by Linda Howard
“I see it.” He swarmed up the slope, lithe and surefooted. He snatched the cap from a broken branch and in only a moment was back beside her. Jamming the cap on her head, he said, “Can you make it up the other side?”
There was no way, she thought. Her body refused to function any longer. She looked at him and lifted her chin. “Of course.”
He didn’t smile, but there was a faint softening of his expression, as if he knew how desperately tired she was. “We have to keep moving,” he said, taking her arm and urging her across the stream. She didn’t care that her boots were getting wet; she just sloshed through the water, moving downstream while he scanned the bank for an easy place to climb up. On this side of the stream, the bank wasn’t sloped; it was almost vertical and covered with what looked like an impenetrable tangle of vines and bushes. The stream created a break in the foliage that allowed more sunlight to pour down, letting the plants grow much more thickly.
“Okay, let’s go up this way,” he finally said, pointing. Jane lifted her head and stared at the bank, but she didn’t see any break in the wild tangle.
“Let’s talk about this,” she hedged.
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Look, Pris, I know you’re tired, but—”
Something snapped inside Jane, and she whirled on him, catching him by the shirt front and drawing back her fist. “If you call me ‘Pris’ just one more time, I’m going to feed you a knuckle sandwich!” she roared, unreasonably angry at his continued use of that hated name. No one, but no one, had ever been allowed to call her Priscilla, Pris, or even Cilla, more than once. This damned commando had been rubbing her face in it from the beginning. She’d kept quiet about it, figuring she owed him for kicking him in the groin, but she was tired and hungry and scared and enough was enough!
He moved so quickly that she didn’t even have time to blink. His hand snaked out and caught her drawn-back fist, while the fingers of his other hand laced around her wrist, removing her grip from his shirt. “Damn it, can’t you keep quiet? I didn’t name you Priscilla, your parents did, so if you don’t like it take it up with them. But until then, climb!”
Jane climbed, even though she was certain at every moment that she was going to collapse on her face. Grabbing vines for handholds, using roots and rocks and bushes and small trees, she squirmed and wiggled her way through the foliage. It was so thick that it could have been swarming with jaguars and she wouldn’t have been able to see one until she stuck her hand in its mouth. She remembered that jaguars liked water, spending most of their time resting comfortably near a river or stream, and she swore vengeance on Grant Sullivan for making her do this.
Finally she scrambled over the top, and after pushing forward several yards found that the foliage had once again thinned, and walking was much easier. She adjusted the pack on her back, wincing as she found new bruises. “Are we heading for the helicopter?”
“No,” he said curtly. “The helicopter is being watched.”
“Who are those men?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Sandinistas, maybe; we’re only a few klicks from the Nicaraguan border. They could be any guerrilla faction. That damned Pablo sold us out.”
Jane didn’t waste time worrying about Pablo’s duplicity; she was too tired to really care. “Where are we going?”
“South.”
She ground her teeth. Getting information out of this man was like pulling teeth. “South where?”
“Limon, eventually. Right now, we’re going due east.”
Jane knew enough about Costa Rica to know what lay due east, and she didn’t like what she’d just been told. Due east lay the Caribbean coast, where the rain forest became swampland. If they were only a few kilometers from the Nicaraguan border, then Limon was roughly a hundred miles away. In her weariness, she felt it might as well have been five hundred miles. How long would it take them to walk a hundred miles? Four or five days? She didn’t know if she could stand four or five days with Mr. Sunshine. She’d known him less than twelve hours, and she was already close to death.
“Why can’t we just go south and forget about east?”
He jerked his head in the direction from which they’d come. “Because of them. They weren’t Turego’s men, but Turego will soon know that you came in this direction, and he’ll be after us. He can’t afford to have the government find out about his little clandestine operations. So…we go where he can’t easily follow.”
It made sense. She didn’t like it, but it made sense. She’d never been in the Caribbean coastal region of Costa Rica, so she didn’t know what to expect, but it had to be better than being Turego’s prisoner. Poisonous snakes, alligators, quicksand, whatever…it was better than Turego. She’d worry about the swamp when they were actually in it. With that settled in her mind, she returned to her most pressing problem.
