But her life had never been in danger like this before. Her mind just wouldn’t settle and her heart continued its frantic beat.
Hard fingers clamped onto the back of her collar and yanked. “Wha—?” she yelped.
She was pulled out of her hidey-hole and into the midst of four men with hard jaws and cold eyes.
Susana screamed.
One of the men backhanded her. The force split her lip and caused her to bump into the man holding her. With a grunt of annoyance, he shoved her to her knees.
Where was Kai? How come these men hadn’t tripped any of her booby traps? How did they avoid the quicksand?
“Let’s kill her now,” the man behind her said in Portuguese.
He kicked her between her shoulder blades. She managed to turn her head at the last second, so her cheek slammed into the ground, not her nose. Then the man stomped his foot on her back, driving all the air out of her lungs. She felt something cold, round and hard press against the base of her skull.
Oh, God. His gun. Her pulse spiked.
She was going to die. Where the hell was Kai?
“No!” The rough male voice sounded vaguely familiar. Susana’s face was scrunched into the ground by the pressure of her captor’s weapon, but she rolled her eyes until she could see the protester.
Yes, it was one of her kidnappers from the boat. But he wasn’t dressed like the other men. His fatigues were old and plain. A faded olive color rather than the deep evergreen with jungle print like the men surrounding her. Maybe her kidnapper wasn’t part of this group. Maybe he could stop them from killing her.
“The man said he wouldn’t pay my cousins and me the rest of our money if the woman was hurt,” her kidnapper protested.
Yes!
“What the fuck do we care what your client told you?” The speaker was a thin man with a tiny button of a nose and lips that put Angelina Jolie’s to shame. “Our orders were to bring the woman back dead. Hell, we don’t even need her whole body, just her abdomen.”
What? Her…her torso? What did that—?
Bright red exploded out of Thick Lips’s chest and neck. Susana screamed. She wanted to look away, but her eyes refused to close, leaving her staring at the ruined mess that had been the man’s chest. A second later, her kidnapper fell beside her, eyes staring at the sky through a blood-covered face.
Then something heavy fell on top of her, knocking her breath away and obscuring her vision. From the strong body odor, it was the man who’d been holding the gun to her neck. Susana tried to buck him off, but he was too heavy.
Oh, no. She wasn’t going to stay trapped here underneath a corpse. She worked her hands up underneath her shoulders, took a deep breath…
And the body was lifted away.
Susana scrambled to her feet. Cold, hard amber eyes met hers. The eyes of a killer. Seeing only death, she backed away and bolted toward the jungle.
“Shit,” she heard behind her. “Susana, wait! I’m not going to hurt you.”
But fear and panic pulsed through her veins, urging her to get away before she was killed.
One minute she was running, the next she was falling, strong male arms capturing her around her waist. But Kai shifted his body mid-fall and twisted so she landed on top of him.
“Dammit, Susana, what’s wrong with you?” Kai growled. “It’s me. Kai. You’re safe.”
Unable to think past the image of Thick Lips’s exploding chest, Susana slapped at Kai’s face and tried to stab her knee into his balls, but he simply captured her hands in his much larger ones and rolled over so that she ended up on her stomach with him lying on top of her.
“Susana, I’m not going to hurt you. I swear. Just calm down. Okay?”
He had her hands pinned to either side of her face and her legs tightly pressed together between his. His hold, while firm, wasn’t rough or bruising. But it was the soothing words he murmured that finally broke through the wall of horror and fear.
She stilled.
Oh, God. She felt foolish. He’d just saved her life. Yet she’d panicked and run from him, afraid he’d kill her next.
“You okay?”
No, dammit. She wasn’t. She’d just seen…just seen…
Gaah, she didn’t know whether to be sick or be mad. But after a few seconds, mad won out, destroying the last of her fear.
“What the hell were you thinking?” she snarled. She wanted to hurt him for putting her through the worst scare of her life. But he had her restrained so tightly she couldn’t hit or kick him.
So she bit the part of his forearm that was closest to her.
“Hey!” he protested, although her teeth had made only a faint indent in his shirt. “What the hell was that for?”
“Where were you? What took you so long to show up, you bastard? You said I’d be safe!” Susana heaved, trying to dislodge him, but Kai’s weight was evenly distributed along her body, pinning her completely.
Kai pressed harder against her. “Settle down. I’m sorry. When I realized they were skirting around the quicksand I started to follow, but then another two men showed up. I had to disable them before I could come for you.”
“Yeah? Well they almost put a bullet through my brain.” She tried to slam the back of her head into Kai’s nose, but he moved out of the way. That just stoked her anger higher.
“I’ve been knocked over the head, pushed into a river, kidnapped, shot at, now this. Those men said they don’t need me alive because all they need is my torso! For the last time. What the hell is going on?”
Kai cursed under his breath.
“Kai?”
He sighed. “You’ve got a microchip implanted in your abdomen, Susana. A microchip containing scientific research men will kill to get.”
Chapter 5
“That’s not funny.” Susana’s body jerked in another attempt to free herself and Kai shifted his hips just in time to avoid having her hit his growing hard-on.
