Commando (12 page)

“Five years later I met Bess at a USO club in Los Angeles. At the time, I was stationed at Camp Pendleton, and a couple of the guys and I decided to go up there for a change of pace.” Jake shut his eyes. “I walked into that place and felt like lightning had struck me. Bess was a ‘donut dolly,’ one of the girls who serve food to the servicemen and women. She was twenty-three also, fresh out of college, and beautiful—with light brown hair, brown eyes, and a pretty smile that made me feel ten feet tall.”

Shah felt Jake’s pain. Something had happened to Jake and his wife. Automatically she clasped his hand a little more tightly.

Jake began to move his fingers back and forth across the top of Shah’s hand, lost in the bittersweet memories, caught up in the old pain and grief. “Bess had a degree in economics, and she was sharp as hell. I courted her for a year before she’d marry me. At the time, I was getting my college degree, even though I was still an enlisted marine.” Jake shook his head as the memories swiftly welled up. “Bess was a lot like you,” he went on in a hushed tone. “She had the love of the land, of nature, and she wanted children more than anything. Nine months to the day after we got married, Bess had Katie…”

Wrestling with a gamut of new emotions, Jake hung his head and clung to Shah’s hand. “Katie,” he choked out, “looked a lot like that Tucanos girl you held in your arms a few days ago. She had my dark hair and her mother’s pretty brown eyes and smile.” Taking a deep breath, Jake plunged on. “Two years later, we had Mandy, and she had her mother’s light brown hair and my gray eyes. Things were going well for us, and we were happy. I eventually got my degree, went to Marine Officer’s Candidate School and came out a lieutenant.

“To make a long story real short, after almost eleven years of marriage, Bess and the girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Anger, white-hot and suffocating, flowed through Jake. “I was stationed near Miami, part of a multi-service drug enforcement team that worked closely with the Coast Guard. We’d made a couple of big busts, and the boys down in Colombia were plenty angry. Somehow,” Jake said bleakly, “information was leaked on all of us, our names, our addresses, where we lived….”

“Oh, no,” Shah cried softly.

Jake bowed his head, holding Shah’s hand as if to release it would be to lose control of himself and his violent, grief-stricken emotions. “A drug lord down in Peru had his men come up to the States to even the score. He had the bastards plant a bomb under my car,” he rasped. “I was sick at home that day with the flu, and Bess had to take both girls for ballet lessons, so she took my car, because it was parked outside the garage.” Tears dampened Jake’s eyes, and he shut them. When he spoke again, his voice was trembling. “I was asleep up in the bedroom…. The next thing I knew, the whole damn side of the house was blown off in the explosion. I—It was a nightmare….”

With a little cry, Shah withdrew her hand and stood up. She couldn’t endure the anguish in Jake’s voice, and she knew he needed to be held. Carefully she moved around the tree until she could sit down beside him, her back supported by another branch so that she couldn’t fall.

“Come here,” she choked out, and gently drew her arms around Jake’s broad shoulders. Her eyes blinded by tears, she felt Jake’s arms slide around her waist, and she felt the air rush out of her lungs as he held her tightly against him. As he buried his head next to hers, Shah whispered brokenly, “I’m so sorry, Jake. So sorry…” The rest of the words died in her throat as it closed up with tears, and she sobbed.

Shah’s unexpected compassion broke Jake’s hold on his grief. He’d cried off and on throughout the years since losing his family, but there had remained a stubborn part of his grief that he’d never been able to reach. Shah’s simple act, placing her slender arms around him, holding him with her woman’s strength, shattered that last bastion of grief. Her hair was like a silken curtain that he could bury his face in. Somewhere in his cartwheeling mind, he realized how much courage it had taken Shah to come to him, to hold him.

The first sob, like a fist shoving violently upward through the center of him, slammed into his throat and lodged there. He tried to fight it, but Shah’s trembling, soothing hand across his hair broke through his control. Jake had always cried alone. Cried when no one was around. The Marine Corps didn’t see tears as strong or good—only as a sign of weakness.

