Out of Control (32 page)
“Thank you for saying that.” He’d just told her more about himself than he ever had before. It wasn’t a lot, but it was certainly a start. And he’d shared that with her to try to give her comfort. She touched his cheek. “You’re a good person.”
He laughed. “Yeah, dream on. You’re the good person.”
“I like myself just fine these days,” she told him. “But I’m glad you think so, too. Some people might not after hearing my tales of my wicked past.”
“What’s that saying about ‘he who casts the first stone . . .’? Believe me, I’m in no position to look down on anyone, let alone you.”
Molly laughed. “David Jones, are you actually quoting the Bible?”
“I don’t know,” he countered. “Is that where that’s from?”
He was smiling at her again, with that look in his eyes that told her if they only had more time, he’d very soon be starting to undress her.
“I realized as I was telling you about the football team that maybe this was something I should have mentioned before you and I became intimate,” Molly told him. “I was so freaked out about the grandmother thing, it just never occurred to me that you might be put off by the crowds of men who had come—no pun intended—before you.”
“How many guys have you slept with since your daughter—what’s her name?”
“Chelsea. I let her adoptive parents name her. It seemed only fair.”
“Since Chelsea was born?”
Molly chewed on her lower lip as she thought. “Well, it’s been twenty-five years . . . I guess . . . three? Yes, three.”
He laughed. “Three men in twenty-five years?”
“What can I say? I happen to really enjoy sex.”
“Yeah, I noticed, but, Molly, three men in twenty-five years is not a lot. You don’t want to know how many women I’ve been with. Add a zero—or two.”
“But I didn’t even start having sexual relationships again until I was thirty—that was kind of a landmark year for me. It was the year I got the letter from the adoption agency, saying that Chelsea wanted to meet me. So it’s really only been twelve years.”
“So am I four?” he asked.
“No, you’re three.”
“Jesus, you are a nun.”
“I don’t think so.” She smiled, remembering what they’d just spent the afternoon doing, and he laughed.
“That smile of yours is going to kill me. If we run into each other and you smile at me like that, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.” He kissed her, and she felt herself melt.
They just sat there, then, kissing like a pair of teenagers. It was unbelievably sweet.
“I hope we do run into each other more often,” Molly finally whispered. “I like talking to you. You’re a good listener.”
That embarrassed him and Molly had to smile. At times, he was such a man.
“I also really like it when you let me be on top and you push yourself way deep inside of me,” she added.
That, of course, did not embarrass him one bit. He actually laughed at that. “Yeah, okay, great. I spend the entire afternoon having the best sex of my life, and still you’re determined for me to walk off this boat with a hard-on, aren’t you?”
“I just want you to plan to stick around this part of the jungle for a while,” she admitted, praying that by saying this she wouldn’t make him run away. Best sex of his life . . . “And I wanted you to have something to think about tonight.”
“I would have done just fine on my own, thanks.”
She smiled at him. “But now you’ll know what I’ll be thinking about.”
“Jesus, Molly, you make me—” He cut himself off, shook his head. Pulled himself out of her arms, stood up and moved to the outboard motor. He shook his head again, as if to clear it, the way men sometimes did when they got punched in the face. “Look, we’re almost to the village dock. I better get off before we round the bend. Anyone who sees us together—sees this stupid grin I can’t keep off my face—is going to know what we’ve been up to.”
“Maybe they’ll think I converted you—that you’ve found God or been born again,” she teased.
He pulled the cord to start the outboard, then turned to look at her. She couldn’t hear him over the initial roar of the starting motor, but she could see his lips move and she would’ve sworn he’d said, “Maybe I have.”
He steered the boat to the side of the river, kissed her quick, grabbed his pack, and vanished into the underbrush.
Only to appear two seconds later.
“Can you come for dinner tonight?” he shouted.
Oh, my. She cut the engine so they wouldn’t have to shout. “I’m sorry—I’ve been gone all day. I can’t be away all evening, too.”
Jones nodded. “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking—that was stupid.”
“No, it was sweet. I’d love to, really, but . . .”
“Tomorrow, then,” he said as the boat started to drift downstream.
“Definitely,” Molly said. “Tomorrow.”
But he still didn’t leave. “You know, I really liked talking to you, too. And reading to you. I liked it all—except maybe the part where that chopper blew. That I could have done without. But the rest of it was . . .”
“I had a wonderful day, too,” she called back to him.
He was still standing there, looking after her, his hand lifted in a wave, as the boat drifted around the bend.
Ken hadn’t said he’d forgiven her.
Savannah knew that that wasn’t the worst of her problems, since she was stranded in a tropical jungle somewhere in Indonesia, on some island of which she didn’t even know the name, with men with big guns in a helicopter searching for her because they wanted to kill her.
The helicopter had come back. Twice more. Searching for them relentlessly.
Still, she couldn’t stop thinking about Kenny. I forgive you, she’d said to him. And all he’d said in return was thanks.
He’d marched her silently along the river, stopping only to rinse off at a place where the water was running rather briskly.
“No leeches here,” was all he’d said, and she’d gone in with her—his—clothes on.
After she’d come out, he’d resumed the fast pace. She’d had to struggle to keep up. There was no way she could maintain that pace and try to talk to him at the same time, so they’d walked in silence for hours, stopping only during the sudden occasional cloudbursts, when the rain got too heavy to see their feet, or when the helo passed overhead.
