Stolen By The Queen: A Narcos Romance

Chapter 16

Camila felt the air leave her lungs as Ryan's heavy body covered hers, pushing her onto the ground. She'd just opened the bathroom door when his muscled arms wrapped around her, throwing her to the ground. She heard the gunshots, the sounds registering fear and adrenaline throughout her body before her brain caught up. 

She'd heard gunshots too many times throughout her life, especially her early years, but that didn't stop the raw, carnal fear from coursing through her veins. 

The heat of Ryan's body seeped through to her skin, her face pressed painfully to the ground as he covered her. Finally the shots stopped. The entire thing couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes but somehow it felt like hours. She heard the sound of her own labored breathing before picking up on the distant sound of incoming sirens.

"Fuck." Ryan grumbled above her, his body still not leaving hers. Camila heard the weight of his gun thumb against her ear as he pressed it into the ground, his hands flanking her head as he pushed himself off of her back. She felt a shiver ripple throughout her spine at the loss of his heat, her breathing still rapid. "Stay down." Ryan barked the command through clenched teeth as he made his way toward the wall of windows, pulling back the curtains before looking out onto the streets below. 

The thought now racing on a loop through Camila's mind was whether or not the gunshots had been them. The men who had been prowling around the exterior of her hotel. Hunting her like an animal. 

"Should be clear." Ryan turned back to face her, his eyes hard as she struggled to lift herself from the ground, her limbs trembling. She stood upright, only dressed in Ryan's t-shirt, the joggers he'd offered her forgotten in the bathroom when she heard the gunshots. The hem of the t-shirt reached the top of her thighs, the rest of her long legs exposed. Ryan's heated gaze trailed down her body but his blue eyes remained hard and impassive, as if scanning her for signs of injury and nothing more. "I'll check in with my team," Ryan ran a hand through his hair, pulling out a laptop from the duffle bag near the dresser, "see if it was a random attack or anything related to the Sinaloa Cartel." 

Camila just nodded mutely, a wave of nausea unfurling in her stomach. She needed a distraction, something to quell the rush of fear and adrenaline coursing throughout her body. She couldn't tell Ryan her suspicions. She wasn't even supposed to know who those men were, but that small, dark whisper in her mind told her that it was them. 

She fidgeted in place, needing to run or do something reckless to release this tension within her. She had days, weeks at best, based on these recent developments to make her plan a reality. If not, her life was over--either in death or in captivity to a brutal man--and she couldn't swallow down either outcome. Couldn't make sense of the jumble in her brain. 

She thought she'd been careful. She'd spent months, almost a year, meticulously laying out her plan. Hiding her location, keeping up the rouse she was still in the states, taking a job at the club to make connections that could help her get close to the man she despised. She was so close, so damn close it burned like a knife in her chest. A searing, slicing pain she couldn't think around. 

Her limbs took over, her thoughts shutting down as she crossed the small open-studio space to Ryan's foreboding form, his body rigid as he watched her. She stepped right up to his space, her eyes meeting his collarbone. She stared down at her bare feet, just an inch from his leather boots. And then she stopped thinking entirely.

Tipping her head back she stared up at him, at his granite jaw, the harsh, masculine lines of his face, the unreadable blue of his eyes. She needed to feel something, anything, to quiet the panic. To give her enough time to calm and plan her next move. To just exist without the weight of the world on her shoulders.