Pilar didn’t dare look at Culver. She heard the uncertainty in his roughened tone, and without thinking, she reached out and blindly wrapped her fingers around his big, thickly callused hand. It was a hand that had loved her to oblivion, to a special world of love and light she had never experienced before—or since. He halted abruptly at her touch, and she tightened her grip on his hand as she turned to face him. The expression on his face was heartrending. Instantly, Pilar released his hand, afraid of invoking more pain by her presence.
“I owe you an apology, Culver,” she began, her voice unsteady. “I—I…my world was pulled out from under me when you were wounded. You were so close to death. I didn’t think I’d reach help in time to save you. I know it happened eight years ago, but at times, it seems like yesterday.” Pilar touched her damp, white cotton blouse. The thunder sounded another warning, much closer this time, the jungle vibrating with the booming rumbles. She looked up at the canopy and then back at him. “I can still feel how I felt then. The terror. The grief.”
Culver looked at her strangely. Why was she telling him this? “But you didn’t have to leave me, Pilar. Why did you run? I remember you at the hospital, holding my hand, crying and praying out loud for me. But when I regained consciousness, you were gone. The doctors didn’t know where you were. The nurses didn’t know—” His voice cracked. “I wanted to die when you didn’t return. I couldn’t understand why you left me. You saved my life, then just disappeared. Why?”
Biting down on her lower lip, Pilar looked away. “Dios, Culver, I—I wish I could tell you, but I cannot.” Abruptly, she remembered hearing him say casually, not long after they met, “Oh, sure, I love kids.” They had stopped to help a small girl crying outside a village, she recalled. “But I’m a long way from being ready to settle down with children of my own.”
“Hector said you were pulled undercover again,” he was saying now, his mouth flattened. “A Q-clearance mission. I knew from CIA experience that if someone goes Q-clearance, I might as well ask a brick wall for information. Hector refused to tell me anything more. Two weeks in that hospital, and I was transferred by plane back to the States. I tried,” he said, frustration ringing in his voice, “through Hector to reach you. But he gave me nothing.”
Wincing, Pilar nodded and closed her eyes, unable to stand the anguish in Culver’s gaze. “Mi querido,” she whispered faintly, “I didn’t want to leave you, but something…came up. Something only I was able to handle.” She opened her eyes, Culver’s rugged features blurring before her. “I’m so sorry, Culver. I didn’t mean to wound you that way. I had no intention…” She opened her hands helplessly. “I wish I could heal your pain. I see you still carry the injury in your heart, the grief and anger toward me.” Her voice broke, she was so close to tears. “Can you ever forgive me, Culver? If I am going to die, I need to know you will forgive me for abandoning you at the moment of your greatest need. Can you?”
Culver’s throat constricted. Reaching out, he cupped her cheek. How soft and firm her skin was beneath his fingertips as he grazed that velvety slope. She’d called him “my darling.” The sweetness of the words soothed him like a healing salve, easing the ache in his heart. He saw tears swimming in Pilar’s eyes, saw her valiant attempt to force them back. The girl he remembered from so long ago would have burst easily into uncontrollable tears, and he would have pulled her into his arms, rocking her as she cried, soothing her tiny kisses and caresses.
How badly Culver wanted to do just that. For the first time, he began to understand the depth of Pilar’s own anguish over abandoning him. He had thought she didn’t care, but he’d been wrong. So very, stupidly wrong. Now he continued to stroke her cheek with his thumb, seeing the magic of his touch as her large, cat’s eyes changed to glorious gold. Joy coursed through him, sharp and breathtaking, avalanching his old grief, which at long last began to dissolve.
All he had to do was take one step forward, drop his arms around her small form and pull her against him. He saw the unmistakable need in Pilar’s eyes. Yet, as she held herself rigidly, he knew just as surely that she didn’t want his embrace. Before, a simple kiss, a loving touch would have eased her pain. But back then, life had been simple between them. Joyous. Bitterly, Culver dropped his hand from her cheek and sighed.
