Chapter Nineteen
The desert grew so cold overnight that if Chance had any light, he would’ve seen his breath puff out in front of him. But as the first rays of daylight broke over the horizon, he knew that would change. And quickly.
Until then, he stayed close to Jane. She’d slept more soundly this time. He’d caught a few Zzzs on and off as well. When he woke the last time, her head rested on his bicep like he was her pillow and his leg was thrown over her thigh.
Given the circumstances, staying close was always a good idea.
But that wasn’t the reason he didn’t move.
Holding her warmed him from the inside out.
Then again, he wasn’t within his rights to touch her like that.
There was no need to tangle their legs to keep her warm.
Chance gritted his molars and lifted his leg from her thigh.
Jane mumbled in her sleep and turned to face him.
She cuddled and nuzzled herself into the crook of his arm, and son of a bitch, he liked that the testy blonde had a soft side.
He liked a whole hell of a lot about her besides her attitude, and if he wasn’t very careful, the way she curled her body to his would make him hard as a rock.
He closed his eyes and tried to find sleep again, knowing it wouldn’t come. Not that he’d had enough rest. The warm tickle of her breath against his skin would keep him wide awake.
Chance wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that.
The inky black sky showed wisps of purple in the east. Dawn would eventually arrive, and he hoped it took its time.
There had never been a time when a woman had rested in his arms for the basic need of safe sleeping.
She didn’t care about looks. She wasn’t there because they’d gone to bed.
She simply needed him to protect her while she rested. He liked that.
Which was a problem. They were in as safe a location as he could find, but now that day was breaking, he should’ve been scanning the perimeter. Instead, he was staring at Sleeping Beauty.
He liked that better than Mary Poppins.
Actually, he liked Jane.
No matter the name, he couldn’t allow attraction to distract him from his duty. Jane shivered and burrowed against him and showed signs of waking. A pang of jealousy lumped in his chest. Those sleepy sighs and quiet, almost awake murmurs weren’t for him. Who did she normally wake up with?
Maybe, no one.
He wondered what would happen if they’d found each other at another place, in another time. That thought was all it took to realize he was losing his touch with reality.
Regretfully, he moved her head from his arm, separating their bodies. Jane sleepily grumbled, fighting for her heat source, leaving Chance now surer than ever that she would wake up, notice how they had clung together and think he was a perverted asshat.
At that moment, her eyes flickered open. Big, blue, and bottomless, they landed on his. Held his. The moment stretched on for an eternity. “Good morning, Chance.”
As if he needed any confirmation of how dangerous Jane was, he now had it. They were on their own in war-torn Syria. Enemies could arrive from any direction. But here he was, immobilized by the woman at his side.
Jane had been having a nightmare. Teddy was ripped from her hands over and over again.
Everywhere she ran, chasing after him, she ran into roadblocks and had to watch his anguished expression as he was pulled farther and farther away.
And then, at the very end, right before she had awoken to face Chance, was a man with dark, sea-blue eyes who promised everything would be okay.
Now that she was awake, staring into those same blue eyes she’d dreamt about, she felt safe. Even as the terror of her time in Syria flooded back, she didn’t worry. Not when this guy was by her side.
“Morning.” His voice was thick with sleep, but he pulled abruptly away.
Her chest twanged, and self-conscious, she sat up, finger-combing her unruly hair. “Not a morning person?”
Big surprise. He didn’t answer.
Then again, she’d been very close to him. When was the last time she’d taken a shower? How awful did she smell? Jane ran her tongue along her teeth, grossing herself out. No wonder Chance jumped from next to her. There was a strong chance she resembled Medusa.
Heat crawled up the back of her neck. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed that Chance Evans was hotter than the Saharan sun. And, oh boy, did she know it now.
Attractive people were fairly constant in her life. The Thanes only associated with only beautiful people. Most of those beautiful people had egos to match the depths of their amazing looks.
But this guy? He was worlds apart, and if left to her own devices, she could’ve lain next to him and stared all day.
How was it possible that he seemed better looking today—with his stubble-covered face and his piercing blue eyes, dark and troubled, like an icy sea during a winter storm?
