AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Comes with the territory,” Alex agreed.
Lauren nodded. “I guess I should warn you now.”
“About what?” Alex asked, meeting her grave-looking gaze.
“Sometimes,” and Lauren sighed and shook her head, “I scream out at night. I’ll probably scare the living hell out of you when it happens.” She saw his eyes narrow upon her, felt a sudden powerful sense of protection emanating from him to her. And she’d not been safe in her life. Not ever. But the feeling was so delicious, so comforting and tender, that Lauren felt her heart respond, warmth flooding her chest.
“Flashbacks?” Alex wondered aloud, wanting to reach out and touch Lauren, to make her feel protected and cared-for. Because he saw the momentary terror come to her eyes. And then, she pushed it away, hiding it again. Hiding so much.
“Yes, flashbacks.”
“Do not worry, Lauren. I get them myself. It is not pleasant.” Alex shared a tender look with her. “But if you have one, I will hold you until you feel safe.”
“No,” she hissed, “don’t you ever touch me when I’m having one!”
Blinking, his smile dissolved. Lauren’s voice had gone hoarse with terror. And, just as quickly, she had choked everything back down. He watched her fight it. Whatever ‘it’ was. The sense he got was that it was so terrifying that she was helpless, and had no control. Frowning, he rasped, “I will not touch you.”
“You can’t,” she whispered, anguished. “This isn’t’ going to work.”
“What is not going to work?” Alex heard the desperation in her voice, saw the wildness in her eyes for a split second. And then, she was back under that icy exterior, game face on.
“Us. Staying in the same room together. It’s not going to work.”
Alex felt the powerful emotion she was experiencing. And it was a mix of desperation and anguish so raw that he damn near reached out and dragged her into his arms. But he remembered.Don’t touch her. She’d fight. Alex knew it. What little trust he’d established with her wasn’t enough to risk blowing it. “Let us take this a step at a time,” he advised, his voice low and soothing. “We have to focus on why we’re going to Peru. You will feel better once we get on the ground.” He saw her lift her chin and give him a look of disbelief.
“Okay,” Lauren uttered, her shoulders collapsing, exhaustion tunneling through her. “I’ll try not to fall out of my seat this time.” and she turned her back on him, pulling her legs beneath her, hugging her pillow against the bulkhead.
Alex sat there, feeling like someone had just gutted him. He thought of his sister, Kira, who was three years younger than he was. That LOOK that had flitted across Lauren’s face was exactly the same look that Kira’s had been after she’d been gang-raped by terrorists at the forward Russian field medical facility where she’d been a nurse. Cursing to himself, he rubbed his brow, an ache coming on.
No…Alex wanted to reject the idea that Lauren had been hurt in that way. Kira was a shadow of her former self, as if the rapists had stolen her soul. No longer did her beautiful light-green eyes light up with joy. When Kira had smiled, Alex had always felt like the sun had suddenly come out from behind a cloud, warming him all the way to his heart.
Kira… Now she was safe in the U.S.A., trying to rebuild her life in San Diego, California. The ocean was helping her heal and she loved walking the beaches. She had been a registered nurse in the Russian Army. After her unit was attacked and overrun by the enemy, all the wounded men in the medical facility, were killed at point-blank range. The doctors were killed in the same way. All the nurses were herded into one tent and the twenty men, armed with AK-47’s, had their way with them over a twenty-four-hour period. Alex dragged in a painful breath. Misery flooded him as he recalled everything regarding his little sister’s situation.
Alex had felt guilty about having been out of the country when Kira had been gang-raped. He’d been notified, and had gone through hell to get back to St. Petersburg Hospital where she, and the other women survivors who had been severely traumatized, were recuperating. Some of them had gone catatonic. Kira was somewhere in between those two states as he’d knelt at her bedside, crying, wanting to hold her. She’d screamed and fought his arms from going around her. Because he was a man. And men had torn her soul from her by their heartless sub-animal actions. His heart ached without reprieve as he recalled that first year after Kira’s rape. She’d quit the Army, quit being a nurse, and quit living, a hull of her original self.
