Running Wild

by Susan Andersen

  They looked like a family.

  When he reached the door, he kept one eye on their progress while also casting swift glances around to see who, if anyone, might look interested in them—or him, for that matter. There were several single men hanging around, but two he discounted right off the bat. A couple of others were harder to peg. They were much tougher-looking than the first guys he’d written off, but it was impossible to tell if they were searching for Mags and him, or were simply tough-looking guys waiting for a family member to exit the train.

  Someone behind him made an impatient noise and, eschewing the steps, he jumped down onto the platform. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he felt more conspicuous by himself than he ever had with Mags.

  Ahead of him a young man struggled to carry a stack of chicken crates. Since everyone had to exit through the station, Finn strode up to him and offered to lend a hand. At least, he hoped he’d asked if he could help with that—and hadn’t insulted the guy’s ancestry.

  The boy—for that’s what Finn saw he was now that he was up close—looked at him suspiciously for a moment. Then he looked at the crates stacked almost as high as his less-than-brawny shoulders and nodded.

  “Gracias,” he said, then added something in rapid Spanish that Finn thought was a lament about the kid’s worthless brother not showing up after he’d promised to help. Or maybe that was his own experience projecting, having had brothers who’d shirked their own share of duties in their younger days.

  Still, he’d recognized el hermano as brother, so he didn’t think he was completely off base.

  They split the pile between them, the hens in his crates smelled surprisingly pleasant, sort of a combination of sun and corn. By the time they got organized and were on the move toward the station house, they were a good ten feet behind Magdalene after all. He had to crane around the side of his crates to keep her in sight, but that also had the advantage of making him nothing more than legs carrying chickens to anyone who might be looking for the americano accompanying Mags Deluca.

  The men waiting on the platform remained outside when first Magdalene and her party, then he and the kid tromped into the station. They crossed toward the exit on the other side of the narrow waiting room.

  Happily, neither did anyone suspicious-looking lurk out front when they exited into the warm golden wash that was the last of the evening light.

  He’d barely taken three steps from the entrance door when a boy who looked even younger than the kid he accompanied rushed up. If his tone and Finn’s less-than-fluent comprehension of the language were anything to go by, he was apologizing profusely for his tardiness.

  The boy he’d been helping set down his crates and smacked his brother on the back of the head with the flat of his hand. But he turned to heap lavish thanks upon Finn, who relinquished his share of the crated chickens to the other boy. Grinning, Finn took his leave, lengthening his stride to catch up with Mags. He arrived just as she was saying goodbyes of her own.

  She turned to him as soon as their former seatmates walked away. “Tomas said there is a hotel in town and he gave me the name of a cheap restaurant with good food.” She flashed him a big smile. “Life is good.”

  “For today, at least.”

  She shrugged. “Seems to me living minute to minute is about all we can do.”

  That wasn’t necessarily a bad policy, given their situation, he decided a short while later as they opened the door to their hotel room and hauled their belongings inside.

  In order for Mags to remain in disguise, they decided to grab dinner first and shower when they got back. They spent the next hour slowly unwinding with drinks and steaming plates of beautifully prepared food. After their meal, he stood on the walkway while Magdalene talked to some locals about the best route through the Amazon to the general area of Munoz’s grow farm. An old guy drew them a map on the back of a paper bag and she thanked him profusely before carefully folding it into her tote. Then they headed off to buy more provisions.

  Back in the hotel, Mags started shedding her clothing the minute they shut their room door behind them. Leaving a trail of discarded duds in her wake, she made a beeline for the bathroom to run a shower. He gave her five minutes of privacy, then let himself into the room.

  Steam billowed over the shower rod and he watched as the cotton shower curtain to the little stall adhered to her shoulder and elbow at one point, then to her very nice butt when she bent to—hell, he didn’t know what—shave her legs, maybe? Wash her feet?

  He didn’t really care why, his only thought was to get in there with her.

