He looked over his shoulder. Her lips were screwed into a pucker and her eyes were rolled up like she was literally looking into her brain as she rattled off numbers. Diego didn’t usually think in terms of cuteness—there wasn’t a whole lot that qualified for such a description in his world—but Vanessa doing math was pretty damn cute.
“Four-nine-two-five-three-point-seven-three-one.”
Grinning, he set his eyes forward again and hacked at a tangle of vines blocking their progress. “Okay, then here’s the next question—how are we supposed to walk the point-seven-three-one of a step?”
“No idea. I’m just the human calculator.”
Diego had been shooting math problems at her for an hour and he figured he had at least another few hours left in him before he’d need a topic change. Maybe he should’ve been a math teacher because he could make up problems like that all day as long as nobody expected him to solve them.
“Okay, I’ve got another one for you. We started at twenty-eight hundred meters’ elevation and the trailhead where we’re meeting my crew is at, say, a hundred meters’ elevation. What’s the elevation change per step we take?”
“Easy.”
“Easy? Gimme a break. All right, Miss PhD, why don’t you go ahead and calculate the angle of our descent while you’re at it?”
Before she could answer, lightning flickered, followed immediately by a roll of thunder.
Typical for Panama, the downpours happened almost daily and were especially torrential in late spring. About what someone would expect in a rainforest near the equator, and normally Diego wouldn’t give a flying leap if it rained the entirety of the two-day hike or not. Problem was, Vanessa had changed back into the outfit Alicia had chosen for her, and walking in the rain wasn’t going to make her clothes any less see-through than her lake jump had.
Groaning as a second round of lightning and thunder reverberated through the jungle and sent birds scattering, he pushed a dense bunch of fronds aside and nearly ran into a wall of rock taller than his head.
“Do you know what’s on the other side of this rock?” she asked.
He shook his head. “This is my first time on this trail in a lot of years. GPS says this is the way we need to head, but looks like we’ll be taking a detour.”
He was in the process of searching for the best path down the drop-off, when Vanessa said, “The fastest way would be for us to go up and over.”
“Depends on what’s on the other side.”
“How about you boost me up and I’ll check it out?”
A roll of thunder cracked close by. Closing his eyes, he let out a dozen silent curses as the first drops of rain fell on his face. “Doesn’t look like we’re going to make it through the day without rain. We ought to hurry if we’ve got to get over this ridge.” Squatting, he laced his fingers as a foothold. “Gimme your foot.”
She slipped her shoe into his hands and turned toward the boulder, putting his face level with all her juicy curves.
With his eyes trained on the shoe he held, he decided the best course of action was to keep his mind occupied cataloguing everything in the jungle that might kill them. Number one for him was going to be a heart attack if she didn’t get her derriere out of his face, stat. He gritted his teeth and got busy on his mental list of dangers—poachers, venomous spiders and snakes, pumas and jaguars, hypothermia, infection.
Infection was the nastiest, so he kept it in the front of his mind as he braced for her lift. “Okay, up you go.”
She pushed against his hands and hauled herself onto the top of the boulder. And he didn’t even peek at her backside as it accidentally brushed his cheek, just held his chin higher and thought back to the whopper of an infection he’d come down with on his arm a few years back in Somalia.
As soon as he got his body in check, he looked up. She was on her hands and knees, facing away from him. This time, he looked his fill.
“It’s a drop-off. Steep. And I don’t see any way around it.”
“Do you see any water?”
“Um...yes. Oh, wow, that’s pretty.” She lowered her hip to the rock and twisted, flashing him a smile. “There’s a waterfall in the distance. Looks like it feeds the river that cuts through this ravine.”
“That would be the Rio Nobu. You’re right. We don’t have any choice but to rappel. I forgot about that part. Luckily we’re coming off the dry season so the river shouldn’t be too high or swift to cross.”
Another rumble of thunder shook the forest. The sky opened up with raindrops the size of marbles. In response, Vanessa let out a girlish squeak that just about stripped away the remnants of Diego’s willpower where she was concerned.
The powers that be had a twisted sense of humor, that was for sure, because Diego didn’t have the chance to avert his eyes before her clothes turned translucent again. He tried to remember the topic he’d been meditating on to distract himself, but the only thought in his head was wondering how he was going to survive his time with Vanessa Crosby without going insane.
Then she flipped to her stomach and slid to the ground, bouncing in all the right spots when she touched down, and he knew he was a goner.
Turning away from her, he dug into the backpack and withdrew climbing rope. He didn’t carry a proper rappelling harness, preferring the fluidity of free-climb when possible and the versatility of knotting a harness out of rope when necessary.
As Vanessa watched, using her hands on her forehead like a visor to shield her eyes from the rain, he got busy with the ropes, fashioning them each a harness.
He looped a rope around each of her legs, tied the ends together at her waist with a water knot, then secured the straps with a carabiner. The situation shouldn’t have been erotic. It was pouring rain in the middle of a two-day hike after a mission went FUBAR in a major way. Even without all that, his mind should’ve been 100 percent focused on Vanessa’s safety, but the act of wrapping ropes around the wet fabric plastered to her thighs and waist only made the pulse of attraction buzzing between them hum like a live wire.
