by Rachel Lee
“Is that so? Just how many nuns do you know?”
Something glimmered in his eyes. Sarah couldn’t tell whether it was surprise that she refused to let him intimidate her, or reluctant admiration at her stand, or amusement. The thought that her desperate struggle to contain her fear might amuse him sent her chin up another notch.
“Not many,” he admitted. The ghost of a smile tugged at his lips. “In fact, I’ve only met one other. She caught me snitching fruit from the corner grocery store and whacked me over the head with her umbrella. When she marched me home, my staunch Methodist father agreed with the good sister that I needed a little more forceful guidance and took me out behind the garage. Since then I’ve tended to avoid your kind.”
Waves of relief coursed through Sarah. She just might make it through this mess after all. Lifting her chin, she gave a disdainful sniff. “Obviously, both the whack over the head and your trip to the garage failed dismally to curb your ways.”
“Obviously,” he drawled, turning away. “Go eat. Then we’d better get what sleep we can before the heat gets too unbearable. I’ll string some hammocks for the kids, and we can make do with the bedrolls.”
“You’re going to sleep here? With us?”
“Right the first time.”
“I don’t think that’s either necessary or appropriate, Mr…. Gringo.”
He didn’t even bother to turn around. “What you think in this instance doesn’t matter a whole lot, Sister Sarah. You see, that ferret-faced little runt out there who leads this band of so-called revolutionaries isn’t exactly pleased that I dragged you back here. He’s made me personally responsible for you, and I’m not a man who takes his responsibilities lightly.”
Ignoring Sarah’s inelegant little huff of derision, he looped the end of a hammock rope around an exposed wooden roof support. “Go eat,” he ordered, in a voice that brooked no further argument.
While he moved about the small hut, Sarah joined the children. They scooted aside to make room for her around the impromptu table. Remembering his warning about things that went boom in the night, she lowered herself gingerly onto the edge of the crate, then glanced around for something to eat with. There wasn’t anything except her fingers. Sarah wiped them on her robe and tried not to think of what might be clinging to either her skin or her skirts.
Her first scoop of cold beans and rice lodged in a throat still dry with the residue of fear and exhaustion. Sarah un-screwed the plastic top of one of the canteens and washed the lump down, grimacing at the taste of tepid water laced with chemical purifiers. She wiped the mouth of the canteen with her sleeve and passed it to little Teresa, then scooped up another few fingerfuls of food. Within moments, she was gobbling the hearty fare down as hungrily as the children.
After half a lifetime of dining at Washington’s elegant restaurants and quaint eateries, Sarah had been surprised at how well she adapted to the steady diet of rice and black beans that formed the basis of every meal in this part of the world. In the evening the villagers augmented the dish with chicken or, occasionally, pork cooked in a spicy tomato sauce. When scooped up in still-warm corn tortillas and finished off with the plentiful fruits of the area, the food was nutritious and filling.
Or maybe Sarah’s easy adjustment to it had stemmed from the fact that, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t giving much thought to either her weight or her appearance. The humidity had wreaked such havoc on her once-shining cap of long platinum blond hair that she’d taken to simply dragging it back with an elastic band. Moreover, she’d found a degree of comfort and a strange sense of freedom in the baggy cotton trousers and shirts her Peace Corps sponsor had told her to bring. Sarah smothered a silent groan, wishing she could shuck the hot, sticky black habit and pull on one of those lightweight shirts right now.
Even Maria herself had rarely worn these suffocating robes, donning them only for infrequent visits to her chapter house in the capital city. In the interior she wore sensible lightweight cotton work clothes—and the bright red ball cap with the Washington Redskins logo emblazoned on the front that Sarah had given her.
