
And of course, she kept hearing his words: I’m not letting you go, no matter what happens.
So clearly, if she stopped, if she sank into the depths…well, he did too.
Nope.
He dragged her through the water, one stroke. Another. His breathing steady even while towing her dead weight.
“Kick,” he said. “Help me out here.”
She kicked. Barely. But kicked.
“Stay low. Stay quiet. Don’t let them see us.”
“That’s Ham. That’s your team.”
“I know.”
“Then why—”
“Just trust me. Please.”
That word. Please. Like it cost him something to ask.
Fear was a decent motivator. Fear and the cold from the water that was seeping into her bones, and the certainty that West wouldn’t be hiding from his own team unless something was very, very wrong.
They swam parallel to shore, away from the voices. The exhaustion turned her muscles sluggish. Her brain stopped firing.
“West.” Her voice came out slurred. “Spent.”
“I know. Almost there.”
Almost where?
She strained to gauge how far they were from the flickering lights of shore, but the smoke blotted out most of it.
Trust. She grabbed the word, held it close, because without it, she’d end up at sea, alone in the darkness.
Please, West, don’t let go.
He stopped, treading water for a minute, breathing hard. She treaded water too, letting him hold on to her so she didn’t float away.
“Who are they?” she asked. Her words were running together. Exhaustion. Shock, maybe. Or exhaustion. “What do they want?”
“I don’t know yet whether this is about you.”
“Then who?”
He was quiet for a moment, his gaze beyond her in the darkness.
“The Jones, Inc., team is in the sights of a killer,” he said finally. “We thwarted the assassination attempt on your father a few weeks ago. Could be that the people behind that are targeting the team.”
Britta tried to process that. “So the yacht—”
“Might have been targeting us. Or just you.” His voice was grim. “Either way, I can’t trust anyone until I know who’s compromised. Who Petrov got to. Who’s working for him.”
“Your team—”
“Is clean. But somehow the attackers knew we’d be on the yacht, so…” He looked at her. “I have to find a place for us to lay low. Just until I can verify it’s safe.”
“My security detail—”
“Disappeared. I didn’t see Martinez.”
“You think—”
“I don’t know.”
“Chávez is probably losing his mind right now.”
“Yep. But I can’t hand you over to him until I know for certain he’s not compromised.”
“He’s been with me for ten years. I trust him.”
“I know. But now I’m asking you to trust me. Money and blackmail can turn anyone.”
That made terrible sense. The kind of sense Britta didn’t want to accept but couldn’t deny. And she rolled that thought through her mind as he swam, silently saving her life.
Her feet hit sand and she tried to stand. Stumbled. West caught her. Kept her upright.
“Almost there,” he said. “A little farther.”
They waded through shallow water. Britta’s legs barely worked. She fell twice. West hauled her up both times. Half carrying her now.
Then they were on shore. Britta collapsed. Face down in the sand. Shaking. Coughing. Alive.
West didn’t let her rest.
“Up. We need to move.”
“Can’t.”
“You can.” He pulled her to her feet. She swayed. He steadied her. “We’re on the south side of the island, away from the harbor, near the residential area. I need to find us transportation.”
“Transportation.”
“Something with an engine that can get us away from here.”
“That’s stealing.”
“That’s surviving.”
He half dragged her across the beach, through the seaweed that caked the shore, to a boardwalk. Beyond that, the quiet tangle of the small Key West neighborhoods. Quiet streets, quaint homes.
Parked cars and scooters.
West tucked an arm around her waist and helped her along down a street and stopped near a scooter—older model, nothing fancy. He pulled something from his pocket that Britta’s brain couldn’t identify at first.
A utility knife.
“You always come to parties armed?”
He glanced at her, his mouth a grim slash, and said nothing.
Okay, so maybe.
He turned to the scooter.
“What are you—”
“Hot-wiring.”
“That’s illegal.”
“So is bombing yachts. We’re way past legal.”
He worked fast. Pulled off the cover near the handlebars, then worked on the wires.
She rubbed her goosefleshed arms, looking around in the darkness.
Where had Martinez gone? Her gut tightened. Had someone killed him? No way did she believe that he’d betrayed her. No. Way.
The scooter coughed. Sputtered. Caught.
She turned back to him. “That was fast.”
He swung his leg over the seat and held out his hand. Water dripped from his hair, his white shirt plastered to his chest.