And when he would visit Kira, he always saw that terror banked up in her wide, guileless eyes. Her beautiful red hair, once so long and feminine, had all been chopped off. She looked more like a young boy to Alex than the beautiful, twenty-year-old woman who was his warm, loving sister. Kira’s personality had been violently stolen from her. She was so internalized, wary of all men, hurting inwardly, unable to speak of her trauma to him. Alex stopped trying to count how much and how often he’d cried for his sister. Lifting his head, he stared at Lauren’s back. She was asleep once more. Perhaps it gave her some of the peace she so richly deserved.
More than anything, Alex sat there feeling like the earth had moved beneath his feet and that he was tumbling out of control, in shock. Cal had said Lauren had had a bad childhood. Whether he liked it or not, Alex couldn’t help but compare Lauren’s experiences with Kira’s. Unwillingly, he looked at the possibility that someone had raped Lauren. Hurt her badly. Stained her life just as Kira’s was now stained forever. That was why Lauren had reacted so strongly, with such fierceness, when he’d said he’d hold her if she had a nightmare. If she was dreaming of being raped, of course she wouldn’t want ANY man to touch her. Much less hold her. Now it all made sense.
Not only were they hunting an enemy who was deadly in their external world, Alex now suspected that Lauren saw him as the enemy from her past, overlaid on the present, and on him. He would have to be in the same room with her. There was no place for her to relax. To honestly rest. IF she had been raped. And he had a wretched feeling that she had been. But how to find out? How to confirm it? Alex knew it was vital to understand what was fueling Lauren’s reactions to him. If he couldn’t find out, that left them both open to getting killed on this op. Because, in this business, a team trusted one another without question. And they didn’t have that kind of trust between them. At all.
CHAPTER 5
Lauren was exhaustedfrom the nonstop traveling over the last twenty-four hours. They’d landed at the Chavez International Airport in Lima at 0400. At 0600, they took a local flight deep into the Andes and arrived at Cusco about two hours later. The city sat in a raw, dustbowl-shaped area nearly twelve-thousand feet above sea level, the rugged Andes rising around the once renowned Incan fortress, where the emperor Pachacuti had resided. She was grateful that Alex knew Cusco and Peru so well. He got them a taxi and they went to the railway station where he bought two first class tickets, and then they were on their way down to Aguas Calientes, that lay at six-thousand feet of elevation. From the train window, she saw the brown, barren land where Cusco sat. Literally, it was naked desert, with nothing growing in the dustbowl except for the Incan-built city at the center of it. As the train rocked gently back and forth, clicking and clacking, heading down to the world heritage site of Machu Picchu, she saw bare rock and soil slowly transition to dark, verdant jungle vegetation. By the time they reached Aguas Calientes, the town sitting at the base of Machu Picchu, it was mid-morning and she was exhausted. Maybe it was because of the severe altitude changes, or her new fear of Alex being in the same apartment with her, hearing her scream at night if she had a nightmare. She felt trapped.
Alex guided her out of the train and onto the busy terminal station, a long concrete platform with a dark-green tin roof overhead. Even though she was tired, Lauren felt the vibrancy of the jungle area surrounding them. She saw teenage Peruvian boys quickly hauling the luggage off the train for the tourists. They formed a continuous line from the train to a roaring river that divided the station from the town below it. Alex led her over to the edge of the platform, and pointed at a churning feeder river that spilled into the nearby powerful Urubamba River that snaked in and around the area. The boys balanced themselves, and the luggage they bore, carefully, leaping from one massive, smooth, wet rock, to another. They nimbly crossed the dangerous river.
“Sometimes,” Alex told her grimly, “a boy slips. Those kids are young and their families are hungry. They take this dangerous job because it means money to feed all of them.”
Alex stood near her and, for whatever reason, Lauren appreciated his quiet strength, feeling the heat from his body, so close to hers. Now, they really had to be undercover. “That water is so swift. The current’s fast.”
“Yes,” he said, his mouth flexing. “These boys sometimes fall in. They are dead. No one can rescue them because the river runs so swift. If they do not die from striking those big boulders throughout the river, they will die in twenty minutes from hypothermia because this is glacier water from the Andes.”
It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
“Are you ready?” Alex asked, leaning over enough to catch her weary gaze. “We need to walk from the train station, down that hill to a bridge that leads into the plaza of Aguas Calientes. From there, we will walk up a sloping concrete road. Our apartment is located at the top of it.”
“Yes, I’m ready.”
