by Becky Wicks
HE DID KNOW. Ryan knew exactly how it felt to live under a blanket of insecurity and self-doubt. It was the exact opposite of the image he portrayed to the world.
He squeezed Madeline’s hand, brought it onto his lap and looked down at their tangled fingers. The truth about Josephine seemed too big and too daunting to think about most days—even to himself. And he’d grown used to the ghosts that lived inside him...grown accustomed to the haunting taunts that had left him cold, even with a camera on his smiling face and four hundred thousand Twitter fans calling him ‘hot’.
Madeline knew the bare bones of what was bothering him. He wanted to tell her everything—of course he did—because for the first time in a long time he realised he actually needed to talk about it.
He glanced at her profile, at the firelight bouncing in her eyes as she hummed along to Evan’s music. He wanted to do so much more than talk with Madeline. She’d told him what had spawned her deepest insecurities. Couldn’t he provide her with the same intimacy?
A frown creased his brow. Letting go of the past meant letting her in, and that was still a risk. Where would it end? Where would she stop with the information he offered her? How much would she put in a book to feed the vultures? She wasn’t here to feed his ego, or his desires. She was here to write the book he’d been dreading and they both knew she couldn’t give it less than her best.
‘Mind if I play?’
Madeline’s voice broke into his warring thoughts. She was talking to Evan. Everyone’s eyes were on her so she dropped his hand back into the shadows. They’d probably seen anyway, he realised. After today, though, and the fears she’d faced in surgery, he had no doubt the producer would want to interview her about her back story, and him on why he’d been so insistent that she help him. Anything to make good TV.
At least he could pass their hand-holding off as affection between colleagues who’d saved a life.
With a slight look of surprise, Evan handed the guitar over to Madeline. He folded his arms across his chest as she pulled the instrument onto her lap.
‘I only know a few songs,’ she said a little shyly as she cast him a sideways glance.
Her fingers were already moving over the frets, though, creating a melody. Ryan noticed Mark and Evan grinning at each other like schoolboys, clearly impressed. Madeline had agreed to try improvising some songs for the kids, but she’d never admitted to being able to play like this. There was so much he still didn’t know about this woman.
‘Where did you learn to play?’ he said into her ear.
‘Colombia. I learned a lot there,’ she replied.
Then she launched into a song he recognised immediately: Moon River.
Chills ran through his veins in spite of the humidity and the fire. He saw Maria’s mouth fall open. Madeline could really sing. Her voice was like hot honey trickling over him, and he couldn’t keep his eyes from her face. Her skin was glowing; her whole presence was pure light.
Ryan swore in that moment that he’d never seen or heard anything quite as exquisite as Madeline Savoia in his whole life.
When she wrapped up the final verse and chorus the circle broke out into rapturous applause—and his clapping, he realised, was the loudest. Evan shot him a knowing look, which he chose to ignore. For this one night, he decided, he was letting go. He was not going to give a damn what anyone thought.
‘Can I keep this for tomorrow?’ Madeline asked Evan, holding the guitar close against her. ‘Ryan said the kids love to sing—we could probably do something fun around the dental hygiene stuff.’
‘By all means, please do,’ Evan said, holding his hands up. ‘It sounds much better in your company than mine.’
Ryan smiled. ‘I’m sure there’s a tune in her about toothpaste.’
He heard Evan emit a snort—probably at the stupid words that had just slipped from his mouth. He stood up, rooted around in his pockets and pulled out his flashlight. Holding it up, he motioned for Madeline to hand him the guitar.
‘I’ll walk you back to the dining hall with that. No room in your tent, I’m guessing.’
She stood up herself and gave him the guitar. ‘I was thinking of calling it a night anyway. It’s been a long day, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said, feeling his pulse quicken suddenly.
He had no clue where this was leading, but he knew he had to get them both away from the fire and all the prying eyes and ears.
They wished the group goodnight, and walked away into the shadows.
‘You have quite a voice, you know,’ he told her, shining his light into the dining room, opening the squeaky mesh door and resting the guitar on one of the benches before stepping out again and walking with Madeline towards the tents. ‘I might have followed you around that university campus if you’d been there,’ he said, ‘instead of my acapella girl. She didn’t even like me back.’
Madeline laughed, pushing her hands into her pockets as they walked across the grass and stopped outside her tent. ‘How do you know I like you?’
The air was hot, even away from the fire, and Ryan couldn’t help thinking that this would be the perfect night to be out on the river again. The fireflies were holding a glow-stick party in the trees around them and all he could think about was kissing her.
He turned off his flashlight, plunging them both into darkness.
‘I know you like me,’ he said in reply. ‘You didn’t exactly bat me off this morning.’
They were hovering outside her tent now. Her hands were still in her pockets. He stepped closer, reached for her arm and let his fingers slide slowly down from her elbow to the edge of one pocket till she was forced to set her hand free. He took it again in his, clasped his fingers around it, stepped even closer.
‘This morning at the lake,’ he said softly. ‘I knew you were there the whole time.’
He could hear the smile in her voice when she responded. ‘I thought about swimming past you and getting out, but I didn’t.’
