Forced Disappearance (11 page)

He reached up to touch her face, his fingers gentle, cupping the curve of her jaw, anchoring her to him. That helped.

“Anyway, I found some teenagers in there, smoking, a couple of boys. I was herding them out, not realizing I missed one. He crept up behind me and hit me over the head with a brick.” She swallowed.

Glenn didn’t push for more. He waited.

“I came to in the trunk of a car.” She swallowed again, her throat dry. “Hot, dark, and cramped.”

“Like this place.”

Pretty freaking much. “They kept riding down bumpy dirt roads all day, trying to decide what to do with me. They didn’t set out to kidnap an American soldier. It just happened, and they were feeling like big boys all of a sudden. They were having a grand old time congratulating each other.”

His palm gently cupped her cheek, but his voice was tight with anger as he said, “While you were waiting in that trunk for hours for them to decide what they wanted to do with you.”

“I figured I was as good as dead,” she confessed with a twist of her lips.

“What happened?”

“They made the mistake of going home for some food. I banged on the trunk, and another family member heard me. The patriarch of the family let me out, beat those kids with a stick, literally, right in front of me. Then he personally drove me back to the base, even while he knew that those boys could be charged with being insurgents, tossed into prison, and never seen again.”

She shook her head. “He could have been arrested or even shot the second he showed up with me outside the base.” She was still as incredulous now as she’d been back then. “He did the right thing even if it put his entire family in jeopardy.”

“What happened to the boys?”

“They were questioned, then handed over to local law enforcement. I think they were caned and released.”

“You could have made a big stink over it. Demanded more.”

“I didn’t want more,” she said. “I wasn’t hurt.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.” His whispered voice grew tighter with every word. Then he added a moment later, “I imagine you’re not a fan of being stuffed in dark trunks.”

“It wouldn’t be my first choice for mode of transportation.” Not that she would admit to being claustrophobic, exactly. She wouldn’t let her discomfort stop her. The definition of bravery, as she’d learned in the army, was to feel the fear, but do whatever you needed to do anyway.

She rested her head on Glenn’s chest, while he put his arm around her. She closed her eyes, and let his steady heartbeat comfort her. Her own heartbeat slowed to match. They lay together, practically fused together in the small space. But soon her hip was going numb and her toes were tingling. She tried to wiggle them.

“Here.” Glenn rubbed her neck, her back, her arm that he could reach, her lower back, her buttocks, shifting so his long arm could reach lower.

The tingling numbness was soon replaced by a different kind of tingling altogether. The longer he worked on her, the heavier her breasts felt, the more heat pooled low in her belly. Then he shifted his hand to rub life back to her inner thighs.

Okay. We’ve clearly moved past the therapeutic massage thing.
But she didn’t have it in her to protest.

He worked on the muscles just above her knee. If he went even an inch higher . . . And then he did, his breathing growing heavier. He moved his long, kneading fingers up another inch. Her breathing was becoming erratic too. Soon his probing fingers were at mid-thigh. Then higher.

She knew only too well what those long fingers of his could do. Before they’d gone all the way, back in college, they’d spent weeks and weeks learning each other’s bodies, learning to satisfy each other every way possible.

Engineering students liked to know how things worked. The human body and its responses to stimuli were no exception, no less fascinating than building a bridge. They’d learned each other’s bodies with meticulous care.

Memories of those times pushed out the last memories of her terrifying day in captivity. With Glenn putting his mind to distracting her, resistance was futile.

As heat and need washed through her, she very nearly reached down to move his hand to the goal line, but ended up pushing him away instead. They couldn’t do this.
Not now, not here.

The tourists could be back any second. She couldn’t even stand movies where the hero and heroine stopped to have sex in the middle of mortal danger. There was a name for characters like that: TSTL.
Too stupid to live.

She waited until the rush of blood in her veins slowed to normal. Okay, she did feel a hundred percent better. Her body might have wanted more, but it got what it really needed: restored blood flow.

“My turn.” If they had to leave their hiding place in a hurry, it’d be better not to fall on their faces with their first steps. She reached for Glenn, wanting to help his muscles regain circulation.

If she thought focusing on him was going to distract her from her own desires, she was sadly mistaken. Sweet heaven, the man had muscles.

She’d seen his back when he’d taken his shirt off at their campsite; she’d even snuggled against him. But having free rein to explore every impressive inch made the whole tactile experience very different. He had muscles like bridge cables. He swam.
How much could a man swim?

She worked on his neck, back, lower back as far as she could reach. She moved her fingers along hills and valleys of muscles, over the thin ridges she knew to be scars. Until something hard poked against the V of her thighs as he shifted. She had a fair idea it wasn’t a water canteen.

