Cameron nodded warily and put out a hand. What he remembered was a tendency on Fred’s part toward physical intervention in Acasia’s life. And he and Acasia had been nowhere near that kind of
involved
at the time. "Sure. Thanks for the bed, Fred."
Calculation replaced the scowl on Fred’s face. Fate and his sister had put a very captive, very wealthy audience right in his grasp. And his clinic always needed money. If he played his cards right… One huge paw engulfed Cameron’s offered hand. "First guy to interfere with my sister’s virtue, right?"
It was direct, even for a man who generally took the shortest distance between two points in quantum leaps. Acasia choked. Cameron shut his eyes and cleared his throat. "Something like that," he managed.
Acasia turned her back and made a strangling noise deep in her throat. Never, never, did Fred do what she expected. But then, she supposed it ran in the family, diversity being not only the Jones clan’s stock–in–trade, but their motto, as well. Dignity, she thought, and tried to salvage some, but failed abysmally. One look at Cameron trying to figure Fred out turned the final shred of her self–control into multicolored confetti. The day was not going at all the way she’d planned. There were things to do, places to go, people to stay away from…. If one was running away from a madman and his mercenary, it was best to start early.
Sternly Acasia mastered her laughter and turned back to Cameron and Fred. They’d come to their first agreement ever and were now studiously ignoring her. It was the only way. Acasia appreciated that. She took a deep breath. "I’m all right now. Maybe we could continue?"
"If you’re sure," Cameron said.
"Perhaps it would help to consider the severity of your situation and the fact that you’re at my mercy," Fred suggested meaningfully.
"Perhaps," Acasia returned sweetly, "you should consider who smuggles unmelted candy bars to you at no small risk to herself."
"You’d stop?"
"In a flash."
"That’s blackmail."
Acasia nodded. "You got it, bro."
"Well that’s a fine how do you do," Fred proclaimed eloquently. "If the director of your local medical clinic cum guerrilla refugee camp can’t indulge his chocolate fetish without someone holding it against him…" He shook his head sadly. "What’s the world coming to?"
"No sweet revenge," Cameron muttered, then caught Acasia’s shoulder to steady himself when a wave of dizziness struck him.
Acasia eyed him sharply. A thin trickle of watery blood had seeped through his hair and down his neck to decorate his collarbone. His eyes were bright, his skin pale beneath the high flush on his cheeks. Tension, relieved briefly by the game she’d played with Fred, came crashing back. Apprehension prickled through the hair at the nape of her neck, twisted barely relaxed muscles into knots.
Fred moved quickly, brother gone, doctor back in place. He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of a cargo pocket on his pants and donned them. "Where’s the blood from?"
"His head. The wound’s infected and probably needs stitches."
"Great." His expert fingers parted Cameron’s matted hair.
"I caught a brick yesterday before Acasia arrived." Cameron bit down hard on the last word when Fred’s fingers collided with sore flesh.
"That’s what I’d have guessed. Look, I want to get some antibiotics into you and get this thing cleaned and dressed pronto." He leveled a sharp glance at his sister. "I should’ve seen to this last night."
Acasia flinched at the accusation in his tone and swung away into the hall, nearly knocking a cut–glass vase off the smoking stand in her path. A gentle English landscape rocked on the wall. Everything was out of place: Cameron, the vase, the painting, her life. None of them should have been in Fred’s jungle.
"Acasia!" Fred called, surprised by her reaction. "Damn it, come back here!"
He started after her, but Cameron’s hand closed on his arm and jerked him around. "Lay off her, Jones!" he told him. He’d seen Acasia’s flash of guilt and experienced a flare of protective anger when the past had bolted forward to consume him. Back came the leftover antagonism, the desire to defend her. When had the line vanished between what he wanted and what he needed? In what instant had tenuous motives been replaced by the simple desire that burned in him now and had nothing whatever to do with lust? He cared.
"What?" Fred eyed him as though he had gone mad. He accepted without qualification how easily nerves frayed in the heat, how little it took to incite riot, but this was his sister, the only person he’d ever known who was able to keep her head no matter what the situation. No hapless idiot, however injured or wealthy, was going to keep him from discovering the reason for Acasia’s ridiculous behavior—and putting a stop to it. "What did you say to me?"
