Authors: Melissa James
She shoved half a fist in her mouth to stop the hysterical laughter emerging. “Mitch, we’re gong into a war zone!”
But he only nodded. “What better place to prove I trust you, by putting my life in your hands, and yours in mine?”
Startled, she turned to face him.
He smiled grimly. “This is as real as it gets, Lissa. I’ve always worked alone. I’ve never trusted anyone. But in the next two days I’ll have to. Because any decisions I make will affect the rest of your life—and yours will affect mine. Matt, Luke and Jenny’s as well…and Hana’s, too. We have to do this together, for all our sakes. No arbitrary decisions or orders. Joint decisions. If we can do this, we can do anything. If I prove I can do that, will you think again about our life together?”
She wanted time to think it through—but he was right. There was no decision. This had to be. If they survived the next two days, maybe—just maybe—they could make a life together, too.
Slowly she nodded.
The stiffness of his spine visibly relaxed. “Thank you.” Then he turned the plane toward far-west Queensland, to the tiny Outback town famous for its yearly insane horse race, its one pub and nothing else. As he guided the Cessna groundward the sun dipped and fell, and they flew right into a harsh, unforgiving land, all ochres and copper and rust and the flaming dark red of blood, in a violent and glorious sunset.
T
he adorable little dark-haired child’s face lit on seeing Mitch the next morning. “Nicker! Nicker!”
With a grin Mitch dropped to his haunches and held out a Snickers—one of an amazing supply, almost into the hundreds, he’d bought that morning near Darwin airport
. “Go for it, kid.”
With a look of ecstasy Hana devoured the chocolate, smearing a good portion of it over her face in her hurry to get it all in. Then she gave Mitch a timid smile. “Tanks you.”
He touched her grubby cheek. “
Wala pong anuman,
Hana.”
Hana’s face lit up at his use of Tagalog; she nodded, with a beaming smile. Then she dragged him to a small table, where she got out a pack of cards, and they were soon embroiled in a falteringly bilingual, very intense game of Snap.
Lissa watched him playing with Hana, touched anew by his rapport with kids—any kids. For a man never brought up in a family—whose own last name came from the priest who ran the church orphanage where he’d been dumped—he had such innate tenderness and empathy. He never wasted time with self-pity but got on with living, making the best of what he had.
“Would you like a drink of tea, Lis-sa?”
Lissa turned to the smiling Tumah-ran woman. “Thank you, Lily. I would.”
The little woman bustled around her simple kitchen beneath the ceiling fan, cheerful amid heat so humid she could wring out her clothes. If she hung them on an outdoor line they’d still be wet tomorrow. The whole house—the whole city of Darwin—had a heavy odor of steamy heat and the doubtful swirling freshness of an afternoon storm coming.
Lissa used her handkerchief for the fiftieth time to wipe her perspiring face, but it was so damp it was of little use. She felt limp and languid, puddling from the inside. “Is Tumah-ra as humid as Darwin?” she asked Lily, wondering if, like a character in a book she’d read in childhood, she would literally melt away in her own sweat. How could people live here?
Lily frowned and tilted her head. “What is—”
Lissa bit her lip, then she fanned herself and wiped her forehead, using the same sort of verbal sign shorthand she’d seen Mitch use with Hana during the Snap game. “Tumah-ra same?”
Lily smiled and nodded. “Hot. Very hot. Rain.”
Lissa sighed.
Lily patted her arm. “Very nice, Tumah-ra. Pretty. Much tree, pretty water…coral. Nice. Before soldiers come and…and—” She frowned, then said triumphantly, “Shoot ’em up!”
Lissa gasped at the terminology. “Are you sad, Lily?”
Lily turned to her, with a heart-wrenching smile of sadness and bravado and acceptance all in one. “Tumah-ra very pretty. Very nice. Find oil, it go bad for money. My brother, he die fighting rebels. My sister, she disappear. We lucky here, my husband, me, my son, be refugees for one year, maybe two. But one day go home. Make house again. Make village back. Find my father. He we not find to go on boat.” She shook her head as Lissa’s eyes filled with sympathetic tears. “No, Lis-sa. My brother, my sister in God’s hands. We have good life. This bad thing for now—only now. One day soldiers go home, and we go home. Make Tumah-ra pretty again.”
She couldn’t answer Lily. A queer pain streaked through her, an aching wistfulness. Lily and her family—not to mention Mitch—had known so much less of love and joy and family security in their lives, yet it was she who held back, who refused to rebuild her world when it fell apart. She who kept others at arm’s length for fear of being hurt.
