Cold.

Everything is cold.

Cold and numb.

I'd give anything for just a few minutes under the hot desert sun. I'd take the bombs, the endless, desolate panoramas, and even one hell of a dust storm for one ray of sunlight.

Something.

Anything to warm up my icy insides again.

The phone is ringing.

Is Emily calling?

Shit, was I supposed to pick her up today? Taylor will be pissed.

I sit up and my head spins.

God, I must have drank too much.

A hand shakes me and my traumatized brain conjures up a picture of a beautiful woman, all doe eyes and long hair.

Chloe.

I shoot straight up, ignoring the vicious pounding in my head. The ringing wasn't coming from a phone. It's coming from my own ears. Chloe is laying across my legs, her eyes fluttering, and soft groans bubbling up from her throat. Then her eyes open and she looks right at me.

"What the hell happened?" she asks, her voice cracking. She wets her lips with the tip of a pink tongue and lifts her uninjured hand to her brow.

Remembering Jones pushing Chloe, who knocked me down, I scan the wheelhouse and find it empty.

"Shit!" I get to my feet and offer her my hand. She looks up at me as she takes it and I pull her up. "The bastard just can't help shoving you, can he? I'm going to kick his ass."

"Where'd he go?" she asks.

"If he's smart, he jumped ship." I go to the fridge where I found his store earlier and find the gun still there. Finally, something goes right today. "Do you see where the other gun went?"

She glances around, confused. "I must have dropped it when he pushed me over."

A quick glance around the room and the gun doesn't turn up. "Best to assume he has it."

"Gabe," Chloe says.

I cross to the dashboard and radio Tyler. The line crackles but is otherwise silent.

"Gabe!"

I radio Tyler again, but still no response. Chloe yanks at my shirt and I turn around ready to snarl. "What the fuck?"

"The captain," she hisses and forces my head around with her hands.

The space where he was propped up against the wall is vacant and he's nowhere else in sight. I stride back across the room and rip the radio off its hook. "Tyler, it's Gabe, are you there?"

"Gabe, we're here," the radio crackles.

"Thank God." I give him our location and as I'm in the middle of relaying what's happened since we last spoke, I hear the ping of a bullet off of the dashboard. I drop the mic and cover Chloe's body with my own, but not before the next whizzing bullet causes her to cry out in pain.

I don't even notice when a third cuts a path of fire through my side or when a fourth shatters the glass above the dash, causing it to rain down on us.

"Are you—"

"If you ask me if I'm okay again, I'll strangle you myself," she says. "It's just a scratch."

I push my own injuries to the back of my head. "If you say so." Pressing Jones' gun into her hands, I shelter her with my body and urge her toward a wall for more cover. "I sure hope you know how to use this."

"Point and shoot, right?" she asks.

Even if I had the time, it's not worth it to argue. "Basically," I say. "Aim for his middle. Otherwise you're bound to miss."

"Do you think he will hurt the captain?" Chloe asks.

"I think he'll do whatever he can. He's desperate. I also think you should stay here while I go try to find where he's hiding."

Her fingers dig into my arm. "I don't think that's such a good idea. He's got a gun."

My teeth flash and I gesture to the firearm I found in the refrigerator. "So do I."

"We should wait until Tyler gets here with the sheriff's."

"If we do that, then Jones will kill him."

"And if you do this, Jones will kill you."

I tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. "We don't have another choice."

She squares her shoulders. "Fine, but I'm going with you."

"I don't think so."

Her eyes flash and her pouty lips pull into a frown. "It's not up to you," she says and then skirts around me.

I grab her arm and she struggles against me. "The hell it isn't. You're not fucking going anywhere."

She gets in my face. "I think I've proved today that I won't run away from this guy. I can either go with you now, or follow you once you leave, but either way, you aren't leaving me behind," she says, then gives a pointed look at my hand still around her arm. "You can let go of me now."

When I don't, she frowns up at me.

"I'm thinking about it," I say.

She tugs her arm, but gets nowhere. "Better think fast."

"You're making me wish I was a cop so I could handcuff your ass where you'd be safe."

She tugs her arm again and this time, I let her go. As she rubs her wrist, she glares up at me. "My dad was a cop. I've got my own damn handcuffs."

I open my mouth to respond and then my jaw clamps closed. Blindly, I turn around and stride to the stairs as I gulp for air. Jesus Christ.

Surviving a psychopath hell-bent on my destruction is easy, but surviving Chloe is something else altogether.

"Gabe?" she whispers from behind me.

"Don't talk," I say through gritted teeth.

"It wasn't your fault," she says anyway.

The stairs are empty and they end in a square of flooring with yellow light pooling in the center. Smears of blood streak across from the woman Jones shot. The only thing in our line of sight is the woman's red heel poised drunkenly on its side.

