by Jane Graves
He gave her arms and fingers the same treatment, then placed his palms against her rib cage, pressing gently. “How about here? Anything hurt?”
“No. Just sore. Bruises and stuff.”
“The plane crash.”
“Yes.”
“Have you gotten much sleep?”
“No,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Because they’re after you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she murmured, then felt a jolt of panic. She thought she heard a lilt of disbelief in his voice, a patronizing tone that told her he still wasn’t completely sure she was in possession of all her marbles. She grasped his arm.
“You haven’t told anyone where I am, have you?”
“Only my brothers, and they’re not telling anyone. You’re safe. But sooner or later you probably need to get to a doctor.”
She sat up suddenly, every muscle screaming with pain. “Didn’t you hear what I told you on the phone? He’s out to kill me!”
“Take it easy, okay?” he said, easing her back down again. “I hear you. We’re not going anywhere right now. Are there any other doctors in Santa Rios besides Douglas?”
“No. The clinic is all there is. That’s why it’s here. Because this is the place that needed it the most. But Robert Douglas is not what he seems to be. I swear he’s not. You have to believe me. If he knows I’m alive, he’ll kill me!”
She wanted to shout, but her voice came out in a raspy whisper. She sounded crazy. He was going to think she was delusional. He was going to drag her into town, take her to the clinic, and if he did . . .
“They already shot at me after the crash.” She dug her fingers into his arm. “They had machine guns. Machine guns!”
She was rambling like a madwoman, her voice slurring worse than the time she’d done a dozen tequila shots in high school and passed out. She tried to clear her throat, but she coughed instead. Weakness overtook her and she could barely muster up the energy to talk again. Did he understand? Did he understand how much danger she was in?
“Just go to sleep,” he told her.
“No. I can’t sleep. I can’t.”
“You need sleep, Lisa. We’ll talk again when you wake up.”
“Promise me,” she said weakly. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone that I’m alive.”
“Lisa—”
“Promise.”
“Of course. I promise.”
“But if they come—”
“I’ll protect you. Just sleep.”
She stared up at him, still amazed that he was here. In spite of the chaos that ruled her mind right now, still she remembered with startling clarity that day so long ago that she’d looked into those dark eyes and imagined a thousand more tomorrows filled with the sight of him.
“Just sleep,” he repeated.
His voice was quiet, hypnotic, and suddenly she felt as if a hundred pounds of pressure were being exerted on each of her eyelids. She had no doubt that she was only one step away from a well-placed bullet if Robert should find out she was still alive, so she should still be afraid, still be on her guard. Every shred of her being was geared toward standing up for herself, taking no crap, defending her own life. She felt driven to stay awake. Needed to stay awake. But with Dave here . . .
I’ll protect you.
For the first time since this whole thing began, her pulse returned to normal, her muscles relaxed, and her jangled nerves quieted to a sleepy lull. He told her she was safe, and she believed him.
And she slept.
When Dave passed through the distasteful little community of Santa Rios, swerving his way up the potholed road to the abandoned mining camp, he’d had a hunch the situation wasn’t going to be pretty, but he hadn’t expected this.
He hadn’t expected to find Lisa hiding out in the trees, then running from him like a cornered animal. He hadn’t expected the crazed expression of fear in her eyes. And he hadn’t expected her to look as if she’d been to hell and back through a sewer pipe. Three times.
He sat on the bunk across from her, his back against the wall, shining the flashlight in such a way that allowed him to watch her but didn’t disturb her sleep. She wore a pair of jeans, boots, and a white sweatshirt with a Dallas Cowboys logo over the left breast. All were splattered with mud and grime, as if she’d gotten wet, then rolled around in the dirt. Her reddish-blond hair stuck out in ten different directions like a stray kitten caught in the rain. Various minor scrapes and cuts marred her arms and face, and on her forehead was a bruise that spanned two or three inches and wrapped around to her temple, black and purple in the middle, ringed by pale yellow, with a deep scrape in the center crusted with dried blood.
The good news was that he’d seen her pupils reacting equally to light. His meager emergency medical training told him that was a good sign in favor of no neurological damage and probably no internal bleeding resulting from her bump on the head. Considering she’d been in a plane crash, she’d come away relatively unscathed.
It had taken her approximately three seconds to fall asleep once she closed her eyes. No wonder. It was probably the first real sleep she’d had since the accident. Since she didn’t seem to have any significant injuries outside of the whack she’d taken to the forehead, he guessed that she was just completely exhausted from lack of food and water and from the effort it took to crawl away from that crash, along with the tension that came from believing that somebody was out to kill her.
That was the question he’d pay a thousand dollars for an answer to right about now. Did somebody actually want her dead?
He knew for a fact that if circumstances were right, the human mind could take some strange detours. He’d once helped pull a guy out of a wrecked 18-wheeler who had a bump on his head and thought he was being abducted by aliens. Dave had been reasonably sure that no aliens had been spotted in the area. He’d once cornered an escaped psych patient in the produce section of a grocery store who was absolutely certain he was Jesus Christ, and Dave hadn’t been the least bit inclined to phone the pope to alert him of the Second Coming. Why, then, would he take this outlandish story of hers seriously?
