She rearranged the blanket over him. “I’m going to give you some pain meds.”
“No,” he said, glancing through wet-clumped lashes at the poster tacked onto the ceiling above him. It was a SEAL in full combat gear, a tagline running across the bottom saying: The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday. Yeah, no shit.
She paused in the middle of filling a hypo. “Are you in a drug recovery program?”
He shook his head, and the combat SEAL swam along the ceiling. “I, uh…” I’m owed some penance, so pain is good. “I gotta learn to take it, right? As a future SEAL.”
She huffed. A needle jabbed his arm.
He tilted his chin to look at her.
She smiled sweetly. “I guess I disagree.” She kneaded his abdomen. “Does this hurt?”
Everything hurt. “No. I’m Shane. What’s your name?”
“HM3 Hart,” she answered, examining the cuts on his arms. “But you can call me Corpsman.”
“C’mon, give a guy a break here. Normally I’d charm your socks off to get your actual name.” Yeah, right. A South Boston man was as likely to have charm as he was to go to Jiffy Lube for an oil change. “But I don’t have the energy.” He tried out a casual laugh on her. It was an alligator belching.
“Kitty,” she said, taking pity on him. Nice of her.
“Kitty,” he repeated. His head did a few cartwheels.
She peered down at him with concerned blue eyes.
“Kitty,” he said again, this time murmuring her name. Liquid ran down his neck. Not sea water. Sweat. Lots and lots of it. What the—? “Kitty,” he groaned.
“He’s delirious,” a female said. “He keeps calling me Kitty.”
“Shit,” a male responded.
Sounded like Jason. Jace? Are you here, man? But didn’t Jason go straight back to the barracks to sleep after Hell Week ended?
A soft palm came to rest on Shane’s forehead. “His fever is very high.”
Jason’s voice again: “There’s ibuprofen in the first aid kit from my ditch bag.”
“Oh, good.” The palm disappeared.
Shane dragged his tongue across his lips. It snagged a couple of times, it was so dry. He wanted Kitty’s hand back.
“Hell,” Jason swore. “His tongue looks like it’s covered with day-old proofing yeast.”
Pause.
“What?” Jason shot out defensively. “When I was a kid, I used to watch the family cook make sticky buns.”
“Could you maybe not mention food right now?”
A huff. “Look, I know everyone’s hungry. Next town we stop near, I’ll steal some food. Do you know where the map is?”
“Oh, sorry, I was studying it. Here.”
Paper rustles.
Kitty was writing on Shane’s chart.
“So, hey, while you’re writing, how about putting down your phone number for me?” Shane winked at her. Maybe.
Kitty cast a glance at him from beneath her eyelashes, an expression in her baby blues that said Who me? Really? On the inside, this girl was a little bird with a broken wing. She needed someone like Shane to look out for her. And that decided him. He was going to marry her.
Jason asked, “How soon until you think he can travel?”
Outside in the hallway, a male corpsman called for Sam Tyson to follow him to exam room four. “Hey, Jace,” Shane said, laughing. “Remember how we joked about what Sam’s call sign would be? We guessed something like Gerber Baby, what with that big-ass head of his.” He laughed again. “Remember?”
“Yeah, Mad Dog,” Jace said quietly. “I remember.”
“What’s that about?” the female asked.
“He’s back at BUD/S, talking about a guy we trained with. His call sign ended up being Munster.”
“Oh.”
“After Herman Munster…you know, the guy from the old black-and-white TV show The Munsters…the man with the, uh, big-assed head.”
Sigh. “I don’t think Shane will be traveling any time today.”
“I figured. And that damned riverbed is turning out to be Grand Central Station for the villagers.” Boots scrape. “I just love it when all options suck.”
* * *
The moonlit silence pervading the small town of Choha Khalsa was crushing. It kept the hairs on Jason’s nape in constant high-alert, erect mode, and the curses in his mind running a steady barrage. Without any covering noise, he couldn’t get dick done without being heard.
