Running Wild (8 page)

“Yeah. ’Fraid so.”

“You think we should get back on the Pan-American?”

“You’re the one who’s been studying the map. How far do you estimate it is to a city of decent size, supposing such a thing even exists on this road?”

“If the legend is accurate, it looks like there’s a...well, not a city, exactly. But quite possibly a good-sized town in maybe sixty, seventy miles.”

“Okay, then.” He gave her a brisk nod. “If it were me I’d probably risk betting on there being a place where we can turn this heap in for something newer and more reliable. But you’re the one responsible for the rental. So, what do you think?”

“That you probably have a better grasp on this kind of thing than I do.” She shrugged, because she really didn’t have a clue what was the best thing to do. “It’s all a crapshoot,” she admitted. “So let’s go with your idea. At least you have one—it’s more than I do.”

He gave her a slight smile, popped the last bite in his mouth, chewed it up and swallowed it down. Then he killed off the remainder of his beer and rolled easily to his feet. “Let me start up the car and see how she sounds. Then if your offer is still good, I will take you up on the driving thing and grab myself another brew. Because, you’re right. The last however many hours feel more like a couple of weeks.”

They took off a few minutes later. Slumped in the passenger seat next to her, Finn finished his second beer before they were five miles down the road. Seconds after tucking the bottle out of the way, he was asleep.

It didn’t take long for the silence to grate on Mags’s nerves. With no love of spending time by herself, she’d made a habit of surrounding herself with people.

But she tried to be smart about it. She’d figured out a long time ago that it wasn’t wise to fully open herself up to anyone. Relationships didn’t last and she’d discovered the hard way that the instant she forgot that and tried to know someone on a deeper level, they were more likely than not to disappear on her.

If that meant she had more acquaintances than actual friends...well, that was okay. It was preferable, actually. She could talk to just about anyone, and no matter how superficial the connection, she possessed a genuine talent for making people feel like they were good friends for whatever space of time they spent together.

Yet here she was, captive in a soundless bubble, her only company dead to the world. And she’d admit it—that scratched at her last good nerve.

By the time Finn finally stirred over in his corner, she was downright antsy. Generally she excelled at finessing a conversation. Around Finn, however, that skill seemed to slip-slide away with frightening ease.

Now was no exception. She barely allowed the poor guy to stretch and blink the sleep from his eyes before she demanded, “So, why are you on vacation all by yourself?”

“Huh?” He turned his head to look at her through heavy-lidded eyes.

“Aren’t hikers supposed to do the buddy-system thing? It seems dangerous to be in the wild in a foreign country all by yourself.”
And why the hell would anyone
choose
to be alone anyway?

“It’s kind of a moot point, don’t you think?” he said, giving her a level look out of dark eyes that had grown considerably more alert. “Since as it turns out I’m not in the wild.”

“Yeah, I suppose so, but I’m curious.”

“My plans with another hiker fell through.”

Several beats went by as she waited for him to continue. Apparently, however, he’d said everything he planned to. Men were such a different species when it came to conversation. Would offering a few details kill them? “Why? What happened?”

He exhaled a gusty put-upon breath. But he said, “My brother Bren and I had this trip in the works for two years, then early last year he was diagnosed with cancer.”

Her heart clutched. “Omigawd, Finn, I am so sorry. I hope he beat it.”

“Yeah, he’s now cancer-free. But his oncologist wasn’t overjoyed with the idea of him taking an arduous hike in a country where neither of us speaks the language particularly well and the medical care isn’t always all it should be. His doc was a pussycat, though, compared to Bren’s wife, Jody. Bren fought the good fight but Jody went through a lot, too, when he was so sick, so he finally had to throw in the towel. By then it was too late to find anyone else to go.” He shrugged. “I didn’t particularly mind. I was looking forward to some time to myself.”

Which, of course, her situation had totally screwed up. Still, she asked, “Why? Do you have a marriage or long-time relationship that’s going south on you?”

His laugh was short and unamused. “No.”

She waited for him to elaborate and when he didn’t, she sighed. “You’re not a real big communicator, are ya?”

He had the nerve to look insulted. “I’m an excellent communicator when there’s something worth communicating about. This touchy-feely shit isn’t.”

“C’mon!” Reaching across the seat, she poked a finger in his side and merely gave him a little smile when he snapped tough-skinned fingers around her wrist and delivered her hand back to the steering wheel. “Are you pining for an unrequited love?”

“Jesus.” He shook his head in disgust.

“I’ll take that as a no. So, you’re not married, not involved and not carrying a torch. What had you so hot for some alone time, then?”

