Taken by Two (4 page)

He ducked down to look me straight in the eye. “You don’t need a knight, Penny, or any man to save you. What you need is a good spanking—and then you need to grow the fuck up and start acting like the badass woman that you are. I have work to do, and once again, you’re a monkey wrench in my life. Danger or not, I’m shipping you back to the States the second we get back to the compound—are we clear?”

I nodded, sniffling and fighting back the tears that threatened to fall. As twisted as it may sound, Rex’s words were the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. Not that I was pretty, not that I knew where the best parties were, and not that I gave good head. But, a man like him could see something badass in me. I was blown away—and I didn’t want to go home.

“I-I’m sorry,” I blubbered as he turned to leave me behind.

I caught up—he slowed down to cut me a little slack.

After a few more minutes of harsh silence, I could see the small band of men milling around a fallen log at the entrance to a dense section of jungle.

The younger guy, Joe, waved to Rex. “Here? Or go in further?” he shouted to Rex across the distance.

Rex silently gave the man a thumbs up gesture as we approached.

“Okay, guys, let’s catch some lunch. We don’t catch anything, you don’t eat. In that section over there,” he pointed, “spread out. You need to find trails where animals are running through these low vines. Your backpacks have snare wire—I’m going to quickly give you a demo, then it’s all you. Set as many snares as you can, then grab your knife and try to stab something. Don’t forget to load up on that DEET insect junk before you start. And,” he warned, looking directly at me, “I want absolute silence during the hunt.”

After his demonstration to the group on how to set a snare, as well as the proper way to humanely dispose of the catch, he set the group loose to hunt.

With the men off hunting, he turned his attention to me. “Well,
sis
, I don’t have an extra kit for you, but I have an extra knife you can use. The snare thing is useless anyway—it would take multiple snares for days to nab enough meat to make it worth the energy expenditure. I just want them to learn various ways of obtaining food.” I stood speechless as he handed me a large knife in a leather scabbard. “You’re joking—I’m not going to kill anything! I can’t. Rex,
please.
”

“Of course you can. That rainforest,” he pointed his own knife toward the overgrown jungle, “is so full of food only an idiot would starve here. Surviving off the land in Colombia is child’s play. Go stab something, and because you look so hot in those snug jeans, I’ll be a gentleman and show you how to clean it.”

Without another word, he walked into the lush jungle and left me standing there alone—alone and freaked out.

I sat in the grass for half an hour as my stomach howled. His words rang out in my head:
“You need to grow the fuck up and start acting like the badass woman that you are.”
He was right—I’d been floundering for years. My mother’s long, grueling illness had leveled me. After college, I did nothing but shop during the day and cruise exclusive clubs at night collecting men. Most of them, all of them, looked like Nate. Rich, pretty, and coveted by the less-connected, less-spoiled women who, unlike me, were able to maintain a size two. A man like Rex would never be attracted to the shallow, trivial Penelope Sedgewick that lived in a Las Vegas casino penthouse. But, I knew damn well he
was
attracted to the captured Penny who was in Colombia. I liked myself here a lot more than I did at home, I decided, as I stood up and rubbed the insect repellent into my skin.

With knife in hand and head held high, I ventured into the moist jungle.

Rex was right—the place was teeming with life. Hunting would never be my thing, but I could see the value of being able to survive if I had to. My mind raced through the list of small mammals that Rex instructed the group to be on the lookout for—I mentally kicked myself for not paying better attention to his lesson.

It took me an hour to happen upon what resembled a large rat sitting in the heavy foliage under a canopy of trees. With the quietest footsteps I could manage, I crept up behind it, and in a flash stabbed it with my knife. Well,
tried
to stab it, anyway. The minute my arm lunged toward it, the tiny creature was gone. My knife sunk into the marshy earth as my body crashed into the muddy jungle floor.

Before I could think, a massive, fat snake fell from above and landed several feet in front of me. I was frozen in place, the snake and I in a catatonic stand-off. My worst nightmare sat there, its beady eyes staring into mine. A voice began to scream, to howl—a voice I recognized from my out-of-body state as my own. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed—the snake never moving.

The demon was brown with marbled markings, his pink forked tongue occasionally darting out at me like a threat. I was sure he was the devil incarnate, there to drag me to hell. The snake was bigger around than my thigh and longer than I was tall. I continued to howl, slowly trying to free myself from the quicksand-like mud I was immersed in. The villainous snake continued its evil stare.

Footsteps—I heard footsteps!

“Penny, I mean
Joanie
, very nice work. Now kill it.” Rex stood nearby, the small group of men babbling to each other in nervous excitement before Rex shushed them.

“Please, Rex, please—it’s going to kill me! I have a phobia—I’m terrified of snakes!”

“Nonsense. Sophocles said ‘To him who is in fear, everything rustles.’ That’s the case here, sweetheart. Get up and kill that fucking snake—we’re all hungry, and that plump bastard is a feast!”

“I
can’t
.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

“Fight or run, Princess. Those are your options.”

I clawed my way out of the mud while they watched, Rex forbidding anyone to help me. As I stood, he walked toward me and handed me the machete they’d been using to fight their way through the jungle. I took the machete and approached the docile reptile.

“Will he bite me?” I asked calmly.

“No,” Rex answered confidently. “Chop off the head.”

My arm swung at the snake with every bit of power I possessed. I didn’t want to miss again and be bitten. In one stroke, the head of the snake was separated from its meaty body.

“Well done,” Rex praised, walking toward the snake. “Kick the head to the side.” I did as I was told numbly, my fear of the snake dissipating like a vapor.

Rex pulled me into him, the clay-like mud I was covered in soiling his clothes. “See? You
are
a badass,” he whispered in my ear. Suddenly my lips were on his, kissing him without thought of the group watching us. His tongue stroked against mine as someone whispered, “I thought that was his sister?”

