are.” Her annoyance was a bristling, physical thing as she brushed past him through the cockpit door.
The bare skin of his arm tingled from the contact. He looked back at her. He was acting like an ass. He knew it. She knew it. She was beautiful, sexy as hell with her hair tied back in that tight knot, and he didn’t want to need her help. He didn’t trust her but he had to work with her.
Damn El Jefe!
He ran a practiced eye over the instrument panel, then looked back at her.
She was just fastening her seat belt, her head lowered as she fumbled with what should have been an easy task. A long strand of hair had worked free of her knot and clung to her cheek. She dashed it away with an angry motion, her gaze meeting his.
She looked away, but not quickly enough.
He thought he was immune to crocodile tears. Sonya had been able to summon them at the drop of a hat.
Hell. A conscience was mighty inconvenient, sometimes. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Why?” She was suspicious.
“Only making conversation.” He turned back around, automatically checking his panel.
After a long moment, she answered. “I have a sixteen-year-old-sister and…”
He glanced back at her when she paused.
“Three brothers,” she finished flatly. But at least her tears were nowhere in sight. Then her eyebrows rose and with extreme politeness, she said, “And you?”
“I’m one of a kind.” Though, really, he had no way of knowing whether the man who’d fathered him had sired a dozen other offspring, since Tyler never even knew the guy.
“Indeed.” Her tone was dry. “What a pity the world doesn’t have more just like—” She gasped when the plane shuddered and suddenly lost altitude.
He snapped around just in time to see a piece of cowling fly from the nose. Fury followed hard on the heels of disbelief at the sight of his plane damaged. Wounded.
Under his hands, the stick jittered. His adrenaline shot through the roof as he struggled to maintain his heading. “Come on, baby,” he whispered. “Keep it together for me.” He raised his voice. “Get up here,” he ordered.
Marisa was already slipping into the right seat, fastening the harness. “Take those binoculars, there,” he ordered.
She immediately reached for the leather case. “What am I looking for?”
“Anything,” he said flatly. It took some doing, and the execution was hardly textbook, but he turned the plane, changed headings. Coaxed some precious altitude from the reluctant controls. Keeping one eye on the instruments, he looked out the window. “He’s probably got a truck. A Jeep, maybe.”
“He?”
“Whoever shot at us.”
“Shot!” She swallowed audibly. Holding the small, powerful lenses to her eyes, she peered out the side window. “Dios. All I see are trees!”
At least she wasn’t screaming in hysterics.
She wasn’t screaming in hysterics.
Tyler grabbed her arm and yanked her around. The binoculars tumbled out of her hand and bounced with a clank off the instrument panel to fall on the floor near her feet.
She stared at him like he was mad. “What is wrong with you?”
“Who’d you talk to?”
“What?”
“Come on, princess, spill.”
Realization dawned. Marisa’s fingers curled against her palms, wishing that they were clawing out his eyes, and the strength of that desire horrified her to her soul. “You think I had something to do with this?” She yanked against his grip, but he merely tightened his fingers. “Let me go!”
“Tell me, Marisa. You know so much about la Fortuna. Maybe you’re already one of the El Jefe whores. They’d consider you expendable to keep me from getting to Westin.”
She saw red. Literally saw a haze of it come over her vision. Gerald had called her a whore. He’d been wrong, too. “You are vile,” she snapped, and yanked again at her arm. She succeeded in breaking from his hold only because he suddenly turned back and had both hands on the stick as he crooned—there was no other word for it but crooned—to the plane.
It chugged, it jerked, it shuddered.
Then all was silent.
The wicked-looking prop slowed until it turned lackadaisically, like some exotic wind decoration.
Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears.
She could hear Tyler’s breath.
She stared at the prop, wishing with everything inside her that it would turn, whip into the revolutions that were so fast, they seemed invisible. Wishing she was once again near deafened by the hum of the engine that could be felt all around them.
But nothing.
She swallowed, not daring to look at Tyler, because if she did, this would all seem too real, too desperate.
Then she realized it wasn’t really all that silent, after all. And she did look across at Tyler.
The ominous sound of wind rushing outside the plane grew to a roar as the plane bulleted through the sky with no power and only a grim-faced Tyler at the controls.
She stared again out the nose of the plane, seeing the damage, feeling dizzy. “We’re going to crash,” she said faintly. All she’d wanted was to undo the damage that had been set into motion by her leaving Mezcaya. Was this, then, to be her final punishment?
“We’re not going to crash,” Tyler gritted beside her, as if by willpower alone he could prevent that from happening.
She looked at him, saw the tendons in his arms stand out as he struggled with the controls, the sheen of sweat on his face. “I didn’t do this to us,” she whispered.
“You better hope to hell I don’t find out differently, or I’ll finish off the job that shooter didn’t.”
She believed him.
Tyler didn’t have time to worry about Marisa’s pale face or the way she was staring out the window. There was no mistaking the abject terror in her face, whether she knew about the attack beforehand, or not.
He needed a place to land and he needed it yesterday. Had El Jefe somehow tracked them? Or was this an act by one of the natives, the ones who were determined to protect their way of life even if that meant shooting at a suspicious plane circling over their territory?
They were losing altitude. He’d been heading back toward the river, and he could just spot it in the distance. If he could just coax a few more…
“Brace
