Fatal Pursuit (The Aegis Series) (7 page)

Manuel pulled the driver door open and scrambled inside. “Paramilitary. Very bad men. Very, very bad.” He grabbed Marley’s backpack and threw it onto the ground.

Jake let go of Marley and stepped toward the door. “Hold on. Just what the hell do you think you’re—”

Manuel chucked Jake’s backpack onto the ground next to Marley’s and slammed the door shut. “This as far as I go. Bruhia that way.” He pointed to the left, into the trees, in the opposite direction of the gunfire. “Good luck,
amigos
.”

He shoved the truck into reverse. Dirt and gravel spit up in the air. The vehicle whipped around, then tore away.

“Motherfucker!” Jake ran after the truck and smacked his hand along the tailgate, but Manuel floored it. Seconds later, all that was left was the crunch of gravel far off in the distance and the plume of dust he left in his wake.

The ricochet of gunfire sounded behind them. Closer this time. Marley looked in that direction, a sense of foreboding rushing down her spine.

“Son of a bitch.” Jake marched back to her. “Grab your pack.”

Marley scooped up her backpack and tossed it on. “What the heck are we supposed to do now?”

“Now we’re getting as far from that”—he nodded in the direction of the gunfire—“as we can.”

He knelt in front of his pack and pulled out a Glock. After checking the magazine, he drew out a holster, which he strapped to his thigh, slid the weapon inside, then threw his pack on. “Colombian guerrillas and paramilitary. Two groups we do not want to run into out here in the jungle.”

Marley strapped the buckle of her pack around her waist. “What do they want?”

“The same thing all paramilitary groups want. Whatever the fuck they can get.” Jake shoved a palm frond out of his way and stepped over a huge root. “Keep up, Addison. We need to put as much distance between us and them as we can.”

He’d just taken over, but suddenly Marley didn’t care. Her adrenaline surged as she shoved the damp palm out of her face and followed him deeper into the jungle. More gunfire echoed behind her, and she quickened her pace, working hard to keep up with Jake’s big steps. Fear rippled down her spine, cooling her skin in the humid air, but two things became bitterly clear.

One, she wasn’t just risking her life anymore, now she was risking Jake’s. And two, there wasn’t anyone she trusted more than him.

Jake unbuckled his pack and dropped it on the ground near some giant tree he couldn’t name with huge roots sticking out from the base five feet high and extending downward to the forest floor. “We can stop here. I haven’t heard any sign of our friends for the last hour. I think we lost them.”

Marley stepped up next to him and gripped both shoulder straps of her pack. “We should keep going. If we keep up this pace, we could reach Bruhia in a couple of hours.”

He glanced up at her as he knelt by his pack and flipped the top open. She looked over the jungle in the direction they’d been heading since he’d last checked his compass. She was right. If they kept going, they might reach the small town in three, four hours tops. But he didn’t want to push her too hard. She was a city girl. And more importantly, he wasn’t sure what was out there in the dark of the jungle.

He took in the supple line of her jaw, the bead of sweat that slid down her temple. Her hair was pulled back into a messy tail. Damp blonde tendrils hung around her face and down the back of her neck. The black tank she wore stuck to her curves, leaving nothing to the imagination, and her gray cargo pants were muddy up to her calves. But she didn’t look tired or scared or overwhelmed. And she hadn’t once complained as he’d led through foliage so thick she could barely move, across creeks that had soaked her boots to the point where they probably wouldn’t dry in this climate, and up and down hills that had fatigued even his muscles. A fact that not only surprised him, it impressed the hell out of him.

Not that he was about to tell her that. The last thing he needed was her saying,
See? Told ya I could hold my own on an op.

Frowning, he found his knife. After clipping it to his belt, he unhooked the machete he’d picked up in town before they’d left, just in case, and muttered, “Too bad this isn’t an op.”

“What?” She turned to look down at him. “Did you say something?”

He shoved his pack closer to the base of the tree between two wide roots. “I said we’re not going anywhere. It’ll be dark soon.”

“I have a headlamp. Something tells me you do too in that magic pack of yours.”

She was right. He did have one. But he wasn’t about to use it. “There are all kinds of things in the jungle you do not want to meet in the dark. Trust me.” He pushed to his feet. “Stay here while I cut some palms so we can build a roof over these roots for shelter.”

He moved past her into the foliage. At his back, she mumbled, “I’m not an invalid, you know.”

“Then do something productive while I’m gone.” He glanced back at her. “Like find some berries for dinner. Just watch out for poisonous dart frogs, vampire bats, and anacondas.”

“Yeah, thanks.” She shot him a look that was cuter than it was frustrated. “I’ll do just that.”

