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“Funny.”
“Maybe a little?”
“I can’t feel my hands.”
She leaned over him, wishing for light. He still breathed hard. His hands were ice in hers. She rubbed them, blowing on them, then finally opening her thermal suit and pulling them inside.
“What happened?”
He pulled her hard to himself. His chest rose and fell, and she scrambled to open his thermal, get her body, although fully clothed, against his to warm it. She lay on his chest, listening to his heart, and thought it might leave his chest.
“The door…I couldn’t…get it open.” He swallowed. Took another couple of breaths. “And then I went under, and I thought—this is it. I had nothing, and for a long second I thought…it’s over. And weirdly, I didn’t panic. I floated there, freezing, my heartbeat slowing, my breath caught, and then…and then I realized—the door wouldn’t open before because the water pressure outside was greater than inside. But once we were submerged, the pressure equalized. I pushed the door and it opened. Just like that.”
Just like that. “I thought you’d drowned.”
“We both would have if you hadn’t cut the rope. How did you—”
“A spoon.”
Silence. Then, “A spoon?”
“Yeah. Just a little trick being in the joint taught me.”
“The joint.”
“The slammer. The big house. The clink.”
He pulled her down by her hood and kissed her. Cold lips, and he’d started to shiver, but she stretched out beside him and kissed him back. Then she threw a warm leg over him and pulled him into her arms. “Stay alive, big guy. We’re not out of this yet. You’re not alone. And you’re still safe.”
He held onto her, shivering as the sea tossed them. But the cocoon of their raft held, even as the sea calmed and the morning sun began to burn the outside of the tent.
He’d stopped shivering sometime in the night, and for a while, she feared he’d succumbed to hypothermia, but she kept waking him, and he kept grunting, so…
She watched as the sun swept over them, turning their cubicle to fire. Such a handsome man. Dark whiskers covered his chin, his eyelashes long on his face and determination etched into the lines around his eyes.
“Want some breakfast?”
He opened those beautiful eyes and frowned at her.
“I stole a couple candy bars and a hydration pack.”
She’d relieved her thermal suit of her loot earlier and now retrieved them from a netted pocket and opened the hydration pack.
He took a sip, offered it back to her. “We need to save this in case—”
“We spend five days at sea?”
But he pushed himself up. Looked at her. “Do you hear that?”
She stilled, even tried to quiet her heartbeat. The faraway thump of— “Is that a helicopter?”
Crawling over to the door, she unzipped it and peered out.
A gorgeous red-and-white helicopter flew above the water, the words Air One written on the back behind a massive sliding door.
She waved, and the chopper came closer, the water whipping up with its blades. Around her, the giant swells still rolled, but less violently now, and overhead, the sun spilled gold into the sea.
Then, as she watched, a man came over the edge of the chopper on a line. He was lowered down, and she caught his foot and helped pull him in.
