by Cindy Dees
But in the meantime, she had a very curious and increasingly insistent problem on her hands. And it was named John Hollister.
Chapter 5
The drive-a bone-jarring affair that all but rattled Melina’s teeth loose-took most of the afternoon. John finally pulled into a gas station in a tiny, impoverished village as the sun began to go down. The hamlet, tucked into a valley lined with green pastures and herds of cattle and alpacas, looked like an old Western movie set with its dusty streets, rust-stained stucco cantina, and a few decrepit vintage cars parked along raised wooden sidewalks.
John opened the door and climbed out. He peeled a few bills out of his wallet and passed them to a wizened, dark-haired man who came outside to pump their gas.
“Stay in the car,” John murmured through the window in English.
She sighed. Her legs felt like prickly rubber. She was really ready to get out and stretch. But there’d been a certain tone in John’s voice, a warning that he didn’t like something about this place. She studied the one-street village out the window, trying to spot what was bothering him. Nothing moved. All was quiet-as in completely deserted. The locals were probably at home by now settling down to supper with their families.
She heard John ask the gas station attendant about the condition of the roads ahead and how far it was to the next village. But she didn’t hear the man’s mumbled answers. John climbed back in the car and made a production of stowing his wallet and settling into his seat again. As he did so, he said without moving his lips, “We have a decision to make.”
“Do tell.”
“This place is entirely controlled by whomever you’re trying to hook up with. Frankly, I don’t think it’s safe for us. We can stop here for the night, or we can move on and try to find a village that’s neutral territory.”
“Did the guy on the phone tell us to stop here?” she asked in an undertone.
John shook his head as he latched his seat belt. “Nope. He said this place was about halfway to where we were going and mentioned that it has an inn, though.”
She glanced outside. “Really?” I don’t see one.”
The gas station attendant said the pub has a couple rooms for rent.”
Melina grinned over at him. “For rent by the hour, or the night?”
He grinned back. “I hesitate to think of the state of the bed linens.”
She nodded. “We go on.”
“I can’t promise the next village will be any better,” he warned.
She shrugged. “I’m learning to enjoy not playing by the rules. Let’s do our own thing tonight.”
He grinned over at her. “I like the sound of that.”
They drove for another hour as the sun set behind them and twilight settled outside. When the hills had turned a colorless gray and the trees were black silhouettes looming over the road, John exhaled in what sounded for all the world like disgust.
“What’s up?” she asked quickly, picking up on his disquiet.
“Traveling at night in this part of the world is asking for trouble.”
That didn’t answer her question. What wasn’t he telling her? She pressed. “What kind of trouble?”
He shrugged and glanced at her. “Pick your poison. Anything from roaming wild pigs to Shining Path guerrillas.”
“The way I hear it, they’re not so different.”
John laughed. “I dunno. Those pigs are pretty smart.”
The lightness of the moment faded along with the last vestiges of twilight. She asked soberly, “So what are our options?”
“Here’s the thing. The guy in the last village lied to me. He said the next town was forty kilometers away. No more than an hour down this road. We’ve gone sixty-five kilometers, and there’s no sign of civilization anywhere near here.”
Alarmed, she blurted, “What does that mean?”
“I imagine our friend has called ahead to some sort of welcoming committee who’ll be out here looking for us before too much longer.”
Melina jolted, looking around outside, wildly.
“Easy, darlin’. We’re far from defenseless. I’ve got a few aces up my sleeve.”
Just then he gripped the steering wheel tightly and swore under his breath. She peered up ahead and made out some sort of large, irregular obstruction lying across the road. It looked like a fallen tree.
“Looks like it’s time to pull out one of those aces,” she bit out.
“Climb in the backseat,” John ordered tersely. “Hurry.”
She complied with alacrity, falling in an ungainly heap on top of something hard and sharp in his gear bags.
He continued, “In my green duffel that you’re lying on, pull out the big gun on top and a couple of pistols, and pass them up here. Then buckle yourself in back there. We’re going cross-country. It’s gonna get rough.”
He wasn’t kidding. He swerved hard to the left, off the road. They banged down and up again through some sort of ditch, and then they took off across an open field strewn with stands of trees and brush. In a matter of seconds, the Land Rover was bucking and bumping over the most god-awful terrain she could imagine. John fought the steering wheel like it was a wild bronco, muscling it forward by sheer force of will. It was an impressive display of strength.
Apparently, the field was some sort of drainage or flood zone, for it was streaked by gullies. Thankfully the gashes, varying in size from a few feet deep to large enough to swallow the entire Land Rover, were mostly dry at the moment. Mostly. Mud splashed up, covering the vehicle’s windows until Melina could barely see outside.
A crack of sound, like a truck backfiring, made her jump.
“Get down!” John yelled, flooring the accelerator.
The ride went from horrendous to epic in its discomfort. Amusement park rides had nothing over the pounding she was taking back here! She lay down in the backseat for a few moments, but got so sick so fast that she had to sit up again. She braced a hand against the ceiling to protect her head from banging into the metal roof. How John could see where he was going, she had no idea. It was pitch-black outside, and he’d turned off the headlights. A few more cracks sounded, from behind them this time. She thought she heard faint shouts, but she couldn’t be sure.