He chuckled as he walked off, thankful the animosity was gone from her voice. He knew she was still miffed that he’d shown up and pushed his way into this little excursion, but he wasn’t about to leave her safety in the hands of someone else. Especially not where she was headed.

It took longer than he thought to find the right kind of palm fronds. He had to make do with a variety that fanned out from a central branch. There were gaps between the spindly fronds that might let water in if it rained in the night, so he cut extra. By the time he had enough for the shelter, he was drenched in sweat, hot and sticky, cut and bleeding from the razor-sharp fronds and prickly vines around him, and irritated because it was growing dark quicker than he’d calculated.

He trudged his way back through the jungle. Stopped when he was sure he should have already reached their camp, then pulled out his compass and checked his coordinates.

Damn jungle. Everything looked the same in the dwindling light. Backtracking, he made his way to the area where he’d cut the vines, checked his compass again, and headed in the other direction. Twenty minutes later, he slowed when he spotted a warm orange glow.

His adrenaline spiked, and his heart beat hard against his ribs. He squinted to see through the trees.

A fire. Someone had built a fire near their makeshift camp. A quick shot of fear raced through his veins. He reached for the Glock at his thigh. If those guerrillas had caught up with them . . . If they’d done something to Marley . . . A thousand scenarios raced through his mind, every one ending in something horrid.

A figure moved in front of the fire, circled around the other side, and knelt down. A curvy figure. One with blond hair pulled back in a tail. One he recognized.

Confused, Jake inched forward, careful not to make any sound, just in case. Ten yards away he realized Marley was the only one in the area. And their camp now looked nothing like it had when he’d left.

She’d laid the tarp on the ground between two giant roots. A fire sizzled ten feet away in a circle of rocks. Two Y-shaped sticks were stuck into the ground on each side of the fire, supporting another stick skewered through some kind of meat. On a piece of bark off to the right of the fire, a pile of purple berries sat untouched along with a cluster of bananas.

Reaching around the fire, Marley gripped the ends of the roughly made rotisserie and turned the meat. She winced when the flame got too close to her fingers, pulled her hand back, and sucked on her knuckle.

“What the heck is this?”

She turned at the sound of his voice and looked up as he stepped through the trees. “You’re back. I was starting to wonder if I’d have to go look for you.”

Jake dragged the fronds into camp, dropping them near the fire. “Who did all this?”

“I did.”

He glanced from the fire to the berries and back again. “No, seriously. Is someone else here?”

She pushed to her feet. “No one but me.” Stepping toward the tarp she’d laid out, she said, “The iguana needs a little longer to cook. In the meantime, we can get started on the shelter. It’s getting more humid. I have a feeling rain’s going to hit tonight.”

“Iguana.” Jake eyed the meat sizzling over the fire. “You’re trying to tell me you caught an iguana.”

“A green iguana. Fast little bugger.” She picked up a wide-leafed frond, one that was easily three times bigger than the fronds he’d cut, with no gaps or holes. “I thought these might be good for the roof. What do you think?”

Jake glanced down at the spindly fronds at his feet.

“Oh,” she said, following his gaze. “Yours are nice too. If you’d rather use yours, we can.”

He looked up at her, widening his eyes in utter disbelief. Who was this chick? All this time, MacGyver had been sitting out in the other office?

A slow, gloating smile spread across her lips. One that warmed his belly in a way he didn’t expect. “I told you I wasn’t an invalid, Jake. My father dragged me all over the globe as a kid. I know a thing or two about survival in the wild. I also know how to take care of myself.”

That was becomingly painfully obvious. Hidden survival skills, hijacking abilities, a mystery brother, and a not-so-dead boyfriend. The woman in front of him was turning out to be nothing like the one who’d quietly worked for him all these years. As Jake glanced around the camp she’d set up without a bit of his help, he couldn’t help but wonder what other secrets were hiding behind those pretty blue eyes.

And just what the hell kind of trouble that meant was waiting for him down the line.

M
arley turned her head in the darkness to look toward Jake, but all she could see was the outline of his shadow. “You really should let me look at those cuts on your hands.”

“My hands are fine,” he muttered next to her.

She smiled up at the roof of the shelter they’d built with her banana leaves. Mr. Moody was back. And this time she knew he was pouting because she’d surprised the heck out of him by setting up camp, catching and cooking dinner, and not being the needy and whiny female he expected her to be.

She really wanted to say,
I told you I could be an asset on an op, not a liability,
but held her tongue. She’d made her point. Rubbing it in now would just be overly satisfying.

She folded her hands over her belly, sighing as she listened to the bats and howler monkeys in the canopy above. After they’d finished eating, they’d laid Jake’s palm fronds as bedding under the tarp. They were currently lying next to each other in the shelter, both of them quiet and lost in thought.

