He was wearing jeans and his worn-out cowboy boots again today, despite the fact that the tropical sun had already sent the temperature soaring into the nineties. A light-colored T-shirt hugged his upper body, and Kayla had the feeling that he wore it only out of deference to her. If he’d been alone in this heat, his shirt would have been off.
Her own T-shirt was folded and in her fanny pack. She wore only a bandeau bathing suit top with her shorts and sandals, and even then she was much too warm.
The road grew narrower, the jungle thickening almost discernibly on either side, as if seeking to swallow them whole. It was barely wide enough for a single car to pass through. Even on the motorcycle, Kayla felt vines and tendrils occasionally brush against her arms and legs.
The motorcycle’s small engine whined as they climbed steadily uphill. Despite the fact that the road was shaded, Kayla felt a trickle of perspiration travel down between her breasts. She was glad Cal was wearing a T-shirt. If he hadn’t been, their skin would have stuck together. As it was, his body heat and hard muscles brought back memories of the previous night’s disturbing dreams.
“Right before we get to the top of this hill there should be another road off to the right,” she told him, leaning closer to his ear to be heard over the engine.
He nodded once. “There’s some kind of turnoff ahead.”
It looked to be hardly more than a path, but as they got closer, it was clear that it had, at one time, been a road.
“Go past it,” Kayla shouted. “If there’s nothing else before the rise, we can come back.”
They got to the top of the hill with no other turnoffs evident on either side of the road. Cal turned the bike around and coasted back down the hill.
“Let’s take it.”
Cal stopped the motorcycle at the beginning of the road, and turned slightly in his seat to look at her. “Put your shirt back on. I don’t know who we’re going to run into out here, and I don’t want to give ’em any…ideas.”
“Such as the idea that since I’ve got my bathing suit on, I might want to go for a swim?”
He met her gaze evenly. “You know damn well that’s not what I meant.”
“Then say what you mean—don’t talk in code.”
“Cover yourself,” he said bluntly. “You’re underdressed.”
“In your opinion. According to certain Pygmy tribes in Africa, I would be considered way over- dressed.”
Cal cut the engine of the motorcycle and sudden silence surrounded them. “Maybe you’re the one who should stop talking in code,” he said quietly. “Why are you stalling, Kayla?”
Kayla looked at the narrow road and then into Cal’s eyes. They seemed bluer in the deep shadows of the jungle. Bluer, and almost unbearably gentle. “I am stalling. I guess because I’m scared.”
He didn’t hesitate. “We can go back to the hotel.”
She shook her head. “I’m not scared for us. I’m scared for Liam. For what we’re going to find—or for what we’re not going to find.” She looked at the overgrown road. “No one’s been down this way in weeks, maybe months. What kind of prison camp doesn’t need supply trucks coming in and out?” The only answer she could come up with was not a good one: The prison camp—and Liam—were gone.
“Maybe there’s another road in, one that’s used more often.” He reached to unfasten her helmet. “Come on. Put on your shirt and let’s go see.”
Kayla took off her helmet, and he held it for her as she pulled on her T-shirt. Her hair was damp from sweat, and she made a face as she slipped the helmet back on.
Cal smiled. “Brilliant idea, wearing helmets, huh? Especially since we’re going to take this road at a whopping ten miles an hour.”
“At least I know spiders won’t drop off these branches and into my hair.”
“Yeah, I think that’s exactly what the helmet manufacturer had in mind.” He jumped on the pedal that started the engine, then turned to give her one more look. “Ready?”
Kayla wrapped her arms around his waist. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
Although Cal stayed in the very middle of the overgrown road, leaves and branches brushed past them like so many reaching, grasping fingers. Kayla held tightly to him, trying not to think about insects and snakes, trying not to think about rebels and government forces, trying not to think about Liam, locked in a foreign prison for two years, trying not to think at all.
But then suddenly they were in the middle of a clearing, the sun beating mercilessly down on their backs.
