How?
Why?
Images flashed before his eyes as he staggered back and fell into the chair beside the bed; each picture was uglier and more gut-wrenching than the last. He had no way of knowing which was accurate and which wasn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Six weeks ago, he’d seen this woman’s body battered and abused. But it had occurred in the line of duty.
Not under the guise of love.
He swallowed the bile burning in his throat and cradled his head in his hands, scrubbing his eyes over and over until the images were gone. By the time he raised his head and focused again, her tears had ebbed.
Eve was resting quietly now, peacefully.
The touch of makeup she’d applied earlier had faded, but her cheeks were still flushed. He suspected she looked much like the child she must have been the first time her world had fallen out of the sky and then exploded around her.
Carrie. Anna.
Trust.
It all made sense now. Or at least, enough of it did for him to know Eve would never trust him. She had no reason to. Not if he continued to press her the way he had six weeks before and then again yesterday and today, much less if he continued to conceal the truth from her as he had out on that dance floor tonight, even if he had thought it was for her own good. If he wanted Eve’s trust, he’d have to do what Carrie and Anna and her other two Sisters-in-Arms had done.
He’d have to earn it.
Chapter 8
S he’d always wondered why the grunts were so damned eager to rappel out of a perfectly good chopper.
Now she knew.
They must have flown in this one.
An early prototype model, the Huey rattling around them should have been given a decent burial fifteen years ago. Eve stared at the hefty Panamanian thug hunkered down on the opposite web bench. She wasn’t sure if the goon had been relegated to the rear of the chopper along with her and Rick to cut their rappelling ropes after they hit the ground, or to cushion the chopper’s eventual crash.
Lord, did this bird need a tune-up.
But as bad as the Huey was, she had to admit she’d give anything to be flying it instead of sitting in the dark, a fully-loaded rucksack on her back, waiting for Rick’s signal to bail out one of the side doors before whizzing down through fifty feet of pitch-black jungle canopy with nothing more than a slender rope to break her fall.
Or her neck.
Frankly, she had more faith in the Jesus nut atop even these decrepit rotor blades than she ever would in some thin strand of nylon. Eve glanced over her left shoulder and into the glowing cockpit.
No doubt about it.
She was on the wrong end of this operation—or even of the equally illegal one that would be going down after she and Rick inserted into the jungle. She shifted her attention across the moonlit belly of the Huey and studied the ammunition crates stacked beneath the thug’s frayed webbed bench. She might not be able to read Chinese, but she knew enough to know those crates contained enough 7.62 mm rounds to supply a private army.
The question was, whose?
And where had the pilot stashed the AK-47 rifles that went with those rounds? But most importantly, exactly how was Anna mixed up in all this? The first two questions might never be answered to her satisfaction, but the last one would. Just as soon as she and Rick returned to Panama.
She owed it to Anna to find out.
“Ready?”
Eve swung her stare to the right. To Rick. His eyes burned steady and brown amid the green and black camouflage grease paint he’d applied to his face. He pointed silently, directing her attention toward the cockpit. The pilot had his right hand in the air, all five fingers splayed wide.
Five minutes to insertion.
Five minutes to experiencing Newton’s Law of Gravity firsthand. Joy. If she ever got her wings back she’d never tease another recruit about getting airsick again.
She braced the stock of her AK-47 against the floor of the chopper and stood as high as she could along with Rick. They took a moment to sling their rifles over their respective rucksacks before shuffling forward, fighting the stiff wind blowing in through gaping holes where the Huey’s side doors had been. Rick had already woven separate ropes around both their waists and thighs to form the Swiss seats they’d use to rappel down through the trees several kilometers from the actual crash site. The last either of them had heard, Army Intelligence believed the Córdobans hadn’t located the remains of her chopper. Nor did the search appear to be a priority.
Neither of them were anxious to rectify that.
Eve stiffened as Rick leaned close enough to run his hands around her waist and down between her legs. She flushed, grateful for the dark, as she realized he was double-checking her Swiss seat. Her thundering pulse slowed, but not by much.
Dammit, breathe.
Relax.
It was easier to accomplish than she thought. Maybe it was the hand that settled firmly on her shoulder.
Rick’s hand.
Just as it had during their initial trek through the jungle, the man’s mere presence seemed to steady her. She couldn’t explain it, but she was grateful for it. Just as she’d been grateful last night—despite the fact that then Rick had been nothing more than a figment of her imagination.
She’d had the dream again.
She hadn’t had it in years. Not since college.
It had started up again in the hospital, the night of the crash, and it had been waking her up ever since. It didn’t take a student of Freud’s to figure out why. But lately, the dream had been changing, almost…evolving.
First Carrie had been in it.
And now Rick.
Last night, her mother had left her as she always did. But this time, when she’d finally broken down and cried out for her, Rick had appeared. He’d cradled her in his arms and warmed her and comforted her as he promised her over and over that everything would be all right. And for once, it had been. She usually woke up disoriented and crying after the dream. But this time she hadn’t woken until 0300.
