by Janzen, Tara
“Hold on!” he warned as he slammed on the brakes and swung the wheel in a 180-degree arc. He punched the gas, and the car roared back down the bone-jarring pavement. Nikki’s stomach leapt into her throat, lodging in the middle of a knot of nausea and fear. They were going to die. Travinas had covered every escape route. He hadn’t given her a chance to pull together her side of their sordid bargain. Or had he found out about Delgado? Had he put her name next to Josh’s on Brazia’s hit list?
God save us. The soundless prayer fell from her trembling lips.
Josh tried to make it to a through street but was cut off again by another car. Not a military vehicle. The odd thought registered, but only for a moment before a jeep came out of nowhere to take up the chase.
Sweat and panic broke out at the same time. He’d never lose all three of them. The ensuing few minutes proved his point. The jeep stayed hot on his tail, but the other two cars were playing cat and mouse with him, falling behind, jumping ahead, shooting through the alleys. One thing he quickly realized was the horsepower advantage they had. He was faster than the jeep, but the two cars were faster than anything he’d seen in San Simeon—and they were confusing the hell out of him. He was about ready to do something crazy, like stop the car and ask them what they were doing, when he got a clue.
During a blur of lights and cars at a crossroad, the jeep took off after the wrong car. He didn’t really believe the mix-up had happened on purpose, but neither did he quite believe it was an accident. Thoroughly confused, he tried for the highway again and was cut off by the second car.
He uttered a foul obscenity. They were left with only one way out, the river road. He wheeled the Chevy into the last-chance turn.
“Don’t take the river road,” Nikki moaned from her huddled position deep in the seat, her head barely above the windowsill. “It dead-ends in about a mile.”
“Not quite,” he muttered.
True, she knew, but it didn’t exactly remain a road, either. She hazarded a quick glance at him. His face was a stony mask, his mouth drawn tight. A small muscle twitched in his jaw, a warning sign she normally would have heeded, but nothing about the night was normal.
“My car doesn’t have four-wheel drive,” she said, straining to be diplomatic.
He slanted her a hard look and continued driving too fast. The pavement ended abruptly, but that didn’t slow him down. If the driver of the other car wanted them, he was going to have to blow a few shocks to get them. Dust billowed up behind and around the Chevy until even the dirt track became lost in an overgrowth of weeds.
Instinct and a faint set of memories guided his hands on the wheel. The trail curved around every giant tree, hearkening back to its history as a footpath from the outlying villages, and it took them deeper into the forest with every turn. Finally, out of necessity, he eased up on the gas pedal.
Shadows and shapes loomed out of the pitch darkness, caught in the gleam of the headlights, but no lights followed them. Josh didn’t know whether to be relieved or scared senseless—it was pretty obvious the car driver had allowed him to go this way—so he settled for an intense mix of alertness and unease.
Branches slapped against the car, and the dank odor of mildewing leaves permeated the air. The undergrowth thickened with each mile until he was forced to slow the car to a crawl.
Shaking uncontrollably, Nikki released a heavy breath and pried her fingers off the dashboard. Blindly she groped in the glove compartment, feeling around for the bottle of antacid tablets she’d stashed in there for her Sulaco trip.
Two tablets and five minutes later, she felt the nausea and cramping subside to a manageable level. She would live after all.
Josh heard her sigh and stretch out in the passenger seat, and felt a small measure of his own tension dissipate. A very small measure. She’d pushed him too far this time. He wanted to shake her or hold her or yell at her or something.
“Whatever you took, give me double,” he demanded.
She complied by shaking four tablets into his open palm. He popped them into his mouth and immediately grimaced, but he chewed until he got the whole chalky mess down.
“You’re a little young to be working on an ulcer, aren’t you?”
His accusing tone grated on her already shot nerves. The last thing she needed was a rundown of her shortcomings. “So are you,” she countered, not bothering to open her eyes, let alone look at him. Lord! What had happened? She’d had everything under control until he’d shown up, and damn little had gone right since.
“It wasn’t me back there holding my gut and shaking like a leaf,” he said.
And the last thing she wanted to talk about was her stomach. With luck, she might be able to forget she even had one, an empty, aching one. “This road has changed since the last time we were on it. Nobody uses it anymore. We might not be able to get through to the highway.”
“We might not need to.”
Her eyes opened to narrow slits. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that unless I get the answers I want, I’m turning this Chevy around and heading back to the city.”
Despite the harsh conviction in his voice, she didn’t believe him, not for a minute. “I’d heard you’d gotten a little reckless,” she said, “but no one mentioned you’d gone crazy.”
“Then whoever you were talking to didn’t know the whole story,” he snapped back, fighting the wheels out of a deep rut. He knew he’d been labeled as one of journalism’s “bad boys,” but most of the time his reputation worked to his advantage. It kept other reporters out of his stories and kept his editor’s expectations high for quality and low for obedience.
“Don’t you know who Brazia is?” Her voice rose with doubt, instantly setting him back on the fine edge of anger.
