Jared’s hand on his shoulder interrupted his thoughts. “What?” he demanded.
“Over there,” Jared said, not releasing his grip on Riley’s shoulder. “Manuel.”
The Mexican lay on the ground, a bullet wound in his shoulder, another in his leg, his face battered, blood everywhere. There was no sign of Abby.
With his own heart thundering in his chest, Riley rushed to the older man’s side, knelt down and felt for a pulse. Finally, after what seemed forever, he felt a faint beat. “Manuel! Come on, amigo. Hang in there. We’ll get help for you.”
Dark brown eyes blinked open. “Sorry, se;atnor.”
“Don’t apologize. Just tell me what happened.”
“It was the se;atnorita’s wish to go on. I could not refuse her. She said she would go alone.” He shot Riley an accusatory look. “She could not have managed on her own.”
“I’m sure she was very persuasive, Manuel,” Riley said dryly. “Where is she now? What happened?”
Manuel struggled for breath. “The guerrillas.”
“Dear God in heaven,” Riley murmured, fighting back the rising tide of panic that threatened to engulf him. Even though he’d anticipated something so terrible, he clearly hadn’t been prepared to face the reality of it.
“They took her?” he asked, filled with fury and the first flicker of an unwavering resolve to make them pay.
“S;aai, s;aai. They took to hospital. Promised.”
Riley was confused. “They didn’t shoot you?”
“No, se;atnor. It was bandidos. Three of them.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“They took the maps, nothing else.”
Three of them, Riley thought with a sinking sensation. Higgins and his brothers? It was all too likely.
Manuel interrupted his thoughts. “The guerrillas found us. Promised to take Se;atnorita Abby to hospital.”
“Why didn’t they take you as well?” Riley asked.
“I could not go. More important that I come to tell you what happened.” He regarded Riley apologetically. “I tried, se;atnor. I could go no farther.”
“How badly was she hurt?”
Manuel sketched the sign of the cross across his heaving chest. “No s;aae. She was...”
He searched for the right word, while Riley’s heart thudded dully. “What, Manuel? Tell me.”
“Unconscious,” he said finally. “I am very afraid for her, se;atnor.”
Riley closed his eyes against the unbearable anguish that swept through him. She couldn’t die! She couldn’t!
He glanced at Jared.
“Go,” his friend said. “You’ll reach her faster if you’re alone. I’ll see that Manuel gets help. We’ll meet up at the hospital.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll pray for her,” Jared promised.
And for me, Riley wanted to say. Because if Abby died, he was very much afraid his soul would go with her.
* * *
She was so terribly, terribly pale, Riley thought, as he stared down at Abby more than twenty-four hours after finding Manuel and learning that she’d been wounded. Like the Mexican, she had been shot and beaten, more savagely, it appeared. Probably because she had fought back, he guessed. She was too willful not to.
Every time he looked at her swollen face, the vicious black-and-blue bruises, Riley wanted to weep. The gunshot, which had barely grazed her shoulder, according to the doctors, seemed to be the least of her injuries.
This was all his fault. He’d brought her to Mexico. He’d driven her away from their camp with only an old Mexican guide to protect her. Guilt became his constant companion as he sat by her bedside, listening to the steady beep of the monitors for reassurance that she was still alive.
For hours now he’d been holding her hand, murmuring words of comfort and praying harder than he’d ever prayed for anything in his entire life. None of the entreaties from the nurses or the commands from the doctors had gotten him to budge from his place by her bed.
It had been only three days since he’d been this close, three days since she had angrily stolen away from their camp and set off to find the Mayan artifacts on her own. But that was long enough for him to think long and hard about what he’d lost, long enough to conclude that his overly protective attitude had been exactly what the situation had called for. Just look what had happened. She was in the hospital, damned close to dying. If she’d listened to him, she would have been safely back in Arizona by now.
He still couldn’t quite believe that she’d defied him so stubbornly. Even as he’d trailed after her through the jungle, he’d told himself that surely Manuel was guiding her back to the airstrip in Comitan. He’d wanted desperately to believe that she had left the camp just to taunt him, that she was far too sensible to do anything as dangerous as trying to go on with the search for the Mayan site. Discovering that she had not, that she was lying unconscious in a hospital bed, had infuriated him almost as much as her condition terrified him.
Now he drank in the sight of her, her normally rosy complexion as white as the hospital sheets, her long hair a tangled fan of ebony against the pillow. More devastating than her pallor somehow was that absolute stillness.
Abigail was all about quick, efficient motion, affectionate hugs and peals of joyous laughter. This silent, immobilized form wasn’t the woman he had cared for practically his entire life. That woman was somewhere else, somewhere he wasn’t sure he could reach, even though the doctors swore that his words might penetrate the thick fog of unconsciousness.
Riley knew all about his well-publicized international reputation as a daring adventurer, a man who would risk anything for the sheer thrill of it, a man widely regarded as fearless. Right at
