The Heart of a Mercenary

by White, Loreth Anne

  She reached for his pack. “Here, let me help you off-load this.” He didn’t argue, which vaguely surprised—and concerned—her. He turned around, allowing her to help him shrug out of his gear without putting pressure on his shoulder joint.

  “You really should’ve let me carry more stuff.”

  “I’m fine.” He crouched down, untied the roll of canvas and nylon that was secured at the bottom of his pack. “Hammock,” he said as he flicked the roll with his good arm, sending it unraveling, the ropes flying. “Doubles as a decent ground cover.” He handed her a corner and she helped him spread it near the roots of a tree at the edge of the clearing. The shade here was dappled, the sunlight not too harsh.

  “Give me your shirt.” She held out her hand. “I’ll hang it in the sun.”

  He arched a brow, studied her. “This how you treated the kids in your ward?”

  “Kids were more cooperative.”

  He shrugged out of his flak jacket and undid his shirt buttons with one hand. “What made you become a pediatric nurse anyway, Sarah?”

  “How’d you know I was a pediatric nurse?”

  “It was in your file.”

  Reality intruded and with it a twinge of unease. She nodded. “I see. Well, I love children, always have.” She lifted her eyes, met his.

  He studied her carefully as he shrugged out of his one-sleeved shirt. “Something tells me you’re a sucker for the vulnerable, Sarah.” He handed her his damp gear. “You’re a born nurturer. It’s your strength.”

  “And weakness,” she muttered as she took his clothes. She hesitated, looking at his pants.

  A grin ghosted his lips. “I keep the pants. For now.” He sank down onto the hammock, leaned back heavily against the tree trunk and closed his eyes with a sigh.

  Sarah removed her own long-sleeved blouse and the thin cotton pants from under her skirt. She ventured out into the long gold grass and draped their clothes over a scrubby bush in direct sunlight. She was surprised to feel how dry his high-tech gear felt compared to her stuff. The heat burned down on the top of her head, her shoulders and the bare skin on her arms as she made her way back to him and the shade. She sat on the tarp next to him and removed her socks and shoes. She wiggled her toes in the warm air and sighed. “Feels good,” she said. “What about you, your boots?”

  “I’m good. Jungle gear. Breathable.”

  She frowned. He wasn’t relaxed enough to take his shoes off. He was still on guard. A niggle of unease skittered through her. She shrugged it off, pulled the first aid kit to her side, extracted a roll of bandages. “Okay, soldier, sit up and get that arm into position.”

  He did, his eyes locking on to hers. Up close they were the color of an evening sky slipping into velvet night. His breath was warm against her face, his scent masculine. Her heart skipped a beat, then kicked into a fast, light pace. She was suddenly very conscious of being so close to his naked chest, the dark hair that covered his powerful pecs, the glorious way it nestled between ridges of honed muscle and disappeared into the belt of his pants. Warmth unfurled low in her belly. She felt a little giddy.

  She told herself it was fatigue, dehydration, lack of food, oppressive heat. Or maybe it was just the dizzying, life-affirming thrill of having once again cheated death.

  Whatever it was, she hadn’t expected to feel wild sexual attraction out here in the jungle. She swallowed against the dryness in her mouth, looked away from his eyes and began to wrap the bandage around him. She noticed her hands were trembling slightly as she worked, and it had nothing to do with fear.

  “There. That’ll help keep it still.” She blew out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and made the mistake of looking back up into his eyes.

  They smoldered with a dangerous, dark electricity, and the air seemed to suddenly pulse with the heat of it. Sarah couldn’t speak. The mutual attraction was undeniable. And for a dizzying instant she felt as if they were poised on the knife edge of a torrent, just like he’d hung for a second at the brink of Eikona Falls. She feared what would happen if they were plunged into the depths of what swirled between them. In truth, she was flat-out terrified of feeling anything like this for a man as powerful as Hunter. She’d made that mistake before.

  And it had cost her everything.

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice low and husky.