When had she lost that optimism, that willingness to see the brighter side of life? When had she become so much less than the woman she’d once wanted to be?
Give me two days, Lissa. Two days to show you that our lives can be as real as our dreams.
Maybe it was time to start dreaming again. If anyone deserved to have their dreams come true, it was Mitch. Why he wanted to marry her, why he wanted her at all, she had no idea. But if he wanted this to work, she could at least give him these two days, for his sake. And for her own. For something told her this was her final chance at life. If she threw this away—whatever it was she and Mitch had—then cynical loneliness would set in her heart for good. She’d become another deserted wife and single mother, complaining about the price of education, interfering with her kids’ choices in life because she had no life of her own, and then, finally, she’d grow old alone, bitter and angry, wondering why her kids no longer came to visit her.
She couldn’t live that way. She didn’t
want
to live that way, nor did she want to live for the past anymore. Something had to change. It was time to let go of the fears she’d held almost as friends for too long—the false friends who’d robbed her of her chance with Mitch. Who’d helped her settle for Tim. Who’d allowed local kids to rob her four times before she fought back. Who whispered in her heart that Mitch would desert her again if she let him into her world. That if she trusted him again, he’d only let her down.
Give me two days, Lissa.
“Lis-sa?”
She smiled into the anxious soft eyes of her hostess. “Thank you, Lily.” She took her cup of tea and gave Lily a swift, impulsive kiss. “Thank you.”
With the empathy born of her turbulent life, Lily didn’t need to speak. The understanding hovered in the air between the women. A defining moment passing in gentle silence…and Lissa knew she’d never be the same.
She was making him nervous.
It was afternoon by the time they made it to the island. Mitch requested permission to land at the only civilian airstrip left in Tumah-ra not taken over by the rebels yet. He wondered what was going on with her. She must have a hundred questions about what would happen next, where they’d be going, what to do if they got caught. But beyond halting attempts to talk to Hana she’d said nothing beyond, “Look at the ocean. Isn’t it a perfect shade of turquoise?” or “The forest looks so cool and lush.”
Perfect. Cool. Boy, was she about to learn. It was hotter than Hades down in that jungle, and perfection was an illusion, a conjurer’s trick of smoke and mirrors, gone with one pull of a trigger. Or a thousand. Death in steaming heat, fighting for a deceptive treasure beneath corals that would destroy the island.
For the thousandth time he wished he’d sent her with Tim and the kids to safety, even if it meant losing her trust. At least she’d be alive and safe.
What had he been thinking to bring her here? Trouble was, he hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d gone with his damn fool heart and bloody gonads, the need eating him alive—the need to have her near him, obsessed with the need to make love to her.
Damn his insecurity and unfounded jealousy of Tim, his need to prove God knew what to her. And damn her need to prove she could live in his world, a world she’d never needed to know about.
The unreality of the whole situation hit him. Sweet, gentle Lissa Miller was going into a war zone. She had no idea what she was in for, and he’d promised not to protect her.
Heaven help them both.
He landed, steered Bertha into the high-security hangar built especially for the Air Force but used by the Nighthawks, and pulled out the motorbike before he locked the massive doors.
Lissa, with Hana perched on her hip, frowned. “Mitch, there’s three of us. How do we fit on one bike?”
He shrugged. “We make do. This is Tumah-ra, Lissa. There’s no road rules, the taxis have all been confiscated by the rebels or blown up, and buying a car—if there’s any to buy—will only yell to all the organized gangs and looters that we have money.” He pulled the license plates off the bike, tore a jagged line across the seat with a long-bladed knife from his backpack, and smeared dirt and tire black all over it. “That’ll do.”
He looked up to find Lissa shoving the money Anson had given her into her running shoes in two flat piles. Then she pulled out a mirror and made herself up, putting a dark foundation all over her exposed skin, and liner on her eyes and brows to give herself an Asian look. She pulled her hair under a ratty baseball cap and rubbed dirt over her face, hands, neck and upper chest not covered by the long-sleeved dark-green shirt. Then she looked at him with a quiet, defeated glance of defiance and despair.
Man, she’d missed her calling in not becoming an actress! In deep, reluctant admiration, he nodded. Apart from her eye color, she barely looked different from the women here—dirty, neglected, defeated. Most of the militia wouldn’t give her a second glance with all that lovely hair hidden. “Good idea.”
She just grinned at him and held out the makeup. He rubbed some dark stuff on his face, grateful for whatever ancestry gave him bronzed s dark hair and eyes.
