Her Last Line of Defense (9 page)

She rested her head on his shoulder as he stroked her silky hair. “Tell me, how does such a sexy woman make it to your age without certain experiences?”

“I assume you mean sexually?”

He nodded. “Not that I’m complaining. It gives me great pleasure to be your teacher.” That was an understatement. One of his romance-reading previous girlfriends had called him an “alpha male,” kind of like the alpha wolf that dominated the pack and earned his pick of the females.

And Claire was the best he’d ever picked. But he still wasn’t sure why’d she’d picked him.

“It’s kind of a boring story.”

“We have all night.” He kissed the top of her head.

“Well, I was almost engaged once. He was the president of his fraternity at UVA.”

Luc hated him already.

“He was blond and handsome, played on the university tennis team and was premed.”

Hmmph. Luc was his team’s medic and wasn’t impressed by any pretty-boy doctor wannabe.

“We even got pinned.”

“Pinned?” What was that? He thought he knew pretty much every slang word for sex out there.

She blushed, her face heating against his arm. “Yeah, he gave me his fraternity pin to wear. It’s regarded as a precursor to an engagement ring.”

“Oh.” Like giving a girl your varsity jacket before heading out to the sock hop. A whole world still existed that hadn’t moved much past the nineteen-fifties.

“Have you ever pinned a girl, Luc?” she asked innocently.

Only if that was a slang term for sex. “No, I wasn’t in a fraternity. So what happened to him?” Hopefully a slow and painful death involving invertebrates in bodily orifices.

The corners of her mouth turned down. “He was a cheater,” she admitted. “With at least one of my sorority sisters, maybe two. Janey learned about it and told me. I didn’t want to believe her, but she never lies. He admitted it when I confronted him.” She gave Luc a small smile. “He was the human equivalent of a foil-wrapped chocolate Easter bunny—bright and fancy on the outside, but hollow and waxy on the inside. Too much will make you sick.”

Poor Claire was still going through sugar withdrawal. Luc wondered what kind of chocolate he would be. “You’re well rid of someone like that,” he said dismissively, but she had turned her face away. “What else?”

“He said he had needs, and I hadn’t satisfied them.”

“That’s garbage, Claire!”

She looked up, startled. “What?”

“You heard me. He was looking for an excuse to cheat.”

“Yes, I know, but I didn’t have any experience and—”

“And it was his job to show you how to please him—his job to please you.” He ran his hand down her arm. “Did he ever please
you,
Claire? Ever make you scream his name in pure ecstasy? Ever take you so high you thought you’d never come down?”

“No, never.” She was trembling against him now.

“Then he wasn’t a man at all. And you please me plenty.” He pulled her under him and proceeded to show her how much she pleased him—several times.

When they lay together, sweaty and satisfied again, he asked the question that had popped into his head earlier. “So what kind of chocolate am I, Claire?” he asked lazily.

“Chocolate? Hmm, let’s see. You’d be dark, strong chocolate that melted on my tongue and made me crave more.”

“And you would be a
petite
bonbon. Delicate, sweet, with a creamy soft center.” As he was saying the words, they were sounding sentimental even to him, as if he were developing feelings for this woman. True, he did have feelings for her: respect and admiration for her tenacity, her kind nature, how the sun picked up caramel highlights in her hair and how her lips curved to showcase her white teeth…
non
. Respect and admiration on a purely professional level was best. That was all.

Luc showed her how to work the phone. “Can they tell where I am?”

“No. One of our tech guys arranged it so the signal relays through several foreign countries. Unless they have access to Green Beret technology at the exact moment you call, they don’t have a prayer of tracing us.”

“Good.” That made her feel marginally better. “Still, I think I’ll call Janey.” She dialed and had to smile when she heard Janey’s cautious hello. Goodness only knew what was showing on her phone’s caller ID.

“Janey, it’s me, Claire.”

After the relative peace of the woods, her friend’s shriek jabbed through her head like a jackhammer. “Claire, oh, my God, where the hell are you? We’re all going nuts here. I can’t believe you went off in the woods with that guy. Are you okay? Your dad’s about to call in bloodhounds and the FBI to find you even though he got your notes and voice mails.”

“Janey, I’m fine,” she answered, cutting through her friend’s chatter. “I’ve had several days of survival training. Luc taught me how to clean and cook fish, rabbits and even snakes.” She made a face.