"Stay behind me and for God's sake don't shoot me on accident," I tell her.

I ignore her muttered, "I might just shoot you on purpose," and focus on each step down. When I reach the bottom, I scan the shadowed main floor and find it empty.

"As if this whole night weren't creepy enough," Chloe says.

"Be quiet," I hiss.

But she's right. Ancient sconces adorn every other pole and the light is so weak it only illuminates the area directly underneath it, leaving large spaces consumed by shadows.

Jones could be in any of them. Watching, waiting. Like a malignant tumor just biding time until it steals up on you when you least expect it.

Part of my job, though, has always been to expect the unexpected. Adapt. Overcome. I don't know how I'll live with the bombshell Jones dropped, but I'll worry about the implications later. The most important thing is getting Chloe off this boat alive. She's innocent in this.

My head aches, my side is on fire, and there's still a slight ringing in my ears, but I set all of that aside. To my right, there's another door that leads down into the engine access area, but I doubt he'd go down there. He'd be cornered, no way to escape. All the same, I put my back to the water so I can limit the points of attack.

The crash of water against the side of the ferry doesn't help. I'm down nearly two senses with the lack of light and the ringing so I move toward the back of the boat on pure instinct. Chloe moves behind me, silent as a breeze.

And then I hear it. It's barely higher than a whisper, but the sound of low voices is unmistakable.

"You go now," a man says. It's too low for me to discern if it's Jones or the captain.

"No," comes another voice.

I stop in my tracks and hold up a hand, signaling Chloe to wait. She nods in return and grips her gun a little tighter. The voices are coming from the back of the boat and grow louder as we near.

"Now," the first voice says.

"I'm not—"

A garbled yell cuts off his words and then even his hoarse cries are swallowed by the resulting crash of his body against the water. Chloe and I share a look.

"Jones must have pushed the captain overboard," she says. "Why would he do that?"

"Desperation," I guess. "He may be running out of ammo. We have his other weapons. Maybe he's trying to lure us out of hiding. It could be any one of a million things."

Silence presses in around us as I strain to hear any sign of movement. Then, the crack of a gun sounds through the night.

At first, I think the gunshot went wild and a rush of relief streaks through me. I slump against Gabe's back, my forehead lolling between his broad shoulders. His warmth and his closeness are immeasurably reassuring.

It takes a few seconds for me to register the liquid on my hands isn't spray from the ocean. Absently, I bring my hands up under a near spray of light and find them covered in red.

My eyes widen and I duck around Gabe to find his face awash with anguish. I thought I could handle traumatic. Apparently, I've got a hidden talent for it. Guns, bombs, murder. But my kickass girl-power persona melts away when he goes limp against me.

I catch him, his weight listing heavily against the metal railing beside us. "Gabe?" I whisper.

His heart thunders beneath my hands and his chest heaves in an effort to catch his breath. He opens his mouth like he wants to talk, but a hiss of pain escapes instead and his knees buckle.

My own breath hitches in my throat and tears prickle the back of my eyes. "Gabe?"

His weight takes us both down to the cold, wet floor and I do my best to control our descent but he's six-foot-two of pure male muscle and I'm one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet. His head bumps against the rail and he makes a pained sound in the back of his throat.

He can barely keep his head up and his lips are pulled too tight to talk. It's pitch black and I can't even see a foot in front of my face, so I can't see where he's injured.

"Gabe?" I say, and this time I can't even hear my own voice over the sound of the waves. "I'm going to check to see where you're hurt."

He makes a sound, but I can't tell if it's a warning or an assent. We don't have time for me to second guess myself, and if he's wounded he certainly doesn't have time for it, so I take a deep breath, but it does nothing to calm my nerves. Then all I can do is start.

His hair is shorn closely to his head and aside from a goose egg, there aren't any other serious injuries. I probe the bump, which makes him wince and rear back.

"Sorry," I say, pulling my shaking hands back. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," he manages, his breath shallow. "Leg. It's—leg."

"Leg," I repeat. "Okay, right."

As I move down, my hand bumps against his midriff and he sucks in a quick breath.

"What are you..." My stomach drops when my hands come back soaked in what must be blood.

"He shot you twice?" I say incredulously. "Jesus Christ, Gabe. You aren't superman. Why didn't you say anything?"

"Put...pressure on it."

"Oh, I'll put pressure on it," I mutter. "I'm gonna help you with your zipper so I can wrap your wound up."

"Don't...have time. Need to...find Jones."

"Yeah, you sure as hell won't have time if you bleed out. Just shut up while I do this, then we'll go find Jones."

"Bossy," he says and I can hear the smile in his voice.

"Damn straight," I say. "Now shut up."

