Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart Of The Warrior

by Lindsay McKenna

  Inca gave him a flat look, her mouth twitching. “Then what? If I am not bad, what am I?”

  “Human. A terribly vulnerable and beautiful human being…just like me. Like the rest of us….”

  Chapter 8

  “They are going to have many of their men injured or killed going through the swamp,” Inca said the next morning as she stood beside Roan on a hill that overlooked the thin, straggling column of men a good half mile away. They were well camouflaged by the rain forest. Luckily, the floor of the forest was clear of a lot of thick bushes and ferns, due to the fact that the triple canopy overhead prevented sunlight from reaching the ground. It made marching faster and easier.

  “The colonel is bullheaded,” he said, turning and looking at her. This morning he felt a change in Inca. Oh, it was nothing obvious, but Roan felt that she was much more at ease with him. It was because of the trust he was building with her. “I wish he’d listen to his son.”

  Snorting, Inca adjusted the sling of the rifle on her right shoulder. “Julian has more intelligence than his father ever will.”

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  With a shrug, Inca said, “He is a gentle person in a machine of war. He does not fit in it. I like his energy. He is a man of peace. My heart aches for him, for all he wants from his father. The colonel is lucky to have Julian. But he does not know that.”

  “You don’t find many men like that,” Roan said, partly teasing. “The peaceful type, that is.”

  “You are like that.”

  “Yeah?” He baited her with a growing grin. Just being next to her was making him feel happier than he had a right to be. Roan recalled that Sarah had made him feel that way, too. There was something magical about Inca. She was completely naive to the fact that she was a beautiful young woman. Not many of the men of the company had missed her beauty. Roan had seen them staring open-mouthed at her, like wolves salivating after an innocent lamb.

  Inca liked the warm smile he turned on her. “Sometimes I think you have been trained by the Jaguar Clan. You handle yourself, your energy, carefully. You do not give it away. You conserve it. You know when to use it and when not to.” She found herself wanting to reach out and touch Roan. That act was foreign to her, until now. He stood there in his fatigues, the shirt dampened with sweat and emphasizing his powerful chest and broad shoulders. Recalling his touch, Inca felt warmth stir in her lower body like sunlight warming the chill of the night. An ache centered in her heart as she lifted her gaze to his mouth, which was crooked with that slight, teasing smile. She liked the way Roan looked. His face was strong and uncompromising, like him. When he’d moved to her back and drawn his pistol to protect her from possible harm by the soldiers as she confronted the colonel, she’d been grateful. Not many men would stand their ground like that. Though badly outnumbered, he’d been good at his word; he had protected and cared for her when it counted. He could be trusted.

  She smiled a little as she watched the army column below. The men were slipping and falling on the damp, leaf-strewn rain forest floor. Inca wanted the colonel to make twenty miles a day, but the men of this company were too soft. They’d be lucky to make ten miles this first day.

  “With the way they are crawling along, the Valentinos will be well prepared for them when we finally make it to that valley.”

  Roan nodded. “The troops aren’t in good shape. It will take at least five days to toughen them up. We’ll lose a lot of time doing that.”

  Inca’s eyes flashed with anger. “And Colonel Marcellino said these were his best troops. Bah. My people would embarrass and shame them. The Indians are tough and have the kind of endurance it takes to move quickly through the forest.”

  “Well,” Roan sighed, his gaze brushing her upturned features, “we’ll just have to be patient with them. I’m more worried about what’s going to happen when we hit the edge of that swamp two days from now.”

  Giving the column a look of derision, Inca growled, “Marcellino is going to have many of his men injured. The swamp is nothing but predators waiting for food.”

  Roan reached out and briefly touched her shoulder. Instantly, he saw her features soften. It was split seconds before she rearranged her face so that he could not see her true feelings. “Do you want to move ahead of the column?”

