Perfect Stranger (5 page)

His jaw ticked as he tried to scramble an
answer. "My name is Jericho Eden. I am a U.S. citizen, like
yourself. However, I can't tell you much more than that. You're
welcome to guess, but for your safety I suggest you don’t." He
leaned down to catch her stare. "Really, Chloe. I mean you no harm.
I want to help you. God as my witness, I wish you had never helped
me." He shook his head. "I will protect you at all costs and
somehow get you to safety. You have no reason to trust me as I said
before, but for now, I need you to try."

There was a moment of silence between them,
but then Chloe stuck out her hand to shake, offering a lopsided
smile. "Chloe Burgesse. I have no idea what to make of all this. I
wish I did, but it seems I have no choice."

Jericho's lips lifted at the corner as he
took her hand in his and shook it. "I'd like to say it is nice to
meet you, but under the circumstances…"

Chloe laughed, dropping
her hand and again tucked an errant lock behind her ear. Her worry
crossed back over her face, as though she had only been hiding her
anxiety away. "
What
circumstances are we under, Jericho? Please." Her voice
trembled. "Please tell me.
Are
those men going to kill me because I helped you?"
Fright pooled in her blue eyes.

Jericho quickly stepped
forward, ignoring the fact that her knees were on either side of
him as he leaned against the table, gently taking her wrists in his
hands. She tensed at his touch. "
Ssh
." He made an attempt to soothe
her, though he was sorely out of practice. "We're gonna be okay."
When she began to cry in earnest again, tears streaming her cheeks,
he lifted her chin with a crooked finger. "Look at me, Chloe. Look
at me." He forced her stare to his. She had pretty powder-blue
eyes. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you, I promise. Up
until yesterday, I never lost a soldier on my watch. It won't
happen again," he swore.

Her brow furrowed. "A
soldier?" She leapt on the one hint. "
You're
a soldier?"

His jaw ticked. "Army Special Forces," he
said, hoping to garner a little trust.

She sucked in a rattled breath, as though
the full impact of the situation hit her at once. "Then you can
call in reinforcement, right? We can go to the embassy," she said
desperately.

He shook his head. "No." Jericho sighed
hard, stepping back from her. "Not here we can't."

"What do you mean?" Chloe asked.

"I mean if we do, we
wouldn’t leave this country alive. I would disappear, and likely
there would be no one to look for me. You, if you have family, they
would get your body. Your family would be told you were raped and
murdered. Some poor fool would take the fall." He turned back to
her sharply. "There are people here, Chloe, very bad people made
more dangerous because of their power and means for making others
disappear. If they find us, they won't let me leave Brazil alive
because of what I know." He stopped to rake a hand through his
hair. "They won't let you live because of association. I won't lie.
The next several days will not be easy. We
will
be shot at. You
will
see people die. I
need you to be calm and at the ready at all times if you want to
survive this."

Chloe gaped, blinking. She made a strangled
little noise and sat straight. She brought her hand to her throat
as she looked off, then suddenly threw her face into her hands.
"Oh, God, how did this happen?" She sniffed, sitting up to take a
deep breath. "I don’t even know if I should be surprised."

Jericho turned around to face the counter.
"Why is that?" he asked, still curious as to why she was in Brazil
to begin with, in case he needed to know. "Were you here with
anyone who might be looking for you?"

"No," she said. "I was trying to find the
airport when you jumped onto my car."

His worry lessened, and he scoffed in slight
amusement. "Wrong side of the city," he said. She obviously didn't
have a sense of direction.

Jericho pulled off his shirt, hissing as the
material pulled caked and scabbed blood from many wounds where they
had dried to his shirt, reopening most of the small gashes on his
side.

Chloe gasped. "Good Lord! Here, let me help
you with that." She leapt off the table to take up a wipe packet
from the metal counter, opening the small, white package with her
teeth and spitting the torn paper away.

