If I hadn’t come, Silvana might have used my grandmother as a pawn against my father.
Indiana leans in for a kiss, then whispers into my ear, “I knew the moment I saw you dancing on the beach that youwould light up the night. I just didn’t think you’d take that so literally.” He pulls back and holds my gaze. “But what the hell? At least we’ll go out with a bang.”
But the thought of him dying because he followed me into the jungle makes me feel like Álvaro is already cutting me open.
“You ...” I slide one hand behind his neck and pull him close for another kiss. “I need you to take advantage of the explosion to get everyone else out of here.”
“G, this is a two-pronged operation. They’ve moved some of their stuff to the beach, but the rest of it is in that tent.” He runs his hand over my shoulder and down my arm. “Even the moon can’t be two places at once. You need help.”
“I’m not going to let you—”
Indiana swallows my argument with a kiss. “This isn’t your call, G.” Another kiss. “I make my own decisions.”
“You’re supposed to make out when you’redonearguing,” I whisper against his earlobe.
“We are done arguing.” He drops a series of kisses along my jaw until he finds my mouth again. “You lost.”
Ineverlose. But I know when to change tactics.
“Okay,” I say when we’re both breathing heavily. “We’ll have to do it tonight, before my dad calls back. But we have to get into that tent first. We need to know what kind of explosives we’re dealing with.”
And while he works on that obstacle to our plan, I’ll figure out how to keep him out of the line of fire... .
9 HOURS EARLIER
MADDIE
I lift my foot, and the wet earth beneath me makes a sucking sound. “It’s too wet to sleep on the ground.”
Since we stopped for water—and banana boats—the beach has gradually narrowed until patches of sand alternate with a scraggly, marshy coastline that reminds me of the swamps of Southern Florida.
“I know,” Luke says. “We’re going to have to sleep in one of these trees.”
“Ina tree?” I look up, but none of the branches are tangled or close together enough to hold one sleeping human, much less two.
“Well, hanging from the tree, at least.” He puts his rifle on the ground and begins unbuckling a bundle I’d assumed was a second sleeping bag, which we couldn’t fit in our one-man tent.
The material is actually a bright blue hammock.
“Should I be worried about snakes, or some other arboreal predator up there?”
“I don’t think so. This’ll be like a tent, just in a tree, and we’ve slept together with no—” He chokes on his own words, and I try to hide my laugh. “I mean ... Not that we’ve slept together. We’ve just slept in close proximity. Together. Damn it.”
I laugh harder, and he tosses his hands into the air, giving up.
“Excuse me while I stick my head in the ocean and take a deep breath.”
“You better not. We’re in this together.”
Luke’s smile is the brightest thing I’ve seen since the sun went down.
I hold the flashlight while he ties each end of the hammock to a different thick branch. Then I watch, fascinated, while he saws small branches from the same tree with Moisés’s multi-tool, leaving two-inch “hooks” from which to hang our backpacks.
I climb into the hammock and Luke climbs in after me, then pulls a sheet of mosquito netting over us. We can see through it, of course—what little there is to see in the dark—but the netting feels like a boundary between us and the rest of the jungle.
We are alone, suspended in our cocoon.
The curve of the hammock rolls us toward the center, gravity closing the distance between us, so I settle into the arc of Luke’s arm with my head on his shoulder and my arm over his chest. I can feel his heartbeat through his shirt.Every breath he takes makes me more aware of how much of him I’m touching.