“You aren’t gonna let this go, are you?”

She shot him a cheerful smile and discovered to her surprise that something about the conversation actually made her feel that way. “Nope.”

“Fine. It’s my family.” He must have seen her knee-jerk protest forming, because he added flatly, “I know, I know, you think a big family is more romantic than chocolates and roses on Valentine’s Day. But as someone who actually lives in one, I’m here to tell you there are times when the lack of privacy is enough to drive a guy to drink. There’s just no getting away from everyone. I work with my three brothers in the family construction business all day long—although, given we’re all men, that’s not so bad.”

“Because you can scratch and spit and beat your hairy chests in male solidarity?”

His mouth quirked up. “Or at least speak the same language. My aunts and grandmas and even one of my sisters-in-law and a few girl cousins who damn well oughta know better, on the other hand, want to see me settled. Apparently something happens to the Kavanagh females once they get married. They morph from fun chicks into nags who believe the entire world needs to march by twos, man-woman, man-woman.”

“No man-man, woman-woman allowed?”

He laughed. “I honest to God think they’d be okay with that. What they can’t stand is that I never bring anyone to the family events.”

“Why not? Don’t you date?”

“I date plenty. No—more than plenty. I date a lot.”

“Omigawd,” she breathed, suddenly flashing back to the memory of that I’d-do-ya-baby look he’d given her in the cantina yesterday. Her brain hit a patch of black ice and spun a fast three-sixty through a decade’s worth of mental images from the myriad nightspots she’d frequented over the years. Slightly dizzied by the impressions whirling through her head faster than the sound of light, she eased her foot off the gas pedal, steered the car to a stop on the side of the road and shut it down. “Oh. My. God.”

She turned to stare at Finn, a strangled laugh threatening to blow her windpipe apart. “You’re one of
those
guys.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Why’d you stop? What guys?”

“The ones you see cutting a different woman out of the herd every night of the week in every club in every city in the world.”
Good God, Mags, hyperbole much?
But she shook her head because she knew—she just
knew
—she was right about this. “Men who are charming and fun, but most of all dedicated to getting laid and staying single. You know who I’m talking about, Kavanagh.

“You’re one of the man whores.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
MAN
...
WHAT
?
Finn gaped at Magdalene’s profile as she turned away to lounge in the driver’s seat, casually draping her left wrist over the steering wheel. Did she just call him a
man whore
?

Temper sparked. Because, what the fuck? She’d known him five lousy minutes in the greater scheme of things and thought she had him all figured out? Well, excuse the hell outta him if that hacked him off some. Only one thing prevented his spark of ire from racing up a line of black powder to explode all up in her face.

He couldn’t claim she was completely wrong. He had made avoiding commitments—and, yeah, sue him, getting laid as often as possible—a priority from the time he was about seventeen. Until recently it hadn’t occurred to him to even question his habit of holding himself romantically aloof.

And if that wasn’t enough, in his head he could hear his sister Hannah laughing her ass off, then wheezing between raucous whoops of hilarity, “Oh, God,
man whore
. She sure nailed it in one with that description, didn’t she, boyo?”

Still
. The spark might refuse to set off an explosion, but it didn’t simply vanish in a puff of harmless smoke, either. Hannah was family; since first memory they had taken turns insulting and knocking each other off their respective high horses.
She
was allowed to dent his pride, because he knew her bottom line was she would always have his back.

Little Ms. Magdalene, on the other hand, didn’t know him for shit.

Well, two could play this game. He felt as though he, too, had a decent grasp on her less desirable characteristics. He opened his mouth, ready and willing to pepper her with them like buckshot.

Only to notice that maybe she wasn’t as insouciant as she appeared. When he looked closely, in fact, he could see how rigid her left leg was and how hard the foot on the end of that leg pressed against the floor on the far side of the brake pedal.

Almost as if she were bracing for him to take his best shot.

It made him remember that, unlike him, she probably hadn’t had a lifetime of someone having her back. Which was not to say he felt duty bound to give her a free pass to take potshots at him. Hell, no; screw that.

He slid over and even as he stopped to leave space between their bodies, he slipped his arm the rest of the way along the top of her seat until he could tiptoe his fingers across the cap of her shoulder. He plucked up a strand of her braid-wavy hair and rubbed its ends between his finger and thumb. “Jealous, Magdalene?”

She whipped her head around, yanking the strand free. “How many times do I have to tell you my name is Mags?” she demanded. “And jealous of what?” She gave him a look that said, “One of us is deluded, Jack—and it’s not me.”

