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“Mmmhmm.” She strummed her lip with her teeth. Yeah, she was in pain. “I’m on assignment with a magazine. Black vultures are endangered, but there are a few of them in Dadia Forest National Park. A fire wiped out a lot of their nesting habitat, so biologists built artificial nests, and it worked. The first chicks hatched last week.”
“That’s cool as hell, Lila. What magazine?”
“National Geographic.”
I rocked back on my heels. “No shit?”
She grinned and gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’m kind of a big deal,” she whispered conspiratorially. Self-deprecating and proud all at once. Her laugh ended on a wince, and her hand darted toward her calf, either to rub or scratch at the itchy welts, but I intercepted before she made contact.
“Don’t touch. Scratching makes it worse.” I picked up a broken shell and handed it to her, like she was a toddler I could distract. But it worked. “Dadia is pretty far from here. How did you end up on the island?”
“I couldn’t miss my chance to see the pink beach. Beaches come in so many different colors, did you know that? I’ve seen a black beach in Iceland, a purple beach in California, a yellow beach in Malta. There’s a red beach in Hawaii I really want to visit, if I can swing it with another paid work trip.”
Images flashed through my brain like a horny slide show. Lila in a bikini, her red hair matching the sand under our toes. Lila in the rainforest, sexy and competent, her camera trained on one of those little hooked-bill birds the color of her hair. Lila’s laugh mixing with the roar of the ocean because I was funny as shit and she would appreciate that.
Fucking hell, I wanted that. And since it had been a good long while since I had truly wanted anything except the one big impossible thing, it knocked me sideways a bit. I inhaled sharply through my nose and pressed my palm to the sand to ground myself.
I couldn’t have Lila and Hawaii. What I could have was one more week in Greece to stop moping, as my father called it, before returning to Washington, D.C., to join my family’s defense contracting company.
“What about you?” she asked. “What are you doing in Greece with your cute little first aid kit? Are you a lifeguard? Or maybe a guide with one of those adventure tourism companies?”
“Not a tour guide or a lifeguard. Just a safety fanatic.” I eyed her shin. “I think I got it all.”
But she didn’t let me off the hook. “So you’re in Greece for….?” she pressed.
“A good time.” My answer felt inadequate in comparison to her photographing vultures, but everyone died but me tended to crash the mood, so I was doing her a favor, really, with my boring ass answer. Let her think I was a fuckboy. I did want to fuck her.
“And you bring your first aid kit to the beach because your idea of a good time is peeling jellyfish tentacles from unsuspecting tourists.” She grinned. “How fortuitous that you met me.”
I helped her to her feet with a chuckle. “Baby, I’m having a great time,” I teased, but the truth of it surprised me. I was having a great time. I leaned in to say in a jokingly sexy voice, “My rental isn’t far from here. You want to come over and pour some vinegar on you? Keep this party going?”
Her gray-green eyes penetrated my soul as she considered my offer. “Okay. But I should warn you first.”
I cocked my head. “Okay…”
“I have no survival skills. Like, none. But I have a ferocious will to live. If you attack me, I will fight back, and it will be ugly. Painful—for both of us—because I have no idea how to be neat and tidy about it. I don’t know where the important arteries are or pressure points or anything like that. But I will scratch off every piece of your skin with my nails until you have nothing left. Pull your eyeballs out of your skull. I’ll bite your dick clean off if I have to.”
It was, without question, the hottest thing anyone had ever said to me. And I did know where the important arteries were.
“Understood,” I rasped out.
She beamed. “Great. Then we understand each other. Can you give me a piggyback ride? My leg really hurts.”
Wordlessly, I turned around, dropped into a squat, and patted my shoulder. “Hop on, baby.”
Laughing, she climbed on my back. Her warm breath grazed my cheek when she whispered, “Thanks, Seb.”
Apparently, we were friends now.
I am going to marry this woman.
1
LILA
Almost there.
Six miles to Mercy River Ranch, according to the GPS. I could stay alive for six miles. I had to. My mother would kill me if I bled out six miles from safety.
