Heart of a Hero (34 page)

“Excuse me?”

He grinned. “—while I go catch us some fish. Equal division of labor, no chauvinism intended.”

She laughed, suddenly grateful to be focusing on the present. “And just how are you going to catch fish?”

A wicked gleam lit his eyes. He slipped his hunting knife out of its holster, pointed the blade toward the river. “See that tree hanging over the bank there, the one with the yellow fruit?”

She squinted into the haze.

“The locals call it a fishing tree. The fish wait under it until one of those yellow fruits drops off then…bam—” He crouched down in a blur of movement and lopped the pompoms off the back of her socks with his blade before she even realized what he was doing.

“Hunter!
What the
—”

He stood up, held the grubby yellow pompoms out in the palm of his hand, his eyes laughing. “Perfect lures once I get my hook into them.” He angled his head. “I knew you’d come in handy at some point, Burdett.”

She scowled at him.

He winked, closed his fist around her pompoms. And in that moment she had a warm sense of being part of a couple, the two of them at ease and comfortable with each other. It was a nice feeling—one she hadn’t had in more years than she could recall.

Night had fallen thick and fast. The storm clouds had moved in, swallowed the stars and the small sliver of moon. Darkness was now complete, save for the roaring fire Hunter had built in the fireplace on the veranda. He’d lit it after the sun had gone down so no one would see their smoke, and he’d raked glowing coals over to one side to slowly roast the fish he’d cleaned by the river.

They’d both washed in sweet water he’d managed to crank up from the old well on the property, and Sarah had swept the
veranda with palm fronds. She’d laid out his hammock as a tarp and taken great pleasure in personally lopping off banana leaves with his machete to serve as plates for the fresh fruit and fish. She’d found fat candles in what was once the kitchen area of the mansion, and positioned them around the deck in a circle to ward off crawly things.

A velvet breeze stirred as the storm closed in, making the candlelight quiver, and lifting the fragrance of the tropical night into the air. The smell of flowers mingled with the comforting scents of wood smoke and the coming rain.

Sarah sighed, feeling utterly content. This was the most delicious meal she could ever remember, and although the night sounds of the jungle rose in a raucous crescendo across the river, she felt safe on the covered deck of the old house, with the fire and candles and Hunter and his gun at her side.

She’d enjoyed cutting down the fruit, in spite of the snake she’d disturbed, and the spiders. Wielding the machete to provide for their dinner had empowered her in a way that had surprised her. And she’d taken great pleasure in cleaning off the veranda, arranging the candles and the slices of fruit on the banana leaves and putting a flower in her hair.

It made her realize that while she’d come to this wild place to do good, to offer her help to others, to challenge herself in a new environment, she still really loved the simple pleasure of creating a beautiful home. It was a pleasure Josh had stolen from her, and it was the last thing she’d expected to rediscover in the heart of the cursed Congo jungle.

“Fit for kings,” Hunter said as he leaned back on his elbow next to her, eyes on the fire. He was relaxed enough to have taken his boots off, and he was naked from the waist up. She studied his rugged profile, the hardened and scarred muscles of his torso, and smiled sadly. He was right when he’d said
they were different, that they needed different things. While she was coming to the realization that what she really wanted,
needed,
was a home—a real home, full of love and warmth—Hunter McBride was just about the furthest thing from it. There was nothing mainstream about this man. He existed on the fringes of society, and she had a sense it was something no woman could take from him. This man could not be put in a container behind a picket fence. He
belonged
in untamed places like this.

He caught her watching. He smiled, reached up and touched the flower tucked behind her ear. “Nice.”

She smiled back, caught his hand in her own before he could move it away from her face. “This is your injured arm, Hunter.”

He grinned. “Yeah. And it’s doing good, thanks to you.”

She made a mock frown. “You never put that sling back on after you…fought with that soldier. You think I didn’t notice?”

He moved a little closer to her. “So?”

“You were just humoring me back in the clearing when you let me bandage you up, weren’t you? You wanted to give me a sense of purpose, a job.”

