Dangerous to Hold Page 5

  “Suit yourself.”

  After the children finished their meal, Sarah wiped ineffectually at the smallest ones’ faces with the dampened tail of her sleeve. Eduard disdained her ministrations. He folded his thin body into the hammock, then pulled Ricci in beside him. Sarah draped a tent of mosquito netting the gringo had rigged over both of them.

  She approached the second hammock with the assurance of a woman who danced with a joyful, natural grace and played a mean game of tennis. She soon found, however, that negotiating her way into a swinging hammock with a child in one arm and heavy skirts draped over the other took more than grace or coordination. It took a skill she didn’t seem to possess.

  On her first attempt, the lightweight net swung out from under her, nearly dropping her on her bottom. On her second attempt, the knee she’d lifted to anchor the net swayed away, causing her to hop a few steps across the dirt floor on one foot to keep from losing her balance. Six year old Teresa clung to her neck, like one of those stuffed toys with the long, strangling arms, and giggled.

  The sound tugged at Sarah’s heart. She smiled down at the child. “Think that’s funny, do you?”

  Teresa put a dirty hand to her mouth to cover the gap from her lost front teeth. Her black eyes sparkled.

  “Let’s try this again. We’ll do it scientifically this time. One step at a time.”

  Grasping the edge of the net in a firm hand, Sarah rose up on tiptoe and swung her hips into the net. She gave a startled squawk as the hammock rolled high up in the air and dumped her on the floor.

  Teresa came down on top of her, giggling helplessly. Childish snickers from the other hammock told Sarah that Ricci was getting as much enjoyment out of this as Teresa. Even Eduard was smiling, she saw when she sat up and shoved back the once-starched white headband that held her veil out of her eyes.

  So was the mercenary. He leaned on one elbow, the floppy hat pushed to the back of his head. Even through the draped mosquito net, Sarah could see the crooked slash of white teeth that cut the darkness of his unshaven cheeks.

  Sarah had perfected a lot of skills during her years as a Washington political hostess. One of the most valuable was a ripple of musical laughter that went a long way toward minimizing any social disaster. André had often told her that her ability to smile and shrug off domestic crises that would mortify other hostesses was among her most charming traits.

  So the answering smile she gave the gringo began as a well-learned, deliberate response to an embarrassing situation. But as her mouth curved, Sarah found relief from her fear and fatigue in the simple act. Her smile deepened.

  For a moment, their eyes met, his gray and shadowed by black lashes, hers free of the fear that had haunted her for so many hours. They weren’t mercenary and nun, but simply a man and woman enjoying a ridiculous moment. He broke it off first. Still grinning, he lay down again and tugged the hat over his eyes.

  Sarah dragged herself to her feet and plunked Teresa into the hammock. “It’s all yours, sweetheart.”

  The little girl grabbed at her hand. “Sarita!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be right here beside you.”

  Gently disengaging her hand, Sarah pushed aside the mosquito netting draped over the stained, uninviting bedroll. She lifted the sleeping bag by one corner and shook it once, twice. Something fell out and scurried away between the stacked crates. Sarah gasped, then grabbed the other corner and shook the mat for all she was worth.

  The man on the other bedroll grunted and rolled over on his side, his back to Sarah.

  After a vigorous shaking, she laid the edges of the limp bedroll down and sat back on her heels, eyeing it distrustfully. When nothing moved under its surface and no hissing lump appeared, she smoothed it out with short, swift and very cautious pats.

  “For Pete’s sake, will you lie down?”

  Sarah threw his broad back an indignant look. Slowly, gingerly, she stretched out, then reached up to tug the mosquito netting back down. It settled around them both like a white cloud, enclosing them in an airy, strangely intimate cocoon. After a few moments, the exhaustion seeping through her bones caused her rigid muscles to relax. She dragged her sleeve across her face to wipe away the moisture generated by her exertions and closed her eyes, sure she’d be asleep within moments.

  She was wrong.

