Uncharted(4)

But now, minutes from meeting the Flints, all those concerns I’ve been so determined to push aside are clanging around inside my head so loud, it’s hard to think about anything else.

In twelve hours, I’ll be in a bikini on a beach, I remind myself. Focus on that.

With a renewed bounce in my step, I finally locate the BOS-LAX carousel in the baggage claim area. I wait with several dozen strangers, eyes trained on the unmoving luggage chute. It seems an eternity before the orange strobe lights begin to pulse, assaulting my weary eyes with rhythmic flashes. A few seconds later, there’s a grind of gears and a metallic groan as the carousel churns into motion. My ability to filter out the many sensations occurring around me is all but gone. Every sound and smell feels like an assault — the piercing scrape of metal against metal, the pungent medley of too many sweaty, perfumed bodies crushed together.

When the first suitcase slides from the chute, everyone presses inward in an impatient wave, all eager to get their bag and then get the hell out of here. My nose twitches as a woman wearing a heavy dose of Chanel presses against my right side. I catch an elbow to the collarbone when an aggressive man yammering into a cellphone spots his black rolling bag and staggers forward to retrieve it. I don’t know how he recognizes it — those rectangular rolling suitcases all look identical to me. Black on black, without so much as a sticker or a luggage tag to distinguish them from the rest.

Bags disappear one by one, and their owners along with them, eventually thinning the crowd until I can breathe again. Mine must be in the bowels of the plane because by the time it finally appears, I’m one of the only people left gathered around the carousel. The green duffle is well-worn, made of sturdy canvas with thick padded straps — a relic from my father’s days in the army. It survived a war zone; let’s hope it’ll outlast a few weeks with me in the South Pacific.

Mom wanted to buy me a flashy new rolling set for the trip, but I wouldn’t budge. Even though he’s long gone, carrying Dad’s duffle somehow makes me feel like I’m carrying a small piece of him with me, wherever the journey leads.

Rushing forward with my eyes fixed on the bag, my arm lifts from my side on auto-pilot. I’m eager to finally be on my way. So eager, in fact, I don’t notice I’m on a crash-course with something that — when I look back later — I’ll have no choice but to ascribe to fate.

My hand closes around the right strap. I’m already turning on my heel to walk away when I hit unexpected resistance. A sharp, opposing tug stops me in my tracks, jerking me back like a puppet on a string. For a second, I think a strap must’ve gotten stuck in the carousel, but when I whip around, I see it isn’t caught in a metal gear.

It’s trapped inside a hand.

A big, callused, male hand.

What the hell?

Reflexively, I yank at the right strap still curled in my fist; at the same instant, the stranger attempting to steal my stuff gives a sharp tug from his side. The duffle jerks into the air as we pull in opposite directions, the bag suspended between us in the strangest game of tug-of-war I’ve ever participated in. No matter how hard I pull, he doesn’t relinquish so much as a single finger’s grip.

“Hey!” I squawk, eyes flashing up to his face, fully prepared to unleash a string of less-than-polite accusations. “What the hell do you think you’re—”

The words dissipate on my tongue mid-sentence, because the man attached to my bag, the one who owns that massive, callused hand currently wrapped so firmly around my duffle’s other strap, is simply…

Breath-stealing.

I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched as my eyes roam over his features. He’s not handsome — the word doesn’t do him justice. He’s far too rough around the edges, with stubble peppering that strong, square jaw and a thin scar bisecting one of those dark, slanted brows. An aristocratic nose sits squarely above a set of lush lips that, it must be noted, are currently pursed in an impatient scowl as he meets my gaze.

I suck in a much-needed breath.

He’s glaring down at me from an impossible height, a wall of muscle in faded jeans and a black v-neck. In his late twenties or early thirties, he looks like a man accustomed to things I can barely fathom: fine meals and fast cars and gorgeous, glamorous women with loads of experience — sexual and otherwise. I feel like a little girl standing here beneath his gaze. Sloppy and naive and impossibly young.

There’s a rhythmic ticking in his jaw that tells me his patience is about to expire. It takes all the willpower I possess not to drop my hand from the bag and simply give it to him, such is the effect of those intense eyes scorching into mine.

Honestly, I’ve never had a grown man glare at me before, besides the time I crashed Clint’s sit-atop lawnmower into the pond after one too many post-graduation wine coolers and incurred his father’s — much deserved — wrath. Call me crazy, but I just don’t get what most girls find so attractive about total assholes. I’m not submissive. I don’t have authority issues or daddy issues or whatever other issues usually make the fairer sex swoon over that gruff smolder adopted by blockbuster action heroes and angsty teen dystopian bad boys.

Or… I didn’t.

Until this moment.

Because, while I’m perfectly aware I should not find myself thinking that this glaring stranger is the most magnetically attractive man I’ve ever laid eyes on…