I unzip his wetsuit slowly, afraid of what I'm going to find underneath. My eyes adjust to the dark the hem of the suit reveals a track wound maybe four inches long through the fleshy part of his waist, I suck in a breath. I let it out in one shaky exhalation.

"Well, the good news is that it doesn't look deep," I say. "The bad news is that you've definitely been shot."

"Not the first time," he manages grimly.

"Now the part where you don't like hospitals is starting to make sense," I say.

I feel like a heroine in a Regency novel as I rip off the bottom part of my dress off to wrap around his waist. "I'm going to do this quickly," I say.

"Just do it."

I have to wedge my arms behind him to wrap the large strip around his stomach. The slash through his sides starts by his right hip and wraps around his side to end near his back. I fix the wide part of the strip over the wound and carefully align it to make sure it's completely covered before I arrange it on the other side and tie it off. I do it more tightly than I think is necessary because I have a feeling he's not going to take a few minutes to rest, even if we could.

I help him get his wetsuit back on as quickly and painlessly as possible. When I glance back up, I catch him grinning at me. "What?"

"You're not a nurse are you?" he jokes even though he's short of breath and grimacing in pain.

"Definitely not," I say.

He chuckles. "Maybe you should be. I wouldn't have such a bad attitude about them if I had a pretty nurse like you."

"You must be going into shock," I say and look away so he can't see the reluctant smile pulling at my lips. "Now be quiet. I've got to concentrate."

"Yes ma'am," he drawls.

My fingers tremble as I check over his leg. The material of his suit wicks away moisture, but it's slick on his outer thigh. I tear off another strip of my dress and wrap it around his leg.

"Not normally how I get women out of their clothes."

A laugh catches in my chest and I glance over at him as I tie off the tourniquet around his leg wound. "I think the knock on the head may have damaged your brain." Once the cloth is tied, I sit back on my heels. "Okay, it's not pretty and if you don't get medical treatment soon, I'm sure you'll risk infection or worse, but I think it'll do for now."

"You did great," he says.

"Thanks." I cross to his other side and wedge my shoulder under his arm to help him up. "Now let's find this guy and get the hell out of here. Where do you think he is?"

Gabe hisses in pain as he gets to his feet. "Well, he knows we're here, and he hasn't come to finish us off."

Without saying a word, we both head to the back of the boat where we heard Jones push the captain overboard. It's an arduous process. Gabe can only put so much weight on his wounded leg and I'm no match for his sheer bulk.

By the time we reach the back railing, we're both covered in sweat and panting, but the loading point is blessedly empty. One look at Gabe's face has me propping him against the railing. I look around and find a barrel for him to sit on and drag it over to him.

"Sit down before you pass out."

He glares at me, but collapses on the barrel anyway. "I'm fine," he insists.

"Yeah," I scoff. "You're so fine you're about to pass out where you stand. Just, sit there. The Coast Guard should be here soon. As soon as they get here you can be all macho, but for now, just, don't."

I retrieve the gun from where I'd stored it in my cardigan's pocket and hold it loosely in my hand. The last thing I want to do is be caught off guard. Not knowing where Jones is at is making me jumpy and there's nothing in the water behind us except the waves. No sign of the captain.

"C'mere," Gabe says behind me.

I back up toward him, keeping my eyes on the boat in front of us. The shadows and moonlight are playing tricks on my eyes. Every whisper of wind or shifting light has all of my muscles tensing.

When I get close enough, Gabe tugs me back against him. He's shivering, probably from a combination of cold, fear, and pain. The tattered suit he's wearing isn't much of a barrier from the elements.

"They'll be here soon," I tell him. As I press my body into his uninjured side, I try not to think about how hard he is—all over, or how good he smells. So not the time.

"I should be the one rescuing you," he says and it makes me smile a little to hear the petulant tone in his voice.

"Trust me, I'm happy to be your damsel in distress if it'll get us off of this thing," I say.

"Definitely no damsel. You're more like a warrior queen," he says. His voice is soft. I don't know if it's because we're so close or because he's in pain. "Don't tell me you're a police officer, too."

The thought teases laughter out and I blush. "No, definitely not. I went to college for business management and I work at a luxury travel company out of Jacksonville."

"After this," he says, "I think we both deserve a vacation."

"Only if it doesn't involve boats."

A movement out of the corner of my eye catches my attention. My body goes rock solid, alerting Gabe, and he straightens. "See something?" he whispers, all playfulness gone from his voice.

I strain to make anything out of the darkness. "Not sure. I thought I did," I whisper back.

Shadows shift and Jones appears with his hands up, which makes the hand holding the gun pointed at his head sag.

"Oh my God," I say, once he gets close enough for me to see what had taken him so long.

Jones has his hands held over his head and in them is the control for the bomb collars he'd had the hostages wear. And around his neck is a collar of his own.