Out of Control (27 page)
She unwrapped her feet and he dove back into her bag.
There were some zinc lozenges, probably in case someone sneezed on her on the airplane, a granola bar—one of the health food varieties that tasted like gravel and twigs—a little plastic bottle of pain killer, a travel sewing kit, a match book, the paperback book he’d seen her holding but never reading on the plane, a spare pair of panty hose, and—excuse me?
What was this? A demure little pink plastic case that held . . . .
Tah-dah! Three foil-wrapped condoms.
“Well, well,” he said. “Is this what you meant when you said you wanted to start over? You want to start over with my condoms, honey, or yours?”
She didn’t say anything for a full thirty seconds and then, “You’re an unbelievable jerk,” she informed him.
He was aware of that, aware the moment the words had left his mouth that there would have been a far better chance of them actually using one of those condoms if he just kept his big mouth shut. But his jerk gene—highly dominant—had kicked in.
Still, it was probably for the best. He was ashamed of himself for still wanting her, even after knowing that she’d set out from the start to manipulate him. She wasn’t his soulmate—as he’d had the stupidity to hope. Man, he was an idiot. Soulmate. Christ. Talk about fairy tales . . .
But the truth was, even though his chance of living happily ever after with this woman was nix, he still wanted another chance to make her come. And come.
And come.
God damn.
It was shallow, it was wrong, he’d end up way in over his head, but Ken knew the truth. If he could go back in time, he’d travel straight to her hotel room at the Del. He’d let her tell him that she’d come to San Diego specifically to find him, and—like she’d said she hoped he’d do—he’d force himself to laugh at the irony and at her resourcefulness in grabbing his interest.
And then he’d take off her clothes and bury his interest, so to speak, deeply inside of her.
If he had been just a little less stupid, he could’ve gotten it on with her in the Hong Kong airport and on the airbus flight to Jakarta. They could have shagged their way around the world. They could’ve been making use of one of those condoms he’d brought right this very moment as she showed him how much she appreciated his saving her life.
Instead, she was sitting there with her hair a mess again, streaks of mud on her face and clothes, giving him a baleful look with those incredible eyes.
He turned his attention back to the broken crate, wondering for the twenty-fifth time how the hell he was going to manage to carry that dynamite and the attaché case of money. Maybe there was some room in the case for some of the dynamite. Maybe . . .
“That’s it?” She stood up. “Conversation over? You have no response?”
“What’s to respond to? You think I’m a jerk,” he said. “This is not earthshaking news. Lots of people think I’m a jerk. What, do you want me to argue? No, I’m not a jerk? I’m a jerk, okay? I know it. You know it. Everybody and their flipping Uncle Fred knows it. Shit.”
Savannah laughed. She actually laughed.
Of course, that only served to piss him off even more. “Good,” Ken told her. “Great. Laugh at me, babe. You want someone to be polite, to come to whatever tea party you want to throw? Don’t call me, okay? But if you need your ass saved, if you want to stay alive when other people want you dead—”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
He heard it before she did. “God damn. Helo’s coming.”
Christ, they had to get to cover. He looked around. Nearby there was a particularly dense growth of some kind of giant funky fern-type plant under an equally dense growth of trees. He pointed to it. “Help me get the attaché case and the crate over there.”
She carried the case, he dragged the crate, and he covered them both with extra branches and dirt. “Help me,” he said, and she helped him damn near bury the metal case.
He could tell just from listening that the helo was flying in a spiral search pattern, coming closer and closer each time. Next pass it was going to be overhead. And suddenly the patch of foliage didn’t feel quite so thick. Particularly with Savannah dressed in light-colored clothes.
Ken grabbed her. “Get down,” he ordered, pushing her under the ferns.
Shit, it was coming. She sat down.
“Lie down,” he ordered. “On your belly.”
“Oh, God, I hate bugs,” she said, but she obeyed his command. “And spiders. And snakes . . . Oh, God, do you think there are any snakes?”
She was really going to hate this, too, but . . .
He lay down on top of her, covering her with his far more jungle appropriate colors. From the sky, there’d be no one here at all.
Fortunately, she didn’t misunderstand his reasons for this undeniable intimacy.
Still, “Is this really necessary?” she whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Ken apologized. “If I’d had more time, I could’ve taken off my clothes and covered you that way.”
“Then what about you?”
“I would’ve dug myself into the ground. Or used the dirt as an impromptu way to cammy up.”
“Cammy up?” she whispered.
“You don’t need to whisper,” he said. “There’s no way they can hear us. Remember how loud it is on board a helo?”
“I am so completely freaked out,” she whispered. “I think there’s something crawling around underneath me.”
“Think about something else.” Kind of like the way he was trying to think about something besides the fact that she was underneath him. Jesus, he could still smell her perfume. He didn’t know what it was called or how expensive it was. All he knew was that it should be sold in a big bottle with three letters printed on the outside—S, E, and X.
“What’s cammy up?” she asked again.
“It means to get camouflaged—to put greasepaint on our faces so no one will see us. The SEAL teams usually use black and green in this kind of jungle environment and will you please lie still?”
The helo was directly overhead. Now was not the time to leap away so that they could both pretend that lying on top of her wasn’t giving him one giant boner.
She stopped moving, but it was too late. She shifted once more, then froze.
Yes, indeed, babe, that there was him.
The fact that his body part in question was pressed right up against her sweet little tush wasn’t helping the situation any.
