by Jill Myles
He was silent, the soft, steady stroking of my arm uninterrupted by my speech. Not that it mattered if I spoke it aloud or not, but it felt good to be having some sort of conversation, even if it was one-sided. “I even miss Mr. Wingarde and my lousy ex-boyfriend who couldn’t keep a job.” I laughed at that, the sound tired and bitter. “To think, I broke up with him because he wasn’t ambitious enough for me. I wanted to sell enough real estate to retire early, maybe start a business of my own.” My amused chuckle grew strained. “Everyone warned me not to go on this trip, but all I could see was the big fat commission. Anything for the job, you know? And here I am, stuck on dinosaur island with a hot guy that doesn’t speak English, and I’m hungry, and tired, and cold, and wet, and all I can think about is the fact that I’d give this all up for the worst night at home.”
More hot tears dropped from my face and onto his leg. “I hate it here. I want to go home.” A sob caught in my throat. “Please let me wake up and this all be a bad dream.”
Ever silent, Salvador pulled me into his arms and rocked me until I fell asleep, listening to the soft sigh of his breath and hiccupping from my tears.
CHAPTER SIX
When I woke up the next morning, Salvador was already staring down at me. It was a disconcerting feeling, to have a gorgeous, unshaven man looming over me when I woke up, and then to realize that this wasn’t a hotel room and a cheap one night stand, but a deserted island.
Not that either option was prime, of course.
Salvador nodded acknowledgement when I sat up, then gestured for me to be silent again. I froze in place. Were the dinosaurs back?
Apparently they were not, because he smiled in the next moment, and patted my leg. I was momentarily dazzled by his masculine beauty. At least, I was dazzled until he handed me another banana and gave me a suggestive look that caused me to flush bright red.
Okay, so the banana eating from yesterday hadn’t gone unnoticed by him.
We ate as we walked, and I was still feeling weak and tired. As we walked, I dreamed about burgers and pizza, and my mouth watered, and I continued to feel sorry for myself. “Do you eat anything but bananas?” I said to him at one point, feeling irritated. “Not that I’m ungrateful, mind you, but I’d like a nice juicy steak as much as the next girl. I don’t suppose you ever eat the dinosaurs around here, instead of just the other way around? No?”
He ignored me as I spoke, scanning the trail, and I sighed. “I suppose not.”
We crossed another stream about midmorning, our pace a slow, easy walk through the underbrush. I’d notice a small trail every once in a while, but Salvador kept away from those. At first, I wondered why he’d do that, when the small dirt paths seemed like easier walking than the ferny under-growth that we were cutting across, but he paused at one and looked back at me.
“Bgha,” he said, gesturing with his hand to show the reduced height of the cavemen. Oh – those were the cavemen’s trails that we were avoiding. I suddenly didn’t mind traipsing cross-country. I didn’t want to run into that little bastard again.
I knew we kept the pace at a slow walk because of me – I’d seen glimpses of intense quickness from Salvador – but my feet were bare and I wasn’t nearly as fast or sure on the terrain as he was. Every stick or rock I stepped on made me wince.
My latest stumble was the worst one yet, and I stopped to glance down at the soles of my feet and noticed they were scraped open from where I’d stepped on a rock. “Damn it,” I said, tugging on Salvador’s hand and making him stop. “I’m bleeding.” I gestured at my foot.
His reaction of concern surprised me. Before I realized what was going on, I was down on my back on the forest floor, and Salvador loomed over me, my foot in his hand.
“Uh,” I said, squirming at the intense scrutiny he was giving my dirty foot. “I’m sure it’s not that bad. Really.”
He said something in Spanish under his breath, then glanced around, scanning the forest. I jerked my leg, trying to get it out of his grasp. To my surprise, he let me go and walked away a few feet to examine a nearby bush.
Irritated, I sat up and glared at his back. “Geez. You sure do blow hot and cold. One moment you want to give me a foot massage, the next you’re treating me like a leper. Make up your mind, already.”
