Where the Wild Things Bite(9)

“Would you stop yanking me around like a rag doll?” I grumbled, though I had to admit that we were making much better progress without my aquatic flailings. My arms and legs didn’t seem to be getting the right messages from my brain.

“Well, if you would just cooperate, I wouldn’t have to yank you around,” he growled into my ear. As he bobbed in the water, his mouth inadvertently brushed against the back of my neck, sending a shiver down my spine that had nothing to do with water temperature. “Did you have to dig your claws into me like that?”

“Yeah, I protest when someone tries to drag me out of a plane. What an unreasonable wench I am,” I shot back.

“Tell that to the gouge marks in my shoulders.”

“They’ll heal,” I muttered.

“But my shirt won’t. It’s like you’re half-wolverine,” he told me, as my feet hit the muddy bottom of the lake. I stumbled, trying to get footing on the slick surface. I’d dressed sensibly for a flight, canvas ballet flats, jeans, a tank top, and a cardigan. I’d wanted shoes I could wear through the security gate without struggling to get them back on. And frankly, it was a miracle they’d stayed on my feet during our impromptu skydive-slash-swim. But they were not much help in the “finding purchase in swamp mud” department.

My feet slipped out from under me, and I dropped under the water again. He pulled me up by my arms as we staggered onto solid ground.

“Is this going to be a thing?” I asked him. “This constant grabbing and dragging? And don’t think I didn’t notice the underwater breast graze.”

“Yeah, I accidentally brushed against your chest while saving your life, taking the impact for you when we jumped out of a plane into a lake. What an unreasonable jerk I am.”

I’d just reached knee-deep water when I turned on him and slung my wet hair out of my face. “You lingered.”

“You flatter yourself,” he told me.

“Look, I am not interested in whatever you’re selling. So you can just keep this weird, flirtatious, ‘oh, silly female, I’m not really flirting with you, I’m just naturally gregarious and charming’ thing that I’m sure works on those girls you neg at the blood bar, and cut it out.”

“We just survived a plane crash, and this is the moment you want to tell me that? And I don’t bother with girls at the blood bar. At least, not in the last year or so—and you know what, I wasn’t even trying to flirt with you!”

“Good. Because it wouldn’t work.”

“Oh, if I tried, it would work,” he insisted, smirking at me.

And for a second, I was sincerely concerned that it would work. Because that smirk was chock-full of dangerous, manipulative potential, and I was a mere human who would have to refer to a calendar to remember the last time I’d had sex.

A pregnant silence hung between us for a few seconds before I added, “And it’s not like we dropped some huge distance. It was maybe a hundred yards.” I stumbled but righted myself before he had to save me from another face-plant. “An airborne skydiving rescue it was not.”

“Speaking as the man sandwiched between you and the water, I can tell you it felt like more.”

I made an absolutely foul face at him as I unzipped my purse. I’d sealed the package in two airtight plastic bags and closed the outer bag with wax. But there was always the chance that it could leak, or that the bag could have ruptured when we fell out of the freaking plane. I blew out a relieved breath when I saw the bag was intact. The interior of the package was dry and untouched.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “I think your makeup is a loss at this point.”

Breathing deeply, I fished my hand through my sodden bag. “My phone is in here,” I lied easily. “I was going to try to call 911 or the airline’s customer-service complaint line or someone who could maybe fish us out of this godforsaken nowhere.”

“I hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but if your phone is still in there, it’s a paperweight. The water has probably fried it.”

I fished my cell out of the bottom of my purse—which still had several inches of water standing in it—and saw that he was right. My phone was completely soaked, because I’d failed to close the little charger port on my protective phone cover. Damn it. My wallet, paperback, and watch were also soaked through. I supposed the only blessing was that I’d decided to leave my laptop at home instead of bringing it with me. Otherwise, years of research would have been lost.

As I searched through the ruins of my bag, my stomach sank with the realization of exactly how unprepared I was for this situation. If I’d known we were going to be dropping into the wilderness, I would have brought my trusty Swiss Army knife, some waterproof matches, a first-aid kit, water-purifying tablets—most of the emergency supplies I kept handy in my “apocalypse closet.”