  She jerked her mind back, swallowed once more. Then pinched his deltoid muscle. Hard.

  “Hey, I felt that.”

  “Good,” she said, and pinched him again, harder, this time on the back of his hand.

  “That, too. I’m beginning to think I wouldn’t want to get into a heavy tussle with you over taking my medicine.”

  She shook off the sensuous image that leaped into her mind, cleared her throat and checked his pulse at his wrist, and then at his elbow. “Looks like you’ll live another day.”

  He studied her, a wickedly playful light beginning to twinkle in his eyes. “So, nurse, just how am I going to get my shirt back on?”

  “What?”

  He jerked his chin toward the bandage she’d used to carefully strap his arm to his chest.

  She clapped her hand to her head and sank back against the tree, the heat of embarrassment warming her cheeks. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Where did you say you went to nursing school?”

  She began to laugh. It felt damn good. It released all the pent-up tension, the sexual heat.

  He touched her jaw. She stilled instantly. He traced her profile lightly with his fingertips. “Do you have any idea how gorgeous you are when you laugh like that?”

  She bit her lip, suddenly nervous. He’d put his attraction into words. It made it too real, something to be dealt with. She was afraid, not ready. And yet she was. She wanted him to touch her—wanted it with such a sudden deep and desperate need it overwhelmed her.

  It was as if he read her mind. He smiled, a genuine, warm, caring smile, and dropped his hand from her face, reached for his pack, fished in an outside pocket, took something out. “Here.” He held it toward her. “Reward for saving my ass back there.”

  She gaped. “Oh. My. God. Chocolate!”

  “Want some?”

  “Are you kidding?” She lunged for it.

  He jerked it just out of her reach, wiggled the chocolate bar in temptation. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Saving your butt again.”

  “That’ll do.” He handed it to her.

  She tore it open. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe you have chocolate. Hunter…I think I love you.”

  He stilled.

  Oops. What had she just said? She looked slowly up into his eyes.

  His face was dark. Unreadable. “You mean that?”

  Her heart began to palpitate, her palms grow moist. “I…I—” Lord, what was it she felt for him?

  His face cracked into a grin. “I’m kidding. You gonna share that? I want at least a third.”

  She moistened her lips and broke the soft chocolate bar in two, thankful for the task. She handed him half and popped a squishy square into her mouth.

  She closed her eyes, leaned back against the trunk and let it melt over her tongue. It tasted like heaven. “Mmm, this is so good. It’s the best chocolate ever.” She opened her eyes as sugar surged through her depleted system. “You know, the night I escaped the clinic, I was hunched up in the roots of that Bombax tree, in pitch darkness, petrified, not knowing what on earth to do next, and you know what I was thinking?”

  “What?”

  She broke off another square. “I was thinking about buying chocolate, in a mall. I was thinking the stores in Seattle would be getting in Halloween stuff by now. Can you believe that? I was staring death in the face, and all I could do was think about candy.”

  “The mind seeks comfort in strange ways.” He looked away from her over the gently swaying gold savannah grass, and his eyes grew distant. “Sometimes you have no control.” He snapped back from wherever his th
oughts had taken him. “And now? What’re you thinking now?”

  She stopped munching. “Now?”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “I…I’m just happy to be alive right now. I’m not really thinking about anything,” she lied. She could feel her face flush as she said it. She was a pathetic liar. But there was no way she was going to go near telling him what she was really thinking, about how damn attractive she found him, about how the way his hair disappeared into the belt of his pants made her want to melt from the inside out.

  “You’re not thinking about home now?”

  “I told you, I don’t have a home anymore.” She forced a smile and held up her last piece of chocolate. “Besides, I have everything I need right here.”

  “Everything?” The muscle at his jaw pulsed softly.

  She watched it, feeling her own pulse match his rhythm. She swallowed hard. He was doing the damnedest things to her body with a few words. She had to talk about something else, so she switched tables on him. “What’re you thinking?”

  “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking, Sarah.” His voice was husky as he said it.