Trouble was, no matter how outlandish it seemed, he just didn’t know the truth, and he had no intention of going anywhere until he did. But he was unlikely to get the truth by continuing to question her when she was half out of her mind from lack of sleep. Until she woke, he hoped with a newly acquired grip on herself, he was stuck here.
He grabbed a bottle of water out of his bag and took a drink, then smacked the lid down again, thinking about how Alex and John had gone berserk when he told them he was coming here. Dave had ended up telling them that they could flip out all they wanted to, but when the dust settled he was still going to Mexico. Eventually they’d backed off. John had taken Ashley, and Dave had hit the road for Dallas, barely catching a 10:15 flight out of DFW to Monterrey.
It did feel more than a little surreal that he’d ended up in this godforsaken place, staring at a woman he’d thought he’d never see again. A woman he’d thought was dead. A woman who, even though she was a wreck right now, he couldn’t take his eyes off of. Lisa Merrick was imprinted on his brain to represent all things hot, sexy, and dangerous. Even now, just looking at her made his heart pick up its pace and his mouth go dry.
At age eighteen, she’d been a volatile, defensive, hard-edged girl who’d seen more of the seamy side of life than a woman three times her age ever should have. At maybe fivefoot-four, there wasn’t much of her, but he pitied the poor person who underestimated her.
She’d matured physically, her shapely girl’s body becoming lush and womanly. She wasn’t dressed nearly as provocatively as she’d been known to back then, but still her sweatshirt outlined her breasts in a way that dared him to stare. They rose and fell rhythmically with every breath she took, and for a long time he held the flashlight steady, not even bothering to try to drag his gaze away.
He remembered a time in high school when he’d seen her
on the back of Derek Brody’s motorcycle, wearing a crop top so short that a simple lift of her arms left little to the imagination. And as she rode that motorcycle behind that spikehaired, leather-clad, silver-studded son of a bitch she called a boyfriend, she’d looped her arms around his waist and pressed those breasts against his back, and to this day Dave still remembered the stark envy that had rolled through him at that moment.
Consequently, when Lisa slid into the seat beside him the first day of shop class in the second semester of their senior year his brain had instantly fallen to his crotch and stayed there for the remainder of the hour. Right off the bat, she gave him a blatant, protracted, up-and-down stare, as if she was picturing what he looked like naked, then spent most of the class period crossing and uncrossing her legs, displayed at their most spectacular in a pair of cutoff shorts that couldn’t possibly have passed the dress code. But few people messed with Lisa Merrick, including Mr. Pennington, the vice principal. Once Dave had seen her walk past him, and Pennington’s gaze had slid right down the curve of her back and landed dead center on her ass. Looking back over her shoulder, Lisa had winked at him. One wink, and the poor bastard had fallen apart. His squinty little eyes had flown wide open, his pasty face had turned six shades of red, and he’d stumbled back to his office as if he’d been kicked in the groin.
As the teacher droned on and on about engine overhaul, Dave leaned away from Lisa, trying to put as much distance between them as he could. But still he could feel her next to him, shifting and breathing and running the eraser of her pencil back and forth across her lower lip. He pretended to focus on what the teacher was saying, all the while thinking about Lisa’s lips and just how adept she might be in the use of them. Then he thought about how Carla would be waiting for him after class. If she’d had any idea what was going on in his mind right then, she’d have broken down and cried.
At the end of the hour, the teacher told them to pair up for a project they were starting the next day, and Dave hadn’t moved quickly enough. When the shuffle was over, only two people were left without partners.
Shit.
Lisa turned and looked him right in the eye. “Well, DeMarco, looks like you’re stuck with me. You got a problem with that?”
She might as well have drawn a line across the greasy shop floor and dared him to step over it.
“Of course not. What makes you think I’d have a problem with it?”
“Body language, baby. If you lean any farther away from me, you’re going to fall right out of that chair.”
He instantly sat up straight, only to have her turn away with an amused shake of her head. She stood up and slid her backpack over her shoulder, giving him another one of those brazen up-and-down stares, accompanied by a mocking smile.
“I’ll be counting the hours until tomorrow,” she murmured, with a sexual lilt to her voice that would have put Madonna to shame. She walked away, her backpack bouncing against her hip. After half a dozen strides, she glanced back over her shoulder and caught him watching her. She smiled knowingly, then slipped out the door.
Damn. Pennington wasn’t the only idiot around there who couldn’t keep his eyeballs in his head. Why couldn’t he have been looking at anything else at that moment besides Lisa Merrick’s ass?
Because trying to take his eyes off her was like trying to stop an avalanche from rolling down a mountainside.
For the first several days they worked on that project together, she’d gone out of her way to dress provocatively, bombarding him with so much sexual innuendo that he couldn’t even apply a screwdriver to something without her finding all kinds of meaning in it.
Then one day she’d been sitting in a chair next to the workbench, twisted around in such a way that he could barely look at her without having an unobstructed line of sight right down the front of her shirt, and of course she wasn’t wearing anything underneath that shirt that might get in the way of his view. It had taken a significant amount of orchestration for her to reach that pose, and in the beginning it would have rattled him. But slowly his perception shifted, and instead of letting it intimidate him, he started to see it for the attempted manipulation it was.
