by Cherry Adair
She’d tamed and controlled her thick braid down her back as they walked, and despite little sleep, and the stress of that last vision, she looked determined and eager to get where they were going.
Eager, Gideon knew, to do her job, and move on.
To what? To whom? None of his damned business. God only knew he had his own issues to deal with. He didn’t know the what or whom of his situation either.
While the trees provided overhead cover, they were sparser here, allowing washes of weak, early morning sunlight to bathe the ground. The scant understory made walking side by side possible and they sped up. They were careful where they stepped, though. The uneven ground, bumpy with thick veining of roots, was also a good place for reptiles to coil up in the sun. They’d passed two snoozing anacondas in the space of a hundred yards.
Something struck Gideon on the forehead. He glanced up and smiled. “We have company.” He pointed at several dozen playful spider monkeys racing around the branches of a Brazilian nut tree. “Watch out, they’re using us for target practice.”
“Beats bullets.” Unsmiling, Riva put up a hand to deflect a missile aimed at her face, and frowned. “I think you should reconsider. Head into Santa de Porres when we reach the vehicle. We can meet up there in a couple of days.”
If they separated as she suggested, that would be the last he saw of her.
He knew it, and he knew she knew it. They were inevitably going to say good-bye, but not when they reached the vehicle. He wasn’t letting her go after Maza alone. End of story. Besides, he didn’t want to admit it, but he wasn’t ready to say good-bye yet. “Have you received a blow to the head recently from something bigger than these stupid nuts, that I don’t know about?”
She turned to give him a narrow-eyed look. “What? No. Why?”
“Because we’ve had this convo ad nauseam. The answer remains the same.”
“You’re being obstinate.”
“You’re being pigheaded.”
She shot him a fulminating glance, then faced forward, speeding up her steps. “Fine.”
“Fine.” Gideon lengthened his stride to catch up.
Two minutes later, she tried again. “I still wis—”
“Shut the fuck up, Riva,” he told her without heat. Had her vision shown one of them dying? Both of them dying? That gave him pause. It made sense with how shook up she’d been and why she’d not wanted to tell him about it. If he went with her, would that change her fate? Would his presence, instead of protecting her, get her killed? He thought about asking. Hell, she had a power they should capitalize on. Instead, he clamped his mouth shut. If he asked, she sure as shit wouldn’t tell him.
But instinctively he knew, if he was the one in mortal danger, Riva would tell him. She’d warn him away without mincing words.
So she was the one at potential risk. Unfuckingacceptable. And if he had any power to stop her, he would. “How close are we to danger?”
Using the elevated highway of vines to chase them as they walked below, the monkeys became more proficient in their target practice. Riva shot out her hand and deflected a flying nut headed for his face. “I’ll protect you, don’t worry.”
That wasn’t what concerned him. He needed facts before he calculated the risks. He had no intention of letting her see Maza alone. That was set in stone. “I’m sure you will, but it’s not me I’m worried about.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Good to know. So back to my question. Are you seeing any imminent threat?” he asked as they stepped into a pool of sunlight.
Riva’s glossy hair shone blue/black. The curve of her smooth cheek begged to be touched. She was 100 percent focused. Walking fast. Her gaze strafed their immediate terrain for danger. Her SIG was in her hand at all times. “Not that I see.”
“Any new visions?”
“Thank God, no. Not yet.”
“Good.” He reached for her arm above her elbow and drew her to a stop. He ran his thumb in small circles on the inside of the soft flesh of bicep, then slid his hands up, letting his knuckles brush the sides of her breasts. “How about now?”
She cocked her head.
“I really want to kiss you.”
Her brown eyes darkened. Golden light gleamed on her creamy olive skin, and sheened the moisture on her lips. “This isn’t the time or place,” she told him crossly, not moving, but not shaking off his restraining hand.
“Yes.” Gideon turned her, then cupped her jaw. “It is. Later will be…later. Now is perfect.” He stroked his thumb over her lower lip. “Scared?”