She snatched her hand back just as new voices sounded outside, excited chatter, some male, some female. The tourists were returning.

Moment of truth.

She’d been half on top of Glenn, but shifted now so she’d be on the outside, blocking his body with hers. Even as he growled his displeasure into her ear, she moved her hand toward the gun in the back of her waistband, held her breath as the voices reached closer and closer.

She didn’t want a shootout. She didn’t want any tourists hurt. But if she had to protect Glenn and herself from the guardsmen, she’d do what she had to. She waited.

If the driver opened the storage compartments for the backpacks . . .

But the bus dipped slightly as the tourists filed up the steps one by one. They never stopped talking. From the sound of it, the trek had been a wild success. In ten minutes or so, the engine started, rumbling, and they were on their way.

And the next second, with a ferocious growl as the only warning, Glenn shifted her under him, covered her with his well-built body, and crushed her lips under his.

Okay, then.

His soft beard, a few days’ worth of growth, tickled her skin. The bus rattling over uneven ground and the hard metal beneath her took nothing away from the experience. She was too far gone to notice discomfort. She couldn’t really complain with Glenn’s tongue in her mouth, mastering her, whipping her need into fever pitch.

His large hand covered her breast, weighed it, measured it, caught her budding nipple between his thumb and index finger through the soft material of her shirt. Hot, liquid desire shot through her.

She moaned into his mouth. They no longer had to be silent. The people in the bus wouldn’t hear them over the engine.

Glenn let go of her breast to slide a hand between them.

She felt a rush of tingles.

They were still in terrible danger, but they were safe for the moment and a moment was all she needed. Or maybe two, because he was taking his time, damn him.

He cupped her with his warm palm until everything he touched sang to life. Then slowly, oh ever so freaking slowly, he pressed his palm hard between her legs and rubbed her.

She arched her hips into the pleasure as tension built inside her.

Nobody but Glenn could ever do this to her, not this fast. She felt like a hormone-crazed teenager all over again. And had about as much self-control.

They were both fully clothed, for heaven’s sake. They could barely touch each other, could barely even see each other.

But she’d learned from their long-ago experiments that when Glenn touched her body, she seemed to go to pieces with unfair ease. She was going to, soon now. She teetered on the edge. Right on the ragged edge . . . poised to tumble over when the bus stopped at the checkpoint.

Glenn froze.

She bit into his shoulder so she wouldn’t moan in frustration.

This was so freaking unfair!
Okay, okay. And dangerous.
Focus.
She inched her fingers toward her weapon.

The bus door creaked open, then soldiers talked with the driver. The bus rocked a little when one of them stepped up to look at the passengers. He took his damned time. But then he wished them a good visit at last, got the hell off the bus, and let them go on their way.

Relief flooded her, and then the heat and need were back, even as the bus chugged forward.

“Now. Please,” she whispered.

“Tell me you missed me,” Glenn demanded, his voice rough with need.

“I missed you.”

But she couldn’t think about that, or anything else, because he claimed her lips while he pressed his palm against her and kneaded her into the kind of oblivion only a prizewinning orgasm could offer.

Chapter 10

HIS BALLS HAD
to be bluer than the tour bus. Glenn moved off her, making sure he was on the outside, protecting her, loving how she panted next to him, how she’d come for him, moaning his name.

He’d started out wanting to distract her, but the whole thing spiraled out of control pretty fast.

Miranda.
She was a unique phenomenon entirely.

He wanted this. Not just more, not just to finish it, but he wanted her over and over again. Wanted Miranda back in his life.

He should have looked for her after she’d walked away from him. To hell with his injured pride and what his mother had wanted.

He should have gone after her ten years ago and done whatever it took to bring her back. In hindsight, it seemed pretty obvious. He felt like an idiot for not having seen the light sooner. It wasn’t a feeling he experienced often. He frowned in the darkness.

The bus stopped, dropped the tourists off, then went on. Glenn stayed still in the cramped storage compartment with Miranda lying next to him. Another twenty minutes passed before the vehicle stopped once again. This time, the driver turned off the engine. They could hear his footsteps outside a moment later, his shoes crunching on gravel as he walked away.

Other engines rumbled on farther off, probably other buses coming and going. Glenn waited about five minutes to open the flip door to a crack and steal a glance of the outside world.

“Buses, buses, and more buses.” Some new, some old, but they all stood empty. They were at some kind of a bus station, parked in the back.

“Can we get out?” Miranda whispered behind him.

He could see in only one direction, forward. A couple of men were going about their business at least two hundred yards away, wearing driver’s uniforms. “I don’t know.”

“I have to pee.”

