Page 29

She nodded. Saying yes would have taken too much effort.

“We have farther to go. A couple of hours at least. You go soft on me now, we’re both dead. Understand that too?”

Another nod. Her hair was in her face. She scraped it back with a trembling hand.

“See that those bushes and trees to my right?”

What she saw was what you saw everywhere in the jungle. A jumble of leaves. A riot of flowers. Tree branches. Shrubs. Vines. An indecipherable mess, no different than anything she’d seen before.

“It’s a game trail.”

This time, she managed a sentence, even if she panted the words.

“I…don’t…see…a…trail.”

He let go of her, stepped a few feet away and shoved aside some of the vegetation. “Look again.”

Alessandra looked. She blinked. She squinted. Okay. She saw…something. A dark space within the dense growth.

“It’s an old game trail,” her rescuer said. “Probably hasn’t been used by anything but pigs for years.”

“New…World…pigs.”

“Right. White-lipped—”

“White-lipped peccaries,” she said. Breathing was a little easier although she was still panting. “But they’re rare.”

He looked surprises for a second, as if he hadn’t expected her to know the name of those animals. Then he let the vines and leaves fall back into place.

“Tell that to the pigs,” he said briskly. “Coming in, I saw plenty of signs of them. The point is, the trail we’re on gets all the human traffic. That’s why we’re going to take the other one. With luck, your bozos will go right past it.”

Her bozos? Alessandra narrowed her eyes. “They’re not my anything.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. Right now, I want to leave some sign to mislead them.”

His tone was downright unpleasant. What in hell did he mean by calling Stubby and Skinny hers? And what was with this sign business? Who did he think he was? Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans?

“And what if they don’t?”

“Don’t what?”

She damn near rolled her eyes. “Don’t go right past that trail?”

“They will.”

He flashed a quick smile, except it wasn’t really a smile at all. As exhausted as she was, Alessandra could recognize a look that said little lady, are you actually questioning me? You didn’t grow up in a Sicilian household without being able to recognize the signs that invisibly read Arrogant Male in Residence.

“I don’t even know your name.”

He didn’t answer.

“I said, Who are you? Who sent you? Who…Hey! Hey, that hurts! Stop! Why are you yanking on my hair? Are you crazy?”

Despite the danger of their situation, Tanner damn near laughed.

Alessandra Wilde spoke with a barely there Italian accent, but it didn’t disguise the fact that she was burning with indignation. She was covered in dirt. She had a black eye. Her skin was dotted with bug bites, her clothes were muddy and torn, and her hair was a wild mass of pale gold curls shot through with bits of leaf and twigs and God only knew what else, but he could easily imagine her standing in a fancy restaurant, facing down a maître d’ who’d made the unforgivable mistake of thinking he could seat her at a bad table.

That a woman of her type had survived the last few days was remarkable, but if life had taught him