by Vicki Tharp
He tried to bend over, but he stopped short and hissed in a breath. “Can you set the food down and help me? I need to bind my ribs.”
“You, sit.” Sidney ordered.
When he landed heavily on the ledge, he said, “Check my right boot for my knife. They might have taken it, but maybe they weren’t very thorough when they found out I have a prosthetic. Freaks some people out.”
“And here I thought the carbon-fiber print on the socket was badass.”
She palpated down his leg until she got to the cuff of his jeans, mostly doing everything by feel because either the moon wasn’t high enough or it was hiding behind cloud cover. She easily slipped her hand into his boot because there wasn’t any muscle there to take up the space, just the narrow stalk of his prosthetic.
She fished around until her hand hit on something hard. “Bingo.”
“Thanks be.”
She handed it to him, as well as the blanket. He cut what felt like three-inch strips down one of the long sides, laid the knife on the ledge next to him, stood, and handed her the strips. She tied them all together to make one long bandage.
He offered brief instructions, then raised his arms to the side. She started at his waist and worked her way up.
“Tighter,” he said.
He stiffened and grunted as she restarted.
“Tighter.”
Pulling tighter, she continued her way up his chest. He groaned and blew out air in short, hard, repeated bursts.
“You all right?”
“Fuck…” Pant, pant, “…tastic.”
She tied off the end and gave it a light tug to make sure it was secure. “Done.”
It took him a few seconds before he could talk. “Thanks. Dinner?”
“You want the ledge or the ground.”
“Ground,” he said. “Once I’m down there I don’t plan on getting up until morning.”
She laid out the remains of the blanket for them and then settled beside him, their legs outstretched, the plate balancing between their laps.
“Let’s see what the waiter brought.” Bryan investigated the content of the plate with his fingers. “Biscuit at twelve o’clock. Something mushy at three. Hunk of mystery meat at six and…I’m pretty sure those are beans at nine.” He licked his finger clean. “Yep, beans.”
She made a grab for the biscuit, tore it in half, and handed him a piece. It was stale and…really, really good, and not because she was starving. “I think this is one of the biscuits we packed in.”
After biting off a hunk, he said, “Definitely Lottie’s biscuit.”
They settled into the meal. Sidney choked on the spice of whatever was at the three o’clock position and suffered because they were conserving the last of the water. Her nose ran and sweat popped on her brow.
The meat was fist-sized and tough, and it was easier to take turns biting off pieces than bother getting up to get his knife off the ledge. The beans were a challenge. Not exactly finger food, but they were hungry and managed without complaint.
She gave him the last bite of meat, the dregs of the beans, and whatever that was—pureed habaneros came to mind—that was too freaking hot for her to eat, though Bryan had no problem with it.
Bryan laid the plate aside. “I feel like I should leave a tip.”
“Better than I expected.”
His stomach grumbled even after the meal. “Not enough for two.”
“It’s a good sign they’re feeding us. I mean, if they were planning on shooting us and dumping our bodies, why feed us, right?”
“Sure.” The word sounded a little patronizing, but he was in a lot of pain, so she cut him some slack.
Then she had a terrible thought. “Unless it was our last meal.”
In the darkness, there was a darker blob where his head should have been. He bumped her shoulder with his. “It can’t be our last meal.”
“Why’s that?”
He took her hand and tucked her against him. “Because I promised I’d get you out of this.”
“Yeah…”
He chuckled, then groaned when the pain hit him. “I hear a big, fat, fucking ‘but.’”
“But, this isn’t like you promised to fix my flat or get me out of a ticket. This isn’t your everyday situation.”
“Irish.” The word came out the way other men say “honey” or “sweetheart.” “Every day I spent in Iraq wasn’t an everyday situation.”
Crap. Not the guy to bemoan bad days to. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. All I’m saying is I’ve been in some hairy situations and managed to get out of them intact.” Then he bumped his prosthetic against her leg. “More or less.”
“How is this situation like anything you’ve dealt with before? How can you joke at a time like this? Aren’t you concerned? Aren’t—”
Sidney cut herself off, not liking the pitch to her voice as the hysteria crept in. She gave him bonus points for not slapping her across the face to knock some sense into her.
Bugs buzzed in the trees. Laughs and hoots and hollers came from up the hill. There must have been a breeze blowing their way, because she smelled meat cooking on the fire, the smoke thick with the aroma of cooking peppers. The words didn’t carry, but it sounded like people at the end of a long day, around a fire after a good meal.
“When people are trying to kill you, they—” His voice was loud enough for the guard to hear, if he was still there.
Sidney remained mute.
“They are trying to kill you.” He was quieter, but no less passionate, when he spoke again. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an insurgent, a civilian, or a drug cartel. They want you dead. Your job, your mission, is to get out alive. Period. ‘Damn the torpedoes!’ and ‘full steam ahead!’ and all that fuckery. You survive. End of story.”
He’d stopped talking, but by the tension in his body, he wasn’t finished speaking.
