Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

LOGAN

A fter our steamy make-out session, we left the electrical room and headed back to where we had been before. My cock bemoaned having lost the opportunity to get inside her twice in one day, but we hadn't had much of a choice.

Not this morning, and not now either.

While I'd have preferred to have her riding me as we rode out the storm in turn, it just couldn't happen. I groaned internally as I followed her back into the corridor, seriously wondering when I'd become so responsible.

There had been a time—not very long ago—that I'd happily have spent the afternoon hooking up with her in that room and not given a damn about the consequences. Not about who knew, or what was happening outside, or who it was happening to.

Unfortunately, it turned out that I had become responsible and that said consequences now mattered to me—even more so than the desires of my dick. Mira turned her head to look at me over her shoulders, her gaze so soft and heated all at the same time that I considered dragging her right back into that room as our eyes met.

But then I caught a glimpse of something behind her that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The spot where Andrew had been sitting was empty. I broke eye contact instantly, looking around, up and down the corridor again and again, but he wasn't there.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

The cusses echoed through my head with every beat of my suddenly pounding heart.

Mira had cottoned onto the fact that something was amiss. As I watched, her head swiveled and she noticed the empty space immediately. Her eyes widened, her cheeks grew pale, her lips parted, and her spine snapped straight as she realized he really was missing.

"Where is he?" she asked out loud, storming toward the crew of men who were milling around. "Where did he go?"

One of the guys finally cast her a lazy glance, his features pinching when he saw the panic on her face. "Where is who?"

"Andrew," she snapped. "Your fucking boss. Where the hell did he go?"

The guy blinked a few times fast, looking around as if realizing for the first time that the man wasn't among them anymore. Mira gave up on him, throwing open the doors on either side of the corridor and checking inside each one, becoming more and more frenzied as she emerged from every room without him.

Shit!

My mind reeled as I stood there, trying to process the fact that we'd lost a potential consultant—in a storm. In the middle of the ocean. On a dangerous vessel he shouldn't have been roaming free on.

Fuck.

I was way out of my depth and I knew it, but as I tracked Mira's frantic movements and wide, wild eyes as she darted up and down the corridors, I knew I was going to have to keep a level head. With that thought in mind, I finally forced my feet to move, going after her and wrapping my fingers around her wrist when she was in reaching distance.

"Mira," I said, firmly but gently. "Look at me. Stop. Just look at me."

Her chest rose and fell as she spun to face me, a frown puckering her forehead as our gazes clashed. "What? I don't have time for this right now, Logan."

"Yes, you do," I said patiently. "Just listen to me, okay? I don't know where he went, but for all we know, he's just gone to look for a toilet. Or to get a drink of water. Just take a deep breath for me, okay?"

She kept frowning for another long minute before she humored me, inhaling and exhaling a few times before she finally nodded. "You're right. Okay. Yes. You're right. Maybe he's just wandered off somewhere, but Logan?"

"Yes?"

Her eyelids shuttered as her breathing grew shaky. "If that's not the case…" She trailed off and opened her eyes to look at me again. My heart lurched into my throat at the fear, resignation, and worry staring back at me. I frowned. "There's no way he'd have tried to go back across the bridge, right? Mira? Is that what you're thinking?"

She didn't answer me immediately, but she glanced at the door we'd come in through and I saw the doubt tightening her features. "I don't know. I hope not, but he was pretty adamant about wanting to go back and now he's gone."

Taking a step back from me, she put her hands on her hips and turned to his crew, carefully studying each man in turn as she spoke. "Where did he go? Did anyone see him leave? Which direction did he go in?"

"We didn't see him go, ma'am," one of the guys said, a rugged, wrinkled man who seemed to be about my own age but he must've spent a hell of a lot of time in the sun for his skin to look the way it did. He glanced at me but addressed Mira. "Mr. Jones is probably right, though. He's probably just gone to take a leak."

She didn't seem sure at all, lifting her hands to link her fingers together on top of her head as she spun in a slow circle. I could practically see the gears turning in her head as she thought over the facts we had.

"It might be, but every man needs to be accounted for in weather like this," she said. "We have safety protocols for a reason."

Her hands dropped back to her sides and she made a beeline for the small window facing the bridge. Pushing herself up on her toes to get a better view, she planted a palm flat against the wall and either side of the window and leaned forward.