“Why the heck didn’t I know Mason Addison has a son who was a soldier?”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t quite as lost in thought as she’d assumed. “Ronan told you he was in the military?”

Jake crossed his arms over his chest beside her, his thick biceps straining the thin black T-shirt he’d changed into just before they’d left Puerto Asis. “He didn’t have to. Once a soldier, always a soldier.”

He recognized the stance too. That made sense. “The reason you didn’t know is because he’s not my father’s son. We’re half siblings. Through our mother.”

“I thought your mom was dead.”

“She is.”

“Sorry. That was blunt. I meant—”

“I know what you meant.” Marley’s good mood took a nosedive. This was not a story she enjoyed rehashing, but since Jake was here, helping her when he didn’t need to be, she decided there was no reason not to tell him.

“Ronan’s a year younger than me. Omega Intel was just a fledgling company back when we were both born. My dad’s whole focus was building it up, gaining contracts, making a name for himself. He was gone all the time. Off running secret covert ops through different contracts with the government and private clients. My mother was lonely. I don’t blame her. I mean, I know what it’s like to live in this world. It’s stressful and secretive and isolating at times. And he didn’t make it easy on her. She was stuck on the outside looking in because my father didn’t tell her anything. Maybe he thought he was keeping her safe that way, I don’t know.

“Anyway, I was just a baby at the time, so I don’t remember any of this, but according to my aunt Ginger who passed away from cancer a few years ago, my mother was in Nashville at the time visiting a friend and met some guy. My dad was somewhere in Africa at the time on this long mission—four months, I think. She hit it off with the guy and, well, got pregnant with Ronan.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Ouch. Kinda hard to pass off a surprise pregnancy when your husband has been gone that long. She stopped seeing the guy in Nashville, but my dad didn’t want to have anything to do with her. He kicked her out. The divorce got ugly, but he had a much better attorney and got custody of me. She moved in with her parents and had Ronan, but the guilt of it all got to be too much for her. She killed herself when Ronan was only a year old.”

“Oh man.”

“My dad never talked about her. For a long time I thought she’d died of cancer when I was a baby. It was only when I was in college that my aunt filled me in on the whole story. I didn’t even know I had a brother until then.”

“That must have been a shock.”

“A good shock. I always wanted a sibling. I went and found him. He, as you can imagine, wasn’t thrilled to see me. Unlike me, he knew all about my family. He was a pretty screwed-up kid then—raised by his grandparents, his dad was never in the picture, and he had a lot of anger—but I was persistent. Didn’t let him push me away.”

Jake chuckled. “Yeah, I can totally see you doing that.”

Marley smiled in the darkness, remembering how resistant Ronan had been to her friendship at first. He still acted like he never wanted her around, but she knew it was all a façade. He wouldn’t have hopped on a plane to help her if he didn’t care.

“Just what did you say to him to get him to leave anyway? Ronan never would have left me in Colombia alone if you had threatened him.”

“Yeah, well.” Jake shifted on the tarp beside her.

“Yeah, well what?” She turned to look at his shadowy outline again.

He exhaled. “I just told him he didn’t need to stick around.”

No, there was more. She sensed it. “You recognized him, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Marley looked back up at the makeshift ceiling. “I’m not stupid. I know SEALs run missions with DELTA guys now and then. You don’t have to pretend as if you don’t know who he is.”

Jake was silent a minute, then said, “It just surprises me you’d turn to someone like him for help instead of asking me.”

There it was. The frustration she knew had been at the root of his moodiness since the moment he’d stepped foot in Colombia.

She tried to figure out how to answer and came up empty. Because deep down she wasn’t exactly sure why she’d been so adamant he not help her. It was more than the fact she didn’t want to listen to his opinion. It had to do with the complexity of their relationship—more than colleagues, not quite friends, and the weird sexual tension she’d been feeling around him the last few months.

She cleared her throat. Crossed her ankles. Really wanted to put distance between them because her skin was suddenly tingling, but knew there was nowhere to go. Not knowing how else to answer, she finally said, “Ronan is not what you think. There’s more to the story about how and why he was discharged than you and your SEAL buddies know.”

Jake turned his head in her direction. She didn’t have to see his
get real
expression to know it was there. “You know all guys say that, right? It’s not what you think?”

“In this case it’s true.” Marley didn’t want to talk any more about Ronan. What he’d been kicked out of the military for was pretty nasty. He’d been lucky he hadn’t been court-martialed, but his judge advocate had gotten him off due to mishandling of evidence. He’d still lost his commission, and it had pretty well fucked up his life, but these days he seemed to be doing okay even if he was floating around South America doing mercenary work she didn’t want to think too much about.

It wasn’t worth her time or energy to try to convince Jake of that fact, though. No matter what she said, his rigid by-the-book ethics would make it impossible for him to agree with or understand the things Ronan had done.

