To Love a Man (19 page)

Sometime during that interminable afternoon, it began to rain. Not a light, summer drizzle, but a full-fledged downpour. At first the thick jungle foliage protected them from the worst of it, but gradually they ran out of jungle. Walking through fields of tall, golden grass, nearly flattened now by the force of the rain, they were exposed to the full fury of the storm.

At first Lisa, exhausted almost to the point of mindlessness and so hot she felt like a steak on the grill, welcomed the cool drops that trickled down through the sheltering canopy of leaves to fall in a light patter on her head. But when that patter turned into a seemingly endless waterfall, and when there was no escape from it, she was soon more miserable physically than she had ever dreamed she could be. Water soaked her hair so that it dangled in dripping rats’ tails down her back; it sluiced her face and drenched her clothes so that she was chilled to the bone. Even Sam’s jacket—which he stubbornly refused to wear—was no protection. It was soon just as wet as the rest of her. From sweating profusely, she went to shivering so much that her teeth chattered. Her feet made little squelching sounds with each step. Helplessly she looked at Sam through the blinding downpour; he was moving steadily, already some little distance ahead of her. He had to be at least as wet as she was, and she knew that his shoulder must be hurting like hell. But he seemed oblivious to discomfort, and even to the rain that turned the grassy field into a quagmire beneath their feet. As he strode relentlessly on, she wanted to scream at him to stop, if only for a moment or two. Was he out to prove how macho he was—was that it? Lisa glared at his broad back in impotent outrage. She was dead tired—he had to be, too. It only made sense to stop for a rest. Surely their pursuers would have been halted by this storm. No sane human being would stay out in it any longer than absolutely necessary.

Finally she could stand it no more. A trio of huge, leafy baobab trees beckoned enticingly some thirty feet away, and she for one was going to take advantage of their shelter. If she didn’t sit down soon, out of this miserable rain, she was afraid she would fall down.

“Sam!” she called, staggering toward the trees. “Sam, stop!”

Out of breath, wiping away the water that streamed down her face with both hands, she reached the trees and sank down beside one gnarled trunk, which was easily thirty feet in diameter, and leaned back against it. For a moment she feared that Sam had not heard, or, having heard, meant to go on, leaving her to her fate. Then, to her overwhelming relief, he turned, plodding toward her. When at last he stood towering over her, shielded from the worst of the rain by the spreading, interlocking branches overhead, she looked up at him with weary defiance. His face was paper white, marked with lines of exhaustion.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, leaning one arm against the tree and letting it bear his weight.

“I have to rest a minute. Please.” Lisa huddled at his feet and looked up at him appealingly. He made her feel incredibly small—and not just physically. He was the one who had been shot. That bullet hole in his shoulder should have laid him flat on his back, but he was carrying on without so much as a murmur of pain—even trying to make things easier for her, for God’s sake. While she was perfectly whole, not hurt a bit, and yet she couldn’t find the strength to move a muscle. It was humiliating, and didn’t say a lot for her powers of endurance, but she couldn’t help it. She had simply had all she could take. Nothing short of an atomic blast could have gotten her to move.

“Okay.” Sam seemed to realize that she was really and truly at the end of her rope. “We’ll take a breather. Ten minutes. No more.”

With a sound that was midway between a sigh and a groan, he sank down beside her, his good shoulder propped against the tree next to her, one long leg drawn up close to his body while the other sprawled its length in the muck.

“How are you feeling?” Lisa asked after a moment, her concern for him growing appreciably as she looked over at him. He really did look awful, she thought with dismay. His head was resting limply back against the tree; his eyes were closed, and his mouth was a tight, bloodless line. His skin was more gray now than white; the scar on his cheek stood out in stark relief. At her words, his blue eyes flickered open to stare into hers. Uneasily Lisa saw that they seemed almost unnaturally bright.

“I have felt better,” he admitted slowly. “But I don’t think I’m in any immediate danger of dying. What about you?”

“I’m just tired, mostly,” Lisa answered, striving for a light tone. “How does your shoulder feel?”

