“Stay back!” she warned in a high, shaking voice. The pistol wobbled in her hold. Desperately she snapped it up, pointing it at him. To her fury, Sam kept coming.
“Give me the pistol, Lisa,” he cajoled, his hand held out to receive it.
Lisa saw that he wasn’t going to stop. She glared at him with impotent fury for a moment. He was so damned cock-sure that she wouldn’t shoot, that she would just meekly hand over the pistol. . . . For a moment Lisa seriously considered pulling the trigger, and to hell with the consequences. Then, with a sound midway between a sob and a growl, she hurled the pistol at him.
Sam caught it easily in one hand. Lisa ground her teeth as she watched him pluck it out of the air as casually as if it were a baseball. At the very least she had hoped to leave him with a large bruise by which to remember this encounter.
He stopped, balancing the pistol in his hand. Lisa glared at him. He was close—close enough that he could reach out and grab her if he liked. Well, she wasn’t afraid of him, and she wasn’t moving an inch. Let him take whatever revenge he chose.
“Next time you hold a pistol on a man,” he drawled infuriatingly, “make sure the safety’s off. The effect is infinitely more threatening.”
Grinning, he flicked the safety switch from off to on and back again. Lisa could have screamed with pure rage. No wonder he had been so casually confident!
“Now,” he began. His words were interrupted by the unmistakable rattle of an approaching jeep. Instantly Sam stiffened; the teasing expression fled from his face, to be replaced by cold concentration. Lisa was frightened. Seen like this, she believed that he could kill. . . .
“Someone’s coming,” he said unnecessarily. “Get back over in those trees and stay out of sight.”
Even as he spoke, he was checking the chamber of the pistol. What he saw there appeared to satisfy him, because he clicked the compartment closed again, and, with a quick glance at Lisa to make sure that she was obeying him, he sprinted toward the jeep.
Lisa was already running for the trees, pausing only to scoop up those of her clothes that she could find. Panting, her heart beating like a hunted rabbit’s, she reached the safety of the trees and cowered in their concealing shadow. Looking back at Sam, she saw that he was leaning over the jeep’s side to pull a businesslike rifle from the rear seat. With his other hand he scooped up a belt stuffed with ammunition, slinging it over his shoulder. Quickly he checked the mechanisms of the rifle, then headed away from the jeep, moving fast.
Horrible memories of the night she had met him flickered through Lisa’s brain like flashes from a movie. She was so frightened that her knees were shaking. If the approaching vehicle did indeed contain enemy soldiers, what would she and Sam do? They would both be killed. . . . Dazed, her eyes sought Sam again. He had dropped to one knee some little distance from the jeep; the rifle was held to his shoulder, its mouth pointed steadily in the direction of the sound that was growing ever closer. He was squinting purposefully down the long barrel; beside him on the ground, within easy reach, lay the pistol.
Just looking at him helped to steady Lisa’s crumbling nerves. He was a cruel, calculating bastard, and she despised him, but she knew that he would protect her with his life if necessary. He himself had admitted that he felt responsible for her, and he was not a man to shirk his responsibilities at any cost. Even dressed as he was, in nothing but an ammunition belt, he looked tough and hard and capable of fighting off an army single-handedly if the need arose. Suddenly Lisa felt immeasurably calmer. As much as she hated to admit it, she knew she was in good hands.
Lisa made a quick inventory of the clothes she held in one hand. Whatever happened, she would be better prepared to face it fully dressed, she thought. Her panties were missing; they must still be out there in the field. She stepped into her shorts, tying the rope belt into a satisfyingly secure knot. Then she slid her feet into her sneakers and knelt to tie the laces. Dressed, she felt better. Sam might be unconcerned with his own nudity, but she was not.
She pressed herself against the thick trunk of the very tree she had been attempting to assassinate earlier, and peered apprehensively around it. She could see Sam where he knelt, rocklike, his body almost hidden by the tall grass. Whoever was approaching wouldn’t see him until they were almost upon him, and maybe not even then. If they spotted anything it would be Sam’s jeep, and they would probably go over to investigate, giving Sam a chance to take them totally by surprise.
