The menace was back in his voice. Gina barely repressed a shiver. “Yes.”
By that time they’d almost reached the mouth of the bay fronting the beach that was her target. The water before them wasn’t quite as rough as the waves they were riding, although tall whitecaps rolled angrily toward shore, and near the beach the surf was white with foam. As they flew past, the giant waves they were leaving behind broke over a trio of building-size rocks that served as a breakwater, booming as they showered the boat with a fine mist of icy spray.
Gina barely felt the droplets hit. She had both hands clamped around the wheel as she piloted the boat through the rocks. All her focus had to be on keeping the boat on course as she pointed it directly toward the smoothest section of beach.
Given the turbulence and what was certain to be the concurrent state of the undertow, to say nothing of the temperature of the water, she wasn’t even going to try to bring the Zodiac in in the usual way, which, absent a dock, involved stopping a few yards from shore, hopping out, and pulling the boat through the surf to land.
“Hold on,” she threw at him over her shoulder. “I’m going to beach it.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead he gripped the seat hard with both hands, one on either side of her, which she took as an acknowledgment of her words. He was so close behind her now that he was practically breathing down her neck, boxing her in with hard arms and the solid wall of his chest, but there was nothing she could do to get away from him at this point, and, anyway, she couldn’t worry about him at the moment. Bringing the boat in had to be her only concern.
Steering as best she could given the buffeting the boat was taking from the wind and waves, she sent the boat racing toward the beach. At the last possible minute she shifted into neutral and threw the lever that lifted the motor clear of the water. Clenching her teeth, hands clamped around the wheel, she prepared herself for a hard impact as the force of the huge wave they were riding carried them the rest of the way in.
Gina let out an involuntary cry as they hit land with a grinding jolt that threw her forward, slamming her painfully into the wheel, driving the binoculars that still hung around her neck into her breastbone. The stranger crashed into her, heavy as a sack of cement, his chest colliding with her back with the approximate force of a giant sledgehammer. Gasping as the air was driven from her lungs, Gina could only lie helplessly against the wheel with him draped on top of her as the boat scraped over the beach, slewed violently sideways, and then finally shuddered to a halt maybe six feet or so beyond the reach of the surf.
For a moment after they stopped, Gina lay unmoving. The wind had been knocked out of her. Aching, slightly dazed, she gasped for air. After a moment, he levered himself off her. Free of his weight, she finally managed to suck in enough air to fill her lungs.
The world instantly came back into too-sharp and unpleasant focus.
Pushing away from the wheel, she coughed, wheezed, and coughed some more.
“Okay?” he asked. At least he sounded minimally concerned about her well-being, which she took as a good sign. He wouldn’t care if she was hurt if he meant to hurt her himself, would he?
Not that she intended to wait around to find out. Now that they were safely ashore, she was going to ditch him just as fast as she could. She’d saved his life, repaid a little of her karmic debt as it were, and at this point taking care of number one became the most important item on her agenda. He didn’t know it yet, but as soon as she could get off the boat they were going to go their separate ways.
“Yes.” Gina was still taking careful breaths and trying not to wince from what felt like the severe bruising of her chest. If it hadn’t been for the cushioning properties of the life vest and her parka, she thought the impact probably would have cracked a rib. There wasn’t time to sit around assessing any possible injuries she might have suffered, however. She needed to move.
The storm was already barreling into the bay. The breakwater rocks were no longer visible. The waves that had carried the boat in had increased in size until they were now towering walls of water thundering to shore. In the few minutes since the boat had skidded to a stop, the air around them had darkened and taken on a greenish tinge. The surf had risen to the point where frothy fingers slithered under the far side of the boat. The wind howled rather than moaned.
Slanting lines of snow obscured her vision. What once had been flakes now felt like hundreds of icy needles hitting her skin. The temperature had dropped so that each exhalation frosted the air. She could see individual bolts of lightning as they zapped to earth inside the clouds. The pounding of the waves against the no-longer-visible breakwater boomed like cannon fire.