“What the hell…?” Cal killed the motorcycle’s engine as they stared around them.
The charred ruins of buildings and huts dotted the cleared area. It wasn’t a prison camp—at least it wasn’t the one that had been described to Kayla, with a huge stone building behind barbed-wire fencing. This looked instead as if it might have been some kind of town or village.
But it had been burned. Everything, including the jungle surrounding it, was blackened. It was as if the entire side of the mountain had been torched. But even so, already the jungle was reclaiming the earth. Tendrils of green had softened the edge of the burned area, and shoots were even coming up among the ruined buildings.
“What was it that old man in the pawnshop told us?” Kayla whispered. “That the Americano escaped from the prison camp and hid in a village, and the entire village was wiped out in retaliation?”
“He said that was just a story—made up to keep people in line.”
“Maybe it wasn’t just a story. Maybe it was true. It’s obvious what we’re looking at wasn’t the result of someone’s dinnertime grease fire,” Kayla pointed out.
Cal gazed around, the muscle in the side of his jaw jumping. There were several rows of fairly fresh graves next to the ruins of what had to have been a church. The wooden crosses had been painted white, and they contrasted starkly with the charred ground. There were nearly three dozen of them, many of the crosses smaller, as if they marked the graves of children.
“Then where’s Liam?” he asked, his voice raspy as he viciously started the motorcycle. “If these people died protecting the kid, where the hell is he?”
As if in answer, a gunshot rang out and a bullet smashed into the bike’s side mirror, shattering it. Kayla didn’t even have time to scream before Cal was reacting, gunning the engine. The rear wheel spun in the soot and ash, but then caught on the road and they leapt forward, toward the cover of the jungle.
Kayla clung to Cal as he pushed the bike harder, coaxing every last little bit of speed out of the aging engine. She closed her eyes, pressing her cheek against him, well aware that her back was a very large, very clear target. And the way they were sitting, a bullet that struck her could very well take both their lives.
She had brought Cal to San Salustiano, but she hadn’t brought him there to die.
Another shot boomed, and Kayla closed her eyes even tighter, praying that it wouldn’t be the last sound she heard. She felt a sharp tug on her upper arm and a blaze of heat. She’d been hit. Or had she? A pebble, thrown up by the bike’s front tire struck her bare leg like the pellet from a BB gun, smacking her with a similar tug and burst of heat, hard enough to raise a welt. The smarting pain was good though—as long as she felt it, that meant she was still alive.
The jungle on the other side of the clearing swallowed them up as they roared along the overgrown road. Leaves and branches caught at them, tender green vines as sharp and stinging as whips as they raced past.
The speed at which the road zoomed by was both frightening and wildly exhilarating, the power of the engine mastered by the power in Cal’s taut body. They surely were out of range and out of sight of the shooter, but he didn’t slow down, and Kayla didn’t want him to.
With a clarity born of the gunman’s missed shots, she recognized the truth. She wanted Cal desperately. Emotionally, totally, in every way imaginable. Even physically. She knew without a single hesitation that she wanted to make love to this man. She wanted him to hel
p conquer her fear, to banish it forever—or at least for as long as he held her in his arms.
She wanted to make love to Cal, and she liked going fast.
She liked it the same way she had liked Cal’s kisses. It was dangerous, there was no denying that. One wrong move, and they’d be smeared across the cracked tarmac. Potential disaster was just a heartbeat away. But oh, how it made the adrenaline rush through her body. She felt alive—thoroughly, fabulously, breathtakingly alive.
She gripped Cal tighter with both her arms and her legs, trying to absorb the sheer power that seemed to radiate from him as the miles sped past. She knew she wanted more than he could afford to give, more than she could afford to take, and this reckless ride was a compromise. This ride was the only risk they could share.
But how she wished it were otherwise.
And then it was over. The motorcycle began to slow, the wild ride finally ending. Kayla lifted her head, looking up to find they were approaching what had once been an enormous wire fence. Barbed wire still straggled from the top, but the gate was half torn from its hinges, as if an angry giant had yanked it open.
