Forbidden (10 page)

“Then where’s Liam?” he asked, his voice raspy as he viciously started the motorcycle. “If these people died protecting the kid, where the hell
is
he?”

As if in answer, a gunshot rang out and a bullet smashed into the bike’s side mirror, shattering it. Kayla didn’t even have time to scream before Cal was reacting, gunning the engine. The rear wheel spun in the soot and ash, but then caught on the road and they leapt forward, toward the cover of the jungle.

Kayla clung to Cal as he pushed the bike harder, coaxing every last little bit of speed out of the aging engine. She closed her eyes, pressing her cheek against him, well aware that her back was a very large, very clear target. And the way they were sitting, a bullet that struck her could very well take both their lives.

She had brought Cal to San Salustiano, but she hadn’t brought him there to die.

Another shot boomed, and Kayla closed her eyes even tighter, praying that it wouldn’t be the last sound she heard. She felt a sharp tug on her upper arm and a blaze of heat. She’d been hit. Or had she? A pebble, thrown up by the bike’s front tire struck her bare leg like the pellet from a BB gun, smacking her with a similar tug and burst of heat, hard enough to raise a welt. The smarting pain was good though—as long as she felt it, that meant she was still alive.

The jungle on the other side of the clearing swallowed them up as they roared along the overgrown road. Leaves and branches caught at them, tender green vines as sharp and stinging as whips as they raced past.

The speed at which the road zoomed by was both frightening and wildly exhilarating, the power of the engine mastered by the power in Cal’s taut body. They surely were out of range and out of sight of the shooter, but he didn’t slow down, and Kayla didn’t want him to.

With a clarity born of the gunman’s missed shots, she recognized the truth. She wanted Cal desperately. Emotionally, totally, in every way imaginable. Even physically. She knew without a single hesitation that she wanted to make love to this man. She wanted him to help conquer her fear, to banish it forever—or at least for as long as he held her in his arms.

She wanted to make love to Cal, and she liked going fast.

She liked it the same way she had liked Cal’s kisses. It was dangerous, there was no denying that. One wrong move, and they’d be smeared across the cracked tarmac. Potential disaster was just a heartbeat away. But oh, how it made the adrenaline rush through her body. She felt alive—thoroughly, fabulously, breathtakingly alive.

She gripped Cal tighter with both her arms and her legs, trying to absorb the sheer power that seemed to radiate from him as the miles sped past. She knew she wanted more than he could afford to give, more than she could afford to take, and this reckless ride was a compromise. This ride was the only risk they could share.

But how she wished it were otherwise.

And then it was over. The motorcycle began to slow, the wild ride finally ending. Kayla lifted her head, looking up to find they were approaching what had once been an enormous wire fence. Barbed wire still straggled from the top, but the gate was half torn from its hinges, as if an angry giant had yanked it open.

Inside the compound was a stone structure in ruins that looked as if it had received many direct hits from mortar fire. The other outbuildings had been wood, and they, like the village, had been burned nearly to the ground.

The place was deserted. The only prisoners still inside were ghosts. And from what Kayla had heard and read about the long and bloody struggle for power in San Salustiano, there were no doubt hundreds upon hundreds of those ghosts among these ashes.

She shivered, reaching up to unfasten her helmet and—Her entire right shirtsleeve was soaked with blood.

Cal noticed it at the same time she did, and he cut the engine and was off the bike so fast, she barely saw him move. His helmet hit the dirt and he was crouched beside her. “Sweet Jesus, Kayla,” he ground out through clenched teeth, “why didn’t you tell me you were shot?”

“I was shot,” she echoed faintly, staring down into his sweat-streaked face. “I didn’t know.”

Cal couldn’t breathe. Half of the back of Kayla’s shirt was stained bright red with her blood. He moved quickly, checking her eyes for shock, feeling her pulse at the base of her throat. Her eyes looked good, the pupils neither too big nor too small, but her pulse was racing. Was that a sign of shock? He couldn’t remember. Her heartbeat seemed strong, and that could only be good. There was no sign of an exit wound, though, and that scared him to death. There was no way he was going to let those so-called doctors in the Puerto Norte hospital take her into surgery to remove a bullet from her back—or, God help her, out of her lungs.

“Are you having trouble breathing?” he asked her, cupping her face with his hands, gazing into her wide green eyes. He was willing her to be all right, and praying in double time. Dear God, let this girl be okay, and he would never ask for anything ever again….