After a few minutes, the ride smoothed out some, which was to say it went back to merely terrible. A splash of water slammed the window beside her, startling her badly. However, it also washed most of the sticky mud off the window. They were running along the bed of a river-size gully, a high clay wall looming outside the window. Periodically, they crashed into pockets of standing water, some as deep as the front fenders. But the sturdy Land Rover plowed right through them.
Eventually, the vehicle slowed down. John began peering outside, obviously looking for something.
“Can I help? What are we looking for?” she asked breathlessly.
“A low spot in the bank so we can get out of here.”
Lovely. They were trapped down in this canyon? What if it ran out on them? Then what? “You’re sure no one’s following us?” she asked quickly.
“I’m fairly certain they’ve given up by now. None of them have vehicles with the suspension this one has. They’d be hard-pressed to keep up with us.”
“Thank God.”
“You can come up here if you like. The ride’s smoother than back there, over the rear axle. But you’ll have to hold the guns in your lap.”
In immense relief, she climbed back into the front seat, managing to get all tangled up in her own legs and arms and seat belts and gun straps. But eventually, she got it all sorted out. She glanced over at John and he was grinning at her.
“What?”
“Having fun yet?” he asked lightly.
“Fun? Fun! You think fleeing armed bandits is fun?” she exclaimed.
“Nah, that’s just another day at the office. Watching you try to climb into a seat full of firearms-now that’s fun.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. And realized, suddenl
y, that he’d effectively broken her tension. She’d bet he hadn’t done that by accident, either. “What’s next, assuming we can get out of here?”
He shrugged. “We’ll get out eventually. It’s just a matter of how dicey the maneuver will be. After that, we’ll find someplace to hunker down for the night. In the morning, we’ll figure out where we are and proceed toward our destination from there.”
He made it all sound so easy. She shuddered to think what would have happened to her back there if he hadn’t been with her. She’d have driven straight into that ambush. And she had no illusions about how a good-looking, relatively wealthy, foreign woman would have faired at the hands of a bunch of bandits.
“Bingo.”
She jumped at John’s sudden outburst. He slammed on the brakes and backed the Land Rover up, turning it ninety degrees to face the riverbank on their left. A solid wall of dirt loomed in front of them. “You don’t expect to drive up that, do you?” she asked in dismay.
“Sure. No problem.”
“That’s a vertical wall! We’ll flip over.”
“Nah, this is a tough old bird. It’ll climb that. Hang on, and lean forward when we hit the wall.”
Oh my God. She grabbed the bar across the dashboard in horror as he gunned the motor and the Land Rover leaped at the riverbank. The vehicle bucked and slid, its tires clawing at the bank, finding purchase, slipping, then finding purchase again. The vehicle did, indeed, stand up almost on its hind end as the engine roared and the tires threw mud wildly in every direction.
“Lean forward!” John yelled.
She flung herself forward in her seat and John did the same. Whether or not it helped, she had no idea, but at the last moment before she thought the Land Rover had to flip over on its back, its rear wheels caught, and it surged up the last six feet or so of the bank. It burst up and over the edge, skidding sideways as it hit level dirt and the squealing tires caught solid ground.
John stopped the vehicle. He peeled his fingers carefully from around the steering wheel. She noticed they were clawed from the effort and took several seconds to straighten once more. “Well,” he panted. “That was fun. You okay over there, Mel? You look a little pale around the gills.”
“Near-death experiences have that effect on me,” she replied dryly.
He grinned and put the vehicle into gear once more. Driving at a much more sane pace, he eased across the wide pasture they found themselves in. A farmhouse blinked with light on the mountainside above them, but John gave it wide berth and drove past it. On the other side of the dwelling, he let out a quiet exclamation of satisfaction.
She peered outside to see what so pleased him. A dirt road stretched away in front of them. Little more than a parallel pair of gravel tire tracks, it was, nonetheless, a vast improvement over the past half hour’s worth of terrain. She sighed in relief as he guided the Land Rover along the crude road.
“Well. That was interesting,” she commented.
“More interesting than I was hoping for, but not as interesting as I expected,” he replied calmly. What kind of work had he been in before this, that nearly dying at the hands of bandits had barely fazed him? And the way he’d handled the Land Rover-no normal person could’ve done that. He had some special sort of training. Had he been a policeman, maybe? It would explain his familiarity with guns, too.
“Who were those guys back there?” she asked.
He glanced over at her grimly. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I don’t have any idea!”
He sighed. Brought the Land Rover to a stop. Turned off the ignition and lights. Alarmed, she saw him studying her in the dark, his eyes no more than shadowed hollows of blackness in the night. “True confessions time, Melina. Someone just tried to kill us, and that changes the rules of this game. It means you owe me the full truth and nothing but the truth. Now.”
She closed her eyes in despair. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Sorry we got shot at, or sorry that you didn’t tell me everything up front?” he prodded.