  He kicked off his pants—the only thing he hadn’t already stripped off in the other room—and slid a condom on his already raging dick, then ripped back the curtain in a whoosh of fabric, clattering rings and additional clouds of steam.

  With a squeak, Magdalene whirled to face him, her posture defensive, combative. That brief I’ll-fight-you-to-the-death attitude quickly turned to recognition, however, when he climbed in with her. Leaping on him, she twined her legs around his waist and her arms about his neck. Lifting herself up to meet his mouth, she kissed him hotly. The water had run cold by the time they climbed out again.

  But they were both relaxed and smiling.

  He patted her dry with the thin towel, noticing for the first time that her skin was washed clean of all the makeup she’d applied earlier. Then he swiped the now damp towel over himself while she did the girlie thing and slathered lotion all over that baby-fine skin. When she was done, he swooped her up in his arms and carried her back to the bed, where he settled them both, him on his back and Mags curled against him with her head on his chest, her ear pressed against his heart and her arm looped loosely around his neck.

  He looked down at her, soft and sleepy in his arms. “Talk to me.”

  Yawning, she raised her eyes to look up at him. “Hmmm?”

  “Tell me something about yourself that you haven’t told many people.”

  * * *

  “CRAP.” MAGS ROLLED away from Finn. Feeling naked where she hadn’t twenty seconds ago, she looked around for something to put on.

  Finn turned onto his side and braced his head in his palm. “What the hell, Mags?”

  “Why do people always want to talk about all that touchy-feely stuff?” She honestly didn’t get it. It only led to raised hopes and she knew from hard-earned experience that hope was a bitch just waiting to kick your teeth down your throat.

  His face lost its amusement. “Why are you always so emotionally standoffish?”

  “Oh, will you give the emotional dodge-’em accusations a rest? I connect with people all the time!” And if her sociability was a way to fill a lonely void that had chiseled a permanent home deep inside of her? Well, she felt no need to air her dirty laundry for everyone in the known universe to paw through.

  She blinked. Okay, Finn wasn’t “everyone.” Still, he was poking a raw nerve.

  “Yeah, we’ve established you’re the goddamn life of the party. It doesn’t make you emotionally available.”

  True. And every now and then she hit the wall and just couldn’t bring herself to be “on” yet one more time. But if she went to a venue where people hung out laughing and talking, it was almost enough to sit quietly and eavesdrop on the conversations of folks who were unafraid to conduct relationships.

  She didn’t fool herself—she knew that made her pathetic, which was not a feeling she tolerated well. But she sure as hell had no desire to drag her loser tendencies out to be analyzed like one of those idiots from daytime TV who seemed actually proud about spilling their guts and thus demonstrating how ridiculous they were to people who, up until then, might have only suspected as much.

  Dammit. Now her back was really up, but she tried her utmost to rein in her temper before she ended up spewing it wholesale all over Finn.

  Only to instead do what people who felt cornered had been doing since the earth’s crust cooled: she turned it around on him. “Seriously?
The man ho is questioning my ability to commit? Hello, pot. Black much?”

  He shrugged. “I work hard and I play hard and I’ve always liked a frequent changeup in my playmates. I know I can be a little emotionally distant myself, but that’s kind of my point. Like recognizes like, baby. I, at least, am attempting to put that attitude behind me.”

  “Well, bully for you.”

  “He-e-yy,” he said softly and pushed upright, swinging around to sit facing her, supremely unself-conscious in his nudity. “How did this go from you coming around me so hard and sweet it damn near blew the top of my head off to all this anger?”

  Fair question. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I’m not good at the deep stuff. But you already knew that, since that’s what this whole conversation is about. So you want me to tell you something not many people know? I’m...lonely, okay? Pretty much all the time.”

