by Jill Barnett
Thwack! she jabbed it into the soft mound of dirt near the wagon.
It was the oddest thing. She could have sworn she heard some muffled swearing. She stopped fumbling with her purse and looked up. It couldn’t have been the woman. The voice had been a man’s. She looked behind her, but didn’t see anyone.
Shrugging it off as market noise and an active imagination, she pulled some coins from her purse, paid the woman, grabbed her closed parasol, and, fan in hand, sailed through the marketplace, figuring she could find a few more doodads before she had to make her way home.
Sam’s leg hurt like hell. He let go of it, tore the bandanna off his damp neck, and wrapped it around his aching calf. He couldn’t bloody believe it when that pink umbrella had stabbed his leg. He’d been snaking along from wagon to wagon, working his way across the marketplace. He must have moved his leg too close to the edge because the next thing he knew, a sharp pain sliced through his calf. It had been all he could do not to yell. Instead, he’d sucked in a chestful of air, held it, and exhaled every curse he’d ever heard and a few he’d made up.
He finished tying the knot, hoping the pressure of the bandage would ease the ache in his leg. He turned and glared at the spot where the umbrella assassin stood, but she was gone. Her lucky day, he thought, unsure of what he would have done but knowing full well what he’d have liked to do. But he’d never murdered a woman . . . yet.
Sam continued moving from wagon to wagon, pausing when the soldiers stomped by. They were determined fellas, he’d have to give them credit for that. Aguinaldo must want those guns real bad.
The wagons formed a T about ten yards away. The market vendors turned their wagons only at the corners of the market square. If his calculations were right, he should be nearing the northeast corner of the marketplace, which was close to a maze of adobe-walled alleys in which he could make good his escape. Aguinaldo’s men couldn’t find him there; of that Sam was sure. If he could reach those alleys, he’d be home free.
He belly-crawled a few more feet. His leg throbbed and he paused. Only a little farther, he thought. Just a little farther. He sucked in a deep breath and crawled on until he was barely five feet from where the wagons ended. Close, he was so close.
Then he saw the shoes—ladies’ high-button black shoes with bone-crushing heels. The pink parasol with its spear-like tip hung alongside the woman’s frilly skirts, and Sam turned away, intending to move on. A fan plunked to the ground right next to his head. He looked over. The upsidedown blond head of a woman stared at him in horror, her hand just touching the dropped fan.
“Oh, my Gawd!” Her head flew up out of sight.
Aw, crap. There was an eternal pause, and Sam waited for her scream, knowing he’d have to make a run for it. The scream never came.
The crazy woman bent down again, her whiskey-blond hair hanging to the ground as she peered at him. Only this time she held that damn umbrella like a sword, the sharp point aimed right at him.
“Are you some kind of pirate?” she asked in the thickest southern drawl he’d ever heard.
She was going to get him killed. Slowly he edged closer to her.
“Well, answer me, sir. Are you?” she repeated, obviously a little irritated, jabbing her parasol to punctuate each word.
Sam held a finger to his lips, indicating she should be quiet. She appeared thoughtful and didn’t seem to notice that he’d repositioned his legs, ready to move in an instant.
“Did you grab my foot?” Her face filled with suspicion, and then she shook the parasol at him as if she were ready to give him a piece of her mind, something Sam was sure she couldn’t afford.
“Well, did you?”
That did it. He grabbed the parasol, jerked it back, and shot to his knees. His other arm snaked out and clamped around her waist, pulling her under with him. Now she screamed. His mouth covered hers to silence her, and he rolled farther under the wagon, pinning her squirming body beneath him. She kept yelling against his mouth, which was damned uncomfortable, not to mention loud. He released the parasol and replaced his mouth with a hard hand. She moved her hand around, trying to grab the closed parasol, but he ripped it from beneath her pinned body and jammed it across her throat.
“Shut up!” he gritted.
