by Anna Lowe
Then the kids tugged again, and long after she slipped away, her fingers wiggled, wishing for his.
Chapter Seven
Tobin watched as a couple of girls came along and hooked Cara into what sounded like a word game of some kind. They’d point to something, say a word, and wait for her to repeat it so they could collapse into giggles, then point again. Their language was nothing like Spanish; it was full of hard sounds and guttural stops, and even Cara seemed to have trouble replicating the sounds. The best part was watching her giggle and laugh along. Watching her cock her head to listen, work her lips around the foreign syllables, and laugh again as the kids rolled in laughter all around her.
Cara. One of those people who was beautiful inside and outside. Any side, really.
Someone stole up to Tobin’s elbow. Rodrigo. Again.
“Your wife, eh? I didn’t see a ring.”
Tobin rubbed a thumb against the finger where the engagement ring used to sit, a long time ago. “We left them at home. Didn’t want something that precious stolen while we’re traveling.”
Rodrigo watched him like a snake. “Have you been married long?”
“Not long,” Tobin whispered. “Not long at all.” When he realized a couple of too-quiet seconds had ticked by and Rodrigo was still watching him, he cleared his throat roughly and turned his stare on Rodrigo, thinking thoughts like Mine. Not leaving her. Ever. He kept it up until Rodrigo dropped his eyes to the dirt and started digging with the tip of his bare toe.
That was more like it.
“You mess with my wife, man…” he growled, letting the threat trail off. It wasn’t an act, either, except maybe for the wife part.
Rodrigo raised his hands quickly. “No one will harm her here, your wife.”
Now, why did his chest go all warm when people called Cara his wife? Maybe because that was supposed to be the way it was. The way they belonged.
Except it hadn’t quite worked out that way.
“Better not,” Tobin shot back, though he’d already figured as much. But the village had some kind of hidden agenda, that was for sure.
He looked Rodrigo up and down. His wiry body and copper skin were just like those of the other villagers, but his perfect English and steel-rimmed glasses said this was a man who’d been out in the outside world.
The chief’s nephew — wasn’t that was Cara said? If anyone knew what was going on behind the scenes with the antenna deal, it would be Rodrigo.
“Rodrigo, have you been to the US?”
Rodrigo answered with a half smile that could have signaled pride or disgust. “Sure. Four years at UC Davis, two at Georgetown.”
Now, why didn’t that surprise him? “So you probably know the Eagles. The band.”
“Sure.”
“Then tell me, what’s with the Hotel California thing you’ve got going on here?”
Rodrigo tried to hide his smile, but it was too big.
“Hotel California,” Tobin pressed on. “‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’ Sound familiar?”
The man wore his best poker face, but that didn’t fool him.
“You don’t want this antenna deal to happen?” Tobin prompted.
Rodrigo’s eyes narrowed, like he was deciding how much to reveal.
“The antenna is coming,” Rodrigo said at last. “The government has decided that.” He scowled. “That is a battle I cannot win. But we can influence who wins the bid. The lesser of two evils.”
Which meant DigiOne, Tobin figured. Cara’s competition. “How much are they paying you to make her miss that meeting?”
Rodrigo stared a little longer then gave a little nod, like he’d decided no harm would come of the truth. “Enough for a new roof,” he said quietly, pointing to an open-sided building. A couple of tiny voices trickled out of it, singing an alphabet song in Spanish for Cara. The makeshift village schoolhouse.
Shit.
Tobin eyed the crooked beams and the thatched roof, then kicked at the dirt. Leave it Cara to stumble across a rebel with a worthy cause. No wonder they were adamant that she stay.
“Tables and chairs, too. Right now, the children sit on the ground.” Rodrigo’s eyes were sparkling with vision now, so much that Tobin could see it, too: neat rows of desks and chairs with a dozen kids singing, laughing, learning. “And a world map on the wall,” Rodrigo went on, “so they can be proud of where they come from but know what’s outside. So they can choose, and choose wisely.”