As the jeep, for that was what it was, roared into view, Sam’s muscles tensed. Lisa could see them bulge against the brown satin of his skin. . . . For just a moment his hands tightened on the upraised rifle, and she thought that he looked ready to fire on the instant. But then, as the jeep came closer, he laid the rifle down on the ground beside the pistol and stood up. When the jeep rattled to a halt beside him, he had put on his shorts and was very calmly stepping into his pants.
Two men were in the jeep, and Lisa felt a wave of relief as she recognized them as being from the camp. They were both grinning broadly at Sam as he zipped up his pants.
“Well, I see we didn’t have any reason to be worried about you,” one of them remarked jovially to Sam. Lisa vaguely remembered that Sam had introduced him to her simply as Frank.
“No, you didn’t,” Sam responded, his tone dry. “As you see, I’m alive and well.”
“Yeah.” Frank was grinning; from the knowing tone of his voice, he had a very shrewd idea about what had taken place in the field just prior to his arrival. Lisa, staying out of sight among the trees because she was too embarrassed to come out, felt her cheeks burning. She clapped her hands to them, hoping to dull their hectic color before anyone could see it.
Over by the jeep, Sam finished buckling his belt, picked up his shoulder holster, and strapped it on. Then he shrugged into his shirt.
“Hey, you forgot something!” Frank clambered from the jeep, walking over to a spot some little distance away from Sam and scooping something out of the tall grass. He was chuckling audibly, and Lisa had no trouble discerning the twitting note in his voice. An instant later, she saw its cause: as he held out the object he had retrieved, Lisa was horrified to recognize her own silky, peach-colored underpants dangling from his stubby fingers.
“Very funny.” Sam took the undergarment from his henchman without any sign of embarrassment. Lisa, if she hadn’t been feeling so thoroughly mortified, would have reluctantly had to admire his aplomb. As it was, all she could do was squirm with humiliation as he casually tucked her panties into his pocket.
“Now that you’ve assured yourselves that I’m not in any mortal danger, why don’t you take off?” Sam made it clear that it was an order, not a request. “I think you’ve embarrassed the lady enough.”
“Some lady!” The other man in the jeep spoke for the first time. Sam turned a suddenly furious frown on the man as he grinned at his own wit. Abashed, the man muttered something that sounded like an apology. Frank, meanwhile, had climbed back into the jeep.
“See you later,” he said to Sam, turning the key in the ignition. Sam nodded curtly in answer as the engine roared to life, and then the jeep was bumping away from him, headed back in the direction of the camp.
After it was out of sight, Sam strolled toward the trees where Lisa still hid. She watched him approach, wishing that the ground would open up and swallow her.
“You can come out now,” he called dryly. Reluctantly, feeling a fool, Lisa stepped out into the sunshine. Sam surveyed her silently for a moment, then reached into his pants pocket.
“Here,” he said, holding her panties out to her. Lisa felt as if her face were on fire. Knowing she must be turning beet red, she accepted the garment from him with a muttered word of thanks. He eyed her sardonically.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said, turning in the direction of the jeep. “And don’t look so embarrassed. What you heard was just sour grapes. Every man jack of them would murder his grandmother to be in my place.”
/> Speechless, Lisa followed him over to the jeep and obediently climbed inside. As they drove back to camp, she pondered this man who was stranger, enemy, and lover all at the same time. He had been brutal earlier in word and deed. When he had so ruthlessly taken her body she had wanted to kill him. Yet, when they had first made love out there in the grass, he had taught her body a lesson in passion that it had never thought to learn; and, later, he had been kind to try to alleviate her embarrassment.
When they reached the camp, he stopped the jeep and turned to her.
“Go on back to the tent,” he said, his hands resting lightly on the top of the steering wheel as he regarded her broodingly. “I have some things to do. I’ll see you later.”
Lisa got out without argument. No sooner had her feet hit the ground than the jeep drove off.