“When do we get to rest? And eat? And, frankly, Attila, you may have a bladder the size of New Jersey, but I’ve got to go!”
Again she caught that unwilling twitch of his lips, as if he’d almost grinned. “We can’t stop yet, but you can eat while we walk. As for the other, go behind that tree there.” He pointed, and she turned to see another of those huge, funny trees with the enormous buttressed roots. In the absence of indoor plumbing it would have to do. She plunged for its shelter.
When they started out again he gave her something hard and dark to chew on; it tasted faintly like meat, but after examining it suspiciously she decided not to question him too closely about it. It eased the empty pains in her stomach, and after washing a few bites down with cautious sips of water, she began to feel better and the rubbery feeling left her legs. He chewed a stick of it, too, which reassured her in regard to his humanity.
Still, after walking steadily for a few hours, Jane began to lose the strength that had come with her second wind. Her legs were moving clumsily, and she felt as if she were wading in knee-deep water. The temperature had risen steadily; it was well over ninety now, even in the thick shelter of the canopy. The humidity was draining her as she continued to sweat, losing water that she wasn’t replacing. Just when she was about to tell him that she couldn’t take another step, he turned and surveyed her with an impersonal professionalism.
“Stay here while I find some sort of shelter for us. It’s going to start raining in a little while, so we might as well sit it out. You look pretty well beat, anyway.”
Jane pulled her cap off and wiped her streaming face with her forearm, too tired to comment as he melted from sight. How did he know it was going to start raining? It rained almost every day, of course, so it didn’t take a fortune-teller to predict rain, but she hadn’t heard the thunder that usually preceded it.
He was back in only a short while, taking her arm and leading her to a small rise, where a scattering of boulders testified to Costa Rica’s volcanic origin. After taking his knife from his belt, he cut small limbs and lashed them together with vines, then propped one end of his contraption up by wedging sturdier limbs under the corners. Producing a rolled-up tarp from his backpack like a magician, he tied the tarp over the crude lean-to, making it waterproof. “Well, crawl in and get comfortable,” he growled when Jane simply stood there, staring in astonishment at the shelter he’d constructed in just a few minutes.
Obediently she crawled in, groaning with relief as she shrugged out of her backpack and relaxed her aching muscles. Her ears caught the first distant rumble of thunder; whatever he did for a living, the man certainly knew his way around the jungle.
Grant ducked under the shelter, too, relieving his shoulders of the weight of his own backpack. He had apparently decided that while they were waiting out the rain they might as well eat, because he dug out a couple of cans of field rations.
Jane sat up straight and leaned closer, staring at the cans. “What’s that?”
“Food.”
“What kind of food?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never looked at it long enough to identify it. Take my advice: don’t
think about it. Just eat it.”
She put her hand on his as he started to open the cans. “Wait. Why don’t we save those for have-to situations?”
“This is a have-to situation,” he grunted. “We have to eat.”
“Yes, but we don’t have to eat that!”
Exasperation tightened his hard features. “Honey, we either eat this, or two more cans exactly like them!”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” she scoffed, dragging her own backpack closer. She began delving around in it, and in a moment produced a small packet wrapped in a purloined towel. With an air of triumph she unwrapped it to expose two badly smashed but still edible sandwiches, then returned to the backpack to dig around again. Her face flushed with success, she pulled out two cans of orange juice. “Here!” she said cheerfully, handing him one of the cans. “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a can of orange juice. Protein, carbohydrates and vitamin C. What more could we ask for?”
Grant took the sandwich and the pop-top can she offered him, staring at them in disbelief. He blinked once, then an amazing thing happened: he laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh. It was rather rusty sounding, but it revealed his straight white teeth and made his amber eyes crinkle at the corners. The rough texture of that laugh gave her a funny little feeling in her chest. It was obvious that he rarely laughed, that life didn’t hold much humor for him, and she felt both happy that she’d made him laugh and sad that he’d had so little to laugh about. Without laughter she would never have kept her sanity, so she knew how precious it was.