“Cry,” Shah whispered near his ear. “Cry for all you’ve lost, Jake. I’ll hold you…. I’ll just hold you….” And she did, with all her strength and all her love. Shah felt another sob rack Jake’s body, and she held him even more tightly. This bear of a man she’d been so afraid of, so distrusting of, before, was hauntingly human now as she held him in her arms. As she sat rocking him ever so slightly, much as a mother would a hurt child, she cried with him. She cried for his terrible loss, unable to imagine how much it must continue to hurt him. The closest comparison Shah could imagine was her mother being torn brutally and suddenly out of her life. She thought how terrible that loss would be, and she was able to transfer that understanding to Jake. But only he knew the full emotional impact of losing his family.

The moments melted into one another. The darkness was so complete that Shah couldn’t see anything. It didn’t matter, anyway, because the tears flowing from her eyes were blinding her. She continued to stroke Jake’s head, shoulders and back. If only she could take away some of his grief. And then she laughed softly to herself as Jake expended his heartache within her arms. Amazingly, all her fear of him as a man had dissolved. As she sat there in the aftermath, a half hour after the storm had broken within Jake, Shah watched the moon rise in the east. She saw the soft, luminescent light silently spreading across the dark, silhouetted rain forest, as the symbolic light of a new day.

Intuitively Shah understood that she had been a catalyst in Jake’s healing process. The moon was a woman’s symbol, a feminine one, and the light from the silvery sphere was always gentle and nonintrusive. She prayed to the Great Spirit that her questions hadn’t been damaging to Jake, but had served instead as a catharsis for further healing.

Leaning down, she pressed a kiss against his heavily bearded cheek. Jake’s scent entered her nostrils, and she inhaled it deep into her lungs. The bristles of his beard were wet from his tears. Or were they her tears, too? Shah was lost in the textures, scents and awareness of Jake as a vulnerable human being. As she pressed a second kiss to his cheek to console him, she felt his hands frame her face.

A soft breath escaped Shah as Jake opened his eyes and looked deep into her soul. Her breathing suspended, she felt her world tilt out of control. Vividly she recalled that her ex-husband had always called her cold, unable to respond. Hesitating fractionally, she wondered if she had anything to offer Jake. Another part of her urged her to try, despite that knowledge. Her lips parting, she leaned forward to meet and touch Jake’s mouth. Never in all her life had anything felt so right.

Shah’s entire existence centered on Jake’s questing mouth, touching her lips, sliding gently against them. The bristles of his beard were a counterpoint to the strength of his mouth as it molded and captured hers. With a moan, she melted against him, drowning in the splendor of his mouth as it moved with a reverence that made tears squeeze beneath her lashes. His hands, large, scarred and rough, held her gently as he touched, cajoled and silently asked Shah to participate in the beautiful dance of life their kiss was creating. It was life, she realized hazily, all her senses moving in a rainbow of vibrant feelings as she hesitantly returned his kiss.

The steamy Amazon jungle caressed them like a lover, and Shah’s breathing increased as she felt his tongue move across her lower lip. There was such a ribbon of pleasure beneath each touch. Jake proceeded to explore her slowly, deliberately—as if each contact were an exquisite gift. And to Shah it was. Her mind was no longer functioning. She was aware only of Jake, of his tenderness and his coaxing. With each small kiss, each nip, each touch with his tongue, she yielded, like a flower opening for the first time. Reality mingled with euphoria, with the fragrance of the orchids that surrounded them, with the singing sounds of the night that embraced them, and with Jake’s ragged breath flowing moistly across her face.