The alarm had gone off, but Rick was already up and dressed in the jungle fatigues that had been waiting for them when they returned to the hotel, ready to go.
Just as she should be right now.
She glanced forward in time to see the pilot hold up his hand. This time, two fingers.
Two minutes.
Rick passed her a pair of black leather gloves and donned another pair as she jerked hers on. He gripped her shoulders again as she finished, nudging her toward the chopper’s left gaping doorway. His fingers tightened, steadying her as the cross wind slammed into her.
It was a good thing.
With the rucksack on her back, her balance was off.
He reached up and clipped both her rappelling ropes through her snap link, then slapped the lead ends in her hands as he kicked the remainder of the coils out the side of the chopper. His breath filled her ear as he leaned close and shouted over the pounding blades. “Remember, brake no more than ten feet off the ground! Understood?”
In theory, yes.
In practice?
Hell, no!
Unfortunately, her one-day cliff-rappelling training would have to suffice because as she nodded, Rick moved off. By the time she’d pulled her ropes taut and twisted her braking hand behind her back, Rick had snapped his own ropes into place and stepped out onto the chopper’s right skid. He swung straight out from the doorway of the chopper until he was leaning sixty degrees off the skid.
Eve glanced down at her own skid.
The Huey was hovering ten feet above jungle canopy, centered over a tiny clearing. She quickly blessed the pilot and silently thanked his bird as she hooked the heels of her boots onto the skid and used her ropes to swing out into the rotor wash to balance Rick’s position. The waiting thug unsheathed his machete and shuffled forward to toss a neon green chem light out each doorway.
She focused on hers as it fell and marked its location.
It was time.
She glanced up and Rick nodded.
And she let go—
Adrenaline shot through her as she fell through the dark, thundering through her veins until it matched the roar of the rotors above. She ignored it and focused on the chem light as Rick had instructed. Moments later, she felt her gloves overheating the way he’d warned and instinctively tugged her right hand low and fully behind her back.
Her entire body whiplashed.
She recovered quickly and shifted her hand forward, loosening her grip enough to slide down the rest of the way. Her boots hit the jungle floor with a thud. Rick was beside her, grabbing her shoulders with one hand, her ruck with his other, steadying her before the force succeeded in knocking her on her rear. A moment later, their ropes rained down around them as the Huey roared off into the night.
And then there was nothing but dark, eerie silence.
“You did great.”
“Thanks.”
He must have realized he was still holding her because he jerked his hands away. Unfortunately, her nerves had held up better than her legs. Her knees buckled. His hands snapped out again. This time he grabbed her arms just below her shoulders and pulled her close. Close enough for her to see his eyes in the dark as the moon slipped from beneath the clouds, filling the tiny clearing with a soft glow.
“Sorry. I don’t know what—”
He shook his head. “Happens a lot the first time. Give the rush time to work itself through.” He must have gotten a rush himself because he grinned. She sucked in her breath as his dimples caved in. This second, piercing jolt that ripped through her was much more intense than the first. And it had absolutely nothing to do with adrenaline.
It was desire, pure and simple.
She strangled something embarrassingly similar to a groan—or thought she had. The tail end slipped out.
He frowned. “Your ribs. Did you re-injure—”
“They’re fine. They have been for two weeks now.”
He nodded, visibly relieved. “I thought so after your apartment. But I figured I’d better make sure.”
Her apartment?
Her confusion must have shown, because he winced in memory—and she flushed. The door. She’d slammed her fist into his gut and then when she’d opened the door on him, he’d plowed headlong into her counter. Into his—
Her flush deepened.
To her surprise, his chuckle filled the dark. He tipped her chin. “It’s okay. I might have deserved it.”
“No, you didn’t. It’s just, I was…upset.”
“I gathered that.”
Uncomfortable with the odd mix of amusement and open admiration in his gaze, she took a step back.
He released her instantly.
Who was this man?
With his face camouflaged to match his jungle fatigues, he certainly looked like Rick. He even sounded like him. But the man standing ten inches away was different somehow. She’d felt it from the moment she’d woken. At first she’d chalked it up to their pending insertion. The normal pre-mission excitement and jitters that even seasoned soldiers experienced. Now she wasn’t so sure.
For one thing he was too confident, too relaxed.
Too focused.
But on what?
She was still trying to decide when he turned around and set about retrieving the ropes they’d used to rappel down from the Huey. She shook off her confusion and reached down to snag her chem light before heading across the clearing for his. By the time she’d returned, Rick had piled the ropes into a small crevice several trees inside the jungle and was already concealing the snarled coils with underbrush. She handed over the chem sticks and he added them to the pile.
Moments later, he stood.
She froze as he reached out and brushed a large insect with more legs than she could count from the right strap of her ruck, less than an inch away from her breast. She wasn’t sure which stunned her more, that she hadn’t noticed the creature or the way he no longer seemed concerned with personal space.
Hers or his.
