by Linda Turner
They returned to camp a few minutes later to find a lantern burning brightly in the clearing between the two tents and the scent of something that smelled an awful lot like stew simmering in a pot over the small Bunsen burner Dominic had brought along. Dominic regretfully explained that it was only a dehydrated mixture that he’d simply added water to, but it wasn’t trail mix, and in Maddy’s eyes, that made it gourmet fare. Between the three of them, they consumed the entire pot in a matter of minutes, then finished off the meal with dried apricots as dessert.
After that, there was nothing to do but go to bed. But as her eyes drifted to the tent she would share with Ace, Maddy’s heart kicked into high gear and she got this fluttery feeling in her stomach that had nothing to do with the food she’d just eaten. Nothing had really changed, she tried to tell herself. Yet everything had. She’d come to trust him, and that suddenly made him far more dangerous than he had been before. Because he was, she realized, shaken, a man she could lose her heart to without even trying.
“We’ve got an early start in the morning, gang,” he said as he helped clear away the remains of the meal and put out the lantern. “Better get to bed and catch all the sleep you can. I’m setting my alarm for five.”
“Sí,” Dominic agreed as the night gathered closer. “Tomorrow’s going to be more strenuous than today. We still have a long ways to go.”
With a soft good-night, he headed for his tent, leaving Ace and Maddy behind in a silence that was suddenly crackling with tension. Hugging herself in the dark, she almost jumped when Ace asked in a gravelly voice, “Aren’t you coming?”
“In a minute,” she promised huskily. She needed some time to herself, some time to think. “You go ahead.”
He wanted to argue with her—she could almost feel his disapproval, but just when she thought he was going to insist, he shrugged and turned away. “Have it your way. But I wouldn’t stay out here too long by myself with the fire out if I were you,” he advised. “Keep the flashlight handy.”
The night swallowed him whole, and all too soon, Maddy found herself alone with her thoughts and a thundering heart that refused to behave. Staring at the darker shadow that she knew was the tent, she gripped the flashlight tighter and dragged in a deep, calming breath. This was not the time to let her romantic fantasies take charge, she reminded herself as the warm, steamy night pushed in on her from all sides. She and Ace were sharing a tent simply because Dominic had misunderstood their relationship. It was as simple and uncomplicated as that, and if she made the mistake of thinking Ace had some kind of romantic interlude planned, she was only going to end up making a fool of herself. And there was nothing more pathetic than an old maid who couldn’t take her eyes off a man who wasn’t interested in anything but a little harmless flirting that didn’t mean a thing.
Wincing at the thought, Maddy didn’t notice the frogs croaking on the opposite side of the river and in the trees. Then somewhere off to her right, something moved in the thick underbrush, leaving a wake of ominous, shimmering leaves. Suddenly from just beyond the clearing, something snarled, something big and hungry and wild. Maddy froze, every hair on her body standing at attention. A heartbeat later, she bolted toward the tent…and Ace.
She didn’t stop to announce her presence but simply burst through the tent opening like the hounds of hell were after her…and caught Ace in the act of unzipping his pants. Startled, she gasped and dropped the flashlight, which immediately went out. “Oh! I—I’m sorry. I should have knocked…o-or s-something.”
Not the least disturbed, Ace stepped out of his pants and laid them on top of his backpack. “That’d be a little difficult since there’s no door,” he said wryly as he threw himself down on top of his sleeping bag in just his shorts and rolled over onto his stomach. “Zip the tent, Little Red Riding Hood. We don’t want any wolves visiting us during the middle of the night.”
He’d slipped back into the irritating habit of calling her nicknames again, but Maddy was too flustered to protest. “Oh! Of course!” Her cheeks burning even though she hadn’t seen a thing once she’d dropped the flashlight, she whirled and fumbled for the zipper tab at the tent opening and yanked it down, sealing them in. Behind her, she heard Ace move around in search of a more comfortable position, then his sigh as he found it and went still.
