Just a Kiss Away

by Jill Barnett

  “I’m tired of walking.” She sagged back and raised a limp hand to her brow, absolutely sure she was gonna get a headache any minute. “Can’t we just sit here a spell?”

  “No.” He extended his hand. “Get up.”

  Lollie sighed twice, let him help her up, then proceeded to dust the leaves off her fanny. By the time she’d finished and had scratched the bites on her arms, Sam had disappeared into the jungle at what must have been almost a full run. She sighed for strength and stumbled off after him.

  Over the last two miserable, horrid days, trailing along behind Sam the Tireless, she’d had nothing to do but walk. Every time she’d tried to sing he threatened to gag her again. She’d tried to talk to him. Sometimes he answered her, sometimes he grunted, and usually he ignored her. She’d had nothing to do but scratch and feel sorry for herself, which wasn’t too difficult when she was forced to slog through clinging brown mud and to tramp through jungle that scratched her exposed skin and served as a breeding ground for every creepy critter imaginable.

  But the nights were the worst. One night they’d slept on a dirty moss-covered rock ledge with three feet separating them. She’d been on the inside, forced to lie there in the dark, smelling the pungent stink of the moss and listening to the foreign sounds—rustles, hums, twitters, buzzes—and wondering what gawdforsaken creature made those sounds.

  The pack made a perfect pillow, so he’d taken it, leaving her to fall asleep on one mosquito-ravaged arm. She’d tried to talk to him. He told her to shut up and go to sleep. She didn’t hear another sound from him until he kicked her—well, prodded her—awake the next morning.

  The next night there were no rock ledges, so they’d slept against a tree. At least Sam had slept; she hadn’t. Which didn’t make today any easier to deal with. She was bone tired. Even the mosquitoes knew it, she thought as she whacked those stupid palm fronds and a swarm of mosquitoes out of her face. She’d stumbled over at least a mile of rock beds with jagged black lava that had jabbed into the soles of her shoes and cut her hands when she fell. After that she’d had no trouble shifting the blame for her situation.

  Taking a determined step, she intended to tell Sam just how miserable she was. She kept her eyes on his back instead of on the terrain, and her foot slammed into a rock—a slippery rock. She fell. Struggling to her sore knees, she looked up, expecting Sam’s help. He hadn’t even noticed. She watched his broad, damp, monstrous back move through the jungle ahead of her as if he were just a strolling on a Sunday. She stood up and stormed after him. This was all his fault.

  She was miserable, bruised, and so tired, and she needed to take that misery out on someone, or something. After all, she had to tell someone. There was nothing worse than being miserable and having no one to tell about it. She wasn’t strong like Joan of Arc or Spartacus.

  If Lollie had to play the role of martyr, the world was gonna know it.

  Trudging through a deep sticky pool of mud, she glared at Sam’s big back, trying to catch up with him so she could give him a piece of her mind. A small rational part of her knew she wasn’t being fair, but neither was her situation fair. She was here, stuck with him just like he was stuck with her. And right now fairness wasn’t foremost on her mind. Lollie wanted to be home, clean, and riding in a comfortable carriage under the wild oaks instead of plodding like a drudge mule over this humid, sticky island.

  The mudhole widened and deepened as they neared its rim. Sam was still a few yards ahead. He reached the far side of the pool first and pushed himself up and out. She stood there, forced by her circumstances to look way up at him.

  It was not a good position for griping. She decided it would be more appropriate to discuss this after he helped her out.

  He turned to face her. “Give me your hands and dig your feet into the side of the mudhole. From this angle, I need some leverage to help pull you out.”

  She wiped the filthy hair out of her face and placed her hands in his.

  “Can you feel the small outcropping of the rocks on the side?”

  She moved her right foot around until she felt the hardness of the rock. She nodded.

  “Good. Now tell me when your foot’s on it. I’ll pull up and you push up at the same time with your foot. Understand?”

  “Uh-huh.” She stepped on a shallow ridge in the rock. “Okay, pull.”