How long Shah clung to his mouth, allowing him to explore her fully, to kiss her reverently, she had no idea. She felt bereft when Jake drew inches away, his breathing uneven, his hands still framing her uplifted face. Slowly opening her eyes, Shah lost herself in the silver glitter of his narrowed ones. Her body felt on fire, a bubbling volcano ready to explode, and it left her trembling and anticipating. Anticipating what? She had no idea. All she knew was that Jake had made her feel more alive, more of a woman, with that single kiss, than in all her experience with her ex-husband combined.

Gently Jake leaned down and brushed Shah’s parted lips one more time. He knew he’d reached the limit of his control. If he continued to kiss her, continued to teach her that love, real love, was not painful, but something so beautiful it could make a man cry, he’d take her to the jungle floor and make love to her there. Shah’s eyes were lustrous with desire, and the moonlight was radiant and lovely on her upturned features. With her hair loose, she looked like a magical part of this rain forest—a goddess, perhaps, flowing like the silent mists through the jungle.

Jake felt as if someone had taken a bottle brush to his insides, leaving him miraculously lighter. The load he’d unconsciously carried for so long was gone. Blinking away the last of his tears, he smiled down at Shah, who clung to him as if she might fall out of the tree. There was such beauty in her dazed-looking eyes, and Jake knew that the kiss they’d shared had been wonderful—for both of them. Caressing her high cheekbones with his thumbs, he erased the last of her tears there. More tears were beaded on her thick lashes, and Jake felt such a fierce love for Shah that it left him stunned in its wake.

As he sat with Shah resting against him, her hands pressed against his chest as she looked up at him, Jake assimilated the discovery. He loved Shah. And then he realized that from the moment he’d met her he’d been falling in love with her. There wasn’t anything not to love about her, Jake decided as he continued to dry her cheeks with his thumbs. Weren’t they both terribly scarred by past battles with life? Was it possible not only to feel like living again, but to want to love again? Shocked by the prospect—a silly dream he’d never envisioned coming true—Jake could do nothing but lose himself in Shah’s golden eyes, eyes that spoke of her love for him. Was she aware of it? Jake, humbled by the realization that they could have shared so much in such a short space of time, had no answers.

There were no words he could say, so Jake took the ultimate risk and folded his arms around Shah. They would sleep here, together, with him leaning against the trunk of the tree, holding her safe in his arms. Shah could lean against him. To his surprise, she eased into his arms, her body meeting his, molding against it. He shut his eyes, and a low sound, like a groan, escaped his lips. As her arm went around his waist and she nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder, Jake knew he was the luckiest man alive.

Too shaken by the grief he’d expressed, Jake’s mind refused to work coherently. Exhaustion and lack of sleep overtook him, and in minutes he slept. A nagging thought flitted through his spongy senses as he surrendered to sleep. How would Shah react to him tomorrow morning? Would she run away from him because he was a man? He loved her with a fierceness that defied description. As he rested there, with Shah secure in his arms, he knew that he was being given a second chance—and nothing short of dying was going to keep him from taking the risk of loving Shah without reservation. But did she love him? Could she ever fall in love again?

Shah awoke first, wrapped in a warm, secure feeling she’d never felt anywhere except in Jake’s arms. It was barely dawn, not light enough yet to travel, so she relaxed and absorbed the moment at his side.

The mists moved slowly and sensuously through the rain forest’s branches, seeming to symbolize Shah’s own life: the twists and turns she’d taken, some of them by her own choice, most of them not, and where they had led her at this moment. The kiss Jake had branded her lips with lingered hotly in her body, like a fever that refused to subside. It was a new and unfamiliar sensation, one that Shah basked in. There was a gnawing ache within her, and she didn’t know where it was coming from, or why it was there. The entire lower region of her body felt like a simmering cauldron ready to overflow. Because Shah was Native American, she had grown up seeing life in terms of symbols, and understanding that everything was connected to everything else. This new and wonderful yet disturbing feeling in her triggered her curiosity. Would Jake know what it was? What she was feeling? She had long since recognized his perceptiveness about human beings in general. If anyone would know, Jake would, she decided.

