The first thing Abigail became aware of was that there was a heavy weight pressing down on her back and that she could hardly breathe. Concerned by this realization, she shifted slightly, and then stilled as a warm breath stirred the hair by her ear. The heavy weight was Tomasso, she realized. The same Tomasso who was a complete stranger and whom she’d been grinding up against just moments ago. At least she hoped it was only moments ago. But for all she knew, she could have been unconscious for hours.

That thought made her still and listen for the hum of the plane engine. Much to her relief Abigail not only heard it, but was quite sure she could feel it vibrating through her body from the floor. They were still in the air then. Thank God! There was still time to prepare. She just had to get Hercules off her back and . . .

Actually, she didn’t have a clue what they should do then. She had no idea how they were going to get out of this situation. Should they rush the cockpit before they landed and attack Jet’s clients, counting on surprise to help them in their endeavor?

That seemed a bit risky. Jet could get hurt in the tussle and they could crash.

So, maybe they should wait until the plane was on the ground and tackle the men as they came to retrieve their “cargo.” That too seemed risky. The men might have weapons.

Perhaps they should just wait until the plane landed, slip into the cabin when Jet knocked to announce that it was all clear, grab Jet and flee the plane for the airport. Surely they would find help there? She considered that plan and found all sorts of holes at once. What if Jet knocked as he left the cabin and they weren’t able to catch him before he was outside? She didn’t want to leave him to the mercies of his kidnapping clients. There was also the possibility that should they manage to catch Jet before he left the cockpit, they might all be shot in the back as they fled the plane for the airport.

“You smell good.”

Abigail stilled and turned her head slightly, trying to see the man on top of her. She’d actually managed to forget he was there despite her problems breathing. Now she recalled him, though, and how they’d landed in this position, or at least what they’d been doing before she’d fainted like a sissy from the strength of the first orgasm she’d had in what seemed like forever. Damn, it had been good, and it never should have happened. She had more respect for herself than this, or she should anyway. That’s what her mother would have said.

Grimacing at the thought, Abigail opened her mouth to ask Tomasso to let her up, but then closed it when she felt him shift and his weight was suddenly removed from her. Oddly enough, she immediately missed his warmth and was sorry that moving was necessary.

Abigail began to push herself to her hands and knees to get up as well, and then gasped when she was caught by the waist and lifted to her feet as if she weighed nothing. This time she didn’t make a crack about his hurting himself if he kept doing things like that as she’d done with Jet. Tomasso obviously hadn’t got a good look at her yet and had no idea how large she was, and she’d like to keep it that way. Of course, she knew he’d see her eventually, but she’d like to put that off as long as possible. Abigail had no desire to witness the disappointment that would no doubt come when he saw just how rounded she was.

“Are you all right?” he asked in a rumble.

“Yes,” Abigail murmured primly and then bent to retrieve her backpack. It too had apparently been crushed, but by both of them. The chocolate bar, when she found it again, was a little the worse for wear because of it, but she offered it to him anyway.

“Thank you,” he murmured, taking the chocolate bar. He then slid an arm around her waist, pulled her forward and bent to kiss her. Caught in the act of starting to say “you’re welcome,” Abigail found her mouth suddenly full of tongue before the words could leave her lips. And delicious tongue it was. Still, she was startled enough that it took a moment for her to respond to the kiss. But when his hands slid over her bottom, then cupped her cheeks to lift her so that there was full body contact as they kissed, Abigail began to respond.

Like the last time he’d touched her, things got heated pretty quickly, and Abigail was just thinking they were going to end up back on the floor in a heap again, when he suddenly broke the kiss and set her back down.

“Later,” he promised, then turned away and disappeared into the darkness.

Abigail blinked after him, her mind slow to recover from the passionate if brief interlude. Damn, the man was like a match to her tinder. All he had to do was touch her and she went up in flames, burning all her good intentions to behave.

Shaking her head, she focused her gaze, trying to pinpoint where Tomasso was. He hadn’t moved back to the cage where the flashlight was and was nowhere its light touched, which admittedly wasn’t a large expanse of the cargo area.