“Wow,” Janey said cautiously. “But, Claire, this isn’t like you. I thought for sure you’d be back by now. You didn’t even take three-quarters of your gear.”

Claire fought down her anger. “Janey, my dad put GPS tracking devices in my stuff—my boots, my purse, my bags.”

“Oh. That’s a bit much, even for him.”

“And he made all those arrangements for training me at Parris Island, having me sleep in the VIP hotel every night. Do you know what I’ve done out here? I built a sleeping platform out of real live trees with a real machete that I sharpened myself. I slept on it for two nights. And those were two long nights, Janey.”

“Where have you slept the other nights, Claire?” her friend asked quietly.

“Once I proved I could do it, Luc let me off the hook and put up the tent he’d stashed.”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking.”

“I know what you’re asking and I’m not answering.” She and Janey had always shared everything, but this thing with Luc was too raw and untested to giggle over with her friend. Not that Janey sounded in the mood to giggle.

“Roger that, Claire. What I don’t know, I can’t tell your father.”

“Exactly. You can tell him I found his spies in the sky, and you can tell him that my survival training is on
my
terms.” Luc raised his eyebrows at her emphatic conversation.

“Don’t you think you should call him yourself to tell him? He is worried sick about you being alone in the woods with some stranger.”

“He’s not a stranger anymore.”

“That’s what I thought.” Janey sighed. “When will you be back?
Where
will you be back? At least let me tell your dad that.”

Claire considered that and nodded. “Let me check with Luc.” She turned to him. “When are we coming back?”

He studied her for a second. “You want to go now?”

“No.” She still had plenty to learn, about survival, as well as about Luc.

“Three days from now. We’ll meet your father at the Special Forces compound at Bragg, where we first met.”

She relayed the information to Janey.

“Okay, that will be the eleventh and plenty of time for you to pack for your flight.”

“Oh, right.” In the whole crucible of her experience, she had almost forgotten about leaving for the settlement at Río San Lucas.

“You are still going to South America, aren’t you?” Janey’s tone was dry. “That
is
the reason you’re out in the woods eating snakes with a snake-eater.”

“Honestly, Janey, ‘snake-eater’ isn’t the nicest way to refer to Green Berets. Didn’t Olie tell you that?”

“You don’t even want to know what Olie told me.” Her voice went from dry to pissed-off.

“Really? Well, you’ll have to fill me in later. I don’t want to run down the battery.”

“I imagine not. According to my caller ID, you’re calling from Uzbekistan. Quite the survival trip, that.”

Claire finally had to laugh. “We’re a bit closer than Uzbekistan, if my dad asks.”

“Oh, he will, Claire. He will.” With that foreboding prediction, they said their goodbyes.

Luc studied her face, his own unreadable. “She’s worried about you?”

“Yeah,” Claire admitted. “This is all pretty out of character for me.”

“Me, too.” He stared off into the woods. “Maybe I should have kept you at Parris Island. You still could have learned the basics.”

She frowned at him. “How was I supposed to learn how to survive at night? How was I supposed to gut all those fish if I knew I had a hamburger and fries waiting for me for dinner? Hunger is a powerful motivator.”

“I was hungry, too—hungry for you.”

“Well, don’t look so thrilled about it.”

He wore a sourpuss expression. “I’m not happy. I’m letting my…need for you cloud my judgment. And clouded judgment gets people hurt.”

“I won’t get hurt.”

“There’s so much you need to know.” He paced the clearing. “A proper course would take weeks, if not months.”

She jumped in front of him. “But there are all those stories of people who survive terrible things without much or any formal training.”

He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “And there are plenty of well-trained men who die anyway.”

“So what’s the point?” She made a sweeping gesture at the fire she had started with a flint and steel, the fish and game she had painstakingly cleaned, the water she had purified. “If none of this means a damn, why bother? If those big, tough men can’t make it even with all their knowledge, I should curl into a ball and die if I ever get dumped in the middle of nowhere.”

“Stop it!” He reached out and grabbed her arms, shaking her. “If you ever get into trouble, you will remember every damn thing I tell you and you will get your ass to safety. You are not going to die.”

“Okay, Luc.” She shook off his grip.

He stared at her and slumped onto a log, a stunned look on his face. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you like that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have. Why did you?”

“’Cuz I can’t stand the idea of you dying lost and alone—you dying, period.” He rubbed his eyes. “I…well, I’ve lost teammates who seemed invincible.”