He picked up another thicker tendril and wrapped it around his forefinger, bringing his hand closer and closer to her face, until he could trace the whorl of her ear with his fingertip. “Of the fact,” he said in a low voice, leaning near, “that I have had lots. And. Lots. Of s-s-ssex.” He breathed the final word directly into her ear.

Which, okay, probably wasn’t his smartest move. Not when it brought him close enough to smell the sunshine in her hair and the healthy Mags scent of the rest of her. “But, hey, don’t you worry, darlin’,” he said as if running off at the mouth would somehow negate his awareness. “I can always make room for one more.”

He didn’t need the scream of outraged she-relatives in his head to know he was out of line. But he’d say this for Mags, she lost that stiffness he’d noticed and turned to face him, cool as you please. Ignoring his hand now firmly entangled in her hair, she gave him a long, slow once-over.

“Tell you what,
darlin’
—and what’s with your constant use of that word anyway? Is it just a sly way of dodging ever having to remember actual names?” She essayed a never-mind-that wave of her hand. “That’s not important. My point is that I’m not really interested in being one of a faceless horde of...dozens? Hundreds?” Mild distaste flashed across her expression. “Thousands, perhaps?”

“Hey, let’s not rule out millions.” He watched color fluctuate under the fine-grained skin of her chest, her throat and face, and dug his fingers deeper into that warm, streaky blond hair until he could scratch his nails along her scalp. Goose bumps cropped up on her arms. “So...should I take that as a no, then?”

“Yes. You should take it as a great big resounding no. I’d have to be drunk off my ass to sleep with you.”

“Yeah?” He leaned close. Lightly gripped her firm little cleft chin, pressed a here-and-gone kiss on her lips, then, setting her loose, pulled back. And in his most tempting voice murmured, “Buy you a margarita?”

She made a sound like a suppressed sneeze exploding in her throat and, knowing a muffled laugh when he heard one, he grinned, disentangled his fingers and moved back to his own side. He knew damn well their chemistry went both ways, because she’d been every bit as engaged as he when she’d kissed him in the gondola. But unable to shake his dad’s edicts about the way men treated women, he merely said, “You know you’re tempted.”

“You keep telling yourself that.” But then she laughed outright and started the car again. Pulling out onto the empty road, she shook her head, shot him a what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-
do
-with-you glance, then turned her attention back to her driving.

“You just keep telling yourself that, bub.”

* * *

W
HEN
THEY
ROLLED
into the town of La Plata later that day, Mags was relieved to see it looked plenty large enough to house a car-rental agency. She pulled over to ask the first person they came across if there was indeed one—and if so, where they might find it. Following the man’s directions, she then set off to locate it.

They couldn’t have driven more than a couple of miles before they suddenly found themselves at a cross street bisecting a sizable festival in progress. The air rang with the shouts of merrymakers and music, and the long boulevard they crossed was closed to traffic and clogged with costumed revelers. Citizens dressed in their own brilliantly colored party garb filled the sidewalks, while seductive aromas of fiesta food wafted beckoning fingers, inviting one and all to come eat their fill.

The guitar, horns and mariachi-heavy music drifting through their open windows had her involuntarily dancing in her seat. She forced herself to still, but when she glanced over at Finn she discovered that he, too, was doing a seated boogie.

Meeting her gaze, he gave her a whatta-ya-gonna-do, one-sided smile and continued to rock his upper body in a subtle, sinuous rhythm. She took back what she’d thought yesterday when she’d made the snap judgment he wasn’t a club kind of guy. Apparently he was.

The man rocked some serious moves, at any rate.

The music faded as they left the festival behind. Mags navigated her way to the rental agency through a maze of secondary streets until she finally spotted a sign for Paseo Las Industrias Barato Auto Rentals. And for the first time since running afoul of Joaquin in Santa Rosa, she felt as if something might actually go their way. She’d gotten her current car through a Barato agency—and while the quality of this one didn’t compare to the few cars she’d rented in the States, the agency did honor returns from any Barato dealership in South America.

After giving Finn the paperwork and letting him out in front of the office, she looked for a place to park in the minuscule lot. Judging by the vehicles she walked past a minute later, it might have been the Santa Rosa agency fleet that was the fluke, not the rest of the Barato-owned agencies at all. The cars in this lot looked far newer. That was encouraging. So was entering the tiny agency to find the clerk speaking English and dealing quite handily with the American.

Finn looked pumped when he and the clerk joined her a moment later. He slid a folded piece of paper and a key on a foam ring, of all things, into his back pocket. Reaching her, he turned her around and escorted her right back out again.

