Page 44 of Ruining His Smirk

“Not one.”

He exhaled, and then laughed, a sound of disbelief and wonder.

I looked at him. I hadn’t seen him smiling much. We had been scowling at each other so much all the time. He was such a handsome man. Little crinkles around his eyes made him even more attractive. I’d seen how he behaved with his brother. There was a different side to him. Or maybe it was my heart hoping uselessly.

That boy from the museum hadn’t become my friend after all. He had made a face at me and called me a ‘nerd’ before running away. Apparently, I hadn’t learned my lesson.

And yet I couldn’t stop staring at him. He seemed to be thinking something intense. His eyes were locked onto the sea, but I didn’t think he was really seeing anything. He was holding onto the railing with such a strong grip that the corded muscles of his arms stood out.

He must have felt my gaze because when he turned to look at me, his brown eyes were burning with something fierce.

He leaned forward until his lips hovered over mine.

I shuddered.

“Why did you—”

Landry’s words were cut off brutally as my feet suddenly vanished out from under me. For a bewildered instant, my mind simply refused to make sense of what my body was doing. One moment I was standing, the next I was skidding helplesslyacross the deck, boots scraping uselessly against the steel as I fought for purchase that wasn’t there.

I threw out an arm, instinctively reaching for anything I could grab, but my fingers closed on empty air. The rail rushed toward me at unbelievable speed. I hit it hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. Pain exploded through my hip and ribs as I folded awkwardly against the cold metal, my body twisting with the force of the impact.

As I hung there, pinned by unseen forces with my upper body leaning downward, the sea below began to rise. A mammoth wave was forming.

I stared uncomprehendingly.

An eerie groan sounded all around me and from the very belly of my ship. I turned my head in pure, primal fear, and my eyes widened impossibly at what I saw. The entire back section of the ship, the one we weren’t on, was rising.

That was when I noticed the sheet of water beneath my feet and all over the deck. Where did all this water come from? Were we sinking? But that was impossible.

The ship tilted further, and the next moment the steel rail disappeared beneath me, replaced by open air, as I toppled and fell several feet down into a blur of the ship’s bright red paint and dark blue of the ocean below.

12

Nate

My shout rang in the air, but I wasn’t sure anyone heard it in the chaos.

The cold hit like a concrete slab against my body. Every muscle in my body seized so violently it felt as though invisible cables had cinched themselves around my ribs, squeezing the air from my lungs. My mouth opened on instinct, desperate to inhale, but years of training immediately kicked in. Inhaling cold water would be a fatal mistake. I locked my throat instead, jaw clamping hard, and focused on my breathing.

Don’t breathe.

The thought wasn’t even conscious. It had been drilled into me through thousands of swim lessons and then later competitive swimming. At sixteen, to prove how ‘tough’ I was, I had swum across the English Channel. I knew what cold and exhaustion felt like. I also knew that millions of repetitions can counter even the deadliest panic.

The first few seconds belong to your body.

The next belong to you.

My limbs still burned with the violent urge to thrash toward the surface, but I forced myself to ignore it. I tucked my chin, blinked against the sting in my eyes, and waited the heartbeat it took for my brain to catch up with reality.

I was surrounded by dark water. My legs finally answered when I kicked, powerful and practiced despite the shock still tearing through my chest. I kept my face above the surface, resisting the urge to waste energy fighting the sea.

By then, my brain had caught up with the fact that I’d gone overboard, but I remembered the second man who had been with me on the deck.

Landry!

I trod water, forcing slow, measured breaths despite the cold that seemed determined to crawl through every layer of skin and settle inside my bones. My eyes scanned the deck high up. Movement caught my eye.

There! Leaning over the rail, Landry was staring down at me. Even from this distance, I could see the shock and terror on his face. His eyes were impossibly wide, his mouth moving around words the water and chaos tore away before they reached me.