"Damn it. The rain and mist are making it impossible to see clearly," she muttered. "I can barely see the lights from the other platform. There's no way of knowing whether he's gone out there."

I walked up to her side, peering out the window over her shoulder. The extra few inches of height I had didn't make a lick of difference to the visibility, though. Between the sheets of rain, sea spray, and mist out there, it was like looking into a gray abyss.

"I doubt he'd have gone out there," I murmured to her as I stared into said abyss, wondering how the hell the sun was just gone. It would've made a perfect setting for a horror movie. "Even if he did open the door, do you really think he'd have gone into that?"

She shrugged, glancing up at me with the worry so intense now that it was like a live wire crackling behind her eyes. "I think he's a stubborn man who didn't want to listen to us in the first place and then disappeared as soon as we stepped away for a minute."

"We need to go out there and start looking for him," the rugged guy said, pressing his hands down on the floor like he was about to get up.

I turned to him, sizing him up and wondering if he stood a chance against that wind out there. He was bigger than me, which definitely wasn't a good thing in this kind of weather, but he seemed confident as he climbed to his feet and crossed his arms.

"That's probably a good idea," I said reluctantly.

While I was completely out of my element in this situation, it didn't take a genius to know that we couldn't just sit tight while someone was missing. Plus, experience or no, this was still my rig. Someone had to step up and it was going to be me.

But at the same time, I was out of my depth, out of my element, and unfamiliar with the safety protocols called for by this situation, and I wasn't stupid. I wasn't about to put lives at risk while I stepped up, so I turned to Mira.

"What's the procedure when something like this happens? Logic is telling me we should go look for him but confine our search to anywhere he could've gone inside."

Mira rounded on us all, stepping away from the window and shaking her head. "You're keeping your asses in this room, got it? All of you. From here on out, no one leaves. No one goes anywhere without reporting to me, and if you want to go outside to look for your boss, you're going to have to go through me to do it."

She wasn't messing around. That much was obvious.

A few of the guys exchanged eye rolls and shrugs, and Mira huffed out a breath. "Look, I'm worried about him too, but I'm not letting anyone out of my sight. Searching for him means splitting up, which means putting more of you in danger. I'm sure you've been on rigs before, but you haven't been on this one. The last thing we need is for more people to go missing."

She looked at me. "It would've been a good idea to search for him inside if anyone here actually knew where they were going on this rig, but they don't. You don't. The best and safest thing for us to do is to stay here, together, wait it out, and then launch a search with my crew once the weather clears."

"That could be hours," Rugged Guy argued. "If he went outside, slipped or got blown over, and got hurt, he could be lying somewhere bleeding out right now."

"That's true," she said. "If he went outside, it's very possible that's exactly what's happening, which is why no one is going out there. It's also why no one is leaving the room. Stay where I can see you."

"Do you want to hold our hands if we need to take a piss?" another guy snapped at her.

Mira scoffed, rolling her eyes at him. "If it means keeping you alive, I'll even hold your tiny dick for you. Now pipe down and settle in. From the looks of things out there, we're going to be stuck in here for a few hours. Andrew shouldn't have left, but he has. He assumed the risk and whatever is happening to him right now is on him, no one else. If he's still alive by the time the weather clears, we'll do our best to make sure this stupid mistake isn't his last."

At those words, the contracting crew finally grew quiet. Because no one had said it yet, but we were all very aware of the fact that he could already be dead and now that she had said it, reality seemed to be dawning.

As Mira moved back to the window, I went with her. As I had been before and was sure I would be again, I was damn impressed by the way she handled these men. She really stood her own without hesitating and without so much as a flinch.

Frankly, when she was like this, I didn't know whether to be scared or turned on. Maybe a little bit of both. It was a weirdly tantalizing mix, but once again, the turned-on part of the equation would have to wait.

We had a contractor missing and Mira's words weighed heavily on my sense of responsibility. I had asked him to come out here, but he had possibly gone running off into a monster of a storm. That wasn't on me, but shit.

I was not looking forward to finding out if he'd made it across that bridge to the other side, or if he'd crossed a whole different bridge. The rainbow bridge. That one that led to the ever after. The one that could bury me in a pile of tedious lawsuits if what we all suspected turned out to be true.