Her arm hurt worse than she had let on, and as she tried to pull his T-shirt over her head, she winced. He moved to help her, gently guiding her injured arm into the sleeve, then pulling the collar over her head and helping her into the other armhole.
She gazed up at him as he pulled the shirt down across her stomach, covering her nakedness.
“What Liam and I had was different than you think.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t love him,” she admitted, “not that way. We were friends—close friends—and then he asked me to marry him and…I told him no, Cal, but he wouldn’t listen. He told me to wait and think about it, until he got back from San Salustiano, but there was never anything to think about, because I didn’t love him.”
Cal straightened up, then reached down to help Kayla to her feet. He let go of her immediately, backing away to dust off the knees and the seat of his jeans.
“That’s all right,” he said quietly, turning to look at the deserted ruins of the island prison camp. “I love him enough for both of us.”
9
“You sure someone’s going to find this?” Cal asked.
“As long as it doesn’t rain—and as long as someone comes out here to look. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth the thirty seconds it took to write it, don’t you think?”
“What does it say?”
Kayla glanced up at Cal, brushing off her hands as she painfully straightened up from the place in the dirt where she’d scratched the message. “Roughly translated, it reads, ‘We seek the truth. We are friends of the Americano.’ I signed it ‘Mike and the cowboy.’”
“Mike?”
She could meet his eyes only very briefly without getting light-headed from the memory of those incredible kisses. “Liam called me that. He thought the nickname for Mikayla should be Mike. And since he usually did what he wanted…” She shrugged.
“Well, I hate to break it to you, Mike, but I’m not a cowboy,” Cal told her as he swung his leg over the motorcycle seat.
It was funny, actually. Or it would have been funny if her sense of humor hadn’t been turned upside down and sideways when this man—this cowboy—took her in his arms and kissed her as if there were no tomorrow.
He was sitting astride the motorcycle wearing only his faded home-on-the-range-style blue jeans and his dusty brown cowboy boots, his broad, tanned chest gleaming in the sunshine, his dark, wavy hair tumbling over his genuine one-hundred-percent western American forehead, looking every little last fraction of an inch an authentic cowboy.
“I’m a cowman,” he told her with a perfectly straight face, but with that now-familiar glint of amusement lurking in his gray-blue eyes. “There’s a difference. The cowmen own the land they work. The cowboys just work it.”
“Liam told me that you didn’t just own the land—the land owned you. He was envious of you for those ties.”
“He was envious of the noose around my neck?”
“He told me once that he felt as if he didn’t belong anywhere.” Kayla tried to explain. “As much as he loved Boston, it wasn’t his home. And when he was with you at the ranch, he felt as if you could communicate with the mountains and the sky and the earth, and that he was out of the loop—that you spoke some language he’d never been taught. He laughed when he told me that he felt left out. He pretended it was just a great big joke, but I knew there was truth to his words.”
“He was a lousy rider.” There was a catch in Cal’s voice. “For a kid born and raised on a working ranch, he was a damned lousy rider.”
Kayla stepped toward him, drawn to him despite the knowledge that he wanted her to keep her distance. “And yet he kept at it. He even won that rodeo ring,” she said. “Because he wanted to be a part of your world.”
“Part of my world? I wanted to be part of his.” Cal had an odd look on his face. “I always wanted to go to Harvard. I dreamed about going to Harvard….”
“And Liam went.”
“And I wanted to be a writer.”
Kayla hadn’t known that. Liam hadn’t told her because no doubt Liam hadn’t known either. Or had he? Had Liam taken on a life that wasn’t quite his, forsaking his own dreams in an attempt to become the man his brother wanted him to be?
“During one of the last phone conversations I had with him,” Cal said, “I was riding him because he was about to turn twenty-five. I teased him—told him it was high time he settled down and got married. I told him I was counting on him to get me some cute little nieces and nephews.” He turned away from her slightly, pretending to be absorbed in the line that led from the handgrips to the front brake. But then he looked up, directly at her. “That was when he first told me about you.”
“But you said he never spoke of me.”
“I lied.”
“What…what did he say?”
He was gazing at her, his pale blue eyes intense. “That the moment I met you, I would fall in love with you.” He laughed, but there wasn’t very much humor in it. “Damned if the kid wasn’t right.”
Kayla’s heart was in her throat. Had he just told her…?
As if aware he’d said too much, Cal started the motorcycle engine. “Come on, get on the bike,” he told her gruffly. “There’s no way in hell we’re going back the same way we came in, and I don’t want to get stuck out here, trying to navigate these roads after dark.”
She put on her helmet and climbed on the bike behind him. Her shoulder ached as she put her arms around his waist. It ached, but not half as much as her heart.
“I think I’m falling in love with you too, Cal,” she whispered, her words lost in the sound of the engine as they roared down the jungle road.
“There!” Kayla said. “Through the trees. Over to the right. There’s definitely a light.”
Cal saw it too. He could hear strains of music and the sound of voices echoing oddly through the darkness as he pushed the motorcycle along the mountain road.
They’d run out of gas.