Kayla shook her head no.

Cal took his knife from its holster in his boot and, holding her steady, sliced upward through the thin cotton of her T-shirt.

“Hey!” she said, outrage tingeing her voice.

“Believe me, it was already ruined.”

“Well, if it wasn’t, it sure is now,” she countered, “and on top of that, you cut my bathing-suit strap. Good job, Zorro.”

Cal wasn’t listening. He was carefully peeling the blood-sodden shirt from her back, bracing himself for the sight of a torn and angry-looking entry wound. But there was nothing. Only her smooth, pale skin, the fine blond hairs slightly damp with blood.

Where had all that blood come from?

He ran his fingers across the silkiness of her back in disbelief, turning her to face him and lifting the front of her shirt, still touching her, all sense of decorum vanished in his need to prove to himself that whatever wound she had received was not life-threatening. Her perfect breasts were whole and—

Her arm. Her upper arm was bleeding. And—of course—the pressure from their high-speed ride had kept the blood from flowing down her arm, instead pushing it down the back of her shirt.

He gently cut her sleeve, and there it was. A four-inch gash along the top of her deltoid muscle. It was truly no more than a surface wound, just a bad scrape that wouldn’t even require stitches.

She wasn’t going to die.

Cal sat back in the dirt, covering his face with his hand, focusing on breathing through the waves of relief that were threatening to drown him.

“Oh, my God.” He looked up through his fingers to see Kayla taking her first good look at her bloodstained shirt, realization dawning on her face. She slid off the motorcycle and sat in the road next to him, holding the shirt in one hand and her bathing-suit top in place with the other. “You thought I was shot in the back?”

Cal nodded. “I thought…” He couldn’t say it, couldn’t say anything, couldn’t do more than stare at her, his heart still in his throat.

She looked down at the wound in her arm. It was still oozing blood. She met his gaze searchingly, her eyes wide. “How were we sitting that you weren’t hit by this too?”

He reached for her, taking the T-shirt from her hand and tearing away the bloodstained half. He folded the clean part and used it to put pressure on her wound. “We were moving pretty quickly, and if the gun was fired at a distance, if the shooter wasn’t using a rifle or long-distance weapon, if the bullet had lost velocity by the time it struck you—”

“
If?
” Kayla stared at him as he tied what was left of her shirt in place around her upper arm. “All those ifs…”

Still holding her bathing-suit top in place, she touched his arm as if needing confirmation that he, too, was in one solid piece. He couldn’t help himself, and he put his arms around her, touching her shoulders, her hair, her face—the smoothness of her cheek, the softness of her lips. They were both trembling. Sweet Lord, this could have ended so tragically.

“We were lucky,” he said harshly, closing his eyes and breathing in the sweet scent of her hair. “A few inches to the left, and right this minute you could very well be dying in my arms.”

“I am,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion. “Cal, I am dying in your arms.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek into the palm of his hand, lightly brushing the tips of his work-roughened fingers with her lips. When she looked up at him, when she opened her eyes, he could see a mirrored reflection of everything he felt, everything he wanted, everything he burned for.

Time stood still. Cal didn’t move, he just gazed into those incredible eyes that were only inches away from his own, and let her see into his soul.

She smiled hesitantly, apologetically, just a quirk of her lips, and he felt his own mouth soften.

“I want you so bad, it’s killing me,” he said quietly, calmly, as if he weren’t spilling his very guts right there in the dust for her to see.

She nodded. She already knew. Still, the words had needed to be said.

“I know it’s wrong,” he continued, and when she took a breath to speak, he gently put his thumb across her lips, silencing her. “And
you
know it’s wrong, so don’t go trying to make excuses, or to justify what this is we’re feeling here.”

He paused, letting himself absorb the powerful strength of their connection, giving himself a taste of what he knew he could not allow to be.

A taste…

He moistened his lips, and her eyes followed the movement, and he knew that even though it was wrong, he was going to give himself just that. A taste of Kayla Grey.

“This one’s just for you and me,” he whispered, watching his words register in her eyes, watching her understand why. “With no mistaken identities, and with no one watching, and even though we know it’s wrong….”

Cal leaned toward her, and she closed her eyes and lifted her mouth to him. He kissed her slowly, taking his time, drinking in the sweetness of her lips, savoring the softness of her bare back beneath his fingers as he drew her even closer. He deepened the kiss, claiming full possession of her mouth, and her tongue met his in a languorous, bone-meltingly intimate dance.

