Rebecca and her sister had been close and it killed him to know that a friend of his had been responsible, even partially, for driving a wedge between them. He knew that was one of the things that brought such sadness to Becca’s face. He didn’t give himself much credit when it came to knowing what was going on in a woman’s mind. Even having a mother and sister hadn’t given him much education in the female brain, but there was something else bothering Becca, even beyond her worry over her sister and her father’s health. And he was going to find out what it was.
“Let’s take a look around,” he suggested. “And see if we can find out why everyone left.”
They climbed out of the Range Rover and walked around to the front. There was no sound except for the wind and a pinging sound coming from the car’s hood as it cooled.
Becca shivered and he looked at her. “Are you cold?”
She shook her head. “Ghosts.”
“I won’t let them get you.”
He started toward the tent and she followed. He turned back the flap and glanced around. In the fading light, he could see very little – and nothing that told him where the crew had gone. The tent must have been used for sorting and cataloguing the team’s finds because there were long tables inside that could have been used for that purpose.
Rebecca stepped inside eagerly, her gaze darting around the room. “This is where she worked. I never saw what she does. And I’ve never known why her specialty is in this area of the world.”
“Maybe because when she was very young, she fell in love with someone from here and wanted to know more about his people – or maybe she came here hoping to see him again.”
Becca grew solemn. “I suppose so. I never thought of that. Maybe she is trying to find the one who betrayed her.”
“A harsh word,” he said.
“For Jenny it was a harsh reality.”
He turned away, pulling a flashlight from his pocket. “Come on. Let’s see what else is here.”
She followed him to a small structure which appeared to be surrounded by palm fronds and other branches. “What’s that? It looks like a brush arbor.”
“That’s the bathroom,” he answered, startling a laugh out of her. “Latrines, really.”
They stepped inside the little structure to see that it was, indeed, a bathroom. Separated by stalls, also made of palm fronds, they found toilets with paper and a huge bucket of water and a small pail to use for flushing.
“Wow,” Becca said. “I never would have expected this. I wonder where the, um, waste goes?”
“There’s probably a septic tank down below. Some benefactor must have had a lot of money – and high sanitary standards. Believe me, you won’t see anything like this again out here in the desert.”
Nearby was another brush arbor that held showers. A cistern with a tight-fitting lid provided the water. There was an ingenious hand pump to bring the water flowing into the shower head.
Aaron grasped the top of the tall cistern, moved the lid aside, and then stretched onto his toes to see inside. “It’s full. We can shower here. It might be our last opportunity for a few days.”
“I guess I’d better plan to not get very dirty.”
He grinned at her. “It’s the desert, Rebecca. Of course you’ll get dirty.”
As he said that, a thought struck him and he turned quickly and strode back to the latrines.
Rebecca trotted along behind him. “Aaron, what is it?”
He used the flashlight to examine the surface of the fresh water in the buckets beside the toilets, then pointed the beam down inside.
“It’s clean,” he said. “That means they’ve been gone only a short time. The wind hasn’t had time to flow any dust in.”
“Then we can follow them.” Excited, she started to swing back toward the Range Rover, but he caught her arm.
“We can’t, Rebecca.” He took her outside again and swung his arm in a wide arc. “We have no idea which way they went. There’s only one road in and out and if they’d been on it, we would have met them. No, they’ve gone into the desert for some reason, but we won’t be able to follow their trail until morning. And I don’t know this area well enough to drive it in the dark, even if we knew which direction they went.”
“But . . . .”
“You have to trust me, Rebecca.”
Her deep blue eyes came up to meet his. In them he saw all the stress and worry that was dogging her.
“I do,” she said, with a wobbly smile.
He nodded and turned toward the Range Rover. “Let’s get out what we need for the night. We can sleep in that tent.” He nodded toward the one with the long tables and she murmured her assent.
Rebecca followed along dutifully, taking out supplies and preparing to fix a meal while he got sleeping bags and even found a couple of small pillows. All the time, he thought about the word ‘trust’. He wanted her to trust him, to believe he would take care of her, protect her, find her sister. He also wanted to make love to her, long and hard. What he had told her was true. He could have had her yesterday on top of his desk, but that wasn’t what he wanted with Rebecca. She’d haunted his thoughts for ten years.
He’d felt like a lecherous fool when they’d first met because she’d been so young – and maturity wise, with his sheltered background, he hadn’t been much older. Even then, he hadn’t acted on his feelings because his instinct to protect her had been stronger than anything else. He still felt that way, but it was ten times stronger since it had been growing for that many years.
So why had he acted like such a bastard yesterday, kissing her the way he had, almost taking her, quick and hard, on his desk? Fury, he concluded at the secret she had kept for so many years, but lust, too. And neither of those had anything to do with the need to protect her.
“Been insane long, Aaron?” he muttered to himself.
Since there was no answer to that question, he went to the Range Rover and began removing the things they would need for the night. He carried a cooler of food and a lantern into the tent, then returned for the sleeping bags, piling everything on the tables. Becca was busy pulling packages of food from the cooler and trying to decipher their labels. He should have asked his mother to mark them in English instead of having the cook do it in Arabic.