She did. Her eyes grew big as silver pesos, almost swallowing her small flushed face. He looked away and up as two pairs of boots ran by the wagon. Tension shot through him, and every muscle in his body stiffened. Unconsciously, he pressed down harder with his body. Her small, deadly foot scraped against his throbbing leg. He scowled at her. She lay still as a doldrum sea, but her eyes darted a look at the ground outside the wagon.
He followed her gaze to where the soldiers’ boots stood right next to the wagon. The men talked, and he listened, trying to hear their plans. She mumbled something against his hand, and he pressed harder on her mouth.
“Not a sound,” he threatened in a deadly whisper, “and I won’t kill you.”
Her gaze shot back to the ground. Then he saw it. Her fan lay there right next to a soldier’s foot. If the man bent down to pick it up, he’d see them.
Sam looked back at her, waiting. She stared at his eye patch. He wanted to laugh. One thing about losing his eye was that women always reacted to the patch, some with revulsion, some with curiosity, which was how this blonde looked at him—both curious and afraid. That was fine with him. If she was afraid, she’d keep her mouth shut, and that was all he cared about at the moment.
The guerrillas talked on. He listened. They knew he was here somewhere, hiding, so they planned to split up and comb the whole marketplace, going from wagon to wagon and looking underneath. He had to get out. Now. He looked behind him at the trail of wagons, then at the corner ahead. There were no wagons, but the open space was filled with people. Beyond that and on the left was a big adobe church; on the right stood a ring of brick warehouses. Between them was the maze of walled alleys—his objective.
He took a deep breath and pulled his machete out, holding it barely two inches above the woman’s face. Her breath stopped. He could feel her terror. “Not one sound or I’ll use this. Understand?”
She nodded, blue eyes wide.
He pulled the parasol off her neck and placed the knife there, whispering, “I’m going to take my hand away. If you make one sound, I’ll slit your sweet throat.”
Slowly he pulled his hand from her mouth. At the same time he let the cool steel of the machete blade rest against her flushed neck. She didn’t make a sound. He bit back a winner’s smile and continued to pin her with a lethal gaze. He hooked the parasol to his belt, a preventive action. He’d had enough close calls with it and didn’t want to chance that she would try to use it as a weapon. He moved his left leg toward the huge baskets that lined the back of the wagon. With his foot he managed to shove one aside enough to crawl through.
“Very slowly we’re going to get up and crawl out that space. Got it?”
She glanced at the opening and then turned her frightened eyes back on his face. She swallowed hard, then nodded.
He slowly lifted his body off hers, sure to keep his knees on either side of her thighs so she couldn’t roll out the opposite side. “Turn over.”
Her shoulders jerked at his command.
“Turn over!” he gritted again, pressing on the knife to intimidate her before lifting it enough so she could turn without slitting her own throat.
She rolled onto her stomach.
He kept the knife at the back of her neck and sat on his haunches. His calf throbbed from the pressure. “Get on your knees.”
She didn’t budge.
“I said get . . . on . . . your . . . knees. Now!”
“The knife . . .” she whispered, indicating the reason she couldn’t move.
In one slick movement his arm was under her ribs, and he jerked her up against his chest, repositioning the knife against her white, pulsing throat. Her head pressed back against his shoulder, her back against his ribs, her bo
ttom against his groin.
For a long, hot moment he held her that way. He could smell her scent—gardenias, musk, and female fear. His breath grew shallow. He looked down at her. Her skin was pale; she was too frightened to be flushed. She didn’t flinch at his look. She just stared. It was then that he noticed her eyes. They were an odd crystal blue, the color of alpine ice. Her breath, as shallow as his own, whispered past her full, dry lips. His gaze roved over her small chin, down her white neck, strained with her thin blue veins exposed from the position of her head. He watched her pulse beat rapidly in her neck. His own pulse increased, pounding as it had in the jungle.
Two pairs of soldiers’ boots thudded by. Sam jerked his gaze away, and after a moment he nodded at the opening. “Move.”
