THEIR_VIRGIN_PRINCESS (15 page)

Coop took out his piece and started for the cockpit, his
feet moving silently across the floor while Lan went in the opposite direction,
gun drawn, in search of the hostess. Alone, he stood over Alea.

“Come on, Princess. Get up and don’t freak out on me. I’m
going to have to touch you,” Dane explained.

Her eyes fluttered open. They had almost a dreamy quality to
them. God, she was so beautiful. Even in the midst of life or death, he
couldn’t
not
notice how fucking
gorgeous she was. Especially when she looked so soft and sleepy. Welcoming.
That was how she would look after they made love to her, when she’d taken them
all and they surrounded her. She’d look happy and exhausted and satisfied.

“You have to touch me? Oh, what a shame. Which part are you
going to touch, babe?”

He felt his eyebrows rise. “Babe?”

“You call me baby. I get to call you babe. Or maybe I should
go with sweetie pie.” Her voice was low and languid. Seductive.

Wow, she was high. Apparently a little wine and some
sedatives did wonders for her disposition. “You can call me anything you like,
Princess, but right now you’re getting on your feet.”

She shook her head, her lips pursing in a sweet pout. “No.
Need sleep. But you can touch me. You like my breasts? Touch mine. Second
base.” She giggled before sleep overtook her again.

Oh, what he would do to her if they weren’t potentially in a
fight for their lives.

“Yes, Princess, we’ll get to second base eventually—and way
beyond—but right now I need you to stand. Up we go.” He lifted her, forcing her
to her feet.

Alea groaned and tried to wiggle away from him. “This is
mean. I’m having a good dream. Go away.”

He needed to get some coffee in her, but even if the hostess
suddenly appeared and offered some, he wouldn’t trust that it hadn’t been
drugged either. But damn, where had the flight crew gone? Had they managed to
get off the plane somehow? They couldn’t have opened the door. Despite what
happened in movies, the pressure from the outside would keep the door closed,
no matter how hard someone tried to push. They would have to blow the door. If
that had happened, there would be nothing between the pressurized cabin and the
great outdoors now, and they would all have been sucked out of the plane
already.

Since he, Alea, and the guys were still in the plane, it
followed that whoever had drugged them was still on board, too.

“You feel nice. So much muscle.” Alea sighed as she leaned
against him, her fingers running over his torso as if she wanted to touch him
all over.

Adrenaline had already given him a hard-on. He did not need
her making it worse. “Baby, I need you to focus.”

Lan pushed the curtains aside that separated the main cabin
from the back. He had his backpack in his hands and tossed it on one of the
chairs, rifling through it as he spoke. “The hostess is dead. Someone whacked
her over the head with something heavy, maybe a pan. It’s not pretty back
there. Lots of blood. I doubt she’s the one who drugged us. Since I don’t think
we have a stowaway, that leaves the pilot. He hit her a couple of times. I
checked the whole back, but couldn’t find the fucker.

Fuck.
“Where is
he? We need to find him.”

“He’s in there.” Cooper hitched a thumb back toward the
cockpit. “He’s dead.”

That was bad news. Could Cooper fly the plane? He’d only
handled small aircraft with propellers before.

“Who’s dead?” Alea asked, her head coming up from Dane’s
chest. “Dead is sad. No one should be dead. Except for Khalil. He was an
asshole.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Lan asked. “Coop, maybe you should
have a look at her.”

“She’s just a lightweight,” Dane shot back. “Coop needs to
fly the plane.”

Alea gasped and tried to step back. “Am I on drugs again?
Did I take drugs?”

“It’s fine.” Dane pulled her closer, unwilling to let her
get very far. She raised her arms and gave him an ineffectual push, trying to
put distance between them. But the struggle was short-lived, and she finally
let him hold her. “Someone drugged the wine. You didn’t have much.”

“I can’t relapse. Can’t go back there. Can’t.” Tears
streamed down her face.

She was talking about the shit her captors had addicted her
to. “We’ll take care of you, baby. Don’t worry.”

“Dane, we have bigger problems,” Cooper said. “The pilot
poisoned himself, but not before he also killed the radio and all the
electrical equipment, then dumped most of the fuel.”

