air became thick and oppressive, and she struggled to breathe, to fight down the fear that she knew was unreasonable but that no amount of reason could conquer. Even knowing its source didn’t help. She simply couldn’t stand the darkness. She couldn’t sleep without a light; she never went into a room without first reaching in and turning on the light switch, and she always left her lights on if she knew she would be late returning home. She, who always took extraordinary precautions against being left in the dark, was standing in the middle of a jungle in darkness so complete that it was like being blind.
Her fragile control broke and she reached out wildly, clawing for him, for reassurance that he was still there. Her outstretched fingers touched fabric, and she threw herself against him, gasping in mingled panic and relief. The next second steely fingers grasped her shirt and she was hurled through the air to land flat on her back in the smelly, rotting vegetation. Before she could move, before she could suck air back into her lungs, her hair was pulled back and she felt the suffocating pressure of his knee on her chest again. His breath was a low rasp above her, his voice little more than a snarl “Don’t ever—ever—come at me from behind again.”
Jane writhed, pushing at his knee. After a moment he lifted it, and eased the grip on her hair. Even being thrown over his shoulder had been better than being left alone in the darkness, and she grabbed for him again, catching him around the knees. Automatically he tried to step away from her entangling arms but she lunged for him. He uttered a startled curse, tried to regain his balance, then crashed to the ground.
He lay so still that Jane’s heart plummeted. What would she do if he were hurt? She couldn’t possibly carry him, but neither could she leave him lying there, injured and unable to protect himself. Feeling her way up his body, she scrambled to crouch by his shoulders. “Mister, are you all right?” she whispered, running her hands up his shoulders to his face, then searching his head for any cuts or lumps. There was an elasticized band around his head, and she followed it, her nervous fingers finding an odd type of glasses over his eyes. “Are you hurt?” she demanded again, her voice tight with fear. “Damn it, answer me!”
“Lady,” the man said in a low, furious voice, “you’re crazier than hell. If I was your daddy, I’d pay Turego to keep you!”
She didn’t know him, but his words caused an odd little pain in her chest. She sat silently, shocked that he could hurt her feelings. She didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her—how could his opinion matter? But it did, somehow, and she felt strangely vulnerable.
He eased himself to a sitting position, and when she didn’t say anything, he sighed. “Why did you jump me like that?” he asked in resignation.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” she said with quiet dignity. “I couldn’t hear you breathing, and I can’t see a thing. I panicked. I’m sorry.”
After a moment he said, “All right,” and got to his feet. Bending down, he grasped her wrists and pulled her up to stand beside him. Jane inched a little closer to him.
“You can see because of those glasses you’re wearing, can’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah. There’s not a lot of light, but enough that I can make out where I’m going. Infrared lenses.”
A howler monkey suddenly screamed somewhere above their heads, and Jane jumped, bumping into him. “Got another pair?” she asked shakily.
She could feel him hesitate, then his arm went around her shoulders. “Nope, just these. Don’t worry, Pris, I’m not going to lose you. In another five minutes or so, it’ll start getting light.”
“I’m all right now,” she said, and she was, as long as she could touch him and know that she wasn’t alone. That was the real terror: being alone in the darkness. For years she had fought a battle against the nightmare that had begun when she was nine years old, but at last she had come to accept it, and in the acceptance she’d won peace. She knew it was there, knew when to expect it and what to do to ward it off, and that knowledge gave her the ability to enjoy life again. She hadn’t let the nightmare cripple her. Maybe her methods of combating it were a little unorthodox, but she had found the balance within herself and she was happy with it.
Feeling remarkably safe with that steely arm looped over her shoulders, Jane waited beside him, and in a very short time she found that she could indeed see a little better. Deep in the rain forest there was no brilliant sunrise to announce the day—the sunrise could not be seen from beneath the canopy of vegetation. Even during the hottest noon, the light that reached the jungle floor was dim, filtered through layers of greenery. She waited as the faint gray light slowly became stronger, until she could pick out more of the details of the lush foliage that surrounded her. She felt almost swamped by the plant life. She’d never been in the jungle before; her only knowledge of it came from movies and what little she’d been able to see during the trip upriver to the plantation. During her days at the plantation she’d begun to think of the jungle as a living entity, huge and green, surrounding her, waiting. She had known from the first that to escape she would have to plunge into that seemingly impenetrable green barrier, and she had spent hours staring at it.
Now she was deep within it, and it wasn’t quite what she’d expected. It wasn’t a thick tangle, where paths had to be cut with a machete. The jungle floor was littered with rotting vegetation, and laced with networks of vines and roots, but for all that it was surprisingly clear. Plant life that lingered near the jungle floor was doomed. To compete for the precious light it had to rise and spread out its broad leaves, to gather as much light as it could. She stared at a fern that wasn’t quite a fern; it was a tree with a buttressed root system, rising to a height of at least eight feet, only at the top it feathered into a fern.
“You can see now,” he muttered suddenly, lifting his arm from her shoulders and stripping off the night-vision goggles. He placed them carefully in a zippered section of his field pack.
Jane stared at him in open curiosity, wishing that the light were better so she could really see him. What she could see gave wing to hundreds of tiny butterflies in her stomach. It would take one brave hombre to meet this man in a dark alley, she thought with a frightened shiver. She couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, but they glittered at her from beneath fierce, level dark brows. His face was blackened, which made those eyes all the brighter. His light-colored hair was far too long, and he’d tied a strip of cloth around his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. He was clad in tiger-striped camouflage fatigues, and he wore the trappings of war. A wicked knife was stuck casually in his belt, and a pistol rode his left hip while he carried a carbine slung over his right shoulder. Her startled eyes darted back up to his face, a strong-boned face that revealed no emotion, though he had been aware of her survey.
“Loaded for bear, aren’t you?” she quipped, eyeing the knife again. For some reason it looked more deadly than either of the guns.
“I don’t walk into anything unprepared,” he said flatly.
Well, he certainly looked prepared for anything. She eyed him again, more warily this time; he was about six feet tall, and looked like…looked like… Her mind groped for and found the phrase. It had been bandied about and almost turned into a joke, but with this man, it was deadly serious. He looked like a lean, mean, fighting machine, every hard, muscled inch of him. His shoulders looked to be a yard wide, and he’d carried her dead weight through the jungle without even a hint of strain. He’d knocked her down twice, and she realized the only reason she wasn’t badly hurt was that, both times, he’d tempered his strength.
Abruptly his attention left her, and his head lifted with a quick, alert motion, like that of an eagle. His eyes narrowed as he listened. “The helicopter is coming,” he told her. “Let’s go.”
Jane listened, but she couldn’t hear anything. “Are you sure?” she asked doubtfully.
“I said let’s go,” he repeated impatiently, and walked away from her. It took Jane only a few seconds to realize that he was heading out, and in the jungle he would be completely hidden from view before he’d gone ten yards. She hurried to catch up to him.
“Hey,