To the Brink (12 page)
He followed suit until all that was left was the sauce, which they sopped up with delicious homemade bread and devoured with unabashed hedonism.
That was another thing he loved about her. She enjoyed. Everything. Whether it was a lavender-gray sky at sunset, a song that she would stop and listen to as if it were a prayer, the glide of skin on skin. Or now, as she touched her fingers to the worn blue-and-white-checkered tablecloth, absorbing the much-washed feel of it between her fingertips. A very tactile person, was Miss Prescott. And touching him, being touched by him, was one of her favorite sensory experiences.
From the corner of his eye he saw Madam Jacques walk past, a smile on her face. She had grown used to seeing them together. Apparently, he was a good tipper, because she always gave them the best table in the house.
Even though the evening was warm, a small fire burned in the fireplace by the window that overlooked the garden. From the kitchen he could hear Jean, where he cooked in battered copper pots, barking orders to the little cholo Indian boy who bused tables and helped Madam serve their customers.
When their entrees arrived, Darcy dug into her fish, then ate every bite of the cold baked sweet potato and chunk of corn on the cob that accompanied it. And then when they were both as full as ticks, they still indulged in some lucuma ice cream that made him think of peaches and that exotic and tender flesh between her thighs.
After lingering over their drinks, they finally decided to walk back to her apartment.
"They call it
gania,"
she told him when he commented on the mist that settled over the city. "It makes everything seem sort of dreamlike. I love this time of year here."
It did feel like a dream. The warm Lima night and the contact of their joined hands felt too good to be real as they walked back to her apartment. He'd given up his hotel room after their second night together, earning little more than a raised eyebrow and a curious grin from Manny, who had connected with an old lover himself.
Later they made love. Slow and sultry. Long and lazy. Ethan drifted off to sleep with Darcy in his arms and his mind a blank slate.
It was a gift. A gift of peace that she gave him.
In her arms, he forgot about the hellish places he'd been. Forgot about the reality of the silent, secret wars he fought, about the men he'd killed before they could kill him.
With her, he didn't have to be a warrior.
With her, he only needed to be a man.
He'd known her less than a week. And she'd changed his life completely.
Changed him to the point where he'd never be the same again.
To the point where he knew he didn't ever want to be.
Chapter 9
JOLO
ISLAND,
PHILIPPINES
PRESENT
"It's going to be dark soon," Darcy said
softly even though the entire camp was asleep— including the woman who was lying with her head on Darcy's lap.
She didn't care. She just needed to talk. Needed to hear the sound of her own voice. Something real in a surreal nightmare.
"It's something, isn't it? How nightfall just sort of drops like a log in the jungle? It's daylight. Then it isn't.
"I'm not much of a fan of the dark," she confessed, looking forward to the transition with all the enthusiasm of going under the knife without anesthetic.
She looked down. The woman had surrendered to a combination of exhaustion and fever. Or possibly she'd just shut down mentally as well as physically. Sleep was one way to escape the mental anguish of her ordeal.
Despite the oppressive heat, icy chills ran down Darcy's spine when she remembered the horrible, otherworldly sounds the woman had made before finally quieting.
"Wish I knew who you were," Darcy said, resting a comforting hand on the woman's shoulder.
"Amy."
It took a moment for Darcy to react. And then her heart picked up a beat. "Did ... did you say something?
The silence that followed was so long and so absolute that Darcy decided she must have been hearing things. So long that when, at last, she heard another almost indiscernible whisper, it startled her.
"Amy."
A surge of adrenaline shot through Darcy's system.
"Amy?" she whispered back so the guard wouldn't hear. "Is that your name?"
Without lifting her head, she nodded.
Darcy's surprise was so huge it made her lightheaded. "Oh, Amy. I'm so glad to meet you. I'm Darcy. And I have a friend back in the states named Amy," she said, working to soothe, relieved beyond belief that Amy had finally initiated conversation. "Are you from the states?"
"New York."
"You're from New York?" Darcy asked, more to keep her talking than for confirmation.
"Buffalo. And I'm ... I'm not crazy. Sometimes ... sometimes I just want them to think I am. They ... they leave me alone that way."
Darcy glanced up at their guard again. He stood a couple of yards away, his back to them, deep in conversation with another one of the terrorists. Another teenager. She looked across the camp. No one was paying the least bit of attention to them.
By the time she zeroed back in on Amy, a lightbulb had burst on in her head.
"Amy ... would you be Amy Walker?"
Another slow, hesitant nod.
My God.
Everyone at the embassy had assumed Amy Walker was dead. It had been months—maybe six months—since the office had received an inquiry about the American teacher who had disappeared. Darcy hadn't worked the case herself, so she didn't know who'd made the contact, but if she remembered right, they'd expressed concern over not hearing from Amy. The last anyone had known, she was in Manila.