Cooper’s words landed like a bomb in the cabin, diving
toward the earth even now.

“Are you telling me that we’re over the Indian Ocean and we
don’t have any fuel?” Dane asked.

“I don’t know where the fuck we are. I don’t know how long
we’ve been in flight. I don’t have a fucking longitude or latitude. I don’t
have a goddamn radio to call for help because that dead fucker made sure that
we’re going to go down without any hope of sending out a distress signal,”
Cooper said between clenched teeth.

Dane pushed down his burst of panic. He had to take things
in hand or the others might fall the fuck apart. “Cooper, we’re not in trouble
because you’re going to fly the plane.”

“You know I’ve never flown anything like this,” Cooper
replied. “And it’s not really flying since we’re going to be completely out of
fuel in about five minutes.”

“Then you’ll glide us down.” Landon seemed to have picked up
on Dane’s calm vibe. “We have a couple of minutes. What are our options? Do you
see any land where we can set down? Should I look for parachutes?”

“Parachutes won’t work,” Dane replied, settling Alea into a
chair. He didn’t want to leave her alone, but this was getting damn fucking
serious. This plane and everyone in it was going down. He had ten minutes tops
to formulate the best plan for their survival. “The pressure against the door
will make it impossible to open until we get closer to the water. Our best bet
is to try to find a place to put the plane down. Coop, I need you in that
cockpit. If we’re lucky, maybe we’re not far off the coast of Indonesia or one
of its islands. Go look.”

Cooper nodded and disappeared again.

“I don’t even have a cell signal,” Lan said, looking down at
his phone.

“Cell towers don’t cover great swaths of water, man. But we
all have apps on our phones that could be helpful. Everyone try to waterproof
your phones. And save as much battery life as you can. Lan, get every bit of
food you can find in back in case we aren’t rescued immediately. We’re going to
need water. And see if there’s a life raft.”

“What’s happening?” Alea asked a bit more lucidly, pushing
her hair back with trembling hands.

His first instinct was to coddle and protect her, tell her
not to worry and to go back to sleep, but she was more than a pretty doll. She
was a brave woman, and he was going to need every available hand and resource
if they had any hope of getting out of this alive.

Dane sank to one knee and took her hands in his. “Our plane
has been sabotaged, and we’re crashing. We need to do everything possible to
mitigate the damage and find a way to survive. I need you to focus.”

She nodded, genuine tears running down her face, but he
watched as she visibly straightened her spine and gathered her strength. “Okay.
The cushions are floatation devices. There should be an inflatable raft.”

“The pilot took a knife to it,” Lan said, tossing a big
yellow thing into the cabin. “It’s useless as a raft, but we could build a
desalination unit with it. If we can find some land. I tossed the clothes out
of this case. I think it was the hostess’s. It’s now holding water bottles and
a bunch of snacks. Hope you like crackers, peanuts, and pâté. What the fuck is
pâté made of?”

He didn’t have time to teach Landon about the art of fine
cuisine. “Anything we can use to fish?”

“I’ve got land!” Cooper shouted.

Dane shoved down his relief. It wasn’t over yet.

“I’ll find something.” Lan moved quicker, running to the
back of the plane again.

Alea stood just as the plane jerked and the engines died.
She staggered, and the truth hit him. No more fuel. They were coasting now, and
that could be very bad because they were dependent on a lot of factors they
couldn’t control, like the wind, the current, and their speed.

Alea lurched toward the cockpit just as the plane started to
take a nosedive. It almost immediately corrected with a jerk, then tilted the
opposite direction. She tumbled, but Dane threw an arm around her waist,
hauling her close. She stiffened but calmed, then stepped through the door with
a gasp.

Damn it. The body.
Cooper had shoved the pilot to the floor and now occupied his seat, his hand on
the yoke. The pilot had definitely poisoned himself, as evidenced by his blue
lips and the empty cup he clutched in his hand. Dead eyes stared up into
nothingness.

Why the fuck would the pilot kill the hostess and himself,
then sabotage the plane and leave him and the others alive?

“Alea, come on. You don’t need to be here.” Dane urged her
toward the door. The last thing he needed was for her to freak out.

