Page 31 of The Mercenary's Guide to Mishaps and Romance

“Calm down,” a woman says as she nears us. “Just come with us or I’ll shoot you.”

“How is that supposed to make mecalm?”

“Good question,” she replies. “But not coming with us will hurt a whole lot more.”

The guy I’m riding on tries to go under the water to get rid of me, but I’m a master at holding my breath and have no issue with any of it. When he comes back up, I’m now riding his shoulders. I squeeze as tightly as I can with my thighs before jabbing him right in the eyes.

“Christ!” he yells. “Danielle, get him off!”

“I don’t want to be jabbed in the eyes. My eyes are one of my best features,” she says as she just floats and watches. “He’ll tire himself out before long.”

“Yeah, after I’m dead!” the guy shouts as he flounders some more.

“Eh.” Clearly, she doesn’t care.

“Come at me… bitch,” I toss out. I’ve never called a woman such a bad name in my life andimmediatelyfeel horrible. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. I don’t know why I said that.”

“God, you’re so cute,” she says. “It almost makes me feel guilty for this.”

She pulls out a can of mace and sprays it right at me. I flip myself back under the water and the man I’m riding gets the brunt of it.

He doesn’t even have the breath to complain. He just immediately starts coughing and sneezing and drowning a little as I push away from him to get away from the horrible fumes and slam right into the chest of another man.

“Come along,” he orders as his hand latches around my arm like a vise. He starts hauling me back toward the shore as I try to decide how hard it’d be to get her to mace this one too.

“Does anyone else find Terry’s cries irritating?” the woman named Danielle asks as she tags along.

“You were the one who sprayed him in the face,” the guy says as he casually drags me after him. It doesn’t matter how much I twist, fight, or flail, I feel like a toddler being dragged away from the toy section.

“I would never do that,” she says as we reach the shore that I’m pulled across. Surely Tavish had plenty of time to get free during all of this.

“I really think you guys should let me go. That’d be the good thing to do. You can both still be good people,” I assure them.

“Are you sure this is the right kid?” Danielle asks.

“Right? The whole thing is suspicious,” the guy dragging me over to an ATV says.

“I can help you become better people!”

“It’s kind of hilarious,” Danielle comments as I’m tossed onto the back of an ATV.

“Should we tie him to it?”

“I’ll just tase him if he falls off,” she says as she picks up a taser off a different ATV and gives the button a push to demonstrate what she could do to me. “I thought about tasing him in the water, but there was a little voice in the back of my mind that reminded me that electricity and water don’t mix andthat I didn’t quite know what it would do. I can try it on Terry, though, if you want.”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty curious now. It’d be like one of those science experiments we’d do in grade school.”

“What kind of school did you two go to?” I ask, glad for my public schooling.

The guy climbs onto the ATV in front of me and tells me to hang on, but am I really supposed to just bear-hug the enemy?

The ATV takes off so fast my head is snapped back, and I’m left scrambling to hold on to the man as the woman comes in behind me with her taser ready. Isn’t there anyone nice on this island? Someone who will take pity on me? Someone who will be like “You definitely don’t deserve to be here; we should get you home—and here, have this million dollars as an apology”?

What a mess.

At least I still have the phones that I’m sitting on as the ATV takes me away from Tavish and back toward the mansion. Like… my balls are smashed up against them, which I feel like Tavish deserves after all he’s put me through. I can only hope that I can figure out a way to get at least one of them to work.

ELEVEN

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