Angel Face (19 page)

The cat snarled and crouched menacingly, as if readying itself to leap.

Angela didn’t attempt to imitate that pose. Instead, she walked over to the beast and bopped it on the nose with her hand, showering water everywhere.

Jordan watched in amazement as the huge male cat made a squealing noise, darted around her and out the door.

Was she crazy? Or was he? Because someone sure as hell was.

A
NGELA
rushed over and knelt next to him on the floor.

“Who did this?” she asked, apparently meaning the upended furniture. “Did the jaguar attack you? They rarely do that.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said with as much irony as he could dredge up, given his situation. He was lying on his side, propped awkwardly by bound hands that had gone so numb he couldn’t feel them anymore. And he still couldn’t believe what he was hearing or seeing.

She was naked. She was dripping wet. And his heart was clambering to get out of his body any way it could. Right now, his mouth was the preferred exit.

“Untie me,” he urged. “The cat may come back.”

She stared at him with the patience of a small child whose parent has just said something very silly. “If it does,” she assured him. “I can handle it.”

He heaved himself around, maneuvering to get back to his knees. He didn’t want her to help him. It was more than a matter of pride. He knew what would happen. His
glands went on cruise control when she got near him.

She did anyway, of course, embracing him with arms that were cool and wet and shivering, rubbing him with breasts that were aroused and tender from the elements. Her body was a delicate shade of blush pink, and the worst of it was, she was trembling. Trembling everywhere. He could hear it in her breath, feel it in her hands.

How had she backed down a two hundred fifty pound beast?

Shock, most likely. She was naked and soaked. The stream water may have brought her fever down too abruptly.

By the time she got him to his knees, Jordan was wet and she was dry. Well, drier. Her hair was still dripping beads of water that seemed to be drooling all over the wonders of her feminine flesh. Droplets raced to the tips of her breasts and then hung there, clinging to rose-colored nipples.

No, she wasn’t dry, but she wasn’t a waterfall, either, and that gave him an idea, thank God. Hopefully, it would distract his drooling hormones for a damn second. He did not need her staring with female satisfaction at another one of his resounding erections.

“It was probably because you were wet, right?” he said. “Cats hate water.”

“Jaguars love water.” She rose and gave him a sisterly pat on the cheek, which made him think of Penny. And Birdy. And the hospital. He’d made arrangements for Steve Lloyd and Teri Benson to handle his postop patients and take the surgeries he couldn’t reschedule, but he hadn’t planned to be gone more than a few days. How long
had
he been gone? A few years? It felt like it.

“They love to swim and fish,” she went on. “They’re the most water-friendly of the big cats.”

“Good to know. Next time one attacks, I won’t go hunting for my flippers.”

Now she was picking up the furniture, and he could have broken his neck, craning around to look at her. She’d picked up her blouse but hadn’t bothered to put it on yet. And it wouldn’t have covered the part of her that was pointing his way, anyhow. She
would
have to have an incredible ass, he observed, feeling slightly guilty at the salacious thought.

News flash, Carpenter. She is not an angel. Admiring her backside is not sacrilege.

When she’d righted the coffee table and put the platter on it, she came back, apparently to share some more jaguar lore. Her blouse was draped over her shoulder like an afterthought as she sank to her knees and rested her hands on her thighs. Uncanny how much she looked like that Disney movie mermaid. Even more uncanny how he never had a clue who this woman was going to be from one minute to the next.
Please stand up,
he thought.

“You should never show fear to a jaguar,” she informed him with quiet conviction. “They sense it immediately, and you lose their respect.”

“I’ll remember that, too. Any other jungle etiquette while you’re at it?”

Apparently, there was plenty, because she went on, seemingly without the slightest awareness of his sarcasm. He wasn’t sure she was aware of him.

“Jaguars are the boldest of animals,” she said. “If you’re bold in return, they’ll accept you as one of them. If you act like prey, you’ll
be
prey.”

“It’s difficult not to act like prey when you’re tied hand and foot.”

He got one of those long-suffering looks again. It seemed she did know he was there.

“It has nothing to do with your physical stature,” she chided. “It’s your heart. You could be a child, but if you have courage and strength of character, those things will be honored.”

He hoped his expression conveyed true concern. “You’re starting to sound like a Star Trek conventioneer.”

Nothing. No response. Not an eye blink. She missed not a beat of her
Wild Kingdom
lecture series.

“They were worshiped in most ancient Indian religions,” she continued. “Some of the tribes engaged in bloodletting, and the king would actually cut his own penis with a stingray’s spine and collect the blood in a ceremonial bowl.”

“Ouch!” And Jordan thought his knees hurt.

“Various other parts of the body were cut, too, and often quite gruesomely.”

That was announced with a certain amount of relish, he noted.

“It was all part of their sacrifice to the jaguar god,” she pointed out. “They believed it released human energy and balanced heaven and earth.”

“Where are you getting this stuff?”

She hesitated as if she weren’t at all certain “The
Bajio
is steeped in mysticism. I’ve been here before.”

Wet hair fell into her eyes, and she shook it back. All it took was a toss of her head, but when she stopped, a couple of other parts of her body didn’t. Jordan couldn’t take it anymore. “Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?”

She glanced down with a blink of surprise, but the expression on her face said she had no idea what he was talking about. She’d thought she
was
clothed. That’s when Jordan knew something was wrong. She appeared alert and talked rationally . . . well, rational was a relative term, but for a woman with jungle fever, she wasn’t doing so badly. What tipped him off was her ashen complexion and the sweat that sheened her chest and throat.

