Wilder

Every time he hit the dirt, I felt the crash in my bones, the scrapes on my own skin. I rubbed my hands over my bare arms as he picked up the bike again, giving me the thumbs-up.

When the hell did I get to give the thumbs-down?

Selfishly, I was exhausted. My eyes tracked every motion around Paxton, watching to see if someone messed with him, the bike, the ramp, the crane…all of it. It had to be someone close to him, someone familiar with the gear and his routines. We’d ruled out Little John last night over a quiet dinner—after all, the rigs had been found on board, and Little John hadn’t been on the ship since Miami.

That only left every other Renegade to question.

“It’s not easy to watch, is it?” Brooke said, sitting down next to me.

“Hey, when did you get here?” I asked.

She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand. “This morning. I had to do some tech work on the website and the channel. We’ve been hacked a few times since we set sail, and a bunch of the videos were taken down.”

“Do they know?” I motioned to where Paxton was discussing the last jump with Landon and Penna.

“Yeah, Penna’s the one who asked me to look at it. I used to run all their site stuff before they blew up big, and she’s not quick to trust people, even if she’s paying them to maintain the site.”

A sick feeling settled in my stomach. “Do you think it’s malicious? The videos coming down?”

She shrugged. “I’m not skilled enough to tell you that. I don’t know. But I can say that there are a ton of worse things they could have done in there than just take down some videos.”

As a single incident, the site hacking didn’t seem too bad, but when combined with the mishaps with Paxton, it was adding up to something that had my stomach twisted in knots. Plus, if Pax knew, why hadn’t he told me? Because you would have screamed until he shut down the practice. “Right.”

I was going to hand his ass to him later.

“It’s probably some stupid hacker kids out for bragging rights or something. I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” she finished. “Are they done for the day?”

“They shouldn’t be, it’s not even lunch—” The words died on my tongue as Paxton stripped off his chest protector and then the Under Armour beneath it, leaving his torso deliciously bare. Sweat ran down the carved lines, making his tan skin glisten in the sunlight. The nasty bruise along the side of his rib cage was turning green, but even that didn’t detract from his appeal. He could probably radiate sex in a full body cast.

All it took was one look in my direction and my body was humming, despite the fact that he’d made love to me before breakfast.

Or rather…I’d been breakfast.

He grinned as he walked up to us. His blue eyes held me captive as he bent to kiss me. “You look good enough to eat.”

I raised an eyebrow, and he laughed. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had this morning on the brain. “Well, I think we should probably get you some lunch, don’t you?” I asked.

His eyes dropped to my lips, and he lifted me out of my chair by my waist, pulling me against his chest. “Are you offering?”

Yes. “No. I meant food. Real food. The kind that fuels that body you’re torturing out there.”

“Oh, you fuel me, Firecracker.” He kissed me again, and I nearly forgot where we were.

“You two are nauseating. Cute, but vomit-worthy,” Penna said from behind him. “Let’s get going; our reservation is in about thirty minutes.”

“Reservation?” I asked.

“I’m taking you to lunch,” Paxton answered. “So if you’ll go with Penna, I’ll hop in the shower real fast.”

“It’s a group date,” Landon added.

“A group date,” I parroted. “I didn’t realize anyone else was seeing anyone,” I mused out loud.

“Oh, well, you date one of us, you kind of get us all,” Penna said with a grin.

“That’s a show I’d pay to watch,” Landon said with a wiggle of his eyebrows in our direction…until he caught Paxton’s death glare. “You know… I think I’ll go wait on the plane.”

“Plane?” I looked up at my boyfriend. Boyfriend. How amazing is that?

“I didn’t want our first official date to be ordinary,” he said with a soft kiss on my forehead.

“Oh, nothing with you could ever be ordinary.” I laughed.

“Thank you.”

I tilted my head. “I’m not sure that was a compliment.”

He held my face in his hands and kissed me softly. “Wait and see what I have planned for us.”

…

“You want me to what?” I asked a few hours later, standing on a hilltop in Zakynthos, over three hundred miles away from Mykonos.

“BASE jump,” Paxton said, positively giddy.

“You want me to jump off a thousand-foot cliff? Are you out of your mind? I don’t even know how to operate a parachute.” No way. No freaking way.

He brought my hands up to his heart, as if the beat would reassure me. Damn it, he was right. “First, it’s actually only nine hundred feet, and we’d go tandem—together. I’ll work everything, and you’ll just enjoy the ride.”

All around us, the Renegades were strapping on their harnesses and parachutes. Little John was even helping Brooke into one.