Page 77 of Fighting With Light

“Yes, princess, we can be done.” I smile at her and drop my leg.

She drops hers, groaning, and goes back into the villa. I roll our mats up and lean them against the side of the wall before following her inside.

“Yes, please, can you get me the pancakes, the variety of empanadas, six eggs, and the chorizo is fine, please throw a ton of fruit in there, a big pot of coffee,and then five bottles of mineral water, please.” My eyes widen, wondering why in the world she would order all of that but my stomach grumbles as if it had ears.

She hangs up the phone and looks at me. “What else are you going to do today?”

“Well, I need to get some surf time in and then I figured we should keep looking into Colombia,” I suggest. She nods and saunters into the bathroom.

When she emerges her hair is pulled up in a messy bun instead of the braid she had it in. She’s wearing another bikini I haven’t seen before. This one is white, and it makes her skin look almost like milk chocolate. I want to take a bite out of her. It’s one of those high-cut bottoms on the hips, and it dips low in the front. The top is a simple triangle bikini, but I like the way it looks on her.

“If you keep looking at me like you want to eat me, you will absolutely not get your surf in,” she says.

“Maybe you need to stop taunting me with those bikinis,” I tell her, lifting my eyebrow, egging her on.

She purses her lips meeting the challenge. “I think you remember what happened last time you said to stop messing with you, I could do that again, and solve the problem right now,” she says, lifting her hand to her neck.

“No,” I grunt, holding up a hand. “I wish, baby, but I need a surf.”

She smiles, dropping her hand from her neck.

“I’m too hungry, anyway. I probably would have passed out.” She grins.

“You passing out would have nothing to do with food, princess,” I tell her.

Her eyebrow ticks up, and there is a knock at the door.

My stomach grumbles as I push the cart to our little table. We don’t bother with pretense and dig in.

I get back to work looking for flight manifests. The one I thought I found ended up being a dead end, it could be for anything legal or illegal, so I dropped it and moved on.

Aelia is sipping her coffee and hunting for a cook site in the mountains. I’m not so sure she’ll find it, but if she does, it would be a major piece of evidence that could lead us to more.

I looked for other private airports and started looking through their manifests, and I found a few that made me take another look. There are ten manifests for the past year with cargo listed and a few of their reported weights stuck out to me. They were consistent shipments all slightly over one thousand kilograms, which is a little over a ton.

This could be anything, but there is a pattern with one specifically, El Rey Café, coffee. But coffee beans are a little heavier, and because of that, they couldn’t put as much weight that’s listed on the plane. I looked up the company, and it’s not a real coffee grower either, it’s a shell corporation. It’s also important to note that the plane being used can’t carry that amount of weight for coffee beans, and they would need a bigger plane. But if you are just flying cocaine to Mexico City, then the size of the plane is fine.

“I think I might have found our plane,” I tell Aelia.

She gasps and rolls over to me sitting at the small table.

I explain what I think is happening and she seems to think that’s plausible, so I grab all the manifests and put them in our file. It’s something, but I’m afraid we’re taking too long. It feels like time is running out because Aelia’s father is going to figure out something isn’t right.

Aelia is searching square by square through the dense mountains without any luck. I help her for another hour until I can’t take looking at a screen anymore.

“I need a break,” I tell her.

“Do you want me to watch you surf again?” she asks and suddenly I feel a little embarrassed that my answer is immediately yes. I feel like a little kid when my mom was standing on the shore watching me practice as a teen.

“Oh uh, you don’t have to if you’d rather do this,” I say, gesturing to the computer.

“Just give me a little longer and I’ll be out later,” she says and turns back to the screen.

“Okay, no problem,” I mutter and move my feet out the door.Idiot. She doesn’t want to watch you surf. It’s boring, Liam. You have a competition to win tomorrow, stop thinking about your pretend girlfriend watching you surf and being your cheerleader from the shore.

***

I forced myself to focus on the waves and every move I made until my mind finally shut up. The waves are perfect today. I think the only way I can pull in my points is by demonstrating some more technical tricks and skills without error. I’ve had a great season, but after everything that happened with Mom getting shot after Kai and Cordelia’s wedding, I was off my game. I couldn’t stop thinking that someone was coming for me next.