“I forgive you, Pilar. I guess I had already forgiven you a long time ago, if you want the truth.” He felt an immediate lightening in his chest, as if merely speaking those words freed him of so much of the ugliness he’d carried. Anxiously, he watched Pilar’s face, to see if his words would have an equally healing effect on her. Never had he wanted anything more for her.
Pilar took in a deep, cleansing breath. “Dios, thank you…thank you… .” She stepped away from Culver, feeling suddenly dizzy—and at the same time an uncontrollable need of more contact with him. But she didn’t dare give in to it. He’d wanted to kiss her again—she’d seen it so clearly in his eyes. And she’d wanted him to. Breathing raggedly, Pilar turned and began walking as fast as she could down the trail. Culver forgave her. She’d seen the sincerity in his darkened eyes. Heard it in the grave tone of his unsteady voice. So much of her guilt and shame was miraculously dissolving around her as she moved swiftly through the jungle.
Raindrops heralding the approaching storm began to plunk loudly against the highest canopy of leaves more than a hundred feet above them. The three levels of trees in the jungle’s distinctive canopy would absorb most of the storm’s fury, Pilar knew. Still, the gentler droplets cascading off the leaves of the lowest trees would soak them thoroughly soon enough. Where was Culver? Pilar slowed and partially turned, to see him walking a good hundred feet behind her, his features alert, his gaze constantly shifting like personal all-terrain radar, on the lookout for trouble.
The many shadows had lengthened as the sunlight was doused by dark gray clouds, which were illuminated occasionally by brilliant bolts of lightning. By dusk, the combination of darkness and fog would make this storm-ridden scene seem bright. They had about four more hours of daylight, Pilar figured. She turned and resumed walking, this time at a more reasonable pace. Rain continued to explode against the upper canopy, and lightning zigzagged above them, creating sudden, eerie shadows. As she’d known it would, water began to drip steadily, quickly soaking her hair, face and clothing. Eventually, as the trail twisted and turned, Culver was again at her side, and Pilar gathered the courage to steal a quick glance at him. His mouth was no longer pursed, as if to stop a wave of pain, and the look in his eyes, though sharpened, no longer had the frozen quality that had so dismayed her.
Somehow, a small miracle of healing had occurred between them, she realized humbly. The kiss they’d shared had broken open the old, infected wound. And her reaching out to touch him and ask his forgiveness had somehow allowed him to find that forgiveness in his heart. A new light shone in his eyes, and his very gait had changed. Pilar couldn’t define it exactly, though she sensed a great weight had lifted from his too-long-weary shoulders. She bit her bottom lip. If only she had the courage to tell him the whole truth of what had happened eight years ago.
Chapter 8
Culver prodded the small fire with a twig. Near dusk, they’d made a lean-to of huge, thick palm leaves. He’d dug a deep hole, and Pilar had started a fire. Luckily, a snake had slithered across their path earlier, and he’d killed it, so chunks of meat were now roasting in the flickering flames, slowly turned by Pilar. The two of them had been soaked to the skin by the thunderstorm, and though the rain had long since stopped, Culver knew their clothes would never completely dry in the perpetually high humidity.
They sat close together, as the lean-to’s tiny dimensions dictated. After adding a few more still-damp twigs to the fire, Culver glanced at Pilar. Her hair was in mild disarray about her face, framing her haunting, jaguar’s eyes—eyes that had communicated to the depths of his soul with just one look. The taste of her kiss still lingered hotly in his memory. Her cheeks were high with color, and he
sensed she hadn’t forgotten it, either.
Darkness was falling. Culver watched as the thin smoke rose and caught in the palm-leaf roof above them, swirling and separating until only slight wisps escaped the shelter. No one should be able to detect their presence—at least for tonight. Tomorrow, Culver knew grimly, was another situation altogether. Tomorrow, by nightfall, they would reach Ramirez’s fortress. With every mile closer, the danger to them increased exponentially.
“Did you ever marry?” Pilar asked softly. She looked up from the skewer of meat she held over the fire. Culver’s eyes sharpened on her, his expression quizzical, and she realized he probably hadn’t expected her to ask personal questions of him. Yet, to salve her own conscience, she needed to know. If she died, she wanted to know what had happened to Culver in these intervening years.