She sat next to him. “Nobody is invincible. My mother lived in the jungle for over twenty years without any problems but then died from cancer.” She slugged him in the biceps, definitely causing more damage to herself than him. “Oh, why am I lecturing you on danger, anyway? You jump out of planes, sneak around in enemy territory and probably go shark-hunting for fun in flippers with a knife clenched between your teeth. You are the last person to bitch at me about risk. Didn’t you tell me you had a pet alligator when you were a kid?”

“Yeah.” He finally grinned, showing her a couple round white scars on his forearm. “Li’l bastard got me good before I smartened up.”

“Got rid of him?”

“No, got fast enough to avoid being bit. Once he got big enough to take an arm off, I let him loose in the swamp.”

Claire sighed. “And you think I’m crazy for wanting to go teach some kids? Believe me, I’ll stay away from the alligators.”

“Okay,
béb
.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “You’re gettin’ to be one tough chick. Maybe the gators’ll swim away when they see you coming.”

She laughed and leaned into his side. “You bet. They know I need a new alligator purse.”

He laughed. “Since you’re stickin’ ’round for the end of training, I need to figure out what to cover next.”

“What, you thought I’d quit before now?”

“That was before I knew you,” he replied diplomatically.

“Since I’ve made it almost to the end, what comes toward the end of the training for a real Green Beret?”

“SERE training—survival, evasion, resistance and escape. SERE training is heavy duty and only a few soldiers can hack it. The rest wash out to their regular units.”

“Oh. Are you going to teach me some SERE skills?”

“No way. You need months of training before you’d be even half-ready for that. I’m happy you know how to use a compass now.”

Claire pursed her lips. She thought she’d done slightly better than that. “I bet you I can hide from you—at least for a while.”

“Cher,
you couldn’t win a game of hide-and-seek with a two-year-old.”

“Hey! You too chicken to try?”

He gave her an amused smile bordering on the edge of smirkiness. She hated when people smirked at her.

“I mean it. A big, bad Green Beret like you can’t find a civilian out here? What kind of bayou boy are you?”

“Listen, I could track a mosquito through the air if I wanted. But I don’t.”

“What do you want?”

“You.” He gave her a blatant stare that made her quiver, but not enough to back down.

“Well, you’re not going to get me like that.” She snapped her fingers. “You think I need more training—well, train me in this evasion stuff.”

He rubbed his chin. “All right. You wanna do some evasion training, we’ll do it. Gear up.”

She quickly gathered her knife, compass, flashlight and canteen, strapping the machete in its scabbard to her waist. Its weight was comforting now rather than scary.

He examined her from head-to-toe, shaking his head. “Damn, who’d have thought a woman could look so sexy wearing a machete.”

“I’m full of surprises.”

He gave her some last-minute instructions about avoiding snakes and gators. “Now the part that comes after evasion is resistance. When I catch you—”

“You mean ‘if,’” she interrupted, trying for bravado.

“No, I don’t.
When
I catch you, you are my captive and totally within my power. Under my absolute control.”

“So what does that mean?”

“You have to do anything I want. Unless you want to resist me—you know, just for practice. That’s the R in SERE. Resistance.”

The part of being under his control sounded a bit menacing. Luc would never hurt her, but she wasn’t tough enough to resist much.

He watched her closely. “You up for this?”

“Absolutely.”

“I find you, you’re mine. Every last inch of you. For as long as I say so.”

She swallowed hard.

“I’ll give you a half hour’s head start. Enough time to get yourself away, but not too far lost. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Go.”

She scurried out of camp, noting with irritation how he leaned against the log and tipped his hat over his eyes to take a catnap.

She’d show him. Her ancestors had hidden from the British and the Yankees both. Surely some of their abilities had been passed along. She stepped into the nearby stream, careful to not disturb any rocks to give away her moves.

Walking upstream was actually kind of pleasant, her poor, battered feet cooling after several minutes in the brackish water. The birds sang overhead and even that fat stick floating toward her was interesting.

Oh, no, that was a snake swimming downstream, not a stick. Well, that would be a real bite in the butt if she got snakebit. Claire stepped purposely to one side of the stream, trying not to scream and sprint from the water like she desperately wanted to. According to Luc, most snake species around here were non-venomous, except for two: rattlesnakes didn’t swim and the other…The snake sensed the changing current and opened its white-lined mouth wide, its fangs a-popping.

This was the other venomous snake in the area—the cottonmouth. She gasped and froze, trying to gauge which way the snake would swim.
Away from me, away from me.