He could feel the softness of her breasts crushed against him as she held him tightly. He knew she’d dropped her bathing-suit top. He knew he merely had to move his hand to cup the fullness of her breast in his palm. And he knew that he didn’t dare allow himself that pleasure. Because he couldn’t touch her without wanting to taste her, and that would be going too far.

Instead, he lost himself in the sweetness of her kiss, in the sheer, exquisite softness of her mouth as he kissed her deeper and longer, but still not harder, afraid to lose the tenuous grip he had on his control.

Because he had to remember that this kiss was only a taste.

Cal drew back slowly, leaving her as softly and as gently as he’d started. Once again he took his time, lingering with feather-light kisses against her still-parted lips, knowing full well that this taste of paradise was going to have to last him a lifetime.

Slowly, she opened her eyes, and again he saw a reflection of everything he carried in his heart. This wasn’t enough, this taste, this kiss. It wasn’t enough and she desperately wanted more.

Sweet Lord, she was sitting in front of him, her breasts bare. She didn’t move to cover herself, didn’t move at all, and he couldn’t help but look at her. She was exquisite—softly rounded porcelain skin, with rose-colored tips hardened into points of desire. He ached to touch her, taste her, bury himself inside her.

He met her eyes, letting her see his desire, letting her know that he, too, wanted so much more. But the knowledge of that fact was all he could give her.

He backed away, putting more space between them, and she drew in a deep, shaky breath.

“You are the most desirable woman I’ve ever known, but right now I need to keep my mind on Liam only, no matter what my body is telling me. And why I can’t seem to resist you, even knowing the way you’ve been hurt in the past, even knowing the way my own brother felt about you…” He shook his head. He took off his shirt, quickly pulling it over his head and handing it to her. “Put this on.”

Her arm hurt worse than she had let on, and as she tried to pull his T-shirt over her head, she winced. He moved to help her, gently guiding her injured arm into the sleeve, then pulling the collar over her head and helping her into the other armhole.

She gazed up at him as he pulled the shirt down across her stomach, covering her nakedness.

“What Liam and I had was different than you think.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I
don’t
love him,” she admitted, “not that way. We were friends—close friends—and then he asked me to marry him and…I told him no, Cal, but he wouldn’t listen. He told me to wait and think about it, until he got back from San Salustiano, but there was never anything to think about, because I didn’t love him.”

Cal straightened up, then reached down to help Kayla to her feet. He let go of her immediately, backing away to dust off the knees and the seat of his jeans.

“That’s all right,” he said quietly, turning to look at the deserted ruins of the island prison camp. “I love him enough for both of us.”

         
9
         

“You sure someone’s going to find this?” Cal asked.

“As long as it doesn’t rain—and as long as someone comes out here to look. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth the thirty seconds it took to write it, don’t you think?”

“What does it say?”

Kayla glanced up at Cal, brushing off her hands as she painfully straightened up from the place in the dirt where she’d scratched the message. “Roughly translated, it reads, ‘We seek the truth. We are friends of the Americano.’ I signed it ‘Mike and the cowboy.’”

“Mike?”

She could meet his eyes only very briefly without getting light-headed from the memory of those incredible kisses. “Liam called me that. He thought the nickname for Mikayla should be Mike. And since he usually did what he wanted…” She shrugged.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, Mike, but I’m not a cowboy,” Cal told her as he swung his leg over the motorcycle seat.

It was funny, actually. Or it would have been funny if her sense of humor hadn’t been turned upside down and sideways when this man—this
cowboy
—took her in his arms and kissed her as if there were no tomorrow.

He was sitting astride the motorcycle wearing only his faded home-on-the-range-style blue jeans and his dusty brown cowboy boots, his broad, tanned chest gleaming in the sunshine, his dark, wavy hair tumbling over his genuine one-hundred-percent western American forehead, looking every little last fraction of an inch an authentic cowboy.

“I’m a cow
man
,” he told her with a perfectly straight face, but with that now-familiar glint of amusement lurking in his gray-blue eyes. “There’s a difference. The cowmen own the land they work. The cowboys just work it.”

“Liam told me that you didn’t just own the land—the land owned you. He was envious of you for those ties.”

“He was
envious
of the noose around my neck?”