Over the last thirty minutes of sneaking and spying, he’d discovered that Choha Khalsa was utterly useless to him—a small, shabby town with an imbecilic network of roads littered with debris, old furniture, car parts, the occasional pile of fecal matter—animal or human, he didn’t care to contemplate—and one atrociously stinky dead cat. He spotted more than one vehicle shedding orange flakes of rust into the dirt, any one of which he could easily have hotwired…except that the sound of an engine firing up in this consuming quiet would’ve earned him all the attention he didn’t want.
The people here were also too damned poor. He’d peeked into over two dozen houses, and hadn’t spotted a single spare scrap of food just ho-humming around, waiting for him to snag it. He supposed he could’ve crept inside a few homes and conducted a more thorough search. Thanks to his SEAL training, he knew how to move soundlessly, but with the floors of just about every room covered with three generations of Pakistanis sacked out on sleeping mats, he would’ve needed to do some fancy tiptoeing to find his way to the kitchen—“kitchen” being a charitable term. Considering he wore size fourteen boots, the likelihood of him waking someone wasn’t worth the risk, not when there wasn’t any sure sign of food.
What he could really use was a big, noisy city. Kallar Syedan would no doubt have worked for him, but Shane’s fever rendered that option unreachable. For today, at least.
Sighing expansively, he took a rest from what was summing up to be a total bomb of an outing, hunkering down in the shadows of a building that smelled like the musk of a tomcat and some kind of pungent, oily stench, like the hell smell of rotten fish, but not exactly that. He propped his forearms on his knees and let his hands hang down.
Across the street, the tattered awning of what covered a market stall by day gave a couple of brisk flaps. One good thing, they’d never been hit weather-wise by anything worse than gusty wind. About the only good thing.
Christ, he could use a drink—alcohol, coffee. Either/or.
A cat crossed the road in front of him, looking like it’d just finished riding several hundred miles napping on a car’s transmission—singed hair standing on end. It darted up one of the poles supporting the awning. A second later, two more cats came by, one following the other with the kind of single-minded purpose that generally led to more cats being made. Maybe Choha Khalsa was the stray capital of Pakistan. The pursing cat made a low, lusty warble in its throat, and the two disappeared down an alley.
Jason raked his fingers through his hair. Okay, no way was he going to let two cats going off to screw give him ideas. Because that was just bizarre.
He was already thinking about Farrin way too much anyway, after spending the whole day with her essentially alone—Shane’s on-again, off-again unconsciousness rendering him a nonentity. He and Farrin hadn’t talked much, but he’d observed her all day, growing more damned intrigued by the minute.
Like when she went through his ditch bag to reassess supplies and found his first aid kit. He’d been fascinated, watching her rearrange the items to her satisfaction—bandages neighboring with the anti-bacterial ointment, gauze pads next to white tape, packets of aspirin stacked on top of ibuprofen, a lone condom tucked away in a hidden corner. He’d found it oddly restful. The way her surgeon’s hands did things was neat and graceful. Competent and no-nonsense. Hands to admire and trust.
Trust?
Doubtful.
Weirdly enough, the more he was intrigued by her, the more he felt himself trying to go in the opposite direction, reverting to his regu
lar modus operandi of letting his general suspicions toward women spill over onto her. All sorts of thoughts along the lines of, no way Farrin is really this good; she’s just better at hiding her bad side than others, were going through his mind…a lot of unfair thoughts born from his predisposition to judge women harshly.
Yeah, he wasn’t so head-in-the-sand about his past that he didn’t know his relationship with his mother had scarred him in this area. ’Course that way of thinking would also fail to take into account everything his past girlfriends and dates had done just fine on their own to help him find the door.
But what had Farrin ever done to earn his scorn?
Not a damned thing, yet he seemed to be stamping on his fledgling I’m-open-to-seeing-her-as-okay attitude as fast as it could sprout.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. He needed a break from her, that’s what. Even one day would help—something while he worked out in his head what was going on with him about the woman.