  “Humph. They are many at the pace of a snail,” Inca complained as she started gingerly down the slope. “I think I will move ahead to where I think they will straggle to a stop at dusk. We need meat. I will sing a snake song and ask one of the snakes to give its life for us as a meal tonight.”

  Roan nodded. “You’ll find us, I’m sure.”

  She flashed him a grin as she trotted down the last stretch of slope to the forest floor below. “I will find you,” she promised, and took off at a slow jog, weaving among the trees.

  Roan smiled to himself. Inca moved with a bonelessness that defied description, her thick braid swinging between her shoulder blades. He thought he saw a black-and-gold jaguar for a moment, trotting near her side. When he blinked again, the image was gone, but Roan knew he wasn’t seeing things. His mother had been clairvoyant and he’d managed to inherit some of that gift himself.

  Moving along at a brisk walk, Roan opened the blouse of his fatigues, his chest shining with sweat. The humidity was high, and the cooling breeze felt good on his flesh. Planning on moving ahead and remaining with the point guards out in front of the column, he already missed Inca’s considerable presence. Yes, he liked her. A lot. More than he should. His heart blossomed with such fierce longing that it caught him by surprise. Inca was like a drug to his system, an addiction. Roan had thought his heart had died when Sarah left him. But that wasn’t so, he was discovering. And for the first time in two years, he felt hope. He felt like living once more, but squashed that feeling instantly. The thought of ever falling in love again terrified Roan. The fear of losing someone he loved held him in its icy clutches. He fought his feelings for Inca. He didn’t dare fall for her. She lived her life moment to moment. Hers was not a world where one was guaranteed to live to a ripe old age. And compared to Sarah’s love of climbing, Inca’s career was even more dangerous.

  Inca squatted down in front of the open fire. She had found Roan at dusk. He was in the midst of making sure the colonel’s column was getting set up for the coming night. As he left the company, she met him near one of the moundlike hills and led him to her chosen hiding spot for the night, in a grove of towering kapok trees. It was easy to hide among the huge, six-to-eight-foot tall, winglike roots. There were smaller trees nearby, and she’d already hung out two hammocks for them to sleep in.

  Just seeing Roan made her heart soar. Inca had found that as she traveled the rest of the day without Roan at her side, she had missed him more than she should. His quiet, powerful presence somehow made her feel more stable. Protected. And that scared her. In her panic, she had left him with the troops instead of staying with him. She was afraid of herself more than him, of the new and uneasy feelings she was now experiencing. No man had made her feel like he did, and Inca simply didn’t know what to do with that—or herself.

  Inca had called a snake to give its life so that they could eat. It had come and she had killed it, and after praying for the release of the spirit, she had skinned it and placed it on a spit. As it cooked, she looked across the fire at Roan. The shadows carved out every hard line in his angular, narrow face. “I thought about you a lot today after we split up,” she said. “It feels odd to me to work with someone.” She squarely met his blue eyes, which were hooded and thoughtful looking after she tossed the bombastic comment his way.

  “You’re used to working alone,” he agreed. “My job here is to be your partner.” Roan lifted his chin and looked down at the clearing where the Brazilian Army continued to set up camp for the night. They could see the company, but the men there could not see them.

  Snorting, Inca tried to ignore his deep, husky baritone voice. Fear ate at her. She decided to bluff hi
m, to scare him off. “I told you before—I was abandoned to die at birth and I will die alone. I work alone. My path is one of being alone.” But she knew, whether she liked it or not, she had felt a thrill race through her that Roan had chosen to be at her campsite and not remain with the colonel’s company. Pursing her full lips, she concentrated on keeping the four-foot-long snake turning so it would not burn in the low flames. She liked the warmth of the fire against her body as she worked near it. “I do not need you. Go back to the company. That is where you belong, with the other men.”