They edged out the opening. Sam kept one arm around her, and with his other hand he held the knife in its threatening position. Daylight glared in his eye, momentarily blinding him. He pulled her against him to make sure she couldn’t get away. He felt one of the oversize baskets against his own back, and so while his vision adjusted he got ready. Vision cleared, he looked around, seeing only the crowd.
“Now!” he said, jerking her up with him and taking off in a stooped run for the alley.
Suddenly the woman was like a lead weight.
“Run!” he ordered, watching, stunned, as she dug in those cursed heels and just stood there, shaking her head. Her eyes had a glazed look of pure fear. Sam had seen that look before, on dying men.
He dragged her a few more feet before she pulled back on his arm, bringing them both to a dead stop.
He had to jerk the knife away to keep from cutting her fool throat. The close call stunned him. At that same instant two guerrillas came at him, one from the left and one from his back. Sam fought like the devil himself, punching, kicking, and head-butting.
An arm locked around his neck, jerking him backward while the soldier’s arm tightened on his windpipe. He reached behind him and gripped the man’s head. His lucky day, no helmet. He bent his head forward, then slammed it back as hard as he could, cracking his opponent in the forehead. He shook his own head to clear it and spun around, fists raised, ready. The soldier staggered back, dazed. Sam punched him out with an upper cut that would have done John L. Sullivan proud.
The other one got up, came at him again. Sam’s fist slammed into the neck of the soldier, and he fell to the dirt right next to his sprawled friend. Wiping the blood from his own busted lip, Sam turned. Five other soldiers closed in from behind the woman. She, on the other hand, looked as if she was going to throw up.
To hell with that, he thought, and took off toward the alley. He closed the distance, ignoring the crowd, pushing and shoving, until he was there. The eaves of the adobe cast the entrance to the alley in shadow. He rounded the corner, knowing he was finally safe.
And then he heard her scream—the world could have heard that woman scream.
Common sense told him to run even faster, far, far away. His conscience stopped him dead in his tracks. His calf throbbed, his hand hurt, and both pains should have warned him.
She was trouble.
The trouble screamed again, loud enough to crack a wall, high enough to shatter glass. He grimaced. He couldn’t leave her. She might be trouble, but she was also in trouble because she’d been seen with him.
He moved back in the shadows and took a look. Two soldiers held her while another placed a deadly bolo to her chest. She had no color in her face. Yeah, she was in trouble, and though he’d threatened her in the same way, he wouldn’t have used the knife on her.
These men would.
Chapter 3
She was gonna throw up.
But there wasn’t time. One moment she stood there with foreign soldiers yelling at her and a knife at her chest, and the next moment a huge hard arm clamped around her waist, lifted her, and slammed her horizontally onto a hard male hip. Instinctively she tried to wiggle free, but the iron grip of her captor kept her pinned to him with an arm as unyielding as a tree trunk. She knew the feel of that arm. The one-eyed man with the knife had come back.
Her stomach lurched as he flung her around. He spun on one leg, the other hiked up to kick one of those gawdawful mean soldiers who kept threatening her. She gulped deep breaths of air. Grunts and moans and the hard slap of pounding fist against flesh echoed around them, but she couldn’t see anything except the blurred flying images of uniformed human figures hitting the ground.
He stopped turning long enough for her to focus her eyes. A soldier flew past her line of vision. She started to scream but the man spun around again, kicking out at the next soldier. With each of his neck-whipping spins, she flopped around. Her hair reeled outward and her stomach upward. She wanted to scream, but her open mouth had the breath sucked from it and her skirt took up enough air to show the whole island her lacy ruffled drawers.
Her limbs dangled like limp chicken necks. The lady in her locked her ankles, trying to salvage some scrap of dignity, and seeking some sense of equilibrium, she grabbed the man’s thigh. She discovered something. She had been wrong about his arm. His leg was the tree trunk.
Around she went again, and he squeezed tighter, pushing the air from her lungs. Her head swam; her vision blurred. She shook her head to clear it.
“Hold still, dammit!”