“I’m not joking, Susana. There’s—”
A radio squawked. Shit. When the dead men didn’t check in, their buddies would come looking for them.
“I’ve got to go shut that radio off. Promise me you won’t run and I’ll let you up,” he said.
She actually thought about running, he could sense it in the way her muscles tightened. She gave a sexy little hmmm of indecision, then exhaled heavily. “Okay. I…promise,” she said.
Gee. She sounded so sincere.
Still, if he didn’t trust her they’d be stuck here all day. And after a while she’d realize his body was experiencing a typical male reaction to being pressed so tightly to her perfect ass. He didn’t want to give her another reason to be wary of him.
So he’d have to take her promise seriously. For now at least. “Thank you,” he said. He rolled off her and stood.
She refused his offer of a hand up and crawled a good five feet away before she stood.
O-kay. So she didn’t want to be anywhere near him. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for being freaked out. She’d probably never had a dead person fall on her before.
Well, maybe she had. But any corpses she’d encountered as an archaeologist would have lacked the…gore…of what she’d just witnessed. Yeah, probably not a lot of spraying blood from those bodies.
Susana finished brushing the leaves off the front of her shirt, then crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.
With her dark hair escaping its braid in wildly curling tendrils, her full lips pursed and her dirty, sweat-stained clothes, she looked ferocious. Sexy as hell.
And exhausted.
Ignoring another surge of protectiveness, he turned his back on her and knelt beside the bodies. “Uh…you might want to go into the jungle a bit.”
“Why?” She sounded suspicious.
“Because in order to search the bodies for the radio and the tracking device monitor I’m going to have to turn this guy over. You don’t need to see what’s on the other side. Why don’t you see if the tracki
ng device is somewhere on your clothes?”
He heard Susana stomp away, muttering under her breath.
“Hey,” he called after her, removing the man’s pistol and holding it up. “Can you shoot?”
“Yes, I can. Will I?” She glanced quickly at the bodies and bit her lip. “I don’t know.”
“Take this anyway. Just in case.” He tossed her the weapon.
She caught it. The way she checked the safety reassured him she knew enough not to accidentally shoot herself. Despite the look of revulsion on her face as she tucked the gun in her pocket, he figured her temper would kick in and have her firing at anyone who threatened her.
Including him. He’d have to be careful. But somehow, that thought brought a tiny smile to his face. He liked her temper. Hell, he liked everything about her. Didn’t it just figure she’d ended up witnessing his violent side in action.
Kai watched her move through the brush until he was satisfied she wasn’t going to see anything, then turned over the first body. It was the man who’d held his weapon to Susana’s head.
Before he could stop it, the rage came back. When he’d seen Susana on the ground with the butt of the automatic weapon digging into her neck, he’d lost it. He hadn’t consciously decided to shoot. He’d acted on instinct. Given in to that savage part of himself that he still didn’t fully understand. Or trust.
But let’s hear it for being aggressive. Susana was alive and untouched by any stray bullets. And he had six less opponents to worry about. Still, the back of his neck itched, telling him they’d better leave as soon as possible.
Kai quickly searched the bodies. The radios were short-range only, no good to him, so he turned them off. He took the weapons and extra ammo.
The third man had the tracking device monitor in his pocket. It looked like a Blackberry, only this screen showed a rough map instead of a menu of features. There was a dot for the person holding the monitor and another dot roughly where Susana was standing.
Okay. That was both good and bad. Good, because he now knew how the mercenaries had stayed on their trail.
Bad, because the tracking device had to be found and removed. And if Susana didn’t find it in her clothes, then it was inside her. Like the tracking device he’d recently allowed the SSU to implant under his skin to make sure they could rescue him if he ever disappeared.
Or find him if he went rogue.
He had to hope the device inside Susana could be easily removed.
Otherwise, they’d never escape the mercenaries.
“What about here?” Twenty minutes later Susana indicated a fallen log hemmed in on one side by trees and on the other by a sluggish stream. A drape of vines and branches hid the spot from view until you were almost past it.
She hadn’t located the tracking device during her self-pat-down, so Kai had told her to keep an eye out for a sheltered spot where he could perform a more thorough search.
Kai nodded. “Yeah, this’ll do.”
Susana let her backpack slide to the ground as she sank onto the fallen tree. Every muscle in her body wanted to go slack in relief, but she forced her back muscles to straighten. She would not collapse into an exhausted puddle at Kai’s feet.
But God, it felt wonderful to sit.
She let her mind drift, thinking of nothing. Her eyes must have closed, because the feel of Kai’s hand shaking her shoulder made her jump.
“Have a drink,” he said.
“Mmm, I’ll take a piña colada,” she murmured.
“Er…Sorry. Today’s special is Amazon river water. Filtered, of course.” Kai spoke in the haughty tones of a four-star maître-d’.
Her cheeks flushed and her eyelids flew open. Kai was holding out a canteen, his lips curled in amusement.
“Thanks.” She took the canteen, but carefully avoided looking in his eyes. What an idiotic thing to say. She must be more tired than she thought.
The warm, slightly brackish water spread smooth as quicksilver across her tongue. She forced herself to drink slowly and stop before she was satisfied. It took a long time to filter and purify water. She couldn’t take the chance that this was Kai’s only canteen.