“Step,” I heard Joe answer. “Barely related,” he tried to assure the shocked group.

Rex pulled back and looked at the gaping group of men. “Takes a woman to kill something worth skinning, I see. Well done, sis.” He patted me on the back and reached toward the snake. “I’ll cook ‘er up if you’ll share?” I nodded, still in shock at the last hour.

I chased after him as he carried the still moving corpse of the snake toward the clearing. The hungry men followed, and he yelled to one of them to start a fire and find a roasting stick.

“You knew I had it in me,”
I mused as he peeled the skin from the fatty body of the serpent. The fire was going, and Rex cleaned the snake as I sat on a log across from him.

“Well, not really. I hoped, but that boa wasn’t going to hurt you, sweetheart. They bite a little, but aren’t venomous. A five-foot long boa constrictor wasn’t going to take you on, baby. You’re too big for her to eat, and on top of it,” he said as he bit his lip to pull at a particularly stubborn section of skin, “she was digesting a recent kill, that’s why she wasn’t moving.”

“It’s female?”

He nodded.

“She really is beautiful,” I noticed, looking at the richness of her markings. “I feel bad now that I killed her.”

“Nah, we needed the food out here. These snakes are everywhere—most common pet snake in America, in fact. She’d have probably been eaten by something else anyway—she was stuck out in the open and vulnerable. If we weren’t going to eat her this afternoon, I bet something else would be. We’ll honor her sacrifice with a feast.”

After the meal of the snake, which I admit was delicious, it took several hours to purify the water and make camp. I was amazed that Rex was able to survive only on what he carried on his back. Later that evening, when we were finally alone in his small tent, he pulled out a silver flask. “Whiskey?” he asked with a wink.

“Yes!” I giggled like a teenager.

“Not too much—you’re still recovering from the dehydration.” He passed me the flask. I shuddered as I took a drink, the warmth of the alcohol a comforting presence as it slid down.

“I feel guilty not sharing a sip.” I nodded toward the noisy shadows still outside telling stories around the fire.

He shook his head, his face suddenly serious. “They are all addicts, Penny. Drugs, alcohol, sex—but addicts, nonetheless. Filthy rich addicts hoping to shake their demons with a high-priced, exclusive survival course taught by a decorated former…well, a former special ops guy.”

“That’s your business?” I asked, passing the flask back to him.

“Among other things,” he answered. “What about you, Penny? What makes you so sad?”

“Sad?”

“There’s a deep down darkness—regret maybe, I’m not sure. Discontent, that’s all over you, but also a restlessness.” He reached for the flask, and took a long sip in the darkness.

“Sad, yeah, I guess that’s fair. My mother and I were close—she died a slow, painful death that I watched day by day. Everyone else in our upscale, fashionable world stepped away when she stopped being pretty, when things got bad. They wrapped it up in giving her privacy, or wanting to remember her the way she was bullshit—but it was really just weak-ass shallow fuckers not wanting to face their own mortality.”

“Most people on earth are weak-ass shallow fuckers not wanting to face their own mortality, sweetheart.”

“I know,” I nodded. “But ever since—I’ve been so empty. Like none of it matters. I float through life looking for something that will move me.”

He handed the flask back to me. “You’re looking in the wrong place, Penny. Nothing, no one will ever fill that hole inside you. You have to find you.”

I sat in the dark tent, my lips numb from the whiskey, listening to words that would change my life.

“Why did you let some guy from your past
kidnap
you, Penny?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly… He drugged me!”

“Okay, but you fought very little. I mean, until yesterday you made no attempt to leave, offered very little resistance. We could be two psychopaths, and you? You decide to fuck your captor? You should have been scared shitless, but yet you just went along with it. Fear is your friend—and yet, you suppressed it. Do you always suppress your emotions like that?”

“I guess I do, yeah. I floated through being captured by some crazy guy from my past the same why I float through life. It took him really freaking me out to get me to act. I didn’t want to die, but this whole time I thought someone would rescue me. They always have.”

“We should have explained to you what was going on right off the bat. I guess in our desire to protect you from the ugly truth, we enabled that same lack of control that’s been plaguing you.”

“Killing that snake was life changing for me. I was lying in the mud, thinking,
‘He’ll save me,’
and then something just clicked—no one is going to save
me
but
me
.”

Between the two of us, we drained the flask. As the noise of the men outside faded, we fell into each other. Rex wove his hands through my hair, pulling my face up toward his. “You surprised me today, Penny. I suspected underneath that silly façade, there was something of substance—but the snake? Never did I think you’d machete a fucking Colombian Boa!” I wrapped my arms around his powerful torso as we snuggled in closer. “There’s something here—about this place, about the two of you…I feel like I just woke up from a long, dark nap. Please don’t send me home, Rex. I’ll behave.”

He gave me a quick kiss before answering with a grin, “You won’t behave. But, you’ve brought a lightness to our existence here. I mean with Nate, it all changed for the better. But now with you, I don’t know
what
it is, but I know it’s something.”

His mouth ground against mine again, eager this time—needy. My hands hunted for the opening to his pants, tearing at the fabric until the head of his cock popped free from the waistband. “Do you really want me, Penny? Or are you just going along with what you think is expected?” I shook my head, sure for the first time in forever what I really wanted. At that moment, I wanted Rex. “I want you
so
badly right now,” I answered. His tongue plowed into my throat, his muscular arms wrapped around my back in a strong embrace. I brushed my palm against the silky skin of his erection, the metal I’d seen earlier felt cold against my hand. I couldn’t help but wonder where else his magnificent body might be tattooed or pierced.