Rebel (The Renegades)

by Rebecca Yarros

  “—but there’s no arguing with Penna when she’s determined,” Wilder said.

  “She’s Rebel for a reason,” Landon agreed, his arm around Rachel.

  “So she’s jumping,” I said, tearing my eyes from the bluff to stare down Wilder.

  He shifted, having the awareness to look a little sheepish. “We should have told you.”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I growled.

  I didn’t miss the side-eye the team gave one another, nor did I comment on it. Once she was safe, we’d have a nice little talk where I’d explain to them that this shit wasn’t going to fly.

  I heard the high hum, the revving of an engine.

  Then Penelope rode off the cliff.

  My heart stopped, the blood froze in my veins, and every muscle in my body locked up tight. She fell so fast, I didn’t even count, didn’t pray. I couldn’t think or move.

  Then her chute deployed, and she was violently jerked, but kept the ATV straight as air filled the canopy, dramatically slowing her descent.

  Cheers erupted around me about the same time my lungs decided to function and my heart picked up a faster than normal rhythm.

  “The chute is rigged to both her and the ATV,” I said absentmindedly.

  “It’s her design,” Wilder said with pride. “We worked on it her last day in L.A.”

  The day after Brooke wouldn’t see her.

  Did her friends even realize what she was doing? It was so plainly clear to me—using the adrenaline to soothe, the stunts to hide. She was shoving everything Penelope under the Rebel mask, and they were too fucking absorbed in their happy little relationships to see it, otherwise they would have stopped this.

  She landed just outside the tarp, and the guys were off running, their arms in the air in victory. I remained on top of the ATV, able to see her smile clearly from here, but not moving. Fighting my instinct to get to her, to untangle her from the rigging, to shake her and then kiss her senseless took every ounce of my strength and concentration.

  They unhooked her, and she hugged both of her friends, that mega-watt grin in place for the cameras as she did a quick interview with Bobby about the massive stunt she’d just pulled off. Solo. With zero backup, since her friends were already down here.

  As the other ATVs returned and parked in a line near me, the trio walked over. Penelope looked up at me, her eyes as radiant as her smile. “What did you think?”

  That I want to simultaneously throttle and fuck you.

  Closing my mouth was the smartest move I could make. Pressing my lips together, I sent her a look that took that smile down to almost nothing. Then I looked past her to where Wilder stood with Landon.

  “The three of you will meet with me as soon as we’re back on the Athena.”

  That got their attention.

  “That’s right. I’m not some pushover, and I’m not an idiot, and that shit”—I pointed to the bluff—“will never fucking happen again on my watch. Not without you fully filling me in. Do you understand?”

  “We were perfectly safe—” Penna started, but I couldn’t look at her. Not when I was this angry, this raw from what she’d just put me through.

  “Do. You. Understand?” I repeated softer, in a tone that left no room for argument.

  “Dr. Delgado—” Penelope tried again.

  My eyes flickered to hers just long enough to let her know she was walking in a mine field. “One change in the wind. One more second without deploying the chute. The mass of that ATV built with the speed you’re traveling. One snap of a carabineer, and you would have…” I snapped my attention to the guys. “That’s why you were down here. In case she didn’t land it. So you’d be closer when she bled out on the sand.”

  “We had a medevac standing by. This isn’t our first ride at the rodeo,” Landon quipped.

  “Just like the one who had to airlift your snowboarder friend?”

  He paled.

  “Tonight,” I promised them in warning.

  Then I walked the hell away before I did something I regretted, like pulling Penelope into my arms just to feel her heartbeat.

  At the period in my life when I needed to stay put together more than anything, that woman was doing her best to unravel me one nerve at a time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Penna

  At Sea

  I didn’t bother with putting extra effort into my hair or makeup, opting to keep it simple. It wasn’t like Cruz was impressed by those kinds of things, anyway. That didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. My heart galloped at an alarming rate as I turned the handle to the door of his classroom.

  “One second,” he said, leaned over a stack of papers.

  I’d never gone for the studious types, but damn, he looked incredibly sexy with a backward baseball hat and a tight T-shirt. He looked like the Cruz I met in Vegas and not Dr. Delgado.

  Then again, it wasn’t exactly office hours.

  I closed the door behind me, pushed the lock, and dropped the blinds to cover the window.

  “What can I do— Penelope?” He startled when he realized it was me. “We’re not supposed to meet for another half hour.”

  “I know,” I said, sitting on the desk next to his stack of papers.

  His eyes fixed on my ass, and I mentally high-fived myself for my choice in jeans. Snapping his gaze to mine, he sighed. “What can I do for you, Miss Carstairs?”

  “You’re angry with me.”

  He leaned back in his chair—one of those armless rolling ones—obviously putting distance between us. “We can discuss that with your friends in a half hour.”

  That look would be enough to shred a lesser woman, but I dished it right back. He might own me on the sexual battleground, but I would go toe-to-toe with him in every other arena. “If you were as mad at them as you are at me, that would be okay. But you’re mad at me, and not because we didn’t clear the stunt with you but because of what we are.”

  “And what is that?” he challenged, folding his hands in front of him like he was the most relaxed guy in the world. But those brown eyes and the deepening of his accent gave him away.

