Dateline: Kydd and Rios (17 page)

“Josh . . . Josh . . .”

Her desperate gasp tore through the air—then the shot.

Josh heard the panic in her voice, he felt and heard the explosion, the fall, and he knew the best of his life had ended.

Dust turned to mud in her mouth. She spat out the dirty taste and wondered why getting shot didn’t hurt more where the bullet had gone in, and why she still hurt in other places like her arms and stomach. Something was wrong. Had Brazia missed? Impossible. He’d had the gun to her head.

She did a quick check of her senses and came to an undeniable conclusion: she was alive. Then why couldn’t she move? The weight crushing her into the earth shifted and pushed against her, and she pushed back. The weight slid off her with a groan and a thud.

“Josh?” Her voice trembled with a terrible premonition.

“Nikki?”

She jerked her head around toward his voice. If he wasn’t on top of her, who—Brazia! Someone had shot Brazia, but he wasn’t dead either. She scrambled to her feet to get away from him, then immediately dropped back to the ground, suddenly aware of the chaos all around her. Shots were coming from everywhere, with her, Josh, and Brazia in the middle.

“Stay down! Stay put!” Josh yelled.

Lord, she wished she could see.

“Say something, Nikki! I can’t find you!” Seconds after she fell, Josh realized help had come. One of the soldiers had literally run over him trying to escape, knocking him down and turning him around.

“Here. I’m over here.” Her voice came from behind him.

Help had come in time. Nikki was alive. He prayed he could keep her that way.

Shuffling on his knees, he scooted closer to her. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Brazia’s here. He’s alive, but I think he’s been shot.”

“Good,” he said, his breath coming hard from fear, the shock of thinking she’d been shot, and the sheer relief of knowing she was alive. “Lie down and roll close to my back.” He nudged her shoulder and felt her drop to the ground. Bullets whizzed by them, pinging off the vehicles parked haphazardly around the compound. Someone screamed.

Nikki shivered at the sound of terror cutting across the compound. A minute ago it could have been her death cry, or Josh’s. It might still be.

“Can you reach my hands?” he asked urgently.

“Yes.” She understood what he wanted, and she worked frantically at the ropes tying his hands, her movements hindered by her own bound wrists.

When he was free, he rolled over, ripping off his blindfold and hers. He reached for her hands. “We’ll try for the forest, see who comes out on top in this thing. Come on.”

The rope fell away. Cradling her arms, she got to her knees. A fresh round of gunfire put her right back flat on the ground. She pulled herself closer to Josh, until their shoulders touched. Feathers of dust skittered across the compound on all sides of them.

“We’re pinned,” she gasped, her fingers digging into the dirt, her heart racing.

“Yeah.” Josh lifted his head a fraction of an inch and glanced around. He couldn’t tell the bad guys from the good guys, or if there were any good guys.

A fireball streaked out of the night on his left, sucking up the oxygen with a whoosh and blinding him with a red-orange burst of light. No explosion rocked the air, just a sudden intense heat coming out of nowhere and destroying the shack. Fire crawled down the building and into the forest.

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and watched their escape route go up in flames. Damn, he wished they were anywhere else in the world. He jerked his head around, looking for an alternative. “Try for Brazia’s jeep. Belly-crawl.” That was the best he could come up with.

Pushing with her elbows and knees, Nikki wriggled forward. The jeep was ahead of her, the four tires marking a safety zone of shadow in the torched battlefield. Yellow and red firelight ringed the north border of the camp. Whoever had come after Brazia was using the mad dog’s own tricks against him—saturation violence and mayhem. They were going to crush him, and maybe crush her and Josh in the bargain.

She slid the last foot under the jeep, pushed by Josh’s hand on her bottom. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the battle was over. The
pop-pop
of the final rifle shots faded into the crashing sounds of the tumbling, flaming shack. Voices came out of the darkness, shouted orders and cheers of victory. From their hiding place beneath the jeep, Nikki saw a man push Brazia’s body with his booted foot. Brazia cringed.