The sky, a veil of thick and thin curtains of mist, took on an ethereal glow as the night eased its grip on the rain forest. The horizon, covered with magnificent pau trees stretching for the sky with their arms, became a panorama of golden hues and darker tones. Shah lay there, her head pressed to Jake’s chest, the slow beating of his heart soothing the chaotic feelings that were moving through her like a wild, unmanageable river that had escaped its banks.

She felt Jake jerk awake. Lifting her head, she sat up and brushed the hair away from her face. Never had she felt more vulnerable than in the moments before she forced herself to meet and hold Jake’s gaze.

Jake reached over, laid his hand on her arm. He saw the terrible uncertainty in Shah’s face. “Don’t go,” he rasped, and his fingers closed gently around her arm.

“I—” Shah gulped unsteadily as she anxiously searched Jake’s sleep-clouded eyes. His raw voice had sent a shiver of need through Shah that tore at her fear of rejection. “No…I’m not going anywhere….” she whispered.

Fighting to regain wakefulness, Jake hungrily absorbed Shah’s innocent gestures. Her lips were still slightly swollen, proof of his need of her. All his focus, his world, narrowed on her as he eased into a sitting position. The bluish sheets of her hair moved in a rippling wave, and he captured some of the thick strands and tucked them behind her shoulder so that he could have a good look at her profile. Shah’s nervousness touched him deeply.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, sliding his hand along her arm and capturing her fingers.

Shah shrugged and looked down at his large hand. The hand that had been so incredibly gentle with her the night before. The hand that had wiped the tears from her face. “I feel mixed up inside, Jake,” she admitted hoarsely. “I’m sorry I asked you about Bess…about your family.” She risked a glance up at him. “I don’t understand how you survived with that happening to you. I—I’d go crazy. I’d kill the bastards. I’d do something….”

He sighed and nodded. “What I didn’t tell you was that I left the Marine Corps shortly after it happened. I wanted to kill the men responsible for my family’s murders. The only place I could go was Perseus, the company I work for now. Morgan Trayhern, who runs it, let me take assignments having to do with drug dealers here in South America. I’d been in Peru and Columbia on a number of missions, putting the bastards out of commission, usually in jail. I had one assignment that put me on the Orinoco River, close to the Brazilian border. For the past four years I’ve been waging a one-man war against the drug dealers. It’s helped me settle past debts.”

Shah gauged him in silence. “A one-man war.” She laughed, a little self-consciously, glad that Jake was holding her hand. “I’ve always seen myself as waging a one-woman war down here with a different kind of criminal—an ecological one.”

“I know,” Jake whispered, and managed a lopsided smile. “We have a lot more in common than you first thought.”

“Yes…” Shah bit down on her lower lip. “What I don’t understand is why you took my father’s assignment. This has nothing to do with drug dealers, Jake.”

He held her shimmering golden gaze, touched as never before, because Shah was completely open to him, without any of her old defenses in place. Had their kiss been the reason? Jake didn’t know, and he desperately wanted to find out. Caution made him move slowly, however, because he sensed that so much of what Shah had experienced last night was new to her. How could it be? She was thirty years old—a grown woman with experience.
Patience,
he ordered himself.
Be patient with her.

“I just happened to have come off an assignment for Perseus and was in the office when your father and Morgan were talking. Morgan called me in because I was the only available agent who spoke Portuguese and had South American experience.” Jake watched Shah’s expressive features, his gaze centered hotly on her parted lips. The kiss they’d shared had been unlike any other. “I didn’t like your father or his attitude, and neither did Morgan. At first, because of your father, I wasn’t going to take the assignment. Besides, I needed a rest, and I didn’t want to get sent out this soon after my last mission.”

Shah frowned. “What changed your mind?”