“We have to go grab our stuff out of the trunk,” he said. “Enrique here is hot to close up for a couple of hours to attend the festival. You and I are gonna go check it out as well.”

“Oh, but—” She glanced over her shoulder to see the clerk locking the front door, then hustling away. She opened her mouth to call him back, but snapped it shut again. And nodded. What the hell. Checking out a local festival sounded like a great break from their single-minded drive toward the Munoz grow farm.

Finn grabbed her tote out of the trunk, handed it to her and pulled out his backpack. He put the foam-ringed key into the pack’s outside pocket and swung it onto his back.

“Which car is ours?” she asked, digging through her bag for her wallet and a lipstick.

“Beats the hell out of me.”

She turned to him. “But what do we do with our stuff?”

“We’ll have to carry the pack and your purse. The rest we’ll leave here and come back for later.”

“If it’s still here to retrieve.”

He shrugged. “Which is why we’re taking the important stuff with us.”

She sighed, put her wallet and lipstick back in the tote and pulled out one of her scarves. She twisted her hair up off her neck, tied it in a knot midway between her crown and the base of her skull, then wrapped the scarf around it in a style a South African makeup artist had shown her. Looping the bag’s strap over her head, she settled it cross body. She looked up to see Finn watching her with a crooked smile. “What?”

“Nothing. It’s just...that girlie stuff you’re always doing is way outside my experience.”

“Yeah? Don’t your sisters or your millions of lovers do the girlie thing?”

He shrugged. “Probably. I’ve just never paid much attention. C’mon.” He nudged her with his shoulder. “Let’s you and me go do the festival.”

The rental agency was on the edge of La Plata’s industrial area, so they had to hike quite a way before they reached the event. Mags was hot and thirsty by the time they plunged into the heart of the party, but the music and aromas and the sheer amount of men, women and children gathered with a single shared purpose of having fun made her forget for a while the problems that had been piling upon her shoulders. Looking over at Finn, she saw he had his camera out to document the scene.

She got caught up in the crowds as she and Finn inched their way along the sidewalk, dividing their attention between the spectacle around them and looking over the goods for sale on rugs and flimsy tables. They stopped to watch as a group of women in brightly patterned costumes danced past in the street, twirling and manipulating their huge circle skirts until they swirled around them like kites taking flight.

Mags pored over a table piled high with costume jewelry. She particularly loved the chunky bracelets made from what looked like old-school Lucite. Even with the bargain-basement asking price, she was aware of the limited amount of cash she’d brought with her on this trip. She tried to ignore it, but it jangled at the back of her mind and finally, regretfully, she turned away from a particularly appealing orange-and-cream-colored bangle.

Out of nowhere a little voice in her head demanded,
What right do you have to enjoy yourself—and coveting jewelry, for pity’s sake—when your mother and father are enduring God knows what at the hands of Munoz’s men?

Enormous guilt threatened to consume her, but she squared her shoulders and forced herself to think logically.

And, looked at rationally...

They weren’t blowing off her parents’ situation so they could enjoy a day out of time. The car agency was closed until the festival was over and their attending it themselves was a legitimate means of de-stressing. Heaven knew their psyches had absorbed hit after heavy-duty hit ever since her original run-in with Joaquin. It felt like it’d been one craptastic challenge after another. So, she shook off her guilt as best she could and granted herself permission to take this time for what it was—a brief respite that would help refill their wells and give them the strength to fight again.

Several barely pubescent boys in elaborate costumes and headdresses the colors of the sun did a tribal dance out in the street a short distance from the jewelry tables. Beyond them two shirtless teenaged boys in white pants performed a contrastingly modern B-boy routine to a hip-hop tune blaring from an old eighties-style boom box.

Mags looked over her shoulder to share a grin with Finn over the wildly divergent cultural styles and found him gone. She looked around, but for a moment all she could see was a group of men in black bowlers and beautiful elaborately embroidered yellow ponchos with yellow and green fringe that shivered with their every move. Anxiety began to itch like a bad rash under her skin.
Oh, God, where did he go?

She mentally kicked herself, because if he’d deliberately shaken free of her, well, it was her own damn fault, wasn’t it? Why did she always have to shoot off her big mouth before she thought things through? She knew she had crummy impulse control, but couldn’t she, just once, have bitten her tongue and not blurted out the first damn thing to pop into her head?

Oh, no
, a voice dripping in sarcasm drawled in her head.
Not you, girl.
You
had to go call him a man whore.