She set her hand on his back while he worked near her waist. “I’d tell you how scared I am, but then you’d accuse me of not trusting you.”
He gave a tug on the rope to secure it at the place where her thighs met and stood, proud that his gaze hadn’t lingered too extra long in that particular spot. “Don’t go there. This is going to be a piece of cake compared to your jump out of the chopper. When you rappel, you control the speed.”
“Control. I like the sound of that.”
He liked the sound of her voice, husky and low in a way that got him thinking about pinning her to the rock and setting his mouth to work on the hollow of her throat, proving to her which of them was in control. Then again, feelings didn’t get much more out of control than his were at the moment.
“You’re going to be rappelling with me, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Definitely. Rappelling in the rain isn’t ideal. I’ll be right next to you the whole time making sure you’re safe.” He fitted himself with leg loops, then crafted his own harness.
For makeshift rappelling devices, he used more rope and carabiners in a technique he’d learned as a SEAL, then took the time to double-anchor the ropes to trees and triple-check the strength of the knots. He boosted Vanessa onto the rock ledge again and followed her up. After a lesson on using the friction created by the rappelling device to control the speed of descent, he modeled the right way to back over the edge.
She was a trouper. Though her hands were unsteady and he knew from the chopper that she was afraid of heights, she put her back to the ravine and stepped off the edge. Hard rain pummeled their backs and heads, making footholds slippery and insecure. He kept up a string of encouraging words and positioned himself slightly beneath her in case she slipped. The descent was excruciatingly slow,
but steady.
Her feet lost purchase once and she slammed into the rock.
He swung close and rubbed her shoulder. “You okay?”
“Never better. I’m a huge fan of scaling cliffs in the pouring rain.”
Sarcasm was a good sign. It meant she was going to make it to the bottom without succumbing to her fear. They resumed their descent. Diego mirrored her speed, keeping as close to her as he could while still giving them each enough space to work.
“You know,” he said, “there’s some people that pay good money to go on a vacation that includes helicopter rides and rappelling through a rainforest.”
“True, but I’m not one of those people. I like vacations where you can kick back on a tropical beach with a margarita. Do you take time off work to relax and recharge like that?”
The line had tangled around her foot. He shook it out and they kept going. Her question was probably a strategy to distract herself from what they were doing. He was tempted to tell her to be quiet and concentrate, but she was doing a terrific job for a beginner, and she hadn’t complained once the entire day, so he didn’t see any harm in playing along. “Not really. I try to visit my parents at least once a year, but that’s about it.”
“Don’t you ever just want to be home, in your house or apartment or wherever you live?”
“I don’t live anywhere. I have a couple P.O. boxes, one in Mexico City, the other in Jersey. When I’m not on a mission, I’m training. So either I sleep in base housing or hotels. And sometimes I go to my Leroy cabin.”
They navigated over an outcrop in silence. When they were below it, she asked, “What about a vacation? Somewhere tropical.”
He huffed. “Don’t get much more tropical than this.”
He didn’t think it was possible, but the rain grew denser, surging down on them like sheets of water.
Vanessa’s pace slowed. “No, I mean like Hawaii, at a resort.”
“Um...last year, for my parents’ fortieth anniversary, all us kids took them on a Caribbean cruise.”
She cast him a sidelong look. “I can’t picture you on a cruise.”
“I know, right? I couldn’t believe I was doing it, but that was my parents’ big dream, so off we went. My brother and sisters, my middle sister’s husband and their kids, the whole lot of us. It made my parents happy and that’s all that mattered, but let me tell you, if I go to hell, it’s going to look like the bingo hall of a cruise ship.”
She laughed. “Were you able to relax at all?”
“Not really. The whole cruise, I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“What? Why not?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what I should be doing, that while I floated on this barge of fake luxury, children were being sold into slavery, and I could’ve saved them if I was on the clock. I laid in bed and pictured boats of cocaine slipping into the country, and I thought, if me and my crew had been on it, we would’ve stopped all that from happening. I think, when you’ve seen the things I have and know what I do about how the world works, there’s no such thing as a vacation.”
The bottom four meters of rock were slick and flat and would be the most treacherous part for Vanessa. He eased the friction in the carabiners and sailed the rest of the way down to get himself in a position to help her should she need it.
“Every day, you wake up wanting to save people,” she said as she negotiated the last few meters of the descent. “I know you don’t agree, but you really are a real-life superhero.”
She angled to look at him and her feet slipped. She yelped and her body twisted out. The rock was so slick that her arms, rather than grip the rope tighter, flailed as she fell.
Diego’s instincts took over. He grabbed her waist with one hand and caught her left leg behind the knee with the other, stopping her fall with his body.
By the time he’d recovered enough wits to realize her arms were around his neck and she was straddling him, and that he was pressing her hips against the rock with his groin, it was too late to pretend that touching her like that didn’t affect him in a fundamental physical way. Too late to deny that she fit around his body like she was born for it.