“Lisa?” he said, unscrewing a bolt and removing it, dropping it to the workbench with a soft clatter. “Why don’t you just go ahead and take off your shirt? I can see everything you’ve got anyway. But then, you know that, don’t you?”
A self-satisfied smile crossed her lips. “So do you like what you see?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Oh, you’re interested, all right. You’re just too whipped by that prissy little girlfriend of yours to consider taking a walk on the wild side.”
“We’re getting married this summer.”
“Yeah? Well, I was thinking about all the fun we could have in the meantime. You’re not bad-looking, DeMarco. A girl could do a lot worse.”
He tossed the wrench down on the workbench, then turned and leaned over the chair where she sat, putting a hand on either arm. He stared down at her.
“Let’s get something straight, Lisa. I don’t think much of girls who hand out sex like candy. The truth is, though, that you don’t think much of yourself, either, or you wouldn’t dress like a slut and go after anything in pants.”
Lisa met his gaze evenly. “Am I to take that as a no?”
“Someday you’ll figure out that you’ve got a lot more to offer than just your body. As soon as that happens, maybe some decent guy will have you.”
“Decent,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You mean boring.”
“I said exactly what I meant.”
As he returned to his task, she gave him yet one more of her patented “go to hell” looks, and he was sure that all he’d accomplished was to piss her off to the point that the remainder of the semester was destined to be one gigantic confrontational nightmare. Then she’d shown up for class the next day, and he couldn’t believe his eyes.
She wore a pair of jeans topped by a solid blue T-shirt that, if anything, was a size too big. She’d pulled on a pair of worn Reeboks. Her short reddish-blond hair was free of the gel she used to spike it, fluttering in soft curls around her face. She still wore makeup, but she’d toned it down considerably. It was so unlike the in-your-face fashion statement she usually made that he couldn’t take his eyes off her. The longer he watched her, though, the more defensive her expression became.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, but he couldn’t stop staring. “I don’t know. Your hair, I guess.”
“Yeah. My hair.” She ran her fingers through it, then gave him an offhand shrug. “I didn’t have time to do anything with it this morning.”
“It’s pretty. I like it that way.”
She blinked with surprise. “You do?”
“Yeah.”
She looked away self-consciously, stroking her fingers through it again. “Like I said. I ran out of time.”
In spite of her explanation, he was sure he saw a blush rise on her cheeks. In that moment, something tripped inside him, an awareness he hadn’t felt before.
She did it for you. Because of what you said. She cares what you think.
That realization astonished him. It was as if a window opened up and he began to see inside her, revealing tiny fragments of a vulnerability he’d never imagined. And it fascinated him.
For the next hour, she talked to him only about pistons and carburetors and other engine-related topics without a hint of the sexual suggestiveness that had filled practically every word she’d spoken to him up to that point. Still, every glance they exchanged seemed to take on new meaning, and when the bell rang to signal the end of the class period he actually felt a rush of disappointment.
As the weeks passed, instead of the verbal sparring that had characterized their first few days together, they started to have actual conversations, and soon Dave found himself coming up with reasons to drag their shop class projects into after-school time.
Because Carla would have flipped out if he’d shown Lisa any attention at all, he rarely talked to her if their paths crossed in the hall. But looking back, he thought Carla must have sensed just how many of his waking moments were spent with Lisa on his mind.
Dave flicked off the flashlight and leaned his head against the wall of the bunkhouse with a heavy sigh. He thought about getting some sleep himself, then decided maybe he’d better stay awake on the off chance that Mexican marauders with machine guns stormed the place.
God, that sounded loony, like some kind of B movie playing at two o’clock in the morning.
He thinks he killed me. If he finds me now and realizes he failed, I’m dead.
B movie all over again.
With luck, she’d wake in a few hours completely lucid, feeling a little silly for going so far off the deep end tonight. Then he could get her to a doctor or anywhere else she needed to go. His duty would be discharged, his promise fulfilled. He’d return to his real life, she’d return to hers, and that would be that.
Wouldn’t it?
He froze as those words played through his mind, then settled back against the wall, telling himself how crazy that sounded. Fate had been a real bitch to him in recent years, taking him places he’d never wanted to go. But now he couldn’t fight the sense of inevitability he felt, as if the past eleven years had existed only to get him to this place at this moment to see Lisa one more time.
chapter four
As Adam Decker navigated the rugged rain-furrowed road on his way back to Santa Rios, every muscle in his body ached, and he felt as if he hadn’t slept in a week. When he finally saw the city lights through the darkness ahead, he breathed a sigh of relief, but not just because he was so eager to hit the sack and get some sleep.
He hated driving at night. He hated it even more when he was forced to navigate a dark, deserted road like this one that seemed to twist and turn right into the middle of nowhere. The quiet unnerved him. The isolation made him tense and edgy. His fingers throbbed from gripping the steering wheel so tightly, and he shook them alternately to release the tension.
