“Come on,” he yelled, brushing the thing off his shirt. “Those things can bite.”
“Eggzackerly.” She dug her repellant out of the pack, put a quarter-size dollop in her palm and rubbed her hands together. “Don’t use so much. A little goes a long way.” And we don’t know how long we’ll be out here.
“Do I need to rub down my pack?” he asked. “You know, to keep the bugs off.”
“Packs are treated with this,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm, and smeared the oily substance over her skin, hair, and clothes. “Things may fall on it but they’ll jump right off. Now, get your stuff back in the pack. Need to move from this location. We’ve already spent too much time here.”
Walsh said nothing as he returned all the items, after carefully checking them, inside his pack.
“We’ll stay on the edge of the jungle off the beach. No tracks.”
Walsh slipped his arms through the straps and bounced, adjusting the pack. She did the same and they headed off. She headed north. He headed south.
Gemma halted. “Wrong way, Doc.”
He turned and gave her a quizzical look. “That’s south,” he said, jerking his head in the direction he’d been going.
“I know,” Gemma said. “We’re going north.”
“Nooo.” He shook his head. “North is the direction the guys with the guns are. We are going south.”
“Nooo.” She mimicked his tone. “You may be going south but I’m going north. The river leading to several villages and help is a day, maybe two north of here. South is nothing for five days.” She took a couple of steps and Walsh grabbed her pack, damn near yanking her off her feet.
“We are going south,” he said. She rounded on him, ready to chew him up and spit him out but stopped. Losing her temper was not the way to go.
He yanked the pack’s shoulder strap. “What makes you think you’re the one in charge here?”
Bubba pushed too far. Gemma slammed her forearm against his, breaking his grip on her pack, then jammed the heel of her hand into the middle of his chest hard enough to stagger him. Showing him who was boss was apparently the only way to go. She closed the space between them and gave his chest a hard poke. “You’re the client. I’m the company pilot, at your beck and call until . . . those bullets hit the plane. Here, now,” she said and glanced around at their surroundings, “it’s different and you need to be real clear on this. I am in charge here. You doctor.” She poked him again. “Remember? You go medical school, you trained to make life-and-death decisions in a hospital.” She smacked the bandage on her arm. “You fix boo-boos.” She put her hand to her chest. “Me pilot.” She held her arms out like the wings of a plane. “Me go survival school. Me trained to make life-and-death decisions in places like this. Me”—she poked her chest—“know how to save your”—she poked again—“ass.”
The doc said nothing and she took advantage of his silence.
“I’m a real goal-oriented type of person who . . .” His lips were twitching. “My number-one goal here is to stay alive.” She stepped closer and he stepped back. “Why? I like breathing. My second goal is to keep you breathing.” She advanced a step and he took one back. “If I don’t meet my first goal, which I’m very interested in, I automatically won’t be meeting my second goal and presumably a goal you are interested in.” Walsh started to say something but she held up a hand. “No comments now. I’ll be taking questions later.” She took in a breath to rein in her escalating temper. “In my goal-oriented life I’ve learned the reason many goals aren’t reached is because there’s a failure to make secondary goals. My secondary goal is to get us to safety by going north, therefore accomplishing my primary goal.” She paused. “Now here’s where we come up against a problem. If you want to go south that won’t make me happy, but I can’t stop you. Before you take off you will write a note saying you knew the risks of heading south by yourself. Sort of like what you doctors do when a patient signs themselves out of the hospital against medical advice, AMA. Only here it’s APA. Against pilot advice.” She sucked in a breath and blew it out. “You, sir, under no circumstances will deter me from meeting my primary goal. Do. You. Understand?”
“I have permission to speak now?” Walsh said.
“Go for it.” She flipped a hand in a circle.
His lips twitched again. “You look pretty silly doing that pilot-survival-woman thing.”
