The Great Escape

PANDA DRAGGED THE MUSKY SCENT of the bayou into his lungs. He had too much time to think-too many memories crowding in-and each day his resentment burrowed deeper.

He hadn’t expected her to last more than a few hours, yet here she still was, seven days after he’d picked her up. Why couldn’t she do what she was supposed to? Go back to Wynette or run home to Virginia. He didn’t give a damn where she went, as long as she was gone.

He couldn’t understand her. She’d seen right through that stomach-churning bogus rape he’d staged their second night out, and she acted as if she didn’t hear half the insults he hurled at her. She was so controlled, so disciplined. What she’d done on her wedding day was clearly out of character. And yet… Beneath those good manners, he kept catching glimpses of something-someone-more complicated. She was smart, maddeningly perceptive, and stubborn as hell. Shadows didn’t cling to her like they did to him. He’d bet anything she’d never woken up screaming. Or drunk until she blacked out. And when she’d been a kid…

When she’d been a kid, she’d been able to do what he couldn’t.

Five hundred dollars. That’s all his kid brother had been worth.

Through the cry of a swamp creature, he heard his eight-year-old brother’s voice as they’d walked up the broken sidewalk to still another foster home, their current social worker climbing the creaking porch steps in front of them. “What if I pee the bed again?” Curtis whispered. “That’s what got us kicked out of the last house.”

Panda hid his own fear beneath a fifteen-year-old’s swagger. “Don’t worry about it, jerkface.” He delivered a sucker punch to Curtis’s scrawny arm. “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and take you to the bathroom.”

But what if he didn’t wake up like he hadn’t last week? He’d promised himself he wouldn’t fall asleep until he got Curtis up to pee, but he’d dozed off anyway, and the next day old lady Gilbert had told Social Services they had to find someplace else for Curtis.

Panda wouldn’t let anything separate him from his kid brother, and he told their social worker he’d run away if the two of them got split up. She must have believed him because she found a new house for them. But she warned him there weren’t any more families willing to take them both.

“I’m scared,” Curtis whispered as they reached the porch. “Are you scared?”

“I’m never scared,” he lied. “Nothing to be scared of.”

He’d been so wrong.

Panda gazed out at the dark water. Lucy had been fourteen when her mother had died. If he and Curtis had fallen in with Mat and Nealy Jorik, his brother would still be alive. Lucy had accomplished what he couldn’t pull off- she’d kept her sister safe-and now Curtis lay in a grave while the sister Lucy had protected prepared for her first year of college.

Curtis had hooked up with a gang when he was only ten, something Panda could have prevented if he hadn’t been in juvie. They’d let him out long enough to go to his little brother’s funeral.

He blinked his eyes hard. Memories of Curtis only led to other memories. It would be easier not to think if he had music to distract him, but he couldn’t listen to the heavy drama of Otello, Boris Godunov, or a dozen other operas with Lucy around. With anybody around.

He wished she’d come out and talk to him. He wanted her close; he wanted her farther away. He wanted her to leave, to stay, to take off her clothes-he couldn’t help that. Being with her all day would test any man, especially a horny bastard like himself.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, pulled his cell from his pocket, and carried it around to the side of the house where he couldn’t be overheard.

PANDA KEPT GOADING HER INTO going for morning runs, and even though she held him back, he refused to run ahead. “The second I’m out of sight, you’ll start walking,” he said.

True. She walked for exercise and had a gym membership she used semi-semi-regularly, but she wasn’t a running enthusiast. “When did you make yourself my personal trainer?”

He punished her by kicking up the pace. Eventually, however, he took pity and slowed.

Her conviction that he wasn’t entirely the Neanderthal he wanted her to believe had grown along with her curiosity about him, and she embarked on a fishing expedition. “Have you talked to your girlfriend since you’ve been gone from wherever you’re gone from?”

A grunt.

“Where is that, by the way?”

“Up north.”

“Colorado? Nome?”

“Do you have to talk?”

“Married? Divorced?”

“Watch that pothole. If you break your leg, you’re on your own.”

She pulled some extra air into her burning lungs. “You know the details of my life. It’s only fair that I know some of yours.”

He moved ahead again. Unlike her, he wasn’t out of breath. “Never been married, and that’s all you’re getting.”

“Are you involved with anybody?”

He looked at her over his shoulder-faintly pitying. “What do you think?”

“That the pool of lady alligator wrestlers isn’t big enough to give you a lot of dating opportunities?”

She heard a sound-either amusement or a warning that he’d heard enough stupid questions-but all she’d learned was that he was single, and he could be lying about that. “It’s so strange,” she said. “As soon as we got here, your manners improved. It must be the swamp air.”

He cut to the other side of the road. “The question is,” she said, “why bother with all that spitting and scratching since-and I have to admit I was surprised about this-it doesn’t seem to come naturally?”

She expected him to dodge the question, but he didn’t. “So what? I got bored when I realized you were too much of a nut job to be scared into doing what you should have done right away?”

No one had ever called her a nut job, but since the insult came from him, she didn’t take it to heart. “You were hoping when I saw the contrast between you and Ted, I’d realize what I’d given up and go back to Wynette.”

“Something like that. Ted’s a good guy, and he was obviously in love with you. I was trying to do him a favor. I stopped when I realized the biggest favor I could do him was to keep you from going back.”

That was true enough to hurt, and they finished the run in silence.

When they returned to the house, he pulled his sweat-soaked T-shirt over his head, grabbed the hose, and doused himself. His hair clung to his neck in wet black ribbons; the sun poured over his face as he tilted his head to the sky.

He finally set the hose aside and used his palm to sluice the water from his chest. His swarthy skin, blunt- tipped nose, and wet, big-fisted hands made an unsettling contrast to Ted’s perfect male beauty. Panda might not be as crude as he wanted her to believe, but he still existed completely outside her realm of experience.

She realized she was staring and turned away. Her female body was clearly drawn to what she saw. Fortunately, her female brain wasn’t nearly as foolish.

ONE DAY DRIFTED INTO ANOTHER until they’d been at the lake for a week. She swam, read, or baked bread, one of the few foods that tasted good to her. What she didn’t do was call Ted or her family.

Each morning after their run, Panda appeared in the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower, his curls temporarily tamed, although she knew they’d quickly reassert themselves. He picked up what she suspected would be the first of several warm slices of the oatmeal bread she’d just taken from the oven, tore the bread neatly in half, and spread each piece with a spoonful of orange marmalade. “Did Ted know about your baking skills when he let you dump him?” he said after he’d swallowed his second bite.

She set aside her own piece of bread, no longer hungry. “Ted doesn’t eat a lot of carbs.” That wasn’t true, but she wouldn’t admit that she’d never gotten around to baking for her fiance.

She’d picked up her adult cooking skills under the funnel-shaped stainless steel lights that hung in the White House kitchen, the place where she’d escaped when her siblings’ squabbles had gotten on her nerves. There, she’d learned from some of the country’s best chefs, and now Panda, instead of Ted, was the beneficiary.

He twisted the lid back on the marmalade jar. “Ted’s the kind of guy who was born under a lucky star. Brains, money, polish.” He slapped the jar in the refrigerator and shoved the door closed. “While the rest of the world