Such a simple thing, she thought, shaken, listening to a man prepare for sleep in the dark. She hadn’t experienced it before and had never suspected how intimate it could be. Without her eyes to guide her, her hearing seemed to be supersensitive where he was concerned, picking up every nuance of his breathing, each whisper of his bare skin against the material of the sleeping bag as he settled down for sleep. And in her mind, her imagination was going wild, teasing her with hot, restless images that stole her breath.
Her cheeks burning, she stiffened, suddenly realizing that if she could hear his every move, he had to be just as aware of her. And if she stood here much longer, he was bound to start wondering what the heck she was doing. Mortified, she quickly spun away from the tent entrance and cautiously made her way in the dark to the spot where she’d laid out her sleeping bag earlier.
She had no idea if he was watching her in the dark, but she had no intention of being caught without her clothes anytime soon in his presence. Contenting herself with stripping off her socks and shoes, she removed her contacts, dropped down onto the sleeping bag and stretched out with a tired sigh. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually laid down in a completely horizontal position and it felt wonderful.
Every strained muscle in her body crying out for sleep, she closed her eyes and went limp. But the heat was oppressive, the humidity thick enough to cut with a knife. High above the tent, she could hear the wind in the treetops, but the air was utterly still on the forest floor, with not so much as a breeze to stir the bushes. And outside the tent, she heard again the snarl of the big cat that had sent her rushing inside. Only this time, it sounded closer, meaner.
Her heart in her throat, she glanced over to where she could just make out Ace’s broad-shouldered form in the shadows. “Ace?”
For a moment, she thought he was asleep. He didn’t move a muscle, let alone answer her. Then he stirred. “Hmm?”
“What was that?”
“What?” he mumbled.
The growl seemed to come from right outside the tent and sent her heart jumping into her throat. “That!”
He chuckled sleepily. “Just a jaguar.”
“Just a jaguar?”
He laughed softly, an incredibly sexy, sand paper-rough sound in the darkness. “Don’t worry. I won’t let him chew on you. Scout’s honor.”
“You were a Scout?”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised. I was a regular kid just like everybody else. Where do you think I learned my survival skills?”
She smiled at his defensive tone. “Somehow, I don’t think they taught you how to dodge bullets in the Boy Scouts. I just assumed you learned all that stuff in agent’s school.”
She heard, rather than saw, him stiffen with wariness. “When did I say I was an agent?”
“Aren’t you?”
For a moment, his only answer was dead silence. Then he said quietly, “There are some things a little girl shouldn’t ask.”
“I’m not a little girl,” she said just as quietly.
“I know,” he growled. “That’s the problem.” Turning on his side away from her, he presented his back to her. “Go to sleep, Maddy. You’re perfectly safe.”
Within seconds, his breathing was slow and steady and deep. Her pulse racing crazily, Maddy stared at his dark, still shadow. He wasn’t as indifferent to her as he would have liked. That should have worried her, she thought as she flopped over on her back and closed her eyes. Instead, she couldn’t seem to stop smiling.
Outside the thin net walls of the tent, the jungle was alive and restless in the night. Maddy reminded herself that Ace had a gun and she’d seen firsthand just how well he
could use it. If he could shoot a snake between the eyes at the drop of a hat, there was no way he was going to miss something as big as a jungle cat. There was nothing to be afraid of.
But fear, she was discovering, had nothing to do with logic. Ace was less than six feet away, yet suddenly she felt alone, isolated, horribly vulnerable. If something decided to come through the flimsy material of the tent after her, it would be on her before she could manage a scream, let alone turn to Ace for help. And if he was a heavy sleeper, which he could be for all she knew, she could already be dead meat before he discovered something was wrong.
That’s right. Maddy, a voice jeered in her head. Scare yourself to death, why don’t you? Then you’ll really be able to sleep.
