Soldier's Rescue Mission

by Cindy Dees

  “Why did the church take an interest in these two children?” he tried.

  “The church is in the business of protecting all innocents, particularly those who cannot protect themselves. Father Ambrose has brought dozens of orphans from war-torn places all around the world to the United States and found them permanent homes. He’s a remarkable man.”

  “And you work for him?”

  “Something like that.”

  Yet again, he sensed evasion, but he chose not to push. “Do you rescue orphans from war zones often?” The idea of her bombing around in other places as dangerous as this one twisted his gut with distress. An urge to go with her, to guard her from all danger took him by surprise. He was not in the business of protecting God’s lambs, thank you, very much. At least not in the same way she was. He took a more…aggressive…approach to making the world safe for innocents like her and her kids.

  “This is not my full-time work,” she answered belatedly.

  “What is? You aren’t one of those terrifying teacher-nuns with a ruler and a thing for knuckles, are you?”

  She rewarded him with another laugh that pealed across his skin like heavenly bells. “Good Lord, no. I’m a nurse. I work in emergency rooms, supplementing staff when they get short. But mostly I make house calls to people too poor or too illegal to seek health care through official means.”

  “Well, well. Aren’t you just the crusading rebel?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I help people. I don’t care who they are or where they come from. It’s deeply satisfying work.”

  And for the first time, he saw the passionate zeal for service that he would expect from a nun. Disappointment coursed through him. Apparently, at some subconscious level, he’d been hoping she wasn’t really committed to the whole nun thing and could be talked out of her habit and into his bed. What a cad he was! Appalled at himself, he fell silent.

  They drove for several hours, the interior of the Jeep wreathed in grim silence. He pulled into a village in the late afternoon to fill up both his gas tank and the spare gas can strapped to the back of the Jeep. He was intrigued to see Elise reach up and slide the wimple off her hair as they pulled into town. It was a smart move. A nun would be noticed, but just some woman in the company of a man would be practically invisible in this traditionally male-dominated culture. Her hair fell in waves to her shoulders and looked as soft and strokable as a mink pelt.

  “Hungry, Sister?” he asked, surprised at how hoarse his voice was all of a sudden..

  “Yes. But I’ll be okay if you want to press on. The sooner I get to those children, the better.”

  The road had been in worse condition than he’d been told to expect, probably the result of torrential rains the past few weeks, and they’d gotten a late start, compliments of his Sleeping Beauty routine. All of which added up to the fact that they weren’t going to reach Acuna tonight. Regret that her orphans would have to wait another day for their rescue registered vaguely in his brain before he cut the feeling off cold. He was not going to get involved with her crazy project!

  Except he was already involved, like it or not.

  “It’ll be tomorrow before we get there,” he told her regretfully.

  Deep alarm passed across her face. Afraid to be alone with him for the night, was she? He supposed he couldn’t blame her. He’d been sniffing around her skirts like a rutting stag for far too long.

  He sighed. “We can try to find a couple of beds for rent in this village, or we can drive until dark and camp in the jungle.”

  “Which is safer?”

  “It’s about a wash either way. We’re in drug-cartel country, and saying the wrong word in a place like this will get you robbed at best and killed at worst. But the jungle has its own dangers, not the least of which being the wildlife and disease. And then, of course, the drug cartels are active out there, too. Your call.”

  She blinked, looking genuinely startled. “You’re actually asking my opinion on something?” she blurted.

  “I’m not that bad,” he protested.

  “Hah.”

  “Hey!”

  “The jungle.”

  “Excuse me?” He had the worst time trying to follow her train of thought sometimes.

  “I vote for continuing on and spending the night in the jungle. We’ll be less visible. Less rumors will circulate about us. A nun and an arms dealer traveling together are bound to cause a bit of a sensation.”

  He grunted. True. And both of them would benefit by staying as low under the local drug lords’ radars as possible. He was still convinced the kids she was here to rescue were far from average, anonymous orphans.

  After ordering her quietly to stay in the car and out of sight, he walked next door to top off his store of supplies. He wasn’t the kind of man who usually had trouble in places like this—apparently his decades of training in hand-to-hand fighting showed through in the way he carried himself—but he wasn’t about to take any chances with Elise’s safety.

  They headed out as the sun descended slowly into the west. Thankfully, the jungle was still thick enough to block it from his eyes for the most part. Now and then, clear patches were starting to appear where areas of jungle had been slashed and burned to make way for food crops or the insanely valuable coca plants that were the primary source of income—and violence—in this region.

  They had about a half hour of twilight left before full dark when he started looking for a likely place to pull off the road and make camp. In a few minutes he found what he sought. Relatively dry land on the side of a mountain, enough underbrush to hide a vehicle, but enough old-growth forest on the hillside above to allow for a decent clearing in which to pitch a tent, and a fast-running stream nearby.

  He’d been avoiding thinking about the fact that he only had one tent. Buying a second one would’ve drawn too much attention to Elise, and frankly, it would’ve signaled far too deep a commitment to helping her. Everything between them was still temporary, and he planned to keep it that way.

