I clenched around him, unsurprised to find him just as hard now as he had been a minute ago.
“We’re going to die of dehydration before the night is over,” I moaned lightly.
He leaned forward and nipped my ear, and the strangest sense of peace swept over me.
“I tried to do this once with another man.”
He stiffened, pushing himself even further inside of me despite his intentions.
“I couldn’t do it,” I whispered. “He was a good man. A good friend, but… there was something wrong with me. Something that you fixed.”
“What was his name?”
My smile was wide as I said, “Cord.”
“I hate that I can’t hate him.”
When he started to pull out of me and away, I grabbed his behind and held him to me.
“Stay.”
And he did.
But not still.
At least not for long.
Chapter 10
We all have that one friend you need to say ‘be nice’ to before you introduce them to someone. I’m that friend.
-Audrey’s secret thoughts
Audrey
I clenched my eyes shut in horror as the driver took a turn at thirty miles an hour…on the wrong side of the road.
I was going to die.
I was literally going to die, and I hadn’t even told the man currently occupying the front seat how much he meant to me.
“Doesn’t Honduras have any traffic laws?”
The laziness in Tobias’ voice would’ve fooled most people, but with the amount of time I’d been spending with him lately, I wasn’t fooled.
Tobias was about to freak the fuck out.
Being with the Alabama Highway Patrol, he’d seen a lot, and he had responded to quite a few wrecks in his career. Likely he wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the seemingly inevitable accident that was waiting to happen.
“Oh, yeah!” The woman on my left, the tour guide for today’s excursion into the world of Honduras, nodded her head. “Lots of laws.”
I was seated on a bench seat directly behind Tobias, with the tour guide directly beside me. To my left
“Are they enforced?”
I bit my lip at his question, hearing the tightness in his voice.
He sounded relaxed, yes, but with the captain chair he was sitting on, it enabled me to see his right leg. His thigh tensed each and every time the driver veered off the normal side of the road.
I gasped when I saw potholes the size of a small Texas town taking up not just one side of the road, but both.
Wondering if he was going to slow down, and it didn’t appear that he was going to do so, I nearly screamed when he drove off the road and up onto the curb. He then proceeded to drive in the grass, coming right up behind some school-aged girls before they casually dodged out of the way as if they did this every day.
Which, if the ease of their movements was any indication, they probably did.
I looked behind us, past the other dazed passengers who’d been unlucky enough to get onto the same bus as us, and saw three busses behind us taking the same path our driver had blazed.
Shaking my head, I turned back to the front and listened to the woman explain.
“Speeding, they’ll cite you,” she said in thickly accented English. “And driving without a license is a pretty serious offense, too.”
“What about driving on the wrong side of the road?”
I looked at the woman that was sitting on the tour guide’s other side. She was in her mid-thirties, and she’d been staring at Tobias with longing in her eyes since we’d gotten into the van.
I’d been introduced to her earlier. She was a Sheriff who was in the same county as Tobias, and I wanted to gouge her eyes out with my mascara wand the moment she started talking to him like an old friend.
They’d been talking about work for the majority of the trip, and between squeezing my eyes shut and cursing her in my head, I was on the verge of a headache.
“The potholes are really bad,” our tour guide shrugged. “But, we are used to it.”
I rolled my eyes to the seat in front of me.
The handle on the seat in front of me was well used. I could see the creases in the leather where many hands had grasped it much the same way I was doing now.
When the driver of this twenty-five-passenger bus passed a slower car that was obviously occupied by a tourist couple, I realized that I might very well have made the wrong decision in choosing this particular excursion.
I leaned forward and placed my arm through the gap between the mini-bus’s wall and Tobias large, muscular shoulder, and wrapped my arm around his chest.
“I think, if we survive this trip, we should walk back,” I whispered into his ear.
He started to chuckle quietly, his hand coming up to link with mine.
“I chose one tomorrow that we have to drive for over an hour and a half. Let’s just hope they don’t all drive like assholes.”
Wasn’t that the truth.
Though the handle on the back of Tobias’ seat was digging uncomfortably into my chest, I stayed where I was, my forehead resting on Tobias’ shoulder between the wall of the bus and the seat, and spoke quietly with him for the remainder of the time it took to get to our destination, which was a beach on the ‘Crystal Beach Coast’ where the tourists were taken.
And I could see why.
Every single stretch of sandy ocean frontage that we’d passed was littered with trash, and there was no way in hell I’d get in that water if they took me there.
Luckily, from what our tour guide had explained, the beach we were headed to was a private one, and only the tourists who booked this particular adventure were allowed to use it.
The ride itself took thirty harrowing minutes, and by the time we’d arrived, I was the first one off the bus.
Technically, the tour guide was supposed to tell us where to go, but my stomach was in knots, and I was about thirty seconds away from puking.
The minute I was on solid ground, I bent forward, hands on my waist, and breathed deep.
Even when that large, familiar hand spanned the width of my back, I still didn’t stand up.
“You gonna live?”
There was no humor in his voice.
We’d both just lived through the most terrifying ride we’d ever experienced, where neither one of us had any control over the situation. For two people who liked control, that was a big problem. Tobias was a man, an officer of the law, and men like him just didn’t give up control. But I needed control in order to function through my daily activities.
“I could probably walk back and make it to the ship on time if I start now,” I muttered darkly, standing up finally.
“Amen to that,” a man at my back grumbled.
I looked at the man and smiled.
“Hello, Amos,” I grinned. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
My eyes started to wander around the area.
We were in a long driveway of sorts, lined by trees, that led to a path that would take us to the beach. The path was shaded by more trees and went down a hill around and around a bunch of Tiki-hut-type buildings where they sold souvenirs and food.
He shrugged. “Came on some fuckin’ monkey adventure Asher wanted to go on,” he said. “What are y’all doing?”