The menace was implicit, but Cameron stood his ground. Somebody had to look after her, damn it. "I said lay off her."
The quiet snarl brought Fred to attention. "Don’t try to tell me how to handle my family, Smith." Fred easily shook off the grip on his arm. "Down here, you’re her responsibility, not vice versa, and for as long as you’re in my clinic, you’re mine, as well. She shouldn’t be here with you at all, but as long as she is, she’d damn well better look after you!" He took a breath and swept misplaced anger aside with a wave. "It’s all semantics, anyway. You’re here, and so’s she, and what’s done is something I can’t worry about. Right now you don’t look too good, and if you have to run today, I don’t want you slowing her down." He stepped aside and motioned Cameron ahead of him. "Sutures and drugs down the hall, third door on your left."
* * *
Acasia ran from the clinic—from self–perception—like the plague. Vision came in fragments: red loincloths, yellow aprons, brown skin, eyes like coal, curious. Earth—gray, charred, loose—sifted over boots she hadn’t tied, drifted inside to get under her feet, scraping her toes and heels. She carried her pack on the right, the gun on her left, the tools of self–preservation snatched up out of a habit she would soon lose if Cameron stayed around for long.
She ran away from him. Through the village, past cooking fires, between huts, away to the river, where the emerald eye of the forest stared at her, serenely unfathomable.
She staggered to a stop and raised a clenched fist at the jungle, as though it were a person she could threaten with mayhem if it didn’t oblige her by getting out of the way. Unmoved, the forest stood its ground, hiding horror within beauty, keeping, like a miser’s treasures, Acasia’s nightmares somewhere behind the first tree.
Small thoughts, like fledgling demons, skirted the periphery of her mind, not quite allowing her to grasp them. For years she had lived a life without continuity or center, with few real relationships, either with the people of the country she happened to be in or with her colleagues. She didn’t have the time, the trust or the inclination. Cameron was different. He always had been. She wanted to trust him, to relieve herself of the burden of responsibility, to escape the boundaries within which she lived.
But she couldn’t allow that to happen. Damn it.
She took a deep breath. It had to stop, this constant tug–of–war between her past and her present. She couldn’t function inside this emotional hurricane. And that, after all, was her job: to function when all else failed. Scattershot methods were only effective for fanatics and those with nothing to lose.
A prickling sensation edged along the back of her neck, and she ducked down, scanning the area around her. A toucan screamed in the jungle, and she started, senses alerted by an old Indian law of the forest: When the toucan calls, danger is near.
She inhaled deeply, expelling disquiet along with the pungent odor of the river, the riotous scent of the crushed flowers and grasses that fed the morning air. Nothing stirred but the river. The heat of the sun weighed her down as she continued to search her surroundings. She couldn’t see it yet, but it was there, the intangible threat, waiting like the air.
She stooped slowly, reaching for her gun and pack, straining to see, to hear.
"Casie."
She jumped, but she kept her voice calm as she registered both Cam’s presence and an as–yet–invisible helicopter.
"Cam, there you are. Fred fix your head?" She inserted just the right amount of concern into the question as she sifted quickly through the contents of her pack.
Cameron remembered too much to be fooled by her tone. He knew she would be bothered by her display of vulnerability, would bury it under every bit of indifference at her disposal. But he’d be damned if he’d let her retreat now, just when they’d begun.
He circled closer to her, speaking as he drew near. "It’ll do, which is probably not all Fred had in mind, but—" He stopped in front of her and caught agitation where he’d thought to find caustic self–contempt. She wasn’t playing a game; she was back to doing her job. He touched her shoulder.
A funny little lump of emotion wedged itself in Acasia’s throat and made it difficult for her to swallow. If only they had time. She pulled a wrapped parcel out of the pack. Cameron felt a cold spot form in his stomach when he identified chamois cloth darkened by gun oil. Acasia didn’t even look at him as she unwrapped the small 9 mm semiautomatic and checked its load. She handed it to him, grip first. "Can you use this?"