  With quick efficiency, he unloaded the supplies they would need. Elise carried the light gear up the hillside while he hid the Jeep and then followed her carrying the heavy stuff. He approved of the tiny clearing she’d stopped in and helped her clear a patch of ground down to the dirt. The critters that lived on the floor of this jungle were emphatically not the kind a person wanted to have join them in their tent in the middle of the night. Dried leaves hid everything from army ants to deadly snakes out here.

  “You act like you’ve done this before,” he commented.

  Unaccountably, pain flashed across her face. He lurched forward with an impulse to put his arms around her and comfort her. But then she looked up at him and the grief raging in her gaze froze him in place.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked quickly.

  “I used to do this with my parents—” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat and then mumbled, “It has been a long time…thought it wouldn’t be this bad…too many memories…”

  He knew precisely how memories of lost friends and colleagues could haunt a soul. It was one of the hazards of his profession. People you loved died. He waited for her to say more, but she fell silent, lost in tragic contemplation. Sadly, he knew the cure for that. You had to pick yourself up and go on. They were dead, you were not. You went on living. But his heart ached for her loss anyway.

  He passed her a collapsible bucket. “Go fetch water. I’ll put up the tent and get a fire started.”

  She nodded and headed off into the trees toward the sound of cheerfully bubbling water.

  By the time he’d finished building the entire camp, Elise still hadn’t returned with the water. Concerned, he headed out after her. The last remnants of the gloaming filtered down through the canopy overhead and he made out mostly gray shapes and shadows. The sound of the little stream grew louder, and he slowed down, approaching with caution. Crouching, he eased forward on battle alert. The night sounds around him gave no indication that other p
redators prowled the night, but he took no chances, nonetheless.

  The way his stomach jumped with nervous anxiety was a nasty surprise. She was just a nun. An asset to be looked after. There was no reason whatsoever for him to be personally concerned about her. Wasn’t her safety in God’s hands, anyway?

  Right. And that was why the butterflies in his stomach refused to settle down despite all the calming exercises he ran through in his mind. He’d been in gunfights and ambushed, his life put in extreme danger a hundred times, and always been cool as a cucumber. But here he was all alone, sweating bullets that one small female had somehow managed to get herself into trouble.

  He crept around a giant fern and caught sight of a movement ahead. He froze. Very slowly, he drew his pistol. Inch by inch, he moved closer to get a better view. Something light moved against a backdrop of black, crouching down and then rising up again.

  A faint groan reached his ears and his pulse shot up unpleasantly. Was that Elise? Was she in pain? Every nerve screamed at him to bolt forward and save her. Only his long years of training, and the sure and certain knowledge that his stupidity would get her killed faster than anything else out here, gave him the discipline to hold his position.

  Another slow step forward. And another.

  The shape crouched and rose again, this time half-turning toward him.

  Stunned, he stared as he finally made out exactly what he was seeing. Elise was taking a bath. Well, not a bath, exactly. She’d stripped naked and was using a washcloth to scoop up water and stream it down over her glorious body. Her spine was outlined by a long, tantalizing trail of soapsuds that disappeared into the crevice of her buttocks. The shape of her behind captured his gaze; the way it curved into her thighs made his breath catch in his throat.

  She scooped up a handful of water and held her arms up overhead. The water ran down her slender arms, washing a mound of suds into the valley between breasts that were arguably the most perfect he’d ever seen. His breath stopped altogether. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed in ecstasy, her profile as pure as the clear water dripping onto her collarbones.

  As the night cooled rapidly around him, his body raged with fire to rival the searing heat of this tropical climate. This was not lust. It wasn’t even need. It was a pull of instinct so visceral, so overwhelming, he didn’t even know how to think past it, let alone how to control it.

  It shouldn’t shock him that a nun was also a woman, but he was absolutely stunned that she was such a sensual creature beneath all those clothes designed to make her as unattractive as possible.

  Elise groaned again, and there was no mistaking the sound of pleasure. It vibrated through him with the force of an earthquake. He absolutely had to hear her make that sound again. He’d give up his eternal soul to be the one to cause her to make that sound.

  He took an aggressive step forward and a twig snapped underfoot. Elise’s eyes popped open and he froze in horror in the act of stalking her.

  “Who’s there?” she called out nervously.

  Good God, almighty. He was voyeuristically intruding upon the private bath of a nun. N. U. N. Nun. He’d turned into a freaking pervert. He whirled violently to put his back to her and called over his shoulder, “It’s me. I was worried about you. Everything okay?”

  The sounds of frantic movement came from behind him. She had to be snatching up a towel and holding it across her body like an inadequate shield. “Uh, yes.” She sounded out of breath, no doubt racing to yank on her clothes. Covering herself in panic. Please, God, let her not realize he’d seen her enjoying her bath like that. She’d be too humiliated to ever look him in the eye again.

  For all the money in the world he wouldn’t give up having seen her naked in the jungle with water and soapsuds running down her body like a blessing. But neither did he want to lose the easy familiarity between them.

