At Sea
I didn’t bother with putting extra effort into my hair or makeup, opting to keep it simple. It wasn’t like Cruz was impressed by those kinds of things, anyway. That didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. My heart galloped at an alarming rate as I turned the handle to the door of his classroom.
“One second,” he said, leaned over a stack of papers.
I’d never gone for the studious types, but damn, he looked incredibly sexy with a backward baseball hat and a tight T-shirt. He looked like the Cruz I met in Vegas and not Dr. Delgado.
Then again, it wasn’t exactly office hours.
I closed the door behind me, pushed the lock, and dropped the blinds to cover the window.
“What can I do— Penelope?” He startled when he realized it was me. “We’re not supposed to meet for another half hour.”
“I know,” I said, sitting on the desk next to his stack of papers.
His eyes fixed on my ass, and I mentally high-fived myself for my choice in jeans. Snapping his gaze to mine, he sighed. “What can I do for you, Miss Carstairs?”
“You’re angry with me.”
He leaned back in his chair—one of those armless rolling ones—obviously putting distance between us. “We can discuss that with your friends in a half hour.”
That look would be enough to shred a lesser woman, but I dished it right back. He might own me on the sexual battleground, but I would go toe-to-toe with him in every other arena. “If you were as mad at them as you are at me, that would be okay. But you’re mad at me, and not because we didn’t clear the stunt with you but because of what we are.”
“And what is that?” he challenged, folding his hands in front of him like he was the most relaxed guy in the world. But those brown eyes and the deepening of his accent gave him away.
“I wish I knew.”
He stared at me, stripping my emotions naked with nothing more than the arch of an eyebrow. “Me, too.”
Any other time, any other place, any other situation, and I would have been in his lap, my tongue in his mouth, begging him to put his hands on me. But I wasn’t really up for a second rejection at the moment, so I kept my hands and lips to myself.
“I should have told you about the stunt.”
“You should have,” he agreed.
“Not just because you’re our sponsor but because it was overly dangerous, and you—Cruz, not Dr. Delgado—deserved to know what I was doing.”
“I did,” he said, his voice low and soft. “You sent Zoe to distract me.”
My gaze hit my lap for a second before I found the courage to look him in the eyes again. “I did.”
“You thought a pretty girl would turn my head enough to not notice the pack strapped to the back of your quad?”
“Well, now that you say it like that, it sounds pretty childish.”
“It was childish.”
“It also worked.” Damn, that came out a shade whiny.
A smirk played at the corner of his lips. “No, it didn’t. She succeeded in annoying me. Rachel pretty much warning me away from you distracted me. The camera crew asking asinine questions distracted me. But Zoe coming on to me? Not one bit.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“I needed the time to set up the first part of the rig, and I knew you’d ask what I was doing if you paid close attention. Zoe can be very distracting. A ton of the boys like her.”
“Right. A ton of the boys, which I’m not. Penelope, whether or not anything is actually going on between us, it’s pretty damn impossible for me to look at any other woman when you’re within a mile radius of me. Hell, probably while you’re on the same planet.”
My insides melted into a girly puddle of goo. “I don’t look at other guys,” I admitted.
“I’m well aware, because I can feel your eyes on me the minute you walk into a room, the same as you do mine. This”—I gestured between us—“is not for lack of want, or hell…need. If it was a matter of either of those…” His eyes slid shut.
This was dangerous. We both knew it, and yet here we were again. Magnets. Gravity. Chemical reactions. Whatever.
“I should have told you, and I’m sorry. I knew that you would try to talk me out of it. That you would think it wasn’t safe—”
“It wasn’t safe!” he snapped, glaring at me. “For fuck’s sake! Did you do the calculations? Did you test just the ATV first against the wind before you strapped yourself to a four hundred pound piece of dead weight and threw yourself off a cliff?”
“Really, I drove it off. The velocity in the momentum sent me farther than if I had just thrown—”
His mouth crashed into mine before I realized his body had left the chair. The kiss wasn’t gentle—it was a purely physical, carnal act of dominance, and I submitted. My lips opened for him, and then he was all I could taste, feel, breathe. The scrape of his scruff abraded my skin in the most delicious way as he slanted my head for a deeper kiss.
This was what I’d missed. Kissing Cruz brought me back to myself. No expectations. No stunts. No cameras. Just the one man who accepted me as I simply was.
My hands gripped the back of his neck as he pulled me forward so he was between my spread thighs. I locked my ankles around his hips, as if I could keep him there, force a submission of my own.
“Penelope,” he whispered against my lips. “God, you scared me.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” I told him, placing small kisses along his jaw.