“The difference between then and now, and I mean the only difference, is that the men and women overseas were soldiers who went in with the training and the guns and the expectation of having to fight for their life.
“They were my brothers and sisters. As I much as I loved them, and as much as I was willing to die for them, I never had…”
His voice faded to nothing. Reaching down, he found her hand and twined his fingers with hers. In the void, his breath wheezed in and out, short and harsh.
He cleared his throat a couple of times, and then he said, “I never had someone that I…that mattered as much to me as you do. So yeah, I’m fucking concerned.”
“Bry, you know I like—”
“Stop right there.”
“Bry—”
“Stop.”
She stopped.
Sidney felt like the little girl telling the boy at recess she only wanted him to push her on the swing. No kickball, no jungle gym, no sharing the cookie on the lunch tray.
Had she been leading him on? Hadn’t she made herself clear? They had an agreement. A few days on the trail, they would ignore their pasts and their problems.
However, their capture was a stark reminder that they couldn’t live in Fantasy Land. Their actions, their choices, had consequences, and she didn’t think she could get past his. Not if he was unwilling to get past them too. As much as she hated it and wished otherwise, the pills, the alcohol, they were a deal breaker.
“We should try and get some sleep,” he said at last.
He unbuckled his jeans and slipped them off, taking his prosthetic off with them. “Can you remove the ACE bandage?” he asked.
He grunted as he lay flat and she went to work removing the wrapping as best she could, going almost completely on feel. When she finished, she rolled the bandage up on itself so it would stay clean and he could use it again in the morning.
“Give me t
hat,” she said as she reached for his leg. “Is it still sore?”
“The end is, but it isn’t any worse.”
Gently, she rubbed the skin on his leg, starting at the end and slowly working her way up, kneading the sore muscles. She worked her way higher to his knee, where she worked the tendons, then up his lower quads.
“Jesus,” he groaned.
He sounded muffled and she heard the scrunch of his beard, as if he were running his hands down his face. She hit a knot at the back of his thigh and added more pressure until it released beneath her hands.
“Holy mother of God.” He slapped at the blanket with his palm.
She stopped what she was doing. “You tapping out, Marine?”
“I’m pretty sure that was better than sex.”
She playfully backhanded his leg, then stretched out on the blanket beside him and snuggled her head against his shoulder, careful not to bump his ribs.
Teasing, she said, “That was better than what we—?”
“What we shared was different,” he said, all trace of humor gone.
Amazing? Earth shattering? Life changing? For a guy she claimed to like as a friend, what did it matter what he thought the sex together had been like? She didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. “How?”
Beneath her head, his shoulder moved. A slight shrug she never would have noticed if she weren’t touching him. “Just different.”
He reached down and wrapped what was left of the butchered blanket around her. It barely covered her. It didn’t do a damn thing for him.
She didn’t know what to do with her top arm—normally she would have draped it across him, but she didn’t want to cause him any more pain—so she tucked it up under her chin. Instead, he picked up her hand and brought it across his abdomen rather than across his ribs.
“You good?” he asked.
She was lying in the arms of a man she had grown to care for much, much, more than she’d ever imagined possible. She was also in the middle of a drug cartel’s mountain hideout, with the question of survival looming over their heads like a razor-sharp guillotine.
She’d been better. But this very moment wasn’t so bad. “I’m good.”
They lay there in the dark, the camp quieted down enough that the chatter no longer masked the sounds of the animals up at the corrals. Bryan’s breathing slowed, but by the tension in his body, there was no doubt he was awake.
“Off the record,” she said, “you matter to me too. More than I expected. More than I want. The pills, the alcohol…it’s—”
“I know. It’s okay. I didn’t tell you what I did expecting you to tell me anything in return. That’s not why I said it.”
“Then why did you?”
He kissed the top of her head. “I thought it was important that you knew.”
* * * *
The next morning, Boomer woke up next to Sidney in the shed. Ropey saliva pooled in the back of his throat, thick with the taste of bile. Swallowing it back down fueled the burning cauldron of acid bubbling in his gut. He spat it out and groaned with the effort, his arm draped protectively across his ribs.
“Are you okay?”
“Probably something I ate or drank.”
“I ate and drank the exact same thing you did. I’m fine.”
He was afraid to look over at her, afraid to move. He was doing everything in his power not to puke his guts out. As it was, every breath was pure agony, sharp, stabbing pain in his lungs that stole what little breath he’d taken.
Sidney shifted and then loomed above him, a steep frown marring her pretty face, her eyes narrowed with concern as she searched his face for answers.
“You’re pale,” she said. Then she touched her hand to his forehead. “And clammy.”
She vanished from his view but her hands roamed his body—his chest, his abdomen, his legs. Then she slipped a hand beneath his back. “You’ve drenched the blanket with sweat. What’s going on, Bryan?”
He lifted his head to look down at her and his stomach revolted at the movement. The toxic brew boiling in stomach lurched with a violence he’d only witnessed in the truly damned. His stomach convulsed, and he hollered out in pain as he clambered to his hands and knees.
