Her stomach plummeted. Air rushed at her exposed cheeks. Her eyes flicked open. A shadow loomed overhead, retreating. The plane. Oh man, they were falling. Her sinuses pinched. Her nerves pelted panicked messages into her brain. Even through the goggles, she struggled to keep her eyes open. A piece of fabric flapped against her cheek like a jackhammer. What was she supposed to do again? Arms back, legs extended? No, the other way around. They righted and stretched out parallel to the earth as wind buffeted her jumpsuit. The pull of the harness suggested the capitaine was still attached, at least.
The pain behind her eyes intensified, as if someone was shoving needles into her skull. Was something about to pop? This couldn’t be healthy. An hour or so ago she was being rocked to sleep by a gentle ocean swell, and now this?
She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing her mind to imagine herself skimming over the water in a yacht, as she had every endless night in prison, returning her to the happiest time of her life: the three years she’d spent working at the sailing school in Los Angeles, trading honest labor for a place to crash and a chance to sail. But then she’d fallen for the wrong man and got suckered into running cons for him by her desperation for love and money and survival. Yada yada yada.
Pressure thumped into her chest, and something yanked them upwards. Oh, God. What had gone wrong? She opened her eyes. A red parachute stretched above them. The rush of the wind had silenced, leaving her panting the only sound. They’d stopped dead, as if suspended.
“Holy crap,” she said. People did that for fun?
“How was that?” He sounded as if he was grinning.
“Terrifying, you jerk. You could have warned me.”
“Anticipation only makes it worse. Do you trust me now?”
“Even less.”
“An hour ago you probably thought that wasn’t possible.”
Was it only an hour since they’d left the inflatable? How far could a small plane fly in half of that? In the hull, in the darkness, she’d had no grasp of their direction. “Where are we?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Because you don’t know?”
“Oh, I know just what I’m doing.”
If he did, he sure didn’t sound happy about it. Islands were scattered beneath her feet—dark patches among the silver, with not a light in view. Uninhabited? Dang. What body of water could it be—Andaman Sea, Indian Ocean, Strait of Malacca? The land forms didn’t look familiar from any maps she’d studied. She heaved in a breath. At the movement, something poked into her ribs. The GPS unit. It could pinpoint her location. She could get a message away on the sat phone with her coordinates and threaten to go to the media if the senator didn’t rescue her. She gritted her teeth. For now, she’d play the helpless victim. If the capitaine wanted a princess, he’d get one. But the second he let his guard down, she’d be gone.
* * *
Rafe steadied his breath to clear the adrenaline of the 200-kilometer-per-hour free fall, and pulled the toggle to ride the wind to the northeast. Once they’d dropped another three hundred feet, the air currents would take them northwest. His coordinates had been smack on, but Penipuan Island was only twelve square kilometers, and the biggest clearing was smaller than a football field. If he didn’t read the conditions right, they’d wind up snared on a tree—or worse, bobbing in the ocean. At least there wasn’t some insurgent with an AK-47 taking potshots, like the last time he’d fallen from the sky. Tonight he was in far better company.
The heiress raised her gloved hand to her ribs for the third time in as many minutes.
“Has the comms gear slipped?” he said.
“The way you strapped it on? I hardly think so.”
He raised his eyebrows. She was coping surprisingly well. He’d been prepared to knock her unconscious if she’d freaked out about a parachute drop in these conditions, but she was far tougher than he’d expected—and she had a sense of humor. She might need one, to spend a week with him.
And he might need to watch his back. She wouldn’t be the pushover he’d counted on—and with Michael and Uriel gone she was all his responsibility. She turned her head, and the skin of her cheek caught the moonlight, smooth as satin. Tough and beautiful. He grimaced. Tu agis sans passion et sans haine. You act without passion and without hatred. He’d recited the line every day of his nineteen years in the Legion, but it’d never resonated as strongly as it did now. He must put aside his anger toward Gabriel and even his fear for Theo, and treat the heiress honorably. She was a prisoner of war, not a woman to covet. The objective of his mission must remain clear: save his son.
He frowned. The Legionnaire’s Code of Honor hardly applied. If his commandant got wind of this he’d be out of a job and in a French prison quicker than he could say Honneur et Fidélité. Outcast from an outcast’s army. The commandant was already suspicious about Rafe’s claim to be on bereavement leave. Who would a widower, an orphan and a loner mourn? But Rafe had been tied to the Code of Honor so long—after too many years without one—that he couldn’t shrug it off, whatever the circumstances.
Instinctively, he calculated the distance and time to ground. “When we come in to land, raise your legs straight out ahead of you, knees slightly bent, and let me do the work. For you, it’ll be like easing into an armchair.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
He followed the direction of her finger to the dark oval of land beneath them. The breeze warmed with every foot they descended. The coolness at altitude had been a relief after days of gagging humidity. “That’s it.”
“There are no lights. Is no one meeting you?”
“It’s uninhabited.”
“So it’s just you and me?”
Her tone carried a note of hope. “You and me and thousands of miles of ocean. No boat, no helicopter, no airstrip. We’re a hundred kilometers from the nearest inhabited island, nowhere near a shipping lane, and pleasure boats don’t come this way.” Gabriel had chosen well. They were imprisoned by water. But now, he had comms. He just had to figure out what to do with them.
“They stay away because of pirates?”
“Currents and reefs, mostly. But yes, pirates, too. Don’t worry, ma chérie, I will protect you.”
“Before or after you cut off my ear?”
He flinched, and the chute lunged, forcing him to make a hasty correction. He’d forgotten his empty threat, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to believe he was capable of it. “Do exactly as I say and you won’t be harmed. We’ll be on the ground in two minutes.”
“And who will protect you from me?”
He eased the parachute into line for the final approach. He was beginning to wonder that, too. “I don’t need protection.”
Outside the Legion, the only person on Rafe Angelito’s side was Rafe Angelito. Same as it had always been. Same as it would always be.
They skidded across a clearing, sea grass scraping the seat of Holly’s jumpsuit. A gentle landing, as promised. How did someone get that practiced at parachuting? You’d have to be in adventure tourism or the military, and the capitaine was no chirpy tour guide. So she was dealing with a paratrooper? Weren’t they the elite soldiers—dropped behind enemy lines on secret missions?
Her stomach knotted. He became more formidable by the minute. He unclipped them, pulled her to her feet and let go warily, hands splayed in the air either side of her, ready to catch. The earth remained steady. Gravity had begun to take her side, at least. He busied himself with unhooking clips and gathering the parachute,