She was so close to him now. The crickets seemed to be serenading them. He reached for her other hand and she released it willingly, clasping it even tighter around his fingers. The tips of their shoes were touching.
Ryan leaned in closer. Their faces were an inch apart. He could feel her breath on his nose. Every bone in his body was weakening by the millisecond...except maybe one. He brushed her lips with just his shadow, but in a heartbeat Madeline was stepping backwards, swatting at something in the darkness and cursing.
‘Are you OK? What happened?’ He reached for her immediately in the darkness.
‘Stupid mosquitoes. Just got me hard on the ankle.’
‘Did you spray?’
‘I forgot.’
Her hand was still in his as she scratched at her ankle with the other one, but the moment was gone—he knew it. He could feel it slipping further away into the trees.
He sighed to himself and shook his head. ‘It’s always the brightest lights that attract the most mosquitos,’ he said, remembering a quote he’d read somewhere once.
‘I’m not shining a light.’ Madeline straightened up. ‘And neither are you.’
He smiled. ‘It’s a metaphor. Your ex was a mosquito, drawn to your light. I was thinking about this earlier. Good thing you squished him.’
She stood still in the blackness. ‘Very poetic. I should write that down. But he squished me, so to speak.’
‘It’s still a good thing that all the squishing went on... I think.’
‘So do I. If I was still with Jason I wouldn’t be here now.’ Madeline paused. ‘Ryan, what’s happening here?’ Her question was cautious, but loaded.
‘I have no clue,’ he replied honestly, brushing his thumb against the side of her hand slowly.
He felt her shiver...practically felt her weaken alongside him as the moment they’d lost suddenly reappeared like
a huge gaping window.
‘I’m here to do a job,’ she said softly, almost with regret. ‘And I thought we agreed this morning was a mistake.’
He leaned forward so their foreheads were touching, feeling a zip through his insides at their closeness, at what they were surely about to do.
‘Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. You’re doing your job, Maddy, and more. So am I.’
‘Not properly. I can’t do it properly until you give me answers. Just now you told me you know how I’ve been feeling. What did you mean, exactly?’
He let out an anguished groan against her forehead. ‘Why do you do this to me?’
‘You know why. Ryan, I really don’t think we should confuse this...’
‘Screw thinking,’ he growled.
Before she could say anything else he reached for the back of her head and pressed his lips to hers.
Madeline was almost flat against him in an instant, flowing into his arms like water as he bunched up her hair. She reached for his face, kissing him back just as hard. He felt his heart contracting and expanding in his chest as she flattened her hands against him, then clutched the material of his Boston Red Sox T-shirt as though she couldn’t touch enough of him in one go. She tasted of beer and excitement, and somewhere at the back of his perpetually foggy mind he felt a cloud lifting.
Their tongues started a slow dance, then a faster tango as they kissed and kissed and kissed, and he found he was losing himself, losing his own tangled mind, for the first time in a really long time.
‘We should move inside,’ he whispered eventually against her lips, heart hammering, his flesh itching to touch more of hers.
Madeline’s breaths were hot and heavy as her left hand reached for the button at the top of his jeans.
He motioned to the tent. ‘Inside,’ he said again, more urgently.
She turned around to unzip the tent, but a rustle behind them in the trees made them freeze. A flashlight appeared, pointing straight at them.
He stepped away from Madeline. ‘Who’s there?’
‘Ryan? It’s Mark. There’s an emergency—we need you at the station.’
‘Dammit,’ he muttered, meeting Madeline’s wide eyes in the flashlight as she stood up straighter. There was disappointment etched all over her face—and his, too, he was sure. Thank God Mark was standing too far away to see them clearly. ‘Be right there!’ he called, trying his best to sound as though he hadn’t just spent the last five or ten minutes glued to Madeline’s face.
Mark hurried off and Ryan closed the gap between them, snaking an arm around Madeline in the darkness. He kissed her again—hard and meaningfully.
‘Duty calls,’ he said with another groan. ‘Get some sleep.’
‘Will you wake me up later?’ she asked suggestively.
She was sliding a hand down his chest to his jeans again. He thanked the jungle for the darkness as something started standing to attention.
Pulling her hand away, he brought her fingers to his mouth and kissed them. ‘Like you’ve woken me up?’ he said gruffly. ‘Madeline Savoia, you are officially killing me.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WITH HER HANDS against Ryan’s firm torso, even with his T-shirt between her and his bare flesh, Madeline had felt rocket ships launch inside her.
She rolled over in her sleeping bag, listening to the bugs outside and the growing wind ruffling the trees. They were here to do a job, she reminded herself once again. She also had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t about to start leaning on any other man to help fill a void in her life. Even if that man was Ryan Tobias.
She wished she knew what time it was. Sleep had been eluding her for hours, and Ryan still hadn’t come back. It crossed her mind that maybe he’d realised the error of his ways and retreated to his own tent after solving whatever emergency problem had come up, but her ego told her otherwise. He wanted her, no matter what. Right? He’d been the one who’d initiated everything. He’d approached her in the lake...held her hand by the fire. He’d kissed her.