She gave him a slow up-and-down look. Maybe the thing was a little over the top. Ah, hell. There was no maybe, it was over the top. “Come. Stay. Go south. I can’t force you to stay with me. I’m not risking my life going south.” She headed off. It was a good thirty seconds before she heard him behind her. She didn’t bother to suppress her smile. It worked. The good doctor didn’t like being told what to do but he could be manipulated.
“Okay. Okay. North,” he grumbled, catching up and passing her. She’d give him the lead. It would make him happy, keep his testosterone balance under control, and his crashing through the undergrowth would chase the creepy crawly things out of her way.
In fifteen minutes their faces were red and they were panting and gasping like they’d just had sex. Walsh’s hair, which she noted was longer than hers, was plastered to his skull. Their clothes were as wet and clinging as when they’d stumbled from the Pacific. Every ten steps she paused, listening for the boat around Walsh’s crashing and the increasingly annoying zzzeeeing from angry clouds of insects trying to penetrate the nuclear-strength bug protection.
“Stop,” she demanded.
“Stop?” He whirled on her, his arms held out. “A few minutes back you were hell-bent on go. Now it’s stop. Which is it, survival woman?”
“Listen.” Gemma held up a hand and cocked her head. It was faint but there. A hum. An engine’s hum.
“To what?”
She went closer to the beach. Holy shit. She bolted back, shrugging out of her pack as she ran. “It’s the boat.” She hadn’t factored in wind direction while listening. It was almost on top of them.
“Damn it, I told you we shouldn’t go north.”
“Get that shirt off,” Gemma ordered.
“Why?”
For crap’s sake. “It’s white. An unnatural color in the jungle.” She dropped her pack. “Difficult to hide. Off. Now.” Fuck. Why hadn’t she thought of this?
“Your shirt is white and you aren’t . . .” Before he could finish she was tugging hers over her head. His pack hit the ground and he peeled the offending garment away. They stood staring at each other. Her at his broad shoulders, a lightly furred chest bisected with an ugly angular five-inch scar on his right side. His eyes flicked from the tat on her shoulder to the gun holstered between her breasts. Engine sounds broke through the palms, clear and loud.
“Run.” Gemma grabbed her pack and took off through the dense tangle of vines, shrubs and small trees. Hopping over roots, slipping on rotting leaves, pushing branches and vines away, hoping like hell none were snakes, until it was impossible to advance. She did a feet-first, load-the-bases slide under a plant with huge leaves that looked like something from a science project gone bad. Walsh dropped in the small space, rolling half on her. The thrumming engine sound became louder than the surf and was accompanied by an occasional voice until they saw the boat cruising just outside the surf line. Gemma positioned the packs between them and the water for further camouflage.
“Can you make out what they’re saying? Your Spanish is better than mine,” she whispered. He raised his head and she shoved it down. “Stay low.”
Ben turned his head, working on catching the voices. “Nothing. They’re too far away. Why are we whispering?”
“Electronic equipment. That boat is loaded with it. No telling what it’s for.”
The boat vanished from view and engine sounds were quickly overtaken by jungle sounds.
“How long do you think before they come back?”
She squirmed and wiggled until she could turn enough to see his face. Dirt and
other things stuck to the film of sweat coating his face and chest. “No telling.” She twisted her arm from under his body and swiped the back of her hand over her face, coming away with the same kind of debris. “We went into the water,” she said and checked her watch, “an hour ago. We aren’t that far from where we went in. Say it takes them ten minutes to reach the plane.”
“The water there is clear,” Walsh said, worry creeping into his voice. “They put somebody in the water it’ll be easy to see we aren’t in the plane.”
“There aren’t any clear assumptions. The doors are open. We could have been killed and our bodies floated away. Maybe we attempted to get to the beach and drowned. We could have made it to the beach. In that clear water they should be able to read the logo and know we were a medical mission. Know we weren’t looking for them.” And know anybody aboard would bring a fat ransom. He didn’t need to know that. At least not yet.
“What now?”
