Just a Kiss Away (17 page)

The next night there were no rock ledges, so they’d slept against a tree. At least Sam had slept; she hadn’t. Which didn’t make today any easier to deal with. She was bone tired. Even the mosquitoes knew it, she thought as she whacked those stupid palm fronds and a swarm of mosquitoes out of her face. She’d stumbled over at least a mile of rock beds with jagged black lava that had jabbed into the soles of her shoes and cut her hands when she fell. After that she’d had no trouble shifting the blame for her situation.

Taking a determined step, she intended to tell Sam just how miserable she was. She kept her eyes on his back instead of on the terrain, and her foot slammed into a rock—a slippery rock. She fell. Struggling to her sore knees, she looked up, expecting Sam’s help. He hadn’t even noticed. She watched his broad, damp, monstrous back move through the jungle ahead of her as if he were just a strolling on a Sunday. She stood up and stormed after him. This was all his fault.

She was miserable, bruised, and so tired, and she needed to take that misery out on someone, or something. After all, she had to tell someone. There was nothing worse than being miserable and having no one to tell about it. She wasn’t strong like Joan of Arc or Spartacus.

If Lollie had to play the role of martyr, the world was gonna know it.

Trudging through a deep sticky pool of mud, she glared at Sam’s big back, trying to catch up with him so she could give him a piece of her mind. A small rational part of her knew she wasn’t being fair, but neither was her situation fair. She was here, stuck with him just like he was stuck with her. And right now fairness wasn’t foremost on her mind. Lollie wanted to be home, clean, and riding in a comfortable carriage under the wild oaks instead of plodding like a drudge mule over this humid, sticky island.

The mudhole widened and deepened as they neared its rim. Sam was still a few yards ahead. He reached the far side of the pool first and pushed himself up and out. She stood there, forced by her circumstances to look way up at him.

It was not a good position for griping. She decided it would be more appropriate to discuss this after he helped her out.

He turned to face her. “Give me your hands and dig your feet into the side of the mudhole. From this angle, I need some leverage to help pull you out.”

She wiped the filthy hair out of her face and placed her hands in his.

“Can you feel the small outcropping of the rocks on the side?”

She moved her right foot around until she felt the hardness of the rock. She nodded.

“Good. Now tell me when your foot’s on it. I’ll pull up and you push up at the same time with your foot. Understand?”

“Uh-huh.” She stepped on a shallow ridge in the rock. “Okay, pull.”

Sam pulled up. She pushed up. Her shoe slipped, and she panicked, feeling the loss of her balance. Naturally, she let go of him and grabbed the side of the hole.

She felt the wind of his body sailing over her.

She heard the splash and winced.

Very slowly she turned around.

His dark head broke the surface, then the intimidating wall of his shoulders. He loomed in front of her like some huge angry monster, mud dripping from his face and head and eye patch. The lethal way he glared at her made her wish the mud had hidden his good eye, too.

If looks could kill, she’d be dead. If eyes could burn fire, she’d be ashes. If she knew what was good for her, she’d be long gone.

“My shoe slipped,” she explained, having a feeling that he didn’t really want an explanation. He wanted violence. His hands reached out.

She squeezed her eyes shut, gritting her teeth and waiting.

His large hands closed tightly around her waist, spanning it. He lifted her out of the mudhole, and set her none too gently on the rock rim. The moment he let go, she scooted backward fast.

He was out before she could blink, a muddy giant towering over her. With purpose, he bent down and jerked off her shoes then rammed one of them under his arm. He gripped the other shoe in one hand and grabbed the small, squat Louis XV heel in the other. Then he twisted so hard Lollie could hear it crack.

“What’re you doing to my shoes?” She scrambled up, trying to grab them.

“Pretending they’re your neck.” He wrenched the heel off and tossed it over his shoulder, then did the same to her other shoe. He shoved the mangled shoes in her face.

She looked at them, sniffing back her miserable tears. Her rosettes were gone, she’d lost those somewhere along the trail, and now he’d pulled the heels off, too. It didn’t matter that the shoes had been ruined days before. They symbolized her whole wretched state.

“If you start blubbering again I swear to God I’ll leave you here.” Sam looked as if he could breathe fire.

She sniffed. “I’m hungry. I want to go home. I want a bath.”

“I want a muzzle,” he muttered.

She looked up at him, wiping the tears from her eyes. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To muzzle me like some cur.” She stared down at her dress. Nothing was pink or white. It was brown from the mud and green from the plant stains. She touched her ratty hair. “I must look like some mongrel dog.”

“Yeah, you do, maybe worse.” He rolled his eyes as if this were some joke and nudged her shoes with his rifle. “Now put those on, Rover, and let’s go for another walk.”

She didn’t even think. The second he called her Rover she lost the ability to think. She threw the shoes right at his smirking face.

He caught one; the other sailed over his right shoulder. One look at his face and she knew she’d gone too far. He dropped the rifle, shrugged out of the pack, and stalked toward her.