The insect gone, he retrieved the hand-held global positioning unit Anna had provided from his right cargo pocket and checked their location. He must have been satisfied with the result because he restowed the GPS unit and glanced up.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
She should have taken more time with her answer.
She was sure of it when his hand closed over hers as he turned to part the dense jungle undergrowth before leading her through—especially when he didn’t let her go. Something told her that this journey through the jungle with Rick would be nothing like her last.
It had taken six hours and some twenty-odd minutes, but Eve no longer flinched at his occasional touch. Frankly he’d thought it would take longer.
Perhaps days.
Fortunately, heat and exhaustion were on his side.
Rick glanced over his shoulder as he parted what had to be his thousandth section of foliage that hour alone and stepped through. He continued to hold the vines, waiting until they were securely in Eve’s grasp before he let go. This time when their fingers brushed, she didn’t stiffen. He suspected his touch hadn’t even registered at all.
He wasn’t offended.
If anything, he was relieved.
He’d spent the better part of the night sitting up in that chair beside the bed, awake. Part of the time he’d used to fine-tune the remaining steps of their mission, but the majority had been spent watching and thinking about Eve.
She was right.
They were strangers.
The woman might be following in his footsteps as closely as if she was one of his men, but the fact was, he knew less about Eve than he did any one of them. Even so, she’d managed to reach a part of him he’d thought long since buried. At first he’d tried to blame his own awakening on her dream. But once he’d been honest with himself and really thought about it, thought about her, he’d realized that this odd connection he felt to Eve had started much earlier.
It had even started before that crash.
It had taken root earlier that fateful morning, out on the LZ, at the precise moment Eve had extended her hand. He knew now why he’d refused to take it, and it had nothing to do with Carrie Evans or his sergeant. He’d been protecting himself. Unfortunately, by the time Eve turned her back on him, he was already hooked. The only question was, what was he going to do about it?
That, he didn’t know.
But he did know he had no intention of remaining a stranger to this particular woman. Unfortunately, there lay the crux of his current dilemma. Getting to know his men had been easy. They simply talked and he listened.
Eve Paris didn’t talk.
Not to him.
He was beginning to suspect she’d never really talked to anyone other than her sorority sisters. Not about anything that mattered. Not about herself. Hell, she’d been more alive and more animated talking to Anna Shale in the minute it had taken him to return to the table at the restaurant last night, than she’d been with him the entire time he’d known her. He pushed the bittersweet memory aside and focused on the next section of foliage waiting a quarter of an inch from his face, the next vine, the next step.
The next touch.
Fifty steps later, they reached the edge of a clearing. It was barely six feet, but it would have to do.
“Need a break?”
Eve’s gaze shot to his, the exhaustion on her face and in her shoulders as well as her step giving her answer before she could. “Are you sure we have time?”
“You keep a pretty good pace.”
She waited several beats. “Go ahead and finish it.”
“Finish what?”
“Like I told you in my apartment, Bishop. Innocence does not become you.”
He shrugged and complied. “You keep a pretty good pace…for a pampered pilot.”
She stuck out her tongue.
He stood there for a full five seconds, s
tunned—and then he flat-out grinned. The heck with talking. If physical exhaustion worked this well on the woman’s barriers, he’d keep her moving until sundown. Eve stalked past. He was so intent on his relief he missed the movement of her hand. The vine she’d taken from his snapped back at his face.
He grabbed it with barely a centimeter to spare.
This time, she grinned.
He sucked in his breath as her smile transformed her face. Despite the cammo paint smeared into her cheeks and the dirt and sweat streaked across her jaw and down her neck, the field cap pulled low on her forehead, concealing all but the very ends of those soft gold curls, Eve Paris was absolutely mesmerizing. And her eyes…they glowed with life.
She glowed with life.
Right then and there, he knew his decision to bring her back to Córdoba had been the right one. This was the soldier he’d met that morning out on the LZ. A soldier who was not afraid to work for what she wanted. To fight for it.
A soldier worth risking his career for.
Unfortunately, the moment he shoved the vine aside and stepped into the clearing beside her, everything changed. Eve changed. Even before her smile faded, he could feel her pulling away, withdrawing into herself again. Though he now knew why, it didn’t help.
And damned if it didn’t hurt.
Determined to ignore this latest setback as he had every one of her subtle flinches throughout the morning, he moved into the center of the clearing and set his AK-47 on the ground before shrugging his rucksack off his shoulders. He dumped the ruck a foot behind him, severely reducing the amount of free space she’d have to place between them. He was almost amused when she began inching backward as expected.
Almost.
“Hungry?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and hunkered down to retrieve a couple of the MREs from the main section of his ruck.
“Uh…sure.”
He came up with two beef meals. He pulled his K-Bar from the nylon scabbard at his waist and used the tip of the black blade to slit open both main pouches. He passed Eve one. He sorted though his own MRE pouch and pulled out the chocolate bar and cocoa packet and tossed them over as well. She might look better each day, but as far as he was concerned, she could still use the added fat.
Crossing the Line Page 12