  As tired as she was, her body wouldn’t, couldn’t, slip into blessed semiconsciousness. Instead, an insidious need crept through her, stiffening her limbs and keeping her eyes wide open in the hazy light.

  The boys’ breathing evened out. Little Teresa whistled once or twice through the gap in her front teeth, then snuggled down in the hammock and grew still.

  Sarah stared up at the rusted tin roof. She listened to the scurry of forest mice scuttling up and down the walls in their never-ending search for insects. From a few feet away came the rumble of deep, sonorous breathing. Not a snore, exactly, but pretty darn close to it.

  Desperately Sarah willed herself to ignore the sounds around her and go to sleep. She squeezed her eyes shut and began to count, as she’d done so often as a child, when her father had gone to some political fund-raiser or another and she’d lain awake in her big, flower-patterned bedroom, waiting for him to come home and read to her.

  At two hundred and forty-seven, she gave up. Worrying her lower lip with her teeth, she rose up on her knees, then inched to her feet. She lifted her skirts and moved as quietly as possible across the hut.

  She didn’t even hear him move. She was just bending toward an object near the wall when a hard hand spun her around. The veil whipped at her face, causing the headdress to tilt haphazardly to one side of her head.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Suspicion blazed in his eyes and singed his low, furious voice. “I thought you said you didn’t know how to use a weapon.”

  “I don’t!” Sarah gasped.

  “Then why were you reaching for it?”

  Sarah glanced down at the automatic rifle propped against the wall beside the backpack. “I wasn’t reaching for your precious weapon!”

  “So what were you after, lady?”

  No Sister Sarah this time. No crooked grin that coaxed an answering response from her. At this moment, he radiated a hard, cold authority that made Sarah gulp.

  “Tell me,” he growled, giving her a shake.

  The veil tilted farther over her ear, then fell off completely. He sucked in a quick breath, his narrowed eyes on her hair.

  Sarah raised a hand defensively to the limp, sweat-slicked blond strands. “We…we don’t cut it anymore. We haven’t since Pope John’s Vatican Council.”

  There’d been a Pope John. She was sure of it. And the Italian ambassador had talked at great length about a Vatican Council at one of the dinner parties Sarah had given for her father. She held her breath, waiting for the gringo’s response.

  His flinty gaze shifted to her face. “So you don’t cut your hair anymore. That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing creeping around the hut.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. She opened it again, but couldn’t force out the words.

  “I’m fast running out of patience,” he warned softly, “and you don’t want to be around when I do.”

  “I have to use the boot,” Sarah muttered through clenched teeth.

  Chapter 4

  She needed to use the boot!

  Drawing in a deep breath, Jake ran through his options.

  He could risk taking her outside to go downstream, as the other inhabitants of the camp did. Or he could escort her into the jungle, no doubt with a trail of interested spectators tagging along behind.

  No, options one and two weren’t smart. He’d heard the murmurs among the men when Sister Sarah walked into camp. He’d caught the swift, slashing male assessment they’d given her when she glanced up at him, her eyes gemlike in a pale and dirty face.

  Option three, he could let her use the damned boot.

  What the hell? No doubt t
he acid from the kids’ urine had already eaten through the special lining and destroyed the satellite voice communications device concealed there. One of the other OMEGA agents, a former air force jock, had told Jake about a C-130 transport plane that had gone down in Vietnam. Seemed the effluent of the farm animals being evacuated with desperate villagers fleeing the Vietcong had destroyed the cables under the aircraft’s flooring. If urine could destroy the 130’s metal-and-wire cables, Jake’s transmitter-receiver was a goner by now. So was his boot, he decided wryly.

  Releasing the sister’s arm, he stepped back. “Be my guest.”

  Bright spots of color flaring in each cheek, she snatched up the rubber footwear. After a quick look around the hut, she marched behind a stack of crates.

  Jake smiled grimly, wondering how he was going to explain this one to Maggie Sinclair—when, and if, he ever found a way to slip out of the camp and retrieve the backup transmitter he’d buried in a cranny of a towering strangler fig.