Abigail almost went to fetch the flashlight from the cage to find him, but then recalled that there was still one on the wall nearby and felt around until her hand brushed against it. The next moment she’d pulled it free and turned it on and was swinging it around the cargo area in search of Tomasso.

She found him down by the parachute she’d discovered earlier. He was examining it with interest, she noted, and wondered what he was thinking. She supposed he could escape using it, but it would really leave her and Jet in a pickle. The men would find him missing, find her there, know she’d released him and probably kill both her and Jet. Or take them to the island the one fellow had mentioned. Neither option sounded like a good one, so Abigail was more than relieved when he left the parachute in place and moved on.

A moment later he stopped again, this time to examine a set of buttons on the wall by the back of the cargo area. Abigail had no idea what they did. If he did, he didn’t say anything, but instead turned and started back towards her, asking, “How long have we been flying now?”

Abigail glanced down at her watch, her eyebrows rising. They’d been unconscious longer than she’d realized, or at least she had and she assumed he had also since he’d been lying on top of her when she’d woken. He, of course, had more of an excuse for fainting since he was no doubt still suffering from the aftereffects of the drug.

“A little over four hours,” she admitted solemnly. By her estimate, they had less than an hour before they set down in Caracas.

“Can you grab the first aid kit?” he asked.

“Of course,” she murmured and turned to where it was affixed to the wall, suddenly worried that his arm was bothering him after all. It took her a bit of time to get the first aid kit from its holder. The moment she did though, Abigail hurried to Tomasso’s side.

“I saw some ointment and bandages in there earlier. I can bandage up your arm for you if you—” The words stopped abruptly as she saw that he had paused beside the parachute and donned it while her back was turned. “Tomasso, what are you—”

Her words ended on a grunt of surprise when he caught her around the waist and dragged her to his side. Her surprise was not eased when he then hitched her up onto his hip as if she was nothing more than a child.

“Wrap your arms and legs around me,” he ordered as he strode back toward the cargo door. “And hold on to that first aid kit.”

“What—” she began with alarm, only to swallow her words as he hit one of the buttons he’d been examining earlier and the cargo door began to open, dropping slowly downward like a lower jaw would. She gaped at the growing opening with alarm and then turned to Tomasso, gasping, “But Jet—” It was too late, however. Even as she said her friend’s name Tomasso was stepping out into thin air, and taking her with him. Panicking, Abigail pushed at his chest and twisted away from him, grunting in pain when her head slammed into something hard just before the lights went out.

Tomasso caught the first aid kit as it slipped from Abigail’s hand and peered worriedly back up toward the plane he’d just jumped out of. He half expected it to turn and come back to look for them, but it didn’t. That made him wonder. If his kidnappers were aware he’d escaped, he was quite sure they’d want to turn back, and he didn’t doubt they’d force the pilot to do so. They had to know the cargo door was open, and the minute they knew, he was sure they’d go back and check to see what was happening. Tomasso was pretty sure that there must be some kind of light or warning that would come on in the cockpit so the pilot would know when the cargo door opened. If not, there should be.

On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t bother to turn back. What could they do? Fly under them and try to somehow force them back into the plane? That would take some fancy aeronautics, he was sure. He supposed it was more likely they would set down at the nearest airport that would give them permission to land, and then strike out in a boat to search for them.

That made sense, Tomasso decided, and turned his worried gaze to Abigail. She was lying limp in his hold, her head back so that all he could presently see was her chin and the two small puncture wounds on her throat from where he’d bit her earlier. It had been a necessity. Tomasso hadn’t fed in several days by his guess, and he’d needed to be strong if the escape was to be successful. He raised his arm slightly, managing to tip her head up a bit, and let his gaze shift from the small puncture marks to her face, but he couldn’t see much. Her head was still tilted back, so that the wound was out of his view. He needed to see her head, though. The crazy woman had thrown herself backward just as they’d dropped out of the plane. If he hadn’t been holding her so tightly, he probably would have dropped her when she did it. As it was, she’d tossed her head back enough that she’d banged it on the cargo door as they’d dropped out of the plane and had knocked herself out. That had definitely not been part of the plan.

