Authors: Vonna Harper
Sliding. Motorcycle out of control! Too-thin tires fighting to grip slickened pavement. Plowing into the Everglades.
“No!”
Chapter Two
Mala slammed on her brakes. The car jerked to the left and away from what she could still see of the rapidly disappearing motorcycle, but she fought until her vehicle once again obeyed her command. Although some portions of the country between Naples and Fort Lauderdale were little more than swampy prairie, along here the Everglades were everything tourists and residents alike expected of one of the few truly wild areas left. Great moss-hung cypress, saw palmetto stands, pools of dark swamp water, endless muck, all that and more waited for the out-of-control motorcycle and its hard-muscled, helpless rider.
What had happened didn’t matter. Neither did why. Metal and rubber and flesh and bone were being sucked into the wilderness, not by accident, but because some force dwelled in that vastness of water and vegetation. Whoever,
whatever
it was had snared her fantasy man and was bent on claiming it.
“No!”
Although everything remained a blur coated by the raging sky, she knew he was gripping the handlebars with every ounce of strength in his body. His foot massaged the brakes as he sought that delicate balance between a hard slam and a controlled slowing. If the pavement hadn’t been greased with water, his expert handling would have won the battle, but nature had lined up with the opposition. Nothing he did or might do was enough.
She watched him slide almost gracefully out of view, dense foliage and more swallowing him. Although her own squealing brakes and the blood pounding in her temples made a disturbing jumble of sound, she half believed she heard him yell in defiance and denial.
Then he was gone.
“No!” she screamed again. Even before her car stopped rocking, she’d killed the motor and hurtled herself out into the deluge. She was instantly soaked, rain running off her hair and chin and arms. Her sandals were meant for carrying her through a humid day of peddling her wares, not entering the Everglades. Even if they were, could she bring herself to put civilization behind her?
Trapped by indecision, she danced on her toes on the graveled shoulder and stared at where she’d last seen the motorcycle and its rider. Although she weighed just 120 pounds, she was already sinking into the rain-saturated sand. How much worse it must be for the man if he’d landed in swampy ground.
Of course he had. She had no doubt that his forward movement would take him into this living, breathing wilderness.
Shaken, she took a few more cautious steps. She tried to walk beyond what a highway crew had deposited in an all-but-futile effort at providing a barrier between road and jungle, but the sodden ground gripped her shoe, and she jerked back.
“Can you hear me? Please, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Where are you? I’ll—I’ve got to get help. Please! Answer me. Please!”
Silence.
No, not really silence. The rain, wind, and thunder, even the erratic lightning created a noise that was more essence than sound. Woven into that was the music of the Everglades, a constant deep hum. She knew this highway, understood a little about how hard it had been to wrestle a thin, firm strip from the wilderness, but she’d never imagined herself walking into that wasteland.
Until today.
“Can you hear me? Please! Are you all right?”
Darkness. The stench of things wet and rotting. A humming which seemed to grow and expand until his body felt as if it might explode. Mosquitoes which drove him half mad with their insistence. He lay on his side in a bog, his right leg burned from where it had struck the motorcycle’s exhaust pipe, and his mind searching, questioning. The cycle was gone now, maybe a victim of quicksand. Laird Jaeger fought back the icy taste and touch of something he refused to claim, but the effort left him without the strength for anything else. He was alive! Lost. Scared.
No, damn it, not afraid! He became aware of liquid seeping around him, but whatever he’d landed in, it wasn’t about to suck him down to where he couldn’t breathe or see.
Knowing he didn’t immediately have to fight the swamp allowed him to gain a small measure of control. Warning himself not to panic, he took in his situation.
He’d been riding his motorcycle through Alligator Alley. It had been raining, the deluge accompanied by a display of light and sound that had filled him with reckless abandon, an emotion he knew as well as he did the restlessness that was part of his nature. The percussion which accompanied the thunder had actually lifted him off the ground, and he’d been hard pressed to see the divider strip, but then nature had always exerted her control over him. He’d never thought to fight it.