“He’s alive,” the man announced to his troops. “Take him to Sulaco,
inmediatamente
!”

Two soldiers hurried forward to haul the colonel away. The man turned, and the lights of the fire lit his face with a flickering crimson glow.

“Cardena,” she whispered, glancing at Josh. “He came back for us.”

“Yeah, but why?” Josh had been used, abused, and double-crossed too many times in the last thirty-six hours to accept anything or anybody at face value. Not Luis Cardena . . . and not Nikki Kydd, not any longer.

“To take us to Delgado?” she offered, her voice catching on every other breath, like his own.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Some things would never change, he thought, and Nikki drawing trouble like a magnet was the worst of those things. Yes, he loved her. Yes, he accepted the responsibility for being the partial cause of her involvement. But there was something about Nikki, and Nikki alone, that lit fuses and created sparks wherever she went. The woman should be under lock and key. She was dangerous, and he’d had his fill of danger. She’d used him in the worst possible way, and although he understood her reasons, he hoped that somewhere deep down inside himself there was a self-defense mechanism to protect him from being hurt further by her. If he sat tight and waited, maybe it would kick in and he’d be able to think straight.

With the unsettling facts firmly planted in his mind, he opened his eyes and stared for a long moment at his hands. Nothing happened. He’d run out of time, and they’d run out of choices.

“Okay, Nikki. The only way we’re going to find out is to ask and hope we like the answer, because we sure as hell aren’t going to get out of here without him noticing.” Pushing himself out from under the jeep, he deliberately refrained from looking at her, at the most appealing face he’d ever seen. Even when it was smudged with dirt and framed by sweaty, stringy hair, he was a fool for that face.

Nikki followed, unsure of what emotion she’d seen in his eyes. Resignation, definitely. But sadness too? By her reckoning the worst was over. She was still shaking, inside and out, but they were both in one piece. Brazia had been neutralized, and Travinas had to deal with her now. She held the winning hand again, if she had the strength to keep her players in line, to keep Josh by her side—the strength and the sheer audacity after that terrible confession he’d wrung out of her in the shack.

Cardena’s men surrounded them in a rush, grabbing them and hustling them to the middle of the compound. Neither she nor Josh put up any resistance.

“
Señorita
Kydd,
Señor
Rios,” Cardena said, dropping the pretense of their lie. “You are both lucky to be alive, especially you,
señorita
. Another second, or a less steady hand”—he raised his rifle and leveled her with a dark-eyed glare—“and you would be meeting your Maker.”

Nikki nodded her thanks and slanted a quick glance up at Josh.

“Damn good shot,” Josh said, ignoring the pull of her eyes. “You missed on purpose this morning.”

“It is the only way I ever miss,
señor
. Had you not been so eager to run, I could have saved you much unpleasantness. As it is, I will be content with saving your lives.”

Josh took the wound to his pride like a man. He kept his face blank and his hands loose at his sides. He was in no mood to dish out the gratitude Cardena wanted and deserved, at least not for the night’s fiasco. But Cardena had just done him another favor, one Josh would have thanked him for if the situation had allowed. He’d made Josh angry; he’d triggered the self-defense mechanism.

“I’m sure you had your reasons, or your orders,” he drawled, meeting Cardena’s black gaze with a challenge of his own.

“Both,” Cardena slowly admitted, the barest hint of a smile touching the corner of his mouth. “It seems,
Señor
Rios, that you are a person of much value. Carlos Delgado is convinced you have something he needs.”

“But does he have anything I need?”

Cardena’s gaze flicked over Nikki before coming back to Josh. “That depends on how you value the lady and her happiness.”

Slowly but surely Nikki felt herself being cut out of the deal. All she’d ever had was Josh to bargain with. She was only the liaison between him and Travinas, between him and Delgado. He didn’t need her. She needed him. Everybody needed him.