"You should try to leave as little DNA as
possible," he told her, making a note to collect the paper when he
wiped the room later. "The less they know of you the better."

"Oh," she said. Chloe began cleaning his
side, quickly going through the wipes and tossing them in the
trashcan. She paused over the tattoo on his top right shoulder, but
continued to clean.

Jericho glanced up at her, wincing at the
sting, but ignored the questioning look she gave him.

"You need stitches in several of these," she
told him.

He pushed a pile of bandages across the
counter. "This will have to do for now."

Chloe continued to clean his wounds, much
different from how Gunner would have. He couldn’t deny, though it
was the last train of thought he should have been entertaining in
their present situation, but her soft touch reminded him how long
it had been since he had been with a woman.

Chapter Four

1700 hours, Friday

The village of Pirai, Brazil

Chloe dropped her fingers from Jericho as
she smoothed on the last bandage. Had this man allowed her to patch
all his wounds, he would have looked like one giant bandage.
Instead, she cleaned all the tiny cuts and only pulled together the
larger ones to stop any new bleeding.

"All done," she said.

She caught her breath when he turned around,
looking at her inscrutably. Her eyes fell down his thickly corded
torso, and Chloe bit her lip to keep from making any appreciative
expressions.

She could clearly see his tattoos now and
tried to make sense of them. The skull wearing a beret on his right
shoulder had a knife stuck upwards through the mouth and a snake
wound around the blade-point. There were also arrows crossed behind
the skull.

She skimmed down to the underside of his
arm, but just as she did, he turned to the side, effectively
cutting off her view. Chloe jerked her attention up to catch a dark
look from him.

"Come," he said, tossing his torn and
blood-saturated shirt into the trash. "I'll show you to a room
where you can rest and clean up. There's a small bathroom, but no
running water. Some gallon jugs are on the floor, and I believe
Gunner might have put some towels in the cabinet." He opened the
door for her.

Chloe meekly followed, hugging herself,
glancing once at the eagle tattooed on the back of his left
shoulder but quickly turned her inspecting in another direction and
grimaced at the cracked, yellowed walls along the way.

The rundown appearance of the house hadn't
surprised her, for the interior went along well with the exterior
and the rest of the village. However, the polished medical room did
strike her as out of place. How she had gone from dumped at the
altar to being stuck in a real life espionage chase, she didn’t
know.

"Who is Gunner?" she asked.

"A friend."

Chloe sighed, but didn’t press. He had made
it clear she would be left in the dark as much as possible, for her
own safety. Or, more like, so if she were caught and tortured she
wouldn’t have anything to tell to save her own skin. Yet, not even
in the movies did that ever work for anyone. She gave the thought a
dissatisfied twist of her lips.

She watched Jericho's naked back, his
swaggering gait, and lean form as he walked to the room at the end
of the short hall. He wasn’t much older than she. He was tall with
dark sandy hair, and a shade darker bristled his chiseled jaw. He
didn’t wear a military hairstyle, but she had heard the Special
Forces usually didn’t. They were supposed to blend in with their
environment.

His skin was darkly tanned, taut over hard
muscles. She'd never touched a man with a body like his before. A
little quiver ran through her but stopped abruptly at the thought
of her ex. The usual stab of pain seemed minimally changed
somehow.

His
body hadn’t been of any “condition,” per se. Now that she
thought of it, he really hadn't been much to look at. He was
skinny, but not developed. He worked in real estate and always
dressed nicely. At the time, she had thought his good grooming
habits a bonus.

Her eyes fell to the military-style tactical
pants low around her protector's waist, to the holster strapped
around his thigh holding the gun he'd used earlier.

Jericho looked particularly lethal.

And her ex had never seemed like less of a
man to her than he did in that moment.

Chloe swallowed hard and frowned, wondering
why she'd never given her ex's physique much thought.

Jericho exuded a powerful
aura. There was something comforting and strong about him. Though
he was a stranger, she couldn’t help feeling
safe
with him.