"On Fred?" The joke fell flat. He looked from the deadly little piece of equipment snugged in his hand to Acasia and back. "Why?"
Acasia swung her pack over her shoulders, tightening its webbed belt around her waist as she sidled sideways into the brush. "New day, new game, new ground rules. Can you use it?"
Cameron followed her, ignoring the question. "Worse than yesterday? Bad enough that you think I’ll need to use it?"
"Yes."
The simple answer rocked him, and his fingers tightened on the gun. It was an admission he hadn’t expected her to make. If she couldn’t handle it alone, it was bad. "What are we running from?"
Acasia cast an eye at the forest canopy and melted deeper into its gloom, drawing Cameron after her. The helicopter flapped closer, no longer distant, dangerously audible. "A mercenary hired to find you and bring you back to Sanchez alive." She exercised patience she didn’t have and couldn’t afford and stopped long enough to ask, "Can you—
will you
—use the gun?"
Did he have a choice? Cameron pocketed the extra bullet clips she offered him. "If I have to."
He met her eyes, and Acasia saw him through the shadows, saw him for the first time as the man he’d become.
And understood fully for the first time that he wasn’t who he’d thought he’d be by now either.
"Good," she said. Then she hefted up her gun and ran.
T
HE RIVER FOAMED over rocks, roared at its banks and laughed at Acasia as it strained fiercely to burst its seams. Above them, the helicopter hovered so close that she could make out every line in Dominic’s face.
They sat in a lush copse of trees at the river’s edge, silent and alert, while the big green bird sat there whipping the already–raging current into a frenzy. Fear etched the pilot’s face when Dominic spoke to him, pointing forcefully in the direction of the small village clearing where they could set down. Acasia’s lips moved in silent prayer, emotions jockeying for position. Anger, hatred, guilt, disgust—each charted a path visible to Cameron, who looked from the dark–faced man in the see–through bubble to Acasia and back again, noting the physical resemblance to himself, seeing Acasia swallow when she recognized it, too.
She turned to Cameron, an expression like an apology mixed with fear in her eyes before she ducked away. An inner chill dried the sweat on his skin with uncanny suddenness, leaving in its place a grainy film he wanted to wash away. With a single look she had told him what she’d guarded him against last night, what she’d hidden from him this morning. He was the hunted, but she was the prize. He reached for the nine–millimeter, looking up in time to see the helicopter lift slowly and move away, leaving behind it the sound of the river and a thundering silence. Acasia rose without preamble and prepared to move on.
Cameron grabbed at her arm. "A word in your ear, Jones…."
Acasia only glided deeper into the forest, where the overhead canopy became thick and impenetrable once more. She shut him out, closed herself up out of habit, out of practice. She told herself that she was allowed to care, but he was not. She wanted him to behave the way her script said he was supposed to, going where and when he was directed without question or hesitation. But there was more to him than that, damn it, and she knew it.
Nobody ever becomes who they think they will.
Something Fred had said to her once, right before she hit rock bottom and knew the only way out was to reach for "up."
The only way to get to there from here is to grow into yourself, make use of what ails you, and get beyond it.
Sometimes she hated her brother’s perceptiveness.
She disappeared behind a curtain of hanging vines and mosses, and Cameron followed. Sweat trickled down his back and glued his khaki shirt to his skin. Heat and pain from the neatly dressed head wound made him suddenly nauseous, and he stumbled and fell against a tree.
"Sorry," he muttered as Acasia caught him, pulling him away from the red–and–white caterpillar that fell past his bare hand.
"Concentrate on something," Acasia suggested, taking her bandanna, soaking it with water from the canteen and laying it over the back of his neck. "Do the multiplication tables or the ABCs or…"
"The periodic table of elements?" Cameron said wryly.
Acasia used her boot to clear a section of jungle floor and her arms to guide Cameron safely onto it. "Or the periodic table of elements." Amusement was an appreciative ripple in her voice. "Whatever you’re best at." She wet the bandanna again, washed the coolness over his face and throat, twisted the cotton into a strip and tied it around his head. Then she offered him the canteen. "We can rest for about a minute. The antibiotics Fred gave you ought to kick in soon and you’ll be all right. Just take it easy."