find someplace to hunker down for the night. In the morning, we’ll figure out where we are and proceed toward our destination from there.”
He made it all sound so easy. She shuddered to think what would have happened to her back there if he hadn’t been with her. She’d have driven straight into that ambush. And she had no illusions about how a good-looking, relatively wealthy, foreign woman would have faired at the hands of a bunch of bandits.
“Bingo.”
She jumped at John’s sudden outburst. He slammed on the brakes and backed the Land Rover up, turning it ninety degrees to face the riverbank on their left. A solid wall of dirt loomed in front of them. “You don’t expect to drive up that, do you?” she asked in dismay.
“Sure. No problem.”
“That’s a vertical wall! We’ll flip over.”
“Nah, this is a tough old bird. It’ll climb that. Hang on, and lean forward when we hit the wall.”
Oh my God. She grabbed the bar across the dashboard in horror as he gunned the motor and the Land Rover leaped at the riverbank. The vehicle bucked and slid, its tires clawing at the bank, finding purchase, slipping, then finding purchase again. The vehicle did, indeed, stand up almost on its hind end as the engine roared and the tires threw mud wildly in every direction.
“Lean forward!” John yelled.
She flung herself forward in her seat and John did the same. Whether or not it helped, she had no idea, but at the last moment before she thought the Land Rover had to flip over on its back, its rear wheels caught, and it surged up the last six feet or so of the bank. It burst up and over the edge, skidding sideways as it hit level dirt and the squealing tires caught solid ground.
John stopped the vehicle. He peeled his fingers carefully from around the steering wheel. She noticed they were clawed from the effort and took several seconds to straighten once more. “Well,” he panted. “That was fun. You okay over there, Mel? You look a little pale around the gills.”
“Near-death experiences have that effect on me,” she replied dryly.
He grinned and put the vehicle into gear once more. Driving at a much more sane pace, he eased across the wide pasture they found themselves in. A farmhouse blinked with light on the mountainside above them, but John gave it wide berth and drove past it. On the other side of the dwelling, he let out a quiet exclamation of satisfaction.
She peered outside to see what so pleased him. A dirt road stretched away in front of them. Little more than a parallel pair of gravel tire tracks, it was, nonetheless, a vast improvement over the past half hour’s worth of terrain. She sighed in relief as he guided the Land Rover along the crude road.
“Well. That was interesting,” she commented.
“More interesting than I was hoping for, but not as interesting as I expected,” he replied calmly. What kind of work had he been in before this, that nearly dying at the hands of bandits had barely fazed him? And the way he’d handled the Land Rover-no normal person could’ve done that. He had some special sort of training. Had he been a policeman, maybe? It would explain his familiarity with guns, too.
“Who were those guys back there?” she asked.
He glanced over at her grimly. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I don’t have any idea!”
He sighed. Brought the Land Rover to a stop. Turned off the ignition and lights. Alarmed, she saw him studying her in the dark, his eyes no more than shadowed hollows of blackness in the night. “True confessions time, Melina. Someone just tried to kill us, and that changes the rules of this game. It means you owe me the full truth and nothing but the truth. Now.”
She closed her eyes in despair. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Sorry we got shot at, or sorry that you didn’t tell me everything up front?” he prodded.
“Both.”
A pause stretched out between them until it became awkward. Still, he waited, some of that stubborn pigheadedness of his apparently kicking in. There was no help for it. She absolutely wasn’t going to answer his question. She jumped when he abruptly got out of the vehicle and walked around in front of it toward her side of the car. Cringing, she waited as he jerked her door open. She was surprised when he merely held a hand out to her to help her out of the car. She’d pegged him for bodily dragging her out of the vehicle in his current state of irritation.
But he did back her up against the side of the Land Rover in no uncertain terms, his hands on either side of her shoulders, trapping her in place. “What the hell’s going on, Melina?”
“What’s your gut telling you?” she asked lightly. It was a feeble attempt to remind him of the closeness they’d shared back in the hotel-okay it was a blatant attempt to distract him by reminding him of the great sex they’d had in Lima.
He considered her for several seconds in stony silence. Then he surprised her by answering. “Remember those two legitimate reasons I thought of for you coming out here to meet someone?”
She nodded.
“I think we’ve pretty much ruled those out as possibilities.”
She couldn’t help but smile. But as he continued, her humor evaporated.
“Which means you’re up to no good. You’re out here to meet someone on the wrong side of the law. Very much on the wrong side of the law, or you wouldn’t be having to jump through these hoops to even make contact with them. I can only think of a few people who qualify as that criminal and that cautious. And I gotta say, babe, every last one of them is a heaping bad problem.”
He continued grimly. “You’re dragging me around on a wild-goose chase out here, which tells me your criminal contacts don’t trust you. They’re vetting you out before they close in on you. So, I’m thinking you either have something you want to sell-“ at that, his gaze raked coarsely down her body “-or you’re being blackmailed.”
She had to work to keep her face from showing anything, either the hurt at his insinuation that she’d sell herself, or her panic at how close he’d come to the truth.
“My guess is blackmail. You’re too naive to even know how to begin doing business with these sorts on your own initiative. They approached you. So, what do you have that they want?”
She stared up at him, her lips pressed together defiantly. He could ask the question until the cows came home, but she was
He leaned forward. It was a subtle thing, but he invaded her personal space…and not in a nice way. It wasn’t even remotely sexual in overtone. It was just intimidating.
“We’re out here all alone,” he murmured in a silky tone. “You and me. Nobody for miles to hear you shout for help. I’m all you’ve got.”
He said the words in threat, but they resonated all the way to her soul.
And men? People thought she had it easy in that department because she was reasonably good-looking. But they didn’t realize that it got really annoying having to constantly fend off men on the prowl for easy sex with hot chicks. Somewhere along the way, she’d gotten so good at driving off the macho jerks that it had become a habit to push all men away.
She was headed down the fast track to withering up and becoming old and lonely before her time. Heck, she didn’t even have anyone she’d call a friend. Oh, she had a few acquaintances whom she went out with socially now and then, but no one she’d tell her deepest, darkest secrets to.
She looked up at John in dismay. And was even more dismayed to realize her vision was strangely blurred and her eyes suddenly burned.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” he muttered. “Do you have to go and get all weepy on me now?”
“Pardon me for having feelings,” she sniffed. “We women happen to cry, occasionally, you know. Maybe you should give it a try, sometime.”
He recoiled strongly from that suggestion. “No thanks,” he shot back.
She frowned at the violence of his reaction. What was that all about? In a blatant attempt to deflect him from