  Sam pulled up. She pushed up. Her shoe slipped, and she panicked, feeling the loss of her balance. Naturally, she let go of him and grabbed the side of the hole.

  She felt the wind of his body sailing over her.

  She heard the splash and winced.

  Very slowly she turned around.

  His dark head broke the surface, then the intimidating wall of his shoulders. He loomed in front of her like some huge angry monster, mud dripping from his face and head and eye patch. The lethal way he glared at her made her wish the mud had hidden his good eye, too.

  If looks could kill, she’d be dead. If eyes could burn fire, she’d be ashes. If she knew what was good for her, she’d be long gone.

  “My shoe slipped,” she explained, having a feeling that he didn’t really want an explanation. He wanted violence. His hands reached out.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, gritting her teeth and waiting.

  His large hands closed tightly around her waist, spanning it. He lifted her out of the mudhole, and set her none too gently on the rock rim. The moment he let go, she scooted backward fast.

  He was out before she could blink, a muddy giant towering over her. With purpose, he bent down and jerked off her shoes then rammed one of them under his arm. He gripped the other shoe in one hand and grabbed the small, squat Louis XV heel in the other. Then he twisted so hard Lollie could hear it crack.

  “What’re you doing to my shoes?” She scrambled up, trying to grab them.

  “Pretending they’re your neck.” He wrenched the heel off and tossed it over his shoulder, then did the same to her other shoe. He shoved the mangled shoes in her face.

  She looked at them, sniffing back her miserable tears. Her rosettes were gone, she’d lost those somewhere along the trail, and now he’d pulled the heels off, too. It didn’t matter that the shoes had been ruined days before. They symbolized her whole wretched state.

  “If you start blubbering again I swear to God I’ll leave you here.” Sam looked as if he could breathe fire.

  She sniffed. “I’m hungry. I want to go home. I want a bath.”

  “I want a muzzle,” he muttered.

  She looked up at him, wiping the tears from her eyes. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To muzzle me like some cur.” She stared down at her dress. Nothing was pink or white. It was brown from the mud and green from the plant stains. She touched her ratty hair. “I must look like some mongrel dog.”

  “Yeah, you do, maybe worse.” He rolled his eyes as if this were some joke and nudged her shoes with his rifle. “Now put those on, Rover, and let’s go for another walk.”

  She didn’t even think. The second he called her Rover she lost the ability to think. She threw the shoes right at his smirking face.

  He caught one; the other sailed over his right shoulder. One look at his face and she knew she’d gone too far. He dropped the rifle, shrugged out of the pack, and stalked toward her.

  She stepped back, holding her hands out. “Don’t you touch me!”

  He pulled out that huge, sharp knife he called a machete and kept walking toward her.

  She screamed and spun around to run. He grabbed her dress, twisted it, and pinned her against a tree trunk. His hard, anger-tight face was barely an inch away from hers. Their stares locked, hers frightened, his angry.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, throwing her arms out to the sides in surrender. “Go ahead, kill me! I want to die!”

  Nothing happened, but he didn’t move, either. Then she felt the very tip of the knife press against her neck.

  “You, Miss Lah-Roo, are a big pain in the ass, and I’m putting up with you
only because I have no choice. I’m taking you to that camp because I have to. But don’t press your luck. If you think you’re miserable now, just push me some more and I’ll teach you all about misery.”

  Her eyes shot open.

  With one quick slice of the knife, he cut the lace off her dress.

  She gasped.

  “How would you like to walk through the jungle naked?” She swallowed.

  He grabbed a wad of her skirt in a fist and cut it the way a cook lops off the top of a carrot. He dropped the skirt, and it fell in jagged tatters that barely covered her skinned knees.

  After eyeing her from head to foot, he lifted one welt-reddened arm and spoke, his voice deep, calm, and certain. “The mosquitoes will have a feast on all that fine aristocratic white skin.”

  He wouldn’t cut off all her clothes, she reasoned. His face said he would.