He turned to find Lissa on the bike, Hana on her lap. Mitch used a long strip of twine to tie the child to her, handed Hana a Snickers to keep her quiet. He handed Lissa an assault rifle. “Keep it visible to scare the looters. If they come at us, point but don’t shoot. I’ll give you lessons on how to shoot before we head out of town. This town’s safe enough for the next few days. The rebels are still about twenty-five miles to the west.”
Wide-eyed but obedient, she nodded.
He hitched his weapon over his shoulder, got on the bike in front of Hana, and they looked just like any family: any family escaping the horror of a guerrilla war zone.
As he started the bike, he told her, “If we get stopped, let me talk. I’ve been learning Tagalog the past few weeks. Enough to get by, anyway.”
She clicked her tongue. “I should have thought of that.”
He yelled over the engine’s roar, “I’ve had months to think of it, and I only started a few weeks ago. You’ve had twenty-four hours. You’re doing well.”
She held on to him as he roared out of the hangar.
Apart from what she’d seen in news reports, Lissa had few preconceived ideas of what a town on the edge of a war zone would look like. Keeping her telltale eyes beneath the shade of the old cap, she watched a whole new world flash past her.
Though the scent of drenched mud and decaying leaves and steaming jungle proclaimed this as a tropical area in the throes of wet season, somehow it reminded her of one of Clint Eastwood’s old Westerns. Something didn’t seem quite right—didn’t seem quite
real.
It felt like it was a set: it had the dirt roads, rough wooden houses and newspapers drifting in the wind. She half waited for the stroke of noon and the gunfire to begin.
Men lounged against walls, watching them pass. Checking them out for…what? To rob them, kidnap them, kill them? There was the strangest sense of normality as women crossed the roads with their children to visit smiling friends, kids played with rocks or balls in the street and Gaelic music drifted from the pub at the end of the road.
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
That was it: the tense, brooding expectation; the sense of…waiting.
It’s coming. We just don’t know when.
Marking time. Apprehension filled the air, air superheated and drenched in humidity, adding a pulsing underscore to a jarring symphony that remained unspoken, unwanted, inescapable. A desperate people grasping at a precious last few hours of normality before the rebel militia came to destroy their world.
Men ready to protect their families with what few weapons they had. Children having fun out of school. Hedonists in the bars, in the brothels, in the street. Old and young, praying in the church. Opportunists waiting for their chance to smash and grab. All living a strange, unquiet coexistence, waiting for the end…or the beginning.
Why didn’t they cut and run?
Mitch turned the bike in at the pub, a half-brick wooden building not unlike a man with messy hair and a three-day growth, seeming sexy in its unfinished, unpolished state. Shouting silently,
come here and try me, baby.
“We’ll stay here tonight. We’re best off heading out to Hana’s grandparents’ village in the morning.” He twisted around, untied Hana and gestured to them to dismount. Then he held out a simple gold band to her. “From here on in, you’re Sarah Sinclair, my wife, and I’m Alan, your husband.”
She looked down at the ring, then at him, in his face paint and cap. A sense of inevitability—of undone déjà vu—overwhelmed her, and instead of taking the ring, she held out her left hand.
His eyes never leaving hers, he slipped the ring over her third finger.
This is the rehearsal, Lissa,
his gaze seemed to say.
Next time it will be real. And forever.
“I’m your husband,” he said quietly. Then like lightning, before she knew his intention, he’d slipped another ring on top of it. A pretty star sapphire twinkled serenely at her from its bed of tiny diamonds. “I bought this for you thirteen years ago, with my first month’s pay after I joined the Air Force. I think it’s past time I gave it to you.”
Too choked up to speak, she just stared. Somehow the ring, in all its gentle, just-out-of-date loveliness, made everything so
real.
Made his proposal real. Made his wanting her real. “Thir-thirteen years?”
He nodded with a twisted, self-mocking smile. “I’d finally worked up the guts to speak. I knew if I didn’t I’d lose you for good. I was going to ask you to marry me. I was going to beg if I had to, beg you to leave Tim and come with me.” He shrugged. “The day after I bought it, I heard about your engagement.”
She closed her eyes. “I wish you’d spoken, Mitch. I wish…”
He shrugged. “I lost hope. What did I have to offer you against what Tim had? I looked honestly at myself, and I had to stay away. If you went with me, you lost it all. With him, you had it all—stability, a life in Breckerville. A name. A family.”
A family.
She dipped her head in despair. Oh, the
fool
she’d been not to see it sooner, not to know the heart of all his reasons for silence! He couldn’t see what he had, the courage and generous, giving heart; he only saw what he didn’t have—a name and a family. If only she’d overcome her own fears all those years ago, to
see
what he needed so much—her own words of love.