Gemma opened a side compartment on her pack and removed a tightly balled piece of khaki-colored knit material. “We get some clothes on before one of those mosquitoes with bad vision finds us and thinks we’re a duck.” She pushed up and sat facing him. Might as well give him a good view of the tat and gun and get any discussion out of the way now. Walsh didn’t hesitate to stare at the three-inch lighthouse on her left shoulder.
“Guardian.” He repeated the word written in the beam of the lighthouse.
“A nickname.” True. The Coast Guard were guardians of the coast.
His eyebrows moved up his forehead. “You’ve done this before.” It was a statement.
“Yeah.” She shook the material until it became a shirt.
“That gun going to work after it’s been wet?”
“Yes.” She was surprised there wasn’t the standard “What’s a woman like you doing with a tat like that?” question. She squirmed and battled with the science project leaves until she faced away. “Brush off my back and make sure there aren’t any crawly things.”
Walsh sat, had his own foliage mini-battle, then began to brush her back.
“You have a thing about bugs on you.”
“No. I have a thing about bugs biting me. Check my hair.” She let her head loll back and she caught colorful birds flitting silently through the branches high in the canopy.
“You’re clear.”
She didn’t care for the humor in Walsh’s voice and quickly pulled the shirt over her head. If he’d been bitten enough times to be hospitalized he’d be careful also. Geeze, what if he . . . ? She whipped around. “Let me check you.” Frantically she ran her hands up and down, side to side over his chest and raked her fingers through his dark hair.
“Hey, take it easy,” he protested while attempting to shove her hands away. She grabbed his shoulders and twisted until she could see his back and began vigorously rubbing away debris.
“Ahh! That feels good. A little lower.”
“Shut up.” She dug his shirt out and tossed it to him. “Get it on and get back down,” she said, tucking her body against the jungle floor.
“Do we really have to stay down?” he said, tugging the shirt over his head. “I just got my back massaged and cleaned and . . .”
Gemma shushed him. “You hear that?”
He turned his head side to side. “All I hear is the surf and palms. What did you think it . . . ?” He paused. His dark eyes turned to her. “Gunfire?”
Gemma bobbed her head. “They’re probably strafing the jungle.” At least she knew they weren’t looking to take hostages.
Walsh settled next to her. No, not next to her—half on her. Again. His body rested heavy on hers and she felt the in and out of his breaths. A muscular thigh rested on her legs. The two thin layers of cloth between them did nothing to reduce the feel of what he was packing.
“Damn. I’ve been coming down here seven years and this is the first time I’ve been shot at.”
Was he blaming that on her? She squirmed until she was on her back, looking up. She opened her mouth to set him straight and swallowed her words. Walsh’s expression was humorless. No smile ready to escape twitching lips. His dark eyes staring at the water. His body tense against hers.
“Relax, Doc. You’re nobody till somebody shoots at you.”
He looked down, squinting. She guessed he was trying to determine how serious she was. Finally, a corner of his mouth curved up. He rested his arm on the ground beside her and moved his body around, creating a not unpleasant friction. For a moment she thought he was going in for a kiss. “You don’t need to get that relaxed.”
“What now, pilot survival woman?” he said in a loud whisper.
“We stay put. They’ll run south a ways, see if they can find us. After they head north again we should be okay.”
“If they don’t find us will they come ashore looking?”
“Naw!”
“Why not?” He picked a leaf off her shoulder and held it up so she could see it wasn’t alive.
“Too much trouble for them to come ashore, and besides—” She paused, making sure she had his full attention. “They know we’ll never survive the jungle,” she said, unable to keep the smile from her voice.
“Little do they know,” he said in a deep voice that sounded like a promo for an action flick, “survivor woman is here.”
“I’m here to serve.” She raised her hand and he flinched as if he thought she was going to smack him for the way he was pressed against her. “Relax. You’ve managed to get more crap in your hair.” She ruffled his hair, sending bits of flora and fauna raining down into her eyes and mouth that she sputtered to clear.
