Hands grabbed her shoulders, then her face. She looked into Will’s eyes. On his knees in front of her, he looked hollow and beat and terrified. “Jade? Are you all right?”
The other boat vanished beneath the orange and red flames and smoke. The nightmare was over. Over. “Yes, I’m okay.”
He picked up her cell phone. “Maybe now we can call for help.”
“Yes.” Because there might be more bad guys with guns. Maybe that Frank guy who liked to break kneecaps. She shivered.
And when Will finished with his call, suddenly there were two of him, wavering in and out of her vision. Two sets of sharp eyes as green as the sea, two square, strong jaws, two hard, warm bodies that she didn’t think she’d ever get tired of.
She wondered if she could keep them both, and the thought made her laugh, because she realized she didn’t regret a single thing that had happened. She couldn’t, not when the whole experience had given her so much. Confidence. A sense of being. The knowledge that she could do anything she set her mind to. And Will. It’d given her Will.
He touched her head. His fingers came away red with her blood. “Christ. You are hurt.”
Yes. Yes, she was. In fact, now she thought she might throw up. The pain in her ribs was making itself known, making it difficult to breathe. But she could breathe, which meant she was still alive, and alive was good. Alive meant she could tell Will what she’d just discovered about herself. About him. About them. “Will—”
“Don’t move.” He grabbed her backpack from her fingers and ripped it open, pulling out a shirt, ripping a strip off it. Then he was pressing the cloth to her head.
“Ouch. Will—”
“Shh, baby. You’re bleeding everywhere.” He kept looking around them, which put her on edge because they weren’t completely safe yet.
She put her hand on his wrist. Actually, she put both hands on his wrist because she was still dizzy, and it took two hands to find his. “I want to tell you something. It’s important.”
“What else hurts?” he demanded.
“My ribs— No, stop it,” she said when he ran his hands down her body, his face tight and grim and terrified. For her. “Will, listen. Both of you.”
He stared at her. “There’s a Coast Guard cutter in the area. They’ll be here in minutes. We’re going straight to the hospital—”
“I love you back.”
“They’ll stitch you up, and then we’ll—” He stopped cold and stared at her, emotion swamping all four of his eyes as turbulent as the sea around them. “What? What did you just say?”
“I said I love you.”
His mouth tightened. “That’s your concussion talking.”
“No.” She reached for one of his jaws, missed, and instead gripped his shirt, right over his heart. “I knew I loved you before the concussion. I think I loved you the moment I opened my door to you.” She tried to lift her other hand to him as well, but it was caught in the backpack, which tipped and spilled across the deck. Everything tumbled out; her spare pair of pants, her toothbrush and toothpaste, her grandmother’s rattle—
“Oh no.” Time stopped as she stared at the cracked porcelain. “Oh no,” she breathed, her throat closing. “I must have landed on it—” She broke off in shock and grief when the rattle divided into two pieces, spilling gems into her hand. Beneath the harsh Baja sun they glinted red, blue, green, yellow . . . blinding them.