Maybe he should just ride out to Kallar Syedan on his own tonight, search for supplies. It was only six miles… Which was way too far for him to be away from Farrin. He would spend the whole time picturing a hundred different things happening to her in his absence, all of them bad. So, tough luck on getting a break.
He was stuck with her.
Even now he was itching to get back to camp. He stood, pushing up through his heels to get to his feet. His leftover back injury twinged him a little, and a few prickles of pain shot through his thighs. His muscles must have started to fall asleep.
He shook out his legs.
Off in the distance, a cat yowled. The sound of feline orgasm?
Snorting softly, he trudged back onto the road while gazing up at the crescent moon, sharp and curved like a scimitar…or maybe a derisive, knowing smile, like someone up there saw everything that Jason didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Town of Talhaar, Northern Pakistan
Another moan, low with unspeakable anguish, pierced Farrin’s cranium. Tucking her elbows between her bent knees, she clutched her head and squeezed her temples.
She was sitting on the dirt floor of their newest hideout, a two-room, fire-damaged hovel that stank of burnt timber, sour decomposition—like the kind found on the inside of a broken refrigerator—and, now that Shane’s mare had lifted its tail, manure. Wood splinters curled down from the walls like over-permed hair, and a thin layer of sand ghosted over everything.
Bad smells and dinginess aside, the place should have been a lucky find for them. Besides the advantage of it providing complete coverage, it had a working toilet and faucet. The brackish water still required anti-bacterial tabs to make it drinkable, and even then it was foul-tasting, but after rationing water all day—with the dry, cracked lips to show for it—she scarcely cared.
But, of course, good fortune had not blessed them. Like new homeowners finding a crack in the foundation of a precious dream home, they soon discovered they’d been sold a lemon with this place. Right after they settled in, a ghastly moaning started coming from their neighbor’s house. On and on and torturously on….
And there went another one.
“Dammit!” Jason’s boots skidded against the hard-packed dirt floor as he brought his pacing to an abrupt halt. Shafts of gray twilight were squeezing through gaps in the boarded-up window and striping his face with metal. “I can’t stand much more of this. What the hell is wrong with that person?” He hacked a gesture in the general direction of the house next door.
She glowered at him from between her forearms. “I’d think the answer would be obvious. Someone over there is terribly ill.” Her tone was snappish, and this was why she never dieted. Because not eating put her in a foul temper, and she’d been starving for two days.
Standing over her, he planted his hands on his hips. He looked tired and drawn, dust caked in the haggard lines of his face. He’d walked beside his gelding for more than half the mileage they covered today.
To save the horse from overwork.
That’s what he’d told her.
Sure. Right. She would believe that excuse the day she believed Raham would reunite with her holding flowers and candy. Ever since Jason had confessed his falling-out-with-Shane story, he’d been avoiding contact with her, and minimizing his time in the saddle with her was just more of the same. She slapped her palms down on the floor with a smack. He hadn’t even let her re-bandage his blistered feet.
“Save the supplies in my first aid kit for the possibility of worse injuries,” he’d said. So noble and selfless…
Save the supplies in my first aid kit for the possibility of worse injuries. What was that… a word count of ten? More or less, whatever. It was pretty much the total of everything he’d said to her in the last two days.
“And your nonstop pacing,” she went on, still snappish, still grouchy and mean, “is only adding another annoyance to this situation.”
He stared moodily at her. His eyes were hot and hard, like the day he saved her from her fallen mare.
What the hell kind of man do you think I am?
Fuming, Farrin took a huge, hot breath, her breasts heaving. I’ll tell you who! A cold jerk, that’s who. An unfeeling louse who pulls away from a woman after initiating her to the joys of closeness and hugging. How dare he?! She’d been in his arms, by holy heaven, sat on his lap and felt desire for him—honest, real, incredible sexual desire. He’d confessed pieces of his past to her that she suspected he normally kept closely guarded, and by this sharing had shown her how much emotional intimacy could add to the physical. Because of Jason, she was experiencing feelings she never thought possible, and she wanted more of them, not less. He wasn’t being fair!
