A Soldier's Quest

by Lori Handeland

  Except the guards walked away. Not too far, but far enough that Bobby reconsidered disabling them. With a reasonable distraction, he could sneak into the hut and make off with the doctor. They might not know she was gone until morning, and by then it would be too late.

  He tried to think of a diversion that wouldn’t wake the entire village. Maybe a dog fight. If he could just find a nice piece of kibble, he’d throw it into the fray and—

  A sudden stillness drew his attention. The men with the guns had disappeared. The doctor’s hut stood quiet, dark, unguarded. This was too easy.

  Did they know he was here? Were they setting a trap?

  No way. If Bobby could do one thing extremely well, it was become invisible. Hell, he’d perfected that skill before he’d joined the army.

  Growing up in a houseful of kids—five boys, one girl—with a mother who took nothing from no one and had eyes in the back of her head, Bobby had learned early on to sneak under the incredible radar of Eleanor Luchetti. A drug dealer with a submachine gun would run screaming if he spent more than two hours in the woman’s company.

  Bobby discovered he was smiling at the memory of his mommy and forced himself to stop. He was on a mission and he’d better get to it.

  Needing to move quickly and silently, he concealed most of his equipment in the jungle. Taking only his sidearm, rifle and a knife in his boot, Bobby stuffed extra ammo in his voluminous and plentiful pant’s pockets before creeping from his hiding place. He’d either make a clean getaway with the doctor, or return to his original plan, take out the guards, then get away with the doctor. With luck, he’d be home for dinner tomorrow.

  He ran toward the hut, keeping low. The sand shifted beneath his boots with no more than a whisper. He reached the back of the shack and scanned the village.

  Not an outcry was raised, not a shadow slunk anywhere that he could see. A dog barked, but with no more enthusiasm than before.

  Success.

  He peered into the hut through the hole in the wall that served as a window. “Psst,” he whispered.

  “Doctor?”

  The lump in the bed didn’t move. Did he have the right place?

  A more thorough examination of the interior revealed medical equipment and textbooks all jumbled together with girlie stuff on the table—although the girlie stuff in this case was sunscreen and a sturdy wide-brimmed hat with a red bandanna tied around the crown.

  His sister, Kim, had always intermingled her lotions and potions with her schoolbooks, her hair ribbons with her pens and pencils. He didn’t understand women. What a surprise.

  Bobby slid past the curtain that doubled as a door. He opened his mouth to hail the doctor again, but the word stuck in his throat. The lump in the bed was gone.

  “Shit,” he muttered an instant before a knife pricked him in the side.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  A tiny jab to the rock-solid back of the man who’d snuck into her quarters punctuated Jane’s question.

  “Dr. Harker?”

  She frowned. American accent—upper Midwest from the sound of him. Big, bad, sneaky. Definitely military, but what was he doing in Quintana Roo?

  “Who wants to know?”

  “If you don’t stop poking me with that thing, I’ll be forced to take it away from you.”

  Jane snorted. She’d been down here long enough to learn a few things about knives and self-defense.

  The next instant he was holding the knife and she was holding her stinging wrist. Maybe she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. And wasn’t that just the story of her life?

  Her gaze drifted over his weapons—a pistol and a rifle, in addition to her knife. Jane didn’t know much about guns, except that they made nasty, gaping holes in people she was often forced to fix. She hated firearms, and the men who wielded them.

  “You are Dr. Harker?” he pressed.

  Jane shrugged, nodded. If he was going to kill her, he was going to kill her, regardless of who she was. She’d seen his face.

  A very nice face beneath several days’ growth of dark beard—handsome if you went for Clint Eastwood before too many years in the sun and the wind had taken their toll. She didn’t—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate good-looking when she saw it.

  Blue eyes, nearly black hair, which was a lot longer than she’d ever seen on a soldier. He was taller than her but not by much. At five-foot-eleven inches, Jane towered over most men of her acquaintance. She didn’t like it any better than they did, but what choice did she have?