“Shaking in my boots,” she snapped. “Hurry up, will you?”
Impatient. Focused. Sexy as hell. Gideon’s heartbeat did calisthenics as he looked down at her upturned face. She was beautiful. Exotic. Annoyed. And he wanted her so badly, he could barely control himself from grabbing her, yanking off her clothes, and fucking her right there in the sunlight.
Running his knuckles gently down her cheek, he murmured, “Honey.”
“I don’t do endearments, Stark.”
“The color of your skin. Honey washed in sunlight. Delicious.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you going to eat me or kiss me?”
His dick leapt at the suggestions. “Depends. Maybe both. Anyone going to shoot me in the back of the head in the next five minutes?”
Giving him a pointed look, she held up the SIG.
Laughing, Gideon brought his mouth down on hers. Now he felt her answering smile. His heart swelled as she opened to receive his tongue. The hard press of her gun bumped into the small of his back. That’s my girl.
With a tenderness that surprised him, he pulled her against his chest and kissed her softly. Her eyes fluttered closed and he brushed his lips across the fan of her eyelashes, then trailed kisses down her nose, back to her damp mouth. Kissing her slow and deep, he relished her low moan of surrender. Her fingers tightened on his belt, tantalizingly inches above his rock-hard dick. The SIG dug into the small of his back.
Sunlight poured over them, and even with his eyes closed he felt the warmth penetrate him to the core. It was he who broke the kiss. He loved the soft, dazed look in her eyes as he stepped away.
“Hey,” she whispered thickly, tightening her fingers around his belt and giving a hard tug. “Come back here.”
He shook his head, though his body wanted to comply. “People to kill, terrorist plots to foil,” he told her, keeping it light. Above them spider monkeys chattered from their ringside seats.
Riva laughed. She released his belt and moved back. “I’d give a dollar to see you in your native habitat. You must be a wonder at the…board table.”
“Yeah. Probably. I’d rather think about what I would do with you on top of that board table,” he said, fascinated when a blush pinked her cheeks.
She raised a dark brow. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Stark; rumors of your prowess out of the boardroom might be highly exaggerated.”
“You have firsthand experience, Rimaldi, what do you think?”
“I think a quarter turn to your left and you’ll face-plant into that spiderweb.”
He was not fond of spiders, and moved forward more slowly. The jungle was filled with hundreds of species of spiders, most of them poisonous. Jorge had been bitten a month ago, and there’d been talk of having to amputate his arm. He’d been in agony for weeks.
The spiderweb wasn’t that big, just the size of a dinner plate. No spider in sight. Yet the web was a reminder that danger lurked, even from the smallest denizen of the rain forest.
“Are you scared of spiders?”
“Everyone’s afraid of something. I have a healthy respect for anything that has the potential to kill me, especially tiny things that can sneak up on me before I have a chance to kill them.”
“You live in a jungle. Everything, including the nut job you lived with, could’ve killed you at any given time. Hell, given the opportunity, I was planning to kill you.”
“I was aware
.” His voice was dry. “Angélica’s afraid of something. I’ll find out what that is, and deliver it to her personally. Ten-fold.”
Riva stopped dead. “Are you saying you’re coming back for her? That’s insane. Once you’re out of Cosio, you should never come back. Ev-er.”
Gideon leveled a dead-on stare at her. “She’s not going to get away with stealing my life from me,” he said, his tone even, but the muscles in his jaw tense. “Sure, I’m going home. I’ll sort out what home is and who I am. The second I reclaim my life, I’m coming back.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, like something foul tasting lingered on his lips. “I’ve been in the inner sanctum of the devil that’s held this region down for years. There are good people who live here, Riva. Their lives have been destroyed because of that she-devil. What she’s done to hostages has been horrific. Not to mention the evil created because of her drug trade.
“She’s a fucking leech on mankind. She deserves to die. I deserve to be the one to do it for what she’s done to me and to others. And then I’ll rip what remains of the ANLF to shreds.”
