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“Yeah? I have a job for you too! It includes you not going off on an adventure to prove you’re still young enough to do your job!”
“That’s not what I did,” I argued.
“That’s exactly what you did,” Sinner inserted.
“Is that Sinner?” she asked. “Put him on the phone!”
Sinner shook his head at me, but I wasn’t an idiot. I shoved the phone in his direction. Once she saw him, there was no getting out of it for him. “Hey, Maggie,” he said, trying to sound cool. He failed miserably.
“So, it was your bright idea to fix him, is that right?”
“Um…”
“And the rest of you?” she shouted, like she could see them all. “Why did not one of you keep him safe?”
I was slightly offended by that, but she wasn’t yelling at me, so I called it a win.
“Because he’s a grown man,” Lola said. I could picture her glaring at Freckles. That woman didn’t take any shit from anyone.
“When this is over, I’m putting you all on babysitting duty. I don’t care if you have to work or not. You took him away from me, and you did…that to him!”
“They did, Freckles,” I said, trying to sound as pathetic as possible. I shouldn’t have oversold it.
“And you! Don’t you dare try and play the sympathy card with me. Your face is fine. Grow some balls and kill the bad guys so you can come home!”
She screamed again, shoving the phone at Kate, who took it and stared at me with a bored expression. “So…thanks for this. I really needed this on my day off.”
“It—”
“She told me to snip the kid and send you the video. I wouldn’t wait too long to come home.”
The call dropped and silence filled the boat.
“Well…that could have gone better,” Rocco sighed.
“It could have gone worse. Although, I think we made a tactical error by putting her on the video call,” Sinner replied.
I nodded in agreement. “We forgot one crucial point.”
“What’s that?” Wolf asked.
I did my best to look over at him. “Freckles isn’t sane when she’s in labor.”
26
CHANCE
From the moment we got here, Rob had been locked away in the hut with the jungle woman, making noises that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than fucking. The rest of us sat outside on watch. And even though I was ready to leave, sitting here and recovering from my near-death experience was good for me.
“How much longer are we going to wait?” Gabe sighed, letting his head drop against the hut. “It’s fucking hot out here and I’m sweaty and smelly.”
I dug in my bag and pulled out some cooling wipes, tossing them at him. He tore into them, groaning as he ran them over his neck and down his chest.
“You have no idea how good this feels. I have mud caked in places it should never be.”
I stared at him incredulously. “Do you not see me? Were we not in the same location?”
“Oh, right,” he chuckled. “Thank God that’s over.”