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“Something should be done about him,” Jane said strongly. “Surely he’s not operating with the sanction of the government?”
“No. Extortion and terrorism are his own little sidelines. We’ve known about him, of course, and occasionally fed him what we wanted him to know.”
“We?” Jane asked casually.
His face was immediately shuttered, as cold and blank as a wall. “A figure of speech.” Mentally, he swore at himself for being so careless. She was too sharp to miss anything. Before she could ask any more questions, he began walking again. He didn’t want to talk about his past, about what he had been. He wanted to forget it all, even in his dreams.
* * *
ABOUT NOON THEY STOPPED to eat, and this time they had to resort to the field rations. After a quick glance at what she was eating, Jane didn’t look at it at all, just put it in her mouth and swallowed without allowing herself to taste it too much. It wasn’t really that bad; it was just so awfully bland. They each drank a bottle of Perrier, and Jane insisted that they take another yeast pill. A roll of thunder announced the daily downpour, so Grant quickly found them shelter under a rocky outcropping. The opening was partially blocked by bushes, making it a snug little haven.
They sat watching the deluge for a few minutes; then Grant stretched out his long legs, leaning back to prop himself on his elbow. “Explain this business of how your father disinherited you as a form of protection.”
Jane watched a small brown spider pick its way across the ground. “It’s very simple,” she said absently. “I wouldn’t live with around-the-clock protection the way he wanted, so the next best thing was to remove the incentive for any kidnappers.”
“That sounds a little paranoid, seeing kidnappers behind every tree.”
“Yes,” she agreed, still watching the spider. It finally minced into a crevice in the rock, out of sight, and she sighed. “He is paranoid about it, because he’s afraid that next time he wouldn’t get me back alive again.”
“Again?” Grant asked sharply, seizing on the implication of her words. “You’ve been kidnapped before?”
She nodded. “When I was nine years old.”
She made no other comment and he sensed that she wasn’t going to elaborate, if given a choice. He wasn’t going to allow her that choice. He wanted to know more about her, learn what went on in that unconventional brain. It was new to him, this overwhelming curiosity about a woman; it was almost a compulsion. Despite his relaxed position, tension had tightened his muscles. She was being very matter-of-fact about it, but instinct told him that the kidnapping had played a large part in the formation of the woman she was now. He was on the verge of discovering the hidden layers of her psyche.
“What happened?” he probed, keeping his voice casual.
“Two men kidnapped me after school, took me to an abandoned house and locked me in a closet until Dad paid the ransom.”
The explanation was so brief as to be ridiculous; how could something as traumatic as a kidnapping be condensed into one sentence? She was staring at the rain now, her expression pensive and withdrawn.
Grant knew too much about the tactics of kidnappers, the means they used to force anxious relatives into paying the required ransom. Looking at her delicate profile, with the lush provocativeness of her mouth, he felt something savage well up in him at the thought that she might have been abused.
“Did they rape you?” He was no longer concerned about maintaining a casual pose. The harshness of his tone made her glance at him, vague surprise in her exotically slanted eyes.
“No, they didn’t do anything like that,” she assured him. “They just left me in that closet…alone. It was dark.”
And to this day she was afraid of the dark, of being alone in it. So that was the basis for her fear. “Tell me about it,” he urged softly.
She shrugged. “There isn’t a lot more to tell. I don’t know how long I was in the closet. There were no other houses close by, so no one heard me scream. The two men just left me there and went to some other location to negotiate with my parents. After awhile I became convinced that they were never coming back, that I was going to die there in that dark closet, and that no one would ever know what had happened to me.”
“Your father paid the ransom?”
“Yes. Dad’s not stupid, though. He knew that he wasn’t likely to get me back alive if he just trusted the kidnappers, so he brought the police in on it. It’s lucky he did. When the kidnappers came back for me, I overheard them making their plans. They were just going to kill me and dump my body somewhere, because I’d seen them and could identify them.” She bent her head, studying the ground with great concentration, as if to somehow divorce herself from what she was telling him. “But there were police sharpshooters surrounding the house. When the two men realized that they were trapped, they decided to use me as a hostage. One of them grabbed my arm and held his pistol to my head, forcing me to walk in front of them when they left the house. They were going to take me with them, until it was safe to kill me.”
Jane shrugged, then took a deep breath. “I didn’t plan it, I swear. I don’t remember if I tripped, or just fainted for a second. Anyway, I fell, and the guy had to let go of me or be jerked off balance. For a second the pistol wasn’t pointed at me, and the policemen fired. They killed both men. The…the man who had held me was shot in the chest and the head, and he fell over on me. His blood splattered all over me, on my face, my hair….” Her voice trailed away.
For a moment there was something naked in her face, the stark terror and revulsion she’d felt as a child; then, as he had seen her do when he’d rescued her from the snake, she gathered herself together. He watched as she defeated the fear, pushed the shadows away. She smoothed her expression and even managed a glint of humor in her eyes as she turned to look at him. “Okay, it’s your turn. Tell me something that happened to you.”
Once he’d felt nothing much at all; he’d accepted the chilled, shadowed brutality of his life without thought. He still didn’t flinch from the memories. They were part of him, as ingrained in his flesh and blood, in his very being, as the color of his eyes and the shape of his body. But when he looked into the uncommon innocence of Jane’s eyes, he knew that he couldn’t brutalize her mind with even the mildest tale of the life he’d known. Somehow she had kept a part of herself as pure and crystalline as a mountain stream, a part of childhood forever unsullied. Nothing that had happened to her had touched the inner woman, except to increase the courage and gallantry that he’d seen twice now in her determined efforts to pull herself together and face forward again.
“I don’t have anything to tell,” he said mildly.
“Oh, sure!” she hooted, shifting herself on the ground until she was sitting facing him, her legs folded in a boneless sort of knot that made him blink. She rested her chin in her palm and surveyed him, so big and controlled and capable. If this man had led a normal life, she’d eat her boots, she told herself, then quickly glanced down at the boots in question. Right now they had something green and squishy on them. Yuk. They’d have to be cleaned before even a goat would eat them. She returned her dark gaze to Grant and studied him with the seriousness of a scientist bent over a microscope. His scarred face was hard, a study of planes and angles, of bronzed skin pulled tautly over the fierce sculpture of his bones. His eyes were those of an eagle, or a lion; she couldn’t quite decide which. The clear amber color was brighter, paler, than topaz, almost like a yellow diamond, and like an eagle’s, the eyes saw everything. They were guarded, expressionless; they hid an almost unbearable burden of experience and weary cynicism.
“Are you an agent?” she asked, probing curiously. Somehow, in those few moments, she had discarded the idea that he was a mercenary. Same field she thought, but a different division.
His mouth quirked. “No.”