“He told me once that he felt as if he didn’t belong anywhere.” Kayla tried to explain. “As much as he loved Boston, it wasn’t his home. And when he was with you at the ranch, he felt as if you could communicate with the mountains and the sky and the earth, and that he was out of the loop—that you spoke some language he’d never been taught. He laughed when he told me that he felt left out. He pretended it was just a great big joke, but I knew there was truth to his words.”

“He was a lousy rider.” There was a catch in Cal’s voice. “For a kid born and raised on a working ranch, he was a
damned
lousy rider.”

Kayla stepped toward him, drawn to him despite the knowledge that he wanted her to keep her distance. “And yet he kept at it. He even won that rodeo ring,” she said. “Because he wanted to be a part of your world.”

“Part of
my
world? I wanted to be part of
his
.” Cal had an odd look on his face. “I always wanted to go to Harvard. I
dreamed
about going to Harvard….”

“And Liam went.”

“And I wanted to be a writer.”

Kayla hadn’t known that. Liam hadn’t told her because no doubt Liam hadn’t known either. Or had he? Had Liam taken on a life that wasn’t quite his, forsaking his own dreams in an attempt to become the man his brother wanted him to be?

“During one of the last phone conversations I had with him,” Cal said, “I was riding him because he was about to turn twenty-five. I teased him—told him it was high time he settled down and got married. I told him I was counting on him to get me some cute little nieces and nephews.” He turned away from her slightly, pretending to be absorbed in the line that led from the handgrips to the front brake. But then he looked up, directly at her. “That was when he first told me about you.”

“But you said he never spoke of me.”

“I lied.”

“What…what did he say?”

He was gazing at her, his pale blue eyes intense. “That the moment I met you, I would fall in love with you.” He laughed, but there wasn’t very much humor in it. “Damned if the kid wasn’t right.”

Kayla’s heart was in her throat. Had he just told her…?

As if aware he’d said too much, Cal started the motorcycle engine. “Come on, get on the bike,” he told her gruffly. “There’s no way in hell we’re going back the same way we came in, and I don’t want to get stuck out here, trying to navigate these roads after dark.”

She put on her helmet and climbed on the bike behind him. Her shoulder ached as she put her arms around his waist. It ached, but not half as much as her heart.

“I think I’m falling in love with you too, Cal,” she whispered, her words lost in the sound of the engine as they roared down the jungle road.

“There!” Kayla said. “Through the trees. Over to the right. There’s definitely a light.”

Cal saw it too. He could hear strains of music and the sound of voices echoing oddly through the darkness as he pushed the motorcycle along the mountain road.

They’d run out of gas.

He still couldn’t think about it without feeling a surge of incredulousness. It was totally his fault. The man who’d rented him the bike had told him the gas gauge didn’t work but that the tank was full. And Cal had been stupid enough to believe him, stupid enough not to double-check.

They’d been walking—and he’d been soundly cursing himself out—since sundown. It was already well past ten.

He’d wanted nothing more than to get Kayla safely back to the hotel. He’d wanted to wash out her wound, order her something to eat, tuck her safely into bed.

He’d failed miserably.

Of course, that was nothing new. This entire journey was a study in failure. The only thing he’d succeeded in doing was the one thing he’d tried desperately not to do: fall in love with the woman his brother loved.

Kayla was drawn to him. Cal knew that. He knew that she found the sexual attraction between them nearly impossible to resist. A part of him believed that it even overcame her fears of being intimate and that she would have made love to him right there on that deserted jungle road.

The pictures that swept into his mind were overpowering, and he had to shake his head to push them away.

She wanted him. And God knew he wanted her. Would it truly be so wrong to—

Yes. The answer came immediately. Yes, it would be wrong.

“Do we go in or keep walking?” Kayla asked.

He could barely make out her face in the dim light from the moon, but he couldn’t miss the weariness in her voice.

She’d been shot. True, her wound wasn’t life-threatening, but her arm had to hurt. Even a glancing blow from a bullet packed a wallop. Along with the gash on her arm, she probably had one hell of a bruise.

A burst of laughter drifted through the heavy brush, along with the fragrant aroma from an outdoor grill.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“I think there’s a fifty-fifty chance that whoever they are will slit our throats and steal the motorcycle, but as long as they feed us some of whatever that is they’ve got cooking first, I’m not sure I’d mind.”

Cal saw a slight break in the trees. It was a path leading down the hill toward the light. Kayla saw it too, and she turned down it. He followed, praying they weren’t climbing out of the frying pan and into the campfire.

