Chapter 1
He was drunk and, consequently, just what she needed.
She studied him through the smoky, dusty haze of the cantina,where he sat on a bar stool, nursing hi
s drink. The glass was chipped, its dark amber contents cloudy. He didn’t seem to notice as he frequently raised it to his lips. He sat with his knees widespread, his head bent low between hunched shoulders, his elbows propped on the greasy surface of the bar.
The tavern was crowded with soldiers and the women who entertained them in rooms upstairs. Squeaky fans, rotating desultorily overhead, barely stirred the thick pall of tobacco smoke. The cloying essence of cheap perfume mixed with the stench of the unwashed bodies of men who had spent days in the jungle.
Laughter was everywhere, but the mood wasn’t particularly jovial. The soldiers’ eyes didn’t smile. There was an aura of desperation to their merrymaking. They took their fun as they took everything else, violently.
They were young for the most part—tough, surly men who lived on a razor’s edge between life and death every day. Most wore the uniform of the army of the current military regime. But whether they were locals or international mercenaries, all had that same hard look about their eyes. They were full of suspicion. Wariness shadowed every grin.
The man Kerry Bishop had her sights on was no exception. He wasn’t Latin—he was American by the looks of him. Hard, well-defined biceps bulged beneath his sleeves, which had been rolled up so tightly they encircled his arms like rope. His dark hair hung long and shaggy over his shirt collar.
Well, she’d just have to chance it. Of the lot, this man was still her best bet. He not only looked the most inebriated, but the most disreputable—lean and hungry and totally without principle. Once he was sober, he would no doubt be easy to buy.
She was getting ahead of herself. She had to get him out of there first. When would the driver of that military truck, the careless one who had negligently left his keys in the ignition, return to find that the keys were gone? At any moment, he could come looking for them.
The keys now rattled in the pocket of Kerry’s skirt each time she moved her legs on her journey across the room toward the man drinking alone at the bar. She dodged couples dancing to the blaring music, warded off a few clumsy passes and averted her eyes from the couples who were too carried away by passion to bother seeking privacy.
After spending almost a year in Monterico, nothing should surprise her. The nation was in the throes of a bloody civil war, and war often reduced human beings to animals. But what she saw some of the couples doing right out in the open brought hot color to her cheeks.
Setting her jaw firmly and concentrating only on her purpose for being there, she moved closer to the man at the bar. The closer she got, the surer she became that he was exactly what she needed.
He was even more fearsome up close than he had been at a distance. He wasn’t actually drinking, but angrily tossing the liquor down his throat. He wasn’t tasting it. He wasn’t drinking for pleasure. He wasn’t there to have a good time, but to vent his anger over something. Perhaps to blot some major upset from his mind? Had someone welshed on a deal? Double-crossed him? Short-changed him?
Kerry hoped so. If he were strapped for cash he’d be much more receptive to the deal she had to offer him.
A pistol had been shoved into the waistband of his fatigue pants. There was a long, wicked machete holstered against his thigh. At his feet, surrounding the bar stool, were three canvas bags. They were so packed with the tools of his trade, that the seams of the bags were strained. Kerry shuddered to think of the destruction his private stash of weaponry was capable of. That was probably one reason why he drank alone and went unmolested. In a place like this, fights frequently broke out among the hot-blooded, trigger-happy men. But no one sought either conversation or trouble with this one who sat on the last bar stool in the row.
Unfortunately for Kerry, it was also the seat farthest from the building’s only exit. There would be no slipping out a back door. She would have to transport him from the rear corner to the door. To succeed in getting him to leave with her, she would have to be her most convincing.
With that in mind, she took a deep breath, closed the remaining distance between them, and sat down on the bar stool next to his, which fortuitously was vacant. His profile was as rugged and stony as a mountain range. Not a soft, compassionate line in evidence. She tried not to think of that as she spoke to him.
“A drink, señor?” Her heart was pounding. Her mouth was as dry as cotton. But she conjured up an alluring smile and tentatively laid her right hand on his left one.
She was beginning to think he hadn’t heard her. He just sat there, staring down into his empty glass. But, just when she was about to repeat her suggestion, he turned his head slightly and looked down at her hand where it rested on top of his.
His, Kerry noticed, was much larger than hers. It was wider by half an inch on either side, and her fingertips extended only as far as his first knuckles. He was wearing a watch. It was black, with a huge, round face and lots of dials and gadgetry. He wore no rings.
He stared at their hands for what seemed like an eternity to Kerry, before his eyes followed her arm up, slowly, to her shoulder, then up and right, to her face. A cigarette was dangling between his sullen lips. He stared at her through the curling, bluish-gray smoke.
She had practiced her smile in a mirror to make sure she was doing a fair imitation of the women who solicited in the cantinas. Eyes at half-mast. Lips moist and slightly parted. She knew she had to get that come-hither smile right. Everything hinged on her being convincing.
But she never got to execute that rehearsed, sultry smile. It, like most everything in her brain, vaporized when she gazed into his face for the first time. Her heavily rouged lips parted all right, but of their own accord and with no direction from her. She drew in a quick little gasp. The fluttering of her eyelashes was involuntary, not affected.
