by Dana Marton
She pushed as hard as she could, but not as hard as he did. One of them had to be safe. If he got injured, she was the backup.
He ripped off his backpack and tossed it so he could go faster. When she reached it, she picked it up. She would catch up with them eventually.
She kept him in sight for another five minutes before the rocky bank gave way to flatter, muddy terrain and he disappeared into denser foliage. She could hear him for a little longer as he dashed through the brush. After that, she heard nothing.
A bend in the river took the kid from her sight, too. Then she was alone in a massive green labyrinth of danger. She kept her gun handy, mindful of wild animals as she ran on, alert and determined. Albeit not one hundred percent sure what in the hell she was doing.
The kid was gone down the river, and she’d let Mitch go after him. Had trusted him. Treated him like a teammate. The thought occurred to her suddenly. She wasn’t a fan of teammates, frankly.
She didn’t mind helping others. She just didn’t like them helping her, didn’t like relying on them. She preferred to do things for herself. Maybe because she was a woman in a male-dominated field and didn’t want to appear weak.
It wouldn’t be good if she began relying on Mitch now.
She pushed harder. The man had a way of getting under her skin. He better not think that if he got to Zak first, he’d have some kind of a claim on him. She was taking the kid back to Juarez. End of story.
If Mitch didn’t like that, tough for him.
She should have shot him at the guesthouse. Not killed him or anything, but hurt him enough to make sure he wouldn’t be coming after her. Or, at the very least, she should have tied him to a tree after he’d shot Paolo. Coming back to Sanchez alone, she could have claimed that the two men took each other out. Sanchez would have accepted that. He would have come across the river for her, and she could have gone back to Juarez with the men.
Mitch was a major complication for her mission, but every time she had a chance to get rid of him, she hadn’t. Better not be because he was ridiculously attractive. That would be crazy. She would never let a consideration that shallow affect her mission. It didn’t matter that he was hot. Or that he was good at what he did. Though she respected that. But the appreciation she had for him was strictly professional. Okay, mostly professional.
All right, so fine, she wasn’t a saint.
She did like him. But she also wanted to strangle him. Frequently.
He’d come to help her with Paolo. Which had been a mistake. But the salient fact was that he’d been with Zak, the object of his rescue mission, and he’d left the kid to come after her because he’d thought she was in trouble.
A sweet gesture, as much as she hated to admit it. Not that she wanted sweet.
She didn’t need a protector. She managed just fine on her own. She didn’t want a partner.
Yet here he was, a thorn in her side.
She was carrying his backpack for heaven’s sake, like some moonstruck teenage boy carried books to a high school girl’s locker. And her thoughts kept buzzing around him.
A noise ahead drew her attention. She slowed and pulled her weapon. Heard swearing, followed by “It’s me.”
“Mitch?” She inched forward, ready for anything.
“I’m alone. It’s okay.”
She pushed through some sticky-leaved palms she hoped weren’t poisonous and saw him at last.
He was sitting on a fallen tree, pressing leaves against a gash in his leg. “Broken stick of bamboo got me.”
She dropped their bags at his feet and assessed the situation. Decent cut, but not life-threatening. “Zak?”
“Lost him.”
That couldn’t happen. Simply couldn’t. Everything depended on her gaining Juarez’s goodwill, and Zak was the only ace up her sleeve. “Did he ever jump out of the canoe?”
“Not that I saw.”
She went for her emergency pack. For a split second she considered just tossing it to him and moving on.
Oh, fine. This didn’t have to take long. She pulled out some gauze and antibiotic ointment and went to work, trying to ignore the way her fingertips tingled every time they touched his skin, which was tanned and smooth with plenty of hard muscles underneath. He was so quintessentially male, everything that was female in her responded to him.
For a second she imagined his hands on her, and the image took her breath away. But that could never happen. He was a big enough distraction already.
Pulling her mind in another direction took effort, but she did it. “In ten miles or so, there are more rapids.” She tried to picture the spot. She’d only been there once. A dangerous place from what she could remember.
Mitch eyed the gun at her feet. “When did your backpack get filled up anyway? I checked it when you first showed up. You didn’t have any weapons.”
“Remember when I went back to the bushes to give back my breakfast?”
He winced. Then his eyes narrowed. “You hid everything important before you stepped out into the clearing. Then, after I checked, you went back and repacked. You weren’t even sick?”
She smiled at him. Patted the bandage. “Done. That’s the second time I saved your life, by the way.” She stood, needing a little space after all that nearness.
“The snake wasn’t that poisonous.”
Still, he would have been very uncomfortable. She doubted that he could have walked out of the jungle unaided. “Fine. Once then.” She could be reasonable.
“I have antibiotics in my backpack, too.”
“You only have your backpack because I brought it after you.” Would it have killed him to acknowledge that she’d been helpful?
He tested his leg then put his full weight on it. “All right. You saved my life. Want a reward?”
She hated that her body tingled at the prospect, even though the question had been meant as a put-down, not as a come-on.
