“Anything for you.” He kisses me again. I hum softly against his lips as warmth spreads out from my chest, chasing away the shadows in my heart.
“Can we stay up and talk all night, for old times’ sake?”
“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs, his lips against my ear.
It’s decided. Until we’re rescued, Theo and I aren’t doomed. He’s not the king, and I’m not a potential pawn for the Firm to control. We can be two idiots in love, kissing in a hot spring under the stars, pretending nothing in the world could ever change that.
Theo lifts me and brings me in front of him. I wrap my legs around his torso and press my fingers into the soft ground behind his shoulders. As we kiss, the earth trembles under my hands.
CHAPTER25
DAYS ON THE ISLAND:THREE
He’s going to be insufferable when he wakes up.”
A voice floats on the periphery of my consciousness. I snuggle deeper into my warm cocoon.
“Only if you keep purposely trying to get his knickers in a twist,” says a second voice.
“I’m going to wake them up,” says a third, more familiar voice.
If I pretend not to hear them, maybe they’ll go away.
“Not yet; they’re knackered.”
“Knackered” is such a perfect word. I feel completely knackered, and I refuse to wake up.
A sprinkle of water falls across my cheeks.
When I open my eyes to find Brooke staring down at me, the watery early sunlight framing her body, I’m certain I only fell asleep seconds ago. “Not yet,” I mumble. Theo and I are tangled together, his legs and arms like weights over mine. I couldn’t move if I wanted to. (I don’t want to.)
“Victoria’s vision is blurring. We don’t have time to waste.”
I quickly sit up as I feel renewed guilt for dropping Victoria’s purse in the water. I watch as Victoria douses the hot embers left over from last night’s fire. Beads of sweat roll down her sallow skin. “You shouldn’t be working if your vision is blurry,” I tell her.
“I’m fine. I just wanted you two to get up.”
I have no idea if I should believe her or not. “Are you really?”
She smirks. “Guess you’ll never know.”
Brooke continues. “I’m hoping to go around the side of the volcano and back down again by tonight. You and your boyfriend—sorry,husband—need to wake up.” She nudges our feet apart with hers, and Theo finally stirs.
“Is it time to go?” His early morning rasp scratches an itch in my brain. If we’d been alone last night, our hot spring make-out session would have been much steamier than it was, but because we both had family members sleeping nearby, we just talked and kissed. Now, though, seeing his sleep-mussed hair and soft lips, my body aches with want. Where Theo is concerned, I never stop wanting. Even if we had forever, I don’t think I’d ever get enough of him.
He presses a sleepy kiss against my shoulder, and I cover my wince so he doesn’t realize how tender my arm is. While everyone (including an overjoyed Comet) eats blueberries for breakfast (poison-tested by Brooke), I sneak into the trees to inspect my stitches. Streaks of red radiate out and away from the wound. I sway a little on my feet and arrange my shirt so no one else will see them.
Once our pockets are packed with fresh fruit and our bottles refilled from the stream, we continue our trek, my calves and hamstrings burning as the rocky ground gets steeper. Theo andI hang at the back of the group, Comet practically glued to my side, and Victoria glances over her shoulder at us every few minutes with a scowl on her face.
“Didn’t you once tell me that royals are supposed to keep a stiff upper lip? Because your siblings have the opposite of that,” I tell Theo as he trails his fingers along the hem of my shirt, grazing the skin of my lower back; it completely scrambles my brain.
“We’re also not supposed to engage in PDA. We’re all screwing up the job since we crashed.” He tips my chin up until my mouth meets his and kisses me. The morning passes in a haze of brief touches and stolen kisses. Since our days together are numbered, we’re going to make them count.
After a couple of hours, we stop for a rest. I double over with my hands on my knees, wheezing as I inhale a jagged breath and choke on a cloud of mosquitoes. Brooke, Henry, and I compare bite counts (Brooke wins with thirty-seven) while Theo checks on an uncharacteristically quiet Victoria.
When he rejoins us, he chucks his backpack to the ground as he sits next to me and leans back against a banana tree whose fruit is depressingly out of reach. The mist from yesterday has lingered, and everything is slightly damp.
Judging by his stormy expression, “checking on Victoria” didn’t go well. “How is she?” I ask.
