Not that visiting here was much of a prize. “It looks abandoned to me.”
“People do live here.” Luc pointed out several clues. “Satellite dishes on the roof, fat chickens running around and that pickup.”
The monster red pickup truck was almost as nice as Luc’s and probably cost more than ten of the dwellings—she couldn’t bring herself to call them houses. “Do they even have indoor plumbing?”
He pointed to a hut tucked into the clearing’s edge. “Easier to do your business outside than bother with a septic tank and all.”
An outhouse. Ugh. And she thought peeing under a tree was bad. What the smell from that building must be…at least they were upwind.
A screen door smacked open on a pea-green metal trailer next to the red pickup. “What y’all doin’ here?”
Luc smoothly swiveled her behind him. The speaker was a small woman, elderly, with slightly hunched shoulders.
“Hey. We just hikin’ by on the way to the state park.” He had purposely broadened his accent into deep Cajun.
“Y’all ain’t from around here, that’s fo’ sho.” She eyed Luc suspiciously.
“From de bayou,
cher
. On a li’l honeymoon.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “What kinda crazy honeymoon is that?” She peered at Claire. “You sho’ ’bout marryin’ a man who take you to Broomsburg for a honeymoon?”
“We ran away from my daddy and don’t want him to find us.”
She cackled. “Don’t worry none ’bout that. He never find you here. Nobody can.”
And that was starting to worry Claire.
She clutched Luc’s arm in what she hoped looked like newlywed affection. Just as she was about to drag him away, a little figure peered out the door. “Is it Momma?”
“No, Callie.”
“What a pretty name.” Claire looked closer at the young girl with pink cheeks and mop of dusty blond hair. “How old is she?”
“Five.”
“Almost old enough for school.” Claire smiled at the child.
“We’ll see. School cain’t keep teachers long ’nuff to stay open. Maybe jus’ teach her at home.”
Claire didn’t know what to say to that. She had nothing against homeschooling, but it was obvious that educational resources were sorely lacking here. “Well, good luck.”
A loud snore came from the trailer and the woman started.
Luc caught Claire’s elbow and steered her away. “You take care, ma’am.”
Callie and the woman disappeared into the trailer and Luc and Claire disappeared into the woods. Luc took the point this time and set a blistering pace.
It wasn’t until about forty-five minutes later that he finally called a halt to the forced march. Claire dropped onto a log and sucked down most of her canteen. “Want to tell me what happened?”
Luc’s face was set in harsh lines. “I didn’t want to stick around to meet the man of the house,
béb
. Could be he was bad news.”
“Like what, a criminal?”
“Who knows?”
Claire cast an anxious glance over her shoulder. “What kind of crime?”
“Maybe drugs—pot or meth, likely. Could even be he’s an orchid poacher. Collectors pay crazy amounts for illegally harvested, wild-grown plants.”
“Really? Orchids? That sounds bizarre.”
He urged her to her feet again. “Same here as in San Lucas de la Selva. Poor people, uneducated people don’t have the same choices, some turn to crime.”
“Yeah, and some don’t.” Claire glared at him. “Were you poor growing up?”
“Family of nine, living in the middle of nowhere? Hell, yeah, we was poor. Never went hungry ’cuz Papa knew how to hunt and fish, but poor.”
“And you had the same choice. Did you turn to crime?”
He shook his head. “My papa never hesitated to pass me a slap if I needed it. After all those girls, he wasn’t ’bout to let his only son go bad, disgrace the Boudreaux name. Now let’s go. We’re breaking camp and moving soon as we get back.” He took off walking again.
“Don’t you want the map?”
“That ol’ thing?” He grinned at her. “I curved our path around so we should hit camp in another hour or so.”
“Oh.” Claire sagged briefly before following him. Another hour. Well, better that than being tracked by insane rural drug pushers. On the other hand, Luc didn’t seem worried, just cautious. He probably wouldn’t be worried if a hundred guys were tracking him in the woods, instead of one woman limping after him.
Claire desperately wished she had someone to talk to about her growing feelings for Luc. Until now, she’d always had Janey or one of her sorority sisters to pore over every detail of her relationships. She supposed it was a bit junior-high, but then again, her previous relationships had been juvenile, as well—unlike the unnerving sensations Luc provoked in her.
Janey would tell her to enjoy Luc without giving herself up to him, but Claire had a sneaking suspicion Janey had never been with a man like Luc.
Then up came the sun. Her tender lover left and her hard-driving instructor returned. Today had been easier than their massive hike yesterday due to her feet giving her trouble, so he’d lectured her in depth on safe plants versus poisonous ones. Claire remembered every word with apprehension. Plants with milky sap were bad, wild mushrooms were bad, white berries were bad—heck, even the plant that made the deadly poison ricin grew wild in the jungle. He’d carried along a field identification guide to show her and after a while, all the plants started to look the same—green and deadly. Larva and frogs were looking mighty tasty after that lesson.