He still couldn’t think about it without feeling a surge of incredulousness. It was totally his fault. The man who’d rented him the bike had told him the gas gauge didn’t work but that the tank was full. And Cal had been stupid enough to believe him, stupid enough not to double-check.
They’d been walking—and he’d been soundly cursing himself out—since sundown. It was already well past ten.
He’d wanted nothing more than to get Kayla safely back to the hotel. He’d wanted to wash out her wound, order her something to eat, tuck her safely into bed.
He’d failed miserably.
Of course, that was nothing new. This entire journey was a study in failure. The only thing he’d succeeded in doing was the one thing he’d tried desperately not to do: fall in love with the woman his brother loved.
Kayla was drawn to him. Cal knew that. He knew that she found the sexual attraction between them nearly impossible to resist. A part of him believed that it even overcame her fears of being intimate and that she would have made love to him right there on that deserted jungle road.
The pictures that swept into his mind were overpowering, and he had to shake his head to push them away.
She wanted him. And God knew he wanted her. Would it truly be so wrong to—
Yes. The answer came immediately. Yes, it would be wrong.
“Do we go in or keep walking?” Kayla asked.
He could barely make out her face in the dim light from the moon, but he couldn’t miss the weariness in her voice.
She’d been shot. True, her wound wasn’t life-threatening, but her arm had to hurt. Even a glancing blow from a bullet packed a wallop. Along with the gash on her arm, she probably had one hell of a bruise.
A burst of laughter drifted through the heavy brush, along with the fragrant aroma from an outdoor grill.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance that whoever they are will slit our throats and steal the motorcycle, but as long as they feed us some of wh
atever that is they’ve got cooking first, I’m not sure I’d mind.”
Cal saw a slight break in the trees. It was a path leading down the hill toward the light. Kayla saw it too, and she turned down it. He followed, praying they weren’t climbing out of the frying pan and into the campfire.
They weren’t more than twenty meters down the trail, when he sensed more than saw or heard movement behind them. Someone had been out there in the darkness of the jungle, guarding the path.
Whoever they were, they moved slowly and quietly, not making an attempt to overtake them or threaten them in any way. At least not yet.
“Speak in Spanish,” Cal said to Kayla in a low voice. “Tell whoever’s behind us that we’re Americans, we mean no harm. Tell them we’re only looking to buy food and enough gasoline to get us back to Puerto Norte.”
He heard Kayla’s softly indrawn breath and knew that she hadn’t heard the footsteps following them. But she spoke clearly and calmly, her voice carrying through the velvet darkness.
As they moved closer to the light, Cal could make out the outline of a building. It was no more than a shack, really, surrounded on all four sides by a clearing. Colorful paper lanterns were strung up in the front of the building, creating a festive feel to the rough-hewn tables and benches that surrounded a makeshift grill. The shack’s windows had neither glass nor screens, yet a neon eagle flashed the logo of a familiar American beer.
As they stepped into the clearing, Cal realized that the music had been turned way down. He heard the unmistakable sound of guns—many, many guns—being locked and loaded.
Nearly all the men and quite a number of the women sitting at the tables had trained some kind of deadly looking gun on him and Kayla. And there were more—shadowy figures stepping out of the surrounding jungle, light glinting off their automatic weapons.
They weren’t wearing the uniforms of the San Salustiano army. Rather, they were dressed like peasants—many of them literally wearing rags. But their guns were shining and well maintained. Despite their appearance, they were an army.
Kayla already had her hands held high, and Cal slowly lowered the kickstand on the motorcycle with one boot. Then he, too, moved slowly, cautiously, holding his hands in front of him, palms faceup, in a universal nonthreatening gesture.
As Kayla spoke in Spanish, Cal scanned the faces of the people sitting closest to them. No one so much as blinked or batted an eye.
He caught the words Puerto Norte, the words for food and gasoline. He heard her say something about the prison camp, about the golden-haired Americano, something about a brother, and, as if the move had been choreographed in advance, all eyes shifted, focusing on him.
One of the gunmen who’d been hiding in the jungle stepped forward, speaking quickly in a low, rough voice. He grabbed Kayla, and despite all the firepower aimed in his direction, Cal couldn’t keep himself from moving toward her.
“Don’t you touch her,” he growled.
But a heavyset man grabbed him and pulled him toward the nearest table while another man stuck the dulled metal barrel of his gun into the soft area of Cal’s throat, just underneath the hinge of his jaw. It might have been Cal’s taller than average height, or it might have been the murderous look in his eyes, but two other men hurried forward to hold his arms despite the presence of the gun.
“It’s all right,” Kayla called to him quickly. “They just want to search us for weapons.”
“Tell ’em to do it without touching you.”
Her voice was low. “You know as well as I do that they can’t do that.”
Cal felt himself being patted down none too gently, and as his captors made a great deal of noise over discovering the holstered knife in his boot, he turned to look across the compound at Kayla.
She had closed her eyes against the roughness of the hands that swept her body. But as if she felt him watching her, she opened her eyes, turning to meet his gaze.