“You have to be more careful.” Swallowing hard, he screwed up his mouth in a cringe, hating the telltale strain in his voice, praying she didn’t hear it, too. So much for playing it close to the vest. He lowered his head to the rock above her shoulder, turning his nose toward her neck. Even sopping wet she smelled good. “I mean, what am I supposed to do with you if you get hurt up here in the middle of nowhere?”
She shivered from her legs up through her shoulders, and he felt like a total bastard because he’d probably gone and said the wrong thing yet again and scared her, like she was imagining that he’d abandon her in the wilderness if she sprained her ankle.
The rain pelted his head and back like pebbles. He hunched over her so it wouldn’t beat her up as hard as it was him. “Forget I said that.”
“No, you’re right,” she said. “We’re a two-day hike from help, with at least twenty kilometers to go. Factor in elevation and the denseness of the undergrowth, rappelling and river-crossing, and I’d be useless if I got injured.”
He didn’t particularly want her factoring anything at the moment, but he was going to keep his trap shut until he thought of something harmless to say. Her grip tightened around his neck, which he supposed meant he wouldn’t be setting her on her feet anytime soon. Not that he wanted to.
“You saved me again.” The adoration in her tone frustrated the hell out him.
“You keep going on about superheroes and Batman, or whatever, but I’m no hero. I don’t want you talking like that, romanticizing it like you’ve been.”
“Explain to me how you’re not heroic, when you wake up every morning wanting to save the world.”
He wasn’t exactly a dynamo in the verbal expression department, but he could tell she wasn’t going to shut up about it until her curiosity was satisfied. “Saying I wake up implies that I sleep, but most of the time, I can’t sleep at all. When I do, yeah, that’s what I wake up knowing I’m going to do that day and every day for the rest of my life, but that’s just because when I close my eyes, all I see is the evil of the world.”
She stroked his hair. “When did you know this was the life you were meant to lead?”
“At my brother’s funeral, I stood over his coffin and looked at that American flag covering it, and I knew what I had to do. I made a vow to him right then and there that I’d never give up the fight to make the world safer for our family.”
“Like I said...”
“Look, all it boils down to is that after 9/11, I was one of the few people in the country with the skill set and the drive to take a stand, make a difference. I only have this one gift—my guns and fists and the burn inside me telling me to use them. It’s my reason for being on this planet. And it’s a good thing I love it because I don’t have the brains or patience for anything else but brute force.”
She moved her hand between them, brushing her fingers across his collarbone. He ground his molars together and adjusted his feet, fighting the primal roar in his body urging him to find the way inside her and claim her for himself.
Her cheek touched his, and when she spoke, the corner of her moving lips tickled his skin. “How do you not realize how smart you are?”
He opened his eyes, blinking the water out of them, and was greeted by the sight of the downpour funneling between her breasts. Man, she was perfect. And he wanted her so damn bad it was killing him.
“Clearly I’m not that smart, or I wouldn’t be standing here with you like this.”
Beyond the fact that she was an asset, she deserved a whole lot more from a man than what Diego had to offer. Not just smarts-wise, but someone who could give her full-time attention, along with the home/kids/d
og dream he’d bet a million dollars she harbored. That wasn’t how Diego was made or how he lived. To change like that, to be what she deserved, he’d have to forsake the promise he’d made to Ossie—and that was the deal breaker.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to set her down and put some space between them. Couldn’t stop blabbing about his life and his insomnia, about how much the pain grew inside him after Ossie died until the only way to deal with it was to throw himself into the fray. And the whole time, Vanessa’s body was wrapped around him like she was the one doing the protecting. She was the one being strong as a shield while he stripped his life bare for her.
What was he thinking, doing that? How would he ever convince her to trust him with her safety if he kept showing her the weakest parts of himself?
* * *
Vanessa had no idea caring about somebody could feel like an umbrella. Sheltering, strengthening. The more Diego opened up to her, the safer she felt from everything.
In her mind’s eye, she could picture him in the tiny stateroom of a cruise ship, staring at the ceiling, checking the clock and waiting for dawn. The weight of the guilt he’d brought on himself for taking time off from saving the world. He would’ve endured it silently on the cruise, to keep his parents happy.
Tenderness for him—for this man who was such a force to be reckoned with that he thought it was all he was good for—glowed inside her, bright and hot.
She wanted to kiss him. Needed him to understand that it was okay to hurt. That he hadn’t lost any standing in her eyes, because she understood the bravery it took to be honest and open. Because she hurt sometimes, too. But somehow she knew he didn’t give himself permission to feel it. He channeled the pain into action and never allowed himself the opportunity to process everything he and his family had been through.
With her fingers in his hair, she angled his face toward hers and pressed a kiss to his closed lips. His muscles tensed, his mouth became unyielding and his hands froze on her hips. She ran the tip of her tongue along the crease of his lips, seeking entrance. Finally his lips softened. He opened enough that she caught the faintest taste of him. A thrill of lust sizzled through her at the realization that his taste matched his scent—a masculine, sweet spice that called to her with its rightness, as if his taste and scent had been designed just for her.
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