Once she’d bathed, Claire stretched out on a towel on the wide rocks surrounding the watering hole. She didn’t want to do any more survival training. Not because she was tired, or lazy, but because she wanted to spend the rest of their time making love.
Unfortunately, Luc had other ideas. He was pushing her training harder and harder, trying to cram every bit of knowledge he had into her head as their time together drew to a close. All of a sudden, it was four days before she was to leave for San Lucas, and he’d promised to return her to Ft. Bragg tomorrow, three days before her plane took off.
Only one day left with Luc. At the moment, she was having a hard time remembering why she wanted to go live in Snakeland, South America, when she could stay in the States with Luc. Then she remembered: he’d never asked her to stay in the first place.
What did she have to do, beg the man? She stifled a giggle. She had certainly enjoyed it. What else did he have to show her? He had an almost unlimited repertoire of sexual tricks up his sleeve, but the one that was making her really hot thinking about it was the one he had mentioned but not tried.
Quickly, before he came along, she stripped off her clean clothing and rearranged herself to lie naked on her stomach. She’d never sunbathed naked before, but that was small potatoes compared to her other new experiences.
Her head was cradled on her arms as if she were resting, but she knew the instant he saw her. Mostly because he shouted her name.
“What the hell are you doing lying there naked?”
She rolled onto her side nonchalantly, pleased to see his agog expression. “Sunbathing, what else?” She ran a hand down her hip. “No swimsuit lines this way.”
“Swimsuit lines? I never heard anything so asinine. If you were a soldier under my command, I’d—”
Claire interrupted his rant with a yawn. “I thought I was under your command. Your
every
command,” she said significantly, eying the growing bulge under his zipper. “It’s your job to make sure I learn my lessons, but I don’t see that happening,” she said with a sniff.
He stood there in shock until comprehension dawned. “Claire, do you want me to punish you?” His voice became silky and menacing.
She was starting to feel aroused. She shrugged. “What? Make me do push-ups?”
“Nothing so ordinary as that. Lie on your stomach.”
Oh, boy, what had she started now? But she did as he told her, hearing the clinks and thuds of his clothing and gear drop to the ground. She was practically quivering in happy anticipation by the time he knelt behind her and shoved a makeshift pillow of their clothing under her cheek.
She folded her arms out in front of her and rested her chin on them.
“Don’t move. A bad girl like you needs to learn how to listen.”
Ooh, she wiggled a bit but stopped when his big hand slapped her bottom.
“Ouch!”
“Quiet.” But he massaged the stinging spot all the same.
“But what did I do wrong?”
He spanked her other cheek, just like she’d hoped when she asked the question. The sting jolted her a bit, but felt surprisingly good. “You knew I’d come here and find you naked, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Another smack.
“And you knew I couldn’t resist the sweet curves of your ripe ass sticking up in the air.”
“Yes.” This time it was a bit harder, but still good.
“In fact, you’ve been flaunting your sexy little body to me ever since I came to your hotel room. You wanted me to rip off that nightgown and show you who was boss.”
Smack.
“Do you know how close you came to bending over that big soft bed with my dick rammed inside you?”
She shook her head, her cheeks brushing her upper arms. “How close?”
“This close.” His erection brushed her stinging bottom. “I could have done anything I wanted to you, and you would have begged me for more.”
“Yes, Luc.” She would have eagerly slept with him that night, even though he’d been a stranger.
“And I saw you bathing in the moonlight and saw you naked for the first time—your high, tight tits, your sweet, creamy pussy.”
He’d spied on her in the woods? She’d been thinking about him as she slowly washed herself with the cloth, almost giving in to the impulse to touch herself.
“Did you know I started touching myself? Your little peep show almost made me shoot my load. But I held off until you begged me to fuck you.”
And it was the best decision she’d ever made. But in the spirit of the game…“I’m sorry, Luc.”
“Are you?” Three quick taps. “I think you’re getting off on your punishment, Claire.” She gasped as he delved between her thighs. “Oh, you are. Your pussy is dripping wet without me touching you.” He withdrew his hand.
“More, more.” She wiggled her hips against the towels, but he clamped down with both big hands.
“You’ll get more when I let you.” He pressed a column of moist openmouthed kisses from the nape of her neck, between her shoulder blades, down the small of her back. She gasped as he nuzzled her stinging bottom. “Only bad girls let men do all sorts of nasty things to them. Are you a bad girl, Claire?”
“I’ll do anything you want right now.” An eager, greedy tone had crept into her voice.
“Good.” He prodded her with his erection and she instinctively widened her legs. “Take me, Claire.” Without waiting for her reply, he filled her completely.
They moaned in unison, locked together. “Take me, Luc,” she echoed.
He slid in and out of her, nudging the deepest parts of her. She arched her hips, daring him to speed up. “That’s it,
cher.”
He curved over her as his hard abs rubbed her bottom.
Luc reached under her belly and found her swollen pleasure point. Claire cried out as he plucked at her. With half-groaned words of encouragement, he stroked her to the edge of her release. She writhed against the towel.