  He raised the knife again, letting the tip touch the seam between her breasts. “There are palm trees here with leaves so sharp they can cut through your skin faster than a machete.”

  He pressed the knife a bit closer. She felt the seam threads separate.

  “Want to test me?”

  Scared enough to spit, she shook her head.

  “Then put those shoes on, start walking, and shut that damn whiny mouth.” He released her, then stood back and bellowed, “Now!”

  She’d never moved so fast in her life. She grabbed one shoe and scurried over to the other, lying near a copse of oleander, where she worked her muddy foot into one flat shoe. It was the wrong foot. She slipped her foot out and glanced up.

  Machete still in his white-knuckled hand, he took one catlike step toward her. “You have ten seconds. One . . .”

  She grabbed a branch and rammed the shoe onto her foot.

  “Four . . .”

  She tried to work her foot into the other one, keeping a death grip on the oleander branches. She was in such a hurry that the shoe slipped from her hand. Panicked, she bent down, never taking her wary eyes off him.

  “Six . . .”

  She rammed the shoe on so hard that her toes cracked. “Eight . . .”

  Her heel wouldn’t slide in, so she used a finger as a shoehorn. The shoe slid on, just as he pointed the knife at her.

  “Ten. Move!”

  She did move, and fast.

  Lollie plopped down on a rock and hung her pounding head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face in a heavy, dirty blond knot.

  It smelled. She smelled. She ached, and she was hungry. A wee part of her still waited to wake up and find out that this was all a bad dream. She looked around her. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.

  Closing her eyes, she buried her palms into her pounding, burning eye sockets. At least there was one good thing: Sam the Tireless had finally given her a rest, telling her not to move while he went to look for Gawd only knew what.

  Imagine . . . telling her to stay there as if she would just take off through the wild, primitive, horrid, gawdforsaken jungle as easily as if she daily changed water to wine. She wished she could. A little wine would taste good right now. She licked her lips, wishing for the taste of something besides water.

  For the hundredth time she wished she were a man. A man would have known what to do. Her skills would have been in survival instead of etiquette—something that was about as useful here as burning green wood. Boys were raised with freedom that girls weren’t given. Boys could ride and shoot and go places alone. They could swim. But girls had to do what was socially correct.

  When they grew up things only got worse. Men could eat all they wanted. Women had to take small bites and leave most of the food behind. She wondered who came up with that foolish rule. Probably some hungry man.

  Many times she’d watched her brothers eat enough ham to make them snort while she had nibbled politely on two or three small bites. She’d really wanted to eat twice as much as they did, and right here and now she was hungry enough to do it.

  She rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  Sam thrashed through the brush behind her. She knew it was Sam. She could smell him. She didn’t bother to look up. It took too much energy.

  “What’s the matter now?” he asked, squatting down in front of her.

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “Yeah, the first time’s always the worst.”

  She ignored him. She was too tired, too weak, and too hungry to do anything else.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Still not looking, she whipped her hand out, expecting to feel the dried leather he’d been giving her to eat. She was right hungry enough now to eat it, or at least to try.

  Like pearls from a strand, small, plump, round berries filled her damp palm. She stared at them as if they were flawless jewels. To her stomach they were even more valuable.

  “Oh, sweet heaven and Lord above! Food . . . real food! Oh, thank you. Thank you.” She popped five into her mouth before she remembered Madame Devereaux’s many lectures on manners and excess. She chewed anyway. She was tired of being a lady. Besides, Madame Devereaux was never stuck in a tropical jungle with a one-eyed human locomotive.

  The locomotive spoke. “Go easy on those. It’s not good for you to eat too many.”

  They tasted soooo good. She popped some more in her mouth, and the flavor almost brought tears to her eyes. She rolled the rest of them around in her hand. They were different from any berries she’d ever seen. The skin was as tight and red as that of a hollyberry, but the center tasted as juicy and sweet as the plump spring blueberries from home.