He gave a one-shouldered shrug and prodded the fire with a stick. “No. You married,” he added, his voice flat, filled with resentment.
“Yes, I married Fernando.”
“Were you…happy?”
Unable to bear his burning gaze, Pilar looked down at the fire, continuing to slowly turn the meat. “Fernando was a dear friend,” she whispered tremulously. “He…was generous.”
“Rich?” Culver didn’t mean for his voice to sound hard. He wanted to know of Pilar’s past. He saw how his spat-out query had struck her. She winced, unable to look up at him.
“Yes, Fernando was rich.” With obvious effort, she lifted her chin and eventually met his gaze. “He was rich from the heart, too, and that was why—well, why I agreed to marry him.”
It wasn’t unusual in this culture, Culver knew, for an old man to take a young wife. He was sure Fernando had been more than satisfied in the bargain. Too, marriages here were often arranged, though he had a hard time picturing that for Pilar, with her independence. His mouth compressing, he asked, “Was Fernando a friend of your father’s?”
“Yes, he worked at the Spanish consulate as assistant to my father. They were the closest of friends.”
“I see.” So it had been an arranged marriage. Culver stared down at the dark brown leaves and twigs that covered the ground beneath them. Pilar’s father had undoubtedly betrothed Pilar to Fernando when she was a young girl of ten or eleven. The agreement would have been that when she reached a certain age, they would marry. Had that age been twenty-one?
His mind raced with these potential new answers to his old questions. By South American custom, Pilar would have had to give up her independence and marry Fernando whether she wanted to or not. Culver had crashed into her life when she was twenty-two. And he’d taken her virginity, no question of that. Virginity was a virtue highly prized by South American men.
Perhaps Fernando had demanded Pilar’s hand in marriage when she’d come off their mission. Though Pilar was independent by the standards of a South American woman, her Quechua blood also made her a product of her culture. She couldn’t operate completely outside it and survive. Her fling with him had been exactly that—a wild, untrammeled instant out of time. Her opportunity to explore her curiosity about a man’s touch. Maybe Pilar hadn’t meant to give him her virginity. Maybe she’d been as carried away by the moment as he had—to her later regret.
Culver wasn’t sure if Pilar had ever loved him. She had been young and naive. He’d had enough women over the years to know that that much hadn’t been an act. And she definitely had been a virgin when she’d come into his embrace. Perhaps Pilar had fallen in love with him—the sort of girlish, romantic love that was lucky to last beyond two or three months.
He knew his own feelings had been deep and real, more than a passing infatuation. Though, to give her credit, he’d been so overwhelmed by the intensity of his emotions at the time that he hadn’t stopped to think about long-range plans. He’d felt then as if life stretched out forever before them. Serious decisions had seemed miles away, so he hadn’t talked of love and marriage. As he glanced at Pilar’s sad features now, his heart twinged with that old, never-forgotten love. Pilar’s fault in this might have been nothing more than youthful ignorance, he realized now. He’d been the sorry fool to love her honestly, to the depths of his soul. Pilar hadn’t had the experience to recognize what he was giving her—and what it meant to him. How could she? Fernando might have gotten her body, but had he touched her soul? Culver knew that when he and Pilar had kissed back there on the trail, he had tapped into her soul as surely as he had eight years ago.
Now she was a widow with a child, but far too young in South American society to get the usual widow’s respect. And men of this hemisphere probably were threatened by her independence, money and full-time career.
“Where did you go after you went home to North America?” Pilar asked, breaking the thoughtful silence that lay between them. Around them, monkeys were howling and screaming to one another. As the insects of the night began their songs, it were as if a musical surrounded them, soft and nonintrusive to the web of good feelings spinning between them as they huddled in the shelter of the lean-to.
“I recuperated in Bethesda, Maryland,” Culver said slowly, rolling a twig between his thumb and forefinger, studying it critically in the coming darkness. “After that, I was sent to Europe to work undercover in Spain.”