Then the baño bucket materialized under his face, empty but reeking of stale, stagnant urine. His stomach heaved and heaved. His ribs felt like they were caving in, his lungs caught in a hydraulic vice gone awry, his heart kicking inside his chest like a battering ram.
Every muscle, fiber, cell, neuron was ablaze. Even when he’d been shot, he hadn’t felt this kind of sheer torture. At least then the adrenaline had damped the pain down to merely excruciating until the morphine from the medics had kicked in.
His adrenaline failed him and every last gram of Vicodin had long left his system. He tried to breathe through the pain, but that pissed the pain off more, like slapping it in the face.
Stars blurred his vision and his arms shook with the effort to hold himself up. Right before he collapsed on his face, Sidney pulled the bucket away.
He didn’t move for the longest time, even to move his cheek off the pebble that jammed into his flesh. The immediate urge to puke had subsided, and he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize his stomach’s tentative cease-fire. If he had to stay facedown on the rocky hillside of a mountain for the rest of his life, he would do that if it meant he never hurled again.
Slowly, he caught his breath and the world around him came into focus. Sidney knelt beside him, her palm on his back, with the gentle strokes one might give a baby as it fell asleep.
“Better?” she asked.
His abdominal muscles were tight, and his stomach still churned, but he was past the eruption phase. At least for now. Even with the sickly sour stench of piss and puke embedded in his nostrils. “A bit.”
“Still think it was the food?”
“That would be the best option.”
“And the worst?”
“Acute alcohol and opiate withdrawal.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You think you’re having withdrawals?” Sidney dropped to the ground inside the cartel’s shed and drew her legs up to her chest.
“Maybe.”
“You could need a hospital.”
A harsh burst of laughter escaped him. “Ouch. Irish, I already need a hospital.”
“Bry—”
“I’m okay. Busted up pretty good, but right now, I’m okay.” He rolled to his side and reached for her hand. “Right now, we focus on this second, this minute, and making it to the next. That’s it. Don’t borrow trouble.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. His hands were cold, but held a strength in his grip that she hadn’t expected. Maybe he wasn’t so bad off.
She reached for the water jug. There was enough left to cover the bottom of the container, but not much more. “Here,” she said. “Rinse out your mouth.”
Scooting behind him, she helped prop up his head. He sloshed the water around in his mouth, then spat it out.
“More?”
“Save it.”
Voices approached. Sidney gently laid him back down before hopping up and peering through the largest of the front slits.
El Jefe and two other men came their way. They were the same men who had brought Bryan down the night before. She assumed these men were El Jefe’s preferred guards.
“They’re coming,” was all she needed to say.
“Help me up.”
“Maybe you should stay down.”
When he looked up at her, his eyes were steely dark with resolve. “Help me up.”
He rolled onto his hands and knees, panting with the effort. She put a shoulder under his armpit and stood, then helped him to the side so he could brace himself against the wall. She made a grab for his pants and prosthetic as the doors swung open.<
br />
El Jefe stood before them. His two men were about a yard behind, one to each side. He didn’t say anything at first, just drank in the sight. Her with Bryan’s jeans and the other half of his leg. Him slumped against the wall, in nothing but his blue boxer briefs, tattered strips of the brown blanket binding his chest.
“They have a knife. Find it.”
The men moved in for their search, tossed the tattered blanket out the door, checked under the barf bucket. In an empty shed the size of a queen-sized bed, a search doesn’t take long. One of the men wrapped his hand around her upper arm while the other started roughly patting her down. She didn’t move. Even when hands got gropey. Were they going to find the knife? Yeah. Didn’t mean she would make it easy on them.
When the guy grabbed her breast again, El Jefe chuckled and Bryan hollered, “Hey!”
The guy ignored Bryan and smiled up at her—the kind of smile the shark gives the seal.
“Sidney,” Bryan said with a calmness that surprised her. “Give them the knife.”
She shot him her best shut-the-hell-up look.
“Sidney.” Bryan used that fatherly tone men use when their kid won’t obey. She glanced back at him, the guard’s hands doing a slow, thorough search at the top of her thigh.
“Give. Them. The. Knife.”
Crap. “Fine.” She shook the guys off her. She pulled the knife from her boot and threw it. It stuck into the dirt two inches to the right of El Jefe’s foot.
One of the men reached down and handed it to their boss. Then a smile raised one side of El Jefe’s lips. More of a smirk, really. A slow anger simmered inside her, for their situation, for their brutality against Bryan.
“You sonofabitch,” she said as she lunged for El Jefe.
She hadn’t planned what she’d do when she got to him, but the guards snapped her up before she got the chance to find out. They shoved her back, the momentum dumping her on her butt in the doorway. Her teeth clattered in her head and she bit her tongue.
“A man who can’t control his woman is not a man,” El Jefe said to Bryan.
Bryan held El Jefe’s gaze, but he didn’t bother to reply.
Sidney stood and brought the water jug with her. “We need more water.”