  He settled back down on the bedroll and bent an arm under his head, thinking about the unexpected complication to his mission in the form of Sister Sarah Josepha. As he’d admitted earlier, he didn’t know a whole lot of nuns, but the few he’d seen here in Central America were sure different from little Sister Sarah. Most of them wore sensible work clothes and no longer covered their hair with veils. They didn’t drape themselves in old-fashioned, uncomfortable habits in an excess of zealous piety.

  Although… Jake was forced to admit that none of the sisters he’d seen around these parts possessed quite the same combination of luminous eyes, tumbling white-gold hair and unconsciously seductive smile, either. At the memory of the way her smile had softened the angled planes of her face into a breathtaking beauty, he felt a slow, involuntary tightening low in his groin—followed immediately by a wave of self-disgust.

  Maybe it wasn’t overzealousness that kept her in those shapeless robes, he thought wryly. Maybe Sister Sarah exhibited a whole lot of common sense by covering up her undeniably attractive attributes so that they wouldn’t distract her—or others—from the vocation she’d chosen.

  Only the strategy wasn’t working. Not right at this moment, anyway. Not for Jake.

  He’d been in the jungle too damned long, he decided grimly. He’d forgotten the basic tenets of civilized behavior. He had no business thinking the thoughts he was about the woman who emerged at that moment from behind the crates and moved quietly toward the mat next to his. Jake heard her give the bedroll a few cautious pats before she settled in.

  He came awake an hour later with the swift, instant alertness that had saved his life more than once. His senses collected immediate impressions for his brain to process. Heat, humid and oppressive against his skin. The scent of his own sweat. The sound of shallow, regular breathing. The feel of a hand on his arm.

  Jake glanced down at the small white hand that rested palm up against his sun-browned skin. Sister Sarah was a restless sleeper, he noted with a tight smile. She lay sprawled on her back, her face turned away. As he watched, she twitched a little and twisted her head toward him. He sucked in a swift breath at the pallor of her face under its sheen of sweat.

  Well, hell. So much for common sense. That heavy black habit had to go, before Sarita succumbed to heatstroke. Jake had better find something more suitable for her to wear in this stifling hut.

  He rolled off the mat with the lithe, noiseless movement that had become second nature to him and reached for the webbed belt that was always within reach. It settled around his hips with the familiarity of an old friend. The leather holster slapped against one thigh, the machete against the other. Clamping the hat down on his head, Jake left the shack.

  Sarah awoke after a few hours’ of restless sleep, groggy and disoriented. She wasn’t at her best in the mornings—if it still was morning. Especially, she remembered slowly, when she’d spent most of the night tramping through the jungle.

  She lay still, unwilling to move, unwilling to face what came next. Maybe if she just kept her eyes closed, she could convince herself she wasn’t lying in an airless little shack. If she didn’t breathe in too deeply, maybe she could keep the searing heat out of her lungs.

  “Sarita.”

  Maybe if she just feigned sleep a little longer, Teresa would stop tugging at her sleeve.

  “Sarita, el gringo is gone. Is he coming back?”

  Sarah opened one eye. The little girl’s worried face hovered against the filmy background of mosquito netting. Sarah turned her head to survey the empty bedroll next to hers.

  “Will he come back?”

  The fear in Teresa’s voice tore at Sarah’s heart. According to Maria, the six year old had lost both parents and two siblings in a devastating flash flood that all but destroyed the village last year. Since then the child had attached herself tenaciously to whoever offered security.

  Maria had taken her into the clinic while church and government officials worked through the lengthy, complicated adoption process. In the interim, the little girl had become the nun’s second shadow, following her everywhere. After Maria’s death, Teresa had immediately transferred her attention to Sarah. For the past two days, Sarah hadn’t been able to take a step without the dark-haired girl in the faded blue flowered dress beside her. When the rebels swept through the village—oh, God, was it only last night?—Teresa had clung to Sarah with terrified, instinctive trust. Frantic with fear herself, Sarah had thrown on Maria’s robes in the hope they would protect her and the children. Running out of the clinic, she had sought safety for them all in the darkness of the jungle.