Tomasso was desperate to check the wound and see that she was all right, but at the moment there were more urgent issues to contend with, like the fact that they were plummeting toward the earth at probably two hundred miles an hour.

Shoving the handle of the first aid kit up his arm to leave at least one hand free, Tomasso turned his attention downward, trying to sort out where they were and when he should throw up the pilot chute to get the main parachute to deploy. He’d never skydived before, but had once read the mind of an enthusiastic skydiver. That was the only reason Tomasso knew that rip cords had gone out in the eighties and modern parachutes had a pilot chute tucked into a pocket in the back over your butt that had to be thrown up hard over your head. Once caught by the air, it would force the main parachute to deploy . . . or so the theory went.

The problem was, Tomasso had no idea when he was supposed to pull out and toss the pilot chute. The guy he’d read had apparently counted one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, but Tomasso wasn’t sure what height that fellow had jumped from compared to what height they’d just leapt from. He had no idea what altitude the cargo plane had been flying at either. He did know, however, that they were dropping fast.

They weren’t in the right formation, Tomasso thought, the spread-eagle, flat-out position that would slow their descent. Unfortunately, with his need to hold on to an unconscious Abigail, Tomasso had no idea how to get them in that position. He certainly couldn’t spread his arms out and hold on to her too. That being the case, he decided that throwing out the pilot chute sooner rather than later was probably a good idea.

His gaze shifted again over the darkness below. Tomasso was beginning to be able to see spots of light below. His guess was that they were either towns or resorts on the islands below, and his hope was that once the parachute was up he could somehow direct them toward one of them. He just wasn’t sure how to do that.

“You live and learn,” Tomasso muttered and retrieved the pilot chute from the pocket over his butt to toss it upward as hard as he could. Apparently he did it right, as he could actually feel the parachute being jerked from its packing. When the wind caught and filled it, there was a much larger jerk as they were immediately slowed and Tomasso instinctively tightened his arm around Abigail to keep her from slipping from his grasp. Their descent slowed considerably then. It seemed more like they were floating than dropping now.

With the concern about the parachute out of the way, Tomasso was finally able to turn his attention to Abigail’s head wound. She had dropped a little lower in his hold, but her head was still tilted back, so he used his free hand to tilt it forward and frowned when he saw the blood flowing freely from the wound. The amount of blood itself didn’t worry him so much, head wounds often bled freely, but it obscured his view of the wound and he really needed to see how bad it was. Tomasso didn’t think she’d hit her head too hard, but it had all happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure. He needed to clean the blood away.

That thought uppermost in his mind, Tomasso started to reach for the first aid kit dangling from his arm, thinking there should be something in there to clean away the blood, but he then paused as he realized how ridiculous he was being. He couldn’t open the damned thing while they were dropping through the air; everything would fly out. But the blood was obstructing the view of her wound and he wanted to know how bad it was. It was also now running down toward her eyes and he didn’t even have a shirtsleeve to wipe it away with.

After the briefest hesitation, he leaned forward and licked away the blood, then pressed his mouth to the wound itself. After sucking gently for a moment to clear away as much blood as he could, he quickly pulled back to see what he’d revealed. The blood was quick to bubble back to the surface, but Tomasso was still able to see that the wound was a small quickly coloring bump and a tiny split in the skin. In truth, as head wounds went, it wasn’t bad at all. At least it didn’t look that bad, but he wouldn’t stop worrying until she woke up and he knew for sure that she was going to be fine.

Shifting his gaze from her wound to her face, Tomasso took a moment to just drink her in. Her face was rounded with high cheekbones, and her hair was a gorgeous chestnut shot through with reds and lighter browns that gave it a depth he found lovely. But it was her mouth he found his eyes constantly drawn to. She had full, pouty lips that made him want to kiss her. Even now, with her unconscious in his arms, just looking at her lips made him want to press his own to them.