  Muscles bulged against the dark shirt. She hoped he had more than muscle between his ears, but she doubted it. In her expert medical opinion, overachieving in one area usually meant underachievement in another.

  Huge muscles, small brain. Big gun, itsy-bitsy male equipment.

  The urge to laugh was nearly overwhelming. Why she was always consumed with mirth at the most inopportune times Jane had never been able to figure out.

  “Take what you need,” he snapped. “We have to get out of here before the guards return.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t have time to argue, ma’am— I mean, Doctor. For some reason the guards wandered off, but they’ll be back.” He glanced out the door. “I’d rather not kill them if I don’t have to.”

  Kill Juan and Enrique? Not while Jane was alive and kicking.

  “Listen, soldier boy, there’ll be no killing. There’s been enough.”

  “Works for me. Let’s go.”

  Grabbing her arm, he tugged her along. Jane dug in and tried to stand her ground. But he was huge and all she succeeded in doing was stumbling into him, where she discovered he was as hard and strong as he appeared. She shoved at his solid chest, and wonder of wonders, he let her go.

  “What do you need?” Bouncing on the tips of his toes, he was action man, ready for anything.

  “I need sleep. Go away.”

  “I’m here to rescue you.”

  “From what? The fleas?”

  “You’ve been kidnapped. You’re being held for ransom by drug dealers.”

  She choked back another laugh. “Since when?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’m just following orders.”

  “What orders?” Her laughter faded. “Who are you?”

  “Captain Luchetti. U.S. Special Forces.”

  Jane lifted a brow. Special Forces? Either this was serious, or he was nuts. Which would be a damn shame because, aside from the mistake he’d made in coming here, he seemed to be pretty good at this.

  “I haven’t been kidnapped. I’ve been working here for over a year.”

  “But— Your mother—”

  Jane cursed. Her mother. Of course.

  She’d been bugging Jane to quit her job with Doctors of Mercy—an international, nonprofit association that sent doctors to underprivileged areas of the world—since she’d taken it. But Jane couldn’t believe her mother would lie, then take advantage of her position as a U.S. senator to send a very expensively trained soldier to drag Jane home. If word of this got out, the scandal just might ruin the senator’s career. And wouldn’t that be a shame?

  Jane stifled a smirk, then stared Luchetti up and down. She might not be much for beefcake— Jane preferred scholarly men, tall blondes with wire-rimmed glasses and slim, artist’s hands—but soldier boy really was nice to look at.

  Poor man. This trip had been a colossal waste of his time.

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” she began. “I’m not—”

  “Whatever,” he said shortly. “You can explain it in Washington.”

  “What? No. I’m not leaving. I’ve got work to do.”

  “My orders are to bring you back. Period.”

  “And you always follow orders?”

  He didn’t bother to answer what to him had to be a stupid question. Of course he always followed orders. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be what he was.

  “I want to talk to your superior.�
�

  “Me, too,” he muttered.

  “Well…?”

  “Interception of information by satellite, radio and cell phones is a lot easier than you think.”

  “Which means?”

  “No contact until we get to the airfield.”

  “What airfield?”

  “Halfway between here and Puerto.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  Puerto was nearly forty miles through the jungle.

  He winced. “Keep it down, will you? You want your kidnappers to hear us?”

  “I have not been kidnapped. Or at least not yet. If you drag me into the jungle, that’s kidnapping.”

  He rolled his eyes and managed to appear bored even when his body was as tense as a hound dog on a leash and his toe had started tapping against the dirt floor of her hut in an annoyingly staccato rhythm. Little puffs of dust rose and sullied what had once undoubtedly been shiny black boots.

  Why didn’t he just tape a neon sign to his back that said U.S. Army Top Secret Soldier? Even without the pistol at his waist and the rifle slung across his chest, he’d hardly fit in around here.