He cupped my face and looked at me as ten thousand emotions crossed his face so fast I couldn’t name them all.
“We shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“We can’t.” His forehead puckered as if he was in physical pain.
“I know that, too. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want you. Don’t want whatever this is. It just means it’s that much harder.”
“It’s impossible.” His thumb caressed my lower lip. “Impossible to be with you. Impossible to not want you. Impossible to stay the fuck away.”
“So don’t,” I whispered.
He dropped my face and backed away like I’d burned him. “Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say that I want you? That you’re the only man my body responds to? That you’re the only person who seems to know who I am under all this?”
He rested against the support pillar a good six feet away. “Do you have any idea how hard it is not to act when you say things like that?”
“As hard as it is for me to sit here and not beg you to touch me,” I threw back. “What’s between us isn’t just physical.”
“And that makes it easier? Fuck, I know that this is more. I know that this has the potential to be real. I am infatuated with far more than just your body, trust me. You’re incredibly smart, driven, kind, and so big-hearted. I like you, and if we were back in L.A.—or hell, anywhere but on this ship, with you in my class—I would ask you out so fast that gorgeous head of yours would spin. But I have more than you could ever realize riding on this job. I can’t risk it for anyone. And I can’t afford to—”
That crushing feeling swept over my chest again, and I lifted my hand to my heart as if I could actually hold it together, keep it from breaking. “You can’t afford to take a chance on me.”
The words were selfish on my part; I knew it the moment they spewed from my mouth. Maybe I was willing to risk my heart, but he had to be willing to risk everything, and he barely knew me. It wasn’t fair to ask, and yet that was all I wanted to do.
Instead of getting mad, he gently took my face in his hands. “No, not chance on you. I can’t afford to involve you—”
A knock sounded at the door.
“Shit. We’ll finish this talk later. Just…” He sighed, searching my eyes for something I couldn’t figure out. “Just don’t think that I don’t want this.”
He let me go and headed to the door while I got off his desk and leaned against the one in the front row instead. What the hell was he involved in?
“Gentlemen,” he said, motioning Pax and Landon through the door. “I’m sorry, Miss Carstairs must have accidentally locked it when she got here.”
“No problem,” Pax said, handing him a manila folder as Landon shut the door behind them.
Cruz stood behind his desk, flipping through the file as Landon and Pax flanked me.
“You got here early,” Landon said, a note of concern in his voice. “You could have waited for us.”
“I know, but I wasn’t in the mood to sit around waiting.” A pang of guilt stabbed my heart. I hated keeping this from them—Cruz and my past and whatever was not going on right now between us.
He kissed you.
Again.
I could still taste him, feel the imprint of his lips on mine, and God help me, I wanted more. I wanted him, and not just sexually. That would have been easier than the direction my thoughts took—to the relationship I knew could be amazing between us.
“That’s every stunt we have planned out until Miami, except the live expo,” Pax said. “We never finalize those stunts until a few days prior because—”
“You’re still working up to them,” Cruz finished, his eyes on the plans.
“Right. Look, we’re not used to answering to anyone,” Pax added, rubbing the back of his neck.
“You are Renegades, after all. The name says it all,” Cruz said, studying one of the papers.
“Right. We started in my backyard, and we were privately funded—”
“Your parents footed your bills.”
Apparently he wasn’t pulling punches tonight. Thank God I’d gotten here earlier to talk to him, or Lord only knew how much worse this could have gone.
“Not sure what difference that makes—”
“To someone like me who worked every day since he was fourteen, put himself through college, and earned even the smallest things you take for granted, it makes a great deal of difference.”
“We’re not a bunch of entitled assholes,” Landon fired.
Cruz arched an eyebrow, ever calm. In fact, the only times I’d seen him upset were directly related to me.
“Once we got sponsors, we made our own rules. We’ve been on our own financially since we were all eighteen.”
“I was seventeen,” I said with a shrug. “Their birthdays are first.”
Cruz’s gaze flickered to mine, clearly not amused.
Pax cleared his throat. “Anyway. We should have told you what would happen, especially what Penna had planned.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, knowing Pax used those words too sparingly.
Cruz shut the file and sighed. “You don’t answer to me. I’m not in charge of the Renegades, nor do I want to be. But I am responsible for you, liable for you. Which means that I expect you to act like adults, and not entitled assholes. I will afford you the same respect you show me, which today wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.”
“We thought you might freak out,” Landon admitted.