His face was a total surprise. She had expected ugliness. He was quite good-looking. She had expected unsightly traces of numerous military campaigns. He had but one scar, a tiny one above his left eyebrow. It was more interesting than unsightly. His face didn’t have the harsh stamp of brutality she had anticipated, only broodiness. And his lips weren’t thin and hard with insensitivity, but full and sensual.
His eyes weren’t blank, as were those of most of the men who killed for hire. His eyes, even though they were fogged with alcohol, burned with internal fires that Kerry found even more unsettling than the heatless glint of indifference. Nor did he smell of sweat. His bronzed skin was glistening with a fine sheen of perspiration, but it gave off the scent of soap. He had recently washed.
Quelling her shock and trepidation—because for some strange reason, his lack of standard looks frightened her more than reassured her—she met his suspicious stare steadily. She forced herself to audition that seductive smile she’d spent hours perfecting and repeated her request as she pressed his hand.
“Beat it.”
His abrupt words took her so by surprise that she actually flinched, almost falling off the slick, vinyl pad of the bar stool. He turned his head forward again and jerked his hand from beneath hers to remove the cigarette from his mouth. He ground it out in the overflowing ashtray.
Kerry was dumbfounded. Was she that unappealing? Weren’t mercenaries supposed to have the appetites of animals? And wasn’t that voraciousness particularly true of their sexual appetites? Fathers hid their daughters from them in dread of the unthinkable. Men protected their wives at all costs.
Now, when Kerry offered herself to one, he had ungraciously said, “Beat it,” and dismissed her with a turn of his head. She must look worse than she thought. Her year in the jungle had apparently taken its toll in ways she hadn’t been aware of.
True, her hair had forgotten the luxury of a hot-oil treatment. Mascara and moisturizing face cream existed for her only in another lifetime. But how attractive did a woman have to be to tempt a man with a bestial sex drive?
She weighed her options. Her plan was foolhardy at best. Success was improbable. It would be risky under the best of circumstances. It would work only if her “recruit?
? was cooperative. If he wasn’t, it would be almost impossible to do what she had set out to do that night.
She glanced over her shoulder, wondering if she should desert this man in favor of another prospect. No. Her time was limited and rapidly running out. Whoever had left that truck parked outside could return at any moment. He might demand a shakedown of everybody in the cantina until the missing keys were found. Or he might have a spare set of keys. In either event, she wanted to be long gone before he returned. The truck was just as important as the man. She had to steal it, and now was the time.
Besides, she told herself, this candidate was her first and best choice. He fit all the criteria she had outlined in her mind. He was drunk, unscrupulous and obviously down on his luck.
“Please, señor, one drink.” Pushing all caution aside, she laid her hand on his thigh near the lethal machete. He mumbled something. “¿Que?” She used her whispered question as an opportunity to move closer to him.
“No time.”
“Por favor.”
He looked at her again. She made a motion that sent the scarf sliding off her head and from around her shoulders. She had previously decided to take off the scarf only as a last resort. When she had told Joe to find her a dress like the women in the taverns wore, she hadn’t counted on him being so knowledgeable about such things.
From a clothesline, he had stolen the dress she now had on. It was faded. The cloth was thin from years of wear and stone washing. The red floral print was lurid and tacky. The woman who had owned the dress had been a size larger than Kerry. The ruffled shoulder straps wouldn’t stay put and the bodice gaped open where it should have been filled.
She wanted to pull the dress against her chest and cover herself, but she forced herself to remain still. Rigid with shame, she let his gaze travel all the way from her exposed shoulder to her sandaled feet. He took his time. While Kerry burned with humiliation, his eyes drifted across her partially exposed breasts and down to her lap, which he studied for an indecently long time, then down her shapely, bare legs and feet to the tips of her toes.
“One drink,” he said thickly.
Kerry barely kept herself from slumping with relief. She smiled flirtatiously as he called out for the querulous bartender to pour them two drinks. They watched each other while he carried over two glasses and a bottle of the potent, local liquor. The bartender poured the drinks. Kerry’s mercenary, without taking his eyes off her face, fished in his pants pocket and slapped two bills onto the bar. Money in hand, the bartender shuffled off, leaving them alone.
The mercenary picked up his glass, tipped it toward Kerry in a mocking salute, and drank it all in one swallow.
She picked up her own glass. If it had been rinsed out since last being used, she would consider herself lucky. Trying not to think about that, she raised it to her lips and took a sip. The liquor tasted like industrial strength disinfectant. It took a tremendous amount of willpower not to spray it into the roughly hewn, handsome face of her mercenary. She swallowed the ghastly stuff. Her throat rebelled instantly. If she had gargled thumbtacks, it couldn’t have hurt more. Tears flooded her eyes.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously, emphasizing the squint lines radiating from their outer corners. “You’re not a drinker. Why’d you come over here?”
She pretended not to understand his English. Smiling, she covered his hand with her own again, and tilted her head so that her dark hair spilled across the shoulder left bare by the slipping strap. “I love you.”