Disgusted, she jumped up, grabbed her sleeping bag and quietly moved it four feet closer to Ace. Undisturbed, he didn’t move a muscle. Close enough to reach out and touch him if the need arose, she laid back down, turned on her side so that she was facing him and closed her eyes. When the jaguar outside growled five minutes later, she was already asleep and didn’t hear a thing.
When the alarm on Ace’s watch went off at five, it was still black as pitch outside and the only time of the night or day when the rain forest was relatively quiet. Groaning, he fumbled for the button to turn off the alarm, cursing the damn thing when he finally found it. It’d been a while since he’d slept on the hard ground and he was feeling it in every bone in his body.
“You’re getting too old for this type of thing, man,” he complained in a gravelly voice as he dragged himself to his feet and reached for his pants. “Taking off into the wilds after scum was all right when you were a kid, but you’re pushing forty, tough guy. You’ve gotten soft…”
In the process of zipping his pants, he frowned at the dark lump in the middle of the tent floor. What the hell was that? Scowling, he started to reach for the flashlight that should have been by his boots, then remembered that Maddy had dropped it when she’d come to bed last night. Praying that the thing in the middle of the floor wasn’t a big, coiled boa, he stepped around it to where he estimated the flashlight had fallen and felt around with his foot until he found it.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t worked, but a couple of whacks with the heel of his hand did the trick. The light sprang on, illuminating every inch of the interior of the tent, as well as the lump in the middle of the floor.
Maddy.
She lay on her stomach, her face buried in the crook of her bent elbow and almost hidden from him by the sassy curls that just barely reached the curve of her cheek. Sometime during the night, the heat must have gotten to her. She’d stripped off her shorts and lay before him in nothing but a long-tailed shirt and the red panties he’d bought her in Mexico City.
His gaze fixed on the lacy elastic that just barely peeked out from beneath the hem of her shirt, he grinned. So she’d worn them. He’d wondered if she would. She’d been so shocked by the color and the cut that it’d been obvious that she’d never worn anything more daring than serviceable white cotton in her life. He hadn’t dared tell her that there was something about a woman in red panties that he couldn’t resist.
She looked damn good in them, he decided as his gaze slowly slid up and down the slender curves of her long legs. Too good. With no trouble at all, he could picture those legs wrapping around him, holding him close….
Just that easily, he was hot and hard and furious with himself. What the hell was he doing? He was here for one reason and one reason only—to catch Lazear before he reached Barrera. Once that was done, he was washing his hands of one Maddy Lawrence just as quickly as he could arrange it. If she was going to arrive home as innocent as the day she was born, he’d damn well better forget what the lady looked like in red panties!
But, damn, he wasn’t cut out for sainthood. The minute he tore his gaze away from those beautiful legs of hers, it suddenly hit him how close her sleeping bag was to his. And since he hadn’t moved his during the night, that meant she’d moved hers—to be closer to him.
Something streaked through him at the thought, something that a man with good intentions had no business feeling. His jaw rigid, he set the flashlight down, checked his boots to make sure they didn’t hold any unwanted visitors and tugged them on. When he squatted down beside Maddy, his face was grim with purpose.
He started to reach for her, but she muttered something in her sleep just then and turned her head away without so much as opening her eyes. The devil sitting on his shoulder, Ace frowned down at her, fighting the sudden urge to lean over her and nibble at the back of her neck, the shell of her ear, the sweet, tempting corner of her mouth. If he set his mind to it, he could have her hot and needy and wide-awake in ten seconds flat.
Hell!
Cursing himself, he stripped off his watch, reset the alarm to go off again in sixty seconds and laid it right by her ear. When it went off, he was standing all the way across the tent.
Startled, by the sudden buzzing in her ear, Maddy jerked out of a sound sleep to find Ace dressed and glaring at her from the tent entrance. Confused, she said, “What? What’s going on?”
“It’s time to get up,” he snapped. “Get dressed so I can take the damn tent down. It’s already after five and we need to get moving.”