  Oh, God. That made her sound too pitiful for words and damned if Mags Deluca would be pitied. Chin up, she said, “But here’s something juicier that nobody knows. Remember when I told you how I was all about the risk when I was a kid? I slept with half the lacrosse team at the Camden Boys Academy before I turned fifteen and—”

  “Wait, what? Back up a minute, Speedy Riggs. You slept with half a lacrosse team?”

  She shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  He stared at her. “Like a gang bang? All of them at once.”

  “Ewww.” She didn’t need a mirror to know her expression was a study in horrified disgust. “No. One at a time’s not stupid enough for you? I thought it was a big fuck you at my parents. But I finally realized the only one I was hurting was myself, because it left me feeling, God, so icky. So I quit sleeping with boys I felt no honest attraction to, which didn’t happen until I was quite a bit older.”

  And, oh, God, just shoot me now. He sat there looking so stunned and she pushed onto her hands and knees with no thought in her head as to where she’d go—she simply wanted to remove herself from this humiliating situation.

  But before she could scramble for the door, he hooked a muscular arm around her waist and tumbled her onto his lap. Settling her as easily as he might a forty-pound child, he then wrapped a long hand halfway around her head and pressed her face against his bare chest.

  “Aw, darlin’, I’m sorry,” he said, his voice above her head not only as dark and smooth as a bolt of black velvet, but a subterranean rumble beneath her ear as well. “I’ve been surrounded by people all my life, so I had help when I screwed up. But you had no support system for your mistakes. I can only imagine how rough that must have been.”

  She shrugged, wanting him to believe she was too tough to be overset by her screwups. But to her horror tears threatened to breech the dam with a flood of biblical proportions.

  Dammit, she’d learned young to defend herself against just about anything. But this sympathy thing—

  That was a killer.

  Through sheer force of will, she got herself under control and surreptitiously blotted her tears against the swell of his pec, counting on the fan of hair growing sleek and black atop it to absorb the wetness leaking over her lower lids. For a second, when he stilled, she feared he’d felt them and would now feel sorry for her, a concept so abhorrent her skin literally itched with mortification.

  But he merely shifted slightly, causing her cheek to slide closer to the muffled thump of his heart beating strongly beneath the hard, safe haven of his chest. And for a few comforting moments he held her close with no apparent need to say anything at all.

  Then he slapped her on the ass and rolled her over onto her side so that she faced away from him. Spooning his long body behind hers, he wrapped his arm around her waist, jerked her back snugly against him and said gruffly, “Get some sleep. I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “HOLY SHIT.” Finn strode behind Mags on a trail that was all but nonexistent. “It’s hotter ’n hell in here.”

  “It’s the humidity,” she said, glancing over her shoulder, and by the sweat dewing her face and throat, he realized she was no more immune to the enervating heat than he was. She’d seemed so in her element since they’d entered the rain forest late this morning that he’d assumed it was just him struggling with the moisture-weighted heat.

  There had been humidity all along, but nothing like this. This was so palpable he could literally feel it entering his lungs like a viscous gas with every breath he drew.

  For the first time since they’d started running from Joaquin, he felt out of his comfort zone—and it wasn’t just the weather. It was being in a place that made him distrust the effectiveness of his long-taken-for-granted skills. “Temperatures tend to stay at around eighty degrees at the equator,” she added, “but the humidity from all the rain in the Amazon jacks the heat index up closer to ninety. I haven’t been here for an age but I still remember how frigid it’d get at night, even though the actual temps are probably only around fifty degrees.” She shot him a wry smile. “I know, no one would call that cozy, but it generally doesn’t feel like the dead of winter, either. As with the heat, the constant damp messes with the line between actual temperatures and what it feels like they are.”

  Clearly done with that topic, she sketched an infinity in the air with the hiking pole he’d given her. “I know I’ve raved about your awesome pole before—”

  He shot her a cocky grin and she gave him a Seriously—are you for real? look in return and said, “What are you, fourteen?” Then, as if she were that age herself, color flooded her cheeks. And it had jack all to do with the heat radiating off the rain-forest floor.