“Both.”
A pause stretched out between them until it became awkward. Still, he waited, some of that stubborn pigheadedness of his apparently kicking in. There was no help for it. She absolutely wasn’t going to answer his question. She jumped when he abruptly got out of the vehicle and walked around in front of it toward her side of the car. Cringing, she waited as he jerked her door open. She was surprised when he merely held a hand out to her to help her out of the car. She’d pegged him for bodily dragging her out of the vehicle in his current state of irritation.
But he did back her up against the side of the Land Rover in no uncertain terms, his hands on either side of her shoulders, trapping her in place. “What the hell’s going on, Melina?”
“What’s your gut telling you?” she asked lightly. It was a feeble attempt to remind him of the closeness they’d shared back in the hotel-okay it was a blatant attempt to distract him by reminding him of the great sex they’d had in Lima.
He considered her for several seconds in stony silence. Then he surprised her by answering. “Remember those two legitimate reasons I thought of for you coming out here to meet someone?”
She nodded.
“I think we’ve pretty much ruled those out as possibilities.”
She couldn’t help but smile. But as he continued, her humor evaporated.
“Which means you’re up to no good. You’re out here to meet someone on the wrong side of the law. Very much on the wrong side of the law, or you wouldn’t be having to jump through these hoops to even make contact with them. I can only think of a few people who qualify as that criminal and that cautious. And I gotta say, babe, every last one of them is a heaping bad problem.”
He continued grimly. “You’re dragging me around on a wild-goose chase out here, which tells me your criminal contacts don’t trust you. They’re vetting you out before they close in on you. So, I’m thinking you either have something you want to sell-“ at that, his gaze raked coarsely down her body “-or you’re being blackmailed.”
She had to work to keep her face from showing anything, either the hurt at his insinuation that she’d sell herself, or her panic at how close he’d come to the truth.
“My guess is blackmail. You’re too naïve to even know how to begin doing business with these sorts on your own initiative. They approached you. So, what do you have that they want?”
She stared up at him, her lips pressed together defiantly. He could ask the question until the cows came home, but she was not going to answer him.
He leaned forward. It was a subtle thing, but he invaded her personal space…and not in a nice way. It wasn’t even remotely sexual in overtone. It was just intimidating.
“We’re out here all alone,” he murmured in a silky tone. “You and me. Nobody for miles to hear you shout for help. I’m all you’ve got.”
He said the words in threat, but they resonated all the way to her soul. I’m all you’ve got. Good Lord, he was exactly right. She had nobody else. Her parents, whom she might have turned to in a crisis, were at the heart of this one. Her younger brother, Mike, was flighty at best, and foolish at worst. Definitely not any help. Her colleagues, neighbors-she’d never bothered to get close to any of them, so involved in her work had she been over the years.
And men? People thought she had it easy in that department because she was reasonably good-looking. But they didn’t realize that it got really annoying having to constantly fend off men on the prowl for easy sex with hot chicks. Somewhere along the way, she’d gotten so good at driving off the macho jerks that it had become a habit to push all men away.
She was headed down the fast track to withering up and becoming old and lonely before her time. Heck, she didn’t even have anyone she’d call a friend. Oh, she had a few acquaintances whom she went out with socially now and then, but no one she’d tell her deepest, darkest secrets to.
She looked up at John in dismay. And was
even more dismayed to realize her vision was strangely blurred and her eyes suddenly burned.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” he muttered. “Do you have to go and get all weepy on me now?”
“Pardon me for having feelings,” she sniffed. “We women happen to cry, occasionally, you know. Maybe you should give it a try, sometime.”
He recoiled strongly from that suggestion. “No thanks,” he shot back.
She frowned at the violence of his reaction. What was that all about? In a blatant attempt to deflect him from pursuing why she was crying, she announced, “You’re so busy demanding to know everything about me and my life, but I don’t see you telling me a whole hell of a lot about yourself.”
“I’m the hired gun you bought to get you to your destination. I’ve played ball in this part of the world before. I know the players and I know the rules of the game. I can get you where you’re going, and you’re paying me top dollar to get you there in one piece. What more is there to know about me?”
She cast around for something personal to ask him. “What are you taking muscle relaxants for? And how did you get that gunshot wound in your back?”
He shoved away from the Land Rover and whirled away from her abruptly. Her eyebrows shot up as he presented her his back and shut her out in no uncertain terms. Uh-huh. That was what she thought. He was all hot and bothered to know her secrets, but he wasn’t about to share any of his with her. It was okay for him to act all dark and tortured and mysterious, but it wasn’t okay for her to be the same way.
He paced a few yards away and then spun and stalked back to her. She held her ground but not for lack of an urge to flee in the face of his advance.
“I hurt my back a few months ago. And to anticipate your next question, no, I’m not telling you how I got shot. So don’t ask.”
She reared back from the vehemence in his voice. Wow. She must have really hit a nerve. She asked casually, “How’s your back feeling now? Are you up for a hike through the high Andes?”