“Josh?” She touched his arm, gazing up at him. She knew it would be so easy for him to walk away, for she certainly hadn’t given him any reason not to. Quite the contrary, she’d given him every reason to leave and never look back. No, never look back—the way he thought she’d left him.

Josh stared down at her, at her pale face and the look of desperate uncertainty in her eyes. Three years of loneliness had brought him to this moment, three years of missing her with an ache he hadn’t been able to assuage. Two days of pure hell hadn’t changed the emotional reality of his love, his loneliness, or the ache. If anything, he missed her more now, for the young girl he’d loved so completely was truly lost to him. A week ago, the woman waiting for his answer had made her decision. One life for another. He wouldn’t deny her.

“Take me to Delgado,” he said to Cardena. “For the price of Helen Cavazos’s freedom, I’ll tell him what he needs to know to bring Travinas down.”

He felt Nikki’s fingers tighten on his arm. “Thank you.” Her voice was soft, almost too soft to hear.

He ignored her and continued speaking directly to Cardena. If he stopped now, he might not have the courage to say what he still had to say. “There is one other condition. Nicolita Kydd. I won’t tell Delgado anything until she’s out of the country.”

“
Señor
?” Cardena’s glance traveled between the two of them.

“You heard me. I want her gone, and I want you to take her. Whatever arrangements have to be made for Helen’s release can be done without Nikki. That’s the deal.”

That was the deal, and that was the end of it, he thought, strangely relieved by the simplicity of the plan. He wasn’t up to complications of any sort, physical, mental, or emotional. His body was bruised, his mind even more so by Brazia’s revelations and Nikki’s confession, by the horror he’d felt when he thought she’d died. He never wanted to feel that kind of pain again. It was unbearable. No, he shouldn’t have let her get away from him, but neither should she have asked him to come back.

“I don’t have the authority to—”

“Take it,” Josh interrupted, calling Cardena’s bluff. The man had needed plenty of authority to pull off the raid. “Take her. Or Delgado can wait until I get back from taking her myself.”

“Where?”

“The States.”

“No. No, Rios.” Cardena shook his head, becoming agitated. “We—the revolution, Delgado—none of us can wait that long. The schedule has been set. The country will be freed in two—soon, very soon,” he corrected himself. “Delgado wants to give your information to the people immediately after he gains control.”

“Then take her,” Josh demanded.

“Maybe one of my men—”

“You, Cardena. Only you. You’re the one who saved her life. You’re the one I want to take her out of here, tonight.” He didn’t want time for anything else to go wrong, for Travinas to marshal his forces, for Delgado to change his mind. He didn’t want time to think about her leaving. He wanted time to heal, alone, knowing she was safe.

Nikki heard the conversation through a haze of shock, her initial relief dying like the flames coming up against the damp forest floor. Josh was sending her away, and Cardena was going to let him. She saw the indecision on the older man’s face, but she also saw the inevitability of his answer.

“No,” she said quickly, trying to sway the odds in her favor. She didn’t want to leave him like this, with so many things left unsaid, with their love and friendship tainted by the ruin of her deception.

“Don’t undercut yourself, Nikki.” Josh looked down at her. “For your mother’s sake, you should be begging him to take you out of here. Nothing’s going to happen until you’re gone.”

“I’ll leave. I promise. But not like this. Not tonight. I can help you.”

“I’ve had all the help from you I can take. No offense”—he raised his hand to stop her protest—“just the plain honest-to-goodness truth. You’re hell on a man, Nikki, real hell.”

One look at him proved his point. Dirt and mud covered every square inch of him. His clothes were torn. Blood stained the collar of his shirt. And none of it compared to the weariness in his eyes.

“I can change, Josh,” she said softly, pleading with him to believe what even she doubted. She needed to change, wanted to change, but she’d been running so hard for so long, subordinating everything to one ultimate goal—her mother’s freedom.

“Prove it. Leave with Cardena. When your mother is released I’ll bring her to you.” He turned to Cardena, not giving her a chance to say anything more. “What’s your decision?”