Chewing on his sandwich, Grant relished the gooiness of the peanut butter and the sweetness of the jelly. So what if the bread was a little stale? The unexpected treat made such a detail unimportant. He leaned back and propped himself against his backpack, stretching his long legs out before him. The first drops of rain began to patter against the upper canopy. It would be impossible for anyone to track them through the downpour that was coming, even if those guerrillas had an Indian tracker with them, which he doubted. For the first time since he’d seen the helicopter that morning, he relaxed, his highly developed sense of danger no longer nagging him.
He finished the sandwich and poured the rest of the orange juice down his throat, then glanced over at Jane to see her daintily licking the last bit of jelly from her fingers. She looked up, caught his gaze, and gave him a cheerful smile that made her dimples flash, then returned to the task of cleaning her fingers.
Against his will, Grant felt his body tighten with a surge of lust that surprised him with its strength. She was a charmer, all right, but not at all what he’d expected. He’d expected a spoiled, helpless, petulant debutante, and instead she had had the spirit, the pure guts, to hurl herself into the jungle with two peanut butter sandwiches and some orange juice as provisions. She’d also dressed in common-sense clothing, with good sturdy boots and green khaki pants, and a short-sleeved black blouse. Not right out of the fashion pages, but he’d had a few distracting moments crawling behind her, seeing those pants molded to her shapely bottom. He hadn’t been able to prevent a deep masculine appreciation for the soft roundness of her buttocks.
She was a mass of contradictions. She was a jet-setter, so wild that her father had disinherited her, and she’d been George Persall’s mistress, yet he couldn’t detect any signs of hard living in her face. If anything, her face was as open and innocent as a child’s, with a child’s enthusiasm for life shining out of her dark brown eyes. She had a look of perpetual mischievousness on her face, yet it was a face of honest sensuality. Her long hair was so dark a brown that it was almost black, and it hung around her shoulders in snarls and tangles. She had pushed it away from her face with total unconcern. Her dark brown eyes were long and a little narrow, slanting in her high-cheekboned face in a way that made him think she might have a little Indian blood. A smattering of small freckles danced across those elegant cheekbones and the dainty bridge of her nose. Her mouth was soft and full, with the upper lip fuller than the lower one, which gave her an astonishingly sensual look. All in all, she was far from beautiful, but there was a freshness and zest about her that made all the other women he’d known suddenly seem bland.
Certainly he’d never been as intimate with any other woman’s knee.
Even now, the thought of it made him angry. Part of it was chagrin that he’d left himself open to the blow; he’d been bested by a lightweight! But another part of it was an instinctive, purely male anger, sexually based. He’d watch her knee now whenever she was within striking distance. Still, the fact that she’d defended herself, and the moves she’d made, told him that she’d had professional training, and that was another contradiction. She wasn’t an expert, but she knew what to do. Why would a wild, spoiled playgirl know anything about self-defense? Some of the pieces didn’t fit, and Grant was always uneasy when he sensed details that didn’t jibe.
He felt pretty grim about the entire operation. Their situation right now was little short of desperate, regardless of the fact that they were, for the moment, rather secure. They had probably managed to shake the soldiers, whoever they worked for, but Turego was a different story. The microfilm wasn’t the only issue now. Turego had been operating without the sanction of the government, and if Pris made it back and filed a complaint against him, the repercussions would cost him his position, and possibly his freedom.
It was Grant’s responsibility to get her out, but it was no longer the simple in-and-out situation he’d planned. From the moment he’d seen Pablo leaning so negligently against the helicopter, waiting for them, he’d known that the deal had gone sour. Pablo wasn’t the type to be waiting for them so casually; in all the time Grant had know him, Pablo had been tense, ready to move, always staying in the helicopter with the rotors turning. The elaborate pose of relaxation had tipped Grant off as clearly as if Pablo had hung a sign around his neck. Perhaps Pablo had been trying to warn him. There was no way he’d ever know for certain.
