Chapter 2

Noah stopped, turned, looked me in the eye.

He was trying to determine if I was about to panic. I don"t panic. But I do raise concerns.

Fake it till you make it, isn"t a thing in football. You put up a real defense to their real offense, or you get run over.

"OK," he said. "That"s a valid concern. But I don"t think so. Maybe that"s what the place is going to turn into—some kind of safe house or private prison. I can totally see that coming. But if it is, we"re the first."

His hand dipped into his pillowcase. Came out with a can of sparkling water.

Hydration is always a good idea. I grabbed one that boasted about the health-giving properties of its acai-blueberry mix. We drank quietly for a moment.

Noah"s Adam apple bobbled. I wanted to touch it.

Kiss it.

Lick it.

"They"re trying it out on us. We"re the experiment," I said slowly. "The lab rats."

"Sure seems like it." He crushed his empty can one-handed. Slipped it back into the pillowcase. Environmentally aware Noah. Also, not-wanting-to leave-an-easy-trail Noah.

I crushed and packed my own can. Waited for a fuller explanation.

"Look," Noah said. "You wouldn"t normally keep people prisoner in such luxurious surroundings. It"s a place they knew about—a place that"s guaranteed to be private that they could lease at the last minute—but most people would probably visit voluntarily."

I thoughtfully dug a toe into the soft earth. The leaves underfoot were soft, not crunchy. It rained a lot here. We were probably lucky it wasn"t raining now.

"If a short-term rental was available to be rented, it"s probably rainy season," I said.

Noah laughed. "Maybe so."

"So that"s our theory. The house is a vacation rental."

"It sure hits me as the kind of place a billionaire with more money than sense might lease for a private retreat."

I nodded. The billionaire didn"t need a road. He could hike in, hike out. He could even fly in on a private helicopter.

His social media manager would love the resulting Instagrams. She"d even be thrilled to write the mandatory posts bragging about the character-building aspects of meditation and solitude. Assuming the owner of the rental property didn"t write them for her.

Fuck the character-building aspects of solitude. The fucking billionaires could have it. I for one prefer being surrounded by a stadium full of adoring fans screaming my name.

Isolation was only not crazy-making because it couldn"t be isolation with Noah at my side.

I frowned.

"What?" Noah asked.

"Short-term rentals get in trouble for having spy cams in the bedrooms and bathrooms. But..."

"I know." He jerked his chin in the direction of a tree.

I squinted. At this distance, I didn"t see what he saw. But I trusted his experience with evading security monitors.

"It"s not pointed our way," he said. "It must be watching a wider track."

"It won"t be the only one."

"Course not. We"ve passed a couple others."

I suddenly understood why he"d quietly but persistently kept the lead. It wasn"t to keep me going with the bouncing carrot of his attractive ass. "You"ve been watching for them."

"Sure. That"s why I took some of those turns you might have wondered about."

I hadn"t. I figured the game that used the trail ahead of us had created those turns. But that wasn"t important now. "What are the odds there are cameras you didn"t spot?"

"A hundred percent." Noah sighed. "I"m good, but this is an unknown area to me. I have no intelligence about who placed the cameras or what kind of game they"re looking for."

Sure, you do. Human game.

"If I don"t know who they are and what they"re thinking, I can"t get in their heads. That means I"m going to miss something."

I have to ask the million-dollar question. "How long before somebody pulls up the feed and decides they need to send in the stormtroopers?"

And why wouldn"t you bring this up before we left the house?

"You"re asking me to guess?" Noah didn"t need to wait for me to reply. "There"s probably an alarm to go with the security uploads. So immediately. They already know we"re trying something. Right now, they"re meeting somewhere to decide how to react."

It wouldn"t be a long meeting. They"d already have a plan in place for that contingency. You don"t have to play football to know that much about strategy.

He saw something in my face that made him step back. A twig crunched under his bare foot.

"That"s what we want, you know," he said. "They"re gonna need to send a boat if we"re gonna get off this island."

"I trusted you," I said. "This isn"t the plan."

"And you"ve got a better one?" He lifted his chin. Folded his arms over his chest. Noah could look cute when he was being defiant.

Suddenly, I was so not in the mood for cute.