  “I wish I knew.”

  He stared at me, stripping my emotions naked with nothing more than the arch of an eyebrow. “Me, too.”

  Any other time, any other place, any other situation, and I would have been in his lap, my tongue in his mouth, begging him to put his hands on me. But I wasn’t really up for a second rejection at the moment, so I kept my hands and lips to myself.

  “I should have told you about the stunt.”

  “You should have,” he agreed.

  “Not just because you’re our sponsor but because it was overly dangerous, and you—Cruz, not Dr. Delgado—deserved to know what I was doing.”

  “I did,” he said, his voice low and soft. “You sent Zoe to distract me.”

  My gaze hit my lap for a second before I found the courage to look him in the eyes again. “I did.”

  “You thought a pretty girl would turn my head enough to not notice the pack strapped to the back of your quad?”

  “Well, now that you say it like that, it sounds pretty childish.”

  “It was childish.”

  “It also worked.” Damn, that came out a shade whiny.

  A smirk played at the corner of his lips. “No, it didn’t. She succeeded in annoying me. Rachel pretty much warning me away from you distracted me. The camera crew asking asinine questions distracted me. But Zoe coming on to me? Not one bit.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  “I needed the time to set up the first part of the rig, and I knew you’d ask what I was doing if you paid close attention. Zoe can be very distracting. A ton of the boys like her.”

  “Right. A ton of the boys, which I’m not. Penelope, whether or not anything is actually going on between us, it’s pretty damn impossible for me to look at any other woman when you’re within a mile radius of me. Hell, probably while you’re on the sa
me planet.”

  My insides melted into a girly puddle of goo. “I don’t look at other guys,” I admitted.

  “I’m well aware, because I can feel your eyes on me the minute you walk into a room, the same as you do mine. This”—I gestured between us—“is not for lack of want, or hell…need. If it was a matter of either of those…” His eyes slid shut.

  This was dangerous. We both knew it, and yet here we were again. Magnets. Gravity. Chemical reactions. Whatever.

  “I should have told you, and I’m sorry. I knew that you would try to talk me out of it. That you would think it wasn’t safe—”

  “It wasn’t safe!” he snapped, glaring at me. “For fuck’s sake! Did you do the calculations? Did you test just the ATV first against the wind before you strapped yourself to a four hundred pound piece of dead weight and threw yourself off a cliff?”

  “Really, I drove it off. The velocity in the momentum sent me farther than if I had just thrown—”

  His mouth crashed into mine before I realized his body had left the chair. The kiss wasn’t gentle—it was a purely physical, carnal act of dominance, and I submitted. My lips opened for him, and then he was all I could taste, feel, breathe. The scrape of his scruff abraded my skin in the most delicious way as he slanted my head for a deeper kiss.

  This was what I’d missed. Kissing Cruz brought me back to myself. No expectations. No stunts. No cameras. Just the one man who accepted me as I simply was.

  My hands gripped the back of his neck as he pulled me forward so he was between my spread thighs. I locked my ankles around his hips, as if I could keep him there, force a submission of my own.

  “Penelope,” he whispered against my lips. “God, you scared me.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” I told him, placing small kisses along his jaw.

  He cupped my face and looked at me as ten thousand emotions crossed his face so fast I couldn’t name them all.

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “I know.”

  “We can’t.” His forehead puckered as if he was in physical pain.

  “I know that, too. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want you. Don’t want whatever this is. It just means it’s that much harder.”

  “It’s impossible.” His thumb caressed my lower lip. “Impossible to be with you. Impossible to not want you. Impossible to stay the fuck away.”

  “So don’t,” I whispered.

  He dropped my face and backed away like I’d burned him. “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t say that I want you? That you’re the only man my body responds to? That you’re the only person who seems to know who I am under all this?”

  He rested against the support pillar a good six feet away. “Do you have any idea how hard it is not to act when you say things like that?”

  “As hard as it is for me to sit here and not beg you to touch me,” I threw back. “What’s between us isn’t just physical.”

  “And that makes it easier? Fuck, I know that this is more. I know that this has the potential to be real. I am infatuated with far more than just your body, trust me. You’re incredibly smart, driven, kind, and so big-hearted. I like you, and if we were back in L.A.—or hell, anywhere but on this ship, with you in my class—I would ask you out so fast that gorgeous head of yours would spin. But I have more than you could ever realize riding on this job. I can’t risk it for anyone. And I can’t afford to—”

  That crushing feeling swept over my chest again, and I lifted my hand to my heart as if I could actually hold it together, keep it from breaking. “You can’t afford to take a chance on me.”

  The words were selfish on my part; I knew it the moment they spewed from my mouth. Maybe I was willing to risk my heart, but he had to be willing to risk everything, and he barely knew me. It wasn’t fair to ask, and yet that was all I wanted to do.

  Instead of getting mad, he gently took my face in his hands. “No, not chance on you. I can’t afford to involve you—”

  A knock sounded at the door.

  “Shit. We’ll finish this talk later. Just…” He sighed, searching my eyes for something I couldn’t figure out. “Just don’t think that I don’t want this.”