He smiled gently. “I saw the photo your father had of you. Morgan isn’t stupid. He knew I wasn’t going to take the mission, because of your father’s abrasive attitude. Neither of us could figure out why he was angry with you. We could understand why he’d be concerned and worried, but not angry. Pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit. Of course, when I got down here and found out your father had botched two other attempts to have you kidnapped, then I figured it out.”

“Chances are,” Shah whispered bitterly, “that my father has stock in some Brazilian lumber company or something. It would be just like him. He always wants to make a quick buck at the expense of Mother Earth and all her relatives. He doesn’t care.”

“I know,” Jake said soothingly, sliding his fingers across the back of her hand. Shah’s pain was no less real than his. “I still have questions I want to ask him when I get back. When I get to Manaus, I’m going to call Morgan and get him to check on your father’s business interests. Then we’ll see what cards he’s holding. I feel that will explain the rest of the missing pieces to us.”

Shah cringed inwardly. Jake was leaving for Manaus? When? She was afraid to ask. She was afraid of her own feelings for him. “So my photo convinced you to take this mission?”

Jake nodded. “Yeah. Morgan’s like a brother to me, and he knows me pretty well. All he had to do was slide that photo of you into my hands, and he knew I’d take the mission, no questions asked.”

She smiled hesitantly. “Morgan sounds like a decent human being.”

“Even if he is a man?” Jake teased gently.

“I guess I had that coming, didn’t I?”

“Don’t ever apologize for how you feel, Shah,” Jake told her in a low, vibrating tone. “What happened to you has shaped your life and your actions.”

“I’m trying to get rid of my anger toward men,” Shah admitted, looking away from Jake’s burning gray gaze. “I really am. I know it doesn’t seem like it most of the time….”

“Listen to me.” Jake took Shah by the arms and made her look at him. “No one knows better than me what pain can do to a person. It’s taken me four years to crawl out from beneath all that grief over losing my family. I tried, the other night, to put myself in your shoes, to try and feel what it might be like to be a kid growing up in that kind of brutal, violent environment.”

“I walked on eggshells,” Shah admitted. “Mother did, too. We tried to find out what kind of mood Father was in as soon as possible so we could plan how we were going to behave for the rest of the day.”

Jake shook his head. “Sweetheart, you’re a survivor of a war. I don’t know if you realize that or not, but you are. You were in a dangerous war zone for twelve of your most formative years.” He gave her a small smile of encouragement. “From my vantage point, I’d say you’ve made something worthwhile out of your life, despite the lousy start you had. There are lots of kids who come out of that same kind of environment and end up on drugs or in prison. Look at you. Look at how you’re helping the world. I’m proud of you.”

Shah turned her head away to wipe her eyes free of the tears that had gathered unexpectedly.

“No, you don’t,” Jake rasped, and he captured her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Don’t ever be ashamed to cry in front of me, Shah. How can you feel that way after I cried in your arms last night?”

He was right, Shah acknowledged. “Jake…You—all of this—it’s so new to me. I’m so confused.”

“What do you mean?” He gently wiped the tears from her cheeks. There was such hope burning in Shah’s eyes; this was a look he’d never seen in them before. Perhaps sharing that load he’d carried alone for so many years had been the most right thing he’d ever done.

“It’s you!” When Shah realized she’d raised her voice above a whisper, she clapped her hand over her lips and sent Jake a silent apology. She looked around, and when she was finally convinced there were no humans nearby to hear her, she said, in a strained undertone, “It’s you, Jake. You’re different. You aren’t like the men I’ve known.”

“All you’ve known are the violent bastards, the ones who would strip your soul from you because you’re a woman.” He grimly held her wavering stare. “I know all about that type, Shah. They’re weak little men with low self-esteem, and the only way they feel powerful is to keep a woman or a child under their thumb. That makes them feel powerful when nothing else does. Men know they’ve got more physical strength than a woman, and so they’ll use it to keep you captive, to keep you docile.”