Resisting the urge, Tomasso shifted his gaze to her eyes. They were closed now, but he recalled them as a beautiful bright green that sparkled as she talked. He’d noted earlier that they were also a little bloodshot. She obviously hadn’t been getting enough sleep. But the red had actually seemed to make the green brighter. The shadows under her eyes, however, hadn’t done the same.

Wondering what troubles had so exhausted and worn her down, Tomasso brushed a thumb across her soft cheek. It felt so nice that he did it again. Abigail’s complexion was perfect, if quite pale—another sign that life had been hard of late for this woman, but it didn’t detract from her beauty for him. Tomasso found her lovely.

Abigail, he thought and liked the name. His mind had still been foggy from the drugs they’d been giving him when he woke up. That was the only reason Tomasso had gone for her throat when he’d opened his eyes to find himself in the cage with her bending over him causing him pain. He’d immediately assumed she was with his kidnappers. But then good sense had returned and made him try to slip into her mind to be sure of who she was and that she was, indeed, one of the bad guys.

Instead of reading her mind and learning that she was, or even that she wasn’t, Tomasso hadn’t been able to read her at all, and that had been enough to make him stop choking her at once. He’d then fallen back in the cage, his mind awhirl. For immortals, not being able to read someone was a sign that they were a possible life mate, and Abigail was the first mortal female he’d encountered that he couldn’t read. That realization had circled around in his mind, along with the thought that it was just his luck to meet his life mate and find she was one of the bad guys.

He’d been somewhat relieved when she’d assured him that she wasn’t with his kidnappers. However, Tomasso hadn’t dropped all of his suspicions right away. At least, not until she’d started babbling. Five minutes of the woman’s nervous chatter had been enough to convince him that she simply did not have it in her to be running with bad guys. It might be foolish on his part to come to this conclusion so quickly, but he felt quite sure that Abigail was as sweet and innocent as modern society would allow. He suspected she was one of those kindhearted mortals others would take advantage of. He could be wrong of course, Tomasso hadn’t known her long, and part of his judgment might be based as much on a desire to want her to be like that, as a belief that she was, but he was hoping he was right. And if he was, he intended to protect her from her own kindhearted ways as well as the rest of the world in future.

That decision made, Tomasso’s next concern had been escape. He had been quite sure that if they were still on the plane when it landed, they would never get free, so his next step had been to get them both off that plane and away from the kidnappers.

Mission accomplished there, he thought wryly, peering down again to check their progress. They were off the plane. The problem was he suspected they were going to land in the ocean instead of one of those spots of light he could see below. Which meant one hell of a swim to reach shore . . . using one arm as he dragged Abigail behind him. Tomasso could do it. He had to. But it wasn’t going to be easy, and he was worried about the blood from her head wound attracting unwanted attention from predators like sharks. Things could get hairy.

Mouth tightening, he watched the dark water below grow nearer and began planning in his mind. Once low enough he would shrug himself out of the parachute and drop into the water with Abigail. Without their weight, the parachute should continue on past them and set down a distance away where he and Abigail would not get tangled up in either the chute or its lines.

If he had a knife Tomasso would be cutting one of the lines off now to tie Abigail to his back so that he could swim with both hands. Unfortunately, he didn’t have anything as useful as a knife in his pocket. Hell, he didn’t even have clothes, let alone pockets, he thought and then noted how low they had dropped while he thought. At the speed they were descending it would only be seconds before they hit the water.

It seemed his planning was over. And with all of his woolgathering he hadn’t managed to direct them anywhere. Not that he probably could have anyway, Tomasso acknowledged, and tried to figure out how far from land they were going to set down.

Moonlight was making things a little easier. The islands were darker masses against the water, often with lit-up sections of inhabitation. Tomasso surveyed the area below and did a quick calculation of the distance they were likely to land from the nearest land mass and almost winced. It was going to be a long night.