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Her irritatingly adorable bunny ears framed her face, emphasizing her enormous, brown eyes that were fringed with thick lashes. She’d had bangs the last time I’d seen her, but those had grown out now, wisping around the curve of her cheeks. Everything about Mattie looked sweet. Trustworthy. When paired with her devilish personality, it was a dangerous combination. She ran her tongue along her bottom lip, somehow both suggestive and innocent at the same time. “Yeah, I just had a hard time recognizing you. My last memory of you was from behind a door.” She flashed her white teeth, still backing away carefully. “My bad.”
Behind Mattie, the river gurgled by with a steady current that looked deceptively gentle. I knew enough about bodies of water to realize that the current could suck a person along with deadly force, despite how it looked on the surface. She backed up another few steps, nimbly keeping her footing as she threaded through trees away from the path. I watched her with quiet amusement. I wasn’t sure where she planned on going, but this game between us was over. She just hadn’t accepted it, yet. “I’m going to be honest,” I said, taking a longer step to close the distance between us. “You won’t see my face again after I drop you off at your parents’. So don’t bother to memorize it.”
The bounce of her cinnamon eyes to the side betrayed her worry. “Thank God,” she replied seriously. “You’re hideous.”
I wasn’t, and we both knew it. I cocked a smile to the side. “What’s the plan, Mattie? Are you going to go with me like a sane person?”
She shook her head, her smile trembling a bit as she chewed that infernal piece of bubblegum. “If you haven’t realized yet that I’m insane, then you’re not paying attention.”
“You’re that desperate to have my hands on you that you’d run?” I needled, closing the gap between our bodies just as inexorably as she ate the distance between the trees and river. “Or do you think, deep down, you’ve earned a little retribution?”
Her hands left her hoodie pockets, and the heels of her sneakers scraped up against the rocky ledge that dropped two feet into the rushing water. There were only two steps left between us. Her eyes went frantic in the next second, and she pulled her gaze over her shoulder to the river. I realized then what she meant to do, but too late. Always, with Mattie, I was five seconds too slow.
With a split-second glance my way, giving me a glimpse of the stark fear on her beautiful features, Mattie jumped into the river. I lunged for her, but my hands swiped empty air. She splashed, full-body, into the water, and although it wasn’t deep, she swam with long, powerful strokes to the middle of the current. The icy water swallowed her whole for a full three seconds before she emerged again. The rushing current churned white and frothy around her body as it carried her downstream.
“Fuck,” I hissed. She was heading for the opposite side, which would take her straight to town. With a growl of frustration, I shucked off my steel-toe sneakers, whipped my green canvas jacket off, and waded into the stream after her. I hadn’t rescued a person from the water in years, but my training kicked in on autopilot. Biting cold stole my breath, and I sucked in hard. I was almost positive my nuts turned into raisins as I submerged to my hips. Then my feet slipped out from under me, and the water got deep fast. The current swept along my legs, tugging me down the river with terrifying force. I kept my eyes on Mattie as she struggled to swim, her wet sweatshirt making her movements sluggish.
I had the benefit of fewer layers and a lot more practice swimming in clothing, so I knew I would catch up to her. It was a matter of what I would do when I had her in my hands that remained in question. At the moment, the idea of gagging her had some merit, and the thought of dragging her stubborn ass out of this freezing water was the only thing that kept me swimming even when my fingers went numb, and my lungs struggled to pull in air. The cold sapped every ounce of energy from me, stabbing my skin with pinpricks of pain and contracting my ribs inward so hard, I could barely draw a breath. It was a familiar feeling. I’d spent more than a year training to swim in cold, black oceans, but it had been over a decade since BUD/S, and I was a bit out of practice when it came to navigating freezing water.