Drawing in a deep and steadying breath, he identified the smell as swamp gases. Bottom line was that his mode of transportation was gone. He had no idea how far he was from the road or what direction he needed to head in order to find it. At least nothing felt broken. It was still raining, a curtain of water only partially deflected by the trees that draped themselves over and around and beyond him.
Trees. Dense and lush. Full of life. Nothing to need to escape. Nothing dangerous.
Encouraged by that bit of logic, he pushed through the fog in his mind. There’d been a woman on the highway with him. She had long hair, straight and dark and soft around her angled features. Big eyes that found and locked with his. He’d read unfulfilled sexual need in those eyes and had taken advantage of it. With nothing more than the energy that had been part of him since becoming a man, he’d spoken to her need. She’d responded. If things hadn’t changed, he would have bedded her. It was as simple as that.
Where was she?
Where was he?
The question brought with it a spasm of emotion. The sounds were of the jungle, without beginning or end, beyond his comprehension and yet—
“Thunder.”
Shaken by something that felt as if it existed inside him, he forced himself into a sitting position. A sharp sting along his right palm alerted him to the fact that he’d cut himself. The injury might have happened while he was being catapulted into the swamp, but perhaps the saw grass was responsible, not that it mattered.
“Thunder.”
“What?” He forced the word. “Is there someone here?”
Even as the impenetrable foliage absorbed his question, he regretted speaking. He hadn’t heard anyone call out. The sound was nothing more than system overload. He glared at a ten-foot-high wall of greenery. He’d always felt imprisoned by enclosures, and if he didn’t keep up his guard, that emotion might rule him now. He became aware of just how spongy the ground under him was. Although he was the furthest thing from being squeamish, he didn’t want to go on sitting. His legs felt less dependable than he needed them to be, his head both light and heavy.
There was no way out.
Moving deliberately, he looked around slowly. Began wrestling understanding from insanity.
He had to have made some kind of an impression on the jungle-growth, tire tracks, grasses flattened, something, but he couldn’t determine where he’d come from, or where his motorcycle had gone. His helmet had been torn from him. What drew his hand to his back pocket where he kept his wallet, he couldn’t say. He didn’t encounter the familiar lump.
No identification. No mode of transportation. Minus the head protection he’d strapped himself into.
“Thunder.”
He breathed through his mouth to lessen the impact of the swamp’s stench and fight a touch of panic, then gave himself the task, not of determining where the “sound” had come from, but of finding his way out. He couldn’t have gone very far. Shouldn’t he hear highway sounds, glimpse open space beyond the living fence that held him prisoner? He wanted to be back on his motorcycle and changing leads with the woman.
Something warm and wet slid between his toes. He wore no boots. Like the helmet and wallet, they’d been stolen from him.
A wistful whisper distracted him from unanswerable questions. It seemed to be human.
The woman in the car? The one he’d known would spread her legs and beg him to spear her.
“Where are you?” he bellowed. The cry had nothing to do with the need for sex and everything to do with survival.
“Thunder.”
Steeling himself against the whisper, he commanded himself to focus on the woman who represented a sane and orderly world. He’d long had a certain power over the female sex—animal magnetism his brother had called it—but until now he’d only used that indefinable something to get them into his bed. Now mentally reaching her might save his life. He had no choice but to try.
“I’m here. Waiting for you. You can’t fight it. Don’t even try.”
Barely daring to breathe, he waited a moment. He had no idea whether his thoughts had reached her, but if they had, he needed to give her more.
“Become animal—an animal in need.
“Find me. Let me satisfy that need.
“Find me!”
Trying to project his thoughts over God knew how many miles exhausted him. Either she heard his plea and command or she didn’t. Right now he had to make order out of insanity.
Somehow.