And in his eyes, that same fierceness that had made her trust him in the ocean. It moved through her, grabbed hold of her.
Steadied her.
“Coming with me?”
She glanced out to the ocean.
Every logical reason said no.
Wait for rescue. Wait for Martinez. Wait for the Coast Guard and official channels and people whose job it was to know what to do.
This was crazy. Getting on a stolen scooter with a man she’d known less than two days. Running from her security detail. Hiding from potential threats she couldn’t verify.
This was the opposite of everything she’d been taught.
But standing there—soaking wet, drenched, watching West wait for her answer—Britta’s writer brain supplied a line.
From the Prague scene she’d written last night. Eva taking the stranger’s hand even though logic said to run.
“I believed him.”
Not because it was smart. Because sometimes survival meant taking a leap.
Britta climbed onto the seat behind West. “Let’s go.”
He gunned the throttle and they took off.
Britta wrapped her arms around his waist. Held on. Let the wind batter her wet skin, and the adrenaline override the exhaustion, and the choice she’d just made settle into her chest.
She was writing herself into the story.
The street blurred past. Residential area giving way to commercial. Music pumped from the bars and restaurants that catered to the tourists, turning the night alive.
No one would spot a couple of soggy tourists fleeing Key West.
West drove like he knew where he was going. Maybe he did. Or maybe he was making it up as he went. Either way, Britta held on and tried not to think about Martinez trying to find her.
“My father is going to lose his mind.”
“We’ll call him as soon as we get to a secure location.”
Yeah, that might be a hot minute. She could just imagine him getting the call that she was missing.
Never mind that she was currently an accessory to scooter theft.
Definitely a new twist on the average destination wedding. And maybe the exhaustion had gone to her brain, because she should be terrified. Instead…well, fear couldn’t quite get through the tight hold she had on West, the sense of safety.
The scooter hit a bump and Britta felt West’s body tense under her hands. But he muscled the scooter back into play and gunned it away from the commercial district, over the bridge, and into the Lower Keys.
The wind cut through her wet clothes. Her body shook. Her arms ached.
But her heart—oh, it might be more alive than, well, ever.
Who needed fiction?
Tonight, she was just going to be brave. Hold on.
And see where that took her.
I won’t let anything happen to you.
His stupid words kept ringing through his head as he muscled the scooter out of Key West proper and toward Hawk’s place.
West had made that promise in the water. Meant it. Intended to keep it.
Except he hadn’t exactly clarified the part where keeping her safe meant hiding from her security detail and anyone outside his own crew until he could verify who was compromised and who wasn’t.
Details.
Right now, the plan was simple—get Britta somewhere safe, contact the team, verify threats, make a plan.
West had executed more complicated operations in his sleep.
Except nothing about tonight was simple.
His phone was waterlogged and dead. His team might be dead. Poor Britta, her soggy body pressed against his back, shook so hard it rattled into him, and he feared that shock was setting in.
He should turn around. Or at least head over to the Key West hospital.
But he didn’t know who to trust, so he turned the scooter onto Whitehead Street.
Ocean Adventure Divers sat three blocks down—Hawkeye Marshall’s dive shop, the address West had memorized seven years ago after he’d saved Hawkeye’s life in Kandahar with an impossible shot from eight hundred meters out.
If you’re ever in the area and need a place to crash. No questions asked.
West was about to test the “no questions asked” part.
He had sort of thought he’d see Hawkeye at the wedding tomorrow—or even tonight on the yacht—since Ford was his cousin. So maybe he wouldn’t surprise the man when he showed up at his house.
With the soaking-wet First Daughter. Yep.
The dive shop appeared ahead. Dark. Closed. A hand-painted sign that read Ocean Adventure Divers hung above a storefront window displaying wetsuits and regulators and masks. No car out front. No lights upstairs where Hawkeye had an apartment above the shop.
Good. Probably.
West killed the engine half a block away. Helped Britta off the scooter. She swayed. He caught her.
“Where are we?” Her voice emerged hoarse, tired, waterlogged.
“Friend’s place. Hopefully he’s home.”
“And if he’s not?”
She raised an eyebrow at the grim set of his mouth, his one-shoulder shrug.
“So we’re breaking in.”
He took her hand. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. We’re old friends.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Please let the press not hear about this.”