The gray lump that was Mattie in the distance suddenly went under. Panic scrabbled at my reason. Shit. I forced my arms and legs to pump faster, fighting the current to slice through the water in the right direction. I didn’t have time to examine my panic, but I was aware of it. Like those fissures around my cemented heart had widened, I realized that a crevice of worry for Matilda Thorne had shown up in my emotions, and it wasn’t sitting well. I’d seen plenty of people die in stupid ways, so why the concern now? “Get up,” I whispered, slapping through the water against the sideways pull of the river. “Get up. Come on, Mattie.”
Her face broke through the churning water, but only briefly. I was almost to her, and I saw the way her hair clung to her face, obstructing her open mouth as she gasped for air. Then she went down again.
I pushed hard, my muscles screaming. “Back up, Mattie,” I shouted. “Come up!” She did, her throat searching for air audibly. I reached her, striking out one hand for the hood of her sweatshirt. I yanked it back, and her body, sopping wet and heavy as fuck with her layers, collided with mine. Thankfully, the current had taken us closer to the shore, and I turned so she lay back on my stomach. I wished I could get her slogged down hoodie off her body, but I didn’t have time. Not with the cold siphoning my strength and turning her lips blue.
“You,” I growled, swiping through the fishy river with my left arm, “are. So. Dead.”
She coughed, her body limp and already shivering so hard, it was like hauling a tiny jackhammer to shore. Which, thankfully, was close enough that we weren’t in the water for long. Even with training for this exact situation, I struggled to keep both our heads above the choppy water, and I swallowed so much of it, I felt like puking.
“Oh my God!” someone shouted from the trail.
Great. We’d been seen, too. This was going just about as well as my other Mattie take-in attempts had gone. She had the most unhinged way of turning a perfectly linear collection of points into a scattered constellation of chaos.
My feet hit silty shore, and with a groan of effort, I hefted us both out of the water. I flung Mattie’s body onto the shore first, and then hauled myself up beside her. I kept one hand on her shivering, prone body because I didn’t care if she was on the brink of hypothermic death, I knew this coddled socialite would find a way to thwart me and escape anyway.
Feet pounded the trail, and then twigs and leaves cracked as a couple rushed to join us. The man’s neon green and yellow athleticwear refracted light from the hazy sun, and the woman, who looked to be in her forties, already had her phone out from her purple coat. The man reached us first. “Are you alright? My God.”
“We’re fine,” I huffed. My breath fogged out like a dragon’s breath as I sucked in a lungful of air and expelled it with a shudder.
“You must be freezing,” the woman said. “I’m calling an ambula—”
“No!” Mattie and I chorused. I swiveled a look down to her and found her curled up tight, her lips quivering and the tips of her fingers blue. She had her eyes shut, but she shook her head in a jerky motion. “No. Really.”
Her determination to remain hidden really knew no equal. What exactly was so bad about being with her billionaire parents that had this girl going full Jason Bourne? I knelt next to Mattie, and sniffing through my own body-wracking tremors, I addressed the paunchy man. “I have—my jacket.” I pointed back upriver. “On the shore.”
“I’ll get it,” he offered, and then he jogged away, adjusting his ear warmer band and huffing.
“Are you sure I can’t call an ambulance?” the woman asked. She had a thin face and well-worn laugh lines around her mouth, and I imagined she came from a home full of children and love. I’d rarely stepped foot in one of those, let alone grown up in one.
“No, thank you,” I shook my head. I gave her a smile that winced a little. “W-we’re locals. Our place isn’t f-far.”
She gusted out a breath in relief, her gloved hand on her stomach. “Oh, my Lanta, you must have been terrified.”
Mattie’s hand lifted off the grass, like she wanted to grab for the woman. “P-please—”
“Come here, baby,” I soothed, lifting her in my arms and tucking her against my sodden shirt. “It’s okay.”
She fought me, but she was so bone-deep frozen—not to mention pathetically weaker than me—it barely shifted my arms around her. I tucked her face under my chin, and bending down with my jaw against her temple, I effectively smothered any other protests she wanted to make.