“Hell, Stark,” she said, studying him. “Remind me not to piss you off.” She gave him a half-smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Maybe I’ll come back with you, to settle my own score.”
He’d be damned if he’d drag her anywhere near the burning vortex of Satan.
Sidestepping the buttressed roots of a hundred-foot-tall kapok tree whose smooth gray trunk measured at least fifteen feet across, they gave a wide berth to several murumuru palms with their twenty-foot-long fronds covered in protective spikes. Vincente, after a drunken night out, had returned to camp covered with painful gashes after falling into one of them.
Gideon had a healthy respect for the rain forest, but was glad this was his last walk through it. Massive biodiversity made seeing trees of the same species within the same area unlikely. In the last mile alone they’d probably passed at least a hundred types of trees. Cosio’s rain forest would be a goldmine to any biotech or medical research facility.
Bright red epiphyte tree bromeliads flourished on the branches, looking like alien pineapples sprouting out of the branches. Purple and pink lobster claw-like Heliconia hid among lush ferns and big-leafed philodendrons. Stunningly vibrant, the colors of the flowers and plants broke up the myriads of greens.
What wasn’t beautiful was the stink of putrefied flesh, which got progressively stronger.
“How do you feel about going home?” Riva adroitly avoided the four-foot-long, charcoal-gray tree boa hanging from a nearby similarly colored branch. Taking out a bandana, she tied it over her nose and mouth. After several minutes, as the smell got even more rank, Gideon was compelled to do the same.
“Oddly, I’ll miss this.” He indicated the surrounding vegetation and a flight of dozens of tiny iridescent orange butterflies that took off as they approached. “But not Cosio. And this,” he indicated the bandana he’d tied to his face to muffle the unpleasant smell. “As for going home—I still don’t remember where it is. It’s only a name. There’s no image, or solid memory, or feeling attached to it.”
“Will you contact your brother?”
Why the interrogation? Friendly conversation or was she as curious about him as he was her? If she was, then maybe she cared more than she tried to pretend with her hard-ass attitude. He’d have to push at that a little bit more. For now, he wanted to know if she had someone to return home to. She never had answered that question. Perhaps, he told himself, because she considered that none of your damned business. Too bad, because when this was all over, it wouldn’t be all over.
“I’ll find a lawyer first. Who knows what those circumstances we— Shit.”
Three crumpled, mutilated bodies explained the stench. Swarming insect life covered them and showed they’d been killed within the last few hours.
He recognized the blond hair of one of the prisoners Riva had liberated from the ANLF camp. Three bodies. Five people had been freed. He pointed to what was left of the woman’s head. “Shot, so at least it was quick. Did the others make it?”
She shook her head. “No. Nor is this a surprise, but I hoped somehow my visions were wrong.”
“Have you had visions of events that in the end haven’t actually happened?”
“Occasionally. When I have a vision, it doesn’t show me what the variables are. Not always. So yes, what I see ends up changing on occasion. But that’s more the exception than the rule. I knew when I freed the captives that they probably wouldn’t make it. But I hoped that I was wrong. And damn it, look how close they were to real freedom. The road to Santa de Porres is just a couple of hours away. They would’ve made it on foot into the city.”
Riva’s coolness in the face of such hideous death of innocent victims made him wonder what else she’d seen in her life. How did she shut off and block out this horror, knowing that these people were only trying to get home? How was he supposed to do it when he’d done nothing to help them? That truth tore at his gut with thick, slashing talons. The hideous loss of innocent lives, the human suffering in which he’d played a part, strengthened his resolve to come back and wipe Mama and the ANLF off the face of the Earth so they couldn’t do any more harm.
“I have a shitload of sins to atone for,” Gideon said grimly. He’d have to find their families. Jesus Christ. He was not looking forward to those conversations.
With her bandana pressed to her face, Riva walked around the bodies. “Could have been either faction that killed them.”