“I might have, but I don’t know because you didn’t give me that opportunity. I would have asked you for weather reports. Wind reports. Safety standby in case something happened. I would have wanted to check your rigging, known what type of chute you were using. I definitely would have told you that she should have been on an auto-pull harness instead of letting her pull the chute. It was an unnecessary risk, which for some odd reason, you all enjoy taking when it adds nothing to the stunt. These are reasonable questions. As for freaking out…” He looked at each of the guys in turn, the darkest look in his eyes I’d ever seen. “I have seen and done things that would leave you both sobbing, hysterical messes. It’s going to take a shit ton more than a poorly planned BASE jump to get me to freak out.”
The urges to slap and kiss him were equal. The man turned me into a walking oxymoron.
“We have four days until we’re in El Salvador. I’ll meet with you the day after tomorrow at noon, if that works for you. We can address anything you have planned for the second day in port.”
“We were thinking the first—”
“You’ll be with me on our history excursion on the first,” he told Pax, folding his arms over his chest.
“Right.”
Pax was holding it together really well—I’d give him that.
“I’ll see you all in class tomorrow,” Cruz said, dismissing us.
Pax was ready to explode by the time we got to my suite. “What. The. Actual. Fuck. Just happened?”
We sank into the couches, Leah and Rachel each making room on theirs while I took the oversized chair, propping my leg on the settee out of recently formed habit.
“What happened?” Leah asked, cuddling into Pax.
“We got put in our place,” Landon said.
“By who? Dr. Delicious?” Rachel chimed in.
“Seriously?” Landon asked, his eyes wide.
“Yeah. Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I mean, that’s his nickname, right? Doc?”
“Not sure he gets a nickname,” Pax growled. “What the hell does he mean I’ve done things that would leave you both sobbing, hysterical messes? Were things dangerous at UCLA?”
“He was in the army,” I snapped.
Everyone slowly turned to look at me, and I cursed my inability to think before I spoke.
“How would you know that?” Landon asked.
Rachel tilted her head at me, knowing I’d just fucked up.
“He has an Airborne tattoo on his arm,” I said with a forced shrug. “I saw it when we were in the gym one day. Explains his knowledge on chutes and stuff, too.”
“That would make sense.”
“Yeah, I thought I saw something.”
“Maybe that’s not all a bad thing.”
They bought it. I let out the breath I’d inadvertently held. “You know, I think I’m going to get some studying in, if you guys are cool?”
Pax nodded. “Yeah. Nothing we can really do until we have his list of concerns, right?”
“Right,” I said, forcing a smile. “And thank you for today. It felt great being back out there.” The rush, the fall, the moment I’d wondered if the chute would work, followed by the snap and jerk of the canopy deploying…it was all part of it—why I loved being a Renegade even when I wasn’t sure I could pull off the name anymore.
There was still that damned bike to deal with.
“It’s just nice to have you back,” Landon said.
“Yeah,” I agreed quietly as I got up to leave. “Back.”
I retreated to my room, closed my door, and leaned against it, a thousand emotions battling for prominence. Sure, I was pissed that Cruz felt the need to do exactly what Landon said and put us in our place. Sure I was pissed that we had someone we were held accountable to, but not nearly as much as I hated the fact that my actions would come back on him if anything went wrong—both in stunts and whatever wasn’t happening with us.
Like getting him arrested in Vegas hadn’t been enough.
But stronger than the anger was a burning need in my chest that wouldn’t go away. No matter how much I pushed it down, it simply came back brighter and hotter, growing every time he kissed me, every time I so much as thought about him.
It was glowing so hard I glanced in the mirror to make sure I didn’t look like a damn glowworm, that my feelings about him weren’t out there for everyone to see.
I wanted him—it was as simple and as overly complicated as that. I wanted what Pax and Leah had, that kind of complete devotion to each other. I wanted what Landon and Rachel had, chemistry so hot, so fated, that they couldn’t stay away from the other even when they tried.
But I wanted something more—to have someone who truly knew me, and not just the face I put on for the rest of the world, and I had that with him.
We’d proven we were powerless to stay away from each other, even when we both knew the situation we were in made it wrong. He already knew me on a level even Pax and Landon didn’t. And damn it, I liked him.
I wanted to be with him—the guy who slept just beneath me.
My eyes were drawn to the floor, like X-ray vision would suddenly develop and I’d be able to see if he were there or still in his classroom.
I knew the signs—hell, I’d seen them with my friends—I was heartsick. Me, Penelope Carstairs, Rebel, the girl who never let a man own her, dictate to her, or even claim her, wanted to belong to Cruz.
But what was I willing to risk for it? What was I willing to go through to be able to claim him in the same way he had already branded me?
Everything.
The answer didn’t soothe me like I’d hoped—it brought that fire in my chest to a nearly painful roar, a determination that summoned up every instinct in my body to fight, to fly.
Now I just had to convince Cruz.