She put a hand to her lips, swollen and plump from those kisses. Her chin was still tingling in the wake of his stubble.
She pulled the sleeping bag over her head. So much for her being a professional. She needed him next to her now. She needed to feel his skin on hers. She wanted him to make love to her so badly she didn’t think she’d be able to function otherwise. But where the hell was he?
When dawn arrived and she still hadn’t slept a wink, she grabbed her toothbrush and water, pulled the zipper up on her tent and crawled outside, yawning. The camp was eerily quiet. Usually there were one or two people milling about, cleaning their teeth outside their tents, doing star jumps to wake themselves up.
She wandered towards the medical stations. The sky wasn’t as yellow as it usually was at this time of day. It was a deep, ominous grey, looming large against the treetops like the roof of another dark tent. Rain was on the way again, she thought as she spotted a howler monkey leap from one branch overhead to another.
She saw Maria, walking from one station to another. Madeline followed her, pushing back the plastic sheet over the door. ‘Morning,’ she said.
Maria spun around in surprise, her hands full of the gauzes she was relocating from a box to a table. ‘Oh, Madeline, hi—you’re up early.’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Where is...?’ She paused, realising she probably shouldn’t ask specifically about Ryan. ‘Where is everyone?’
‘It was kind of a crazy night,’ Maria said, and for the first time Madeline noticed the dark circles under her eyes. ‘Guy got attacked by a black caiman up the river; the crew left about an hour ago to see to him.’
‘Attacked?’ Madeline realised she was still holding her toothbrush. She slid it into the pocket of her denim shorts.
‘Five metres long, it was—apparently. Guy got too close to her eggs, we’re guessing.’
‘Is he OK?’
‘If you count being alive as “OK” he’s OK. They flew him to the hospital and now they’re back at the village. The crew wanted to do some filming there, I think. They’ll probably be gone awhile.’
Madeline couldn’t help the disappointment settling in her stomach like a lead balloon. She felt for whoever had been chomped on by a caiman, of course, but she also felt selfishly resentful of being kept from Ryan even longer.
‘Oh, the producer wants to talk to you,’ Maria said, making Madeline’s heart falter for a second.
‘Really? What about?’
She started to pray internally. Had Mark said something about how close she and Ryan had been standing outside her tent when he’d sprung up on them? Were they all writing stories of their own already? Was the producer going to tell her to back off—to be professional or not be there at all?
‘I think she wants an interview about the girl you helped yesterday, if that’s OK?’
Madeline tried not to sigh out loud in relief. She was way too paranoid. ‘I’m sure that will be fine,’ she said.
She left Maria sorting her gauzes and made her way back towards her tent. But the heat was already making the air intolerably stuffy and she knew that in a canvas bubble she’d simply sweat and feel uncomfortable.
At the last minute Madeline turned, passed the ashes from the fire and followed the path towards the river. She sometimes liked to wander down and chat in Spanish to the local guys who hung out there, waiting to row people up and down from village to village. Besides, she needed to wake up before the kids started gathering around her for the day. She was so tired. Now that she thought about it, she was actually still in a dream.
‘Madeline Savoia, you are officially killing me.’
The longing in his voice as he’d said those words had made a pinball machine of her body, sending hot white sparks zig-zagging downwards from her ears, to her nipples, to her toes.
<
br /> She’d never been kissed like that before. It had been like something from a movie, she mused, the way he’d reached for her and yanked her forward, pressed his mouth to hers as if she was some kind of lifeline. Maybe she was.
So romantic.
She was halfway to the river when a voice in the trees, slightly in the distance, caught her attention. Stopping in her tracks and yawning sleepily again, she listened closer and heard it yet again. It was a man’s voice and it sounded vaguely familiar. One of the crew?
They were probably filming just outside the village. Or maybe there was another emergency. She frowned to herself, feeling stupid. She should be helping them. After what had happened yesterday Madeline was starting to feel she should probably be doing a lot more around camp than simply writing and teaching the kids about cleaning their teeth—much as she loved them.
Maybe she should be assisting in every medical procedure she could, to build her confidence up. Maybe she should even go back to nursing when she returned to London...
Another voice, closer now, yanked her out of her thoughts. She turned towards it, started walking the other pathway towards the noise. As she did so a crash of thunder overhead made her jump. She noticed with dismay that the sky was even darker. She could hear the voices, still ahead of her, and she sped up, clutching her water bottle.
Raindrops started thudding onto the leaves and foliage above her, a few of them slipping through onto her skin. Rain always sounded so much louder in the jungle.
The path was thinning a little. Some way ahead she heard what sounded like the whole team having a heated conversation about something. The rain was too loud for her to make any of the words out, but Madeline was sure there must have been another emergency. She hoped she’d be able to help.
She pushed through a wall of vines and came to a small clearing with what looked like several paths of flattened grass leading away from it in different directions. At the sound of a male voice she carried onwards, and when she turned a small corner she saw them, gathered in a circle, looking down at something on the leaf-strewn ground.
Madeline was just about to call out when she froze in her tracks.