At the memory of the ball cap, Sarah’s fingers stilled halfway to her mouth. She closed her eyes against the familiar wave of pain and guilt that washed through her. André had bought the ball cap for her on one of their delightful, illicit outings. Sarah had thought to use the anonymity of the huge crowd at a Skins game to teach the suave, sophisticated Frenchman a little about the American national pastime. Instead, he’d shaken his head at her incomprehensible enthusiasm for what he considered a slow, pedestrian sport and whisked her away during the third quarter to a discreet little hotel to demonstrate what he laughingly called the French national sport.
She’d been so in love with him, Sarah thought in despair. She hadn’t stopped to think about the pain and tragedy her selfish need for him could cause. She’d believed him when he caressed her and adored her with his skilled hands and clever mouth. She’d—
“Don’t forget to shake your bedroll out before you lie down.”
Sarah blinked and slewed around to see the gringo stretched out, his long legs crossed at the ankle and a floppy-brimmed camouflage hat covering his eyes.
“What?”
“Shake out the bedroll,” he murmured, without removing the hat. “It’s a safe bet the last inhabitant was a snake, either the slippery, slithery variety or one of his two-legged cousins.”
Sarah eyed the stained mat beside his in distaste. “Maybe I’ll share a hammock with Teresa.”
“Suit yourself.”
After the children finished their meal, Sarah wiped ineffectually at the smallest ones’ faces with the dampened tail of her sleeve. Eduard disdained her ministrations. He folded his thin body into the hammock, then pulled Ricci in beside him. Sarah draped a tent of mosquito netting the gringo had rigged over both of them.
She approached the second hammock with the assurance of a woman who danced with a joyful, natural grace and played a mean game of tennis. She soon found, however, that negotiating her way into a swinging hammock with a child in one arm and heavy skirts draped over the other took more than grace or coordination. It took a skill she didn’t seem to possess.
On her first attempt, the lightweight net swung out from under her, nearly dropping her on her bottom. On her second attempt, the knee she’d lifted to anchor the net swayed away, causing her to hop a few steps across the dirt floor on one foot to keep from losing her balance. Six-year-old Teresa clung to her neck, like one of those stuffed toys with the long, strangling arms, and giggled.
The sound tugged at Sarah’s heart. She smiled down at the child. “Think that’s funny, do you?”
Teresa put a dirty hand to her mouth to cover the gap from her lost front teeth. Her black eyes sparkled.
“Let’s try this again. We’ll do it scientifically this time. One step at a time.”
Grasping the edge of the net in a firm hand, Sarah rose up on tiptoe and swung her hips into the net. She gave a startled squawk as the hammock rolled high up in the air and dumped her on the floor.
Teresa came down on top of her, giggling helplessly. Childish snickers from the other hammock told Sarah that Ricci was getting as much enjoyment out of this as Teresa. Even Eduard was smiling, she saw when she sat up and shoved back the once-starched white headband that held her veil out of her eyes.
So was the mercenary. He leaned on one elbow, the floppy hat pushed to the back of his head. Even through the draped mosquito net, Sarah could see the crooked slash of white teeth that cut the darkness of his unshaven cheeks.
Sarah had perfected a lot of skills during her years as a Washington political hostess. One of the most valuable was a ripple of musical laughter that went a long way toward minimizing any social disaster. André had often told her that her ability to smile and shrug off domestic crises that would mortify other hostesses was among her most charming traits.
So the answering smile she gave the gringo began as a wel
l-learned, deliberate response to an embarrassing situation. But as her mouth curved, Sarah found relief from her fear and fatigue in the simple act. Her smile deepened.
For a moment, their eyes met, his gray and shadowed by black lashes, hers free of the fear that had haunted her for so many hours. They weren’t mercenary and nun, but simply a man and woman enjoying a ridiculous moment. He broke it off first. Still grinning, he lay down again and tugged the hat over his eyes.
Sarah dragged herself to her feet and plunked Teresa into the hammock. “It’s all yours, sweetheart.”
The little girl grabbed at her hand. “Sarita!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right here beside you.”
