Hot as Hell (Deep Six 0.5)(33)

Her chin jerked back when she registered what he’d said. She looked down at herself, trying to locate her injury, then shook her head angrily. “I’m not hit, damnit! You’re the one who’s hit!”

“That’s your blood on her face, numbnuts,” Mason whispered.

“Oh, thank God.” Relief hit Bran so hard he felt dizzy. When he let his head fall back, the stars overhead spun in lazy circles.

“Thank God?” Maddy said. He lowered his chin to find her eyes blazing. “Thank God? Are you crazy? For the love of… Someone cut me loose!”

Before Bran could gather himself, Mason did the honors, skirting around Maddy to slice through her restraints. The minute she was free, her little hands landed on Bran’s face.

The hairs on his arms lifted when her cool fingers smoothed over the skin of his cheeks, his lips, his chin. “Bran.” His name sounded sweet on her tongue. “Oh, my sweet Jesus!” Her Texas twang turned the word my into an adorable-sounding mah.

Before he could suck in a breath, she gripped his thigh on either side of the deep furrow cutting through his flesh. A little pool of his blood was gathering on the sand, mixing with the blood of the man he’d eighty-sixed.

“What do I do?” she cried, her eyes beseeching. “Tell me what—”

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Mason said from beside them, having given the laceration a cursory glance.

“And who are you?” Maddy demanded, turning on the poor guy with a look hot enough to set his face on fire. “Monty Python?”

It hit Bran then. “Man, I really like you,” he blurted.

Maddy turned to him, upside-down mouth hanging open in a little O that was far more tempting than he would have thought possible at a time like this. “I—” She hesitated. “I really like you too, Bran.”

“You got a satphone in that ranger’s station?” Mason asked the young ranger, ignoring them.

Bran was still absorbing the fact that Maddy had admitted to liking him, really liking him—But she doesn’t know the real you, he reminded himself. She doesn’t know what you have inside you or what that means you’re capable of—when her fear-tinged expression turned to desperation.

“The ranger’s station? But the girls!” She searched the exterior curtain wall as if she hoped to see the teenagers there. “We have to go get them!”

“First we hafta get off this beach,” Bran told her, hating the way the pulse was hammering in her throat, hating that she was caught in the middle of a hostage situation. Again. “They could start taking potshots at us any minute, and storming the fort to save those girls will be a lot easier if Mason and I are both alive.”

“Storming the fort will also be easier once we stop your bleeding,” Mason added.

“Right.” Maddy turned back to Bran. “Can you make it? You’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig.”

He responded with a smirk. “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

“Would you stop doin’ that?” She curled her plump top lip like Elvis. It was a gesture he remembered well. One that made strange things happen to the butterflies that had recently taken up residence in his stomach.

“Doing what?”

“Quotin’ bad movies at a time like this!”

He gasped exaggeratedly. “You think Predator is a bad movie?”

Before she could answer, Mason told the park ranger, “Lead the way. But stay low.”

Apparently Mason wasn’t of a mind to hang around and discuss the merits of one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s better movies. Considering their current situation, Bran couldn’t blame him.

Grabbing the dead man’s weapon from where it had fallen on the beach, Bran slung the strap over his shoulder before reaching for his M4 and tactical blade. Once he’d shoved the latter into its sheath, he lumbered to his feet and offered a hand to Maddy. When her palm landed in his, he felt a jolt of awareness, like two wires on a car battery suddenly making a connection.

“Are you sure you can make it?” she asked again. Er…demanded, really. With her eyebrows pulled in a vee and her hands balled on her hips, it was definitely a demand. An adorable, adorable demand.

Before he could reassure her, Mason barked, “Go, go, go!” and they were all suddenly on the move.

Bran lifted his rifle, keeping his sights aimed at the fort and the large embrasures—the openings built into the side of the garrison to allow cannon fire—that peered out at the island and the surrounding waters like dark, malevolent eyes.

The short trip to the little cottage that was the ranger’s station seemed to take an eternity. Bran figured that was partly due to the burning pain in his thigh. But it was also due to his acute—we’re talking absolute—awareness of every move Maddy made. He sensed every stutter in her step. Was attuned to every breath she took. He imagined if he listened really closely, he could probably hear her heart beat.

This was how he remembered her, this…hyperawareness. And it was just one of the many reasons he hadn’t wanted to come tonight.

In the three months since he’d last seen her, he’d been able to convince himself he had imagined everything. Chalked up his overwhelming reaction to her to the extreme circumstances under which they’d met. But now that he was back by her side? There was no denying it. That pull, that draw was still there. Still thick in the air between them like a cloud of superpowered pheromones or some shit.