The connection was instant. Even there, in the middle of San Salustiano’s equivalent of an outdoor roadhouse bar and grill, even surrounded by what had to be a significant and deadly portion of the militant rebel forces, the powerful bond between them snapped immediately to life.
“I’m all right,” she told him soundlessly. “Do what they tell you to.” Her eyes echoed her worry that he would, instead, do something to get himself shot.
One of the men searching him found his wallet hidden in his boot. He wasn’t carrying any identification—he’d hidden it back in the hotel room for this very reason. His money could be taken and used, but his ID and passport were of value only if he weren’t around to report it missing. He hadn’t wanted to tempt any thieves into trying their hand at murder.
The money in his wallet was tossed onto a table. Many hands reached for it, but only one scooped it up. Cal followed that particular hand up a slim, muscular arm and found himself looking into the face of a young, dark-haired woman.
On second glance, he saw that he was mistaken. She wasn’t quite a woman. She was really little more than a teenager—seventeen or eighteen at the most. She was dressed in black and carrying a submachine gun that was nearly as big as she was. Despite that, she carried it with total authority. Her face was sweetly pretty with the exception of a fresh jagged scar that marked her right cheekbone. That scar, and the bitterness and anger that sparked in her brown eyes, made her seem much older than she really was.
She waved the money at one of the men, and spoke in staccato Spanish. But then, to Cal’s surprise, she turned back to look at him. When she spoke again, it was in clear, almost accentless American English. “This will cover the cost of a meal.”
Cal was shoved down onto one of the benches, and he had to brace himself against the table to keep his head from being pushed into the unfinished wood. Kayla was pushed down next to him just as roughly. He reached for her, both pulling her close to him and, in one smooth motion, backhanding the man who had treated her so brutally.
He was slammed forward onto the table, and an ancient but extremely well-oiled revolver was nearly shoved up his nose for his trouble.
“Cal, no!” he heard Kayla say as the dark-haired girl gave a crisp order in Spanish.
The gun disappeared, and Kayla put her arms around him in relief.
The wound on her arm was bleeding through both the makeshift bandage and her shirt, but she was thinking of no one but him. “Don’t you dare get yourself killed,” she hissed through clenched teeth, shaking him slightly, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “Don’t you dare do anything like that again. They have guns, Einstein, and we don’t!”
“Listen to your girlfriend.” The girl sat down across from them as someone else placed plates filled with what looked like roasted fish along with refried beans and some kind of greens in front of them both.
“Who are you?” Cal asked.
“We are no one.” Her smile didn’t touch her darkly glittering eyes. “Or so our government would like us to believe.” She fell silent for a moment. “You claim to be the brother of the legendary Americano.”
Kayla leaned forward, eagerness in her voice. “Do you know him?”
The look in the girl’s eyes was unreadable. She would have been one hell of an opponent in a poker game. “I didn’t say that I did.”
“Do you know where he is? Is he still alive? Is he all right?”
The girl ignored Kayla. “You claim to be his brother, yet you carry no proof of your identity. You expect us simply to believe you?”
“I have proof of who I am—back in my hotel room.”
“Which is what you would say if you were only pretending, no?”
Cal let out a burst of air in frustration, knowing that the girl was right. Why should she believe him? “Let me go and get it. I can bring it back here—”
“You don’t really think that we’d still be here, waiting for an ambush?” The girl laughed. “No, I can think of other ways that I would choose to die, Mr. Whoever-You-Claim-to-Be.”
&nbs
p; Kayla leaned forward again. “His name is Calvin Bartlett and he is Liam’s brother. I know they don’t look much alike, but they had different mothers. Cal was told that Liam was killed in a bus bombing two years ago. If his brother is still alive, if we still have cause to hope, please tell us now.”
But the girl didn’t give them any answers. “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “We cannot put gas in your motorcycle. We have none to spare. In fact, we’ve taken what little oil you had—I’m sure you understand.”
With that, she turned and strode quickly to the darkness that surrounded the clearing.
“Please,” Kayla called after her. “Is he alive? Can’t you even tell us that?”
But the girl had already stepped out of the light and disappeared.
10
No sooner had the girl with the machine gun disappeared than a murmur rippled through the crowd.
Cal leaned toward Kayla. “What are they saying?”
“There’s a truck coming,” she translated. As she watched, about thirty men, women, and children vanished into the jungle, taking their plates and cups with them, leaving most of the tables clear.
Four women rushed around with cloths, wiping the tables clean. Someone else turned up the radio. Trumpet music with a Cuban beat filled the air.
“Maybe we should get out of here,” Cal said uneasily.
One of the women whisked their plates away from them. “Go,” she spat out. “Dejame! Or blood will be spilled!”
Threat or premonition, that was one warning Kayla didn’t need to hear twice. She stood up. “They want us to leave.”
Cal moved quickly, taking her by the hand and pulling her toward the path that led up to the jungle road.
“The motorcycle?”
“To hell with it!”
But the people at the roadhouse didn’t want the bike left behind. “Señor!” A teenage boy came chasing after them, pushing the motorcycle up the path. “Don’t leave this here. They will find it and cause trouble!”
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