Apparently, there was nothing better looking in the entire world than a smoking-hot mercenary.
Actually, there was nothing better than staring at the man who rescued her from the shittiest armpit one could find in Syria. She owed him her life. That would make anyone weak in the knees.
She pushed up and looked away from Chance.
There wasn’t much to see. The sun blazed low in the morning sky, harshly changing the air from frigid to burning.
There was nothing but desert, dead brush, and rocks and a million variations of the color beige.
“Where is everything? The refugee camp? The burning fence?”
“Long gone. I hauled ass for a while,” he offered.
Jane snapped and pretended to pout. “I was asleep and missed everything.”
He laughed. “You passed out and missed a lot.” He handed her the canteen of water. It felt woefully close to empty. “Take a sip,” he said.
“You don’t have more, do you?”
He shook his head. “Don’t take too much right now, and we’ll be okay.”
She pursed her chapped lips. “That’s not the ‘yup, more water right here’ that I was hoping for.”
He chuckled then turned to his bag. “Soon as I get my comm device linked up, we’ll get airborne and you can have all the water you could possibly desire.”
He fiddled with his earpiece, and she stood up, stretching.
The muscle aches had lessened, and after a couple of stretches, she focused on her real pain.
The blisters and sunburn. There wasn’t much she could do for them out here, so she eased back onto the sleeping mat that he’d arranged for her.
Chance continued to fuss with his equipment.
She guessed things weren’t going well. “No one’s picking up on the other side? ”
“It’s not like a phone call,” he muttered, distracted.
Well, no kidding. She thought about picking up a stone and pelting him. Maybe he’d realize his tone was a touch too condescending, but she decided against it since he had let her sleep on him.
She opened her mouth to ask him whether he was okay, but he must have anticipated it, because he cut her off with a “shhh.”
Okay. Jane reconsidered a quick stone pelting, again deciding it wouldn’t do any good.
Chance repeated the same action several times and then paced, a stony look on his face.
Ruh-roh. Something wasn’t going well for fearless Hercules. “What’s the problem?” She readied to retaliate if he shushed her again. But how? Give him a little kick? She wasn’t sure. But the shushing and clipped talk could ease up.
She didn’t have to kick him, because he stopped by their motorbike and kicked it. “We have a broken-down bike.” He shook the comm device. “And a broken-down mic.”
“Wait. What?” The motorbike had worked before she’d passed out.
“We ran out of gas.”
Her lips rounded. “That seems like an important thing you failed to mention.”
Chance shrugged. “It happens.”
She blinked. “No one knows where we are?”
“For the time being.” His lips thinned.
Her heart sank. “That throws a kink in the works, huh?”
“It’s a complication,” he agreed.
“A complication is more like when you miss a connecting flight at the airport.”
His lips quirked. “That could be one too.”
How the man could lump a missed flight with sitting alone in the desert, she didn’t know. “Chance, do you ever panic?”
He raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I mean.” She rubbed her temples and tried to think of wording a Herculean-Midas-person might understand. “Do you ever freak out?” She put her hands in the air and pretended to scream, then added, “Ya know, panic?”
His chest trembled as though he were holding back a belly laugh. “Why?”
“Because!” She threw her hands into the air—not panicking yet but definitely feeling the possibility looming. “If you’re not the kind of guy who can give me a heads-up when the end is near—”
Chance tipped his head back and released a belly laugh he’d been wrestling with. He laughed so hard the man gasped.
“Chance, I’m serious!”
He buckled over. “When the end is near.”
She clamped her hands on her hips. “Pardon me, but this is my first abduction-escape-desert-debacle.”
He didn’t stop laughing, and for good measure, threw in an “oh, shit” and slapped his thigh.
Jane crossed her arms. “I’m so thrilled I can make you laugh.”
“Oh, Mary Poppins.” He staggered over as though he could barely walk and draped his arm over her shoulders. “I needed to laugh.”
She rolled her eyes. “Then, jeez, you’re welcome.”
Just when she thought everything would work out, her hero rescuer was cracking up before her very eyes.
She tried to stop her despair from getting too low.