"How do you know that?" Amy whispered.
Darcy lowered her head closer to Amy's. "I work for the vice consul's office in the U.S. Embassy in Manila. I remember seeing a missing-American report on you. My God, Amy, you've been missing for months."
"Close as I can determine, five months, one week, and two days."
"I'm so sorry." It seemed like such an inane, useless thing to say.
"Yeah. I'm sorry, too."
Finally, Amy sat up—and gave Darcy her first good look at her face in the fading light.
As ravaged as she was with fatigue and starvation and God only knew what unspeakable things had been done to her, Darcy could now see what the missing-persons report had described as a twenty-five-year-old white female. Blond. Blue. Five six. One hundred and fifteen pounds. Only there wasn't much more than ninety pounds left to her, if even that.
"So, what did you do to land in Camp Wish-I-Were-Dead?" Amy asked with a tentative smile—as if it had been a very long time since she'd had reason to use one.
Amazing. After all that had happened to this young woman, she still had the backbone to crack a joke. She was half-starved, bruised and battered, and probably ill, yet she'd found a way to stay alive and stay sane.
"Seems I know a little too much about something I shouldn't know anything about," Darcy said, figuring no good would come of exposing Amy to her suspicions. "What about you?"
"Just the opposite. I was trying to find out something I know nothing about. I must have asked the wrong questions of the wrong people." She gave Darcy another hesitant smile. "So ... I suppose it's a stretch to hope you've got a fail-safe escape plan in the works."
"Sorry." Darcy didn't tell her about Ethan or her hope that he would come for her. This woman couldn't take any more letdowns. "But if we could figure out how to fire that relic of a grenade launcher we could wreak some serious havoc."
"Guess we're pretty much screwed then, aren't we?"
Yeah,
Darcy thought, but didn't say as much. They were pretty much screwed.
"How badly are you hurt?" Darcy asked.
"I don't know. My ribs are awfully sore. I think... I think I might be sick. I... I get the chills sometimes."
Darcy touched the back of a bound hand to Amy's forehead. As she'd suspected all along, it was warm. "You have a fever."
"Yeah. I figured as much."
They fell silent for a time before Amy broke it. "What I said ... about not being crazy? It's ... it's true ... most of the time."
The single tear leaking down her dirt-streaked cheek told the rest of the story. Most of the time, she wasn't crazy—but some of the time, it was very, very hard not to fall into that pit.
Darcy reached for her and, looping her bound wrists around her, drew her close again.
And then Darcy held on while Amy cried.
All sorts of night sounds reverberated through the rain forest as Darcy lay on her side drifting in and out of a restless sleep.
Beside her, Amy shivered.
The fever,
Darcy thought. It was getting worse.
They hadn't had much more opportunity to talk after Amy had cried herself dry, because their guard had returned to his post. Fortunately, though, since Amy had quieted down they'd been pretty much ignored.
For how long was anybody's guess.
Darcy didn't know how Amy had survived this long. Darcy had never been so tired. So deep in her bones, weary in her mind exhausted. And yet she couldn't truly sleep. Some of the problem was psychological; she recognized that she was afraid they might shoot her or Amy while she slept.
Other reasons were physical. Pain for one. Hunger for another. But a pressing need to empty her bladder was the most compelling.
When she'd finally been given water, she'd drowned herself in the warm, stagnant wetness of it, not knowing when she would be offered more. Their daily food ration consisted of some kind of cold mush that might have been a mixture of corn, rice, and wallpaper paste. With little more than a cup of the gruel to sustain her since morning, there wasn't much to hold up the urine flow.
On a deep sigh, she conceded that she had no choice. Careful not to wake Amy, she pushed herself stiffly to a sitting position. God. She felt like she was a hundred years old. Every joint ached. Her head throbbed. Insect bites burned and itched. And her feet felt like bloody stubs. If she didn't have an infection from a deep cut on her left heel, she would have soon. Infection in the jungle was a death sentence—at this rate, it could do her in before her captors made up their minds to kill her.
She inhaled deeply. If she was going to die, she'd just as soon do it with an empty bladder. For her mother's sake, she wished for clean underwear. And thinking of her mother, who never let her leave the house wearing anything but clean undies—
what if you're in an accident and end up in the emergency room? What would the doctors think?
—brought tears to her eyes even as she smiled.
Her mom must be so worried. And Daddy.
Oh God. Daddy.
She bit her lower lip to keep from crying. Then she dug deep and squared her shoulders.
She wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction of knowing she'd had a bad moment. And she told herself the moment was over. And then she made it
be
over.
She studied the guard who paced slowly back and forth in front of them. Not far away, huddled around a low-burning fire, the other cell members were knotted in a tight little clew, like the worms they were. Whether they stuck tight for defensive reasons or because each simply didn't trust the others out of his sight she didn't know.