Tobin couldn’t help but nod. Yeah, maybe he’d take a woman hostage, too, if it meant something like that to his hometown.
“I bet her company will match the deal, Rodrigo. Do better, even.”
The man’s face darkened. “Those men are old goats. They do not respect our ways. Do you know what they offered us? A new road. What do we need a new road for?”
Tobin could have tossed out a dozen good reasons. No more hiking in and out. No more mud. Quicker connections—
“We like it the way it is,” Rodrigo said. “The bad road is like…our moat. It protects us from the outside world. From men who love money more than their souls — loggers, miners, smugglers. The drug runners are bad enough already.” His eyes went dark as he shook his head. “No. Money for the school is much better than a road.”
Probably Cara’s company would be just as happy to fix the school as build a road or give the village anything else it wanted, but it was pretty clear they’d pissed Rodrigo off. His mind was made up. He’d do whatever necessary to make sure DigiOne won rights to the antenna. The village would get its school. Cara would lose her job. Tobin would… Wait, what did he have to win or lose?
The alphabet song hit a high note, and Cara’s sweet voice carried above the rest.
He couldn’t quite put it into words, but yeah, he had something on the line, too, even if he wasn’t quite sure how much to hope. But he’d be damned if he’d give up his chance at…at whatever it was signaling madly in his gut. Not without a fight.
Chapter Eight
The sun set quickly in the tropics, but it still caught Tobin off guard. The beach town he’d spent the last couple of weeks in might be in the same small country, but Tucumba might as well have been a different planet. He was used to the whisper of waves over sand and an explosion of reds, oranges, and pinks on an open horizon. In the jungle, it was like God flipped a dimmer and let everything fade from sight.
Sights faded until all he could see was the lumpy outline of the rain forest canopy overhead. while his ears filled with a hum that grew in reverse proportion to the light. If the jungle was a bustling village by day, it was a partying city at night, with every living being in it contributing to the concert from every story of habitation. There were ear-level whistles, overhead hoots, scratches from underfoot. Tweets and scrapes he couldn’t begin to trace, and the occasional low-toned growl that made even the locals huddle closer to their tiny fires.
Made Cara huddle closer to him, too, which made all kinds of body parts want to join the party, too. God, it had been too long. Too long without her.
A toothless old woman motioned them over to sit in the dirt across from each other, separated by a fallen log, then made them stretch out their forearms. She took out a hollowed-out gourd filled with something and started scratching it into his skin, using a stick like a pencil.
“Ouch!” He tried pulling his arm back, but the woman was surprisingly strong.
Cara just giggled. “It’s jagua. A fruit extract. It keeps the mosquitoes away.”
“Does it work?” He grimaced as the woman etched a complicated pattern of black lines into his skin.
“I guess we’ll see.” The way Cara said it hinted at something else.
He looked up and found her eyes and stayed there a long, long time while the rest of the world — the screeching jungle, the scratching on his skin, the chicken muttering by his foot — all faded away. Far away, until it was just him and his princess and a whole lot of pheromones fi
lling the air. The kind that let his imagination take them right back to their hut.
Just when it seemed Cara was letting her guard down, he sensed her tense back up. He followed her frosty gaze across the clearing to a man who had just stepped into sight.
“Who’s that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Jean-Philippe Lefebvre. Some anthropologist type. Not too keen on outsiders.”
That was pretty clear from the way the man stomped over like a charging bull. Wiry and tall, he seemed even taller once he got close. Tobin fought the urge to jump to his feet and let his height do the talking. Instead, he shot out a casual, “Hola.”
“Who are you?” the man demanded, staring him down through bloodshot eyes. “What do you want here?”
Cara, he nearly said, but swallowed it down. Not the point right now. “Tobin Cooper. Pleased to meet you.”
The man looked at him in disgust. God, what an asshole.
From a distance, the man could pass as a local, but up close, a foreign accent and gray-brown hair gave him away. The scent of dope hung over his wiry frame and his heavily lined face.
