his shoulders were still as broad.
And he was just as beautiful.
“Start at the beginning,” she offered.
“Okay. Let me tell you as much as I remember,” he said. “One minute I was striding through the Mexican fields with the man I went to meet. You remember. His name was Carlos, and he claimed to have grown a completely new and fantastic strain of coffee beans.”
He’d gone to obtain samples to see if his company, Boulder’s Best Brew, would be interested in distributing them.
“I felt a blow at the back of my head like an explosion,” he continued. “After that, I regained consciousness chained and was trussed like an animal, with a headache the size of Denver.”
His eyes were haunted as he paused. “I had no idea where I was. I’d gone down in the wilds of the Mexican jungle. Carlos, the two employees who’d traveled with me, as well as my Spanish interpreter, had vanished—either dead or captured, too. I was a prisoner, with no way to contact you or Sean or even the American embassy. Worse, I had no idea why.”
Though he paused as if inviting comments, Lucy didn’t interrupt. Holding her gaze, he swallowed and continued.
“They tortured me enough to put me on the tattered edge of crazy. Without my interpreters, I couldn’t understand most of what they asked me, though after a while I realized they thought I’d stolen something. Instead, I tried to figure out a way out of there, a way home to you. I began making up lies to keep them from torturing me more. But no matter what they did to me, I couldn’t tell them what they wanted because I truly didn’t know.”
“They? Who were they?” she asked, her throat aching at the haunting look on his face. “Who did this to you?”
He winced as he shrugged. “As best as I could tell, I was held prisoner by a major Mexican drug cartel.”
“Did you tell them that they had the wrong person?”
“I tried. But since my Spanish is extremely limited, the explanation I tried to give them fell on deaf ears.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill you.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “At first, I dreamed of escape, of home. After a while, I mostly dreamt of death. I wanted them to just go ahead and kill me. Get it over with. But they wouldn’t end my suffering and let me die.”
His voice broke and he looked down briefly before continuing. “I still don’t understand why not. Drug cartels like this one are ruthless. They usually kill spies or anyone who pissed them off without blinking. You’ve heard the stories of the mass graves found near the border, where they lined their enemies up near a shallow ditch and shot them in the back. But not me.” He sounded bitter, but this time, she understood why.
“For whatever reason, they kept me alive, using me as entertainment. Bored? Go torture the prisoner. Can’t sleep? Then make sure the prisoner doesn’t, either.”
She shuddered at his words, aching, wanting both to stop him and let him go on, hoping maybe once he’d told the story he could purge the horror from his system.
“I hated them with a passion,” he continued. “Though I was careful not to reveal the depths of my rage. As it became more and more clear that they had no intention of killing me, I knew I had to get out. If I could escape, I could try to get home.
“I tried to formulate a plan, but came up with nothing. The only thing I knew for sure was escaping wouldn’t be easy. My captors fed me just enough to keep me breathing, no more. Weakened by starvation, I could barely walk, never mind hike through miles of jungle to search out civilization and rescue.”
“Oh, Tucker. I’m so sorry.”
He went on talking as though he hadn’t heard her. “Basically, unless there was a miracle, I knew I was a dead man. I’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. My luck had finally run out.”
“How’d you escape?” she asked.
His gaze cleared and he dipped his chin. “A rival drug faction ambushed my captors. The ensuing shootout left several dead, many more wounded, while the rest fled. I was left, alone and forgotten in my jail cell. By then, circumstances had extinguished even the smallest flicker of hope. I simply waited to die of starvation and neglect. I hoped I wouldn’t linger—after all, how long could my body hang on by the proverbial thread?”
He went silent.
“But you were rescued. By whom?” she prompted.
“The DEA had someone undercover. Apparently, they learned of my capture and got me out. After that, everything was a blur. The next thing I knew, I found myself in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, under heavy guard. I was questioned by some military-looking types, who’d claimed to be DEA. My repeated attempts to contact my family had been met with refusal. I was told only that making any outside contact could endanger my life. I was so heavily guarded that I felt like I was a prisoner again.”
“But they finally let you go?” she asked. “Do you have any idea why?”
“No. But once my fever was gone and I could keep solid food down and stand unassisted, they finally released me. They even arranged for transport, driving me here in one of those nondescript, law-enforcement type vehicles and dropping me off.” He flashed her a smile, a shadow of the carefree grins she remembered. “And here I am.”
“And here you are,” Lucy echoed. She wanted to go to him and hold him, but instead she kept herself still, hands clenched together. Her anger now directed at herself, she wondered how to tell him what she’d done. Tucker had already been through hell.
Before he’d disappeared and supposedly died, she’d waited forever for him to propose to her. Instead, he’d let his wanderlust haul him all over the globe, unwilling or unable to commit.
And now, believing him dead for over a year, she’d gone and gotten herself engaged to his best friend.
She felt ill, positively sick. Barely two weeks ago she’d agreed to become Sean’s wife.
“Why did they think you were dead?” she cried. “I would have moved heaven and earth to find you if I’d had the tiniest bit of hope that you’d survived. But they said you didn’t. They said it was you.”
“I…” Closing his eyes as though by doing so, he could block out all emotion, he shook his shaggy head. “I don’t know. They didn’t say anything about this when they debriefed me. You really thought I was…”
“Yes. Dead.” She spoke deliberately. “You were killed in the plane crash.”
“Lucy, listen to me. I wasn’t in a plane crash,” he said, his raspy voice simmering with undercurrents of lingering fury mixed with exhaustion.
So they were both angry. And maybe one of them was crazy. But which one? She was beginning to wonder.
“There was a plane crash,” she insisted. “We were told you were dead. The plane went down, exploded on impact, killing all on board. They identified Bruno, and Carlos, the man you’d gone to meet. And they found your wallet, though the…remains were too badly charred and scattered to know for sure.”
“Who told you this?”
“The authorities, of course.”
“Oh, Lucy.”
Unable to sit still any longer, she got up and crossed the room to stand in front of him. “I thought you were dead.” Unthinking, she reached out her hand to him.
While he didn’t recoil, not exactly, he shifted and moved enough so that her outstretched fingers didn’t come in contact with him at all.
As she slowly lowered her arm, he stared at her silently, as a stranger might, offering no embrace, no kiss, nothing to show that they’d loved each other once.
Twisting