Page 30 of Extracted

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Dare answered on the second ring and Dallas had never been so relieved to hear the asshole’s voice.

“I need your help.”

“Seems you need my help a lot lately,” Dare said with a snicker.

Dallas let the words roll off his back. The least annoying but also the grumpiest of his brothers was his twin, Cole, but the chances of Cole returning his phone call in the same day were slim to none. The guy liked to pretend he was dead.

“Our plane crashed in the Amazon jungle. Gemma and I jumped with parachutes, along with the pilot.” No use pretending he wasn’t with the woman Dare had helped him locate last night.

“Jeez, dude. You ever hear of taking a relaxing vacation? So what do you need me for?”

“We need to get back to the plane. My iPhone’s there, in my bag. If it isn’t burned to shit, I’m hoping you can trace it and give me coordinates.” He rarely had to use his satellite phone for emergency situations, but right now he was damn glad he’d bought one that had GPS capability—like a smartphone only better because it didn’t rely on networks.

“All right. Hold on while I do that. You’re lucky I’m home right now.” Rustling sounded in the background. “I’ve got your number punched in,” Dare said, a minute later. “Send me your coordinates, just in case, while I wait for the software to locate your phone.”

Dallas quickly acquired his location and texted it to Dare. “Done.”

“Okay, I’ve got your phone tracked. Can’t say for sure if the plane is with it.”

Dallas’s phone dinged. Gemma hugged his side, her body radiating relief. He copied and pasted the longitude and latitude coordinates Dare had sent into his GPS. A circle swirled on the screen.

He glanced up at the sky through the shroud of trees. It was too hard to tell exactly where the sun was, but it couldn’t be earlier than 2:00 p.m., which meant they only had so many hours before nightfall. When they’d be much more vulnerable to predators.

The screen brought up their route. Almost six miles. He reported that information to Dare.

“That should be doable. How can I help? I don’t know anyone in Colombia right now, but I can call a search in.”

Dallas snorted. “You really think that’s a good idea?”

“I know traipsing through the Amazon sure as hell isn’t.”

“I’ll call you when we get out of here.” Dallas disconnected and brought up the GPS again.

“Six miles?” Gemma said, her breasts pressed against his forearm. “That’ll take us hours.”

“Right. So we’d better move quickly.”

She held out her hand. “I’ll navigate. You can’t move brush out of our way and keep an eye for predators while watching the screen.”

He handed the device over, and her free hand curled around his bicep in an all-too-comfortable way. Her touch sizzled along his nerve endings, reminding him of the crippling relief that had encompassed him when he’d heard her shouting back at him.

He’d been paralyzed. Had thought he’d finally gotten jungle fever. But no. She was here in the flesh, and if he didn’t watch every step they made, one or both of them might die.

He’d been in shitty situations where death was a viable consequence more times than he could count.

Never had it bothered him as it did now.

It could just be that the thought of being jaguar food was really unappealing. Or maybe that he cared more about Gemma’s survival than his own.

“Looks like we keep heading north for a hundred yards and then veer northeast.” She nodded at the tangle of vines.

He brushed away the thoughts poking his brain, hefted the stick, and swiped the thick vines ahead of them down. He’d gotten used to the squawks and hisses of enraged animals. As long as those animals weren’t poisonous or bigger than one of the little tree monkeys that watched them with curious eyes, he could take it.

What he couldn’t take was the pressing sense of danger at the back of his neck. They’d be lucky to have five or six more hours of daylight. If they didn’t get out of here before nightfall, things could get very, very bad.

Hours later, Gemma’s hand had long since fallen from his arm.

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