Rory turned to the others to find them all staring at him with various degrees of suspicion. Cody frowned and folded his arms across his chest. Sasha shook her head with disappointment, while Robert gazed up at the sky, unwilling to meet his gaze. As for Mathilda…he couldn’t tell if she was more hurt or angry, and maybe she didn’t know either.
“Listen, none of this is the important part. My boss has been kidnapped and I need to notify his security team. Where’s your emergency sat phone?”
None of them budged.
“He has a security team? Then how did he end up alone in the jungle?” Cody demanded.
“He didn’t want them on this trip. He said there was already a contingent waiting in Maui.” Rory scanned the skeptical faces around him. “I’m sorry, do you really think I crashed the plane on purpose? I was injured too.” He waved his bandaged arm in the air, although truth to tell, he’d forgotten it was injured. It hadn’t bothered him all night. “We both could have died. Yeah, I switched our identities, but that’s it. I was trying to protect him. I had nothing to do with kidnapping him.”
None of them looked convinced.
Finally Robert said, “The bad guys raided the kitchen and took the sat phone. They didn’t want us calling for help.”
“Fuck.” He’d have to hike out and find a cell signal, and he’d have to leave immediately. He turned to Mathilda. “Can we talk for a moment in private?”
She nodded reluctantly. Her hesitation made his heart twist, but he’d take it. He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the guest tent. After he’d made things right with Mathilda, he wanted to search it. The kidnappers had been in a hurry. Maybe they’d left something behind, some clue about who they were, something he could share with Lincoln’s security team.
Once he’d zipped up the tent and they were alone, Mathilda snatched her hand away from his. Her blue eyes were dark with emotion. Maybe disappointment? Betrayal?
“Look, Mathilda, I wanted to tell you a thousand times. I was trying to this morning, right before the kidnapping.”
“You mean after we slept together.”
He flinched. “I thought about it before, too. But that would have been a whole conversation, and you seemed hellbent on…” Ugh, that didn’t sound good. “I wanted to be there for you, put it that way.”
“Put it however you want, it still feels icky. I generally like to know the actual identity of someone I sleep with.”
“Of course you do. But Mathilda, you’ve gotten to know me over the past few days. I’m still that person.”
“Have I, though? How do I know that anything you’ve said is real? If you can lie about something as basic as who you are, you can lie about anything!”
He drew in a deep breath, because that was a deep cut. “Everything I said about my family is real. My brothers, my grandmother. Learning how to cook. The only things I said that aren’t true were related to Lincoln. I had to guess about those.”
“I can’t believe you let me apologize for hiding the truth about my family when you were doing something much worse!”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. But I wasn’t trying to scam you. You don’t even like billionaires. If I was trying to trick you into bed, I would have said I was an…ornithologist or something, not a billionaire.”
“You could never pull that off.” But her glare softened, just a bit. “That is a good point, however.”
“See? My intentions were always good. I didn’t know you and I were going to?—”
She interrupted him before he could finish his point. “Oh my God. That briefcase! I caught you breaking into it because you didn’t know the code.”
“Yes, but I had a good reason.”
“Okay…” She tapped her foot, waiting.
“I wanted to figure out if our plane crash was due to sabotage.”
“What?”
“Lincoln keeps things close to the vest. He has a lot of secrets, understandably. I needed to know what this trip was all about and I thought the briefcase might tell me.”
“Did it?” she demanded.
“Maybe.”
When he didn’t elaborate, she rolled her eyes and spun away from him. “You still aren’t telling the truth, are you?”
