“Oui.”
“Sorry he wasn’t home so I could thank him. Is he on a hunting trip?”
Luc laughed. “No, he’s in D.C. briefing the president today.”
She turned to look at him and hastily swiveled away as her stomach jumped. “Aren’t you the funny one. If you can’t tell me things, say so. I’m used to security clearances, you know.” His friend was probably at the local Piggly Wiggly stocking up on barbecue sauce and beer.
“No, Claire. He actually is in D.C. to brief the president. My friend is an expert on several Middle Eastern hotspots.”
“Oh.” Claire decided Luc was serious. “Maybe my father knows him.”
“Maybe.”
And that was the end of their conversation for several minutes. Claire slapped at several mosquitoes, glad she had put on plenty of organic citronella-based repellant. She probably smelled like the fuel in a tiki torch, but better than being bitten up. She also wore a packable sun hat with a floppy brim.
Behind her, Luc sat in silence, no humming under his breath, no whistling, not even a sigh now and again. If it wasn’t for the fact the boat was still running smoothly and she hadn’t heard a big splash, she might have thought he’d fallen overboard. Probably all his training. After all, it was a bad idea to go around whistling and sighing when you were trying to sneak up on people to kill them.
She shivered slightly. She’d thought about the proverbial “law of the jungle”—kill, or be killed. How many times had he been in that situation? She really hoped she never was. It was going to be bad enough that they would eat “off the land,” as Luc had put it when he ripped the box of granola bars from her death grip and had tossed it into his truck.
Eating off the land conjured up all sorts of yucky images of her food sitting on the ground in the dirt. Kind of like when you dropped a really expensive piece of chocolate on the pool deck, but picked it up and ate it anyway…only much, much worse.
He slowed and turned the boat into a smaller creek off the main lake. The bugs were much thicker here, little gnats that buzzed around her eyes and mouth. The towering trees covered the waterway, big clumps of Spanish moss dangling from the long branches. “Hey, maybe we can use some Spanish moss for bedding.”
“Not unless you like mites and bugs. Stuff’s crawling with them.”
“Never mind.” Her thoughts churned as she and Luc cruised through the water, weaving their way up smaller and smaller rivers, farther and farther from the lake’s relative civilization. Oh, dear, what was she in for? The VIP quarters at Parris Island were looking mighty nice about now. “What’s our first step?”
“You’re not going to have nearly enough time to prepare, so I need to get you up to speed on the basics. Swamp is different than jungle, but the closest we can get for now. All sorts of tricks you can learn except one.”
That didn’t sound good. “What?”
“Toughness.” He overrode her protests about how she had been getting in shape for this for months. “None of that matters like mental toughness. How tough are you?”
“Probably not very,” she admitted.
He cut the engine and they drifted through the greeny-brown water. “Turn around, Claire. We’re going slow enough that you won’t get motion sick.”
She thought she’d hid that pretty good. She frowned quickly before smoothing her face and turning around. “Yes?”
The early morning sun threw some dappled rays onto his face. Claire stifled a gasp. With a short coating of stubble, he was even more handsome than last night.
“You have to pay attention to me, Claire, or you won’t learn.” He gave her a narrow stare before continuing. “Your mind is your biggest asset. I’ve seen big, muscular men reduced to tears ’cause they weren’t strong-minded. You know who survives best in crappy situations?”
“The ones who know the most about the jungle, or wherever they get stranded.”
“Wrong. The ones who want to live the most. Mothers, who are trying to get home to their children. Fathers, who walk fifty miles through snow for help for their families. The soldiers, who will be Goddamned if they let the jungle eat them up and spit them out.” He broke eye contact and stared into the tangle of brush on the riverbank.
“Were you one of those soldiers?” Claire ventured timidly.
His bleak black gaze lasered into hers and for a second, she thought he wouldn’t answer. “
Oui
. I have been in the jungle. It was not my friend.”
She started to ask when, and where, but he guided the boat along the bank, stopping as gently as a kiss. Unfortunate comparison.
“From here, we walk.”
“Walk? Where to?”
“Wherever I say.”
Oh, goody. Sharing time was over—as if it had ever started—and now the work would begin.
Luc made a uniquely French sound of disgust, a cross between a huff and snort. “Your camp counselor was an idiot. Either that, or you weren’t paying attention that day.”
She wondered if the knife were sharp enough to stab him in the leg or something else nonvital. “Why don’t you show me the right way?” She gave him the best kiss-my-ass smile a Virginia-bred young lady could muster.
Grumbling, he knelt behind her, fresh as a daisy. “Like so.” He grasped her hand that held the hilt of her brand-new survival knife, and the one bracing the whetstone. Claire froze as his arms encircled her. How did the man smell so clean and sexy in the middle of a swamp?