Growling at her to check her shoes before she put them on, he strode out without another word, his face set in implacable lines, his eyes hard. Stunned, Maddy pushed her hair from her eyes and stated after him in bewilderment. Was this the same man who only just last night had killed a snake for her, then tenderly held her until she stopped shaking? The same one she’d felt so close to that she could have trusted him with anything, including her heart? Talk about getting up on the wrong side of the bed! He’d all but bitten her head off, and for the life of her, she didn’t even know what she’d done.
Tears stung her eyes and lumped in her throat. How, she wondered, blinking rapidly, could she have misjudged a man so completely? She’d thought they were coming to like each other, but now that he’d had time to think about their closeness last night, he obviously regretted it and wanted nothing more to do with her.
The anger came out of nowhere, roiling in her gut like a summer storm sweeping in off the Atlantic. God, how could she have been so gullible? This wasn’t a fairy tale where the princess got her man. She was a long way from a blue blood and Ace wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a knight who’d come charging to her rescue. Oh, he’d saved her, all right, but only because he’d thought she could lead him to her boss. He might have changed his opinion of her since then, but he’d just made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to be friends or buddies or anything else with her. Her heart might kick in her breast whenever he was within touching distance, but when he looked at her, all he saw was a responsibility that he was stuck with until they returned to civilization.
Fine, she thought, snatching up her shorts and his watch, which she stuffed into her pocket. If that was the way he wanted it, she wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking they could be anything more than civil to each other again, she assured herself proudly as she popped in another pair of the disposable contacts. She’d be polite…and distant. And if there was a benevolent God up there somewhere looking out for her, she’d still have her heart when they went their separate ways.
Breakfast consisted of the hated trail mix that stuck in Maddy’s throat and a silence that seemed unbreakable. His weathered face lined with confusion, Dominic kept looking from her to Ace and back again, trying to figure out what the problem was between the two of them, but he wisely held his tongue when no one seemed inclined to talk. Then it was time to load the canoe and head farther upriver, and they saved their energy for paddling against the current.
Dawn came as quickly as darkness had the night before. One minute, they were engulfed in a blackness that was so thick it seemed impenetrable, and the next, sunlight was bursting through the thick foliage and pushing back the shadows. Suddenly, the jungle was
alive with life that, for the most part, remained just out of sight within the safety of the trees. Occasionally, they would catch a glimpse of something on the bank, the swish of a tail, the glint of watchful eyes, before it quickly darted back out of sight, and they couldn’t be sure what they’d seen, if anything.
Seated in the middle again, with Ace in front of her and Dominic at the rear of the canoe, Maddy scowled at Ace’s back, determined to hang on to her hurt and anger for as long as possible. But the unspoiled beauty of their surroundings soothed and fascinated her, and when Dominic quietly pointed out a family of turtles sunning on a dead log on the riverbank, she couldn’t help but smile at the sight and long once again for her camera.
Later, Dominic drew her attention to a caiman, which resembled an alligator, all but buried in the water but for its watchful, unblinking eyes. Shivering, she eagerly asked him questions about it, and soon they were both chattering away about the jungle and all its mysteries. Ace, however, remained aloof. Staring stiffly ahead, he ignored them both for hours and only spoke to warn Dominic of a log or some other hazard farther upstream so that the other man could steer them around it.
And the longer Ace ignored them, the more annoyed Maddy became. She didn’t know what his problem was, but whatever it was, it was no excuse for such childishness. They were all literally stuck in the same boat, and the least he could do was pretend to be friendly. But men, she was discovering, didn’t feel the compunction to play nicey-nicey just to keep the peace the way most women did. What you saw was what you got, like it or not. It was downright irritating.
By midday, an uncomfortable silence had once again fallen, and this time, no one seemed inclined to break it. Then they heard a low roar that gradually grew louder and louder as they traveled farther upriver. Startled, Maddy glanced over her shoulder at Dominic. “What’s that noise?”