Sam favored her with a long, wry look. “How do you think it feels? It hurts like hell.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Lisa could think of to say. She felt hopelessly inadequate. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Since you’re not a doctor or a magician, no.”

After that unpromising answer, they lapsed into silence. Sam withdrew a package of sodden cigarettes and some matches from his pants pocket. As drops of rain blown toward them by the wind put out his first match, Sam cursed under his breath. He was more careful with the second, cupping his hand around it protectively and at last managing to light his cigarette. Taking a long drag from it, he offered it wordlessly to Lisa. She shook her head. He knew she didn’t smoke. . . . Maybe he thought she needed something to calm her nerves. If a cigarette could do that, she thought wryly, she would gladly smoke a whole pack. But she was afraid her nerves were too far gone to be helped by a fix of nicotine. . . .

Her stomach growled loudly, reminding her that it hadn’t been fed for almost twenty-four hours. With anyone except Sam, she would have been embarrassed by this uncouth evidence of her body’s needs. But Sam was thoroughly familiar with every aspect of her person, including her dratted stomach’s propensity for demanding food in a voice clearly meant to be heard.

“You’re hungry.” It was a statement, not a question, and it was both amused and resigned. Lisa glanced over at Sam to see a faint smile curving his pale lips.

“Yes.”

“See those yellowish things hanging up there?” He pointed negligently above his head.

Lisa obediently looked up to see what appeared to be gourds nestled among the dark green leaves of the trees sheltering them.

“Yes.”

“They’re fruit, believe it or not. Quite good, in fact. If you can get one down, you can eat it.”

Lisa looked from him to the fruit dangling tauntingly high out of reach.

“Very funny.”

Sam grinned. “All right. If you don’t feel up to climbing trees, there should be some packets of beef jerky in the pack. I guess you can eat one.”

“Thanks very much. You’re too kind.” The glance Lisa cast at him was sour. She certainly wasn’t in the mood to be teased! But she lost no time in rooting through the pack and extracting the beef jerky. There were two sticks of the spicy meat to a packet, and Lisa passed one to Sam. Despite his kidding around, she noticed with a little sniff, he fell upon his strip of beef just as eagerly as she did hers.

“Sam,” she said in a small voice after her appetite was partly appeased.

“Hmmm?”

“What are we going to do?”

“After we eat? Keep walking.”

“I mean—how are we going to get out of here? Where are we going?”

“I’d say we’re a little to the west of Tuli right now—which is a town, in case you’re not up on Rhodesia’s geography. The South African border is probably about fifty miles to the south. We should be able to walk it in three, maybe four, days. Once we’re across the border, we’ll be safe.”

“Oh.” If possible, Lisa’s voice was even smaller than before. Fifty miles had always sounded like such a short distance—when she’d had a car. On foot, it could just as well have been halfway around the world.

“I’d steal us some sort of vehicle,” Sam went on carelessly, as if stealing vehicles was the most natural thing in the world, “but they’ll be expecting that. I bet they have roadblocks out everywhere.”

“Who’s they?” Lisa had meant to match his carelessness, but she succeeded only in sounding thoroughly scared.

“The guys chasing us.”

“I know that.” She threw him an exasperated look. “But who are they? What on earth did you do to them to make them want us so badly? If I’m going to lay down my life on the altar of some cause or another, I’d sure as hell like to know what it is!”

Sam sent her a sideways, considering look.

“You’re better off not knowing. At least they can’t get you to confess to anything you don’t know—and you might live longer. If—and I say if, so don’t look so scared—they should pick us up, they’ll be after information ahead of anything else: Who hired us, and why.”

“Well, who did?” she demanded impatiently. She was sick and tired of his patronizing attitude. Dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist pig, she accused him inwardly for what must have been the hundredth time.

“I told you, you’re better off not knowing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Despite her tiredness, Lisa sat bolt upright, turning to glare at him. That the effect was somewhat spoiled by the sodden tails of hair hanging around her neck and the dirty streaks on her face, she neither knew nor cared.

“You really want to know?” Sam had shifted so that he could look squarely into her eyes. Lisa thought, You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, you devil?

“Yes, I do!”

