Page 39 of Writing Mr. Wrong

GEMMA

T here was a boat, a small fishing vessel coming from the east. Gemma and Mason did everything to get the crew’s attention.

Waved their arms. Shouted. Shouted some more.

It was too far off to hear them. Gemma kept waiting for it to be in line with their boat, as close as it would get. Surely the crew would hear them then.

And then it stopped. They waved and shouted, but the boat was at least five hundred feet away, with no sign it would get closer.

Gemma didn’t pause to think. She had no idea how long the boat would stay there, whether it would get any closer once it restarted.

Their chance was evaporating, and she knew how important it was to Mason to make the game.

And how desperately she wanted to make up for her mistake.

So she told Mason to stay where he was, jumped into the ocean, and started to swim.

It was only after jumping in that she realized this was not a pool. It was not the shallow water around their island. It was the open sea. With sharks.

Gemma knew the popularity of shark TV shows. She’d never seen one, which seemed a serious oversight at this moment. Or maybe it was better, leaving her mind unclouded by deadly shark facts.

Oh yes, it was definitely better to only have horror movies about sharks to fall back on.

Gemma reminded herself that the ocean was a very big place. The chance of a shark being nearby was… Okay, it was probably higher than she liked. But the chance of it being nearby and hungry and choosing her above all the other delicious fish in the sea seemed low.

It had to be low. More people died from lightning strikes than shark attacks, right?

Keep swimming. That was all that mattered.

Swim and think about things that were not sharks.

Her mind went back to Mason’s confession.

Whether or not there’d been a hint of jealousy in what happened with Denny, Mason wasn’t the kind of guy to intentionally allow a young player to get hurt.

Just like he wasn’t the kind of guy to kiss a girl on a dare.

He’d handled things poorly, and the important part was that he knew it.

She suspected there was another layer to the Denny issue, because she also suspected that Mason did not have a retirement plan. Hockey was his life. It had always been his life.

The unfairness of it enraged her. Did she feel “old” at thirty-six? Hell, no. She was starting a new phase of life, and while she wasn’t a precociously young debut author, she was at exactly the right age to start this career. At the same age Mason was nearing the end of his.

He’d need to deal with that, and she’d help him deal with that. But not today. Today was about getting him to that game.

So she ignored thoughts of sharks and stingrays and whatever else might be swimming beneath her. She ignored the growing burn in her lungs. She ignored the stitch in her arm. She ignored the fact that she hadn’t swum more than a few laps in a decade.

She could do this. She would do it. How did she feel about Mason Moretti?

She was ready to brave shark-infested waters for him, to foolishly swim so far that if she failed, she might not be able to get back.

The depth of that emotion scared her more than the sharks or the risk of drowning.

But she was going to get past that fear, and this was how she’d do it.

She’d been hurt—by Alan, and by Mason himself—but she wouldn’t let that be an excuse for not trying again.

She wouldn’t use it as an excuse for hiding how she felt, as she had all those years ago with Mason.

In her books, it was always the guy who made the grand gesture. Well, she was doing this differently. She’d get to the damned boat, one way or another and…

And there it was. One moment she was swimming, head down, arms churning, and then the boat was in front of her. A few more long strokes brought her up beside it, where she grabbed on to a net and looked up…

Into the barrel of a rifle.

Everything inside her convulsed as an inner voice screamed that she’d forgotten this part. She’d been worrying about sharks when the real danger was that she was swimming to a boat while having no idea who was on it.

She looked up, but the rising sun meant she couldn’t see anything except a figure behind the gun. A man snapped in something that might have been Spanish, might have been Portuguese, oh hell, she couldn’t even tell right now, all her attention on that barrel.

“Pl-please,” she said, catching her breath. “Our boat…” She waved in the general direction. “Broke down. Radio…” Another gasping breath. “Not working. Stranded.”

A murmur of voices. Could they understand her? Why the hell hadn’t she studied a brief smattering of tourist Spanish before going on vacation?

Well, because she thought she’d be traveling to someplace with snow, someplace in Canada.

“Por favor,” she said, and that exhausted her Spanish. She couldn’t even remember whether she knew the word for help.