“But by hurting a woman they are hurting themselves!” Shah whispered, her voice choked with emotion. “The Lakota believe that within each of us is the spirit of both man and woman.” She touched her breast. “If a man despises and fears women, he despises his own gentleness, his ability to cry, to reach out and nurture someone other than himself.”

“That’s right,” Jake agreed. “Our society has suppressed women’s feelings and strengths.”

“But why?” she asked, her voice cracking. “Women know how to cry, how to be creative, how to be in touch with Mother Earth.”

He saw the terrible sense of loss in Shah’s eyes, and he understood her pain. “Listen.” he said. “I don’t have all the answers, Shah. Each woman is going to have to find the courage within herself to stand up and say that she will no longer be controlled. Each man has to have the courage to allow women to be their true selves.”

She shook her head in awe. “Jake, before meeting you, I never realized any man could understand what we women see so clearly.” Then she corrected herself. “Well, some women see it. Others are just starting to awaken to the imbalance and unfairness of it all.”

“Yes, and still others are asleep,” Jake agreed.

“Or,” Shah said softly, “too frightened to make the change, even though they’re aware of the unfairness.”

“As I’ve always said,” Jake told her grimly, “it doesn’t take much just to exist a day at a time, but it sure as hell takes the rawest, purest kind of courage to
live
your life. Living life means changing and growing. And change is frightening to most people.”

“I just wish women would realize that the unknown future will be a better one than they’re in right now,” Shah said. “My mother was like that, you know. At first she was so afraid of my father that she cowered like a dog. Over the years, she never grew less afraid of him, but she began to put my safety and welfare ahead of her own.”

“Yes, your mother thought she couldn’t help herself, but she felt you were worth saving.”

“It’s called being a victim,” Shah rattled. “I know—I used to be one myself, in my marriage with Robert.”

Jake stroked her hair in an effort to take away her obvious shame over her lack of fearlessness. “But you chose to grow instead of becoming trapped like your mother. That took real courage, Shah. The rarest kind.”

“My marriage was a travesty,” she admitted painfully. “I let Robert beat me down, and I started to believe I was as worthless as he said I was. Talk about brainwashing.” She smiled bitterly, not feeling very proud of herself. “I swallowed everything he said to me. It never occurred to me he might be wrong.”

Jake wanted to tread carefully, but he had to know the truth regarding Shah’s marriage. “Did you love Robert?”

“Yes and no. At first I did, but, Jake, it was a stupid infatuation, that’s all. I woke up one morning six months later realizing Robert and I had very little in common.” And then she muttered, “I wasn’t any good in bed, either.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Who told you that?”

Shah refused to look at him, too humiliated by the admission. Once Jake had cried in her arms, she’d become helpless to erect defenses against his questions, and now she was blathering like the village idiot. But she couldn’t help herself—the words just came tumbling out in a hurtful torrent.

“I was a virgin when I married Robert. I guess he’d been around a lot, and he—” Shah swallowed, because the words were sticking in her throat “—he said I was lousy in bed. I didn’t know what I was doing, and he said I was too stupid to learn. He said I was cold….”

Jake stared at her in disbelief. He remembered hotly how her mouth had opened to his. He’d tasted her sweetness and felt her passionate response to his kiss. “What?” The word escaped before he could take it back.

“Frigid,” Shah said in a strangled voice. She cast a glance over at Jake and saw the thundercloud blackness in his eyes. Was it aimed at her? Had her kiss been that bad? Had Robert been right?

“Answer me something,” Jake demanded heavily. He forced Shah to hold his gaze. “After you divorced Robert, did you have any lovers?”

Blinking, Shah said, “No.”

Jake’s hands tightened around Shah’s upper arms. “The bastard. The lowlife bastard.” He snapped his mouth shut. He saw the confusion in Shah’s eyes and realized she wasn’t sure if he was angry at her or at her ex-husband. Getting hold of his escaping emotions, he whispered tautly, “Robert is wrong, Shah. Do you hear me? He’s wrong.”