Gently disengaging her hand, Sarah pushed aside the mosquito netting draped over the stained, uninviting bedroll. She lifted the sleeping bag by one corner and shook it once, twice. Something fell out and scurried away between the stacked crates. Sarah gasped, then grabbed the other corner and shook the mat for all she was worth.
The man on the other bedroll grunted and rolled over on his side, his back to Sarah.
After a vigorous shaking, she laid the edges of the limp bedroll down and sat back on her heels, eyeing it distrustfully. When nothing moved under its surface and no hissing lump appeared, she smoothed it out with short, swift and very cautious pats.
“For Pete’s sake, will you lie down?”
Sarah threw his broad back an indignant look. Slowly, gingerly, she stretched out, then reached up to tug the mosquito netting back down. It settled around them both like a white cloud, enclosing them in an airy, strangely intimate cocoon. After a few moments, the exhaustion seeping through her bones caused her rigid muscles to relax. She dragged her sleeve across her face to wipe away the moisture generated by her exertions and closed her eyes, sure she’d be asleep within moments.
She was wrong.
As tired as she was, her body wouldn’t, couldn’t, slip into blessed semiconsciousness. Instead, an insidious need crept through her, stiffening her limbs and keeping her eyes wide open in the hazy light.
The boys’ breathing evened out. Little Teresa whistled once or twice through the gap in her front teeth, then snuggled down in the hammock and grew still.
Sarah stared up at the rusted tin roof. She listened to the scurry of forest mice scuttling up and down the walls in their never-ending search for insects. From a few feet away came the rumble of deep, sonorous breathing. Not a snore, exactly, but pretty darn close to it.
Desperately Sarah willed herself to ignore the sounds around her and go to sleep. She squeezed her eyes shut and began to count, as she’d done so often as a child, when her father had gone to some political fund-raiser or another and she’d lain awake in her big, flower-patterned bedroom, waiting for him to come home and read to her.
At two hundred and forty-seven, she gave up. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth, she rose up on her knees, then inched to her feet. She lifted her skirts and moved as quietly as possible across the hut.
She didn’t even hear him move. She was just bending toward an object near the wall when a hard hand spun her around. The veil whipped at her face, causing the headdress to tilt haphazardly to one side of her head.
“What the hell are you doing?” Suspicion blazed in his eyes and singed his low, furious voice. “I thought you said you didn’t know how to use a weapon.”
“I don’t!” Sarah gasped.
“Then why were you reaching for it?”
Sarah glanced down at the automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the backpack. “I wasn’t reaching for your precious weapon!”
“So what were you after, lady?”
No Sister Sarah this time. No crooked grin that coaxed an answering response from her. At this moment, he radiated a hard, cold authority that made Sarah gulp.
“Tell me,” he growled, giving her a shake.
The veil tilted farther over her ear, then fell off completely. He sucked in a quick breath, his narrowed eyes on her hair.
Sarah raised a hand defensively to the limp, sweat-slicked blond strands. “We…we don’t cut it anymore. We haven’t since Pope John’s Vatican Council.”
There’d been a Pope John. She was sure of it. And the Italian ambassador had talked at great length about a Vatican Council at one of the dinner parties Sarah had given for her father. She held her breath, waiting for the gringo’s response.
His flinty gaze shifted to her face. “So you don’t cut your hair anymore. That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing creeping around the hut.”
She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. She opened it again, but couldn’t force out the words.
“I’m fast running out of patience,” he warned softly, “and you don’t want to be around when I do.”
“I have to use the boot,” Sarah muttered through clenched teeth.
Chapter 4
She needed to use the boot!
Drawing in a deep breath, Jake ran through his options.
He could risk taking her outside to go downstream, as the other inhabitants of the camp did. Or he could escort her into the jungle, no doubt with a trail of interested spectators tagging along behind.
No, options one and two weren’t smart. He’d heard the murmurs among the men when Sister Sarah walked into camp. He’d caught the swift, slashing male assessment they’d given her when she glanced up at him, her eyes gemlike in a pale and dirty face.
