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I sighed, stood up and found my boots. Balancing on one leg, I started to slip my left foot into my boot.
Suddenly, arms hooked under my armpits and jerked me up and back. I let out a yelp: I was dangling, my feet kicking just off the ground and my back pressed to a big male chest.
“Wait,” said Gabriel’s voice in my ear. I went limp and he set me gently down on my sleeping bag. Then he stepped around me, picked up the boot I’d been about to put on, and gave it a shake.
A brown spider as big as my palm dropped out and scuttled into the undergrowth. I jumped back, shuddering and nauseous. God, I’d nearly—
I glanced up at Gabriel and caught him just as he looked down at me: caring and concerned and so powerfully protective that it took my breath away.
I hadn’t been wrong.
Gabriel swallowed, rubbed at his stubble and turned away. “You should check the other one,” he muttered as he walked off.
I stood there watching his retreating back, my heart thumping. He did have feelings for me. But he was pushing me away: why?
I checked both boots very carefully. Twice. Then I pulled them on and we set off.
We made good progress for the first hour but then slowed as we started to climb...A thick mist started to descend: first it was above the canopy, then it was down around the trunks, then finally it was on us: curls of cool, refreshing fog that soaked our clothes and left our faces dripping. “What’s with the mist?” I asked Gabriel.
“It’s not mist,” he told me. “It’s cloud. We’re high enough that we’re walking through clouds.”
I looked around in wonder. Everything felt lush and new, the air was thick with the scent of exotic flowers and the vines overhead dripped a constant warm rain on us. The monkeys were out in force, chattering and howling to each other overhead. There were constant bird calls and croaks that had to be from some sort of frog. I’d never been anywhere that felt so crammed full of life. It was like walking through the Garden of Eden. It felt wrong, that we could be in so much danger, somewhere so beautiful. But we knew the cartel must be close. It wasn’t just that they might have followed us from the camp. This was their turf, and we could stumble into one of their patrols at any time.
The whole time, I could feel Gabriel watching me. When he was behind me, I’d feel his eyes tracking my every move. When he was in front of me, he’d do these little glances over his shoulder, quickly looking away when he realized I’d seen him. And when we were close together, pushing through undergrowth or scrambling up a slick, rocky path, I’d look up and find him gazing at me as if helpless. He’d break the gaze and look away, scowling, then a second later look again, as if he couldn’t help it.
We crested the top of the peak and started descending and the cloud lifted. We stopped around noon for more MREs, supplemented by mangos plucked from the trees. JD sliced one up and we all sat motionless, watching as small white and brown monkeys cautiously approached and then scampered up and grabbed the fruit from his hand.
It hit me that I was way, way out of my comfort zone, thousands of miles from my safe, predictable little life in Arizona. But I was seeing things I never would have seen at home.
We started marching again, and as JD rotated his men through different duties, Colton came up from his position watching our tail and joined me in the middle of the pack. It was the first time I’d spent much time around him. He was big: not as tall as Cal but wider, a walking wall of muscle with not an ounce of fat on him. He’d stripped down to a tank top to beat the heat and he had the strongest arms I’d ever seen, with huge, thick biceps and hands that looked like they could crush rocks. He wasn’t my type but he was hot as hell, in a rough kind of way. With his thick black beard, he almost looked like an outlaw biker. And maybe it was because he was a bounty hunter when he wasn’t with the team, but he had a sort of stern authority. Good, honorable, but someone who wasn’t afraid to lay down the law. It was easy to imagine him slamming some dangerous criminal into the ground and cuffing him. But it was easy to imagine something else, too. If you were a certain sort of woman, one who cheeked him and teased him, he might just—
Tie your hands, throw you over his shoulder and carry you off.
