Something inside Adam quietly shivered open.He felt it like a drop of rain on his skin or a lit window against the night.
Like hope.
Worry still lingered.“Ellie, we’re outnumbered and under guard.The wrong move here could get us both killed.”
“We’ve been under guard before.”
“Yeah—but this time, we don’t have a couple of friends on hand to steal you my knife.”
Ellie’s eyes glinted with mischief.“You still have your knife.”
“That’s one knife against a whole lot of rifles.”
“Is that really your biggest obstacle?”Ellie pressed knowingly.
Adam ran a hand over his face with an air of resigned exasperation.“No.”
“Then what is?”Ellie’s question was implacable.
Adam didn’t search for the answer in his brain.He found it in his gut—where it had been waiting for him all along.
He looked across the camp to where a small, skinny figure sat on a boulder with a rifleman at her back.
“Vanika,” Adam replied bluntly.“I’m not leaving here without her.And I broke any trust she might’ve had in me.”
Ellie lifted her hand to his face.“Then go fix it.”
The simplicity of her answer cut through the morass of uncertainty clogging up Adam’s brain.
Go fix it.
There were legitimate reasons why he hadn’t tried.He couldn’t let Borthwick or Jacobs know that he had any interest in the girl.Staying away from her had been the pragmatic, reasonable thing to do.
But Adam knew that wasn’t the whole truth.A wretched part of him had embraced the excuse because he had wanted to avoid talking to Vanika—because he was ashamed of what he’d done to her in Borthwick’s tent.
He didn’tdeserveher trust after all that… but Ellie was right.
“Hell,” he muttered under his breath.He cast a pointed look at Ellie.“I don’t know where this is gonna go.Be ready.”
Ellie cocked a playful eyebrow.“Aren’t I always?”
Adam grinned back at her.The gesture was warm and familiar—and he wondered just how long it had been since he’d done it.“With a broken pencil and a bottle of third-rate hooch?”
“A bit of third-rate hooch would be handy at the moment,” Ellie grumbled.
“There’s still plenty of ethanol in that medical kit.”
Ellie brightened with an air of wicked inspiration.“There is, isn’t there?”
Adam’s mad love for this woman glowed inside him like a sun.“Go get ‘em, Princess.”
?
Adam’s two guards trailed him as he crossed the camp.Most of the men were setting up.Borthwick leaned over his folding desk with Singh Rao as they developed a plan for surveying the cliff chambers.
The colonel barely spared Adam a glance.As far as Borthwick was concerned, whatever problem Adam might pose had been resolved when he’d been put under guard.
Singh Rao was more careful, but the subedar didn’t intervene as he watched Adam approach Vanika.