After that, their relationship underwent a drastic change. Sam, disdaining her marksmanship and not being able to spare anyone to stay with her, started taking her with him whenever possible. Lisa was instructed to stay with the jeep, and this she obediently did. Sometimes she would take a blanket and curl up on the rear seat while he and his men did whatever they had come to do. She had learned better than to ask questions, and in truth she no longer cared. She only wished that they would finish the job in a hurry so that she could go home again.
Lisa no longer melted with passion at Sam’s slightest touch. His crude words about her qualities as a “lay” had effectively stiffened her resistance. This rankled every time she thought of it; so did the knowing grins on the faces of the men as she accompanied Sam nearly everywhere he went. Perversely, now that she was determined to resist his lovemaking, he took her body every chance he got: at least once a day, sometimes more. If she feigned sleep when they were out late, he disregarded her pretended drowsiness, scooping her out of the rear seat and carrying her inside to his cot, where he would make passionate love to her until the walls of her self-control crumbled. Or sometimes, during the afternoon, he would take her wherever they happened to be. Once he even returned to the jeep while his men were out doing whatever it was they did in the jungle, climbed into the backseat of the jeep with her, and pulled her onto his lap. He proceeded to kiss her until she was limp and pliant in his arms, then took her with her straddling his lap as he sat upright on the car seat. At first Lisa had been terrified that someone would come and catch them in flagrante delicto, as it were. But by the time Sam was finished with her, she wouldn’t have cared if they had had a whole football stadium full of spectators.
Each time he took her, Lisa vowed that it would be the last. And each time she fought him until his rough caresses drove her beyond all reason. Then she went wild in his arms. Lisa found these episodes humiliating in the extreme, but Sam seemed to thrive on them. At any rate, his lovemaking showed no signs of diminishing.
Like the male chauvinist pig Lisa called him, now that she was in truth his “woman” Sam expected her to act like it. He would fling torn garments into her lap and expect her to mend them as she waited for him in the jeep. Back at the camp, she had the honor of making up his cot as well as her own. Doubtless he would have expected her to cook for him if he had had any confidence in the meals she continued to prepare for herself; as it was, after one hard glance at one of her more fanciful concoctions, he preferred to stick with Riley’s efforts, apparently with the conviction that the devil he knew was better than the one he didn’t. Lisa’s temper simmered at his casual assumption that she would perform her “womanly” functions, but he had not pushed her to the point of an explosion—yet.
Lisa figured that she had been in the camp about three weeks. During that time, her life had settled down into a kind of routine. She felt oddly at home in this army encampment surrounded by hired killers, with all hell liable to break loose at any minute. Although she knew that their existence was precarious, she felt almost totally safe. She supposed, reluctantly, that her sense of security in the face of all the facts had something to do with Sam. His very presence inspired confidence. She was certain that he would get her out of this mess in one piece if there was any possible way to do it. And she was content to leave her deliverance to him. Not that she had any choice. He had made it perfectly clear that they would leave when the job he had come to do was completed, and not a moment sooner.
Sam, whether she hated him, as she did one day, or merely intensely disliked him, as she did the next, was beginning to seem like a fixture in her life. It was hard to imagine that she had known of his existence for less than a month. Soon—she hoped—she would be home again, and he would be out of her life for good. All of this would seem like a slightly fantastic dream—or a nightmare, depending on how one looked at it.
She no longer even tried to compose stories suitable for the Star on her adventures. They had become too many, and too varied—and too wound up with Sam. She could not write about what had befallen her without revealing some part of their relationship, and this she was determined not to do. She thought of Grace Ballard at the Star, of the ladies of Annapolis’s upper crust who devoured the features she edited, of the titillation they would receive from ferreting out any hint of an intimate association between Lisa Bennet Collins and a hard-bitten mercenary soldier, of all things, and shuddered. The whispers, titters, and sidelong glances would be more than she could endure. And there was Jeff, who was still her legal husband after all, and her grandfather. They would be embarrassed as much as she was.
Lisa thought of her grandfather with a twinge of compunction. He would be frantically worried about her by now; she hoped he could somehow sense that she was all right. She was the only thing he cared about in the world, now that Jennifer was gone, and it would be extremely hard on him to imagine that something had happened to her, too.