He returned a few moments later with a few long, spiky leaves and began breaking them in his hand, and indicated I should give him my foot again. I lay back and presented my foot once more, skeptical.
Warm fingers encircled my ankle, trapping it in his hand, and I barely had time to think about that before he smeared something cold and stinging on my foot.
I tried to jerk it away. “Ow!”
He wouldn’t let me escape him, and I had to sit there, cheeks burning with embarrassment as he scraped the mud and grime off my foot, applied more of the stinging plant, and then eventually wrapped the wounded appendage in soft leaves. His hands were soft as they kneaded the bruised flesh of my foot, and it got my mind thinking about other things he might tenderly stroke, and I began to get all flushed and bothered at the very thought.
I jerked my foot away once he was done and examined it myself. It wasn’t sparkling clean, of course – I doubted you could get anything sparkly clean in this muddy hole of an island, but it was reasonably clean and the gash was well-wrapped. As I watched, he cut a long piece of fabric from his teeny tiny breech-cloth and made it even tinier, and then offered the string of fabric to me, indicating that I should wrap it around my leaf-covered foot to keep the makeshift bandage in place.
I took it from him and gave him my thanks, adding, “Just so you know, I’m not going to be able to walk very fast in this.” I gestured at the oversized, leaf-covered end of my foot and got to my feet, hopping on one leg like a flamingo.
He grinned at my actions and pointed at the nearest tree, no more than ten feet away.
I followed his pointing finger and frowned. “It’s a tree, yes?” I didn’t understand what he meant. “Tree?”
“Tree,” he agreed, chuckling, as if amused by me. His voice was deliciously husky. “Tree,” he said again, pointing at the base and then gesturing upward.
It took me a few moments to comprehend what he meant. “You want me to go up the tree?” I made a climbing gesture.
My gesturing hands seemed to amuse him mightily, because he grinned even as he nodded at me. “Diana, tree,” he said.
“Why would I want to get in the tree?” I protested, but my words fell on deaf ears. Despite my protests, I was shuffled over to the tree and hoisted unceremoniously onto the lowest hanging branch. “There, I’m in the tree,” I said, clinging to the trunk and glaring down at him. “Happy now?”
“Tree,” he repeated, then gestured that I should go higher.
“You are getting on my last nerve, Salvador,” I grumbled, but continued to climb.
When I was about twenty or thirty feet off the ground and my legs began to throb due to my favoring of one foot, I looked down at him again. “Tree?” I yelled down. “Is this high enough? Tree?”
He nodded at me, looking pleased. “Tree.”
I made myself comfortable on the branch and straddled it, ignoring the way the rough bark chafed my inner thighs. There was no way I was sitting sidesaddle on this enormous thing. The branch that I was on was fully twice as big around as Salvador’s body, and it was one of the smaller ones. “Damn tree,” I muttered.
Just then, Salvador disappeared down below.
I panicked. He was leaving me? Here alone in the damn tree? “Salvador!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, lying flat on my belly and getting ready to shimmy back down after him. Screw this. “Salvador! Come back!”
He reappeared down below, shaking his head at me in anger. “Diana,” he called up, his voice low. “Diana tree. Diana tree.” He put his finger to his lips, indicating silence. Diana tree silence.
Yeah, I got the picture.
“Diana tree,” I agreed, a little disgruntled. If he wanted me to
stay up here, I’d stay up here. “Salvador tree?”
He shook his head and made some motion I didn’t understand. “Salvador,” he said, gesturing. It looked like sweeping. Diana tree silence, Salvador sweeping?
I frowned down at him. “You’ll come back, won’t you? Salvador comes back for Diana? Yes?”
Salvador tilted his head up at me and gave me a blatant, sexy smile. “Salvador and Diana, yes.” His look was suggestive, as if he meant a lot more by just linking our names.
Oooh. That hadn’t been what I meant, but I understood it all the same. Blushing, I sat back on the tree again.
Down below, I caught a glimpse of dark golden skin and muscles, and leaned over my branch to watch the show. From up here, I could admire the man’s body without worrying about him seeing my scrutiny.