“Let me guess,” Tobin continued. “You’re French.”
“Belgian,” the man all but spit back. “And you? American?” He said it like a curse.
“Yup. Nice to meet you, Jean-Claude.”
The man’s glare went to death mode. “Jean-Philippe.”
Whatever.
The man huffed and stomped off, and even the old woman painting Tobin’s arms rolled her eyes.
“What’s his problem?”
“Me. You. Us.” Cara shrugged. “He barely talks to me. Like I don’t exist.”
Moron. What kind of man would ignore a woman like Cara?
“He’s some kind of expert on indigenous languages and cultures,” Cara went on.
An expert on hallucinogens of the jungle would have been Tobin’s guess, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Apparently, he’s written a book.”
Tobin shrugged. “Any idiot can write a book.”
“Lefebvre seems to treat the village like his own private turf. Like any outsider is a threat to his little fiefdom.”
“Seems to me he’s been playing Tarzan a little too long.”
“And mixing a little too much of the local weed with his chicha,” Cara added, shaking her head. “But whatever. Live and let live.”
Tobin watched Lefebvre trot up to Rodrigo. The angry gestures he made in their direction hardly suggested live and let live. More like kick the hell out.
But, of course, Rodrigo didn’t want to let Cara out. And from the looks of it, Rodrigo won, because Lefebvre turned from him and stomped away.
Apparently, even tiny jungle villages had their share of rivalries and intrigues. It might have given him a good laugh if Cara wasn’t stuck in the middle.
The old woman finished painting his arms with a satisfied sound and shooed them over to an open-sided hut. They sat on a log by a tiny spit of a fire, eating dinner while a dozen little kids looked on like this was their favorite television sitcom — the one with the funny gringa who didn’t know how to eat with her hands. He had a leg up on Cara in that department, for sure.
Lefebvre scowled from the shadows, sitting apart from the rest, while Rodrigo and an old man who had to be the local chief ate quietly across the way.
Lefebvre, he wasn’t sure about, but the villagers didn’t mean Cara any harm. For one thing, he believed Rodrigo. For another, the villagers’ smiles were too genuine, their patient nods too indulging. They seemed delighted to share what they had, piling not only Cara’s plate but his too with a big meal — of what, he couldn’t quite tell. Rice and a side of meat that was tough and gamey.
“Tastes like chicken,” he announced to no one in particular.
“Yes, but is it?” Cara whispered.
“Do you really want to know?” He’d seen some kids catch frogs earlier and spotted a snake carcass — a big one — hanging by a shed.
Cara shook her head.
“You been eating like this all week?”
“Yeah,” she sighed and rapped her knuckles against the log. “Knock on wood, I haven’t gotten sick. Yet.” Then she jutted her chin toward the tiny old woman stirring the rice pot. “But they’ve been really nice. Feeding me, showing me how they make baskets, everything. The only thing they don’t let me do is leave.”
“Ah, but tomorrow is another day.”
He didn’t have to look to know she was shooting him a suspicious look. “Tobin, what are you doing here?”
The same question he was asking himself. What was he doing here, other than getting a hard-on just from sitting next to his Italian princess? Was he going to bust her out of this joint or not? A couple more days stuck in the rain forest didn’t suit her, but it sure suited him. Sunday — the day they’d let her go — was four days away, and four days with Cara was more than he ever thought he’d get a chance at. Four days to imprint every part of her on his mind forever. Her scent. Her voice. Her laugh, if he could coax it out of her again. Four days spent filling his tanks with every impression he could stuff in his memory before she marched out of his life once and for all.
Tempting. Very tempting.
Except that wouldn’t be right, and he knew it. Better to stick to the plan. Get Cara out. Maybe get a little bit of closure. Then he could finish out the next month on the beach, head home and…do what?
Cara, as usual, seemed to be reading his mind. “So, what are you doing in Panama, anyway?”