Mala held her breath and willed what had caught her attention to repeat itself, but it didn’t. She was forced to admit she must have imagined she’d heard a human voice. She could wait for him to reappear, at which time she’d offer him the shelter of her car and maybe a hell of a lot more. What made more sense was to go after help. That option would hold more water—an unfunny cliché given the weather and circumstances—if she hadn’t been halfway between two very distant points of civilization. The final alternative was to take courage in hand and plunge in after a man who might be injured and at the mercy of both the elements and his injuries.
Hurt? She hated the thought, and yet if he was, she could minister to him. She again tried to leave the manmade footing. As before, she immediately bogged down. Even if she managed to make her way into the growth, she couldn’t cover more than a few hard-won inches at a time. As she extracted her sandal from the muck, another unsettling thought occurred to her. The motorcycle’s forward motion had taken the man into the jungle, but he wouldn’t have gone very far before the jungle stopped the machine. Still, she couldn’t see or hear him. If she took off after him, how long would it take for her to become lost?
She didn’t want to think about that happening to the man, but the image of him wandering aimlessly among endless trees and moss and swamps and grasses with the rain a waterfall took hold. Was it possible for a person to become so disoriented within a stone’s throw of a highway that he’d never find his way out?
Of course not!
Probably not.
“Can you hear me? Answer me! Damn it, answer me!”
Nothing.
It wasn’t until she’d traveled close to twenty miles that Mala spotted a highway patrol vehicle pulling away from a viewpoint. By then, the rain had slackened enough that her wipers were equal to their task. As she jumped out of her car, she gave a quick thought to how bedraggled she must look, but it didn’t matter. Only rescuing the man who’d turned her world and body on end did.
“Where did you say he left the road?” the too-young officer asked in response to her garbled explanation. “Can you take me there?”
She nodded. She wondered if he’d tell her to lead the way and asked herself if she could concentrate on driving well enough to pull it off. Fortunately, after telling his dispatcher or sergeant or whoever he was talking to what had happened, he indicated he wanted her to sit beside him in his vehicle.
Although she was relieved to have found someone who’d know what to do, she swore he was barely going fast enough to justify having started the engine. She wanted to pound her fist against him and scream at him to hurry. Realizing she’d started shivering, she tried to determine whether he’d turned on the air conditioning, but her eyes refused to focus. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t take her attention off what lurked at the edge of the highway long enough to concentrate on anything else.
More likely the truth was that she still felt sexually stimulated.
A man was out in that tangled vastness. Alone. Lost. Dependent on her when, damn it, she had no idea what to do.
“There.” She pointed. “I hope—oh no. He’s not… He’s still in there, isn’t he?”
The patrolman—he’d said his name was Todd something—pulled over to the side of the road. She was out of the car before he’d unstrapped his seat belt. Belatedly, she remembered to look down to where the motorcycle tire tracks should be. The sky had lost its deep plum hue, and the sun was regaining control, but despite the improved conditions, she saw nothing, heard nothing except what lived and breathed deep in the wilderness. She fought the stupid impulse to yank off her clothes and plunge into that wilderness.
“You’re sure this is where it happened?” Todd asked.
“I’m sure,” she said, irritated. Her nerve endings, the tips of her fingers and base of her throat and pit of her stomach told her that this was the spot where she’d stood not so long ago.
She had to give Todd and the highway department their due. Todd called for backup, and two other patrol vehicles soon arrived. All told, five uniformed officers scoured the side of the highway for a half mile in either direction. When they wandered afield of where he’d disappeared, she couldn’t blame them. After all, the ground bore no signs to indicate a man on an out-of-control piece of machinery had been here.
Still, she was so sure that when Todd pointed out that, given the lack of evidence, they’d concluded there’d been no accident, she practically had to be dragged away. She climbed into the patrol car, but kept her eyes fixed on where he’d disappeared until she could no longer see the forlorn spot.
When Todd deposited her back at her vehicle, he assured her a tracking dog would be brought in for one final search. Then he suggested that because of the heavy downpour, she might have imagined what she’d seen. She nearly yelled at him that a man’s life was at stake here, but he and four other trained men had spent two hours trying to find some sign of her elusive rider.