“What’s—” But she placed a fingertip over his lips, leaving it there until she was assured he wouldn’t ask.
He traced the same route again, but she shuddered slightly when he traced that hidden line once more. After that, he kept his hand clear of it.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she relaxed and finally fell asleep in his arms.
He watched the long waterfall out the window as the sun moved across it. The steady flow was interrupted by gusts of wind up the canyon, or maybe whimsy of the water. With each tiny shift, it caught and reflected the sunlight in unexpected ways.
Was that what was happening? Had Tanya somehow shifted in the light?
Three years ago she had embodied the unexpected—the wildly sexy, outrageous warrior. Now she was something else.
And he wanted her more.
Ever so slowly, Chad retraced the line at her waist. Then as he let his hand drift up her back, he felt more lines. Deep, subtle, not on the skin but under it. They lay like a hidden map that he slowly followed while the sun splashed and the water shone.
The lines almost followed the twisting lines of the falling water.
But not quite.
Then he knew, and he couldn’t suppress the cold chill of rage that ran through him.
He remembered Joncey. A jockey at Hazel Park race course, he’d won a horse race he was supposed to lose. He’d been whipped nearly to death, then dumped in the street near his and Wollson’s squat. Joncey managed to live until the medics arrived—they were never in a real hurry to enter that neighborhood. He was DOA before they closed the ambulance’s back doors. His back had been crosshatched with bloody gashes until there wasn’t a patch of skin bigger than a man’s palm that wasn’t sliced. Whipped worse than any horse.
Tanya’s back wasn’t that cut up, but it was bad. And it was deep. Not with the cruelty of the cuts, but with age. How old had she been when she’d been given those scars? They were healed now and covered by clean skin. Only slow and tender inspection revealed the deeper scar tissue.
Revealed a past she had shrugged away like no more than an unpleasant memory.
Crap! And he thought that he’d had it hard growing up.
Tanya woke in a place she didn’t recognize, couldn’t recognize no matter how many times she blinked at it.
The hotel room lay in evening shadow, the sky just shifting to a darker blue. La Capitana had sent them here.
All that she understood.
Chad’s arms still wrapped around her even as he slept…that she didn’t understand at all. They’d slept together without sex. Without so much as heavy petting or even a kiss.
He was up to something.
But…what?
She couldn’t imagine.
If taking such complete control of her body beneath the topiary had seemed utterly manipulative, then what was this?
If that hadn’t been manipulation, but rather just sexual play, where was the overeager quid pro quo?
Or had it been a kindness—a gift—offering her a release unlike any before that moment? If it was the latter, then her current situation was even more confusing. Instead of being a friendly fuck between sex partners, it was the act of a companion. Of a lover. She had no history to equate that to. No frame of reference to even consider such a thing.
To fight beside Chad was a joy (other than being shot). To screw both their brains out, that was great fun. But to have real meaning suddenly in bed with the both of them simply wouldn’t do. Very dangerous rapids ahead.
Well, she knew how to cure that.
Chad had given her a great ride; it was time to move this whole thing back into that arena.
“Hang on, boy. One great ride coming up.” Her whisper seemed to echo about the small room. She found the string of condoms that Sofia had insisted on tucking into the tiny med kit before Tanya had stuffed it in her pants pocket.
She took her time about it, teasing him awake. Half a dozen times she stopped just the moment before consciousness slipped in, letting him ease back into slumber. When he groaned in his dreams, when a smile touched his lips, that’s when she sheathed his slow arousal and, lying full upon him, kissed him almost violently hard.
She’d come awake in his arms. Let him come awake in hers and see how he felt about it.
Between one heartbeat and the next, his deep blue eyes flashed open. Unlike her own hesitancy, he seemed to know exactly where he was and what he wanted.
Her attacking kiss was returned in kind—deep, penetrating, and undeniable.
One of his palms rode up over her behind and pulled her against him. It was easy to forget Chad’s thoughtless strength until he used it. His big hand cradled her easily and held the sweet pressure solidly.
It was his other hand that distracted her. With the lightest of pressure, he traced his fingertips over her back. At first it was the contrast between the strength of one hand and the gentleness of the other that began firing her body up. The power and the thoughtfulness combined into a heady mix.
Slowly, so slowly, he traced a pattern across her back. A pattern that she’d forgotten until last night when he’d traced the buried scar tissue at the base of her spine.
Then it had been a mere twinge of recognition.
Now it was a hammer blow that had her jerking back. Driving her palms against his shoulders to get distance.
But she couldn’t, because his big hand still clamped their hips together.
“I’m not asking,” Chad’s voice was husky and still rough from sleep.
“And I’m sure as hell not telling.” No one knew except her mother and sister, and the surgeon she’d eventually paid to fix those scars. She didn’t mind the battle wounds—they were badges of honor hard won. But a little girl whipped with her father’s belt, that wasn’t honor. She had tried to tackle her father as he abused Tanya’s sister in other ways. He had thrown Tanya down and whipped her while he was still driven deep into Jimena. It had been a mark she’d been unwilling to wear.
