Page 84

“What are you doing?”
“I’m losing these heavy pants, too.”
He’d worn his lightweight Gore-Tex pants over a pair of snug trunks, so he’d keep his on.
Then she rolled over, facing the shore and starting to swim. He swam behind her, the waves carrying them up and down in the water.
He still held the unhooked strap.
The mountain rose dark and forbidding over the island, and he couldn’t make out any fires.
“There’s the beach,” Tia said, stopping and treading as she pointed to an indentation in the shoreline.
“We could keep swimming, all the way to town.”
She turned in the water, met his gaze. “That’s a half mile away.”
Right.
“If we get tired, we’ll let the waves carry us in. We can do this, Tia.”
She tightened her jaw but nodded. “Don’t let go of me.”
Never.The word pulsed inside him, jolting him.What?—?
They kept swimming parallel to shore, slowly, sidestroke, riding the waves, the shoreline glistening under the moonlight. The water had turned cold in the night, and he shivered, but here in the Caribbean, he wouldn’t get hypothermia, at least, not unless he got pulled farther out to sea.
“Should we be worried about sharks?”
“Great whites? No, the water is too warm. If we were swimming up the eastern coast of Florida, perhaps, but not out here.”
Probably.
In fact, swimming out here, the waves moving them through the water, felt almost... peaceful.
All he had to do was breathe and stay afloat and ride the current as it took them toward Esperanza. And, of course, hang on to Tia.
No problem.
No problem at all.
The moon had started to fall, and dawn crested against the far horizon. He spotted tiny lights dotting the pocket of the mountain where Esperanza sat crowded against the harbor.
“I see the town,” she said.
Yeah.And along with it?—
Fishing boats. The motors rose across the surface of the water, buzzing against the waves and...
No one would see them in the water.
He tugged on her strap. “Tia, come here.”
She righted herself in the water, and he pulled her in, put an arm around her. “I can hear a fishing boat.”
Lifting her arm, she started to wave and shout. “We’re here!”
Aw.They didn’t have a hope of hearing her over the motor. And then he spotted it. A blue-and-white boat headed out to sea for the predawn morning catch.