  He had to hand it to her, though—she forged on as if she were taking high tea with the queen. “As I was saying, your hiking pole was awesome before, but it’s particularly handy down here on the forest floor.”

  “No shit,” he agreed, and admitted, “The Amazon’s more of a challenge than I expected. I can’t tell north from south or east from west since we got here, and I’ve always had an excellent sense of direction.” The ground was thick with layers of deadfall comprised of downed trees, branches, leaves and a lot of detritus he plain didn’t recognize. The path they’d been following was bouncy yet firm in some places, uneven in others and spongy or flat-out treacherous in yet others. Even only having a pole apiece provided a lot of stability.

  “I’ll teach you the way I learned to find north in the Amazon. Meanwhile I’m diggin’ the pole.”

  Smiling at her with genuine delight, he admitted cheerfully, “I thought hiking poles were for sissies. My brother David had the first set I saw and the rest of us gave him a rash over it. I think ‘girlie’ might have come up in that conversation.” More likely pussy...but as his ma used to tell him when he was a kid, he really didn’t have to say everything that popped into his mind.

  As it was, Mags scooped up a clump of he-couldn’t-say-what and threw it at him.

  He dodged the missile handily. “Bren was next to get bit by the HP bug when he bit off more than he could chew on a short hike with too much elevation gain for someone who’d only gotten a clean bill of health three months before. Big Brother went right out the day after we got home and bought his own pair.” He shrugged. “But, c’mon, that’s hardly a definitive vote, right? I mean, the guy had cancer.”

  She gave him a knowing look. “So, what made you a believer?”

  “I strained a muscle. It wasn’t bad and luckily it was at the tail end of a weeklong backpacking trip, but we were still a long way from the trailhead. David insisted I take his poles. And they were effin’ amazing.” He grinned.

  “Thus sending you out to buy your own pair the next day as well.”

  “Hell, no,” he said with faux affront. But he couldn’t keep his mouth from crooking up. “I held out damn near an entire week.”

  She laughed and set off once again. Twenty minutes later she swore and came to a stop.

  He stopped as well. �
��What’s up?”

  “We’ve gone in a circle.” She indicated a leaf that had been bent in half, showcasing its duller underside. Finn looked behind him and saw a noticeable number of similar ones standing out amidst the dense growth of brilliant green and realized she’d been doing that all along. “We need to backtrack to find where the trail branched off.”

  They found it about a hundred yards away, a narrow path that angled away from the one they were on and plunged into even deeper woods than those surrounding them now. They likely wouldn’t have spotted it had they not been specifically searching for it.

  The good news was that, within fifteen minutes of turning onto the new path, they came across a fast-flowing stream. It turned out to be a twofer since it was on the map the old guy had drawn them last night and it provided a much-needed source of drinking water. The thick, killer humidity had made them even thirstier than usual, but aside from the occasional leaf that had caught a tablespoon or so of pooled rainwater—only the clearest of which they’d dared drink—they hadn’t seen much in the way of a water source since leaving their room this morning. He’d started rationing their portions for fear they’d run through all they’d brought with them and have no way of replenishing their supply.

  Finn signaled Mags to hold up. “We need to refill our water containers.”

  They killed off the water left in his filtration water bottle, then he took it to the deepest part of the creek and filled it up. Next, he filled his backup storage bottle. “If we need the unfiltered water before we can make camp and boil it, I have some water-purifying pills that are the next best thing.”

  He peered up at the light filtering through the profuse, leafy canopy far overhead, then glanced at his watch. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, but he’d read somewhere when he’d researched the area that in the more densely vegetated areas—which they definitely appeared to be in—5 percent or less sunlight made it all the way to the floor of the Amazon. Given how he’d felt as though they were hiking under a green glass dome, he’d say that was true. “And speaking of making camp, you think we oughta start looking for a spot?”