And my, was he beautiful. His shoulders were broad and thick, tapering to a trim waist and just a hint of buttock that was barely covered by his scraps of loincloth. As he bent over, the muscles in his back rippled, and I felt my stomach flutter in response. I was attracted to the man like nobody’s business.
It was only after I stared at his gleaming, muscular form for long minutes that I started to realize what he was doing. At first, I thought he was preparing more medicinal gunk for my foot, because he went back to the spiky plant and cut a few more strands off, then crushed them in his hand, the digits of his finger gleaming with creamy moisture that oozed from the crushed leaves. Then, he took the oversized leaf and began to drag it along the ground in a right-to-left sweeping motion.
Puzzled, I watched him work for several minutes. What on earth was he doing? He circled the base of my tree and went over the nearby surroundings, swiping the ground with that long, greasy leaf.
It was only when he began to backtrack the trail we’d taken to get here that I began to get a glimmer of understanding. He was going back and sweeping our trail with the strong scent of the plant, in order to throw any predators off of our smell. I thought of my bloody foot, and the alarm he’d shown when he realized I’d been bleeding for some time, and I felt chagrined. I hadn’t even realized it would be an issue, but I guess I’d made a lot more work for my poor Tarzan.
I leaned over the branch and watched him work until he was well out of sight, and I wondered how far he’d backtrack. Probably to the last stream we’d crossed, I thought. Now that I’d stopped moving, I felt drowsy, and I rested my cheek on the knobby bark of the thick tree branch. It’d be a while before he returned if he was going that far back. The last stream I remembered crossing was well over a few hours back.
I fell asleep for a time. I wasn’t sure how long I was out, but the next thing I knew, I was drooling on the tree branch, my legs and arms were locked tight around the tree-limb itself and smarting from remaining in one uncomfortable position, and there was the world’s biggest caterpillar crawling up my arm.
Like an idiot, I screamed and shook my arm violently. The caterpillar took a few good shakes to dislodge. It landed back on the branch a few feet away from me and started inching forward again.
Oh, hell no. I was not dealing with mutant-sized bugs in addition to everything else. I glanced over at the nearest branch over me, but it was too far out of reach. Glancing once more at the deadly caterpillar, I decided to shimmy down a level and see where that took me.
I reached the new branch after about five minutes of careful maneuvering. It wasn’t nearly as comfortable as my last branch, and part of it was rotted away, and the knothole where my leg would rest looked like it was full of equally disgusting, slimy insects. I imagined spiders the size of Dobermans and decided that maybe I’d lurk on the ground for a few.
It took a few minutes to get back to the ground, but once I was there, my makeshift bandage fell off like I’d never tied it in place, and I spent another chunk of time trying to rig the damn thing to stay back on my foot. Salvador would have a heart-attack if he’d knew that I’d left the tree. No sense in adding to his anger by showing him I’d undone all his hard work as well.
My bandage floppy and falling to pieces – but still on my foot – I took a quick survey of my surroundings. Salvador hadn’t returned yet, and the sun was about to go down. There was a definite chill in the air that reminded me that it got cold here at night, and I rubbed my arms. Surely he hadn’t left me for good. Not after traveling so slow today just for my benefit.
I was just being paranoid.
I settled at the base of the tree and pulled my legs close to me, watching as the forest sank into the busy time of night. A few creatures scurried about – some more of the oversized rodents I’d seen a few times lurking in the underbrush – and were bolder now that the sun was going down. I glimpsed a dinosaur in the background and my heart nearly froze in my chest at the sight, but the extremely slow cadence of steps – no quick thump thump – and the fact that his long neck was angling upwards to eat leaves relaxed me. A brontosaur, I reminded myself, remembering how as a kid I’d been in love with dinosaurs more than Barbies. How times had changed.
Right about now, I’d give anything to never seen another dinosaur again, I mused, just for a chance to return to the Barbie Malibu Dream Mansion, creepy boss or not.