  “The Doctors of Mercy sent me to help the people of this village,” Jane explained. “The guards are for my protection.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s why they wandered into the trees for a smoke or a leak.”

  “Well, there isn’t much to protect me from.”

  “You’re going to tell me you haven’t seen any drug dealers around here?”

  Jane went silent. There were drug dealers all over the place. She’d taken bullets out of quite a few of them, sewn up gashes and punctures, even treated overdoses. But she didn’t ask questions. That was the quickest road to an unmarked grave in the jungle.

  “I thought so,” he murmured when she didn’t answer.

  “Why would I lie about being kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know, why would you?”

  Jane stifled the urge to shriek in frustration. It wouldn’t do any good.

  “I am not lying. I’m fine. Not a care in the world, so…thanks for stopping by. Nice meeting you.”

  Jane had only taken a single step toward her bunk when he grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her right back.

  “I told you before, my orders are to bring you home. If the information was FUBAR, that isn’t my problem.”

  “FUBAR?” she asked, but he wasn’t listening.

  Instead, he cocked his head and whispered, “Shh.”

  Jane opened her mouth to call out to Juan and Enrique. Captain Luchetti slapped his big, hard hand over her lips.

  Indignant, at first she didn’t hear the conversation, then she didn’t understand it. And not because the men approaching her hut were speaking Spanish—she’d taken the language all through high school and college—but because what they were saying did not compute.

  Something about burying her in the soft silt near the river.

  BOBBY KEPT HIS HAND over Dr. Harker’s face and tried to make sense of the words. His Arabic was impeccable; his Spanish far from it. Nevertheless, he’d been in enough Hispanic countries and around enough Hispanic soldiers to get the gist, even before he caught the doctor’s name and felt her go rigid in his arms.

  He glanced out the small hole in the curtain that passed for a door. Her guards were back. Damn. Why hadn’t he thrown her over his shoulder and gotten out while the getting was good?

  He’d been taught how to rescue POWs, had even gone through SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—training to be prepared should he be detained and interrogated.

  Prisoners were often terrified of their captors and might behave in one of two ways—by turning on them after liberation and tearing them to pieces, or by being so afraid of retaliation they were unable to leave their prison at all.

  Dr. Harker wasn’t behaving in the usual way—of course, she hadn’t been kidnapped—still, Bobby should have followed instructions and removed her by any means necessary.

  “Matele.”

  Double damn. That word he knew. Kill in any language had a certain ring to it.

  He turned the doctor to face him, indicating by an urgent finger to the lips that she should be quiet. Then he hurried to the cot, placed her pillow beneath the sheet, snatched the folded blanket from the foot of the bed and hustled back.

  In the shadowy corner of the hut, Bobby shoved her under a table, fluffed the blanket over top, then crawled in after, tugging the end to the floor and leaving a slit of space near the leg so he could see out.

  Not a second too soon. One of the goons strode in. He didn’t look to the left or the right, didn’t pause until he stood directly next to the cot. Bobby knew what was coming next, and he covered the doctor’s mouth again.

  Two muffled shots. Silencer. Double tap to the head.

  Dr. Harker jerked with each sound, but she didn’t cry out and she didn’t faint. Nevertheless, he kept his hand over her lips until the assassin exited the room.

  Bobby could have dispatched the would-be murderer with ease, but then the guy’s friends would have come searching for him, and there’d have been more dispatching, more bodies. Definitely not worth the trouble.

  Luckily the killer was both a coward and an idiot. He hadn’t checked to see if his victim was dead. He hadn’t checked to see if she was even there at all.

  “He thinks he killed you,” Bobby breathed into Dr. Harker’s ear.

  She nodded, and he lowered his hand from her face. She turned, and he was struck by a sense of fragility, which was downright odd considering the doctor was far from small and impressively fierce.

  She wasn’t pretty—not that such things mattered. He’d learned long ago that the loveliest faces often hid the ugliest souls.