She was in shock, which explained what she’d been able to do with the jaguar. Even badly injured shock victims had been known to perform superhuman feats with
little awareness of what they were doing. That was Jordan’s diagnosis, and it was the best he could do without any more information.

“Come over here,” he said.

Another blink of those enormous eyes. He couldn’t help but think about how vulnerable she looked at that moment. He liked her better in shock.

“I want you to hold your forehead against my cheek, so I can check your temperature and your pulse. You look feverish, and I’m concerned about your blood pressure.”

She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “I’m fine,” she said, dismissing his concern with a waggle of her fingers.

He almost believed her, but then she winked at him. The woman who came to his house and sobbed over Birdy’s broken body? Wink?

“Come here,”
he instructed.

She rose to her feet with an exasperated sigh and dropped down right beside him. Her flushed face was pressed against his before he could prepare himself for such intimate contact. And then suddenly his whole body was alert for it. Contact. The more intimate the better.

His poor biceps twitched like a hungry dog’s tail.

“Your forehead,” he reminded her. “We’re not here to dance.”

She actually laughed, but she was a hurricane lamp of radiant heat. The fever was coming back with a vengeance, but she couldn’t feel its effects. Or her racing pulse. She was running on adrenaline from the shock
and
exhausting all her resources. When the adrenaline stopped pumping, she would collapse.

There was an opportunity here, but his training wouldn’t let him take advantage of it.
Idiot,
he told himself.
This is the jungle. You’re a hostage. She’s a serial killer, possibly of the lust murderer variety.

“Look at me,” he told her. “I want to see your eyes.”

She murmured, “Okay,” but kept rubbing her face against his, and then he felt her breath at his throat and his heart began trying to stage another jailbreak. God, what she did to his crazed vital signs.

“Let me go,” he urged. “Angela, untie me now.”

“I can’t let you go. I need you,” she whispered, still nuzzling. She’d tucked her face into the hollow of his neck in the way of a child seeking comfort.

“Need me?” It was hard not to like the sound of that.

“I need you to believe me, I need you to help me . . .”

Maybe he’d hoped for a slightly different conjugation of the verb
to need,
but there was promise in the way she sighed out the words. Not that he was looking for fulfillment. Getting fulfilled by this woman would be suicidal. It rhymed with
killed
.

Several low-pitched howls caught his attention, followed by a medley of throaty snarling, snapping, and mewling. It sounded like cats in love. Big cats. Anguish gripped his soul as he realized that the jungle was a metaphor for everything that was secret and libidinal in civilized life. Humans had the same urges and desires but didn’t dare to whisper them. The jungle screamed them. Mating calls. Hungers at every level. An orgy.

And guess who was trapped in the middle of it with a woman who refused to put her clothes on.
Who didn’t even seem to know she was naked.

“Listen to me,” he said sharply. “You’re sick. What you
need
is medical help.” There was a doctor’s bag in his truck, but he was reluctant to tell her because he’d hidden something in there.

“I’ll be all right,” she insisted. “All I need is to rest for a minute and your body is so cool and lovely.”

His body was a potter’s kiln. What man’s wouldn’t be with an achingly beautiful creature melting and running all over him? Her voice was as delicately soft and fiery as her translucent skin. He could see the blue veins in her
closed eyelids, in her gently rising breasts, and in the hand that had fallen across his bunched thighs.

God, just get it over with, woman. Murder me now and put me out of my misery.

Another crescendo of howling and hissing echoed his sentiments. The mating animals were at it again. But Angela was as unaware of the primal noise as she was of his turmoil. After a few moments, she drowsily lifted her head and looked at him.

“I’m fine now,” she said.

Her expression was sleepy and rather sweet, but she wasn’t fine. Hot red spots the size of silver dollars dominated each of her pale cheeks, and there was a tranced quality to her eyes that made her look like an antique porcelain doll. God, how he wished she would cover herself or that he could get his damn hands free.

“Angela,” he said with what he hoped was enough conviction to break through her lethargy, “you must untie me. Get me out of these ropes, and I’ll help you. I
will
help you.”

“I know,” she said softly, “I know you will, but there’s something else I have to do first.”

“What?”

“This.” She covered herself with crossed arms and settled back to look at him, regarding him with such complete and total absorption, he found it hard to breathe normally.

He followed her gaze as it skimmed upward and lingered on his hair. Was she imagining how it would feel to slide her fingers through the iron waves? The softness would surprise her, he knew. His scalp prickled in anticipation, and deep in the pit of his belly something moved. It was a sensation primitive enough to make him think of the snakes that slithered over the jungle floor.

Her gaze dropped to his eyes, and the sensation intensified. He wasn’t controlling the responses anymore; she
was. With a flick of her focus, she could make his gut quiver. Whether she knew it or not, she wielded a fantastic amount of power, enough to make him wonder if he’d misdiagnosed her. Maybe this wasn’t shock; maybe there was something else going on here.

As if reading his thoughts, she pressed a knuckle to her lower lip, dragging on its fullness as she moved her head back and forth, up and down. She murmured something he couldn’t hear. A breast had been bared, and God, how he wanted to look, but her mouth had just come open and he was riveted by the erotic possibilities. Something needed to be inside that wet, beautiful mouth—now.