Total pages in book: 166
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
My career was over.
Chapter Four
Hudson
NYFouette92: Has anyone even seen Alessandra Rousseau since that break? And I don’t mean reused content. I bet she’s hurt worse than they’re letting on. RousseauSisters4
Four months later
Off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts
“Knock it off!” I shouted over the roar of the angry ocean and the incessant, high-pitched screaming of the midforties man whose life I was trying to save.
His screaming I didn’t mind so much.
The way he was trying to drown me—that was getting on my last fucking nerve.
I got another face full of the Atlantic as the guy pushed down on my shoulders, trying to use me as his personal flotation device.
That’s enough. Shoving his hands off my shoulders, I broke free and kicked upward, sucking in a full breath of air before manhandling the flailing guy so his back faced my chest.
“Stop it, or you’ll drown us both!”
“I don’t want to die!” he shrieked.
“No shit, me either!” I locked his arms with mine and kept an eye on his dog—a golden retriever struggling to paddle near the capsized vessel we were dangerously close to. From the timeline of the distress call, they’d been in the water over forty-five minutes, and the dog was barely keeping her head over the waves. “Hold still and let me get you to the basket. Then I’ll get your dog.”
“Fuck the dog!” He clawed at my arm, fighting to break free.
For a heartbeat, I debated the order in which I wanted to rescue these two. Clearly, the dog would be a better choice.
“You’re getting mighty close to the wreck, and we’re running on fumes,” Ortiz said through my coms, but it wasn’t like I could free up a hand to push the button to respond to the pilot hovering to my left.
Instead, I kicked us away from the sinking vessel—what looked to be a twenty-one-foot ski boat—and into the downwash from the helicopter. Water smacked us in the face, which only made the guy flail harder. He wrenched an arm free and elbowed up, catching me in the jaw.
The pain barely registered, but I knew it would later. “Get in the fucking basket!”
He damn near scrambled over me to get there. I kicked free of the line and signaled up to Beachman that the basket was ready to be hoisted.
“Roger,” Beachman answered through coms from his position on the hoist. “Reeling him in now.”
The basket rose from the waves, and I turned back for the boat.
“Just where in the hell do you think you’re going, Ellis?” Ortiz lectured through my earpiece, no doubt glaring down at me from the cockpit.
“Grabbing the dog.” I hit the button to reply, then swam headfirst toward the capsized vessel. The morning light reflected off the showroom-shiny hull—it was obviously a new purchase.
Pretty sure I heard Ortiz grumble “Of course you are” through the radio.
“You honestly going to tell me not to save the dog?” I let go of the button and continued swimming.
“Make it quick. We have maybe ten minutes of fuel.” We’d been out on patrol when the call came in. Otherwise we’d have been able to hover out here another few hours.
I battled the swells to where the dog tried fruitlessly to climb back aboard, and muttered a swear word. She was too close to the boat. Pursing my lips, I forced through a whistle. The dog perked her ears before a swell rose up and swallowed her.
Fuck.
“Don’t even—” Ortiz warned, but I already had my mouthpiece in.
I ducked beneath the surface and swam dangerously near the careening craft, grabbing ahold of the dog’s collar and yanking her surprisingly small frame against mine before swimming back to daylight. I was either wrong about the breed, or she was a puppy.
Lucky for me, the dog took a breath the second we hit air, because I wasn’t exactly certified in canine CPR. I dragged her to my chest, then spit out my mouthpiece and swam backward, away from the ill-fated ski boat that shouldn’t have been taken out of the damned bay. “You did a good job,” I told her.
“Passenger secured,” Beachman announced through the coms. “Sending the basket back for you, Ellis.”
“Roger.” The dog didn’t so much as flinch when we entered the rotor wash, and her breathing was eerily slow. Hypothermia. May wasn’t exactly hospitable to swimmers around here. “Almost there. Good girl.” I ran a gloved hand over the dog’s head.
Once the basket was lowered, I put her in first, then climbed in as gracefully as a guy in flippers could. After I had her in my lap, and a good grip, I hit the coms. “Passenger secured. Ready for extraction.”
“Roger that. Raising the basket,” Beachman replied. A second later, we had a front-row seat to the sinking of the ski boat as the ocean claimed her. I’d seen at least a hundred similar scenes in the last ten years.