Jeff might be superficially concerned about her disappearance, she acknowledged with a shrug, but he certainly wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over it. Over the past year they had existed like casual acquaintances, living in the same house and still legally married, but hardly seeing each other from one week to the next. Now that Jennifer, the glue that had held them together, was no longer a factor, Lisa had no doubt that he would agree to a divorce with very little argument. And she was now very, very sure that a divorce was what she wanted.
Jeff would never have married her in the first place, she judged, if it hadn’t been for the pressure exerted on him by his family and her grandfather. Perhaps his family had some inkling of his secret, because they had certainly been eager to see him married to her, and then had been overjoyed when she produced Jennifer. Or maybe they had simply wanted him to marry her because she was A. Herman Bennet’s granddaughter—his name alone made her the ideal prospect for a wife in the eyes of most of the boys she had dated. Little Miss Perfect, that’s me, Lisa thought with a touch of bitter humor, then shrugged away all thoughts of the past.
She was sitting in the back of the jeep, her head thrown back against the top of the seat as she gazed up at the stars, a blanket huddled around her shoulders to ward off the night chill. The jeeps were parked in a small copse to shelter them from the view of any chance passersby—not that there were likely to be any in this remote place. The blowing branches above her head made strange patterns against the twinkly midnight-blue sky. Sam and the others had vanished into the thick jungle; they would return when they returned. The despised pistol was by her side. Its silencer had been removed so that she could use it to summon help if an emergency arose. A single shot was the signal they had agreed upon. Sam had decided, and she had whole-heartedly concurred, that if she actually tried to shoot someone, she would be putting herself and any chance bystanders in more danger than anyone who might be intent on doing her harm.
Just knowing that Sam was within earshot of her pistol made Lisa feel safe. Sitting there in the jeep, in the middle of the inhospitable African jungle, with fighting going on all across the country and the possibility of unfriendly soldiers appearing at any moment, she felt much as she had in the past when she
had sat out after dark on the beach near her grandfather’s house: warm and peaceful and slightly drowsy.
Sam had instructed her to stay awake while he was gone—after all, if she was asleep when an enemy closed in on her, she certainly wasn’t going to be able to summon help, was she—and Lisa tried valiantly to obey. But tonight she was so tired. . . . It had been such a hot day, and she had spent most of it sitting in this damned jeep. Then they had returned to the camp for a quick dinner, and here they were again. Lisa was almost ready to tell Sam that she would prefer to remain at the camp alone while they went out on their little forays. Almost. But she had a sneaking suspicion that as soon as the little cavalcade of jeeps disappeared from her view, she would regret it: she would undoubtedly be scared out of her skull.
If she didn’t do something, she would fall asleep, Lisa decided. Stretching, she unwound herself from the blanket and sat for a moment shivering in the cool air. Then she clambered over the side of the jeep. Surely it wouldn’t do any harm to walk around a little; she would be sure to remain fairly close to the jeeps.
Crossing her arms over her chest for warmth, wishing now that she had brought the blanket with her, Lisa moved off a little way through the trees. The world about her was shrouded in a deep charcoal gray; outlines of trees and bushes stood out blackly like swaying ghosts. Lisa heard the scurrying of small animals in the undergrowth, and shivered again, but not from the cold. Then she heard a louder, more ominous crackling as something larger moved through the trees. She froze, her heart speeding up to pound deafeningly. She had horrible visions of a hungry tiger on the prowl. . . . Instinct warned her not to make a sound. Barely breathing, she shrank back against the nearest tree, her palms pressing flat against the rough bark. All at once it occurred to her that she had left the pistol in the jeep. . . .
Lisa literally stopped breathing when the creature suddenly emerged from the trees not ten feet from where she stood. For one horrible moment she thought the looming shape must be a gorilla; then she recognized it as a man. This realization should have made her feel better. Strangely, it had the opposite effect. Her heart was beating in slow, irregular thuds against her chest; her mouth was dry. Something, some inner instinct, warned her that she was in danger. She didn’t move so much as a hair.
To Love a Man Page 11