Inside the compound was a stone structure in ruins that looked as if it had received many direct hits from mortar fire. The other outbuildings had been wood, and they, like the village, had been burned nearly to the ground.
The place was deserted. The only prisoners still inside were ghosts. And from what Kayla had heard and read about the long and bloody struggle for power in San Salustiano, there were no doubt hundreds upon hundreds of those ghosts among these ashes.
She shivered, reaching up to unfasten her helmet and—Her entire right shirtsleeve was soaked with blood.
Cal noticed it at the same time she did, and he cut the engine and was off the bike so fast, she barely saw him move. His helmet hit the dirt and he was crouched beside her. “Sweet Jesus, Kayla,” he ground out through clenched teeth, “why didn’t you tell me you were shot?”
“I was shot,” she echoed faintly, staring down into his sweat-streaked face. “I didn’t know.”
Cal couldn’t breathe. Half of the back of Kayla’s shirt was stained bright red with her blood. He moved quickly, checking her eyes for shock, feeling her pulse at the base of her throat. Her eyes looked good, the pupils neither too big nor too small, but her pulse was racing. Was that a sign of shock? He couldn’t remember. Her heartbeat seemed strong, and that could only be good. There was no sign of an exit wound, though, and that scared him to death. There was no way he was going to let those so-called doctors in the Puerto Norte hospital take her into surgery to remove a bullet from her back—or, God help her, out of her lungs.
“Are you having trouble breathing?” he asked her, cupping her face with his hands, gazing into her wide green eyes. He was willing her to be all right, and praying in double time. Dear God, let this girl be okay, and he would never ask for anything ever again….
Kayla shook her head no.
Cal took his knife from its holster in his boot and, holding her steady, sliced upward through the thin cotton of her T-shirt.
“Hey!” she said, outrage tingeing her voice.
“Believe me, it was already ruined.”
“Well, if it wasn’t, it sure is now,” she countered, “and on top of that, you cut my bathing-suit strap. Good job, Zorro.”
Cal wasn’t listening. He was carefully peeling the blood-sodden shirt from her back, bracing himself for the sight of a torn and angry-looking entry wound. But there was nothing. Only her smooth, pale skin, the fine blond hairs slightly damp with blood.
Where had all that blood come from?
He ran his fingers across the silkiness of her back in disbelief, turning her to face him and lifting the front of her shirt, still touching her, all sense of decorum vanished in his need to prove to himself that whatever wound she had received was not life-threatening. Her perfect breasts were whole and—
Her arm. Her upper arm was bleeding. And—of course—the pressure from their high-speed ride had kept the blood from flowing down her arm, instead pushing it down the back of her shirt.
He gently cut her sleeve, and there it was. A four-inch gash along the top of her deltoid muscle. It was truly no more than a surface wound, just a bad scrape that wouldn’t even require stitches.
She wasn’t going to die.
Cal sat back in the dirt, covering his face with his hand, focusing on breathing through the waves of relief that were threatening to drown him.
“Oh, my God.” He looked up through his fingers to see Kayla taking her first good look at her bloodstained shirt, realization dawning on her face. She slid off the motorcycle and sat in the road next to him, holding the shirt in one hand and her bathing-suit top in place with the other. “You thought I was shot in the back?”
Cal nodded. “I thought…” He couldn’t say it, couldn’t say anything, couldn’t do more than stare at her, his heart still in his throat.
She looked down at the wound in her arm. It was still oozing blood. She met his gaze searchingly, her eyes wide. “How were we sitting that you weren’t hit by this too?”
