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His arms tightened lightly around her, pressing her a little closer to his muscular body. His hands roamed up her bare back while her hands roamed down his. His buttocks were firm and imminently grippable. They made her think of athletic sex.

“You have the best ass, ever,” she whispered.

“You have the best?—“

A noise behind them made him shove away from her, whirling into a defensive crouch.

A motorboat was coming around an outcropping of rock at the end of the tiny beach.

“Get down,” Alex bit out.

Katie threw herself down to the sand. Crap. That looked like a military patrol boat of some kind. The half-dozen men on board wore military uniforms and were using binoculars to stare at the shore.

“Don’t move,” Alex muttered. “As long as we don’t call attention to ourselves, they won’t see us here in the shadows.”

She made like a lump of driftwood to the best of her ability as the vessel cruised slowly, ominously, past. Was this a routine patrol? Or had these guys spotted Pedro’s fishing boat on radar, maybe?

The military vessel rounded the point at the north end of the beach and disappeared from view. Alex scrambled to his feet, dressing fast. She followed suit, too terrified to brush the sand off herself.

Sticking to the shadows, Alex headed down the beach in the opposite direction from the patrol boat, and she followed close on his heels. Tension vibrated in his movements, which alarmed her mightily. Why was he so on edge after seeing that boat?

Without warning, he plunged into the pile of debris. What the heck?

She followed after him, surprised to come into a tunnel of sorts. It looked to have been hacked out by humans. It was barely wide enough for her to pass through, and she had to turn sideways to slip through the worst of it. But in a few seconds, she popped out the other side.

“Now what?” she whispered at Alex.

“We head for the alternate rendezvous point,” he whispered back.

“Let me guess. More hiking.”

He shrugged and gave her a hand signal to be silent followed by the signal to move out. Oh, joy .

They crossed what might at one time have been a paved road, but now it was a smooth drift of sand. Alex hugged the edge of the drift, sticking to the patches of exposed asphalt wherever he could. They’d walked perhaps a mile when he threw up a fist abruptly, signaling a halt.

She stopped, listening intently. Only the swish and crash of the nearby surf were audible at first. But then she heard voices. Crap .

Alex plunged into the brush at the side of the ruined road and she followed suit. Her t-shirt caught on something and she gave it frantic jerk. It tore with a sound of rending cloth, and she froze, horrified.

Alex grabbed her arm with his left hand and yanked her down beside him. She mouthed a silent apology and he nodded tersely as he quickly tied a piece of dark cloth over her blond hair. A pistol appeared in his right hand.

Were they really in so much danger? She thought the whole point of sending him down here was that the Cubans would think he was on their side.

Why was he so freaked out at the prospect of running into Cuban soldiers?

Shouldn’t he wave hello to them, introduce himself, and let them know he was going to be rendering first aid to locals for a while?

Waiting breathlessly, she crouched in the tangle of brush. Who was out there? More soldiers? Locals? Looters? A line of uniformed men on foot drew even with their position, six across, all wielding automatic weapons. They looked like they were expecting trouble.

The two on the end closest to her and Alex were muttering something about footprints in the sand and she caught the fractional wince that crossed Alex’s face. Was that why he’d been making her stumble along on the torn-up asphalt?

Someone called out an order low in Spanish. Something about fanning out. She glanced over at Alex in panic. Shouldn’t they run or something?

He shook his head in the negative so infinitesimally that she nearly missed the gesture.

Instead, he sank lower by slow degrees. She mimicked the sinking movement until she lay flat on her belly beside him.

By inches, his arm came over her shoulder blades.

Whether it was meant to protect her or hold her down if she panicked, she had no idea.

Crashing noises shockingly close to them indicated the soldiers were pushing out into the bush. She tensed, and Alex’s arm went iron hard across her back. The message was clear. Don’t move .

She’d heard her brothers talk about close calls when hostiles walked right by them in the dark, but none of them had ever described the throat-paralyzing terror of it, the roaring helplessness of having to just wait and hope you weren’t spotted while the bad guys crashed past your position.

A soldier passed maybe four feet in front of them, moving left to right.