“And you did it so well.” A mischievous light danced in his eyes. “Even though there was zero chance I could get my shirt back on.”

She jabbed at him. “You’re awfully smug in your medical knowledge, you know. How does a soldier know so much?”

He looked away, the play of firelight and shadow hiding his expression. A fat drop of rain hit the tin roof. The breeze shifted, intensified. Leaves rustled.

“Rain’s coming.”

“You’re changing the subject, Hunter. Where
did
you get your medical knowledge? What did you used to do before you joined the FDS?”

His features hardened. He stared at the flames for a while. “I served with the Légion Étrangère—French Foreign Legion.”

Surprise flared in her. “The Legion? It still exists?” She’d heard about it. Her father, an armchair military buff, had loved to tell her old war stories, and among them were tales of the famous and exotic French Legionnaires—men’s men in a landscape of hot deserts, dense jungles and fierce combat. He’d told his stories with such passion and excitement, she’d often wondered how much of it was really true, but the notion he might’ve been embellishing hadn’t bothered her one bit. She suspected her dad had fancied himself as one of the Legionnaires in his dreams of adventure. And she’d happily lived the dream with him on cold winter nights by the fire.

He’d stopped telling the stories, though, after her mother had died. And Sarah had missed that connection with him more than he could ever have imagined. If he’d known just how much it had hurt her, how desperately cut off he’d made her feel on top of losing her mother, it would have broken his heart.

“The Legion still exists, but apart from military experts, I guess not many people know that it does. The force currently has about 8,500 professional soldiers and 350 officers ready for rapid-action deployment anywhere in the world at extremely short notice.” Hunter still wouldn’t look at her. He stared instead into the crucible of flames he’d built in the stone oven.

Intrigued, she drew her knees into her chest and leaned forward. “How long did you spend with the Legion?”

“I fulfilled my five year contract.” He grunted softly. “If you want to leave any earlier than that, you have to desert. And then they come hunting for you. It’s not pretty when they find you. And they
do
find you.”

Sarah looked at the flames, as if she might see what he was seeing in them, see into his past. From what history she knew
from her father, if the French Foreign Legion had forged Hunter’s character, it explained an awful lot about him.

Her dad had told her that the Légion Étrangère was often referred to as the Legion of the Damned. It was an army comprised completely of foreigners—hard men who were usually running from something back home, men who had to set aside cultural differences and learn quickly to communicate in French. Men who were prepared to give up their pasts, their countries, their families and their homes in order to fight and die for a country that wasn’t their own.

It dawned on her then that the whole French Foreign Legion was a mercenary army, and it had been modeled on generations of private armies in Europe that went before it. So why should what Hunter did for a living now be so unpalatable to much of the world? Sarah suddenly felt like a hypocrite. As a young child she’d relished the exotic tales of combat, but she’d grown into a woman who abhorred war. Was it because her dad’s stories had seemed so foreign, so fictional, so far removed from her reality that they had existed in a separate part of her psyche? Maybe it was because the time spent with her father was so special she just refused to see anything negative about it.

She studied Hunter’s profile, a clearer picture of him emerging in her mind. Her father had told her that when a man joined the Legion he could take nothing of his past with him, no clothes, no cash, no trinkets or photos. Everything was confiscated, even passports. A man literally had to check his past at the gates. And
if he
survived his contract, he earned the right to become a French citizen. He was given a new passport, and if he wanted, a new name and new identity documents. It was the perfect place to officially bury a troubled history.

“My dad used to tell me stories about the Legion,” she said softly.

His eyes flashed to hers. “He did?”

“He told me that if a man wanted to hide from something terrible he’d done, he could join, and after he’d served his contract,
if he
survived it, he could—”

“Be rectified, get a new identity.”

“Yes. He said criminals did it to avoid the law.”

Hunter gave a dry laugh. “Criminals, refugees, revolutionaries, paupers, poets and princes—all welcomed into the French Foreign Legion since King Louis Phillipe established the force in 1831. Yeah, I’ve heard those stories, too.” His eyes held hers. “That’s the romantic version, Sarah. It’s not quite like that now. Not
that
easy for a criminal to get in.”