They weren’t more than twenty meters down the trail, when he sensed more than saw or heard movement behind them. Someone had been out there in the darkness of the jungle, guarding the path.

Whoever they were, they moved slowly and quietly, not making an attempt to overtake them or threaten them in any way. At least not yet.

“Speak in Spanish,” Cal said to Kayla in a low voice. “Tell whoever’s behind us that we’re Americans, we mean no harm. Tell them we’re only looking to buy food and enough gasoline to get us back to Puerto Norte.”

He heard Kayla’s softly indrawn breath and knew that she hadn’t heard the footsteps following them. But she spoke clearly and calmly, her voice carrying through the velvet darkness.

As they moved closer to the light, Cal could make out the outline of a building. It was no more than a shack, really, surrounded on all four sides by a clearing. Colorful paper lanterns were strung up in the front of the building, creating a festive feel to the rough-hewn tables and benches that surrounded a makeshift grill. The shack’s windows had neither glass nor screens, yet a neon eagle flashed the logo of a familiar American beer.

As they stepped into the clearing, Cal realized that the music had been turned way down. He heard the unmistakable sound of guns—many,
many
guns—being locked and loaded.

Nearly all the men and quite a number of the women sitting at the tables had trained some kind of deadly looking gun on him and Kayla. And there were more—shadowy figures stepping out of the surrounding jungle, light glinting off their automatic weapons.

They weren’t wearing the uniforms of the San Salustiano army. Rather, they were dressed like peasants—many of them literally wearing rags. But their guns were shining and well maintained. Despite their appearance, they were an army.

Kayla already had her hands held high, and Cal slowly lowered the kickstand on the motorcycle with one boot. Then he, too, moved slowly, cautiously, holding his hands in front of him, palms faceup, in a universal nonthreatening gesture.

As Kayla spoke in Spanish, Cal scanned the faces of the people sitting closest to them. No one so much as blinked or batted an eye.

He caught the words
Puerto Norte
, the words for food and gasoline. He heard her say something about the prison camp, about the golden-haired Americano, something about a brother, and, as if the move had been choreographed in advance, all eyes shifted, focusing on him.

One of the gunmen who’d been hiding in the jungle stepped forward, speaking quickly in a low, rough voice. He grabbed Kayla, and despite all the firepower aimed in his direction, Cal couldn’t keep himself from moving toward her.

“Don’t you touch her,” he growled.

But a heavyset man grabbed him and pulled him toward the nearest table while another man stuck the dulled metal barrel of his gun into the soft area of Cal’s throat, just underneath the hinge of his jaw. It might have been Cal’s taller than average height, or it might have been the murderous look in his eyes, but two other men hurried forward to hold his arms despite the presence of the gun.

“It’s all right,” Kayla called to him quickly. “They just want to search us for weapons.”

“Tell ’em to do it without touching you.”

Her voice was low. “You know as well as I do that they can’t do that.”

Cal felt himself being patted down none too gently, and as his captors made a great deal of noise over discovering the holstered knife in his boot, he turned to look across the compound at Kayla.

She had closed her eyes against the roughness of the hands that swept her body. But as if she felt him watching her, she opened her eyes, turning to meet his gaze.

The connection was instant. Even there, in the middle of San Salustiano’s equivalent of an outdoor roadhouse bar and grill, even surrounded by what had to be a significant and deadly portion of the militant rebel forces, the powerful bond between them snapped immediately to life.

“I’m all right,” she told him soundlessly. “Do what they tell you to.” Her eyes echoed her worry that he would, instead, do something to get himself shot.

One of the men searching him found his wallet hidden in his boot. He wasn’t carrying any identification—he’d hidden it back in the hotel room for this very reason. His money could be taken and used, but his ID and passport were of value only if he weren’t around to report it missing. He hadn’t wanted to tempt any thieves into trying their hand at murder.

The money in his wallet was tossed onto a table. Many hands reached for it, but only one scooped it up. Cal followed that particular hand up a slim, muscular arm and found himself looking into the face of a young, dark-haired woman.

On second glance, he saw that he was mistaken. She wasn’t quite a woman. She was really little more than a teenager—seventeen or eighteen at the most. She was dressed in black and carrying a submachine gun that was nearly as big as she was. Despite that, she carried it with total authority. Her face was sweetly pretty with the exception of a fresh jagged scar that marked her right cheekbone. That scar, and the bitterness and anger that sparked in her brown eyes, made her seem much older than she really was.