After all, how many times in recent days had she thought she was at the end of the line?
More than she could remember. If she’d given up, it would’ve been the end.
But she didn’t. Something always worked out.
Even in the midst of an insanely good-looking hero who was losing his mind.
Eventually, he stopped laughing and released her from under his arm.
“Did that slip from reality help you come up with a plan?” she asked.
He chuckled again. “We walk.”
“Walk?” Jane flinched when said the words that her blistered feet were hoping to avoid. “Are you sure?”
Instead of answering, shielding his eyes, he studied the uninhabitable terrain before them as if he might be able to pinpoint the promised land.
“Where to?” she asked and mimicked his stance.
Jane shielded her gaze from the sun, turning to face the same direction and scanned the desert.
There didn’t seem to be much to see, though she supposed he had some kind of superhero training that left him well-prepared for life’s little hiccups.
What military mission guy didn’t prepare for a communication failure in the devil’s backyard? Right…?
“Um…” She cut her fruitless search short and glanced at him. “What are we looking for?”
His lips pursed, and he didn’t offer an immediate answer.
“Can you hear me? Or—”
He grinned. “Sometimes no answer is an answer.”
“Not really.”
Chance sobered and pulled a handheld device from his pack. “Sometimes I’m just thinking.”
Her nerves skittered, because while she was not a superhero-rescuer, she considered herself a master of reading faces. At least when it came to little kids. But, it wouldn’t be the first time Jane had lumped grown men and little kids into the same category. Chance’s expression didn’t bode well.
That look mixed with her limited knowledge of the Syrian landscape—yes, she had only glanced over that section in the brochure when Dax announced their final location.
Who would fault her? There was a level-four travel ban in effect.
She hadn’t planned to go merrily skipping along what was called one of the most unforgiving places on Earth—Jane didn’t blame her nerves for somersaulting like delirious, dehydrated little anxiety explosions. “Do you know where we are?”
“We’re right here, Mary Poppins.” He checked his device.
Her eyebrows snapped together, and a growl that surprised both of them rumbled from her throat.
The corner of his mouth quirked, and then he extended the device. “Our GPS coordinates.”
The screen meant a whole bunch of nothing to her, and she lifted her shoulders. “That’s good? Right?”
“Yeah.” He pocketed the GPS tracker. “But it’d be better for headquarters to have them also.”
“Ah, yes.”
“We’ll continue toward the last evac zone.” Chance checked his compass. “But there may be a small problem we deal with on the way.”
Jane chewed on the inside of her mouth, wondering what he considered a small problem. She could name half a dozen concerns without having to think. “The suspense is intense. You know that?”
He rolled back on the heels of his boots and smirked. “We broke from the camp on the far side and judging by the topography map—”
“What? Topography?” Jane extended her arms. “Everything is flat, slightly flat, sandy, dead, or dying.”
“With the occasional promontory.”
She groaned. “I don’t suppose a promontory is a fancy word for a dance hall or something that serves ice water.”
He grinned. “Not quite.”
“More like a club? A disco?”
“It’s good that you’ve kept your sense of humor, MP.”
Jane sighed dramatically. “If it’s not a place to grab a drink and shake my booty, then what?”
His eyebrows arched.
“Oh, it’s something horrible.”
He quietly snorted. “Not horrible.”
“A canyon? Cliffs? A mountain?”
“I think a large landmass would be a good description.”
Her shoulders slumped. “All joking aside, every part of me hurts. Especially my feet.”
“We’ll be out of here soon.”
She sighed and tried to cling to his optimism.
Chance scanned the horizon for the millionth time. “Have you ever been hiking?”
“Not in the desert while taunting death with dehydration.”
“That’s the spirit.” He smiled like Jane announced hiking was her favorite weekend activity. Perhaps the man was certifiable.
She marched up to him and grabbed his biceps. “It worries me a lot that you only hear what you want to hear.”
He winked and adjusted his pack onto his shoulder. “Ready?”
She gave a longing glance to the motorbike, bade it farewell, and gave him a thumbs up.
With that, he strutted off with a cool, easy gait.