Deadly Race (13 page)

“I can remedy part of that.”

“The pool?”

“Perfect for bathing. And now that we are away from the river and starting up into the mountains, the mosquitoes aren’t as bad.”

“No more mud packs?”

He shook his head, his eyes twinkling.

“Well, let’s go,” she announced, not caring that the pool they were talking about was worse in the seductive scene than the clearing. She wanted a bath badly. She turned toward the path they had made through the underbrush.

“Wait.” When she glanced back at Slade, he continued, “First, food, shelter and firewood, then recreation.”

“I don’t consider taking a bath recreation. The way my skin feels right now, it’s a necessity.”

“A necessity?”

“Yes, never in my life have I gone this long without a proper bath. It’s so …” she waved her hand in the air, “so primitive.”

“Remember last night? Do you want to spend another night like that?”

The jaguar’s yellow eyes flashed across her mind, followed by the electrifying closeness of sharing a blanket with Slade while rain fell on them. “Well, no.”

“Then I suggest you gather the firewood and some palm leaves while I look for some food. I promise you I won’t go as far from camp as I did last night.”

Sighing deeply, she set about doing the tasks he had assigned her. For the next hour she worked hard to gather enough firewood and palm leaves for the shelter, because she realized how much she was looking forward to taking a bath. Tomorrow they would have to start their ascent up the mountain that stood between them and the coast. Tonight she intended to relax and fix herself up to resemble a woman as much as possible.

On impulse, while stripping the broad leaves off a tree, she picked up some orchids growing near enough to the ground for her to reach. With a smile, she placed them on the blanket next to his duffel bag. As she straightened up, she heard the rustling of the brush across the clearing. She whirled about to find Slade entering the campsite, whistling some tune she didn’t know.

“Look at this feast. I hit a gold mine this time.”

His arms were full of bananas, coconuts, berries, nuts and some other kind of fruit that Ellie had never seen. While he made the crude hut for them using the large palm leaves, she fixed the wood for the fire and cracked the nuts to make a soup for them in a coconut shell when they returned to camp.

“Ready?” he asked when he completed the shelter, just big enough for two people to fit cozily. “It’s not the prettiest house you ever saw, but it will keep you relatively dry if it rains.”

As she started for the pool, Slade called out, “Wait, let me get the soap.”

“You didn’t tell me you had soap. Have you been holding out on me?” Right now she would pay a king’s ransom for some.

“It’s just a small bar from the hotel. It’s not much. In fact, I’d forgotten about it until I was looking for the matches last night.”

He knelt down in front of his duffel bag and reached to unzip it. His hand stopped when he saw the orchids. Slowly he touched one then the other. He glanced over his shoulder at Ellie, his eyes searing her with his intensity.

She didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking. She shouldn’t have done something so foolish and impulsive. Spinning about on her heel, she hurried from the clearing, heading down the path she hoped led to the pool. At the moment she really didn’t care where it led, so long as it was away from Slade.

CHAPTER 6

Ellie only took a few steps before he grabbed her by the arm and swung her around to face him. His rakish smile made her pulse beat erratically, and she knew her vow not to lose her heart to another man would be sorely tested as long as she was with Slade.

“Flowers for me?” he asked, holding the orchids up for her to see.

“I don’t know how they got there—”

“Liar,” he cut in.

“Unless I put them there,” she finished, her chin tilting up at a defiant angle as she stared at him. “I’m not scared to admit I gave them to you, but I am wondering what overcame me,” she said while trying to break free of his hold. All she managed to do was close the space between them even more. “Must be the heat and exhaustion. I had to be delirious.”

“Liar,” he breathed the word against her mouth, right before crushing it beneath his, while his arms snaked about her like the vines around the trees in the jungle.

After thirty years she should know how to handle a situation like this, but then again she had never been stranded in a jungle with a handsome man like Slade Calvert. Actually she had never been stranded in a jungle at all. And she was enough of a woman to respond to his tantalizing persuasion, even against her better judgment. She found herself clinging to him like the orchid to its host plant.

When he ended the kiss, which wasn’t nearly long enough, he kept his arms locked about her, her body pressed against his. “I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of receiving flowers from a beautiful woman before, but I could get used to it. I could get used to more than that.”

Slowly, too slowly, her common sense surfaced to be heard above the invitation in his voice, and she dislodged herself from his embrace. “Right now all I can think about is that bath.” Liar, she thought, but wasn’t about to let this man know she was focused only on one thing, him--his scent of jungle and sweat, his skin touching her, his taste still on her lips.

“Why did you give me the orchids?”

She took several steps away from him. “Does there have to be a reason?”

“No, not necessarily, but in this case I think there is and you won’t admit it.” He closed the distance between them but didn’t touch her.

“Okay. I saw the orchids and remembered what we discussed yesterday about a man never getting flowers from a woman. I decided to show you we’re for equality.”

“We?” he asked with a half grin. “Was someone helping you?”

“Women! Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”

“Because I’m trying to figure you out. You’re sending me mixed messages.”

Probably because she was mixed up herself
. She wanted him—oh, did she want him—but her past track record, where men were concerned, made her very wary. She was afraid to trust her judgment about men after her ex-fiancé’s betrayal, after her father’s abandonment when she was young.

“Why do you respond to my kiss one minute and the next you’re fleeing from me?”

“I don’t believe in brief affairs, no matter how pleasurable they might be. Can you honestly tell me you have more in mind than a brief affair while we are stuck with each other?”

