think I just cracked a rib,” he groaned, looking like a brand-new calf trying to walk on wobbly legs.
Hope quickly slipped beneath his shoulder to steady him and he went down like a sack of potatoes.
“Don’t you dare pass out on me,” she muttered, but he was out. What was she supposed to do now? Put him over her shoulder and pack him out in a fireman hold? He slipped from her grasp and went straight to the ground in an unconscious heap.
She wiped at the sweat and blood trickling down her face and grabbed J.T.’s arms, pulling him inch by excruciating inch away from the wreckage. Shoulders screaming, Hope managed to pull his deadweight far enough away from the plane before she collapsed beside him, breathing hard.
Okay, now what?
She was in the middle of the Mexican jungle, her pilot was injured and she had no idea how the hell they were going to get out of there alive, much less reach the South American compound.
Hope bit her lip as a wave of helplessness swamped her. It wasn’t like her to cry, but at the moment she wasn’t going to begrudge herself a few tears, because let’s face it...
They were screwed.
J.T. AWOKE TO the mother of all headaches—worse than any hangover he’d ever experienced. If he’d had a hammer handy, he would’ve buried it in his skull to stop the pain—but then he remembered that he was lucky to be alive.
He struggled to open his eyes, but when his vision finally cleared, he saw the leggy doctor curled up next to him in a leafy bed that he knew for a fact he hadn’t put together.
He gingerly touched where his head throbbed and found a respectable goose egg where he must’ve smacked his nob on the control panel when they were going down. Best guess, mild concussion, which would explain why he’d passed out.
Hope stirred and she awoke, rubbing at her eyes as she sat up with a tired yawn, clearly relieved to see him still alive.
“Thank God,” she breathed, her hands fluttering to her chest, where her formerly fancy cream blouse was now tattered and torn. “I was so worried you were going to die in the middle of the night.”
“Ye of little faith,” he grumbled, scooting to a sitting position, wincing as his head protested the small movement. “Takes more than a bump on the head to put me down. Trust me—others have tried.”
“Well, tough guy, you’ve no doubt suffered a concussion, and if your brain had continued to swell, I would’ve been helpless to do anything about it.”
“Lucky for me, I woke up just fine,” he replied dryly, surveying their situation. Great, they were somewhere in the Mexican jungle. Deep. Which put them squarely between up a creek and wedged against a hard place. He rose to his feet, groaning without shame at the way his body screamed with pain. “Been a long time since I had to bring a plane down like that. It’s as shitty as I remember.”
“You’ve done this before?” Hope asked, rising to her feet as well, swiping at her behind as if that small motion were going to make a difference in the grime they were covered in. “You might’ve mentioned that before I chartered your service.”
“Settle down, Doc. It was a long time ago, in another life,” he said, scanning the jungle, looking for something that might tell him where they’d gone down. Thunderclouds rolled ominously on the horizon, temporarily blotting out the early sun. “My guess is that the plane didn’t blow up?”
“No. I was afraid that it might, though, so I pulled you away from it.”
Awww, she cares. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
“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,
