Sweet Christmas Kisses (57 page)

Since returning stateside, he’d been through the military-required group therapy.  He’d even gone to a few individual sessions with a shrink.  And he’d spent sleepless nights searching the war-darkened corners of his soul for answers.  He’d found none.

His mother still cried when she saw the delicate pink tissue beneath his knee.  He hadn’t heard his father laugh genuinely since he’d come home from the V.A. hospital.  His parents had put away the pictures of his youth.  Not the toothy school mug shots or the posed family pictures.  But the action photos of him playing football and soccer were gone.  Nail holes on the wall were the only evidence of where they’d hung.  Trace evidence, like the hole in his chest when he thought of that last day in Afghanistan.

Snake Bait blew out another sigh.  Her matter-of-fact acceptance of his missing limb soothed the restlessness that had driven him to Ecuador months earlier than his physical therapist recommended.  For the first time since he’d arrived, he felt he’d made the right decision.

Jax must have dozed, because he startled awake to a rocket-like explosion.  Except, instead of blinding bursts of light from a battle, the world was dark and temporarily at peace.

During skirmishes, silence wasn’t to be trusted.  He sucked in a muggy lungful of air.  A scream coiled in his throat, spiraling toward release.

“You’re all right.”  A small hand rubbed his right thigh, just above his knee and amputation.  The scent of wildflowers drifted into his lungs, dissipating the urge to panic.

But his throat felt scream-scratched, as if… “Did I scream?” 

“No.”  There was an odd note in that one syllable that didn’t ring true.  It angered him.

Outside, a howler monkey had a similar reaction.

“It’s not good to start a relationship with a lie, Tiff.”

“I…you…You thrashed when the storm came closer.”  Those flat notes.  How he hated them.

The walls seemed to take a step inward.  “Did I scream?” 
Don’t do this to yourself, man.

“It’s the middle of the night.  Let it go.”  Her voice should have soothed him.  The darkness and the quiet should have soothed him.

“It’s a simple question, Snake Bait.”  His jaw clenched tighter than a dog’s on a bone.  “Did.  I.  Scream?”

“If you must know…”  She removed her hand from his thigh.  “It was more like a primal howl.”

Jax bit his lip, vowing to stay awake until the storm passed.

Thunder boomed above in rapid succession.

His body stiffened and jerked as if he’d flat-lined and been shocked back to life. 

Her hand returned to his thigh.  “That was the noise you made.” 

Criminy
.  He hadn’t realized he’d made a sound.

“It’s the thunder, isn’t it?  Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”  If he was going to get through this–the residual of war, his body image issues–he needed to do it alone.  On his trek through the Andes.  Or somewhere else if that didn’t work.  He’d walk around the world until he felt like a man again.

“Well, I want to talk.”  She patted his leg.  “The…uh…There is a…uh…population of small, sometimes large, insects that dislike rain.  They always seem to know that my room is warm and dry.  And they always show up after midnight.”

A week ago, he might have chalked up her phobia to weakness.  He’d since seen the size of Ecuador’s bugs.

The first smattering of rain landed on the tin roof.

“Just so you know,” she continued.  “Big vibrations and light, even from a cell phone, draws them in from the cracks.  It’s the reason for early lights out and why I won’t turn on the light for you.”

“I don’t need a night light!” 

Her hand withdrew from his leg.

Thunder raged.

He gritted his teeth, determined to make no noise, determined not to speak, determined not to beg for her calming touch.

Noise filled the room anyway.

She was humming.  It took him a moment to identify the song:
a lullaby
.

The heat of anger rumbled through his veins.  Panic attacks.  Nightlights.  Lullabies.  She must think he lacked a Y chromosome.

Thunder boomed strong enough to shake the convent’s foundation.

Her hand returned to his thigh.

“I didn’t howl,” he snapped.

“Listen, my tree-hugging friend.  I’m a city girl.  Down here, there are no street lights.  There’s no noise from civilization – not angry taxi cab drivers, not upset protestors, not even passionate couples fighting in the apartment next door.”  Her fingers gripped his quad as her words ran together, filling the room with the tenor of panic.  “At any moment, the creepy-crawlies are going to start marching through the cracks.  They’ll make an assault on my hair, because they seem to like it.  I’m warning you now.  I’ll scream.  And then the next time it thunders your moan will sound like a…well, a bedroom noise, and both our sounds will bring Sister Mary Ofelia pounding on the door, demanding silence.”

