As Lost as I Get Read online

  It was impossible that he could be so in tune with her reactions, but he was, speeding up his thrusts, focusing more attention at the base of her clit, just where she liked it most. She gave over completely, letting him make her dance like a puppet beneath his fingers and tongue. When she finally came, it was a slow, tumbling, breaking wave that swelled until it threatened to drown her. She cried out and trembled until she had to beg him to stop, just on the brink of overstimulation. He collapsed against her thighs, out of breath. While she was recovering, he crawled up beside her and pulled her into his arms. She curled limply against him, making soft, blissful sounds. The hot, hard shape of his cock pressed against her hip, and she still wanted, oh how she wanted. She wanted to make him feel even half as good as he had made her feel. So while she was still gathering her strength, she teased him, barely touching his thighs and his balls, trailing her fingers over his cock to listen to his breath catch.

  “You are amazing.” She turned on her side to face him. She kissed him, thrilling to the taste of herself on his lips. “Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything to make you feel good.” Even as she said it, she realized it was true. There was nothing she could think of that she shouldn’t do—and enjoy. Instead of terrifying her, it gave her an exhilarating sense of power. She leaned in and kissed him again and murmured, “So tell me.”

  “Just touch me,” he said.

  “I think I can do better than that.” Zoe started to kiss her way down his firm, pale body, but he stopped her. “No?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but like this.” He sat up and tugged at her legs until she turned around entirely. Realizing what he meant made her whimper, but she let him lie back and pull her onto him, her knees to either side of his head. She crouched over him, shivering as his cheeks brushed the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, and tried to focus on the gloriously hard cock in front of her.

  She wanted to tease him the way he’d teased her, running her fingertips over his shaft while blowing warm air across the glistening tip. But then he curled his tongue against her clit, leaving her too distracted to tease. He groaned when she took him into her mouth, making her smile around his hot, silken skin. As she started to slide up and down, using one hand for balance and one hand to wrap around the base of his cock, he lapped at her folds, easing his fingers into her. A wave of intense pleasure rippled through her, throwing off the rhythm she was trying to build.

  They devoured each other, passing pleasure back and forth between them like a burning torch. When his mouth left her breathless, she stopped sucking long enough to recover, savoring the slide of his cock against her hand, the beauty of brown skin against white. And when she brought him close to the edge, he panted against her thighs, groaning her name.

  Zoe wanted more than anything to make him lose control. She focused everything she had on driving him insane, her lips and tongue and hands, even a little bit of her teeth. Her own pleasure curled in the pit of her stomach, trembling and ready. When he came, his mouth left her body entirely, and he nearly sat up with the force of it, crying out. She held on, letting him pulse inside her as her body ached and throbbed in response.

  Before either of them could catch their breath, he took her again with his fingers and tongue. She sat up to rock and thrust against him, desperate for release. His free hand clenched tight on her hip as she rode him, finally crying out loud enough to echo down the empty corridors as she shuddered and spasmed with the force of her orgasm.

  Zoe collapsed and let Lee pull her around and up to him as if she were a rag doll, nestling against his shoulder while he stroked her face, slowly bringing her back to earth. He murmured sweet words to her, but the words he didn’t say were loudest. “I love you” slipped between every phrase he spoke, and for the first time, Zoe didn’t think about running from it.

  Afterward, they realized they were both starving, and tore into their supplies without bothering to get dressed. They ate bundled under the blanket, giggling and feeding each other bites of mushy spaghetti. It wasn’t long, though, before they were kissing again, then crawling back under the blankets for more.

  ***

  “You’re telling me you’ve never been to a baseball game. Never, not once,” Zoe said.

  “Not a pro game, no.” Lee was pushing them on a fast pace—they were both a little out of breath. They’d reluctantly left the hotel a few hours before, after a predictably late start. Sleep had come late, and breakfast was interrupted by long slow kisses that led them back to the blankets. While he wouldn’t have missed those caresses for anything, now the pressure of time was hard for him to ignore.

  The “road” to the hotel wasn’t much more than a wide dirt track, but it beat walking through the jungle. Lee kept his ears open for any aircraft overhead.