A gnawing, hungry ache stabbed her gut, and she growled a low breath. Hoisting herself to her feet, she leaned her body weight forward and kept on the attack. “And,” she punctuated, “I’m worried about Shane.” She made her own slicing gesture at the SEAL, who was laid out on the floor across from them under the boarded-up window, his complexion gray and shiny with a sickly patina.
Shane had awakened this morning with his fever down, although not gone, and speaking coherently. This was the good news. The bad news was that the incision on his buttocks was oozing stinky pus. Hardly surprising that he was getting an infection, considering he’d been bouncing in the saddle on that particular wound almost from the moment he came out of surgery. She needed to give him something stronger than ibuprofen.
She needed a hospital, and not a pokey government hospital, like what was available—according to the map—in Kallar Syedan. The pharmaceutical labels at a local facility would be in Arabic, and she couldn’t steal what she couldn’t clearly read. Only an international hospital would have medicine bottles in English.
So instead of making a six-mile trip to Kallar Syedan today, they’d journeyed thirty-five miles to Islamabad.
And did not go to a hospital.
Because in and around the city, there’d been a horde of jeeps, just like the ones the Taliban had parked outside the village to create a roadblock.
Islamabad was crawling with terrorists.
Luckily Jason spotted the jeeps in time to detour them undetected to Talhaar, a small town ten miles to the north of Islamabad. After a half-hour search, they found this abandoned house to occupy, and were now bunking in with their horses. It was close quarters, but—
Moooooan.
She clamped her teeth so hard, her eyeballs pulsed. “Dammit, Jason!” she swore, and she never swore. “Shane needs antibiotics.”
“So you’ve already told me,” he retorted. “Several times.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Sweat dampened her forearms. Marvelous. She’d add stinking to high heaven to her list of complaints. “And we need food!”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?”
“Then sneak into town and steal something, like you said you would do. Unless you plan on having us dine on the rat poop in this house.”
“I am not,” he gritted, “rehashing this conversation with you.”
She glared at him, far from enamored with his tone, even though in all fairness they had already engaged in this fight several times. Each time, he’d enumerated, succinctly and rationally, the reasons why he couldn’t go into town tonight: the Taliban would be intently inspecting any men of Jason’s height; Jason could cover only half his face with his turban, and if the other half was scrutinized too closely—and for that, Farrin needed to refer back to point one—it would be noticed as a white guy’s; and Jason was wearing the same clothes the terrorists had seen him in at the jeep checkpoint. Basically, all points added up to one surety: he would stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore, unless Farrin actually wanted him to get captured, he needed to wait until the bad guys cleared out before going into Islamabad.
Therefore no food, no medicine—and argh! She was sick of this!
She uncrossed her arms in an abrupt motion and exhaled through her teeth.
“If I could,” Jason continued in the same caustic tone, “don’t you think I’d—?” He broke off, his upper lip curling as if he’d just discovered fungus growing between his toes. “Jesus Christ, what is that stench?”
She caught the smell then, too, and snapped her chin around. Holy Allah, she knew that odor. She glanced sharply at Shane, but, no, it couldn’t be coming from him so soon after his wound became infected.
MOOOOOAN.
The moaning was louder now! She walked quickly over to the door and cracked it open.
Jason moved in close behind her to peer over the top of her, seeing what she saw.
It was dark now, the sun having set completely, and on the porch of the house next door a faintly glowing lantern had been placed under the railing and behind an old bicycle, where it cast a looming, nightmarish recreation of the metal frame against the wall. It also illuminated a young boy lying on the porch with a stained pillow under his head and a rough blanket over his body. One of his thin legs was sticking out from the blanket, his shin blackish in color. Oh, no.
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