He angled her thumb against the blunt edge and slowly helped her draw the blade back toward her in a smooth slicing motion. “Like that. Light pressure, gliding it smoothly. Stroke it across the stone.” He flipped over the blade and stone and showed her how to hone the other side.
“That wasn’t too bad.” Claire fought the urge to fan herself, and not from the sticky heat or bugs.
He let go of her and stepped away. “Now repeat that a dozen times.”
“Oh. It’s not sharp enough now?”
He sighed. “‘A dull knife is a dangerous knife,” he recited in a singsong voice. “It will slide when you want to cut and it will cut when it stops sliding—probably when it reaches your hand. Now get moving. I have a couple machetes for you to sharpen.”
Claire bent over the stone and dutifully sharpened the edges, finally holding it up for his inspection.
He gave a grunt and handed her a big, fat leaf. “Not bad. Cut through this.”
It sliced the leaf cleanly. Geez. She hoped she wouldn’t cut herself.
“Now the machetes.” He pulled them out of a bag, and she recoiled a bit. My goodness, were they big and nasty-looking. He grabbed the hilt of one and slid it from its sheath, looking like a pirate pulling out his cutlass for a bit of pillaging.
And of course, there had to be a whole different way to sharpen machetes since the blade didn’t need to be quite as sharp as her knife. After much eye-rolling on his part, he proclaimed her work “adequate, but nothing to be proud of,” and she contemplated hitting him in the head with the hilt.
Fortunately, her good breeding prevented violence like that. That, and the fact she had no idea how to get back to his truck. Her stomach rumbled. “What time is it?”
He checked the sun from his cross-legged seated position. “Late morning. Why? You got somewhere you gotta be?”
She gritted her teeth. “No, I was wondering when you usually ate lunch out here. Off the land,” she added, parroting his words.
“We eat after we purify water, and make shelter and a fire. Unless you plan to eat sushi or raw rabbit, you need a fire. Or we could go digging for grubs and worms. You don’t need to cook those to eat them.”
Claire grimaced. Her stomach had definitely stopped rumbling. Talk about eating off the land—more like eating stuff buried
in
the land.
Luc scowled at her. “Don’t you make that prissy face at me no more, you. They are pure protein and will keep your body from cannibalizing your muscle tissue. Weak muscles won’t get you far.” He tossed her a canteen. “Drink. This is the last of the water we brought. We are on our own now.”
And wasn’t that the truth.
“Right.” She stared down at the bluegills and took a deep breath. “Tell me what to do.”
He walked her through scaling the first fish, which she managed okay. Several scales flew up and landed in her hair and on her cheeks as she scraped away, catching the midafternoon sun like those sparkles girls put on themselves before going to the bar.
She caught her plump lip between white teeth, turning the fish this way and that to clean the head and tail. He caught shadowy glimpses of her cleavage where she’d unbuttoned a couple buttons in the humid heat, especially when she leaned over to examine what she was doing. Sweat rolled down her neck and disappeared between her breasts.
He shifted uneasily, wanting to chase those droplets with his tongue. Who would have thought watching a woman scale a fish could be so sexy?
“All done!” She held up the glassy-eyed creature proudly—the fish, not Luc, who felt about as dazed. Well, the next step would be enough to cool any man’s jets.
“Time to gut it.”
Her face fell. “Right.” She poked tentatively at the fish belly with her knife.
“No, not like that.” Giving into a foolish impulse, he curved his arms around her like he had before with the knife sharpening. It hadn’t been a good idea to touch her then and it certainly wasn’t a better idea now.
“Okay. So show me.” Her voice was a bit husky as he cradled her. She smelled of citronella, sweat and fish, and it aroused him more than the most expensive French perfume.
He’d show her, all right. Would he toss the damn fish away and roll around in the leaves and twigs with her, licking her until she was wet all over and eager for him? Or would he fight his trashy urges and keep his dick in his pants like he’d bragged to Olie he would?
Merde, merde, merde.
It sure sucked—and not in a fun way—to keep a promise to his CO. And to Claire. Because if he gave in and screwed her silly like he’d been dying to, he’d never do anything else with her. She’d finish her survival training not knowing anything except how to sharpen a knife, how to scale a fish and how to sexually satisfy one extremely horny Green Beret. Not much help. Although that last part sounded very, very nice….
“Luc?” She licked her lips. “What now?” He sighed again. “All right, insert the tip of the knife like so….”
He sat cross-legged about six feet from her, eating silently. When he wasn’t ragging on her, he made absolutely no noise. And the swamp, or wetlands or whatever an ecologist might call it, was plenty noisy. Frogs clicked and croaked, birds whistled and honked, and the treetops rustled in the breeze.