  Her cheeks went hot. She flicked her eyes away but something delicious tingled low in her stomach.

  “Tell me about your ex,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “What happened? What did he do to you?”

  She stared at him. Her marital failure was none of his business. Or maybe it was. Maybe she’d made it so by her ridiculous outburst back near the Eikona River.

  He waited for her to answer. A bird called in the distant treetops, a long series of hoots, descending in scale and dying away to a single pitiful hoo. It was an eerie, lonely cry. A shiver chased over her hot skin. Maybe she needed to tell him, to share. Maybe she had to get this off her chest. Perhaps it would give her some sense of closure.

  She sucked in a breath. “Josh left me for another woman.” There, she’d said it. So why did it make her feel as if she’d just stripped off her clothes in front of Hunter and bared her body and soul? She waited, nervous, for his judgment, and at the same time hated herself for feeling this way. This was what Josh had done to her. His leaving her should not be a reflection on her worth as a woman. She shouldn’t feel that she would be somehow judged lacking by his actions.

  She knew all of that, but just couldn’t shed it. That sense of failure, of inferiority had become a part of who she was. And not being able to bear children hadn’t helped. Josh had used that against her, too. He’d abused her caring nature, used her every weakness to undermine her. And he’d done it so insidiously, and over so many years, that she’d finally integrated a sense of worthlessness.

  It had become a part of her psyche. This was what she had to shake. This was what she had to find a way to face down. She just wasn’t sure how. But she had a sense she’d begun. Finally. And it was this jungle and Hunter that were, in a perverse way, showing her she really did have the courage and strength inside to do it.

  He was studying her intently. She glanced self-consciously down at the chocolate wrapper in her hand, fiddled with the foil edges.

  “Why did he leave you?” he asked, the words so simple.

  “It’s…it’s complicated.”

  “Try me.”

  She looked up into Hunter’s eyes. How could she tell him the real reason? How could she tell this übermale that she was pathetic enough to have allowed this to happen to her? It was humiliating. It made her furious with herself.

  He hooked a knuckle under her jaw, made her look at him. “Sarah, talk to me.”

  “It…it was my fault. I should’ve walked out on him when he first started having affairs.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You have to know Josh to understand. He’s…he’s powerful. He had a way of controlling my emotions. He…made me feel…inadequate.”

  Flint hardened Hunter’s eyes. “Did he hurt you?”

  She tensed at the overt aggression in his tone. “No, not in the way you think. Not physically. Just emotionally.” She steeled herself. “Josh was…is a sociopath. He’s charismatic, incredibly charming when he wants to be, but he’s completely manipulative, ruthless in getting exactly what he wants out of a person.” She hesitated. “Now that I have some distance, I can see that he’d been abusing, manipulating me emotionally for years. I should’ve seen it coming. I should never have allowed it to get as far as it did.”

  The muscles in Hunter’s neck went stiff. She could almost feel the anger begin to vibrate off him. She had a sudden vision of Josh squaring off with Hunter, and there was no doubt in her mind who would win. Hunter McBride was a better man than her ex in every possible way.

  “Why did you marry him, Sarah?”

  Her chest went tight. Her eyes began to moisten. She didn’t want to think about Josh. She wanted to forget the past. “Hunter…I—I don’t really want to talk about it. I want to forget. I came here to forget.”

  He leaned forward. “But you can’t forget, can you, Sarah? It’s followed you. You can’t even talk about it without feeling shame. I can see it in your eyes.”

  She bit her lip, fiddled with the wrapper in her lap. “I know. You’re right.” She lifted her eyes to his. “How did a soldier become so deep?”

  “By making his own mistakes.” He covered her fidgeting hand with his. “So why did you marry him?”