Tanya had bled on the sheets all that night because her mother had not wanted the awkward questions that a hospital would ask. Hadn’t wanted to lose her husband.
To hell with that, Mom.
Tanya’s back had bled for the last time from the force of helping her father stumble in front of a garbage truck seven days later. Gone before he could desecrate Jimena’s funeral with some stupid lies.
And now—
Her struggles to get away were futile against a man of Chad’s strength.
“Let me go!” It came out as a snarl he didn’t deserve but she couldn’t alter.
He narrowed his eyes at her for a long moment before replying.
“No, I don’t think so. Not this time. I’m not the one who marked you. And I’m not asking who was. But I think if I let you go, you won’t be coming back and I’m finding that I don’t like that thought much.”
All she could do was snarl again.
“You see…” And there was the Chad tone again, “I don’t give much of a shit about the Tanya of the past. No more than I care about the loser kid Wollson beat out of me until I left the little shit behind on the Detroit streets. Damn but that man was fast with a backhand when I screwed up, which I did plenty early on.”
Tanya stopped fighting, but kept her arms straight and stiff against his shoulders as he continued to trace his free hand over her.
“Now this Tanya. This one I’ve had to do a lot more thinking about. You tell me I could find a better woman anywhere and I’m thinking I’m gonna have to laugh in your face. Besides, it would sound a mite bit disrespectful, seeing our current positions.” He shifted his hips slightly side to side to remind her of where they were still pressed together.
All she had wanted was some good, distancing sex. Use each other and call it done. Because that she understood.
“Now, you wanna make love with me? I’ve got no complaints. I’ve been wanting that ever since you sailed away three years ago out on Lake Maracaibo. You want to lie ba
ck down and talk about something, guess I’m okay with that too. But you running away from me again—not so much down with that. Didn’t even like it when you closed that bedroom door in my face a couple days back in Medellín.”
Tanya glared at him…and believed him.
She’d gone out of her way to get Chad all fired up. And in the midst of that heat, which she could still feel where his big hand kept their hips pressed together, he was being kind and calm and rational.
“You promise you’ll never ask?”
In reply, he kept his lips firmly sealed and didn’t look away. But neither did he release her to cross his heart, which she’d been half-hoping for. Now, he held her in place because he wanted just one thing.
Sex. He wanted sex? Fine.
She shifted her position enough to line everything up and took him in.
It was difficult to hide her gasp of surprise. She’d forgotten how it felt to have Chad inside her. He filled her like no other man ever had. It wasn’t mere physical scale, though Chad certainly didn’t lack in that department at all. It was the way they fit together. As if their bodies had been specifically honed for one another—he wasn’t a good fit, he was a perfect fit. The spread of his hips pressing against her inner thighs as she knelt over him. Their torsos that she knew could let her lie on his chest with her head tucked up against his chin or, like now, placed his lips upon her breast as she arched back and he rose to greet her.
A moment ago, she had wanted to flail against him and be done. Now, she wanted to mold her body to his and never let go. She scooped an arm about his neck to keep him in place and could feel the tug of his lips and tongue all the way down to her bones.
Burying her own face into his so-soft hair, she breathed him in. Breathed in the scent of the outdoors. No, of the wilderness that always seemed to cling to him.
When he began to move beneath her, she pushed him back to the bed and studied his chest with her lips.
It was a beautiful chest. Powerful, scarred but healed, definitely a chest only a top soldier could possess.
But it was more than that.
She lay her cheek upon his breastbone and could feel that chest. Could feel his arms about her—one still clamping their hips together, emphasizing every motion with the pressure. But the other wrapped around her back as if no marks of her failure lay beneath the skin. As if he’d never let go.
No wild rhythm took them over. Instead, the slow build lifted them millimeter by millimeter upward.
The long climb left Tanya time to think.
And time to feel.
Normally, sex for her was only about time to feel the ascent, the break, and the descent of a good release.
This time she felt what it would be like to lie with Chad one night after another. One year after another. What it would be like to be held by a man who understood that some wounds were too deep to talk about, especially in a world where most wounds were a badge of honor, not despair.
Tanya dug her fingers into his pecs and hung on as the slow build finally forced them apart—forced her back until a thin slice of air lay between their chests. A place where they didn’t touch, but instead came together.
Chad’s heat radiated off him as his chest heaved with a shortening breath. In contrast, hers ran slow and deep as if she was breathing all the way down to the soles of her feet, up her legs, through their joining deep inside her, and only then passing upward through her body.
This! This is what it felt like to have a man inside her—a Man with the capital M.
His release slammed her over the top. Because it would be impossible to contain the surge of energy he delivered. The wild energy streamed through her body, slamming her in its stormy passage until she could do no more than hang on and shudder.
This, some part of her mind echoed as life rolled through her.
Yes, this was something special. So outside her past experience that she didn’t know how to think about it except for how good it was to be held and made love to by a man.
Did he love her?
That hadn’t been just sex—he’d certainly made love to her. Was that the same thing? She didn’t know. Tanya only knew that there had never been anything else like it in her life.
