by Dana Marton
His gaze fell to her lips.
The jungle heated around them. Breathing seemed extra difficult for a moment.
An electric charge ran through her. She wasn’t sure what she should hope for, that he’d kiss her or that he wouldn’t.
His tongue darted out and moistened his lower lip. His Adam’s apple bobbed up, then back down as he swallowed.
Then he stepped away.
* * *
SHE HAD NO IDEA how hot she was. How was that possible? She just about short-circuited his brain every time he looked at her. Seeing her in action... She had to be getting male attention 24/7 at Juarez’s camp. Of course, it was probably unwanted attention, more worrisome than self-esteem boosting. Or downright dangerous, like Paolo had been.
“Thank you,” he told her as he moved forward. “That’s what you do when someone saves your life, by the way. Acknowledge it instead of denying it.”
“If you ever save my life, I’ll be sure to express my gratitude,” she said in snarky tone behind him.
He allowed himself a small grin. He didn’t normally work with a partner. She was annoying at times, definitely tested his patience on occasion, but she was also entertaining. And hot. Something about her made hormones flood his brain. Great. He was in the middle of a mission. He’d lost his charge. And now his thoughts made him feel like a teenager.
He’d better fix that, and quickly, before he kissed her or did something equally stupid. The snake hadn’t bothered him, but when she’d stepped that close—to be that near to those lips...
They marched on in silence for a while, pushing as hard as they could. He walked in front. Walking behind her would have provided too much distraction. He needed to keep his mind clear and keep up the pace. Catching up with the men before they reached the compound was crucial.
They didn’t even stop when they came upon a mango tree. They filled their pockets as they walked. Their forced march expended a lot of energy. Replacing that was vital to remain in top fighting shape. They ate as they hiked, but also saved some for later.
She never complained once. Not about the unforgiving pace he set, not about the lack of food or lack of breaks. About an hour later, they heard the rapids, but couldn’t see much. The area around them was too overgrown with bamboo to walk, so they had to turn deeper into the jungle. Long minutes ticked by before they could begin angling back toward the river.
They reached the water just as Sanchez and the others were getting ready to give the final push to their canoe on the other side. Zak was already sitting in the front, looking haggard.
“Hey,” Sanchez called over the water, straightening when he spotted them, his right hand lingering by his gun. “Where is Paolo?”
Had they heard the shot, was the question.
Mitch stayed quiet, letting Megan take the lead and make explanations. They trusted her more than him. She had quite a way with words when she was trying to annoy him. Let her use all that verbal creativity on Sanchez and talk her way out of trouble.
But instead of telling her little tale, she opened fire without warning.
She never did what he expected her to do. Absolutely never. The woman was bewildering.
Sanchez went down first, then the man behind him. Mitch, recovered at last, took care of the third.
“They would have never believed us. Zak wasn’t in the way. I knew I could do it without him getting hurt—” Megan began to explain, but fell silent when the kid began screaming, drawing their attention.
“Help!” He scrambled to keep his balance as the water got hold of the canoe and pulled it from shore. The boat wobbled, got stuck for a moment then jerked farther away as the current took hold.
He stared back at them with horror on his face as the swift waters carried him downriver.
Without a paddle.
This must be some gigantic, cosmic joke, Mitch thought as he stared after his charge.
Except it wasn’t at all funny.
Chapter Five
“Jump,” Megan shouted to Zak, as she took off running. She kept one eye on him and one on where she stepped. “Jump and swim.”
But the kid looked too scared to do anything.
Mitch passed her. He wasn’t as much running as leaping from safe spot to safe spot. The riverbank was littered with rocks and logs and all sorts of rubble the water had deposited. Nature’s hazard course.
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 100 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, 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 carrying 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. She 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’ve 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’d 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 and he’d even caught up with those troublesome witnesses. It hadn’t been the smoothest op he’d ever handled, but he’d been 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.”
“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 it, 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 and 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 stimul
ators, 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 she didn’t seem self-conscious. She was focused on the job at hand.
He was focused on her shapely behind. He should never have 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.”