“I’m fine.” She pulled out her phone, all business. “This
isn’t my first dead body. Cooper, how can I help? Do you need latitude and
longitude?”

“Yes,” Cooper said. “Can you get that?”

“Alea, baby, there’s no signal,” Dane pointed out. She
wasn’t thinking.

“I don’t need a signal,” Alea insisted. “The magnetic poles
work just fine without a satellite signal. Zero-seven and thirty degrees north
by one hundred thirty-four and thirty east. I think we’ve crossed past the
Indian Ocean and into the western Pacific. We’re
way
off course, probably somewhere near the Philippines. It looks
like there are lots of little islands out there.” She seemed to notice everyone
staring at her. She shrugged a little. “What? I liked taking geography and I’m
really good at memorization.”

Damn.
She sounded
competent. Dane looked out over the horizon. Sure enough he could see little
tiny dots of green and gold in an endless sea of blue.

“I don’t know how far away that is.” Cooper wiped away the
sweat dotting his forehead. “We started at about thirty-five thousand feet.
Damn, it’s been so long. My father made us all learn how to fly cropdusters,
but they were little prop planes. I had a little training in the Navy, but…”

“What’s the wind like, tail or head?” Alea asked. “I’m
sorry. I should be able to feel it, but I’m still a bit woozy.”

Coop visibly calmed as Alea spoke, as though focusing and
doing his level best to save her. “It’s a tail wind, baby. It’s at our back. Do
you know anything about flying?”

She nodded. “I do. I took lessons when I was a teenager and
I studied hard. I always did. In a glide, we’ll lose four to five thousand feet
a minute. We’re light and have a tail wind. We’ve got around six or seven
minutes. We’re going to go past those patches of land, but like I said, there
should be other islands in the region. Get us close, Coop. Even if we hit the
water, we’ll swim. At least I hope I can swim.”

Damn, his girl was smart even when she’d been drugged. A
ridiculous pride surged in his chest. “She’s right, Coop. You can do this. And
Lea, don’t you worry. Even if you’re still weak, we’ll get you to safety. I can
swim with you on my back if I have to.”

It would be rough, but if Coop could get them close to land,
they could survive. Because they damn straight wouldn’t last in the open ocean.
This was warm water.
Sharks.
Every
Navy man knew the story of the USS
Indianapolis
.
She went down in the Central Pacific during World War II, and three hundred
were lost in the sinking. The remaining nine hundred or so went into the water.
During the next four days, almost six hundred men were consumed by sharks.

These were the waters below. No fucking shark was going to
take his crew. They were going to live, goddamn it.

First, he had to hope that Coop could actually land the
plane and keep it from breaking apart. Even if he set down on the water, they
could all survive if the crash was controlled and they got to land fast.

Six minutes
. He
had six minutes.

Dane put a hand on Alea’s shoulder. “I’m going to help Lan.
You keep Coop on the right path. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Her face turned up, and he saw a strength there that blew
him away. “We’ll be good. Get my suitcase. I’m ridiculously organized and I
pack for everything. I have a first aid kit and some other helpful things,
including a box of protein bars. I wasn’t sure I could find them in Australia.
It’s the Louis Vuitton roller case.”

Well, of course. She would stave off Armageddon while
wearing designer heels. “Will do, baby.”

He jogged back, determined to find that bag. Even if they dumped
it in the ocean, if it was close enough, he could dive and find it.

Toward the back, he discovered that Lan had made a little
mountain of crap on the floor. He’d pulled out wires, blankets, a small tool
kit.
Yes.
He’d filled a backpack with
extra water bottles and found enough odds and ends to build a desalinization
port if they ran out of water.

The wire they could fashion into hooks and weapons. The sea
would provide protein if they had the tools to get it. He knew enough about
plants and herbs to know what to eat and what to avoid. They had the tools.
They just needed the chance to survive.

He walked through the curtain and toward the back. Lan had
decimated the food station. He’d taken everything except the ceramic mugs.
Mistake.
Ceramic made great knives. They
all had a few, but it never hurt to bring more. And he’d left a pot. They would
need that. The heavy plastic of the useless life raft would mean nothing if
they didn’t have a damn container. Potable water would be their first goal. The
bottled stuff wouldn’t last.