He sat silently fuming, his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel. Who in the hell was she to question him? He was the one with the questions, and rightly so. He hadn’t lied to anybody, and he hadn’t traveled a thousand miles to hear her lie to him. Now that he thought about it, he didn’t know why in the hell he had come back.
He was gearing himself up to tell her just that when the headlights caught a heavy branch lying across the trail. He cut the wheel fast to the right, throwing Nikki over to his side. He slammed his foot down on the brake, and the car lurched to a halt. She thudded into his lap, sprawled over the front seat with one hand digging into his thigh.
“Have you completely lost your mind?” she sputtered, trying to right herself. “Maybe I should—”
He jerked her up, sending her blond hair flying and rattling her teeth. He held her in a viselike grip, her face mere inches from his. “I know Brazia better than his own mother,” he said softly, his eyes glittering with menace. “It’s you I don’t know anymore.”
Her heart jumped back into her throat. She attempted to move away, back to the safety of her side of the car, but he was having none of it.
His hands tightened painfully on her arms. “It’s game time, Nikki, and the game is Twenty Questions. My questions. Your answers.”
A strange tremor, very much like fear, coursed down her spine. She squirmed, shaking her shoulders, testing the strength of his grip and finding it unbreakable. Her eyes flashed up to his. “You’re scaring me,” she said, confessing her fear in the hope it would bring him to his senses. He’d never hurt her before, but he was darn close to doing it now.
“Then we’re even,” he said. “You’ve scared me plenty in the last couple of hours, and I don’t take that from anybody.”
The sheer arrogance of his remark sparked her anger back to life. “Let go of me, Josh.” She squirmed again. “Ask whatever you want, but let go of me.”
“Lady,” he whispered between his teeth, “I’m not even close to letting go of you.”
Before she could protest, he bent his head and took her mouth in a bruising kiss. She gasped and struggled, her awkward position leaving her helpless to break free. He devoured her from the out
side in, taking advantage of her parted lips to thrust his tongue inside.
She fought the intrusion, her hands pushing against his chest. Then suddenly he stopped, his mouth still on hers, and with a soft moan he traced her lips, soothing the tender skin with his tongue. The gentle touch and aching sound went through her like heated honey, melting every ounce of sense she had.
“Kiss me, Nikki.” he murmured between brushes of his mouth, his breath coming hard. “Kiss me.” His arms slid around her in an embrace of pure power, dragging her to her knees and across his chest.
“Don’t.” She choked out the weak command. “Don’t do this to—”
He silenced her with the kiss she didn’t want, with the kiss she couldn’t stop, teasing her mouth and unraveling her resistance. He caught her lower lip between his teeth, tugged gently, and sent a tumultuous wave of longing through her body.
Coerced by the insistence of his passion and her own weak will, she drew his tongue back into her mouth and died just a little inside. Inevitably, she lost herself in the sensual pleasures he offered—the taste of him, the slow explosions of electricity he created with each touch, the glory of his hard body beneath her, and the safety of his arms around her.
She’d missed him for so long. She’d fought the loneliness and regrets until she’d convinced herself she could live without him, that there would be another man someday.
Lies, all lies . . . the truth whispered. Reality faded into a swirling vortex of long-ago emotion and growing excitement. Her hands slipped around his neck as her body slid down his. Josh Rios had been her first man, her only man. He’d been her friend, and one night, one unforgettable summer night, he’d been her lover.
A sweet ache grew between them, needing only a movement here, a touch there, to drown them both. Josh drew her farther on top of him, holding her tighter and closer, his hands cupping her hips, and still he couldn’t get enough. He tilted his head and opened his mouth wider over hers, capturing her soft moans and feeling them run like wildfire to his loins. Nikki Kydd still belonged to him, and if she belonged to him, she didn’t belong to some guy named Carlos, no matter what she’d said.
Slowly sliding his hands up to her face, he lifted his mouth from hers and looked into her languid, passion-smudged eyes. His thumbs caressed the delicate angle of her jaw. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Nikki,” he said huskily. “And the first lesson is don’t lie to me. Who is Carlos?”
She stared at him in confusion, her chest hurting with the effort to breathe, her arms heavy with the need to hold him again.
The longer she looked at him, at his dark angel face and the faint sheen of dampness on his skin, the more aware she became of where she was, of what she’d done. A heated blush stole up her cheeks. She was all over him, straddling his hips, her hands on his shoulders, her fingers tangled in his hair—and she’d kissed him with passion, exposing herself in the most vulnerable way possible.
“Damn you,” she whispered, trying not to die of shame and embarrassment. She quickly scrambled back to her side of the seat, and this time he let her go.
“You’ve already done a good job of that, Nikki.” His voice carried across the darkness without a trace of the tenderness he’d just shown. “Now answer my question.”
“No,” she said, shaking inside. “Do what you have to, Josh. But I’m not playing your game tonight, any of your games.” It was a calculated risk, an emotionally calculated one, but he was manipulating her too easily for her to engage in a battle of wits, let alone a battle of kisses and memories. Exhaustion and stress had lengthened the odds against her. She wasn’t thinking fast enough to win, and win she must, at any cost.