His expression became serious. He tilted his head to the side and didn’t speak for a long moment. “I don’t know, Ellie. I won’t deny I’m attracted to you. That much is obvious. But I also won’t deny I’m not looking for any kind of long-term commitment. I’ve been there, done that. I don’t usually repeat something that doesn’t work.”

“Then we do agree on something. We are attracted to each other, but that’s as far as it should go.” Again she placed some distance between them and hoped he respected the space. She needed it to keep her resolve not to become romantically entangled with him. “We need each other to get off this island, but after that we’ll go our separate ways.”

“That’s true. I have to admit this time together is not our reality.”

“And the real world is out there for us to resume living in as soon as we get off Bella Isla.”

“Correct.”

When he agreed with her, Ellie was surprised at the disappointment she felt. She should be relieved, but she wasn’t completely. There was a part of her that wanted things to be different. There was a part of her that wanted to forget the past, but the past was what had molded her into the woman she was today. “Good. Now that we know where we stand with each other, we can take our dip in the pool and then get back to camp for dinner.”

She started forward on the path, acutely aware of his presence behind her the whole way to the waterfall. The hair on the nape of her neck tingled, and she was sure he was following her hip movement with his gaze. Probably with that infuriating smirk on his face.

Coming out of the jungle onto the pool and waterfall took her breath away, just as it had earlier when they’d discovered it. “This has got to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah. Nature at its best—raw, untamed, wild, exotically luscious.”

The water was clear, fed from a stream that came tumbling down the mountain above them. Around the pool there were beautiful flowers. Ellie had no idea of their names, but their colors were a visional assault that made her realize she needed to stop more often in her busy life to appreciate nature and its wonders. The scent of all those flowers perfumed the moisture-laden air, making her decide this was probably what the Garden of Eden would have looked and smelled like.

“You know it’s a shame a place like this is stuck way out here where no one can appreciate it,” Ellie said, bending down to smell one of those flowers whose name she didn’t know.

“If it was where everyone could appreciate it, do you think it would remain like this? There would probably be pop cans at the bottom of the pool.”

She eyed him. “Cynical but true, I’m afraid.”

A monkey high in a treetop shrieked, causing some brightly colored macaws to take flight in a flurry. Ellie followed one bird’s course until it disappeared in the green-covered branches of a tree.

“I wish we could have camped here.”

“Not at the local watering hole. I doubt you’d like a repeat of last night with the jaguar. Come on, here’s the soap. Ladies first.”

She examined the pool and remembered something about the story of the Garden of Eden. “Snakes are right below heights on my list of things to avoid. So in this case, I think it would be the gentlemanly thing for you to go first and check out the water.” She handed the soap back to him.

“Who said anything about me being a gentleman?” With that infuriating smirk on his face, he shrugged out of his shirt, but to her relieve leaving on his pants.

She ignored his question, diverted her gaze from his body— barely—and tried to concentrate on the floral vista. But its beauty held no attraction for her when she knew Slade was standing so near, definitely one of the most handsome men she had ever seen and even better than that he’d come to her rescue. She turned back to watch as he dove into the pool and swam underwater to the middle, tossing his head as he broke through the surface, water spraying everywhere.

“Come on in. It’s perfect,” he called out as he treaded water.

Okay, she could do this. They were both adults, she told herself while she turned her back on Slade in a futile attempt at modesty while she stepped out of her skirt, leaving on the oversized shirt that hung halfway down her thighs. When she faced him again, he was still treading water and watching her intently.

“Is it cold?” she asked, hoping it was, to cool her off.

“Yes.”

She walked to the edge and stuck her foot into the pool. At least the water’s temperature was going her way.

“That’s no way to go into the water, one inch at a time. At that rate it’ll be morning before you’re completely in.”

“You advocate plunging into the unknown with no regard for the hidden perils?”

“Yes.” He swam toward her, his strokes even and sure like the man.

“Throw caution to the wind?”

“Yes.” He stood up, water dripping from his broad chest, the pool waist deep where he was. “Come in.” He held his hand out to her, his look enticing.

Alarm signals rang loudly in her mind, but the water looked so inviting and she desperately needed to feel clean, to cool off. She made a shallow dive into the pool, surfacing several yards away from Slade. “Where’s the soap?” If she worked fast, she could be cleaned and out of the water in three minutes and safely on her way back to their camp.

“Right here.” He held it up, clenched in his hand.

The smile on his face told her she would have to come and get it if she wanted it. The alarm signals clamored again. She stared longingly at the bar of soap, then at the determinedly set expression on Slade’s face. What had started earlier in the camp wasn’t over. That much was clear from the look in his eyes.

“Don’t you want to use the soap, Ellie?”

“Yes, toss it to me.”

“I wouldn’t want to lose it in the water. You’d better come and get it.”

“I’ll catch it. Didn’t I tell you once I was a catcher for a girl’s softball team one summer?”

“No, and I do believe you’re a chicken.”

“I don’t trust that look on your face, Slade Calvert.”

“What look?” Innocence bathed his expression now as he boyishly smiled at her and waved the soap in front of her as if it were a long awaited piece of candy.

She shook her head and swam backward until her feet touched bottom near the other side of the pool. “You don’t play fair.”

“I promise I won’t do anything you don’t want, Ellie.”

She stared at him for a long moment. The water felt great, but she knew she would feel even better if she could properly clean herself. “Promise?”