“Well, don’t get the wrong idea. You’re still on the clock, Mr. Carmichael. I need you to get me to South America.”
“Lady, my plane is in pieces. How am I supposed to do that exactly? Put you on my back and flap my wings? We’re going to have a bitch of a time getting out of this jungle alive, much less finding another plane to fly your happy ass to Timbuktu.” He paused, then added, “And I told you, my father was Mr. Carmichael. It’s J.T. or else I’m not answering.”
“Fine. J.T. Here’s the situation as I see it—we need each other to get out of this jam, so I suggest we work together instead of against one another so we can survive.” She squared her shoulders and adjusted the fluttering sleeves of her mangled blouse and asked, “Do you have any idea where we might’ve landed?”
“Best guess? Somewhere in the Lacandon Jungle, likely the southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula.” He bracketed his hips, squinting against the morning sun playing peekaboo with the clouds. “And if that’s the case, we’re well and truly screwed.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, because we have two possible situations and neither is good.”
“Which are?” She gestured impatiently.
“First, we have the potential of running into Mexican guerrillas who are using the jungle reserve to grow their illegal crops and guard their crops with semiautomatic weapons and a ‘shoot first, leave the body for the bugs’ mentality, or second, we have the potential of running into the last Lacandon Maya, who don’t interact with outside cultures and don’t take kindly to strangers. I think they might even be cannibals, but don’t quote me on it.”
“That doesn’t sound promising,” she murmured in distress.
And since he didn’t believe in sugarcoating things, he added, “Yeah, and that’s not counting the bugs, snakes and apex predators that call this patch of earth home.”
Hope paled and a bridge of soft brown freckles appeared on her nose. “I don’t like snakes.”
“Yeah, I don’t either, but we did land in Satan’s armpit, otherwise known as the Mexican rain forest.”
“So what do we do?”
“Try not to die?”
Her mouth firmed with exasperation. “Obviously. What about a road? There has to be something that eventually leads to civilization around here. It’s not as if we fell onto an uninhabited planet. We’ll just follow the river. That should lead somewhere.”
“Yeah, right over a cliff. Look, the plane didn’t blow, which means by this point it’s not going to. I’ll trek back to the plane, grab a few flares and other survival supplies, which, thankfully, include a compass and a map. We’ll regroup after that.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you should stay here,” he argued, but she wasn’t going to budge. “Lady—”
“Stop calling me that. If I’m supposed to call you J.T., you can call me Hope. That’s the deal. One more ‘lady’ or ‘Doc’ and I’m calling you Mr. Carmichael, and since you seem to have an aversion to that, I suggest you pay attention to what’s falling from your mouth.”
“You’re a bossy bit of goods, you know that, Hope?”
She took that as a compliment. “A common enough label for a strong woman. I’ll wear it with pride.”
He barked a short laugh. “All right, fine. Let’s get to the plane and see if we can’t find our way out of this place.”
They started making their way back to the plane, being mindful of their steps, when Hope asked, “So, why do you hate being called Mr. Carmichael? Did you have a tense relationship with your father?”
J.T. pushed away a large leafy branch and held it so she could pass. “You could say that. Me and the old man didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. He thought I was a mouthy, disrespectful punk and I thought he was an overbearing, arrogant asshole.”
“Were you?”
“Was I what?”
“A disrespectful punk.”
“At times.”
Hope glanced back at him. “Well, maybe he was an overbearing jerk because he was trying to provide some discipline to a kid who was, in his opinion, going down the wrong path.”
“And maybe he was just a controlling closet alcoholic who cheated on every woman he ever tricked into loving him and at his core was a narcissistic waste of oxygen.”
Way to go, J.T. Why don’t you pull up a leaf and start spilling your whole life story while you’re at it. “It doesn’t matter what he was, anyway. The old man is dead to me and I’m done talking about it.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
Touch a nerve? She’d done more than touch it; she was standing on it. “You know, in the short time I’ve known you, I’ve been shot at, my plane crashed and now I’m pissed off about a man I haven’t seen in eight years and haven’t spared a thought for, either. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were bad luck.”
She scoffed. “There’s no such thing as luck.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Luck has kept me alive and you can thank your stars you hitched a ride on that luck because you’re alive when that crash should’ve killed us both.”
To illustrate that point, they broke the clearing where the plane had crashed and J.T. groaned at the damage. It wasn’t as if he’d actually thought there was hope the plane could be fixed, but maybe, in the back of his mind, he’d clung to the irrational idea that it could be.
That is, until he saw the poor busted-up heap of metal.
“Damn,” he breathed, rubbing the stubble on his jaw as he saw Blue Yonder’s aspirations go up in smoke.
“I’ll buy you a new plane,” Hope said, hoping to soften the blow. When he cast her a dubious look, she added, “I told you, my company has deep pockets. Get me safely to South America and you can add the cost of your plane to the bill.”
“Where the hell do you work?” he asked incredulously. “The Pentagon?”
Hope offered a short smile, but didn’t answer. “Your flares?” she prompted.
Yeah, right. The more he found out about Hope, the less he actually knew.
And he had a feeling that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.
Eye on the prize, Carmichael. Eye on the prize.
All he wanted was to get out alive.
* * *
WHILE J.T. GATHERED up the supplies from the fallen plane, Hope dug through her backpack to find some protein bars she’d stashed for the flight. She also found her cell phone, but, as expected, there was no service. However, she hoped that when she didn’t show up at the designated point, her colleagues would start tracking its GPS.
She tucked the phone back into her pack and tried to repair her bedraggled blouse. There was no help for it—the top was ruined—so she gave up.
J.T. emerged from the wrecked cockpit with an Army-style pack of his own and dropped to the ground.
“I never thought I’d have to use this, but thank God Teagan made me keep one in the plane at all times.” He lifted the pack and shouldered it. “The water-purifying tablets might save our bacon. You don’t want to know what kind of bacteria swim around these parts.”
“I’m a molecular biologist. Chances are I know more about the microbes and bacteria than you,” she said with an enigmatic smile that J.T. found