“Sure.” She swung her backpack on her back. “There’s one thing I’d really like.”
He gave her a careful look. Then a surprised glint came into his eyes that said he was starting to understand her unspoken thoughts. His lips stretched into a slow grin.
There was nothing for them there but trouble. Her heart rate picked up. Thank God, he couldn’t see that.
“As a reward, you could stay out of my way.” She turned on her heels and left him.
SHE WAS SASSY. He hadn’t thought he’d liked that in a woman, but he couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed anyone’s company this much. He was beginning to rethink the whole lone-wolf thing.
Maybe I could work with her, Mitch thought, as he tried not to think of the dozens of other things he would like to do with Megan Cassidy, none of them appropriate for two government operatives on duty.
Especially not with Zak missing.
He grabbed his own bag and took off after her. “So how bad are those rapids?”
“He’ll be out of the canoe. Can he swim?”
He’d never thought to ask. “No idea.” If the kid couldn’t swim…
“I can’t believe you lost him.” She stomped forward.
“I lost him?” Just like a woman to blame a man for everything.
“I left him with you.”
“You know, everything was going just fine until we met up with you.” He’d found the compound without trouble, gotten the kid out, he’d even caught up with those troublesome witnesses. It hadn’t been the smoothest op he’d ever handled, but he was managing.
Then came Megan Cassidy.
She said something under her breath that he couldn’t hear and was pretty sure he didn’t want to.
“You do realize that you’re the biggest obstacle to my mission?” he asked her. “Not the jungle, not the bad guys. Trouble follows you. I’ve heard of people like that. They don’t make it long in this business.”
“Trouble doesn’t follow me. I follow trouble. I go where trouble is, because that’s my job. I conquer trouble.”
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“Is that how you got that scar?” He’d been curious about that from the first time he’d seen it.
“At the beginning, when I showed up at Juarez’s camp, the other men didn’t exactly like the idea of me joining their team.”
But she hadn’t let that stop her. He was beginning to think that she was the type who didn’t let anything stop her when she wanted something. Not a comforting thought since, in this case, they both wanted the same thing. And only one of them could have the kid.
He was definitely taking Zak. As far as all the other things he wanted where she was concerned went, he was going to forget about those. She was too much trouble. Why did he have to meet her?
Or, a better question was, why did he have to want her?
The admission didn’t please him, but there it was. He wanted Megan Cassidy, undercover CIA spook, bane of his existence, destroyer of his mission. When she’d said she wanted a reward from him…his mind had jumped to all the wrong conclusions. The images that had flooded his brain… He couldn’t go there. Their uneasy alliance was complicated already.
There was only one way to handle the situation. He was going to completely ignore the attraction and deny his misguided needs.
“Want a mango?” she called back.
Fruit, in fact, was not on the top of his list of desires. “Still got one.” He patted his pocket, mindful of the whole apple-and-Eve motif.
His new wound pulled with every step he took. Normally, he would have ignored that, but now he focused on the pain to keep his thoughts from Megan. A light rain began to fall, and the bugs around them quieted, looking for shelters under leaves. Birds pulled their necks in. For a while, the only sound they could hear was the patter of raindrops on all that green. He didn’t like the idea of getting soaked to the skin again. He’d barely been dry since he’d gotten here.
She marched on without complaint. He did the same.
He didn’t ask her what she would do if they didn’t find Zak. And she didn’t ask him. For people like them, failure wasn’t an option. Which meant more trouble down the line, sure confrontation.
She stopped suddenly.
He went for his weapon and scanned their surroundings.
“What is it?” He kept his voice at a whisper.
“Banana spider.” She pointed.
“Poisonous.” He’d seen them before, avoided them like the plague. Their poison was rarely strong enough to bring down a healthy adult, but it could cause considerable damage. And excruciating pain. The most painful spider bite on the planet, according to the experts. “Go around it slowly.”
She did. “There must be banana trees around here somewhere.” Her tone was wistful. She scanned the jungle once she was past the spider. A little potassium would have been nice. Fighting their way through the jungle took a lot out of them.
The six-inch hairy arachnid stood its ground and stared at them. Mitch followed Megan, keeping an eye on the ground around them on the principle that where there was one spider, there might be more. “Nasty thing.”
She glanced back with an amused look. “I thought as a man you’d show more appreciation for it.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Priapism is one of the side effects of its bite.”
He took a double take at the spider. Priapism, huh? How come that hadn’t been in his training field book?
Priapism. He shook his head. Some guys might think something like that would be fun, but it sounded painful to him. He was happy with the way his body ordinarily worked.
He didn’t need any stimulators, not with Megan walking in front of him, her pants wet from the rain and sticking to her body. She had to know it, but didn’t seem self-conscious. She was focused on the job at hand.
He was focused on her shapely behind. He should have never let her walk in front of him.
Since they were near the river now, more light reached the ground and the undergrowth grew thicker. The green obstacle course didn’t faze her any. She sure knew how to use that machete.