As they walked or waited out the rain or hid from the helo, she’d brooded over the fact that if he hadn’t forgiven her back by the slime pit, then he probably was never going to forgive her.
But now he set down the sack of dynamite. “We’ll stop here for the night.”
He was kidding. He had to be. It was still early, wasn’t it?
Her watch was set to Hong Kong time. She had no idea what time it was here. Wherever here was.
“Now would be a really good time to relieve yourself,” Ken told her. “Don’t go too far, and bury whatever you leave behind. Really bury it—don’t just kick around a little dirt. Then get back here. When it gets dark out here, it gets dark fast.”
“You’re serious,” Savannah said, blinking at him. “I thought . . .”
He was trying to untie himself from both the vines and the attaché case, and he only glanced briefly over at her. “What, that we would make it all the way to that town on the coast in one afternoon?”
“Well . . . yes.” She started toward him. “Can I help you?”
“No.”
His response was so vehement, she took a step back.
“At the slow pace we were moving, it’s going to take us a couple of days, at least,” he told her.
That gallop they’d done all day was slow?
“Think about it,” he said. “How long were we on the helo after we hit land, heading up into these hills?”
These mountains were hills?
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I was. It was close to an hour. Fifty minutes or so. And we were probably moving at . . . Well, cruising speed of a Puma is about a hundred and sixty miles an hour.” Ken finally got out his knife and cut himself loose. “God damn it.”
And Savannah could see why he’d had such trouble getting free. The vines he’d used to tie the case of money to his bare chest and back had rubbed his skin raw in places. “Kenny, my God, why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve helped carry something.”
“I didn’t want to slow us down.” He shrugged it off. “It’s not that big a deal. While we were walking it was a little annoying. And now it stings. Nothing more. Really.”
“And what happens tomorrow?”
He was already moving, already organizing where they would sleep. On the ground, with the snakes and bugs. Oh, joy.
“I’ll tie the case on in a slightly different spot,” he said shortly.
“And you’ll get rope burns there, too.” She fished in her bag for the antibacterial gel. Who could’ve known it would become her most precious possession? If she had to choose between leaving behind the gel or the case with the money, she’d leave behind the money, no doubt about it. “Tomorrow you can have your shirt back.” She brought him the bottle. “Do you want me to help you put this on?”
He’d already started cutting branches that he was no doubt intending to use to camouflage them once they settled in for the night. Although, if the jungle were as dark as he’d described, it seemed kind of unnecessary. As she moved closer, he stopped and looked directly at her, the strangest look in his eyes. “I still smell your perfume.”
She took a step back. “You couldn’t possibly.”
He came toward her and sniffed her hair, her neck, her throat. He pulled her shirt—his shirt—out from her body and actually took a whiff down the neckline.
Savannah yanked the shirt away from him and took another step back. “Excuse me.”
“Take off your underwear,” he said. “It smells like perfume. What did you do, put it on before you got completely dressed, while you were in your underwear?”
“Yes. That’s the point of perfume—to make you smell good, not your clothes.”
“Take it off and bury it,” he ordered, back to cutting branches. “And, by the way, now I’m really looking forward to you giving me my shirt back in the morning.”
He was purposely being rude. Savannah gritted her teeth as she headed for the underbrush. But then she turned back. She couldn’t keep herself from saying something. “I thought we were over the pouting phase. Aren’t you getting just a little tired of—”
“I wasn’t kidding about the way it gets dark out here. I don’t know when moonrise will be. I do know it’s only a crescent tonight—waning—so it’s not going to help much in the night-light department even when it is up. So if you want to be able to see where you’re walking after you answer the call of nature, you better go now.”
The light was definitely fading. It was spooky how fast it was going.
Savannah turned and walked into the jungle on feet that stung. Still, it was nothing compared to the way Ken made her feel with his unhidden disdain.
Savannah came back out of the jungle pissed off at him.
Good. Ken was okay when she was pissed. It was when she got all doe-eyed and soft and vulnerable that he had trouble being around her. Or when she stood around in her underwear, or when she touched him or talked to him or smiled at him or . . . Crap. It was only when she was tight-lipped and angry that he didn’t want to pull her into his arms and tell her everything was going to be okay. That not only was he going to get her safely out of here, but he was also going to be her personal slave for the rest of his natural days.
Jesus, he was mad at himself for wanting her like that. He didn’t even fricking like her—well, at least not very much. After the slime fight, and after practically running her along the river for hours without a single complaint, he really had to work at not liking her.
They had five, maybe ten minutes of light left—tops—and she came marching over to him and threw her underwear at his head. He hadn’t been expecting that, and she got him dead on.
Good arm. It was hard not to like someone who had such good aim.
“My underwear does not smell like perfume,” she insisted.
Her bra and panties dropped into his hands after they banked off his face. They were still warm from the heat of her body, all slippery satin and yellow lace. God, God, God. He held them up to his nose and breathed deeply. “Yeah, actually, Savannah, it does. You’re just used to the scent.”
She was staring at him like he’d just grown a second head, and he realized he was sitting there, sniffing her panties. Perfect, Karmody. Way to go. Nothing like confirming the fact that he was a raging pervert.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I’ll, uh, bury this for you later.” He dropped it behind him and handed her one of the coconuts he’d cut and bored a pair of holes in with his pocket knife. “Drink.”
“Thanks.” She sat down, her eyes widening as she caught sight of tonight’s main course.
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