  He let me go and headed to the door while I got off his desk and leaned against the one in the front row instead. What the hell was he involved in?

  “Gentlemen,” he said, motioning Pax and Landon through the door. “I’m sorry, Miss Carstairs must have accidentally locked it when she got here.”

  “No problem,” Pax said, handing him a manila folder as Landon shut the door behind them.

  Cruz stood behind his desk, flipping through the file as Landon and Pax flanked me.

  “You got here early,” Landon said, a note of concern in his voice. “You could have waited for us.”

  “I know, but I wasn’t in the mood to sit around waiting.” A pang of guilt stabbed my heart. I hated keeping this from them—Cruz and my past and whatever was not going on right now between us.

  He kissed you.

  Again.

  I could still taste him, feel the imprint of his lips on mine, and God help me, I wanted more. I wanted him, and not just sexually. That would have been easier than the direction my thoughts took—to the relationship I knew could be amazing between us.

  “That’s every stunt we have planned out until Miami, except the live expo,” Pax said. “We never finalize those stunts until a few days prior because—”

  “You’re still working up to them,” Cruz finished, his eyes on the plans.

  “Right. Look, we’re not used to answering to anyone,” Pax added, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “You are Renegades, after all. The name says it all,” Cruz said, studying one of the papers.

  “Right. We started in my backyard, and we were privately funded—”

  “Your parents footed your bills.”

  Apparently he wasn’t pulling punches tonight. Thank God I’d gotten here earlier to talk to him, or Lord only knew how much worse this could have gone.

  “Not sure what difference that makes—”

  “To someone like me who worked every day since he was fourteen, put himself through college, and earned even the smallest things you take for granted, it makes a great deal of difference.”

  “We’re not a bunch of entitled assholes,” Landon fired.

  Cruz arched an eyebrow, ever calm. In fact, the only times I’d seen him upset were directly related to me.

  “Once we got sponsors, we made our own rules. We’ve been on our own financially since we were all eighteen.”

  “I was seventeen,” I said with a shrug. “Their birthdays are first.”

  Cruz’s gaze flickered to mine, clearly not amused.

  Pax cleared his throat. “Anyway. We should have told you what would happen, especially what Penna had planned.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly, knowing Pax used those words too sparingly.

  Cruz shut the file and sighed. “You don’t answer to me. I’m not in charge of the Renegades, nor do I want to be. But I am responsible for you, liable for you. Which means that I expect you to act like adults, and not entitled assholes. I will afford you the same respect you show me, which today wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.”

  “We thought you might freak out,” Landon admitted.

  “I might have, but I don’t know because you didn’t give me that opportunity. I would have asked you for weather reports. Wind reports. Safety standby in case something happened. I would have wanted to check your rigging, known what type of chute you were using. I definitely would have told you that she should have been on an auto-pull harness instead of letting her pull the chute. It was an unnecessary risk, which for some odd reason, you all enjoy taking when it adds nothing to the stunt. These are reasonable questions. As for freaking out…” He looked at each of the guys in turn, the darkest look in his eyes I’d ever seen. “I have seen and done things that would leave you both sobbing, hysterical messes. It’s going
to take a shit ton more than a poorly planned BASE jump to get me to freak out.”

  The urges to slap and kiss him were equal. The man turned me into a walking oxymoron.

  “We have four days until we’re in El Salvador. I’ll meet with you the day after tomorrow at noon, if that works for you. We can address anything you have planned for the second day in port.”

  “We were thinking the first—”

  “You’ll be with me on our history excursion on the first,” he told Pax, folding his arms over his chest.

  “Right.”

  Pax was holding it together really well—I’d give him that.

  “I’ll see you all in class tomorrow,” Cruz said, dismissing us.

  Pax was ready to explode by the time we got to my suite. “What. The. Actual. Fuck. Just happened?”

  We sank into the couches, Leah and Rachel each making room on theirs while I took the oversized chair, propping my leg on the settee out of recently formed habit.

  “What happened?” Leah asked, cuddling into Pax.

  “We got put in our place,” Landon said.

  “By who? Dr. Delicious?” Rachel chimed in.

  “Seriously?” Landon asked, his eyes wide.

  “Yeah. Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I mean, that’s his nickname, right? Doc?”

  “Not sure he gets a nickname,” Pax growled. “What the hell does he mean I’ve done things that would leave you both sobbing, hysterical messes? Were things dangerous at UCLA?”

  “He was in the army,” I snapped.

  Everyone slowly turned to look at me, and I cursed my inability to think before I spoke.

  “How would you know that?” Landon asked.

  Rachel tilted her head at me, knowing I’d just fucked up.

  “He has an Airborne tattoo on his arm,” I said with a forced shrug. “I saw it when we were in the gym one day. Explains his knowledge on chutes and stuff, too.”

  “That would make sense.”

  “Yeah, I thought I saw something.”

  “Maybe that’s not all a bad thing.”

  They bought it. I let out the breath I’d inadvertently held. “You know, I think I’m going to get some studying in, if you guys are cool?”

  Pax nodded. “Yeah. Nothing we can really do until we have his list of concerns, right?”