  Roan swallowed his shock. Where was this coming from? Until now, Inca had seemed happy with his presence. What had changed? Had he said something to her this morning? Roan wasn’t sure. Seeing the fear in Inca’s eyes, he realized she was pushing him away. If he didn’t have the directive from Morgan Trayhern, he’d respect her request, but leaving her alone was not an option. Roan had given Mike Houston his word to protect Inca, and he sure couldn’t do that if he was half a mile from her campsite at night. Clearing his throat, he said softly, “Everyone needs someone at some point in their life.”

  Inca scowled as she continued to deftly turn the meat over the fire. Her heart thudded with fear. Her bluff was not working. “That is not my experience. Jaguars, for the most part, live alone. The only time they see one of their own kind is during mating season, and they split shortly thereafter. The female jaguar goes through her pregnancy and birthing alone, and raises her cubs—alone.” She lifted her head and glared across the fire at Roan. “I do not need a partner to do what I do here in Amazonia.”

  “Because?”

  Anger riffled through Inca. The expression on Roan’s face told her he wasn’t going to budge on this issue. Her black brows dipped. “You have an annoying habit of asking too many questions.”

  “How else am I to know how you feel?” Roan decided to meet her head-on. He found himself unwilling to give up her hard-earned trust so easily.

  “I am not used to showing my feelings to anyone.” She raised her voice to a low, warning growl. Usually, such an action was enough to scare off even the bravest of men. Inca recalled vividly how Roan had found her weeping yesterday and how his touch had been soothing and healing to her. When she looked up again, she saw his blue eyes had softened with interest—in her. That set her back two paces and she felt panicky inside. Roan was not scared off like the male idiots she’d had the sorry misfortune to encounter thus far in her life. And maybe that was the problem: Roan Walker was not the usual male she was used to dealing with. That thought was highly unsettling.

  “I’m not either, so I know how you feel,” Roan murmured. “Sometimes, when we’re in so much pain, we need another person there just to hold us, rock us and let us know that we’re loved, anyway, despite how we’re feeling.” Love? Where had that word come from? Reaching out, Roan placed two more small sticks of wood on the fire. Light and shadows danced across her pain-filled face. A flash of annoyance and then fear laced with curiosity haunted her lovely willow-green eyes. He smiled to himself. Roan felt her powerful and intense curiosity in him as a man. He sensed her uneasiness around him and also her yearning.

  More than anything, Roan needed to continue to cultivate her trust of him. Unless he could keep her trust, she would do as she damned well pleased and would leave him behind in an instant—which was exactly what Mike Houston and Morgan Trayhern didn’t want to happen. Especially with that trigger-happy Brazilian colonel looking for Inca’s head on a platter and the multimillion dollar reward he’d collect once he had it. And then the colonel would have his revenge for his eldest son’s death at Inca’s hands. No, it was important Roan be able to act as her shield—another set of eyes and ears to keep danger at bay, and Inca safe.

  The snake meat began to sizzle and pop as the juices leaked out. With a swipe of her index finger, Inca quickly began to catch them before they fell into the fire. Each time she put her finger into her mouth and sucked on it, making a growling sound of pleasure.

  “This is good….”

  Roan smiled a little, enjoying her obvious enjoyment of such small but important things in her life. “So tell me,” he began conversationally as he watched her sit back on her heels and continue to expertly turn the meat, “why do you distrust men so much?”

  Inca laughed harshly. “Why should I trust them? Many of them are pigs. Brazilian men think they own their wives like slaves.” She glared up at him. “No man owns a woman. No man has the right to slap or strike a woman or child, and yet they do it all the time in Brazil. A woman cannot speak up. If she risks it, her husband can strike her. If she so much as looks at another man, the husband, by law, has the right to murder her on the spot. Of course, any married man is allowed to have all the affairs he wants without any reprisal. To other men, he has machismo. Pah.” Her voice deepened to a snarl. “I see nothing good in that kind of man. All they can do is dominate or destroy children and women. I will not be touched by them. I will not allow one to think that he can so much as lift a hand in my direction. I will not allow any man to dictate what I should or should not say. And if I want to look at a man, that is my right to do so, for the men here stare at women all the time.”

