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Chapter Thirteen
Coop
Late-day sun beat down on the runway as I scanned the asphalt roads leading toward the airfield. The Twin Otter skydiving plane had become stifling as we wedged together on the bench seats. Titan’s panting sure as hell didn’t help.
“Dude, she’s not coming,” Nik grunted from the opposite end of the fuselage, made even more crowded thanks to the large storage trunk that was getting dropped with us. We’d been loaded up and ready to go for the past twenty minutes.
Not only was Nik irritated and impatient, he was still side-eyeing me for my antics in the war room. Returning with my rumpled dress shirt yanked out to hide the wet spot on my pants certainly hadn’t helped prove my innocence. Embarrassing as it was, I couldn’t hold back my smirk. God, that sexy woman had managed to get a gallon out of me with just a little dry humping.
Thankfully, I’d changed into a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt. But I could still taste Zee’s sweet mouth, feel her body wrapped around mine, smell her on my skin. Mojitos, that’s what her scent reminded me of—an intoxicating mix of sweet mint and lime, and just as easy to get drunk on.
“We’re losing daylight,” Nik muttered, ruining my daydream. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t respond. I wasn’t ready to admit she’d bailed on me, but it sure as hell looked that way. She’d told me she needed an hour. It was now bordering on another half past that.
I’d spent some of it researching what I could on Zaki’s shipwreck to refresh my knowledge of the events. But like all things OZ, the information was scarce. The mega yacht Esmeraldaand her crew had departed Salvador, Brazil, carrying Omar Zaki, his son, Sheikh Malik, and his ten-year-old granddaughter, Zamirah. While en route to Marakata, the Esmeralda had become disabled on one of the many outlying coral reef systems before being hit by tropical storm Oscar. Due to the violence of the waves, the damaged ship had swiftly taken on water.
The majority of the crew, Sheik Malik, and Zamirah had abandoned ship in the tender, leaving Zaki and the captain to barely escape via life raft. But the captain had been pitched from the small raft before it could make it to a nearby island. The tender carrying all the others had been decimated by a rogue wave. The rest was speculation and rumor, fueled by Zaki’s refusal to be seen in public.
Knowing there’d been more to the story, I was eager to get down to the wreck site and see for myself.
“Coop, do you have any more of those headache pills?” Thea asked.
I glanced over at her. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, between the heat and those flaming green shots my head’s spinning.”
“You weren’t supposed to have any alcohol,” Nik chastised. He’d had a stick up his butt concerning Thea’s safety since her kidnapping. Seeing his reaction to her had kept me from telling him the whole truth about my own medical situation.
I fished out two pills for myself and handed another over to her.
Despite looking stunning after her spa day, Thea appeared tense. Her wide-eyed gaze darted around the plane. Due to her amnesia, this qualified as her second time ever in an airplane, and she was going to have to jump out of it. Tandem with Nik, of course. I planned to take Titan as my strap. Leo had been under canopy solo a handful of times thanks to Nik and I making him dive with us in the past. He’d been a fairly competent jumper, enough to make the beach drop zone we were headed to. But it had been a while since our last go, so Leo wasn’t what I considered current on skills.
Nik had already reviewed the basics with Leo when he’d taught Thea how to position herself for the freefall. But I reminded, “COA every few seconds.” Circle of awareness was a constant cycle of checks to ensure safety. I tossed a helmet into his lap. “You’ll be fine. Put this on.”
A drop of sweat pilling along his hairline fell as he glanced down at it, unsure.
“Don’t tell me—you’re afraid of ruining your new hairdo?” I mocked. Django had slathered a fair amount of product in Leo’s hair, but the cut did give the kid some much-needed edge. Short on the sides and curly… Why was it so curly on top? Did that fucker get a perm?
“More like ruining my brain,” he fretted. “How is this supposed to protect me in a fall from ten thousand feet?”
“Your pretty head will be just fine, brother.” Mine, on the other hand, needs a hell of a lot more than a hard hat. “The helmet is so Nik and I can comm with you if you need.”
Leo glared at me from his cramped seat in the plane’s tail as he clenched his stomach like he might puke. He didn’t like taking risks the way Nik and I did. If we didn’t get wheels up soon, I knew my little brother would wuss out.
Where the hell was Zee? Had she bailed or flat lied? Maybe this was payback for abandoning her. Teaching me a lesson.
After admitting how badly I wanted her…tasting the rawness of her beautiful desire…her absence now felt like a RIP round to the heart.
If this was how I’d made her feel, I deserved every painful bit of it. Maybe it was good this was a suicide mission. If she wasn’t hurting me, I knew I would ultimately be hurting her.
“Let’s go,” I barked as I rolled down the garage-style jump door.
Jessie, the pilot, turned the engines over. While she taxied the plane to the rock wall, Titan leaned into my right side and poked his nose into the tender spot just left of my sternum. I smoothed the fauxhawk the groomer had given him down as I dropped a kiss on his forehead. “I know, boy. It’s breaking, isn’t it?”
I really didn’t blame Zee for backing out on me. It’d been too much to ask her to leave the island, even for a few days. It wasn’t even like I’d expected her to say yes. My goal had been for her to meet me in the middle, which she had when she’d come to see me in the war room. But my hopes had gotten so high up when she’d said yes that the crash hurt like fucking hell.
The plane’s engines spooled up as Jessie prepared for takeoff.