“Where did he go?” Marley asked, changing the subject.

“I don’t know.” Jake looked back up at the ceiling. “Just threatened me if something happened to you.”

Marley smiled again in the darkness. There was the protective little brother she knew and loved, even if he rarely showed it. “He knows who you are. He must have felt comfortable leaving with you here. Otherwise he’d have stayed.”

Jake huffed, lifted his hand, and slapped a bug on his bare forearm. “Maybe he just didn’t want to trek into this beautiful jungle to be eaten alive by mosquitoes.”

Marley chuckled.

“Or maybe he knew you were being evasive about this so-called boyfriend and didn’t want the headache.”

Marley’s smile faded. So they were back to Gray. She knew their respite from this topic had been too good to be true.

“Why didn’t your father want you dating the guy?”

She was not in the mood to talk about this tonight. Especially when she was already so conflicted about Gray in the first place.
And considering the odd tingle in her belly just from being close to Jake,
she knew he was the last person she could talk to about her ex.

Rolling away from him, she rested her cheek on her hand and blew out a long breath. “I’m tired. We’ll talk tomorrow. Night, Jake.”

He sighed. Muttered, “You bet your ass we’ll talk tomorrow.” Then louder said, “Night, Marley.”

And though she knew she was off the hook for the moment, she didn’t have a clue what she’d tell him in the morning.

Jake blinked several times as he stared at a tree root inches from his face. Rolling to his back, he looked up at green banana leaves above. He was in the shelter they’d built in the jungle. The events of the last few days rippled through his mind, forming waves of consciousness that slowly sank in.

Man, he had to admit, Marley had shocked the hell out of him with her hunting and gathering skills. And she’d not only caught an iguana—which wasn’t an easy task for anyone, him included—she’d skinned and cooked the bugger.

A slow smile spread across his lips as he thought back to the way she’d built a fire, cut and dragged banana leaves back, and set up camp without anyone’s help. Did he know another woman who could do all that? Especially without a single complaint?

He couldn’t think of any. Most of the women he knew didn’t even like to kill a spider. And forget cooking. The last woman he’d dated—Karen, Kallie, no, Krista—hadn’t turned on her stove in at least five years.

That awe came floating back. He shifted his head to the left, expecting to see Marley sleeping beside him in the shelter, but the tarp was empty.

He pushed up to his hands and looked out through the opening of the shelter. Rising to his feet, he stepped outside and glanced around the dimly lit jungle.

A bird cawed high above. The fire had died out, and the forest floor was damp from the drizzle they’d gotten last night, but it was still muggy and hot as hell. He moved past the fire pit and stepped into the trees, searching for her. “Marley?”

A howler monkey screamed somewhere off to his right, the sound echoing through the forest like an eerie premonition. Jake’s pulse picked up speed. He scanned the forest but saw no sign of her.

“Addison!” he called, listening as his voice echoed through the rainforest. But there was still no response. His adrenaline spiked, and the same fears he’d had last night when he’d seen that fire through the trees came rushing back.

He darted back into the shelter and grabbed his Glock. Yeah, she might be able to set up camp on her own, but there were all kinds of dangers in the rainforest just waiting to strike. Not only were guerrillas and paramilitary troops wandering around out here, but snakes, jaguars, cougars, and poisonous plants and insects lurked everywhere.

He holstered his gun at his thigh and picked his way through the brush, cursing every time a thorny vine caught on his clothing and scratched his arms and hands. And he told himself if he found her alive—
Please God, let her be alive
—he was going to shake some ever-loving sense into her.

The splash of water echoed off to his right. He stilled, listened, squinted to see through the thick brush. When it happened again, he turned in that direction and shoved palm fronds and vines out of his way until he stepped into a patch of sunlight and stared dumfounded at the sight in front of him.

Marley stood under a waterfall across a small pond, her eyes closed, her hands brushing her wet hair back from her face while water sluiced down her naked body. The waterline hit at her waist, but Jake was too shocked to notice much more than skin and splashing water.

“Just what in hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

Marley’s blue eyes shot open. A tiny yelp slipped from her lips just before she dropped down into the water.

“Hey,” she managed after several seconds. “I, uh, didn’t know you were awake.”

He stepped closer to the edge of the water. “Get out of that damn pond.”

An amused expression crossed her dewy face. “Why? You got something against being clean, Ryder?”

“What? No.” His brow wrinkled. Why the hell was she smiling like that? Didn’t she know what could be lurking in that water? “You need to get out because there could be snakes or alligators or eels or God knows what else in there.”

Marley laughed. “They’re called caimans in South America, not alligators. And there aren’t any here. I checked. Look down, Jake. If something were to swim up to me, I’d see it.”