He opened the door a little wider. Nobody looked their way. He slipped out, then nearly tripped, his legs stiff. His muscles needed a minute to find their strength after being cramped up for hours. He helped Miranda climb out behind him.

She glanced toward the squat building they could now see to their right, the people milling around, most of them tourists. “I bet they have a bathroom at the station.”

Even as Glenn considered it, he spotted the National Guard under the awning by the front. They were scanning passengers.

He grabbed Miranda’s hand and tugged her in the opposite direction. As the sky opened up in a soft drizzle, they ducked between empty buses and hurried to the chain-link fence in the back. A single-lane street waited on the other side and weather-worn row homes beyond that, definitely not the ritzy section of the city, but not exactly the slums either.

While he looked for a gap in the fence, she was checking the rest of their surroundings.
Bathroom. Right.

“Go between the buses,” he suggested, and once he assured himself that there was no way through the fence, he stepped away to give her a moment of privacy.

He waited a few minutes, then walked back to her. She was using a bus’s mirror to pat down her short, dark hair. Her face was smudged with dirt, her cargo pants and khaki shirt wrinkled beyond hope.

“You look like hell,” he said.

“Believe me,
GQ
wouldn’t put you on the cover either.”

He pulled his spine straight as he brushed off his worn T-shirt and canvas pants. “I’ll have you know, I’ve been on the cover of
Scientific American
, which is way better.”

She stuck out her tongue and blew him a raspberry.

And he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and kiss her.

“We better clean up a little,” he said instead, biting back a smile. They needed to look more like tourists and less like fugitives.

So, hidden by the buses, they used the rest of the water in their canteens to wash their hands and faces, combed their hair with the comb from the toiletry kit, and straightened their clothes as best they could. Then they followed the fence until they found a hole that let them through to the other side.

He took her hand as they crossed the street. He told himself he did it so they’d look a little more touristy. But as they walked through the quiet residential neighborhood, people still looked at them with curiosity.

“We’re obviously not locals, and we don’t look like the tourists,” Miranda said under her breath.

“We need backpacks and better clothes.” Of course, neither of them had money, or credit cards, or an ID for that matter. “Do you know which way the airport is?”

“Somewhere on the south edge of the city, I think.”

At the first intersection, they chose the street that led that way. The rain kept coming down, but not too much, nothing they couldn’t handle. The houses looked progressively smaller and poorer, until they reached an area where people openly slept in doorways.

Trash lined the streets. The homes were simple, one- or two-floor dwellings, the roofs ragged, a number of windows missing. They had to be close to the slums, he figured. When a police car rolled down the street, they ducked under the nearest doorway where a drunk snored. Crouching, they grabbed his blanket and threw it over their heads, pretending to be sleeping next to him.

The police rolled by.

Miranda gagged as she threw off the horse blanket that smelled of alcohol, sweat, and urine. She lay it back on the still sleeping man next to them, then stood and shook herself off. “Better not get lice, or fleas, or whatever.”

“Lice won’t kill you. The commander will.”

They moved on and walked close to half an hour before they heard church bells in the distance, and saw the people in the doorways mobilize, get on their feet, and head in the same direction, some hurrying, others staggering.

“Let’s check it out,” Miranda said.

The homeless were heading south. Glenn shrugged. “We’re going that way anyway.”

They ended up at a simple wooden church barely taller than the hovels around it.
La
Misión
, a sign advertised over the open wooden door, in front of which nearly a hundred people lined up. People filed into the church one by one on the right side of the door. Another row of them came out on the left, carrying food: bread, cheese, and an occasional banana.

Glenn’s stomach growled at the same time as Miranda’s. When she moved to the end of the line, he didn’t try to hold her back.

But he did ask, “What if our pictures were on TV?” under his breath as he joined her.

“If anyone checks us out too closely, we take off. It’ll take time for the police to get here even if someone calls us in.”

The people around them didn’t look like they owned a change of underwear, let alone a phone. And nobody was looking at anyone. They all kept to themselves. “Sounds like a plan.”

The trail mix was a distant memory at this stage. Food and water would be nice. Things were looking up. Even the rain stopped, the clouds clearing.

An old woman shuffled around the corner and came to stand behind Glenn, leaning heavily on a cane. Various old men lined up behind her. Then a group of ruffians in their teens and twenties, loud, wearing mostly black, sporting metal-studded belts, joined the end of the line. They had scarves tied around their necks, backwards, like Old West train robbers. First they began shoving each other around, then shoving people out of the way one by one as they moved up the line.

Glenn glanced at Miranda, who looked like she was ready to put her army training to use and knock the jerks on their asses. Except starting a mass fight was probably not in their best interest. There was no telling how many buddies those kids had in the growing line farther up front, or in the back.

