* * * *
Hawk settled heavily on the deck beside Mac, trying to ignore the burn of the wound in his left arm. “We’ve managed to put some distance between us and them, Sarg, but we’re pretty much out of ammo. What’s the plan?” Mac snorted with disgust. “Aside from trying to stay alive? No clue.”
Hawk nodded. He hadn’t really expected Mac to have a plan, but he’d hoped he did.
“Guess it’ll be a short ride.”
“How’s the fuel holding up?”
Hawk shrugged. “This thing’s built for speed. The good side is that it was fast enough to outrun ‘em—what they had to throw at us so far, anyway. The bad news is, fast equals fuel guzzler at this speed. It’s anybody’s guess how far we can get in it.”
Mac frowned. Coming to a decision, he got to his feet wearily. “I think I’ll go have a chat with our ‘guest’ and see what she knows.”
Hawk looked at him surprise. “You think she’d know anything about the fuel consumption?”
“She’ll know where she came from. I’m guessing whoever the boat belongs to, they were expecting to get back.”
“Duh,” Hawk muttered, irritated with himself. “You think, whatever this thing is we’ve got, it’s gonna turn us into mindless beasts permanently?”
Mac flicked a sharp look at him. He swallowed a little sickly. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Hawk. You lost a lot of blood.”
A flicker of relief went through Hawk. “Hadn’t thought about that.”
Mac glanced around at the men on the deck. “Get some rest while you can.
Everybody needs to be sharp. No telling what we’ve got ahead of us.”
“It’s a fuckin’ shame it didn’t occur to those bastards that we might need to be fresh when we escaped their fuckin’ torture chambers,” Hawk said dryly. “I ain’t slept in
… shit! I can’t remember. Not since ‘it’ happened, I don’t think.”
Mac sent him an irritated look when he followed him down into the main cabin.
He didn’t say anything, though, and Hawk decided it was a warning to cut the chitchat rather than irritation that he’d followed him.
It was dark as shit down in the main cabin, but that was one of the few benefits they’d discovered about the parasites they’d picked up in the jungle. Their vision was a
155
hell of a lot better than it had been before, better than the ‘perfect’ required just to get into Special Forces—because it was better than human—which they weren’t anymore.
Not that any of them wanted to admit it, but they all knew it.
Mac glanced around and finally moved to a light switch. It controlled a wall sconce by the couch. After studying it a moment, he decided not to worry about it. No doubt they were still on radar anyway and the bastards from Guantanamo knew exactly where they were.
It was no surprise to see that their guest wasn’t where he’d left her. He scanned the room, sniffing the air. Whatever it was she had all over her—suntan lotion if he didn’t miss his guess—was strong enough to seem omnipresent, though, making it pretty well impossible to pinpoint her exact location.
It was too small a craft to have many places to hide, though.
Shrugging, he took a few moments to check out what they had and discovered the craft boasted a fairly luxurious captain’s cabin at the bow, two smaller guest cabins barely big enough for the beds in them, and two ‘heads’. The head, or bathroom, for the guests was barely big enough to turn around in and the one for the main cabin not much bigger. He had the impression, though, that the boat had never been intended for any sort of prolonged voyage and had probably never been used for one.
It hadn’t completely lost the ‘new’ smell.
The question was, what was the woman doing on the boat alone?
He found a couple of canvas bags when he did a more thorough search of the cabins, but those only seemed to present him with more questions. There was clothing for two or three different people in each bag—a curious packing arrangement.
Shrugging, he emptied the bags and tossed them to Hawk. “These will work for supplies. Check out the mess and see what kind of stores they brought with them.”
“Any sign of the woman?”
“Not yet, but she didn’t go far,” Mac said dryly.
156
Mac was disconcerted when he found the woman. For a handful of seconds, it hit him that she was dead and he felt his heart contract painfully in his chest. Then he realized she was asleep and amusement and irritation vied for dominance.
Poor kid! he thought. They’d scared the ever-loving shit out of her.
Which might’ve made him wonder how she could be sleeping so peacefully now except that he was familiar enough with nervous exhaustion to know it when he saw it.
There were dried tears on her cheeks. She wasn’t sleeping like a baby because she was too stupid to live, to know what danger she was in. She’d just reached the point of shut down from overload.
He hated like hell to wake her, not the least because he knew she was liable to go berserk on them since they had her cornered. Not that he was particularly worried about his own skin, but she was liable to hurt herself.
His hesitation redirected his mind down a road it shouldn’t have gone, allowed memories to surface of things his mind had recorded that he hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—the way she’d felt beneath him, the way she’d looked in her bikini.