Something white underneath the moving strands of a bush caught the corner of my eye, and I glanced over, only mildly interested.
A business card lay in the moist loamy dirt, damp and half-stuck to a leaf. As if in a dream, I crawled over the few steps to the plant and pulled the wet card off the leaf and flipped it over.
Diana Holcomb, it read. Licensed Realtor.
It was my business card.
I got to my feet, weak and giddy. I only kept the cards in my purse, so for a card to be here meant that my purse was somewhere nearby. I also kept Chapstick (which I sorely needed), Tic-Tacs (which made my mouth water) and my cell phone (which made me want to sob with joy).
I paced our small campsite, oblivious to my bandaged foot, the bandages of which quickly fell apart after a few steps. Surely there was another business card close to here.
There! A few bushes away, I caught another peep of white and raced towards it. Trembling, I plucked it from the dirt. Another two lay scattered in the dirt about fifty feet away.
I followed the reckless trail of cards, until the tree I’d been told to stay in was no longer in sight, and my heart was hammering in my throat with excitement. If I found my cell phone, I could call out. Surely we’d be able to get satellite service from somewhere around here.
I turned a corner, and lo, there it was. Hanging from a nearby tree-branch over one of the little dirt paths, almost entirely upended on itself and leaking business cards everywhere, was my stylish brown Coach handbag. I gave a small cry of joy at the sight and rushed forward to grab it.
Just before my hands were about to clench around my purse in sheer joy, the ground gave way beneath my feet, and I slid into a muddy pit.
My scream was cut off as mud filled my mouth, and I flailed at the bottom, trying to get my balance. A pit trap. Broken foliage dangled over the top of the pit, and I stared up at my purse, still hanging from the tree, contents dangling ever so sweetly out of reach.
I stood up at the slushy bottom of the pit, my feet sucking and getting stuck in the watery mud, and it made me nervous. I didn’t want to end up in quick-sand, unable to keep my head above the surface. If I stretched my arms up above my head, my fingertips just fell short of the lip of the pit. Frustrated, I slapped against the dirt wall and cursed, looking for a root or something to grab onto.
Up above, the fake foliage atop my pit rustled, and I slid back into the mud, cringing to the far corner of the pit. Visions of the T-Rex filled my mind, and I waited for that long, toothy head to lean over and chew me up and spit me out.
Several dark, hulking figures leaned over the edge of the pit, and in the deepening twilight, I was able to make out the grinning face of Bgha.
“Meh,” he said down to me.
Great. My caveman paramour had returned.
Salvador was going to be so pissed at me…if he ever found me again.
*** *** ***
The cavemen were able to get me out of the pit with a group effort. I raised my arms – because going with them was preferable to waiting to be eaten – and they hauled me out with callused, brutal hands, their fingers digging into my flesh so hard I was positive I’d have bruises.
They were strong, though, and within moments I was up on the muddy bank, covered in slime and shivering in cold.
Bgha put a proprietary hand on my lower back. “Meh!”
The others didn’t argue. They figured I was his. No one else was quite so vile and overbearing, after all. They gathered up my purse and bound my hands in front of me with a dirty piece of leather.
With their little spears pricking my back, I was pushed to the front of the small party, a mud-covered, miserable captive. I dragged my aching feet as we went along the small path, eyes stinging from the mud. My wet hair plastered to my face as I swung my head, looking for a hopeful glimpse of Salvador.
I never saw him. A little part of my hopes died with me when I realized he wasn’t coming.
We walked for a few hours, until the moon was high in the sky and I was stumbling into the scenery in exhaustion. I’d thought that we might have stopped earlier than this, but they seemed to want to press on.
Bgha barked something at me. I shook my head, not understanding his language. It was clear soon enough when he reached out a leg to trip me, and I tumbled to the ground. The others howled with laughter at the sight of me sprawled on the ground, muddy and helpless. I struggled to right myself, but one planted a massive foot on my backside and shoved me to the ground again. I got the hint and stayed down.