  She swallowed, slowly, savoring the flavor, then opened her eyes to meet Sam’s stare.

  “Better?” he said. Then his gaze left her face and leisurely drifted down her body.

  She felt a warm flush of embarrassment, realizing what she must have looked like while eating those berries, so she averted her eyes.

  “Time to move on, Lollipop.” He stood then, and she could hear him unscrew the canteen cap. “Want some more water?”

  “No, thank you. The berries were enough.” She licked her moist lips as she moved in behind him. The flavor of the berries still stained them. Only a fool would want to dilute the sweet flavor that remained by drinking water. She wanted to savor their taste for as long as she could.

  He hadn’t moved, and she could still feel the heat of his gaze. She got up, her dignity still tarnished enough that she couldn’t look at him so she made another big to-do over brushing the leaves and wrinkles from her muddy rag of a dress.

  She could almost feel his smile as he finally walked past her, heading back into the jungle. It seemed that she was Sam Forester’s source of entertainment. A few minutes earlier that would have bothered her, but now, with those luscious berries on her lips and in her shriveled stomach, she didn’t mind as much. Let him laugh at her. A LaRue, of the Belvedere LaRues of Hickory House, Calhoun Industries, and Beechtree Farms, was certainly above letting him get to her, especially when she wasn’t hungry anymore.

  She tramped along behind him, and a few minutes later she was as bored as usual with the same old green surroundings, so she ventured into the realm of conversation with Sam Forrester. “Where’d you get those berries?”

  “They grow in the high jungle, which is what we’re in now.” He stopped and waited for her to reach his side. “See those deep purple orchids?”

  She followed his pointing finger to where bushels of lush orchids, thicker than azaleas at Easter, lined the narrow trail.

  “The berry vines twine around those plants. If you look closely you’ll see the small berries beneath the flowers.”

  She walked past him and over to one of the plants. She lifted the flower and there, hanging in small clusters, were those delightful berries. She grabbed a few and popped them into her mouth, smiling as she turned back to him.

  “Don’t eat too many of those,” he warned.

  She nodded, much more concerned with the incredibly sweet flavor of the berries. They were so good!


  He shook his head and moved on. She turned to follow but stopped, turning back to the plant and grabbing a few more handfuls of the berries. Food for the road. Then she hurried to catch up with him, popping berries into her mouth whenever he wasn’t looking.

  The fruit perked her up, and with renewed spirit she followed him, watching him hack his way through more bamboo. Each firm stroke of his machete sent the bamboo falling to the ground like pickup sticks.

  But she wasn’t really looking at the knife. She was watching Sam Forester’s massive body.

  His brawny arm sliced through the air with the power of a guillotine, the blade severing anything in its path. He raised his knife high again, and she watched, noticing how his arm muscles tightened from elbow to wrist so that she could see the outline of his veins, even through the thick black hair on his tanned forearm.

  She ate some more fruit—addictive little devils—and her gaze moved to his upper arm, where his shirtsleeve was rolled high. Sam’s arm was as big as her thigh, but her thigh was pale and perhaps a little soft. She poked it and felt her finger sink a bit. His arm wasn’t soft, though. It was tanned and big and so solid that the muscles showed whenever he moved it.

  Strange how she’d never noticed her brothers’ muscles. She ate another handful of berries while she pondered that thought. Jeffrey was almost as tall as Sam, but not as brawny. Harlan was long and lean, like Harrison. Leland and Jedidiah were shorter than Sam but almost as broad. She could never remember having any interest in their backs.

  Sam’s, however, was really something to see in action. The muscles tightened across his back and bulged beneath his wet shirt. It rippled and swelled into hard, huge knots of muscle, and she had a sudden urge to reach out and touch him just to see if muscle and skin could be that solid.

  She dug into the deep pocket of her dress and felt around for some more berries. She’d eaten them all. She judged his distance. He was only a little bit ahead of her now, so she ran over to another orchid bush, plucked off as many handfuls of fruit as she dared, then hurried back to follow him again.