“Come on,
béb,
scream for me. I wan’ hear you call my name.” He nipped at her neck just like the stallion he’d called himself the other day. His big body dominated hers, riding her hard like she craved. She shook underneath him and squeezed down around him. She took a quick breath only to spend it screaming his name.
He coaxed a long climax out of her before submitting to his own, calling her name, too.
They both finished and he rolled onto his back, dragging her with him. “Claire, you turn me into an animal.”
“You do it to me, too, Luc. Me, too.” She was becoming someone stronger and tougher, but she wasn’t sure if she was strong or tough enough to deal with their inevitable separation.
“Ugh. That is so gross.”
“Take the plunge. You know you’ll have to eat them sooner or later. May as well get it over now where you won’t embarrass yourself.”
She made a face at him.
“Eh, you’ll be happy to eat them if need be. I was, once. All part of surviving in the jungle.”
“Would you ever return to San Lucas?”
“San Lucas.” He wrinkled his face. “Not my first choice. But I would if it were my duty, and only then. And primarily my duty would be to my teammates to make sure they didn’t get killed.”
Claire wondered if she was part of his duty, as well. “I do realize it’s not all lying around and picking bananas and coconuts off the tree. My mother did mention some rough times, like when they all caught some intestinal parasite and were, um, sick to their stomachs for several days.”
Luc didn’t seem impressed. “Whoopee. If you haven’t gotten some stomach bug, you haven’t lived in the jungle.”
“And she said two tribes didn’t get along and her father had to patch up several men.”
He rolled his eyes. “You ever think your mother might have cleaned up her stories for your benefit? You being a kid an’ all. You learned about the nice parts of their lives—like those prairie pioneer girl books my sisters read when we were young. Only for your mother it was ‘Little House in the Jungle’.”
Claire smiled. She had loved those pioneer girl books—still had her original copies from childhood.
He continued, “She probably didn’t want to tell you about the disease, the violence, the unpretty parts of it. That was the
only
part I saw.”
“Why do you hate San Lucas so much? You get a funny look on your face whenever we talk about it.”
He shook his head. “Claire,
cher,
I’ve been in the army long enough to go to some real shitholes, but San Lucas is the worst of the worst.”
“But why?” she persisted. “Surely lots of those other places had warring tribes, parasites and dangerous animals. Why does San Lucas bother you?”
“Your father ever tell you why they chose me to train you? Over all the experienced jungle survival instructors and experts in the whole U.S. Army, why did they pick me?”
She shrugged. “They said you traveled there for several weeks and you knew the country well.”
He snorted. “Too damn well. Look, I can’t tell you why my team and I were there, but we were deep inside the borders, cruising in a small boat down the Río de la Selva—”
“Near the settlement?” she asked eagerly.
“South.” He fingered the hilt of his machete, which was lying in its sheath on the ground next to him. “We came under attack. An RPG was fired into the boat.”
“RPG?”
“Rocket-propelled grenade,” he explained. “Low-tech but makes a hell of an explosion.”
“Oh, my gosh. Were you hurt?” He had so many different scars she couldn’t tell which were which.
“Some. Olie and I were farthest away from the impact, so we got dumped into the water. He made it to the other riverbank but I got swept downstream.”
“Was it just you two? What happened to the rest of the team?”
His face froze. “More guerillas jumped out and emptied their AK-47s into the river. Missed some of the team who were already cut up by shrapnel, a couple others got shot in the shoulders or legs, and T-Bone, well, they got him.”
“Got him?” She tightened her fingers around his.
“Right in the chest.” He thumped his own. “I saw him get hit. He sank like a stone—nothing I could do.”
“Oh, Luc, that’s terrible.” She had held her mother while she died, but her death was grindingly inevitable, a relief after weeks of suffering.
“I swam hard, but the blast stunned me and it was all I could do to keep from drowning. It was high-water season and the rapids took me away. Wound up going downstream in the wrong fork—through a long, deep gorge where I couldn’t get out of the water.”
“How far did you go in the river?”
“Afterward, we figured it was about twenty miles as the crow flies. As the Green Beret walks, it was a bit more.”
“And you walked all the way back?”
“I couldn’t go back, exactly. That’s where they shot at us, after all.” His dry tone didn’t quite disguise his anger at what had happened. “I had to track back to the fork and down the correct branch to the local military installation that had been our rendezvous point.”
“How far was it anyway?”
“A hundred miles. I was trekking for three weeks.”
Her mouth fell open. “All that way by yourself? Without anyone else?”
He started to speak and hesitated.
“Did you have any company on your way? A local tribe or something?”
He sighed. “I did have company for a few days. Her name was Angélique.”
“Figures you’d find a woman even in the jungle,” she muttered.
His laugh was short. “Angélique was a baby.”
“A baby?” She sat upright and stared down into his face, even though she couldn’t see him well in the dark. “What in the world was a baby doing in the jungle?”
“Her family left her there.”