So before Miranda could do something they might regret, Glenn motioned the old woman to step ahead of them, then he turned to face down the young thugs. He squared his shoulders and let his body language spell out his disapproval.

The burliest of the idiots flashed a cocky grin and pulled his shirt up to show off a nasty looking knife with a nine-inch serrated blade.

Glenn could have pushed his own shirt aside to show the handgun stuck into his waistband. He didn’t. He simply held the young thug’s gaze, keeping his face completely expressionless.

Nobody moved. Tension sizzled through the air. Then Glenn nodded toward the end of the line with his head. One of the young men spit at his feet; another swore at him in Spanish, stepping closer. But Glenn stood his ground, and after a few more seconds, the boys sauntered back to the end of the line where they’d started.

In a little while, more people gathered behind them, until the line went around the corner.

“You handled that well,” Miranda said.

Technically, he didn’t need her approval, but he found that he liked having it. As the line moved forward, he nodded toward the church. “What if they ask who we are?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think places like this ask a lot of questions.”

The queue moved fairly quickly. Soon they were at the door, then stepping into the dim interior.

An altar stood up front, but no pews. Did people worship standing up? At the moment, most of the small church was taken up by a mismatched row of tables.

To the right, a water spigot stuck out of the wall, with a drain on the floor below it. Some of the people in front of them washed their hands, some drank right from the spigot.

When Miranda got up there, she washed her face again, then filled her canteens. Glenn followed her example.

They needn’t have worried about being recognized by the staff. A hundred-year-old nun in a dusty black habit supervised the food distribution, her eyes overwhelmed by folds of skin and open only by the smallest of gaps.

She smiled a toothless smile every once in a while, nodding at the unfortunates who filed before her and raising her shaking hand in blessing at intervals, making the sign of the cross.

In front of her, one table held fist-size chunks of bread, another had much smaller chunks of cheese, and another served fruit: mangoes and bananas. Nobody took more than his share, and nearly everyone muttered a “
Gracias
”
or “
Gracias, Madre
.”

Glenn and Miranda did the same and kept moving.

On the way out, in the corner, piles of clothes waited in cardboard boxes, looking fresh off the Salvation Army truck. Most of the people passed right by them.

“You think that’s free?” he asked Miranda. It would be nice to change out of the clothes he’d been wearing for several days. “Why doesn’t anybody take anything?”

“When you’re homeless, you can have only what you can carry with you wherever you go, which, for most, means the clothes on your back.”

The swift sense of protectiveness hit him hard. “Were you ever—”

But she said, “I volunteer with homeless vets.”

That didn’t surprise him. The Miranda he knew always had her causes, had never been afraid to get herself dirty or lend a hand. In college she’d organized walks for multiple sclerosis, worked on Habitat for Humanity crews, and volunteered at the soup kitchen.

They stepped up to the pile and sorted through it, picked out clean shirts and clean pants. She even found a sisal bag, which she threw across her shoulder. He didn’t find the backpack he hoped for, but came across a strap-on baby carrier. If he taped up the leg holes or put a shirt in there to block them, it could come in handy for carrying extra food if they came across another mission. For now, he jammed their new clothes inside and swung the baby carrier over his shoulder.

They put their food in Miranda’s bag since it had no holes in it. Then as they turned to leave, Glenn kicked something on the floor, bent down to check what it was, and realized he’d found a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses.

He tried them on and the world turned into a dizzying blur. Okay, way too strong. But he shoved the glasses into his pocket anyway. Once they were away from the mission, a block or so down the road, he knocked out the glass and shoved the frame onto his nose. “Not much of a disguise, but hopefully better than nothing.”

She grinned at him. “Hey, you can still look nerdy.”

“Nerdy is the new sexy,” he reassured her.

“You look like you did back in college. Okay, plus some muscles.”

“You like the muscles. Admit it.”

“I’m not against them.” She grinned again.

He liked seeing her carefree for a second.

“With the clean clothes we’ll be able to blend in somewhere in a better neighborhood. Even with tourists,” she said as they walked. “We should be able to make our way over to the airport without drawing too much notice.”

They pulled into the first abandoned alley they came across and changed.

“How do I look?” she asked as they reentered the street. She wore blue jeans and a tan T-shirt.

“Strong,” he said. “Self-assured. All grown up. You look like an interesting woman.”

She flashed a brilliant smile that reached all the way to his heart. “Smooth talker.”

Oh, for love’s sake
. Miranda pushed forward. She remembered now why she’d fallen for him in the first place. Glenn never said what you’d expect from a guy. He was the type who’d keep a woman on her toes, and that was a good thing.