  She sucked in another breath. “I told you, he can be a real charmer. We met soon after I got my first job at the children’s hospital. He’d just been transferred to Seattle and was in line for a big promotion.” She looked at the chocolate wrapper in her hand. “He’s a mergers and acquisitions giant. He literally swallows people and businesses for a living without blinking an eye, and I didn’t even see it, how mercenary he was, even back then. I totally fell for him. I loved him with all my heart, but now that I look back, I see that he probably never did love me. I simply fitted his needs at the time. Having a young, obedient trophy wife was just the kind of image he needed to cinch his big promotion. He got it, and he never looked back, just kept right on climbing. That…that was six years ago.” She hesitated. “Now he doesn’t need me anymore. He’s moved on to a beautiful younger woman with a famous name—a model who’s carrying his twins. It’s gotten him into the papers, the tabloids…just what he wanted.” Sarah paused, stared at the gold grass waving in the warm wind. “It’s really quite shocking to realize you’ve wasted so much of your life on someone who never once gave a damn. Men like him can’t care.”

  “Ah, I see. You were comparing him to me.”

  She whipped her eyes to his. “It’s not true, Hunter. You’re not the same. Josh would never have saved me over that canister. He would have let me die. You didn’t.” She looked right into his eyes. “I am so sorry I judged you. I…I’ve been burned, and that makes me…careful. I just don’t trust myself to make good judgments anymore.”

  He sat silent, his eyes glimmering, a powerful current pulsing through him—one she couldn’t identify.

  “What gave you the courage to finally leave him?”

  She liked the way he said that. It implied he believed she’d found some inner strength. But she hadn’t. “Josh left me, Hunter. He walked out the door the night I confronted him about his latest affair. He wasn’t even bothering to be discreet about it anymore.”

  “His affair with the model?”

  Sarah angrily sniffed back her emotion. “Yes. And you know how I found out about it? My friends didn’t tell me. They were embarrassed for me. They didn’t want to hurt me. But nothing could have hurt or humiliated me more than standing in that checkout line at the grocery store and seeing my husband’s face staring at me from the magazine racks—my husband with his arms around another woman, a very pregnant woman.”

  Bitter tears blurred her vision. Sarah scrunched the chocolate wrapper into a tight little ball in the palm of her hand. “I actually put my sunglasses on before I got to the register. What a fool. I mean, who w
as I kidding?” She gave a light, nervous laugh. “I bought the magazine and went straight to the store bathroom. I locked myself in and read about my husband and his lover and the babies they were having. I sat there until the store manager banged on the door. I…I went straight home, waited for Josh. I sat in a chair, watching the front door, numb, just waiting. He came in after 2:00 a.m., and when I confronted him, he looked at me as if I was a pathetic stray animal. And—and he told me I was an idiot for not having seen that our marriage was over long ago.” She stared at the balled chocolate wrapper in her hand. “My husband just turned and walked out that door, and I never saw him again. He sent his lawyer instead. I…I was such a fool, Hunter.”

  He grabbed her jaw, jerked her face to his. “Don’t you ever say that.” The ferocity in his voice startled her.

  “It’s not your fault, Sarah.”

  She wanted to thank him for saying that. She wanted to lean into him, to fold herself into his arms, to feel the radiating warmth of his solid chest, but she held back.

  “That man is a sick bastard who took advantage of your most generous quality, Sarah. People like him prey on people like you.” A raw anger glittered in Hunter’s eyes. “Any man, Sarah, any man who walks out on a woman like you knows zip about life.”

  That did it. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears erupted and spilled in a curtain down her face. He gathered her to his chest and held her firmly against him and she sobbed, until his bandage was wet with her tears.

  “Let it out,” he said softly, stroking her hair. “Let it go, Sarah. Let it all go.”

  She felt herself begin to relax. But just as she did, every muscle in his body stiffened.

  She shot her eyes up to his.

  They’d gone ice-cold, dangerous. His face had completely changed. He’d become the fearsome man she’d first seen back at the Shilongwe.

  Her heart began to pound. “What is it?”

  He lifted a finger to his lips. “Put your shoes on,” he whispered. “We’ve got company coming.”

  “What?”

  He shifted his eyes to the trees at their right. “From over there. Listen, the cuckoo.”