The Rivals - Dylan Allen Page 0,336

soon as my legs touch the glass bottom gondola surface, they tremble and send me swaying. Stone’s grip tightens on my arm and holds me steady. “Woah, got you,” he murmurs in my ear. One of the guides drops to his knees and starts to loosen my harness and Stone and I exchange a grin.

“You made that look easy. And I know it’s not. I’ve done this twice before, and it gets easier. But my first time I almost bailed. And it wasn’t anything as badass as jumping from a gondola. You were afraid and you did it anyway.” He strokes my arms with his thumbs, his eyes telling me before he mouths. “Proud of you, Regan.”

My smile, so wide my cheeks hurt, it’s the highest praise anyone could give me. “Me, too,” is all I can manage. I’m tongue tied under the weight of his praise and don’t know what to say.

But when he asks, “How do you feel?”

I find my voice instantly. “Transformed.”

Chapter 22

Jealous

Stone

“Come dance with me, Stone,” Regan calls from the dance floor, her smile brighter than all of the oil lamps burning around our camp.

“No, go ahead. I like watching,” I force a grin and she pouts. I hold the smile in place until one in the seemingly endless stream of geriatric men who are our fellow campers grabs her by the waist and whirls her around to her irritating shriek of delight.

I force myself to watch him, twirl and fucking dip her. It’s punishment and conditioning exercise all at once.

I thought I was doing her a favor today.

I thought it would be fun to coax her into my bed tonight. That I’d had this wild fantasy with the woman of my dreams and go back to life as I knew it.

Then, I jumped off that gondola.

As I’ve done every time I’ve bungeed, I focused on one thing I want more than anything else as I stood at the ledge. The thing that I’m going to never take for granted again if I survive. Because, no matter what I said to Regan, I know that anything could happen. Not just here, but anywhere. I’ve seen babies go from looking perfectly healthy to being dead in minutes. I don’t take anything for granted.

The first time I bungeed I thought of my brothers. I’d been slacking on calling them regularly and vowed to remedy that. The second time, it was my fellowship.

Today, I expected my thoughts to be focused on the job I’m waiting to get a confirmed start date for. This wasn’t just the culmination of years of sacrifice and hard work. This job, and the prestige attached to it, will also go a long way to proving myself worthy of my stepfather's priceless gift – the last name he gave us when he adopted Dare, Beau, and me. He also left us each a small fortune in annuitized trusts and college tuition funds.

I’ve only touched that money to pay for school and to put a roof over my head. But until I could be a credit to his name, I lived on what I earned. This job is my chance to make him proud and to show that we were worthy of his gift. That I’m nothing like my mother.

But as I stood at the open door, poised to jump, all I could think about was her. I plummeted down thinking that if I didn’t get to hold her hand all day again, kiss her in an alley again, bury myself inside her again, that I might as well die now.

I rode back up to the gondola, exhilarated by the knowledge I had her all to myself for the next few days. And when they pulled me back inside, I pounced; kissing her until we both couldn’t breathe. Any reservations she’d had before we came seemed to be gone. She kissed me as ardently as I kissed her. On the two-hour drive to Balandra, she spread her thighs so I could finger her while I drove. I leaned back when she lowered her head to my lap to suck me off. We held hands like our lives depended on it.

But, by the time we were walking down the pier to catch the boat that would take us from La Paz to the Island Isla Espiritu Santo, reality started dropping reminders.

We were halfway to the boat when we heard a woman’s panicked voice calling out “Regan!” over and over from the dock. She dropped my hand like