  Only they hadn’t found safety. And it appeared Teresa had already recognized the fact that her survival might depend on someone other than the woman whose sleeve she was tugging at.

  “Will he, Sarita? Will he come back?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure he will.”

  Sarah struggled into a sitting position. Only then did she see that Eduard was awake, as well. Unspeaking, he lay propped in the hammock, Ricci curled into a tight, sleeping ball beside him.

  At the sight of his solemn face and unfathomable black eyes, Sarah felt again the enormity of the responsibility she’d so rashly assumed. Her dry throat closed as she fought the panic that threatened. How was she going to get them to safety?

  She dragged in a deep breath. One step at a time.

  “Why don’t you go look in that backpack?” she suggested to Teresa. “Maybe there’s a comb or a brush in it, and we can make you pretty.”

  While the girl fussed with the buckle on the knapsack, Sarah ruthlessly suppressed the memory of the mercenary’s reaction the last time she’d appropriated one of his personal possessions.

  The mercenary. El gringo.

  Sarah made a moue of distaste as she washed her face with tepid water and a corner of her sleeve, then attacked her mouth with the toothbrush she’d appropriated earlier. If she was going to be stuck with the man until she got herself and the children out of this mess—and it looked like she was, she couldn’t go on calling him “the mercenary.” She searched for a name that would fit him, one she’d give him herself, since he wouldn’t give her his. One that would suit a man too masculine and hard for handsomeness. Too lean and tough for politeness. Too lost to all concepts of right and wrong, she thought, for her to ever trust.

  No, Sarah decided with an involuntary shiver. She didn’t want to give him a name that reminded her of his disgusting profession. It would be better to come up with one that made him more human, more within her ability to manage. The image of her father’s chief of staff flashed into her mind. Perfect.

  With Teresa settled between her knees, Sarah went to work on her tangled hair with the black plastic comb the girl had found. She’d finished Teresa’s and was attacking her own when the sound of the door swinging open caught her arm in midtug. She angled her head to see the gringo—Creighton, she reminded herself firmly—step inside.

  A look of surprise crossed his face when he saw her sitti
ng cross-legged on the folded-up mat, her long white-gold hair draped over one shoulder.

  “Here,” he said curtly. “Wear these when you’re inside the hut.”

  Sarah arched a brow at his tone and caught the items he tossed at her. Obviously, the man didn’t like her appropriating his comb any more than he did his boot. “I think it’s better if I stay robed.”

  “I’ve got enough problems on my hands right now without you coming down with heatstroke. Put those on and keep them on. But only in this hut. When you go outside, cover yourself up. Especially that hair. Not that it’ll help much,” he muttered.

  While Teresa scrambled to her feet, Sarah shook out the garments and held them up. Her eyes widened at the tattered skirt, in a bright pattern of pinks and greens, and the well-washed cotton blouse.

  “Are there other women in camp?”

  “Yes.”

  The terse reply irritated her. It was only a comb, for heaven’s sake. “Wouldn’t it be better if the children and I bedded down with these other women?” she asked stiffly. “Then we wouldn’t have to…impose on you.”

  He flashed her a sardonic look and started to reply, but Teresa’s timid voice interrupted her. “I want to stay with el gringo.”

  “Don’t be silly, Teresa. We’ll be more comfortable with the other women. Then el…then Creighton here wouldn’t have to bother with us.”

  He frowned. “Creighton?”

  “You remind me of someone by that name. Since you won’t tell me yours—not that I really want to know it, you understand—I’ll just call you Creighton.”

  His upper lip curled in distaste. “Creighton?”

  Sarah struggled to her feet, yanking at the heavy skirts that threatened to trip her. “Really, I appreciate what you’ve done for us, but I think it would be better if you show me where the other women—” She broke off, gasping, as he moved to her side with the swift, silent grace of a jungle cat.

  “You don’t want to bed down with the other women, Sister Sarah. Trust me.”