  She spoke breathlessly from just behind him. “The water was so cool and refreshing looking, I couldn’t resist. I took a little sponge bath. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

  Huh. Worry didn’t quite describe what she’d done to him. An image of her burned in his mind as brightly as the sun, and no power on earth was removing that from his head anytime soon.

  “Did you enjoy it?” he choked out as she moved up beside him. He risked glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. The potato sack was firmly back in place. But when he looked at her now, all he saw was silky skin and womanly curves. Sex. Mind-blowing sex. Pleasure that transcended mere mortal intensity.

  He must’ve made a sound because she glanced at him in concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. No. Uh, yes.”

  “Which is it?” She stopped and turned to face him, her smile glowing in the dark like a beacon calling him home.

  “I’m fine.”

  A frown creased her forehead, as if she was suddenly questioning exactly what he’d seen. He blurted quickly, “Let me take that bucket of water from you. I’ve got purification tablets for it back in camp. It’ll taste like iodine, but it’ll be safe to drink in an hour.”

  She replied dryly, “Yes, I’m familiar with how water purification tablets work.”

  “Of course you are. We can heat some of the water up and reconstitute the freeze-dried food I’ve got. But you know how that works, too—” He broke off as her grin widened. He was babbling. Actually babbling.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he snapped. “I’m fine.” He was so not fine. He was a mess. He was in total, no-holds-barred lust with this woman.

  She eyed him suspiciously. Apparently, another typically nunlike trait she had in abundance was knowing when people weren’t being truthful with her. Swearing up a blue storm under his breath, he led her back to camp and went about heating water and making them both dinner—if reconstituted chili mac and freeze-dried strawberry ice cream could rightly be called dinner.

  He let the fire burn down to a glowing pile of embers and Elise seemed content to sit thoughtfully beside it and watch it die.

  Finally, he muttered, “We’d better call it a night. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  She looked up quickly. “I thought you said we’d reach Acuna my midmorning.”

  “We will. But once we collect your precious cargo, we’ve got to put as much distance between Acuna and ourselves as we can before we stop. Just to be safe.”

  He was not doing this. He was not helping her collect her blessed orphans! He had other fish to fry, more important fish. But as sure as he was sitting here, he was delaying his own mission to help her with hers. If his boss got wind of this, he was going to be toast. Burned to a crisp, in fact.

  “Right. Safe.” She sounded skeptical about achieving that state anywhere in this country. Smart girl. Her safety around him was a much more precarious thing than he cared to admit, but he was walking a razor’s edge between lust and honor right now.

  He unzipped the tent flap and held it up for her. “Crawl in.”

  He tried not to watch her pert little derriere as she crawled through the low opening. He really tried. But the image of it naked and wet and squeezable just wouldn’t go away. Swearing under his breath, he reached for the zipper.

  “Hey. Aren’t you going to join me?”

  Oh, Lord. “No. I’m going to sleep out here.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  Her pronouncement shocked him out of the haze fogging his brain function. “I beg your pardon?” he asked blankly.

  “This is Colombia. Home of every poisonous insect and snake in creation. And they all love warmth at night. If you sleep out there, you’ll have a veritable zoo crawling all over you by morning. It’s unsafe to sleep directly on the ground.”

  He snorted and refrained from telling her about the first time he’d tied himself into a tree to sleep during a mission in this region and woken up with a deadly eyelash viper curled peacefully asleep in his lap the next morning. He’d sweated for three hours before t
he damned thing finally woke up and meandered off into the tree branches.

  She had a point. This wasn’t an ideal place to spend a night without some sort of protection from the wildlife. But no way was he spending the night a foot away from her without laying his hands on her. He might be disciplined, but she was too much temptation for him.

  “I’ll be okay out here,” he replied stiffly.

  “Don’t be an idiot. Get in here.”

  “No.”

  “Do I have to come out there and get you?”

  His lips twitched. That drill-sergeant tone of voice was just cute coming from all five-foot-two-fluffy-kitten of her.

  “Go to sleep, Elise.”

  “Okay.”

  His brows slammed together. Since when did she give up so easily? She was up to something. Sure enough, the zipper zinged in a few moments and the flap opened. “Move over,” she announced.

  “Why?”

  “I’m coming out.”

  “Forget to make a pit stop before bedtime?”

  “Nope.”

  He started as a wad of down-filled sleeping bag bulged through the tent opening. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Coming out to sleep with you.”

  “Oh, no you don’t—” he started.

  She cut him off. “If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me. I’m not sleeping in the tent unless you do.”

  He cringed at the note of obstinate finality in her voice. “This is madness.”

  “Actually,” she replied blithely, “it’s blackmail. If you want me to get eaten alive out here, so be it. Otherwise, we’re both going inside and getting a decent, safe night’s sleep.”

  His gaze narrowed. He did not appreciate blackmail. Not from his clients and not from her.

  No doubt to emphasize her point, she swatted at her arm. “I swear. The mosquitoes out here are the size of hummingbirds.”