“Okay.” His voice was suddenly expressionless. The teasing grin died. “You asked for it. Don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear. The soldiers hunting us are rebels under the direction of Thomas Kimo—I presume you’ve heard of him?” Lisa nodded. “Apparently they got wind of what we came here to do. They were waiting. We walked into a trap.”

“But what did you come here to do?” This was the crucial bit, Lisa knew. The part Sam didn’t want to tell her.

Sam closed his eyes, resting his head back against the tree. Lisa, watching him as he leaned heavily against the trunk, his black hair glistening with water and curling in absurd little ringlets around his head, his face white as a corpse’s, thought he looked indescribably weary. She bit her lip, on the verge of telling him that she didn’t want to know after all, if it was going to bother him that much to tell her, when those blue eyes opened to fix on her steadily.

“We came here to kill Thomas Kimo.” His voice was flat. Lisa’s eyes widened on his tense face.

“Murder?” she squeaked.

“If you want to call it that. The actual term is, I believe, assassination.”

His eyes met hers without expression. Lisa, staring into those fathomless blue depths, felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. It was suddenly being brought home to her with a vengeance that she knew absolutely nothing about this man, who he was, where he came from, what he did. All she knew was that he was fantastic in bed, and he could, on occasion, be kind. But he could also be brutal, and by his own admission he was fully prepared to commit cold-blooded murder. She shivered convulsively.

“But—why?” It was a shocked whisper.

“Because I needed the money,” he said. His eyes never left her face. Lisa knew that the revulsion she was feeling must be clearly visible there, but she couldn’t help it.

“You were going to kill a man—for money?”

“Yes, I was going to kill a man—for money. Now, are you satisfied?” His voice was suddenly vicious. Lisa recoiled.

Sam studied her for a moment, his eyes unreadable, then his brows snapped together to form a straight black line. Bracing his good arm against the tree, he pushed himself upright.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said harshly. He started walking again, striding briskly out into the rain, without even looking behind him to see if she followed.

Twilight had fallen. The rain was still coming down with no sign of letting up when they came across a small village. It was composed of about two dozen circular, thatched-roofed huts—called rondavels, Sam informed her brusquely—surrounding a much larger one, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. A wide, fairly deep-looking stream rushed nearby, its banks nearly flooded by the rain. Mopani and red syringa trees with their brilliantly colored, drenched flowers formed a sort of barrier between the plain and the village.

Sam stopped at the edge of the trees. Lisa nearly ran into his broad back.

“Why are you stopping?” All she could think of was the lovely shelter the huts would give them. Anything to get out of the rain . . .

“I want to make sure this place is as deserted as it looks. It probably is; most of the tribes that used to live in villages like this were driven out by one side or the other in the war. But you never can tell.”

“Sam—can we stay here overnight?” Lisa’s eyes were unconsciously pleading as they met his. They had not exchanged more than half-a-dozen words since that unhappy conversation hours earlier. Now, Lisa was too tired and cold and wet to care if he was angry with her, or if he killed people for a living, or about anything else except their immediate situation. All she wanted to do was rest—preferably somewhere dry.

“All right,” he conceded slowly after studying her for a moment. “I doubt if anybody’s going to be searching for us too hard until the rain lets up. You stay here while I go make sure we don’t have any company.”

Lisa felt her knees sag with relief. They were actually going to stop—to sleep. And eat. She thought longingly of the C-rations in Sam’s pack. Suddenly they were as appealing as dinner at a five-star restaurant.

“Here.” He took the smaller pistol—the one he usually wore in his shoulder holster—from where he had thrust it into his belt and handed it to her. “It’s on safety. All you have to do is flick it off and pull the trigger.”

Lisa took the pistol automatically, then stared down at it with loathing.

“I don’t want it,” she said with conviction, and tried to hand it back to him.

“Keep it,” he advised sparely. “What would you do if I didn’t come back—if you were stranded out here all by your lonesome? I admit, you’re a lousy shot, but you just might be able to hit a bull elephant if you tried hard enough. Or, who knows, that pistol might just keep you from winding up as a boomslang’s dinner.”