Yeah, if she had any remaining doubts about the fact that he still burned hot for her, they were now gone. He was such a loser, wanting her so badly even after being duped by her, and now she knew it, too.
But even the waves of humiliation and anger—at himself, at her, at his parents for giving birth to him in the first place—that swept over him weren’t enough to subdue his body’s extremely physical reaction to her nearness. No, his dick definitely hadn’t yet caught on to the fact that he wasn’t going to have sex again—at least not in the near future. And probably never again with Savannah.
He’d fucked up his chances of that ever happening but good.
Which was a goddamned shame. It was both a shame that it wasn’t going to happen, and that he wanted it to happen again.
Ken closed his eyes, trying to focus on a programming problem he’d been working on in his spare time over the past few weeks, trying to think in code, praying that would counteract his rampant libido.
But her perfume cut through. It floated over the scent of the jungle, the dank earth, the rotting leaves, the plants, his own less than fresh aroma.
That perfume was going to make it impossible for him and Savannah to hide, he realized with eye-opening intensity. If the men in the helo started searching for them on foot, they were going to be in trouble.
One whiff and they’d be found, no matter how well Ken dug them into their hiding place. Jesus, even her hair smelled of it. And it wouldn’t take a genius or a specially trained tracker to sniff them out. Just men with guns and noses.
The helo was finally far enough away, so he pulled his own nose out of her hair and lifted himself off of her. She got to her feet before he got the chance to give her a hand up.
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. Of course, he wasn’t trying very hard for eye contact himself.
“Sorry,” he muttered, figuring he should probably say something.
“You should probably work on your self-control,” she said much too sweetly. “Considering that you think I’m ugly and that I dress like my mother your reaction was a little, well, unexpected and unwelcome.”
Ugly? “Whoa,” Ken said. “I never said—”
“Unless, of course, you have a secret thing for my mother.”
“—that you’re ugly. I said—”
“Which I find extremely icky.” She was furious with him.
“—that your clothes were—”
“Stop,” she said. “Just . . . just shut up!”
Ken shut his mouth, aware that Miss Too Polite had probably never told anyone to shut up before in her entire twenty-something years of life.
Talk about self-control. If he needed more—and he probably did, he’d grant her that—she needed less. There was real irony here that someone who was wound so tight, who liked everything in its prelabeled, predetermined slot would become so completely out of control during sex. Multiple orgasms. How freaking untidy. It probably scared her to death every time it happened.
Her entire night with him had probably scared her to death. Grease on her neck. Clothes that didn’t fit. Tableware that didn’t match. Sex that didn’t end.
“I would rather you leave me alone in the jungle,” she told him now, “than ever touch me again.”
That was a crock of shit. He had to laugh. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“Yes,” she said through clenched teeth, “I would.”
All right. Fine. Let her think that she would. He wasn’t going to leave her, and he wasn’t not going to touch her if touching her meant saving her ass.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. And he was. He was sorry he’d upset her. Sorry he’d given himself away. Sorry none of this had been as easy as she’d hoped it would be.
He was sorry for himself, too—sorry that she wasn’t the woman he’d fallen so hard for last night. Last night? No, there’d been another night in there somewhere, but they’d been on a plane or in airports, so it didn’t really count. His last real night had been spent in bed with her. Or maybe just with someone who looked a whole lot like her. “I don’t think you’re ugly, Savannah. Let’s just get that straight. I happen to think that you’re unbelievably—”
“Enough already!” She looked ready to cry. But Ken knew absolutely that she wouldn’t. Tears wouldn’t help matters any, and even if they would somehow make her feel a little better, she wouldn’t let her emotions get that crazily out of control. She would rather die first.
“—beautiful and extremely hot,” he said, finishing his sentence just to see what she’d do. What would it take to get her to throw something at him? Which would happen first? That, or her busting into tears?
Or maybe her head would just explode.
She turned away, her mouth a tight line. “You always have to push it just a little farther, don’t you?”
“It needed to be said.” He took off his shirt, took off his undershirt, put his shirt back on. What would she do if he grabbed her and kissed her? Probably kick him in the balls. He decided not to try it and find out. He was still sore from being tossed by that explosion. “Is there any extra room in that briefcase?”
“I don’t think so,” she said tersely.
“Open it for me, will you?” Ken could still hear that helo in the distance. Judging from the sound, it was searching an area about seven clicks to the west.
He knew that there was room in the case. He’d seen when she’d opened it for him in her hotel room. There was an entire top section that covered, and hid, the money. There had been a few files, some loose papers in that top part, but that was it. He was betting he could get almost a quarter of the dynamite and all of the fuses in there.
The rest he’d carry in a bag he’d make by tying closed the end of his undershirt.
She opened the lock and sure enough, quite a bit of the dynamite would fit. It would make it even heavier to carry—something he wasn’t looking forward to.
He took out the papers and files. “Anything here irreplaceable?”
Savannah shook her head. “No, those are copies. One’s for Alex—was for Alex. The other’s . . . not important. Something I was working on. I have it on my computer back in New York.”
“Bury it,” he ordered.
“Shouldn’t we save it?” she asked. “Won’t this paper come in handy when we try to start a fire?”
A fire? She was serious.
“Rule number one for not letting the bad guys find us—no fires.” Ken loaded the briefcase with dynamite. Dynamite and money—what a combination. “Smoke can be seen from miles away. Have you ever even been outside of the city before?”
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