She stepped back, holding her hands out. “Don’t you touch me!”

He pulled out that huge, sharp knife he called a machete and kept walking toward her.

She screamed and spun around to run. He grabbed her dress, twisted it, and pinned her against a tree trunk. His hard, anger-tight face was barely an inch away from hers. Their stares locked, hers frightened, his angry.

She squeezed her eyes shut, throwing her arms out to the sides in surrender. “Go ahead, kill me! I want to die!”

Nothing happened, but he didn’t move, either. Then she felt the very tip of the knife press against her neck.

“You, Miss Lah-Roo, are a big pain in the ass, and I’m putting up with you only because I have no choice. I’m taking you to that camp because I have to. But don’t press your luck. If you think you’re miserable now, just push me some more and I’ll teach you all about misery.”

Her eyes shot open.

With one quick slice of the knife, he cut the lace off her dress.

She gasped.

“How would you like to walk through the jungle naked?” She swallowed.

He grabbed a wad of her skirt in a fist and cut it the way a cook lops off the top of a carrot. He dropped the skirt, and it fell in jagged tatters that barely covered her skinned knees.

After eyeing her from head to foot, he lifted one welt-reddened arm and spoke, his voice deep, calm, and certain. “The mosquitoes will have a feast on all that fine aristocratic white skin.”

He wouldn’t cut off all her clothes, she reasoned. His face said he would.

He raised the knife again, letting the tip touch the seam between her breasts. “There are palm trees here with leaves so sharp they can cut through your skin faster than a machete.”

He pressed the knife a bit closer. She felt the seam threads separate.

“Want to test me?”

Scared enough to spit, she shook her head.

“Then put those shoes on, start walking, and shut that damn whiny mouth.” He released her, then stood back and bellowed, “Now!”

She’d never moved so fast in her life. She grabbed one shoe and scurried over to the other, lying near a copse of oleander, where she worked her muddy foot into one flat shoe. It was the wrong foot. She slipped her foot out and glanced up.

Machete still in his white-knuckled hand, he took one catlike step toward her. “You have ten seconds. One . . .”

She grabbed a branch and rammed the shoe onto her foot.

“Four . . .”

She tried to work her foot into the other one, keeping a death grip on the oleander branches. She was in such a hurry that the shoe slipped from her hand. Panicked, she bent down, never taking her wary eyes off him.

“Six . . .”

She rammed the shoe on so hard that her toes cracked. “Eight . . .”

Her heel wouldn’t slide in, so she used a finger as a shoehorn. The shoe slid on, just as he pointed the knife at her.

“Ten. Move!”

She did move, and fast.

Lollie plopped down
on a rock and hung her pounding head in her hands. Her hair fell over her face in a heavy, dirty blond knot.

It smelled. She smelled. She ached, and she was hungry. A wee part of her still waited to wake up and find out that this was all a bad dream. She looked around her. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.

Closing her eyes, she buried her palms into her pounding, burning eye sockets. At least there was one good thing: Sam the Tireless had finally given her a rest, telling her not to move while he went to look for Gawd only knew what.

Imagine . . . telling her to stay there as if she would just take off through the wild, primitive, horrid, gawdforsaken jungle as easily as if she daily changed water to wine. She wished she could. A little wine would taste good right now. She licked her lips, wishing for the taste of something besides water.

For the hundredth time she wished she were a man. A man would have known what to do. Her skills would have been in survival instead of etiquette—something that was about as useful here as burning green wood. Boys were raised with freedom that girls weren’t given. Boys could ride and shoot and go places alone. They could swim. But girls had to do what was socially correct.

When they grew up things only got worse. Men could eat all they wanted. Women had to take small bites and leave most of the food behind. She wondered who came up with that foolish rule. Probably some hungry man.

Many times she’d watched her brothers eat enough ham to make them snort while she had nibbled politely on two or three small bites. She’d really wanted to eat twice as much as they did, and right here and now she was hungry enough to do it.

She rubbed the bridge of her nose.

Sam thrashed through the brush behind her. She knew it was Sam. She could smell him. She didn’t bother to look up. It took too much energy.

“What’s the matter now?” he asked, squatting down in front of her.

“I’m just thinking.”

“Yeah, the first time’s always the worst.”

She ignored him. She was too tired, too weak, and too hungry to do anything else.

“Hold out your hand.”

Still not looking, she whipped her hand out, expecting to feel the dried leather he’d been giving her to eat. She was right hungry enough now to eat it, or at least to try.

Like pearls from a strand, small, plump, round berries filled her damp palm. She stared at them as if they were flawless jewels. To her stomach they were even more valuable.

“Oh, sweet heaven and Lord above! Food . . . real food! Oh, thank you. Thank you.” She popped five into her mouth before she remembered Madame Devereaux’s many lectures on manners and excess. She chewed anyway. She was tired of being a lady. Besides, Madame Devereaux was never stuck in a tropical jungle with a one-eyed human locomotive.

The locomotive spoke. “Go easy on those. It’s not good for you to eat too many.”