Chad didn’t care about women.
He knew that for a fact.
He enjoyed women, but he didn’t care about them.
Not while they lay together in the gathering twilight.
Nor a little later while taking her up against the cool tile wall in the tiny shower, which was far closer to what he’d expected than what they’d done in the bed.
Even over late-night dinner in a tiny taberna where they ate goat empanadas dipped in cheesy chile con queso with Silva and Daniela.
Chad Hawkins did NOT! care about women.
It was the code of his life.
So why was his leg pressed against Tanya’s as they returned to the airport in the back of the Toyota SUV? Why the hell was he holding her hand rather than his rifle? Why was he trying to figure out how to join Kidon—it shouldn’t be that hard to transfer from Delta Force. Should it?
And why did her quiet smile as they both boarded the Beech Bonanza airplane make him think about joining the mile-high club? Oh, he’d done it with a couple of stewardesses on a big jet, but he knew that with Tanya it would have a whole different meaning.
Meaning.
Sex wasn’t supposed to have meaning. It was supposed to have…sex.
“What the hell have you done to me?” He whispered to her.
“You tell me, then I’ll tell you and we’ll both know.” Tanya’s dazed look was mitigated by the squeeze of her hand in his.
“You’re making my head hurt, woman.”
“You’re making my heart hurt, man.”
And…
Nope! He didn’t have a good answer to that either.
The one thing he knew: he wasn’t letting go this time no matter what.
Actually, two things. He would die to save her. Not the way he would for any of his teammates—because merely giving your all wasn’t enough to qualify you for a Delta team. Delta was what it was because its operators treated every moment as a chance to go above and beyond.
But for Tanya Zimmer?
He’d take a bullet if it would just take a single one of those hidden scars off her soul.
And that didn’t seem normal.
The Chad Hawkins he knew didn’t care about women that way…except now it seems he did. And what the hell was up with that?
17
They flew north with the first hint of the sunrise, Silva at the controls and Daniela riding shotgun. However literal that was, she mainly faced forward and kept her thoughts to herself. Tanya sat with Chad in the second row of the three pairs of seats, narrow enough that her and Chad’s shoulders brushed with each little bit of turbulence. It was very distracting, so she did her best to focus out the window.
Oddly the farther they flew from the heart of the Andes, the rougher the terrain became. Personally, Tanya had spent far more time in Venezuela over these last years, so the typical low-lying jungle there was more familiar, with its peaks that rarely crossed five hundred meters.
In Tulcán and Las Lajas, the landscape was alpine meadow and plateau—most of it near three thousand meters. The occasional river sliced down into it and the tops of the peaks struggled aloft, but they didn’t climb far past the plateaus.
As they passed over Cali and then Medellín, the land dropped away but the peaks did not. They weren’t as high, but they had resisted, held out against their inevitable demise.
She was going to avoid any personal metaphors here—the terrain was just terrain, not some analogy for the razor-thin edge she walked as a Kidon operator. Nor for how even a few nights with Chad was carving changes in her body, in her life. Sure, her physical body reveled in his—the man was like a pure cocaine high. And the crash was far less harsh; she just hoped that it stayed that way.
He was also carving changes
inside her, as if ferreting out the rage that she kept so close to drive her ahead. That she was less sure about. Rage was a very useful motivator. If she let that go, where would she be then?
The rivers were bigger here, carving wide valleys over time. (Chad had better not be doing that to her or they were going to have some harsh words. She didn’t like people, lovers or otherwise, knowing too much about her.) Here, the cities no longer perched along farmland and flooded valleys. They hovered at river junctions where valleys met and spread up the hills until people etched the shape of the valley, rather than the jungle.
“What’s that?” Chad was staring sharply downward out the window on his side.
First checking her side—but all she could see was jungle—she leaned across to look down on Chad’s side. It meant pressing her body against him, which she thoroughly enjoyed. It should be a flirtatious tease—it always would have been before. Now it was backfiring badly. She wasn’t enjoying the tease—she was simply enjoying it. Far too much!
At least until her eyes focused on the valley below.
They were over a slender river. Instead of showing as a meandering line, poking its way through the jungle, it was an unholy gash of gravel-gray mounds and vast pools of sludgy water.
“That,” Daniela’s voice was chill, “is the true scourge of Colombia.”
“Illegal gold mining,” Silva tipped the plane so that it would was easier for them to see.
Gravity made Tanya’s body press harder against Chad.
“We have a long tradition of artisanal miners. All of their digging and extraction left few marks on the landscape. But now the militias and cartels take over the operations, enslave the miners, and use devastating extraction methods of dredges, mercury, and arsenic.”
“We’re a cartel now, aren’t we?” Chad asked it in his ever-so-innocent voice.
Tanya approved of the “we,” but it seemed more heavy-handed than his usual ploy. That wasn’t like him.
“We are. But slavery and destruction are not on my cartel’s agenda.”
Tanya could feel the wince from Chad where their bodies pressed together.
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