Thunder shook the building once more.

She drew a shaky breath.  “So let me be a girl and hang onto the nearest guy, even if he’s such a tree-hugger he won’t shoot a snake.”

The world slowed.  Tiff wanted
him
to protect
her
from the night terrors?

The irony made him laugh.

It wasn’t every day that a girl promised to spend the rest of her life with a man.  The least he could do was
not
laugh at her fears.

She’d broken engagements with men for less heinous acts.  Reginald’s night breathing grated on her nerves.  Wendell’s snobbery was too much to bear.  Adam’s shoe addiction, Malcom’s love of the nightlife, Chad’s designs on the family business.  None of it was personal.  But Jax’s laughter hurt.

That didn’t change the fact that the bugs would be here soon.  Tiff rolled onto her back on the cot, fingers clutching the sheet.  She began humming her favorite lullaby, the one she used to sing to her baby brother when he couldn’t sleep.

In the weeks since she’d been here, only a few storms of this intensity had rolled through.  And every time, the bugs came marching in.

Her ears strained to hear the soft scratch of delicately hinged legs on wood.  Instead, she heard Jax’s breathing–slow and steady.  Until the shudder of thunder destroyed its even cadence.

“Why are you here?” he asked raggedly.

“Good question.”  If the cocoa beans didn’t dry properly, if they didn’t taste good, all her efforts would be for nothing.

“Are you thinking of becoming a nun?”

“Not hardly.”  Not when touching a man–
touching him
–made her pulse beat an alluring tango.  That rhythm made her forget she couldn’t afford any more rash decisions regarding men.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“I answered your questions,” he prompted in a voice tinged with desperation.

He was desperate?  Was that scratching noise a bug?  Her fingers knotted in the cotton sheet.

She swallowed back her fears, the same as she’d been doing for weeks.  “I came here because my family owns all the cocoa fields in the valley.  The Nacional cocoa tree from the Arriba region produces some of the richest chocolate in the world.  But the variety isn’t robust.  It’s susceptible to disease and produces a limited crop.”  Was that his foot scraping over the reed mat?

“Was there an answer in there?”

“No.” 

“Then I don’t get it.  Why are you here?”

Maybe if she hadn’t been scared.  Maybe if he hadn’t laughed at her.  Maybe if she didn’t seem to understand Jax.  Maybe she would have kept her mouth shut.  “My father thinks that because I’m a woman–” And couldn’t seem to make a relationship with a man work.  “–that I can’t manage the family business.  He’s wrong.  He’s wrong in more ways than ignoring the fact that buying cheap cocoa beans for our premium product means inferior taste.  He doesn’t believe I listened when my grandfather spoke.  He doesn’t believe I learned how to graft cocoa beans from a master when I came here for ten summers.  He doesn’t believe me when I tell him I can graft a cocoa tree that produces high quality cocoa beans in higher quantities than our original orchard.”  Her words were loud enough to bounce off the ceiling and pelt her with inadequacy. 

What if she was wrong?

“Your magic beans,” he said softly. 

“They’re not magic, they could be game changing!  And my father doesn’t see it because I’ve made a mistake or two–”  Or five.  “–in my personal life.”  She let go of the sheet and pounded the cot rail with her fist.  “I need those beans I was carrying to prove I’m right.”

Something touched her scalp.  A thin, little something.  Followed by a buzz of wings near her ear.  She screamed and rolled off her cot onto him.

He grunted.  She gasped.

Jax smelled of the dank forest, the green of the river, and man.   He shifted beneath her.  His body was lean and muscular.  His grip on her arms strong as he steadied her.  She wanted to be held.  By him.  All night.  He was that sturdy.  That real.  Unlike the metro-sexual men she’d been engaged to. 

The wings buzzed by her again.  She rolled to his side with a shriek.  “Get it off!  Get it off!”

Sister Mary Ofelia banged on the door, her voice booming louder than the distant thunder. 
“Show some respect!”

Tiff buried her face in the crook of Jax’s neck.  “Oh, no.  She thinks we’re…”

His laughter rumbled in his chest.  It was a nice chest.  He was a nice guy.

Don’t.