They tried to keep the river in sight, but saw no sign of Zak for the next few miles. They ate the last mangoes from their pockets, save one. He offered to take the lead. She handed him the machete and let him. She was self-sufficient and stubborn, but smart enough to know what was best for progress.
They walked another mile before they heard the cry. “Help! Help me!”
Zak. They pushed forward. At least ten minutes passed before they found him on the shore, stuck between two large rocks, half in, half out of the water, floundering like a giant, battered fish.
They rushed to him together, careful of the slippery rocks.
“I thought I was going to die.” Zak shouted in between two moans. “What took you so long? My father is paying you to take better care of me than this.”
Mitch held his rising ire, not the least because the kid was at least partially right. He extracted Zak and supported his weight as they walked to a more even spot where he could sit. He watched for a while as Megan carefully checked the kid over, then he took their water bottles and filled them up, grateful for the filter top that stood between them and the thousands of bacteria and microscopic parasites that lived in these waters.
“So you jumped?” Megan felt the kid’s skull. “Minor gashes,” she informed them when she was done.
“The water overturned the canoe. I could have drowned. You should have been with me,” he accused Mitch. “When my father hears—”
“Shut up and be grateful you’re alive,” Megan snapped at him.
The kid pulled his neck in and blinked at her. “I’m hungry. Do we have any meat?”
She pulled a half a mango from her pocket.
“I don’t think that’s sanitary.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes at Mitch. “Maybe we’ll run into some lemon ants.”
“Are they yellow?” The kid wanted to know.
“They taste like lemons. You collect enough, it’s a nice little shot of protein,” she explained.
“Come on.” Mitch stood. “Anyone coming down the river can see us here.”
“I can’t go anywhere.” The kid dug his heels in. “I’m bruised and exhausted.”
Mitch looked at him for a long second. To think that they were fighting over this little pile of— Seriously? He bent and tossed the kid over his shoulder then walked into the jungle with him.
Megan was saying something in the back, but the river drowned out her words. He could swear he heard tubes and tied both mentioned in the sentence.
Once they were back under thick cover, he set the kid down. He wasn’t going to carry Zak’s lazy behind, not unless the kid was truly incapacitated.
“We’ll take a break.” He rolled a log to check under it for anything dangerous before they sat down.
“Spider!” Zak scrambled away, showing a lot more energy suddenly.
Mitch used a leaf the scoop the little thing up and shoo it out of harm’s way. When he sat, the others followed his example. “You should have seen the banana spider we ran into on the way here.”
“Tastes like bananas?” Zak asked, his face scrunched in a grimace.
“Not like lemon ants. The spiders live in banana trees. You wouldn’t want one of those to bite you.”
“Deadly?”
“Could be. Hurt like hell for sure. And according to Miss Know-it-all here, they cause priapism.”
“Pria-what?”
“An erection that lasts hours,” Megan put in, an amused look on her face. She was no doubt entertained by the fact that particular information had got stuck in Mitch’s head.
The kid perked right up. “Can we go back to look at it?”
Megan struggled to hide a grin.
They took the rest of their five-minute break in silence. Zak looked thoughtful. He was probably calculating how much money he could make if he took a couple of banana spiders back to his frat brothers.
“Time to go.” Mitch stood at last, realizing sudden
ly that they were at a decision point. He needed to take the kid north; Megan wanted to take him south. They were going to have to come to an agreement before they could proceed any farther.
“I need sleep. I haven’t slept in ages,” Zak pleaded.
He did look used up and wrung out. Either they could take an hour to rest here, or he’d slow them down so much they’d lose that hour, or more, anyway.
Mitch looked at Megan. She nodded.
He tossed his backpack to the kid. “Put this under your head.”
“I thought we were supposed to sleep off the ground. What if something bites me?”
“Make a nest from a couple of large leaves. You’ll be fine for a quick nap. I’ll make sure nothing gets near you.”
The kid looked doubtful, but settled down. He was asleep in two minutes.
Megan stood and took a few steps back. She checked her gun. But when she was done, she didn’t put it away. “You should leave now.”
A second passed before he caught on to what she was saying. Looked like the negotiation was about to begin. His hand crept toward his own weapon. “I’m taking the kid north.”
“We’re going south. We’ll be at Juarez’s camp by nightfall.”
He stood slowly. “There’ll be other opportunities to gain the man’s trust.”
“Not before the big meeting.”
“There’ll be other big meetings. Zak only has one life.” He moved closer little by little as he talked.
She stood her ground, but lifted her weapon. “Leave. Get your backpack. Walk away.”
“You would shoot the man who saved your life? Twice?” He tried to add some humor into the situation.
Her upper lip twitched. She said nothing.
“Seriously? You’d kill me.” He stole another step closer and saw hesitation in her eyes.
A second later, her tough-chick face was back. “I wouldn’t have to kill you. I’d just make sure you aren’t in any shape to argue with me.”
“You’d leave me wounded in the jungle?” He gained another foot.