  “That’s called a double standard in North American.”

  Curling her upper lip, she rasped, “Call it what you want. Men like that mean destruction. They manipulate others, and they want power over someone else. I see it all the time. I walk through one of my villages, and I see what drug dealers have done to those who will not bend to their threats and violence. I see children dead. I see women shot in the head because they refuse to give these men their bodies in payment for whatever they need.”

  “That’s not right,” Roan agreed quietly. He heard her stridency, saw the rage in her eyes. It was righteous rage, he acknowledged. And while he was a stranger to Brazil, he had heard of the laws condoning the shooting of a wife who looked at another man. And he’d also heard from Mike Houston that husbands here often had a mistress on the side, as a matter of course.

  “Many men are not right.” She pointed to her breasts beneath the thin olive-green tank top she wore. Earlier, she’d taken off her bandoliers and hung them on a low branch nearby. “All they can do is stare here—” she jabbed at her breasts “—and slobber like dogs in heat. You would think they had never seen a woman’s breasts before! Their tongues hang out. It is disgusting! Yesterday, the soldiers stared at me when I walked into camp to challenge Colonel Marcellino.”

  Raising his brows, Roan nodded. With the bandoliers of ammo set aside, he had to admit that the thin cotton did outline her small, firm breasts beautifully.

  “I have watched you,” Inca said, slowly rising to her full height, the skewer in hand. “And not once have you stared at my breasts like they always do. Why not?”

  Chuckling to himself, Roan reveled in Inca’s naive honesty. He watched as she walked over to her pack. There was an old, beat-up tin plate beside it. She squatted down and, sliding the huge knife from its scabbard at her hip, cut the meat into segments and removed them from the skewer. Putting the skewer aside, she picked up the plate and stood up.

  “Well?” she demanded as she walked back to him, “why do you not stare at me like they do?”

  Roan nodded his thanks as she set the tin plate between them. Inca squatted nearby and quickly picked up a steaming hot chunk of meat with her fingers. There was such a natural grace to her. She was a wild thing, more animal than woman with that feral glint in her eyes.

  Reaching for a piece of the roast white meat, he murmured, “Where I come from, it’s impolite to stare at a woman like that.”

  “Impolite?” Inca exploded with laughter, her lips pulling away from her strong, white teeth. “Rude! Piglike! Even in nature—” she swept her arm dramatically around the jungle that enclosed them “—male pigs do not salivate like that over a female pig!”

  Roan looked at her as he popped a piece of meat into his mouth. It tasted good, almost like chicken, he thoug
ht as he relaxed and watched the firelight lovingly caress her profile. Her hair was frayed and it softened the angularity of her thin, high cheekbones. She was more sinew and bone than flesh. There was no fat whatsoever on Inca. She was slender like a willow, and each hand or finger movement she made reminded him of a ballet dancer.

  “So the men from your tribe do not stare at a woman’s breasts?”

  He shook his head and took a second chunk of snake meat from the plate. “Let’s just say that men of my nation consider women their equals in every way. They aren’t…” he paused, searching for the right words “…sexual objects to be stared at, abused or hurt in any way.”

  She gave him a sizzling sidelong look. “Pity that you cannot teach these Brazilian soldiers a thing or two! I would just as soon put a boot between their legs when they stare and slobber like that, to remind them of the manners they do not possess.”

  “Try and refrain from that,” Roan suggested dryly, hiding a grin desperately trying to tug at one corner of his mouth. “We need their cooperation. I can’t have you injuring them like that. We wouldn’t make twenty miles a day in this jungle if you did.”

  Throwing back her head, Inca laughed deeply, the juice of the meat glistening along her lower lip. With the back of her hand, she wiped her mouth clean. “These men, with kicks between their legs or not, will never make ten miles a day. They are out of shape. Unfit weaklings.”

  Roan didn’t disagree. “You’re right. We’ll be lucky to make ten miles a day until they get their legs under them.”