“Yeah. The ANLF uses this route to Santa de Porres. There’s a poacher’s track up from there, halfway up the mountain. Ironic that the SYP’s camp was so close when we’ve spent months searching high and low for them.” Not ironic. Unbelievable. Yeah, the jungle was dense, mountainous and thousands of hectares in size. But he’d had a small army of men, patrolling daily, searching the mountain and rain forests for months.
“It’s more than ironic, don’t you think?” Riva once again read his mind, which was a bit disconcerting. “Thanks,” she said as he held a thick clump of vines aside for her to pass beneath them. “Your nemesis’s camp is in an area any one of the ANLF could’ve passed countless times over the months.”
“Yeah. Just what I thought when you gave me Maza’s coordinates the other day.”
She looked over at him as she removed something from the side-zipper compartment of her pack. A small earpiece. She placed it in her ear and made an adjustment. “You never said a word.”
“Why would I?” Now that Riva was connected with her people, Gideon felt as though she’d put a physical wall between them. He didn’t like it, and it pissed him off that he felt that way. “I didn’t know who you were, or what your real agenda was.”
“Someone kept you distracted. Someone was playing guess which cup it’s under.” She used her bandana to wipe perspiration off her face and neck. “Who was close enough to you to do that? Who had your trust and your ear? Andrés?”
Gideon turned to look at her.
“Crap. It was Andrés, right? Could he have been in cahoots with Maza?” Gideon started to walk again and Riva pressed on. “It makes sense. I wouldn’t be surprised. He seemed shifty as hell to me. Shifty and weak. A man who could be bought pretty cheaply.”
Gideon shrugged. “Possible. Hell, probable. He craved power, and status. Angélica kept him on a short leash. If Maza offered him some incentive, he would’ve betrayed her in a heartbeat.”
“Betrayed you, too. He was supposed to be your friend.”
“No one has friends in hell.” He blew out a heavy breath. “I saw through that in short order. Took me longer than it should’ve, admittedly, but I was so doped, I wasn’t really functioning on all cylinders until a few months ago.” He thought back to all the fucking lies and bullshit Andrés told him. “We had someone in the SYP’s camp. Guy called Loza. According to Andrés, this guy would only talk to him.”
“Convenient.”
“Yeah. If Loza is s
till in Maza’s camp, he might recognize me.”
“Another reason for you not t—”
Gideon gave her a dark look. “As far as I know, I’ve never met the guy.”
“How about Escobar Maza? Are you a thousand percent positive you’ve never come face-to-face?”
“Not unless Andrés brought him around me pretending he was someone else and Mama didn’t know what he looked like.” He wiped the perspiration off his brow. “Hell, anything’s possible. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter if he’s seen me before. I’ll have to risk it. Because where you go, I go.”
“As long as I get to kill Maza, I guess I’ll have to risk it, too.”
The closer they got to Maza’s camp, the more strongly Riva knew she had to ditch Gideon.
This feeling had stayed with her since it first grabbed her by the gut and heart. The memory of the vision had taken root inside her like a venomous snake coiled around her organs. The lethal bite was coming. Coming soon. And there’d be nothing she could do to stop it if she didn’t change what was about to happen. But what in the hell was she supposed to change?
She hadn’t seen it. Damn it, unlike every other vision she’d ever had, she hadn’t formed a picture. Just felt the unbearable pain of loss. The blackness of hopelessness.
Gideon was the catalyst.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
She couldn’t allow him to come with her. Could freaking not. But how to prevent him from sticking to her like damned glue? A week ago, she would’ve just incapacitated him and taken off. Could she do it now?
Of course she could. But knocking him out would leave him alone and vulnerable at Maza’s front door. And what if that action was what precipitated in the culmination of that vision?
Not an option.
Hell, Rimaldi. Get a grip. Stop being such a damn girl. Do what T-FLAC trained you to do. If anyone got in the way of any important mission, she knew what she had to do. Yet she couldn’t do it. Killing Gideon wasn’t an option and she sure as hell didn’t want to explore why. Another option. Knock him out cold and take him to the city, before backtracking and showing up in Maza’s doorstep. Crap. No time for that.