“There is one condition,” she repeated.
“And what's that?” he asked.
“Don’t touch anything. And definitely don’t take anything,” Evan insisted.
Miguel just stared at her. After a good ten seconds, he simply said, “We will see.”
For three hours, they wandered. Cam was enthralled by her focus and patience. They had only spoken briefly. Evan explained features of the caves and dropped factoids of interest. Cam was surprised to discover they were interesting. Or maybe it was just the woman pointing them out. She was stunning. Her hair and eyes were the identical pale brown, and when she was concentrating, her pink tongue peeked out and rested between bee-stung lips. The way her hands roved the bumps and valleys of the cave walls had him half hard—the way she held her neck and arched her back to ease the stiffness finished the job. She was thankfully oblivious to his arousal, speaking academically and pointing out various nocturnal threats they might encounter. Cam had bitten back a laugh. No beetle or snake could compare to the nocturnal threats he had faced in his career.
Cam had steered Evan away from the chained-off mine tunnel he had spotted when he toured the mines with Atlas and Joseph. Something told him a different kind of nocturnal threat lurked. An hour before dawn, they returned to the storage room where they had started. They hadn’t found any other markers, but Evan had made note of a cluster of caves she wanted to explore the following night. As they entered, Cam noticed her slight limp had become more pronounced.
“You’re injured?” he asked.
She looked down at her calf. “It's nothing. Stingray got me.”
“That's not nothing. They can kill,” Cam replied.
She brushed it off. “I was lucky, I guess. A good Samaritan helped me, and I was treated right away. No long-term damage. It's just a little sore.”
He couldn’t resist. “A good Samaritan?”
“Yes. Just a man who helped. Thank God it wasn’t you on that beach. You would have watched me drown.” Evan began organizing her pack.
Cam came up behind her. “I don’t know, mouse. It depends on how you would have thanked me.”
Evan stilled. “Let's just focus on the search.”
Cam spotted a case of water in the corner of the room and grabbed two bottles. He handed Evan one and downed the other in one go.
“It was a waste of time,” he said.
“No! It wasn’t. Miguel, these caves guard their secrets. Have you ever done a jigsaw puzzle?”
“Sure.” He shrugged.
“I mean a really challenging one. Like a thousand pieces?” she asked.
Cam's face was blank, but on the inside, he was bursting. He wanted to tell her how every Christmas Eve, his family in Miami would eat a big dinner then break out a new puzzle. His sisters competed throughout the year to see who could find the most difficult one, and the family would try to assemble the edge before bedtime. A sudden longing possessed him, an unbidden image flashing in his mind.
Evan in his family home, sitting next to him at the big puzzle table, his arm around the back of her chair distracting her while she searched for pieces.
“Well, anyway, it's super hard at the beginning. You look at this giant stack of pieces and think it will never be a picture. But slowly, you start to assemble it, and all of a sudden, everything makes sense. That's what this search is like—all these caves, all these puzzle pieces. There are markers and gold links and tunnels and tides. We’ve already clicked some pieces into place. We just need to keep at it.”
“Tomorrow, bring food,” he replied.
She laughed then. It was a great sound, hoarse and melodic. Cam wanted to hear it when he threw her onto a bed, and her naked body bounced on the mattress. Then he would wrap her legs around his waist and replace the laughter with shouts of pleasure. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he abruptly turned toward the door that led back to the mine. Evan would leave through the hole and out through the caves to the beach.
“See you tomorrow.” He lifted a hand with his back to her and disappeared around the corner.
Evan secured the Zodiac at the base of the dock. The beach was deserted as she crossed the dark sand and made her way up the grassy path to the finca. It was a bit of a hike, but Evan needed the quiet and the cool air to process her thoughts. No, she corrected. Process her feelings.
She was twenty-seven and in the fifth year of her Ph.D. program. She was a well-adjusted, healthy, heterosexual woman… who had not allowed a man to touch her sexually in nine years. It wasn’t by conscious choice. After the incident in high school, any time a man… argh! She kicked a clump of high grass in frustration. Panic attacks had barred her from intimacy. Until Miguel.
What was it about this man? He was a thug, a pervert, an opportunist, and those were the flattering things about him. He could be a drug addict or a criminal. But when his hand ran down her cheek, or he touched the small of her back to guide her through a narrow passage, she seemed to melt into his touch.
She huffed. It wasn’t as if he was reaching between her legs, and yet more than once, as they knelt to examine a cave wall or investigate a rock outcropping, she had fantasized about just that. An hour into their adventure, her thong was wet.
When she imagined a man with golden eyes, she pictured a predator, an evil beast. But Miguel's eyes were warm and inviting, like sunshine. When he looked at her, she wanted to thrust her fingers into that thick auburn hair and kiss the life out of him.
Her laughter split the silent morning. Evan rubbed her arms over her jacket. She knew she should scold herself for indulging her reverie, but she wouldn’t. She had never ever had these feelings of desire, and she wanted to bathe in the sensation without question or rebuke.
When she arrived at the finca, she climbed the creaky staircase to her room. Quickly rinsing the dirt of the mines from her body, she donned an old T-shirt and crawled into bed. She found sleep just as the sun was peeking up over the horizon.