But at the exact moment when the guy had a clear sight line down to where they lay between two dead logs, a spider web or something similar brushed against his face.

The guy sputtered and waved his right arm impatiently while he used his left hand to wipe his face.

The soldier took the next step, disappeared from a direct sight line, and the threat was past.

Alex held her down while the line of soldiers gradually drew away from them, moving south down the road and beating their way through the brush beside it.

Eventually, Alex’s arm lifted away from her and he rose to a crouch beside her. She scrambled upright somewhat less quietly in spite of her best efforts to be stealthy. He gave her a hand signal to hold her position, and then he rose to his feet.

Her thighs were killing her before he finally held a hand down to help her stand. He headed toward the road and turned in the same direction the soldiers had gone, which shocked her. She did note that Alex was careful to stay off of the sweep of sand covering most of the roadway, now.

They’d been walking maybe five minutes when Alex swore low under his breath and dived for the brush again. Echoing his sentiment, she followed him again. With the exception of the chorus of insects, the night sounded completely normal to her.

Her thighs prickled with pain and then shouted in agony, demanding that she let some circulation back into her legs, but still Alex crouched there.

What was he waiting for? She sent him the hand signal questioningly for moving out, and he shook his head sharply in the negative.

Confused and intensely uncomfortable, she held her position.

In a few minutes, the sound of a vehicle approaching became audible.

It was a Jeep picking its way slowly along the remains of the road.

Four soldiers sat in the vehicle, and the passengers were scanning the shore and jungle carefully.

The two in the back had automatic weapons in their laps.

The two in front were armed most notably with gigantic machetes attached to their belts.

The vehicle did not stop and rumbled by their hiding place. It retreated in the same direction the walking men had gone.

What the hell was going on? How was it the Cuban military had converged on nearly their exact position within minutes of their arrival and appeared to be searching for them?

Had Pedro turned them in? Although she disliked that idea, she disliked the alternative more.

Surely, they hadn’t been betrayed from within Doctors Unlimited. Or worse, the CIA.

As soon as the Jeep passed out of sight, Alex eased out of the brush and continued in the direction the men and vehicle had come from.

She knew it was a good thing to have slipped through the search line like they’d managed to do.

But it didn’t mean they’d seen the last of waves of incoming Cubans, nor did it mean the soldiers wouldn’t head back this way at some point.

She followed Alex for maybe ten minutes in cautious silence before she ventured to whisper, “How did you know the Jeep was coming?”

“The men on foot were talking about their district commander being headed this way.”

“At this time of night? Why?”

“No idea. But given that all this activity is taking place in the exact spot, at the exact time we arrived on the island, one has to wonder if we’re the cause of it.

” Alex stopped and pulled out his cell phone.

He fiddled with the GPS function for a moment.

“Another quarter mile or so should bring us to the back-up rendezvous point.”

Funny, but a quarter mile of walking on destroyed asphalt felt like a lot further. Her calves ached like big dogs before the roofless hell of a small stone building came into view ahead. It sat high above the road on a rocky crag overlooking the ocean.

“Gaviota hut,” Alex muttered. “That’s where we’re headed.”

“What’s a gaviota hut?”

“Gaviota means seagull in Spanish. It’s a ruin where only the birds hang out.”

“Our contact is a seagull? Cool,” she replied lightly.

He smiled briefly and turned up a path that looked more like a washed-out gully at the moment. They wound up the hill about halfway when they reached a massive washout, maybe twenty feet across and at least as deep.

Alex screeched to a stop on its lip and she barely avoided plowing into him and pushing him over the edge. “Whoa,” she gasped.

They stared down into the ravine together. A raging torrent of water rushed down the mountain. If either of them fell into that it would smash them on the rocks before washing their broken bodies down to the sea.

She looked up the mountain, and the slash of the ravine was visible all the way to the top. She murmured, “Got a Plan C meeting point, Captain Preparedness?”

“No. We’re on our own for now.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

He shrugged. “I’m good at improvising. I suggest we head toward the area where the ships have been seen coming and going and scout around for ourselves.”

“Where is this area exactly?”