Other than rescuing her and surfing some fairly sweet breaks? But that wasn’t what she was asking, and he knew it.
“My granddad died last winter,” he started, then stopped when Cara put a hand on his and turned those coal-black eyes on him, wide and sincere.
“Oh, Tobin. He was so sweet.”
His heart tightened just a little, like it always did when he thought of the only person who’d ever really believed in him. “Yeah, he was the best.”
And for a minute, the two of them sat there quietly.
“He left us his boat,” Tobin started again.
Cara’s eyes went wider, and he just about drowned looking in them. “Serendipity?” She said it in a reverent whisper.
“Yeah, Serendipity. He left it in his will, saying he wanted us — all of his grandkids — to get out on it for a while. Remember what’s important. Family. Memories. All that.” He finished quickly, waving a hand in the air in case it came across as too sentimental. “So Seth and I sailed down here—”
“You and your brother sailed that little boat all the way from Boston to the Caribbean?” Her jaw went slack.
He added that to his memory bank. How good it felt to impress someone. Well, to impress Cara.
“Yeah. And you know what? Three months on a thirty-two-foot boat together and we managed not to kill each other, or hit a reef, or get lost.” Or shot or arrested, part of his mind added, though they’d come pretty close. “It was actually a good time.” A really good time, he nearly said. Just him and his brother, getting to know each other all over again.
“Wow. Where is Seth now? Where’s the boat?”
He grinned just thinking about it. “Seth’s never been better. He’s still on the boat, with his girlfriend, Julie.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Seth found time for something other than his job?”
Tobin shot her a look that said, There’s the pot calling the kettle black.
She ignored it. “How serious a girlfriend?”
“Well, he looks at her like he’s the Earth and she’s the sun.” He got stuck there, because that’s how it had been with him and Cara. Christ, that’s how it still was, even though she’d shoved him all the way out by Pluto.
Still, on a night like this, with a fire crackling and the crickets chirping, he could just about pretend everything was okay again.
He swallowed a little and went on. “Julie’s great. She’s dragged out the pirate side of him.”
Cara laughed. “Seth has a pirate side?”
If only she knew some of their escapades in Belize. If only he had time to tell her some of the stories she’d missed. Too bad six years made for a hell of a lot of stories, and they only had a couple of days.
He swallowed the last bit of rice and pretended that was what had him gulping so hard.
“You ought to see the guy. Barefoot, no watch, no cell phone. They’re sailing to Bonaire right now. Bringing the boat to Meredith and Mia. It’s their turn next.”
“Everyone gets a turn on the boat?”
“Yep. Every set of siblings. That’s what Gramps wanted; that’s what we’ll do.”
“Cool,” she whispered, staring into the flames.
He stared, too, and between the licks of fire he saw an image of Serendipity, cutting through the waves. With Cara at the wheel and him working the lines, the two of them sailing into a future together.
He squeezed his lips together. Yeah, well, at least his brother got his happy ending.
Chapter Nine
If being stuck in the village for five days had been a trial of patience, being stuck in a honeymoon-sized bungalow with Tobin for five minutes was a trial of virtue. Especially after that cryptic comment he made when Rodrigo asked what sight-seeing he wanted to do the next day.
Sightseeing? She could have screamed.
But Tobin only grinned. “I’m not sure.” He had his arm around her like she really was his wife, and he chose exactly that moment to squeeze her closer and shoot Rodrigo one of those man-to-man winks. “We’ll have to sleep on it tonight.”
We’ll?
And there he was, two steps away from her in the confines of the tiny cabin, looking at her like that. Like he used to on nights when going to bed didn’t mean they were going to sleep.
It was hell. The sizzling, sinful side of hell. Because Tobin seemed to take out every weapon in his arsenal and spit-polish it in full view. The winning smile that put a dimple in his left cheek. The rumbling baritone, the accidental brush-ups that had her body on fire. The man was temptation in jungle camo.
And then he started to strip.