Claire looked around. She didn’t know if she’d ever been so isolated. Physically, at least. She was used to emotional isolation. Ever since her mother had died, she had been very alone, even among thousands of people in the midst of D.C.
She looked over at Luc, who stared into the fire. He was an enigma to her. Earlier, he’d had a larger-than-life charisma, drawing her attention like a honeybee to a flower. Now, it was as if he had sucked every last bit of his presence inside him and was no more there than the wisps of smoke climbing through the treetops.
Suddenly, she couldn’t stand it—she had to get connected to someone, even if he wasn’t interested in connecting to her. “Luc!”
He turned slowly to her, his thousand-yard stare sharpening as he focused on her.
She forced a smile. “What next?” He still didn’t say anything, and Claire found herself babbling to fill the void. “I figure it’s probably late afternoon, so we should probably decide where to pitch our tents before it gets dark, right? I’ve seen plenty of movies where they try to make camp late at night and it takes forever to pitch the tent and it always collapses anyway. And the mosquitoes—”
“Claire.” His quiet tone cut in to her monologue. “You ever just sit and be?”
“Be what?”
He shook his head. “No, I suppose not.”
“What does that mean?” She was starting to get angry now. Hadn’t she done everything he’d asked to-day? Sharpened frightening blades, impaled worms on fishing hooks, even eviscerated some poor fish.
“Your mind runs a million miles an hour, Claire. I can practically see the brain waves buzzing off your head.”
“Thanks, I guess. So what’s the problem?”
“You spend too much time in your head, you’re not gon’ be a part of anything else.” He gestured at the branches and the patches of bright blue sky above them. “You noticing any of this? Or are you trying to figure out what happens next, and what you’re gon’ have to do, and what I’m gon’ do?”
“I don’t think I’ll have much luck figuring out that last one,” she told him tartly.
She startled a quick smile out of him. He shook his head. “Close your eyes, Claire.”
“Why?” She gave him a narrow stare. “Are you going to leave me here and sneak off and then I have to spend the night by myself?”
“Trust me, Claire. Close your eyes.”
She gave him one last glare and squeezed her eyes shut. If he ditched her in the middle of freaking nowhere, he’d be sorry, although she wasn’t sure how she’d do that. Maybe track him down and talk his ears off, since he didn’t seem to like that.
“Claire.” His deep, French-accented voice cut through her revenge fantasies and inspired some different ones. “Listen to the woods. Listen to the wind, the animals, the water.”
Her eyes flew open. “Oh, are we doing guided meditation? I’ve done this before in hatha yoga class, except we imagined blue balls of light hovering over each chakra—”
He made a strangled sound. “Enough with the blue balls of light! Now close your damn eyes!”
“Fine.” She arranged herself cross-legged with her hands in an obvious yoga mudra position before closing her eyes. “Okay, I’m listening. Wow, it’s noisy out here.”
“Shh. You can’t talk and listen at the same time.”
Since he wasn’t going to let her out of this guided meditation, which it actually was, whether he wanted to admit it or not, she decided to give it a try. Like she had said before, it was a noisy place.
She concentrated on picking out different animal sounds—a small frog’s chirp, a big frog’s croak, so many different birds she couldn’t tell them apart. Then the wind in the trees, swishing and brushing by the leaves. It shifted and blew some smoke in her face and she fanned it away. Another good reason to keep her eyes closed.
Once the smoke cleared, Claire was surprised at how much she could smell with her eyes closed. She never really considered that sense too much, except when she was picking out body lotions or when she was hungry and everything smelled good.
She recognized Luc’s scent right away. A bit of salty sweat, a bit of smoke and a more subtle masculine musk that she’d smelled as he had put his arms around her to instruct her.
What could she do to encourage him to take that further? He seemed impervious to their nearness, or else did a good job hiding it. If the dictionary had an entry for mental toughness, his picture would be next to it.
Maybe she would have to develop her own mental toughness and seduce
him
. She didn’t think she’d ever really done that with a man. Sure, she’d smiled and put on sexy dresses, but it was to be expected that the man did the chasing. It was his nature, after all. Especially the nature of a man who chased people for a living.
“Stop thinking, Claire. Try
being
.” His command cut through her planning, and she went back to “being,” whatever that meant.
To her surprise, it was easier this time. She found herself swaying in time to her breathing, the ground solid and anchoring her. Luc’s presence didn’t distract her anymore, although she was aware of him. It really came down to Claire and what she had to learn to take care of herself. For the first time, the training didn’t seem scary or impossible. Her mother would be proud of her. Maybe Claire could be proud of herself.