And yet, a warm feeling filled her.  It was like coming home from elementary school and discovering freshly baked cookies.  It was that feeling that had led her to accept marriage proposals, recruit bridesmaids, and inspire wedding watches on shows like Entertainment Tonight.

Her father’s voice: 
Can’t you just be friends with a man?

The chocolate chip cookie feeling dissipated.

The bug and Sister Mary Ofelia were gone.  Tiff returned to her cot.  She was glad Jax couldn’t see her face.  It felt hot enough to dry his laundry.  “I’m sorry.  It’s just that the bugs…and you laughed at me…”

There was another awkward silence.

And then Jax spoke.  “I laughed at the idea that you wanted me to protect you during a thunderstorm.  I’m not very steady when it comes to thunder…I get…disoriented.”

“I noticed.”  Her response was as small as her dismay over her misreading him was large.  She had to learn to trust again.  Amazingly, this man felt trustworthy.

“I served in Afghanistan with a guy named Owen.  His grandfather was from Ecuador.”  His words sounded creaky, as if they’d squeezed through barbed wire and been cut.  “We were out on patrol when the ambush came.  The bad guys trapped our unit on a rooftop.  The missiles came as darkness fell and...a lot of guys didn’t make it.”

Including, she’d bet, his friend, Owen.

Tiff wanted to touch Jax, to let him know that in the darkness he wasn’t alone.  But he was temptation, and she always seemed to twist friendship into love, and then realize when the glow of shopping and planning the wedding faded that she’d made a mistake.  She clasped her hands together over her chest and lay on her cot like a corpse ready for her viewing.

“Owen always talked about trekking through Ecuador along the Andes mountains like his grandfather had done.”  His voice had dropped to a whisper, one coated with regret and fringed with shaky determination.  She’d been wrong earlier.  He wasn’t just an average man.  He was an honorable man. 

The knuckles on her fingers unlocked.  One-by-one as if sequenced, her fingers unfurled.  She reached down to touch his muscled thigh. 

She’d been ostracized for her choices in men.  She’d been vilified in the press for her public break-ups.  But she’d never felt as alone as Jax sounded.  “You’re doing this to honor him.”

“Yes.”

Thunder drifted away.  The rain let up.  They didn’t move.

“You and Owen must have been good friends,” Tiff said.

He’d thought she’d been asleep.  The storm had quieted long ago.  Her hand still rested on his thigh.  He wasn’t sure anymore who comforted who.

“No.” He might just as well admit it.  “Owen was a rowdy, annoying idiot.  He took too many risks until...”  The end.

Sleeping in barracks, army tents, and hospitals, Jax had learned to gauge a man’s mood by their breathing.  Quiet meant relaxed.  Uneven meant upset or hurting.  Hyperventilating meant go-for-your-throat rage.

Tiff barely breathed, barely moved, and concealed her mood as completely as the flood of water cascading down the narrow road outside concealed holes in the ground.  “Then why are you here?”

“Hokey as it sounds, we were a band of brothers.”  The temptation to cover her hand with his was strong.  Stupid, but strong.  They were strangers.  It made no sense that he wanted to hold her and learn the texture of her hair and the taste of her lips. 

If this was what one week in the jungle did to him…

Jax cleared his throat, and picked up his story, determined not to let his mind dwell on his hostess.  “I didn’t think much about Owen being an only child when we were deployed.  But back in the world, in the hospital, I wondered who would trek for him.”

The rain had stopped.  The steady drip-drip as it came off the roof’s edge made him tense.  Or it could have been the fact that he wasn’t telling the entire truth.  Or maybe it was the dead bug in his hand.  Its matchstick legs poked at his palm.

“It’s an honorable thing.”  The soft, gentle cadence of her voice.  She should have been a nurse.  Her touch, her tone, her tolerance.  They settled the restlessness within him.

“It would be honorable.”  He forced out the words.  “If that was the only reason I was doing this.”

“Don’t tell me you need to prove you’re a man?”  Whatever compassion had been in her voice was replaced by humor.  “I didn’t think you were that insecure.”

When he didn’t say anything, she sat up.  “You are.”  Her cot creaked.  “This is interesting.” 

Jax gritted his teeth and tossed the bug beneath her cot.

“Why do men always need to prove themselves to the world?”

“Don’t cast stones.”  A heavy one sat on his chest.  “A few minutes ago you were going on about proving yourself to your father.”