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Holy hell. It hadn’t occurred to him she might not be able to swim. Once again, he cursed her parents.

“Yes, you can. Okay, new plan. I’m not going to let go of you. We will hit the water together, and I will get us back to the surface.”

When she didn’t answer, he turned her to face him. “Listen to me, little one. A Daddy would never let his babygirl go. Do you hear me? I promised I would keep you safe. If you haven’t figured it out yet, you’ll soon learn my promises mean everything to me. We are going to see those mountains in Wyoming, you and me. Got me?”

She stared at him for what seemed like forever, then nodded. “I got you, Daddy,” she said, trying her best to keep her voice steady.

His heart swelled with pride at her courage. She was something else.

“All right, babygirl. On three. One. Two… THREE!”

CHAPTER 8

“One, two… THREE!” Boone said, and Tildi found herself flying through the air. She tried to summon her inner Supergirl, but as it turned out, she didn’t have one. She tried not to scream, but that was a lost cause as well.

Only ten seconds, Boone had said. She knew ten seconds was ten seconds on a clock, regardless of what was happening, but perception was a funny thing.

She’d seen a whiz kid solve two Rubik’s cubes in ten seconds. You could barely see his fingers move, and time seemed to fly. But then, she’d also seen a trick once where you could fold a T-shirt like a ninja in ten seconds. That might be true, but in the three day weekend she’d spent trying to master that skill, she’d come to the conclusion it was a highly overrated accomplishment.

The ten seconds Boone mentioned lasted an eternity. As long as it took for a bathroom stall to open up at the theatre when you were at the movie you’d been waiting all summer to see. Longer than it took for that person you just sent a really stupid text to reply while those freaking dots kept appearing and disappearing. Yeah, this was that kind of ten seconds.

She intended to keep her eyes closed, but once her feet left solid ground, she found it impossible not to watch the wall of water she hurtled toward grow closer. It consumed every thought in her brain. Was she going to splatter like a bug hitting a windshield? Or worse, was she going to be swallowed by the frigid waters of the ocean and have mermaids drag her all the way down to Davy Jones’s locker?

She forgot to be Supergirl. She forgot to count down from ten. She forgot to breathe. She forgot everything, including the fact that Boone was holding onto her.

No, in her mind, it was just her careening through the air at Mach 10.

A few seconds in, the straps wrapped around her thighs and chest jerked, biting into her skin and snapping her back to reality. She was going to have bruises, but at least it slowed her speed a bit. Just as he’d promised, Boone used the parachute’s grips to steer them further out over the water. The crests of the waves painted white streaks in the dark, slate-gray water.

“You’ve got this, babygirl,” Boone shouted in her ear. At least, she thought he did. It was hard to hear over the rushing wind and the flapping of the parachute.

The only thing keeping her from losing it completely was his powerful thighs gripping her hips and the heat from his body against hers. That was nice. She should focus on that rather than plunging to certain death.

The cold wind still whipped her face and legs, even though their speed had slowed to a rapid glide. Boone shifted, still holding her hips with his thighs but now hooking his feet behind her knees. By leaning back, he tilted them to a slight reclining angle, and even with all the danger and adrenaline coursing through her, what his thighs might make her do in much more pleasant situations consumed her mind.

“Point your toes and breathe deep, Bluebell,” he yelled just before her feet touched the water. He released her a millisecond before she hit the bitingly frigid waters of the northern Pacific Ocean, pulling down on the release cord for the chute.

The last thing she heard as the water swallowed her was Boone shouting, “Fuck!”

If her lungs hadn’t already been full of air, she wouldn’t have been able to stifle the gasp the cold water almost wrenched from her. It was a good thing, too, because she hit the water and kept going down.

It was so cold her muscles stiffened almost on impact. With straight legs and pointed toes, she sliced through the water like a bullet. The pressure built, and her ears hurt, but the real problem was the parachute. The push and pull of the current tossed her around like a ragdoll, causing the lines connecting the chute to her backpack to wrap themselves around her like a spiderweb. The more she struggled, the tighter the cords bound her.

How was she supposed to get to the surface when she wasn’t even sure which way the surface was? Kicking her feet helped slow her descent, but she continued to sink, and the already icy water grew colder the deeper she went. Her chest began burning, and the need to breathe overwhelmed her. Her rising panic wasn’t helping, either.

Where the heck was Boone? She hadn’t read the manual, but letting your Little drown within hours of becoming her Daddy seemed to go against the whole Daddy Code thing.

Strong tentacles gripped her leg, and she let out precious bubbles of air when she yelped in surprise. She fought against whatever held her. Every B-rated sci-fi movie about giant squid drowning unwary swimmers played in her head. She might go down, but she was going down fighting.

Opening her eyes only made them burn, but she managed to squint long enough to recognize that Boone, not a giant squid, held fast to her calf. He tugged hard on her leg and held up one finger. She shook her head back at him but stilled so he could do whatever he was trying to do.

He pressed a knife against her thigh, slicing through the straps of the backpack imprisoning her. When they fell away from her legs, he repeated the action with the harness straps over her chest and shoulders. She could have cried with relief when the weight from the parachute that pulled her down slipped away and disappeared into the dark waters below.

With one arm wrapped around her waist, he swam them both to the surface. The wind whipped her face, the salty water burned in her eyes, and she had no idea how to stay up where she belonged. It was all she could do not to sing “Out of the Sea, Wish I Could Be” from The Little Mermaid.

Before she could do anything, Boone had flipped her onto her back. Shifting his arm from her waist to her chest, he started moving, but not toward the shore. No, he was heading out to sea. That was what she thought until he curved them around a pointed tip of land and said, “Hold on, Bluebell. You’re doing great. We’re almost to my Zodiac.”

“Your what?” she managed to gasp out. He hadn’t struck her as the horoscope type.