She squirmed, trying to get free, and his knife handle pressed into her ribs.
“I said hold the hell still! I’ve got you!” He kicked out at one of the fighting soldiers, and the ground suddenly rose. She slammed a hand over her mouth. She was gonna die, or vomit.
She didn’t do either.
The man took off at a full run with her still clamped under his arm and now bouncing on his hard hip. Her corseted ribs ached from each jarring stride, but it didn’t matter because just as this madman said, he had her again. She wondered why, and what he was gonna do with her. From what she’d seen of him under the wagon, she’d have bet the farm he’d killed before.
Think! Look at him, she told herself, remembering a novel she’d once read. The heroine had looked her killer in the eye, and the villain hadn’t been able to go through with the killing. That one look had saved the woman’s life. At this point she’d try anything. She wiggled around, trying to look at him. A black eye patch and one dark brown bloodshot eye glared back. He never once broke stride.
She shut her eyes tightly. She didn’t want to be his next victim.
At that thought cold fear crept over her. She felt a scream building, slowly at first. Whenever she was truly frightened, whenever she had no control of over what was happening, she screamed. She’d screamed in the well, and she’d lived to tell about it. She hadn’t screamed with him before because he had held a knife at her throat and warned her not to. It hadn’t been easy, as scared as she was, but the thought of him slicing through her screaming throat had been enough to keep her quiet. She didn’t want her last sound on this earth to be a gurgle.
She made up for it now and screamed for all she was worth.
He swore, then hiked her up higher on his hip, grunted, and clamped his hand over her mouth. Not once did he stop jogging along.
She kept screaming, hoping someone would hear her calls for help, but even to her own ears the sound was muffled behind his sweaty hand. He whipped around a series of dark, musty corners, and finally he stopped.
“Looks like it’s safe now,” he informed her, hardly winded. “You need to learn when to shut up. They could have followed the trail of your mouth.” With that, he flung her upright and set her on the ground with all the finesse of a pile driver. Her wobbly legs buckled, and she raised a gloved hand to her eyes to try to block out the bright flashing spots. She couldn’t have screamed now for anything. She was too swimmy-headed.
“Don’t faint there, sister. I’ve lugged you around enough already, and my arm’s getting tired.” With that mannerless pronouncement, he grabbed the back of her neck and rammed her head down to her knees. Her corset stays almost cu
t her in half.
“Breathe!” he ordered, keeping her head jammed down. The stays were like a vise. She gasped to get air.
“Good,” he said, adding as he released her head. “I guess you can obey orders.”
In the slowest, most ladylike way possible, she straightened and stared at her killer. He was so tall that she had to crane her neck to look up at him. His hair hung to his shoulders and was thick and straight and as black as his sinister eye patch. Despite all his cuts and bruises, he had the devil’s face, with sharp angles and chiseled ridges, and he was in desperate need of a shave.
His muscular tanned neck showed from the open collar of a dirty and torn khaki shirt that was so damp it stuck to his massive body, which was, in size, the very spit of a strongman she’d once seen on a P. T. Barnum poster. The width of his shoulders and the sheer breadth of his chest were enough to dwarf her. Halfway down that Herculean chest several buttons were missing from his shirt, showing a slick, steel-rippled plane of stomach muscles. From his wide brown leather belt hung three knotted loops that held a variety of evil-looking knives, including the one he’d pressed to her throat. Her gaze trailed slowly down to the tip of longest blade. Just below it a faded yellow bandanna stained dark with blood twisted around his upper calf.
“Pass muster?” he said in a tone that scraped right down her spine. His voice was American—common Yankee, to be exact.
“Pardon me?” She looked up.
He wore a nasty white grin that was pure Yankee arrogance.
“Never mind. Let’s get out of here before they pick up our trail again.” His hand gripped her wrist and jerked her along behind him as he rushed down the dark alley.
She tried to pull her hand out of his grip, but he held fast. He overpowered her by sheer strength, so she had no choice but to stumble along behind him. Her mouth, however, was not so passive.