Two days, she prayed, wrapping her arms around her waist and shivering despite the thick, heavy heat pressing all around her. Just let her have two days without making any more mistakes. Two days to set everyone up. Two days before he realized what she’d done.
Two days without making a complete fool of herself, she added with a stifled groan, slipping farther down in the seat and closing her eyes. Even at a hundred percent, she wouldn’t be a match for his mind-weakening style of sensual persuasion.
Josh watched her shut herself away from him, and he knew he’d blown it, in spades. He hadn’t meant to kiss her. He hadn’t meant to get side-tracked on her personal life, which he admitted hadn’t gotten him very far, But then, she’d never been easy to push around.
Some things never changed, he thought, tightening his hands around the steering wheel and dropping his head back in frustration. Not her stubbornness, not her exasperating ability to pull him in over his head, and not his reaction to her touch. His body still pulsed with arousal, a deep throbbing he had only himself to blame for. She hadn’t teased him; he’d plunged in with his heart and soul bared.
Once, they’d gotten love right, so perfect that every other woman he’d had left him feeling empty—but not nearly as empty as he felt now.
With a resigned sound from deep in his throat, he sat up and eased the car forward, taking care not to hit the tree branch lying across the dirt track.
* * *
Nikki woke to a pale, hazy dawn filled with soft shadows and light, and the chattering of birds. Mist drifted down from the canopy of trees. The leaves of the lower plants glistened with a misleading dewy freshness. Nothing was fresh in this tropical forest sauna.
She rolled to a sitting position in the seat, unconsciously reaching up and kneading the sore muscles in her neck and shoulders. A hundred yards ahead, the road opened up and the forest thinned out, giving way to savanna. She noted the fact, then glanced in the backseat.
He was crammed into the small space, one knee bent, the other leg stretched under the front seat. His chest rose and fell softly. His hair was damp and slicked back from his face, heavy with the humidity and sweat that also moistened his face and his clothes. A night’s growth of beard stubbled his jaw.
As she watched him, he shifted uncomfortably, rearranging his shoulders and hips. He grimaced at the futile effort and fell back into his original position. Compassion told her to wake him, to put him out of his misery. Common sense told her he needed all the rest he could get, no matter how uncomfortable. She certainly felt better after her sleep, more in control, less susceptible to the previous night’s volatile mix of tension, fear, and spontaneous combustion.
Combustion. There was no other word for what had happened to her when he’d kissed her. She’d lost all reason under the pliant assault of his mouth, under each caress of his hands. She sighed and dragged her fingers through her hair, her gaze drifting beyond the windshield. Forget it, Nikki, she told herself. Forget it and save yourself a whole lot of heartache.
Behind her, Josh opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw was the woman who had run him ragged in his dreams. He felt like hell, and she looked gorgeous, a recently acquired talent, he guessed. She never used to look that good first thing in the morning. He remembered a gawky girl with a cap of tousled hair, her eyes bloodshot from too many beers the night before, her mood grumpy for the same reason. He hadn’t made much of a guardian.
When he’d finally become aware of her miraculously transforming body and his own reaction to the change, he’d made damn sure he didn’t see her first thing in the morning anymore. The overnight camp-outs had come to a halt, and so had the shared hotel rooms. The cost of an extra room had been a small price to pay for his sanity.
He’d lost it anyway, and what had it gotten him? Months of desperation, years of trying to forget, and all so he could end up in the middle of nowhere in the backseat of a Chevy, alone. The gods must be laughing.
“Good morning,” he lied.
“Good morning.” Her eyes met his briefly before she turned away. “Where are we?”
“We’re where the gas ran out.” She did look beautiful. Her hair was tousled, but it didn’t used to tousle into a golden mane. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot. They were clear, and still the palest summery green he’d ever seen. Her mood was a
mystery, but not for long.
“I told you not to take this road.”
Damn, he thought. The lady had a diagram of all of his buttons, and she was determined to keep pushing the one marked “mad.”
“You told me a lot of things last night,” he said, “and I didn’t believe any of them.” He pushed himself up and reached for his satchel, trying not to notice how the silky T-shirt clung to her breasts and fell off one shoulder, or how the skinny black strap of her slip looked against her creamy skin.
She had great shoulders. No amount of satchel-rummaging could distract him from that particular fact. Finally he found what he wanted.
Nikki watched him unscrew the lid of a metal flask and raise the container to his mouth.
“What have you got?” she asked.
In answer, he handed her the flask and continued swishing the liquid around in his mouth. She took a small sip, and her eyes widened.
“Whiskey,” he rasped.
“Cheap whiskey,” she corrected him. She inhaled deeply and felt her sinuses clear all the way to the tips of her toes. Immediately her stomach told her it didn’t appreciate the crude addition.
She popped two of the antacid tablets into her mouth, for the first time wondering if maybe she was working on an ulcer.
“Sorry. I forgot,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. Do you want something to eat?”
He leaned forward and looked out the windshield, both eyebrows lifted. “Do you see something I don’t? Like a restaurant? Or a bunch of bananas?”
“No. I’ve still got my Sulaco provisions in the trunk. Nothing fancy, but it’ll keep us from starving until we figure out what we’re going to do.”