“Up,” the man’s voice said, and a rope ladder descended.

Gemma hesitated. Did she really want to enter a boat bearing men with guns? No, not really, but the alternative was drowning, because she didn’t have the strength to swim back.

She grabbed the ladder and began to climb. After two rungs, something jerked the ladder from below, and a babble of angry words shot from above.

Gemma looked down… to see Mason’s dark head below her as he held the ladder, panting hard, his arms wobbling from the long swim.

Had she really expected him to stay behind? To be honest, she hadn’t thought about it, just like she hadn’t thought about what to expect from this boat.

“Off!” a man snapped from above. “You! Off!”

Gemma twisted. “Mace? Are you okay staying there?”

“Wh—?” His breath came ragged. “What?”

“I need you to stay down there while I handle this.”

He looked up, and that must have been when he saw the gun, because he let out a string of curses and then grabbed her ankle.

“I’ll talk to them,” he said.

“Yeah, they don’t want the big scary guy on their boat, Mace. I need to handle this. Please.” She lowered her voice. “Just let me talk to them. You’ll be right there.”

His eyes narrowed, but his grip eased on her ankle. He never quite let go, as if he couldn’t bring himself to do that, yet he did let her pull from his grasp. When she resumed climbing, though, he called up something in Spanish, falteringly, but certainly better than she could have managed.

The man answered, and Mason said something else.

Please don’t be threatening him, Mace.

He wasn’t. She could tell by his tone that he was calmly explaining, and as she climbed onto the deck, she saw the two people there—a man and a woman, both a little older than her, the man holding an obviously old rifle, the barrel no longer pointed at her but still raised.

Because she was a stranger who’d latched on to the side of their fishing boat.

“Perdón,” she said, the word coming to her as she hoped it was right and not just some Spanish word close to “pardon.” She added, “I’m sorry. We’re stranded.”

Mason called up in more broken Spanish. The woman shook her head, rolling her eyes and then saying, “Tourists. You go out into the water without even a working radio.”

“It was an emergency,” Gemma said. “We were supposed to be picked up this morning for our flight and no one came. May my, uh, boyfriend come up, please? We swam a long way.”

The man shook his head, which she feared meant no, but he called down, “Up.” The head shake was just for the reckless tourists. Then Mason crested the side, and the man stepped back, gun rising as he realized how big Mason was.

“Stay there,” Gemma said, motioning to Mason. “Please.”

She turned to the couple. “Is there any way we can convince you to take us to shore?”

“We can pay,” Mason said.

Gemma cut him a look. Of course they’d pay, but leading with that could be insulting. For Mason, though, it was his first response because, well, it usually worked.

“We will reimburse you, of course,” Gemma said. “We just need to get to shore.”

“Your boat?” the woman said.

“Screw the boat,” Mason muttered.

Gemma shot him another look, but she swore the woman’s lips twitched.

“We can deal with that later,” Gemma said. “We urgently need to get home today. It’s an emergency. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have left the island. Please. I know this is an inconvenience.”

The two spoke rapidly, but it seemed more like a conversation than a debate. Was that a good sign? Please let it be a good sign.

“Okay,” the woman said. “We can take you as far as the marina. But you will need to pay for our gas.”

“Absolutely,” Gemma said. “Thank you.”

And with that, she could finally breathe again.

MASON

The couple took them to the boat first, to get their belongings. Then they delivered them to the marina. Mason paid them enough that they protested, but it must have been clear how grateful he was, because they finally accepted it and wished them well.

When they walked up the marina steps, it felt like setting foot in Vancouver, their journey at an end. Of course it was not at an end. It was only starting.

Mason had been on his phone the moment they got service. The vacation planner would tell the owners about the boat, and any charges could be passed on to the company that had stranded them. Mason didn’t care who paid for what. He cared about getting home.

Gemma had jumped into the ocean and swum to strangers for him.

Now it was up to him to make sure that hadn’t been for nothing.

And he wasn’t relying on the vacation planners for that.

Oh, he told them they’d damn well better get him home after this latest fuckup, but what he didn’t tell them was that he’d also be making his own plans.