  Her hair was an indistinct color, between brown and blond; her braid brushed her waist. Shock and fear made her eyes appear huge in her suddenly pale face.

  She’d come after him with a knife. He should have been angry, instead he’d been intrigued.

  Bobby shook his head. Now was not the time to get distracted. He needed to figure out why he’d been sent here to rescue her from nothing.

  His gaze drifted over the place where she would have been sleeping. Maybe he hadn’t been rescuing her from nothing after all.

  But why had the senator called in every favor she was owed to send Bobby to Mexico to save her daughter before she’d needed saving?

  And then there was the matter of semantics. Murder versus kidnapping. Equally unpleasant but not interchangeable, even in Spanish.

  Something strange was going on, but Bobby didn’t have the time or the inclination to unravel the mystery at the moment.

  “You ready to go?”

  Her only answer was a nod.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ENRIQUE HAD TRIED to kill her. Jane couldn’t get her mind around that fact.

  The man who’d laughed with her, eaten with her, taken care of her when she was ill with the Mexican version of the twenty-four-hour flu had coolly walked into her hut and put two bullets into her brain.

  That her brain had not been where he thought it was at the time did not excuse him in the least.

  Luchetti climbed out from under the table and reached back. Dazed, Jane put her hand into his.

  His skin was even hotter than the tropical climate. Though nearly the same height, he probably outweighed her by fifty pounds of pure muscle. From the appearance of his biceps, he could bench press a donkey without breaking a sweat. Touching him should be unpleasant, but it wasn’t.

  She pushed aside the disturbing thought. There was no way she was attracted to a Neanderthal like him. Captain Luchetti’s very existence went against everything she’d ever believed in.

  Jane didn’t approve of war; she loathed violence and she specifically detested big, muscle-bound men who radiated testosterone like a foul odor. Too bad Luchetti was all that stood between her and more violence than she’d ever encountered in her thirty years on earth.

  He g
lanced out the window of her hut. “They’re gone. So are we.”

  “But—”

  “Now, Doctor, before one of them grows a brain.”

  Jane’s gaze flitted over her books, her instruments, her medical supplies. He saw what she was looking at and shook his head. “Maybe someone who doesn’t want you dead can ship everything to you later.”

  She wouldn’t need it shipped because she’d be back. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger but with less fanfare. All she’d ever wanted to do was help the helpless. Now she was one of them. Jane didn’t care for the feeling.

  “Do you have any food or water in here?” Luchetti used one finger to lift the corner of a blanket, another to move aside a text on preventative medicine for the tropics.

  Jane nodded and reached under her bed for the few bottles of tepid water. She averted her eyes from the bullet holes in her pillow. The very thought of them made her sick.

  She turned and nearly jumped out of her skin. Luchetti was so close she could feel the heat steaming off of him. Why was he so hot?

  Her cheeks flushed at the double meaning. What was wrong with her? She’d been in danger before, and she’d never wanted to jump the bones of the nearest male. Until today.

  She needed to curb that impulse before she embarrassed herself. A guy like Luchetti would never be interested in a woman like her.

  He lifted his arm. Her backpack hung from his hand. The same backpack she’d used through both college and medical school at Harvard. The bag had been good luck then, maybe there was a little luck left.

  Quickly Jane tossed the water and the few supplies she kept for emergencies—juice boxes, crackers, animal cookies—as well as a mini first-aid kit into the sack.

  Luchetti motioned for her to follow. “Stay close,” he murmured, and slid out the door.

  Jane stayed so close she stepped on the back of his boots more than once. To his credit, he never said a word, never made a single sound of irritation.

  The sky was dark, the stars fading. Soon dawn would tint the horizon. She hoped they were far away from here before then.

  A woof from the other side of the village reminded Jane of certain responsibilities. Snapping her fingers, she gave a low whistle. But many of the dogs were out chasing prey, including the one that had come with her hut.