He helped her decide what they would eat, and then finished taking the last of the items from the car. By then, it was fully dark. He stood in the flap of the tent and stared out.
“What is it, Aaron?” Becca asked, coming up behind him.
“I’d forgotten how completely dark it gets out here,” he said.
“The stars will be out soon.” She looked up and grinned. “We could start a bonfire and sing camp songs. I know lots.”
He laughed. “Let’s eat, then get some sleep. It’s early, but we’ll have to get up early to find their trail.”
~*~
“I’m not going to be able to sleep with such a full stomach,” Becca complained a while later. “How many calories do you think you force-fed me? I feel like a goose whose liver is about to be turned into foie gras.”
“Or Hansel and Gretel being fattened up for the witch’s dinner,” Aaron agreed amiably. “Stop complaining. That wasn’t even a thousand calories.”
“Oh, excuse me.” She stood up and wandered around the tent, then stopped to look out at the night as he had done earlier. She was nervous about the coming night, being close to him, as she had been nervous all day. Not by so much as a look or a gesture had he betrayed that he wanted to repeat what he had started yesterday, or this morning.
Even though his vehicle was equipped with a global positioning system, he was sitting at a table, studying a map by lantern light. When she’d asked about it, he’d said he’d been trained to read maps long before GPS became available and technology told him place, but not topography.
His long, sturdy fingers traced the lines, he consulted what looked like some kind of guide book, and then he went back to examining the map
. By the lantern light, she could see his profile, the angled jaw, the straight nose and hooded eyes. She remembered thinking that he listened with his whole body, but he studied and planned that way, too. She could see his lips, pressed together in thought, then relaxing into a little smile. The memory of his lips on hers warmed her, and thinking about his mouth on her breasts filled her with a rush of heat. If she didn’t stop this, she was going to go around in a semi-aroused state during her entire stay in the country.
As she watched him study the map, his eyes narrowed and he caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
He obviously had a detailed plan to drive her crazy.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said abruptly.
“Do you want me to come with you?” He didn’t even look up from his map.
“No.” She tapped herself on the chest. “Camp counselor here, remember? I’ve taken outdoor showers before.” She grabbed another lantern, her shower items, and the yoga pants and shirt she would be sleeping in and headed out.
Once inside the shower, she got everything ready, took off her clothes, and worked the pump handle to bring the water from the cistern. Feeling smugly satisfied, she turned on the shower. She took a moment to glory in the feel of the water sliding over her skin, then got wet, lathered up – and felt something scamper across the top of her foot.
She let out a surprised shriek and jumped back only to be poked in the rump by one of the branches that made up the walls. She staggered forward and bumped into another branch, all the while trying to swipe shampoo from her eyes. After a few seconds of this crazy dance, she felt herself stumbling into Aaron’s arms.
“Becca,” he demanded, trying to grab her around her slippery waist. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she insisted. “I was startled by something that ran across my foot.”
“Do you think it was a snake?”
“I said it ran, I didn’t say it slithered.” She grabbed for her towel, did her own little slither out of his grasp, and wrapped it around herself, furious for reacting as she had. How much more of a hackneyed idea could it be for a woman to run and shriek at something in an outdoor shower?
Aaron grabbed the lantern and played it around the enclosure. “Ah,” he said. Leaning over, he scooped something from the ground. “Here’s the culprit. A hedgehog.”
“There are hedgehogs here?” Surprised and charmed, she took the prickly creature and looked into its charming triangular face. It stared back.
“Yes, though they don’t come out very often – except to join a beautiful woman in the shower.”
“Uh, huh,” she said skeptically, handing the animal back to him with one hand and shoving her soapy mop of hair out of her face with the other. She didn’t feel beautiful. Lathered and slippery, she felt ridiculous, but his arm around her had been warm and protective. She felt that same odd sensation she’d known already today, as if something had clicked into place.
It was frustrating that she still couldn’t put a name to it.
“I’ll send him on his way,” Aaron said. He put the creature down and watched it waddle away into the night before turning back to her. In the lantern light, his eyes were dark and his grin was wicked. “Are you sure you don’t need any help? I could scrub your back, hold your loofah . . . ?”
“No, thank you. I can handle things from here.” She made a shooing motion with her hands and he walked away, chuckling. She finished showering in record time and carried everything back to the tent, then stumbled to a stop in the doorway.
Aaron had shoved a couple of the tables together to make a place on the sandy floor for their sleeping bags, which he had placed side by side. Something about seeing them like that gave her pause.
Aaron was gathering his own shower things – though his seemed to consist solely of a bar of soap and a towel. He glanced up. “Something wrong?”
“Um, no. Of course not.”
“Are you worried about your sleeping bag? Because we can put them together if you want. They’re made to zip into one big bag – so I can protect you from another hedgehog attack.”
She gave him a steady, drop dead look and said, “That won’t be necessary.”