The terrified doe eyes she’d trained on him when he’d cornered her.
Shrugging inwardly, he carefully lifted the blanket she was huddled under to see if his imagination had gone wild or if she really was as fine a specimen of female anatomy as he’d ever laid eyes on. He excused his curiosity on the grounds that it had been a hell of a while since he’d gotten the chance even to look at a woman and it was bound to be a while more before he got another chance—if ever.
He swallowed a little thickly when he’d looked, struggling to keep his cock from bursting through his fatigues. If anything, he decided his imagination hadn’t done her justice. She was soft and round in all the right places, alright, her muscles toned enough to show she regularly worked out—maybe jogged to stay in shape? Or maybe she was a dancer? She had the body to rake in some kind of dough if she was a stripper.
Maybe that was how she’d acquired the boat? Some rich old bastard that was drooling after her bought it for her?
Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze from her body to examine her face again and decided she didn’t look young enough to be a dancer—unless she was retired? Not that she was old, but it was usually the barely legal girls that danced and there was a mature look about her face that made him think she was probably closer to thirty than twenty.
Not that that mattered one way or another, he thought, feeling anger begin to build in him. He couldn’t touch her—didn’t dare.
Jesus he would like to, though! All over, several times.
He was struggling to banish the image of burying himself hilt deep in her, watching her face go slack in the throes of ecstasy, when Hawk, who’d been standing over him, released a ragged breath that made her stir.
Her eyes opened slowly. For several moments, she stared up at the two of them without comprehension and then her eyes grew so wide he could see the whites all the
157
way around the irises—hazel, he mentally noted, not brown as he’d first thought.
She sat up abruptly, but to his surprise and relief, she didn’t start screaming.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you, baby,” Hawk murmured in a voice that might have been soothing if it wasn’t so rough with desire.
Mac flicked an annoyed look at him but finally decided she might not have noticed that the two of them were hanging over her with raging hard-ons, drooling.
“Who are you?” she asked shakily.
“I’m Staff Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, US Marines, special forces,” he replied, nudging his head at Hawk. “He’s Corporal Gabriel Hawkins.”
Sylvie studied both men, trying to assimilate what they’d told her and make sense of it. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Is this … some sort of military exercise?”
The two men exchanged a speaking glance.
“Yeah,” Hawk responded.
“No,” Mac said at almost the same instant and then glared at Hawk.
Hawk glared back at him. “You
tryin’
the scare the shit out of her?”
Mac met Sylvie’s gaze. “That what you thought that was all about?”
Sylvie swallowed with an effort. “It seemed like it might be a possibility,” she hedged.
“But that isn’t what you thought.”
It wasn’t, but she didn’t think she wanted to bring up what she’d thought. Maybe if she pretended they weren’t convicts they wouldn’t feel any need to do anything to her?
“I won’t tell anybody anything—because I can’t, you know? I didn’t really see anything and I have a very bad memory for names and … uh … faces,” she said a little hopefully.
Mac studied her sardonically. “Where do you suggest we drop you? We’re miles from the coast … any coast.”
“Where are you taking me?” She held up her hand before either man could answer. “No! Don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know.”
Mac studied her thoughtfully. “You want to get out of there?”
Sylvie smiled at him a little weakly. “Not really,” she said, her chin wobbling noticeably.
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you,” Hawk said again.
She sent him a wide-eyed, disbelieving look.
“We just want the boat and whatever supplies you’ve got.”
She seemed to relax fractionally. “Take whatever you want. You can just drop me anywhere.”
Mac scanned her length, lingering a lot longer than he’d intended. She was pale when he met her gaze again. “Lady, I think that’s just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard. We drop you off
anywhere
dressed like that and you’ll be damned lucky to get two feet without ….”
She looked for several moments as if she was going to burst into tears. To Mac’s relief, she sucked it up. He felt like pure shit, though, seeing her eyes swimming with unshed tears—like he’d been pulling the wings off a butterfly.
The look Hawk bent on him pissed him off.
“You should get dressed,” he said gruffly. “I’m not trying to scare you, but we’ve got two squads on board and none of them have been within sniffing distance of a woman
158
in six months—let alone one like you.”
Sylvie nodded jerkily, all too happy to oblige. Gripping the blanket she’d been covered with, she surged to her feet.
Unable to resist the opportunity to see if she felt anything like she looked, Hawk grasped her waist and lifted her from the box where she’d been hiding. It wasn’t one of his brightest ideas. He didn’t want to let go of her once he’d set her on her feet. His hands tightened reflexively on her tiny waist.