Pilar smiled softly. “My father’s home.”
“Yes. I was stationed in Madrid.”
Sighing, Pilar met and held his tender gaze. “I have always wanted to go to Spain, to see my father’s hacienda, to visit where he was born. I heard so many stories, growing up, about how he used to escape from his nanny and ride the countryside around Madrid on his Andalusian gelding. His nanny, who was in her fifties, was poor at riding and would take him out only occasionally.”
“So you have your father’s love of horses.” Culver suddenly felt aware of how much he didn’t know about Pilar. Their time together eight years earlier had been concentrated, passionate and dangerous, leaving little time for talking or in-depth exploration. Now he savored this moment more than he’d ever have thought possible. They were safe. They were alone and without interruption. Stretching out so that his legs curved behind her, his head resting in the palm of his hand, he studied her in the failing light.
Pilar chuckled slightly. “My father said I had the blood of a caballero—a horse person—in me from a very young age.”
“Did he take you riding as a child?”
“Often. I loved it. He bought me a Pampas pony from Argentina—a Spanish mustang—and I took lessons at a riding academy in Lima when I was six.” Smiling wistfully, Pilar said, “My father made a point of riding with me each Saturday. It was our time together, and I loved it.” She sobered, looking out into the grayness. “I loved him so much. I miss him even more now—his counsel, his wisdom… .”
Fog was developing at the lowest level of the canopy. Culver watched it disinterestedly as he absorbed the tremor in Pilar’s tone. Her eyebrows knitted as she leaned over the fire, tending to the skewer. One of the positives of South American culture, he thought, was the connectedness of families and how close extended families remained, whereas in the U.S., the family unit had, for all intents and purposes, been dissolving rapidly.
“When Fernando died, did you feel alone?”
Pilar twisted to look at him. How peaceful Culver seemed, stretched out like a jaguar at rest. But he was lethal—to her volatile, vulnerable emotional state—as never before. “I felt like a ship without a rudder,” she admitted. “I was in Lima, alone. My parents were dead, and I was an only child. The sole family I had left was here in the village—my grandparents. My father’s family lives in Spain, and when Fernando died so suddenly, I thought briefly of moving to Madrid to be near them. I…I needed someone at that time… .”
Pilar didn’t tell Culver she’d needed him, though it was true. It would have been cruel to say so. She fully realized what her decision to leave him at the hospital had cost him, and she didn’t wish ever to inflict that kind of injury again. From that perspective, h
ad their kiss been good or bad? She wasn’t sure. It certainly had opened up a kaleidoscope of memories and yearnings she’d thought she had put to rest over the years. Evidently she hadn’t.
“What stopped you from moving to Spain?”
With a shrug, Pilar picked at a rectangular piece of white meat with her fingers, delicately pulling a strip off and tasting it. Their meal was done. Picking up two small palm leaves to serve as plates, Pilar divided the meat between them. As she handed Culver his share, she said, “I cannot ever ignore my Incan blood, my ancestry as an Indian. Moving to Spain would be like dividing my soul from my body.” She looked out at the jungle lovingly. “This is my soul, Culver. Here, in the forest, the womb of Mother Earth.
“My grandmother has helped me see the wisdom of staying, in terms of looking deep into my heart and understanding that my power, my strength, comes from the soil I was born on.” She pulled a piece of snake meat apart and ate another bite.
“Because you are a shamanka jaguar apprentice?” he wondered aloud, chewing a bite of the snake, which tasted like fresh, grilled chicken.
“In part, yes.” She smiled a little. “As a shamanka, I would always have the capacity to walk in many worlds simultaneously, Grandmother said. Some know me as manager of a horse farm. Others as a competing rider at horse shows. I am a socialite to others, a rich widow, a woman without a husband. Then to others, I am a mestiza—or an undercover agent.” She looked up, a smile playing on her lips. “Or a shamanka apprentice.”
“You wear many hats,” Culver agreed. For him, she was a friend, lover and confidante—the woman he wanted to make his wife. The only woman. Pilar would never know that, however, he thought, and an incredible sadness blanketed him.
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