Chuckling, he strolled out of the tent. Becca quickly combed out her wet hair, hoping it would dry without looking too funky since she didn’t have a blow dryer to smooth and straighten it out. She could drag her sleeping bag to the other side of the tent so she would be so close to his disturbing presence. That wouldn’t solve anything, though. She would still be fully aware of him. Better to stay where he’d put her. Besides, if she moved and he didn’t like it, or think she was safe, he would simply drag her back.
At last, she dove into her sleeping bag and zipped it up, then turned on her side away from where he would be sleeping, and closed her eyes. She told herself that she didn’t want to know what he was wearing – or not wearing -- when he came back to the tent.
Aaron returned shortly. He moved around the tent, making things secure.
Eyes closed, Becca listened to his movements even as she tried to keep her mind from conjuring up an image of what he was wearing. Tighty whities, maybe? Or boxer briefs? Did he seem like the boxer brief type? What did he wear to bed?
Before her fevered imagination could come up with an image, or her eyes could fly open to check, he climbed into his sleeping bag and turned off the lantern. She heard his breathing settle into a steady, even rhythm and then she drifted into sleep.
~*~
Something was chasing her. She was running over the desert, her feet were pounding the ground, her legs were stretching, arms pumping, but she wasn’t moving, and something unspeakable was behind her. She moaned in terror, knowing she had nowhere to turn, no one to help her. She had been alone for so long, she knew there was no one to call out to, no one to depend on.
“Becca, wake up,” Aaron’s voice spoke in her ear – authoritative, yet comforting. “You’re having a bad dream. Wake up.”
She woke with a start as his arm came around her waist. He tugged her close, sleeping bag and all. “There was something out there,” she whispered, still groggy. “And I couldn’t get away from it.”
He settled her within the curve of one arm, and the other came across her waist to hold her in place. “Go back to sleep. Whatever’s out there will have to go through me to get to you.”
Smiling, Becca did as she was told, and drifted back into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter 6
Becca woke slowly, stiff in places that hadn’t known such stiffness since the last time she’d slept on the ground. She took a moment to listen to her surroundings as she always did when she was camping out. She heard birds whose songs she didn’t recognize, and the sweep of the wind that set the fronds of the palm trees to chattering.
She remembered the night, and the dream of trying to run but being frozen in place, Aaron’s reassuring voice in her ear, his presence at her back. She had awakened a couple of hours ago to visit the bathroom. When she’d come back, he had been standing in the tent door as if concerned for her safety. Without a word, he watched her return to her sleeping bag, and then climbed into his own, hooked his arm around her once again, and settled her against his chest.
It had been comforting to have him at her back.
But he wasn’t there now.
She stirred, opened her eyes, and sat up to look around. He was standing in the doorway, facing into the desert, sipping from a cup. He was already dressed, at least partially. He wore tan slacks in some kind of lightweight fabric, but he was barefoot – and shirtless.
Her mouth went dry at the sight of his back which was broad-shouldered, lean, muscled, and tapering to a narrow waist. She wanted to go to him, put her arms around his waist and plant kisses on that smooth expanse of perfect skin. She had never been the sexual aggressor. The thought of what she wanted to do surprised her and had a soft sound of pleasure escaping from her lips.
He turned and she quickly looked
away.
“I thought you might sleep a little longer,” he said, coming toward her. Her gaze came up to meet his, then lowered to his chest. Lean and well-muscled with a faint dusting of hair across his belly, it was even more impressive than his back had been.
He crouched down and offered her his cup. “Coffee?”
He had shaved. The scent of his aftershave washed over her. It was a heady, sexy combination of spice and sandalwood that she knew she would forever after associate with him and this African desert.
“Thank you,” she said taking the warm cup from him and sipping the dark brew.
He watched her, his green eyes going dark as they settled on her mouth. She swallowed and lowered the cup. He took it from her and set it aside, then put his hands on her shoulders.
“I’ve been thinking about this all night,” he said.
“What?”
“Kissing you good morning.” He turned, pulling her with him, down to the sleeping bag, still warm from her body. With gentle purpose, he took her into his arms and urged her mouth up to his.
This was what she wanted, she thought in a dizzying rush of delight. She wanted to wake up to his kiss, to his lovemaking.
His lips fastened over hers and she was lost to all time and place. They could have been anywhere, at any time and she wouldn’t have known. The only thing she knew was his mouth fastened on hers, his tongue playing with hers, his breath giving her life.
She raised her hands to hold him, to prolong the pleasure as much as possible. She pulled her mouth away from his and kissed his jaw, the vulnerable place below his ear which made him growl with pleasure, exciting her further. Emboldened, she kissed his eyes, then returned to his mouth, slipped down his throat to take delight in the warm skin of his chest.
After a moment, he pulled away. “I was only going to kiss you and say good morning, but if we don’t stop, we won’t stop. Are you ready for that?”
Book Boyfriends Cafe Summer Lovin' Anthology 2015 Page 66