Now he had to get her through the jungle, out of the mountains, and south through a swamp, with Turego in hot pursuit. With luck, in a day or so, they’d find a village and be able to hitch a ride, but even that depended on how close behind Turego was.
And on top of that, he couldn’t trust her. She’d disarmed that soldier far too casually, and hadn’t turned a hair at anything that had happened. She was far too matter-of-fact about the whole situation. She wasn’t what she seemed, and that made her dangerous.
He was wary of her, but at the same time he found that he was unable to stop watching her. She was too damned sexy, as lush and exotic as a jungle orchid. What would it be like to lie with her? Did she use the rich curves of her body to make a man forget who he was? How many men had been taken in by that fresh, open expression? Had Turego found himself off balance with her, wanting her, knowing that he could force her at any time—but being eaten alive by the challenge of trying to win her, of making her give herself freely? How else had she managed to control him? None of it added up to what she should have been, unless she played with men as some sort of ego trip, where the more dangerous the man, the greater the thrill at controlling him.
Grant didn’t want her to have that much influence over him; she wasn’t worth it. No matter how beguiling the expression in her dark, slanted eyes, she simply wasn’t worth it. He didn’t need the sort of complication she offered; he just wanted to get her out, collect his money from her father, and get back to the solitude of the farm. Already he’d felt the jungle pulling at him, the heated, almost sexual excitement of danger. The rifle felt like an extension of his body, and the knife fit his palm as if he’d never put it down. All the old moves, the old instincts, were still there, and blackness rose in him as he wondered bitterly if he’d ever really be able to put this life behind him. The blood lust had been there in him, and perhaps he’d have killed that soldier if she hadn’t kicked the rifle up when she had.
Was it part of the intoxication of battle that made him want to pull her beneath him and
drive himself into her body, until he was mindless with intolerable pleasure? Part of it was, and yet part of it had been born hours ago, on the floor of her bedroom, when he’d felt the soft, velvety roundness of her breasts in his hands. Remembering that, he wanted to know what her breasts looked like, if they thrust out conically or had a full lower slope, if her nipples were small or large, pink or brown. Desire made him harden, and he reminded himself caustically that it had been a while since he’d had a woman, so it was only natural that he would be turned on. If nothing else, he should be glad of the evidence that he could still function!
She yawned, and blinked her dark eyes at him like a sleepy cat. “I’m going to take a nap,” she announced, and curled up on the ground. She rested her head on her arm, closed her eyes and yawned again. He watched her, his eyes narrowed. This utter adaptability she displayed was another piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. She should have been moaning and bitching about how uncomfortable she was, rather than calmly curling up on the ground for a nap. But a nap sounded pretty damned good right now, he thought.
Grant looked around. The rain had become a full-fledged downpour, pounding through the canopy and turning the jungle floor into a river. The constant, torrential rains leeched the nutrients out of the soil, making the jungle into a contradiction, where the world’s greatest variety of animal and plant life existed on some of the poorest soil. Right now the rain also made it almost impossible for them to be found. They were safe for the time being, and for the first time he allowed himself to feel the weariness in his muscles. He might as well take a nap, too; he’d wake when the rain stopped, alerted by the total cessation of noise.
Reaching out, he shook her shoulder, and she roused to stare at him sleepily. “Get against the back of the lean-to,” he ordered. “Give me a little room to stretch out, too.”
She crawled around as he’d instructed and stretched out full length, sighing in ecstasy. He pushed their backpacks to one side, then lay down beside her, his big body between her and the rain. He lay on his back, one brawny arm thrown behind his head. There was no twitching around, no yawning or sighing, for him. He simply lay down, closed his eyes and went to sleep. Jane watched him sleepily, her gaze lingering on the hawklike line of his profile, noting the scar that ran along his left cheekbone. How had he gotten it? His jaw was blurred with several days’ growth of beard, and she noticed that his beard was much darker than his hair. His eyebrows and lashes were dark, too, and that made his amber eyes seem even brighter, almost as yellow as an eagle’s.