"Here," his deep voice drew her from her
thoughts. He pushed open the door, sliding a warm look down
her.

Chloe's stomach dropped as she slid past
him, all too close, and she tried to ignore the rush of tingling
electricity rushing down her spine as she nearly brushed against
the man to enter the room.

"I'll be around the corner if you need me.
There are some things I have to take care of," he said.

"Okay." Chloe tucked her hair behind her
ear, averting her eyes from his abdomen, again.

He ran his gaze over her from head to foot.
"We will need to find different clothes for you before we leave
here." He turned, leaving her.

Chloe watched him a second longer than she
should have.

****

1800 hours, Friday

The village of Pirai, Brazil

Chloe cleaned up as much as she could with
one of the few hand-towels she'd found. She looked a mess in the
slinky orange, beaded, off the shoulder top that hung over faded,
second-skin jean shorts. It was her hiking boots that really did
the ensemble in. Yet, she highly doubted the fashion police would
be anywhere near. She grimaced, looking down on herself.

Luckily, she'd found she still had a
hair-band around her wrist from earlier and swooped her long hair
up into a high ponytail, pulling little wispy slivers of bangs free
to push to the side.

Satisfied she looked slightly better, Chloe
left the small room. She couldn’t bear the solitude, not right now.
Energy jumped in her nerves. Usually she was a fairly content girl.
She owned a bookstore, and that was where she spent most her time,
alone. However, right now, she needed human contact even if Jericho
was unfamiliar and she knew little to nothing about the man. She
still felt that he owed her some kind of explanation.

In the back of her mind
she wondered if it were too late to sneak away and leave on her
own. That seemed the wiser notion. Yet, fear rooted her. She hadn't
been able to find her way back to the airport in Rio, even having
been there. How was she supposed to leave this little, obscure
village and find her way back now?
And
with men trying to kill
her.

Chloe sighed. Jericho seemed the safer of
two evils, she supposed.

Slowly, she peeped around all the corners,
coming down the hall as quietly as she could. She heard her
protector-of-sorts in the kitchen/dining area where they had
entered earlier. When he came into view, she noticed he had changed
his clothing to black tactical pants and a nondescript gray shirt.
The t-shirt fit as snugly as the one before, the arms tight around
his muscles, and the back and torso casing thick ripples of
powerful sinew she'd only ever seen in movies or magazine ads.

He still wore the same gun holster around
his thigh, though it was empty again as he leaned over the weapon,
a scattering of paraphernalia, and rags on the table.

As he reached for a rope-like piece lying on
the table, she caught a clear view of the tattoo on the underside
of his left arm. 03 O.I.F 04 was written on the top above a combat
knife and U.S Army was written below.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Chloe realized. He
must have been there in 2003 and 2004.

She swallowed, glancing down, before
knocking on the wall at the end of the hallway so not to startle
him while he handled a weapon.

"I heard you," he said without turning.

Chloe blushed, wondering if he had also
noticed that she had been ogling him, but continued to watch as he
replaced pieces of a gun, as though he had been cleaning the
weapon.

"I couldn’t take being alone," she told
him.

He grunted and snapped a magazine into the
weapon. "I understand." He holstered the gun into the holster
circling his thigh and turned to her, checking his watch. "Do you
need anything?"

Chloe shrugged. "No. Just company." She
folded her arms across her breast.

His gaze flickered over her. "Follow along
if you like, but I have much to do."

"Can I help?" she asked.

"We'll see," he said, passing her in the
narrow hall.

Chloe turned, but he went into the medical
room and stepped back out before she could follow him. He held the
trash-sack containing their used medical items and his torn
shirt.

"Grab your purse from the table."

Chloe frowned, but did as directed, and then
followed him outside.

Jericho left the small tin-roofed porch and
grabbed a shovel from where it had been left stuck in the ground by
a previous user, leaning against the handmade brick spackled
dwelling.