Option three, he could let her use the damned boot.
What the hell? No doubt the acid from the kids’ urine had already eaten through the special lining and destroyed the satellite voice communications device concealed there. One of the other OMEGA agents, a former air force jock, had told Jake about a C-130 transport plane that had gone down in Vietnam. Seemed the effluent of the farm animals being evacuated with desperate villagers fleeing the Vietcong had destroyed the cables under the aircraft’s flooring. If urine could destroy the 130’s metal-and-wire cables, Jake’s transmitter-receiver was a goner by now. So was his boot, he decided wryly.
Releasing the sister’s arm, he stepped back. “Be my guest.”
Bright spots of color flaring in each cheek, she snatched up the rubber footwear. After a quick look around the hut, she marched behind a stack of crates.
Jake smiled grimly, wondering how he was going to explain this one to Maggie Sinclair—when, and if, he ever found a way to slip out of the camp and retrieve the backup transmitter he’d buried in a cranny of a towering strangler fig.
He settled back down on the bedroll and bent an arm under his head, thinking about the unexpected complication to his mission in the form of Sister Sarah Josepha. As he’d admitted earlier, he didn’t know a whole lot of nuns, but the few he’d seen here in Central America were sure different from little Sister Sarah. Most of them wore sensible work clothes and no longer covered their hair with veils. They didn’t drape themselves in old-fashioned, uncomfortable habits in an excess of zealous piety.
Although… Jake was forced to admit that none of the sisters he’d seen around these parts possessed quite the same combination of luminous eyes, tumbling white-gold hair and unconsciously seductive smile, either. At the memory of the way her smile had softened the angled planes of her face into a breathtaking beauty, he felt a slow, involuntary tightening low in his groin—followed immediately by a wave of self-disgust.
Maybe it wasn’t overzealousness that kept her in those shapeless robes, he thought wryly. Maybe Sister Sarah exhibited a whole lot of common sense by covering up her undeniably attractive attributes so that they wouldn’t distract her—or others—from the vocation she’d chosen.
Only the strategy wasn’t working. Not right at this moment, anyway. Not for Jake.
He’d been in the jungle too damned long, he decided grimly. He’d forgotten the basic tenets of civilized behavior. He had no business thinking the thoughts he was about the woman who emerged at that moment from behind the crates and moved quietly toward the mat next t
o his. Jake heard her give the bedroll a few cautious pats before she settled in.
He came awake an hour later with the swift, instant alertness that had saved his life more than once. His senses collected immediate impressions for his brain to process. Heat, humid and oppressive against his skin. The scent of his own sweat. The sound of shallow, regular breathing. The feel of a hand on his arm.
Jake glanced down at the small white hand that rested palm up against his sun-browned skin. Sister Sarah was a restless sleeper, he noted with a tight smile. She lay sprawled on her back, her face turned away. As he watched, she twitched a little and twisted her head toward him. He sucked in a swift breath at the pallor of her face under its sheen of sweat.
Well, hell. So much for common sense. That heavy black habit had to go, before Sarita succumbed to heatstroke. Jake had better find something more suitable for her to wear in this stifling hut.
He rolled off the mat with the lithe, noiseless movement that had become second nature to him and reached for the webbed belt that was always within reach. It settled around his hips with the familiarity of an old friend. The leather holster slapped against one thigh, the machete against the other. Clamping the hat down on his head, Jake left the shack.
Sarah awoke after a few hours’ of restless sleep, groggy and disoriented. She wasn’t at her best in the mornings—if it still was morning. Especially, she remembered slowly, when she’d spent most of the night tramping through the jungle.
She lay still, unwilling to move, unwilling to face what came next. Maybe if she just kept her eyes closed, she could convince herself she wasn’t lying in an airless little shack. If she didn’t breathe in too deeply, maybe she could keep the searing heat out of her lungs.
