“Well, he likes you more than he does me. Don’t you?” He turned to MacGowan
“That’s not saying much,” he grumbled. He looked at her critically. “Take off your shirt.”
“I will not.”
Without a word he turned and walked away, and she knew he wasn’t bluffing. “Okay, okay,” she called after him. “But why.”
He came back. “I need something clean to rest your feet on while I bandage them. And I was planning on using the sleeves for bandages. Any more questions?”
She wasn’t in the mood for fighting. “No questions,” she said, unbuttoning the shirt. They were in the shadows, and even in the steamy heat she had a chill, which the wet cotton wasn’t making any better, and she slipped it off her shoulders and handed it to him.
He caught her ankles in his hands, and they were warm against her icy skin. Her feet were pale in his tanned hands, vulnerable, and she turned her face away while he worked, swiftly and efficiently, binding her feet. Next he took her light sneakers, split them open with a wicked-looking knife, and managed to edge them back onto her swathed feet before falling back, eying his handiwork critically.
“That’ll have to do,” he said, rising. “Next time tell me before things get this bad.”
She looked up at him. “You want me complaining about every little twinge?”
He held out his hand to her, but she scrambled to her feet on her own, managing not to wince in pain. “I wouldn’t call those feet a minor twinge.”
“I didn’t think there was anything that could be done about it.”
“Do me a favor – try not to think.” His voice was terse, and under any other circumstances she would have snapped back. But this was his element, not hers.
“All right.”
He raised an eyebrow, then laughed shortly. “A submissive female? I didn’t think they still existed.”
“Hardly. These are unusual circumstances.”
“Glad you realize it. Dylan, what the hell are you doing?”
The teenager had lit up a joint the size of California and was smiling at them peacefully. “Just chilling, man.”
MacGowan snatched the blunt from his mouth and sent it spinning into the swirling river, ignoring Dylan’s howl of protest. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“That’s all I had left, honest. You’re a major buzz-kill. I was keeping up with you – what the fuck does it matter how stoned I was as long as I didn’t fall behind?”
MacGowan grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, shoved a hand inside his loose shirt and emerged with a faded cloth bag. He sniffed it, and tossed it after the joint, holding on to Dylan as he tried to go after it. “Suffer, dude,” he said. He glanced up at the sun overhead. “Another couple of hours and we can stop. That okay with you, Sister Beth?”
“You’re the boss,” she said wearily. “Just get me out of here.”
He laughed again, shaking his head, releasing Dylan. “You going after the weed, Junior, or are you going to come with us?”
Dylan just glared at him, not smart enough to realize MacGowan was their only hope, Beth thought. A moment later they were moving again, down the path that was growing steeper, and then she stopped thinking entirely, putting one foot in front of the other, just to keep moving.
It was pitch-black when he stopped next. There was no moonlight – thick clouds covered the night, and somewhere in the distance she could hear an ominous rumble. It either had to be gunfire or thunder and at the point she would have preferred gunfire. She’d gone beyond misery to a state of numbness that kept crumbling every time she stepped the wrong way, or the bandages rubbed against her feet, or her stomach growled. She was almost disappointed that it was only another fucking rainstorm, the third that day.
MacGowan shoved the two of them down in the bushes with a terse, Schwarzenegger-like “I’ll be back,” but even a tropical downpour couldn’t put a dent in Dylan’s stink, and his mood was even worse. So Beth simply curled in on herself, ducking her head and praying for it to be over.
She didn’t know how long he was gone and she didn’t care. At least she wasn’t walking. She heard his voice from a distance as the rain pounded down on her bowed head but she didn’t bother to move. He could go on without her. She was staying here, and if things got really bad she’d find an anaconda and feed herself to it. Enough was enough.
She was barely aware of his hands on her, and when he scooped her up in his arms she was too beaten down to react. Between their soaked bodies a faint trace of heat bloomed and blossomed, and she turned her face into his shoulder, hiding it from the pounding rain. She stopped thinking, she stopped feeling. She simply closed her eyes and let the night take her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MacGowan dumped the girl’s body down on the cot near the stove. She was a woman, not a girl, he reminded himself, remembering the unexpected feel of curves beneath his hands, and she was over thirty, wasn’t she? Still, she felt like a girl. Still innocent enough not to realize the way the big bad world worked.
Dylan trailed after him, sullen and exhausted, and collapsed on a pallet in the corner. He didn’t have enough energy to glare, he simply stretched out on the wood floor of the tiny house and immediately began snoring.