But when she handed it back to him, he took a long swallow.
She got distracted by the muscles of Kai’s throat working as he drank. By the angle of his jaw and…
What was she doing? Kai was just drinking. Yet she was getting turned on.
She quickly turned her head away. At least he’d been looking up while he drank so he hadn’t seen her watching him.
She waited until she heard the snick of the cap being replaced before she turned around.
“Stand up and hold your arms out.”
“What?”
Kai held up a device that resembled a Blackberry. “Tracking—”
“—monitor. Yeah, I know. The ranchers carried a similar device to find lost cattle.”
“Ranchers?”
“My mother was a scientist. I spent most of my childhood on ranches here in the Amazon while she tried to develop a drought and famine resistant breed of cattle.”
“Just for the record,” Kai said. “I’m not comparing you to cattle.”
The male appreciation in his eyes triggered an honest-to-goodness blush. Dammit, she never blushed. Susana quickly looked away before he saw how deeply he’d affected her.
“I’m hoping this device has a sensor that will let me know where on your body the tracker is,” Kai said.
“I didn’t feel anything on me or my clothes. What size are we talking about?”
“Small as an eraser head, and flat as a piece of paper. Now, arms out.”
She obediently raised her arms out to her sides as Kai swept the monitor along the line of her body, several inches above her skin.
Dear…Lord. It felt as if he was caressing her.
Susana closed her eyes. She’d heard that the downside of an adrenaline rush was a sudden need for intimacy, but this was ridiculous. Kai wasn’t even touching her, yet her tired body sparked with tiny jolts of electricity as he swept the device above her skin.
Under other circumstances she would have embraced her reaction. Answered it by touching Kai in a way that would leave no doubt what she needed. Because God, if he could arouse her this much without making contact with her skin, what would he be able to do if he decided to seduce her?
But she didn’t know him. He’d shot those men. Without remorse. Without, as far as she could tell, feeling anything. While she was going to relive the moment in her nightmares.
Despite the fact that he’d saved her life, she wasn’t ready yet to fully trust him. So she ignored her inner sex goddess and didn’t pull him closer.
“Your front is clear. Turn around.”
She presented her back to him.
The device chirped.
“Found it.”
She felt his fingers probing along her left shoulder blade. “Ouch.”
“Sorry.” He ran his fingers gently over the sore spot again. “There’s a small tear in the fabric here.” His finger wiggled until it touched her bare skin.
She arched her back at the sharp pain that followed.
“Damn. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He pulled back and she could have sworn she felt his lips press a butterfly kiss to her shoulder. “You’re going to have to take off your shirt. It feels like the device is under your skin.”
“What?” She craned her neck around, but she wasn’t flexible enough to see where he was pointing.
“The tracking device is between your shoulder blade and your spine.” He lightly traced a large circle on her back, but didn’t actually touch the sore spot.
She slipped out of her shirt and clutched it to her chest like a shield. Dammit, her cheeks were heating with another blush. Her friends would howl with laughter if they could see her.
They loved to tease her about her lack of modesty. But honestly, she didn’t see what the big deal was. So some guy got a glimpse of her breasts? So what.
She wasn’t ashamed of her body. Far from it. She’d posed nude on more than one occasion.
Yet for some reason, with this man, she felt the need for propriety. So here she stood, modest as a vapor-prone maiden, hiding the bare skin of her torso even though her sports bra covered her better than most of the bikinis she owned.
It was enough to make her roll her eyes.
But not enough to make her drop the shirt.
The soft touch of Kai’s finger against her bare skin shocked her with a flash of sexual heat that singed all the way to her core. The sound of his breathing so close to her ear as he leaned in to get a better look sent tingles of pleasure down her spine.
She gritted her teeth and prayed that he finished soon, before this stupid arousal deepened to the point she had to act on it. Turning around and kissing him would be a bad mistake.
“Is it there?” she demanded in a voice just a tad too hoarse.
“Yeah, I see it.” He paused. “The skin here is puffy.” He touched her again. “And hot.” Another prod. “There’s pus as well. You’ve got an infection.”
Susana’s blood froze, all thoughts of arousal gone. In the jungle, infection was one of the deadliest threats. Bacteria flourished in the heat and damp. A healthy person could die within days of an untreated infection.
“How bad?” Her voice cracked on the last syllable.
“No red streaks.”
Okay. That was good. She took a deep breath.
His finger explored the sore area and Susana tightened her back muscles so she wouldn’t flinch.
“Whoever inserted the device was lucky,” Kai said.
“Lucky? He’s a guano-brained, hairy-tongued rock-dweller,” she muttered. Who would do this to her?
“I can’t see the device itself but I can feel it. I think there’s a tiny dart in here. Probably shot from a blowgun.”
Oh, how very Indiana Jones.
“Since it tore through your shirt, you probably have fibers embedded in the wound.”
“This shirt is supposed to be rip-proof,” Susana said. “The fabric is an experimental weave I’m testing for the manufacturer. This will definitely be in my report.”
Betrayal (SSU Trilogy Book 2) (The Surgical Strike Unit) Page 4