Mac punched him in his wounded arm. Rage surged through him at the sudden burning pain, but he managed to tamp the urge to punch his superior back.
It still took an effort to peel his fingers off of her when he had visions of throwing her down on the deck and fucking her until he was exhausted dancing in his head.
“Let go of her, Hawk!” Mac growled warningly.
Swallowing a little convulsively, he ordered his fingers to loosen their grip.
Flicking a frightened look at his face, the woman raced toward the cabins, struggling to cover herself with the blanket she was dragging.
“I didn’t catch your name, baby.”
Sending him a terrified look, she slammed the door. They heard the distinctive click of a lock.
Mac sent him a look of disgust. “Jesus, Hawk! Get a fucking grip!”
Hawk glared at him, but after a moment he managed to force himself to relax. He ran a shaking hand over his face. “Sorry, Mac. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I do,” Mac retorted grimly.
Hawk frowned, seemed to wrestle with himself. “It ain’t the parasites,” he growled. “Man, that is one
beautiful
woman. Don’t tell me you don’t want her so bad yourself you can taste it.”
“Like hell! I’ve known you a lot of years, Hawk. Don’t tell me you don’t know you aren’t the same man you were six months ago.”
Hawk swallowed a little sickly. “You think it’s starting to affect us all the time?
Even when we aren’t … you know?”
“I think it has been from the beginning.”
Hawk glanced around and finally flung himself down on the couch. “Maybe it would’ve been better if they’d just killed us,” he muttered. “I’m not sure I want to live like this.”
“Suck it up, soldier!” Mac growled. “We can deal with it.”
Hawk shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He grimaced after a moment. “It ain’t safe to touch her, is it?”
Mac frowned. Instead of answering immediately, he began to pace restlessly. “I don’t know. Nobody at the fucking ‘medical center’ got infected that I know anything about.”
Hawk snorted. “Now who’s living in a fantasy land? We infected our pick-up, remember? Everybody in the lab was wearing hazmat suits.”
Mac frowned and finally shrugged. “We didn’t infect the backup team they sent in to pick us up,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but we were dead—or close to it after they strafed the pick up boat.
Maybe the parasites were too busy fixin’ us up to change hosts?”
“Maybe. Maybe they just had better timing? Maybe the parasites were satisfied
159
with the hosts they already had? Maybe, maybe … that’s all we’ve fucking got, a whole hell of a lot of maybes. Maybe she won’t catch whatever the fuck we have as long as we keep our hands off of her? I don’t know, but as much as I’d like to fuck her until I’m too exhausted to think anymore, we don’t have time for it. We need to keep our minds on escape if we want to stay alive—and I do.”
A sudden thought occurred to Hawk that made him feel distinctly ill. “Shit!
What if we’ve already … contaminated her? What if she passes it to everybody she meets up with?”
Mac chewed his lip thoughtfully and finally shook his head. “They said it was parasites—they seemed pretty sure of that, anyway. If it was that easy to ‘catch’ it, somebody else sure as hell would’ve when they were stacking us in the morgue.”
Hawk considered it and relaxed fractionally. “Well, that’s a relief, anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate those fuckin’ bastards, but I wouldn’t like to think we were a threat to everybody we run across.”
“That might not come up. We aren’t out of the woods, yet,” Mac said dryly. He glanced toward the door of the cabin then, trying to decide whether the woman had had time to dress yet and finally decided she had. Striding to the door, he tapped on it. “You dressed?”
He heard a grunt of exertion from inside the room. “Not yet! Just a minute!”
Shaking his head, he stepped back and kicked the door in. As he’d suspected, her ass was framed in the porthole in the bow of the boat above the bed. Crossing the cabin in two strides, he caught her by the waistband of the shorts she was wearing and dragged her back in. She surprised him by putting up a fight. The moment he’d dragged her upper body back inside, she whirled on him. He caught both wrists as she swung at him and pitched both of them back onto the bed, pinning her beneath him and manacling her wrists on either side of her head.
“Don’t piss me off, woman!” he growled. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m mad.”
Sylvie stopped struggling to buck him off of her abruptly—not because of the warning in his voice or even because she’d run out of steam. She was frightened enough adrenaline was pumping through her at about ninety miles an hour.
It was the change in his expression and the hard ridge rising against her mound that finally filtered into her frantic mind and set off warning bells. Gasping for breath, she went perfectly still. He studied her face for a long, long moment, breathing raggedly, but she didn’t think for a moment that it was from overexerting himself in trying to subdue her. His weight alone was enough to do that when he seemed to be solid muscle from the neck down.
Almost as if he couldn’t control it, he curled his hips into hers. A faint tremor went through him.