“Close your eyes,” Ben said.
She did and he gently wiped guck from her eyelids. The pad of his thumb glided damn sensually back and forth over her lips once, then twice. His breath brushed her cheek, blowing dirt away. Or, was that . . . what he was doing? She opened her lids slightly and saw his lips parted, nostrils flared. Was he . . . ? Her eyes flew open. “Are you smelling me?” She made no attempt to hide her annoyance, then planted a hand on his shoulder, stiff-arming him back.
“Yeah.” He licked his lips, looking surprised and embarrassed.
“Really?” she said incredulously.
“You smell good.”
Was he freaking out on her or . . . ? “How many of those pain meds did you take?” She checked his eyes to see if his pupils were dilated but his irises were so dark she couldn’t tell.
Before he could answer, thrumming engine sounds broke through the jungle “Scoot back as far as you can.”
“Can’t go back any more.”
She lifted her head. His feet were wedged against the trunk of a tree twisted with roots and vines, looking for all the world like it had been created for a Disney theme park.
Gemma rolled to her belly. The moment she settled, his body compressed against hers. She flattened against the moist smelly jungle floor and peered through the space between the backpacks.
The boat cruised slowly outside the cresting waves. “Be still and quiet.”
“You’re . . .”
Gemma elbowed him hard and gave him her cross-me-and-you-die look over her shoulder. Thankfully, Walsh went quiet and still. She rested her forehead on her arm, thinking about the freaky smell thing until Walsh’s breathing was the only un-jungle sound. She shouldered him off and he rolled to his side. “I understand you aren’t used to being told what to do.” He gave her the innocent little-boy look men use when they’re about to catch hell. “From here on out, when I tell you to do something do not ask why or argue. Do it!” she said, rolling into a sitting position.
She stood and brushed off.
“But . . .”
Her boot connected with his thigh. “No buts. I’m not doing it to make your life miserable. I’m keeping you alive.”
“I know. Your number-two goal,” he grumbled, batting the leaves surrounding his head as he sat up.
“Damn skippy,” she snapped.
Walsh stood.
“Come here and let me check you for anything moving.” She circled him brushing, examining him carefully for anything moving.
“Now me.” She turned her back and shot him a look over her shoulder. “And don’t be smelling me anymore.”
Chapter 2
Gemma cautiously made her way to the edge of the beach. She went down on her haunches, not moving for several minutes until she was sure the coast was clear, literally, in each direction and the boat was little more than a dot on the water. The dark clouds building over the ocean stretched as far as she could see and were the reason the boat spent so little time searching. There was no chance of escaping the storm but they could shelter in that protected inlet. She estimated they had an hour, at most, before they’d need to stop to shelter from the coming monsoon.
Walsh was standing, shrugging into his pack. “Sorry about that. I’ll do better next time.”
She nodded, wondering if he was sorry about the talking or smelling or both. She silently retrieved her pack, heading north. No need to check if Walsh was following. He made more racket than a squad of professional noisemakers.
“Hey. How long are we going to walk? What about water? I’m thirsty. Not a good thing. Thirsty means I’m already dehydrated.”
She glanced at the dark clouds. “Storm coming,” she said and picked up her pace. The front was traveling faster than she estimated and that meant stopping sooner.
“I said . . .” he yelled.
“I heard you. Twenty minutes.” She waved an arm. “Keep moving.”
Some curses reached her but the snapping of branches and dry fronds underfoot didn’t slow down. She tracked a few paces deeper into the jungle looking for a safe place to set up the tarps and hammocks and finding one too good to pass up.
Walsh caught up, breathing heavy, but said nothing. He stood hands on hips, head back, grimacing and sucking in deep breaths. Normalizing adrenaline levels mixed with sauna-like conditions were playing hell with both of them.
“We’ll spend the night here. When you get your breath back, pick up coconuts. We’ll have to drink the water from them until we can collect rainwater.”
Under Fire: The Admiral Page 2