Was he mocking her? She studied his eyes. “Why did
you
join, Hunter?”

He shrugged. “Must’ve read the same stories your dad did, got the same romantic notions in my head. You know, the promise of exotic adventure in a man’s world. Hot sun, victorious combat, cool desert nights, cheap wine—” he cocked a brow “—and of course, compliant females.”

Warmth tingled over her skin at the thought of sex with Hunter.

He looked away. “Or maybe it
was
the promise of a cloak of official anonymity, the promise of a new life.”

Sarah had an uncomfortable and growing sense that this was the truth. His accent was Irish, yet he’d told her he was a French citizen. He had to have been rectified. But why? What had driven him to do it? What dark past was Hunter McBride hiding from?

“Is your name really Hunter McBride?”

The fire popped and cracked. The wind rustled in the trees and fat leaves clacked together. A few more drops of rain plopped on the tin roof. He sat up suddenly, reached over, took both her hands in his.

“Yes. I wouldn’t hide that from you. Not now.”

What are you hiding then?
“You’re Irish,” she said. “At least you were before you became French.”

“That was another lifetime.”

“And you don’t want to tell me about it?”

A darkness sifted into his features. His jaw hardened and his eyes turned cold. That look of danger was back. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the truth about Hunter McBride. “It’s okay,” she said, backpedaling. “Maybe…maybe some other time.”

“Yeah.” He picked up a twig blown in by the wind and tossed it at the fire. “Maybe another time.”

But there wouldn’t be one. The notion of a future hung un-articulated between them. The wind whipped a little harder and the fire wavered. Drops of rain began to bomb steadily against the tin roof, and the banana palms swished against the walls.

Hunter stared into the coals. His heart was thudding hard. He’d allowed Sarah to push him right up to the very edge of his past, but he was incapable of going further, incapable of giving her the whole truth.

Yet he’d crossed a line with her—in more ways than one—and he knew in his gut there was no turning back. He just didn’t know if he could go all the way. Or why he should. She’d be out of his life within seventy-two hours.

If they were lucky, by this time tomorrow they’d be in Cameroon. He’d use his radio to contact the FDS. It would be risky, but not as risky as using it in the Congo. The FDS had an agreement with the Cameroonian government, and FDS soldiers were free to operate in the area. He could have Sarah on an FDS chopper within an hour or two of crossing the border.

Hunter would then move on to the next phase of his mission, which was to help “kidnap” Dr. Jan Meyer from his research station in Gabon. The man was a world-renowned expert in infectious
diseases and affiliated with the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, Europe’s answer to the CDC. If anyone could identify the pathogen it was he. The FDS knew Meyer would come to the São Diogo lab willingly, but in the interests of secrecy, they couldn’t let him know about the pathogen until they had him sequestered. They would make it look as if he’d been taken hostage by rebels for cash, and they’d set up a fake negotiating system in an effort to stay under Cabal radar. The next major challenge would be to find an antidote in time.

Time.

Hunter stared at the hot orange embers as the fire began to die down and rain drummed on the roof. Everyone was running out of time. Even him, for God’s sake. He’d be forty-three in a few weeks. Jesus, what was his life all about, really? How often did a woman like Sarah come a man’s way?

And what fool would honestly let her go?

He jerked to his feet and threw another log onto the fire. The rain came down even harder, waves of sound hammering over the roof with each gust of wind. A loose sheet of tin began to bang somewhere, and wind began to moan eerily through the old structure.

Sarah was watching him in silence, those beautiful warm brown eyes liquid with the reflected light of the flames, searching his face for answers. He sat down beside her, unable to talk.

“Hunter.” She touched him, fingers soft on the skin of his arm. “I didn’t mean to pry.” Her eyes glimmered. “I care about you. I…I just want you know that.”

Wind tore suddenly at the banana palms and rattled the leaves. Thunder rumbled in the distance and lightning flashed. The rain came down in a solid silver curtain, and water began to drip through rusted nail holes in the roof.