He reached for her, taking the T-shirt from her hand and tearing away the bloodstained half. He folded the clean part and used it to put pressure on her wound. “We were moving pretty quickly, and if the gun was fired at a distance, if the shooter wasn’t using a rifle or long-distance weapon, if the bullet had lost velocity by the time it struck you—”
“If?” Kayla stared at him as he tied what was left of her shirt in place around her upper arm. “All those ifs…”
Still holding her bathing-suit top in place, she touched his arm as if needing confirmation that he, too, was in one solid piece. He couldn’t help himself, and he put his arms around her, touching her shoulders, her hair, her face—the smoothness of her cheek, the softness of her lips. They were both trembling. Sweet Lord, this could have ended so tragically.
“We were lucky,” he said harshly, closing his eyes and breathing in the sweet scent of her hair. “A few inches to the left, and right this minute you could very well be dying in my arms.”
“I am,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion. “Cal, I am dying in your arms.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek into the palm of his hand, lightly brushing the tips of his work-roughened fingers with her lips. When she looked up at him, when she opened her eyes, he could see a mirrored reflection of everything he felt, everything he wanted, everything he burned for.
Time stood still. Cal didn’t move, he just gazed into those incredible eyes that were only inches away from his own, and let her see into his soul.
She smiled hesitantly, apologetically, just a quirk of her lips, and he felt his own mouth soften.
“I want you so bad, it’s killing me,” he said quietly, calmly, as if he weren’t spilling his very guts right there in the dust for her to see.
She nodded. She already knew. Still, the words had needed to be said.
“I know it’s wrong,” he continued, and when she took a breath to speak, he gently put his thumb across her lips, silencing her. “And you know it’s wrong, so don’t go trying to make excuses, or to justify what this is we’re feeling here.”
He paused, letting himself absorb the powerful strength of their connection, giving himself a taste of what he knew he could not allow to be.
A taste…
He moistened his lips, and her eyes followed the movement, and he knew that even though it was wrong, he was going to give himself just that. A taste of Kayla Grey.
“This one’s just for you and me,” he whispered, watching his words register in her eyes, watching her understand why. “With no mistaken identities, and with no one watching, and even though we know it’s wrong….”
Cal leaned toward her, and she closed her eyes and lifted her mouth to him. He kissed her slowly, taking his time, drinking in the sweetness of her lips, savoring the softness of her bare back beneath his fingers as he drew her even closer.
He deepened the kiss, claiming full possession of her mouth, and her tongue met his in a languorous, bone-meltingly intimate dance.
He could feel the softness of her breasts crushed against him as she held him tightly. He knew she’d dropped her bathing-suit top. He knew he merely had to move his hand to cup the fullness of her breast in his palm. And he knew that he didn’t dare allow himself that pleasure. Because he couldn’t touch her without wanting to taste her, and that would be going too far.
Instead, he lost himself in the sweetness of her kiss, in the sheer, exquisite softness of her mouth as he kissed her deeper and longer, but still not harder, afraid to lose the tenuous grip he had on his control.
Because he had to remember that this kiss was only a taste.
Cal drew back slowly, leaving her as softly and as gently as he’d started. Once again he took his time, lingering with feather-light kisses against her still-parted lips, knowing full well that this taste of paradise was going to have to last him a lifetime.
Slowly, she opened her eyes, and again he saw a reflection of everything he carried in his heart. This wasn’t enough, this taste, this kiss. It wasn’t enough and she desperately wanted more.
Sweet Lord, she was sitting in front of him, her breasts bare. She didn’t move to cover herself, didn’t move at all, and he couldn’t help but look at her. She was exquisite—softly rounded porcelain skin, with rose-colored tips hardened into points of desire. He ached to touch her, taste her, bury himself inside her.
He met her eyes, letting her see his desire, letting her know that he, too, wanted so much more. But the knowledge of that fact was all he could give her.
He backed away, putting more space between them, and she drew in a deep, shaky breath.
“You are the most desirable woman I’ve ever known, but right now I need to keep my mind on Liam only, no matter what my body is telling me. And why I can’t seem to resist you, even knowing the way you’ve been hurt in the past, even knowing the way my own brother felt about you…” He shook his head. He took off his shirt, quickly pulling it over his head and handing it to her. “Put this on.”
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