  “Where the hell did you grow up?” She laughed. “Mars?”

  “Close enough, just outside of D.C.” He couldn’t stop smiling at her, like he was seeing the real Zoe for the very first time. “My dad wasn’t a sports fan.”

  “I used to go with my mom and her sisters. We’d sit in the bleachers at the old Yankee Stadium, and Mama would drink beer and yell at the umpire.” She grinned and kicked a rock out in front of her. “I’ve never heard her swear in English, but in Spanish, with a couple beers in her, she’ll make a sailor blush.”

  Lee laughed. “That’s a little like my mom, only she’s not bilingual, and it’s wine instead of beer.”

  “So what did you do, if you didn’t go to baseball games?” She came up beside him and took his hand in hers, catching him by surprise.

  He squeezed her hand and she made a small noise of contentment. He could tell her about the trips to the opera that his father was so fond of, or how Lee had only gotten out of cello lessons once it was apparent he was hopeless, while Lucas was something of a musical prodigy. “My father was a snob,” he said. “Baseball was too low-brow for him. I was allowed to play football in school because it was something his friends’ sons did too. He would have rather I’d been a musician, or a poet.” Which was ironic, considering that he’d driven away the son who was a musician.

  “How would he feel about his son dating a black girl from New York?” The question shouldn’t have startled him, but it did.

  “We didn’t have Confederate flags around the house or anything, but he was pretty old-school Virginian.” The list of things Nathan Wheeler had disapproved of for his sons was long and far-reaching. He sighed. “I think he would have been an ass about it, and I think it would’ve been another reason we stopped talking.”

  “You don’t get along?”

  “Didn’t. He died five years ago.” He waved her apology away. “There was always friction between him and Lucas—you can imagine. I sided with Lucas.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “Mom . . . is a force unto herself, now that Dad’s gone. She throws herself into loving anything that makes us happy.” He let the silence spin out, then tried to change the subject. “When did you know you wanted to be a doctor?”

  “Sometime last year. Before that, it was still touch and go.” Zoe laughed, and he laughed with her.

  He knew he shouldn’t press his luck, but he couldn’t help it. “Zoe, what’s different now? From before, back in Inírida?”

  “I don’t know. It is different, though.” She lifted her head to look him in the face, so beautiful it made him ache inside, but more than that, she was brave and dedicated and strong. He had to face the fact that he was head-over-heels in love with her. Maybe he had been since the first time he’d seen her.

  Something was still bothering her, he could see it. “Are you sure?”

  “How do you do it?” she finally said. “How do you lead separate lives, how do you—how do you lie for a living?”

  It had been years since he’d thought of it that way. Years of living under a cover story of some sort—his own family didn’t k
now he was CIA until just recently—he’d just . . . gotten used to it. “I guess you stop thinking of it as lying,” he said. “It’s a cover story instead.” He could tell her it was for the greater good, that he lied to protect people, to protect his country, but was that what she wanted to hear? Instead he told her the only truth he could think of. “I do my best to never lie otherwise,” he said, “and I would never lie to you about how I feel.”

  She’d made it clear after that first night she wasn’t interested in more—had things changed? If they hadn’t, he was heading for one hell of a heartbreak—but he leaned in and kissed her anyway.

  “So this, right now, it’s real?” she said.

  “The realest thing I’ve ever known.”

  Her smile was worth everything. She took his hand. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  They spent the day talking more than they had before, about little things. Family stories, school stories. When they stopped for lunch, it felt more like a picnic than anything else.

  They hadn’t been walking long after lunch when he heard a helicopter overhead again. “Quick, under the trees.” He took her arm and moved them both down the small incline off the road, trying to get as much tree cover between them and the chopper as it got closer. The ground was slick from the rains and he was too concerned about getting Zoe down safely to pay attention. His heel slid to the side and his toes didn’t, giving his right knee a vicious twist. He heard a crunch just as the pain rocketed up his leg, spilling him to the ground.

  “Lee!”

  “We have to keep moving.” He gritted his teeth against the pain that rolled through him in sickening waves. “Can you help me up?”

  “What did you hurt?” She moved to his right side and took his outstretched hand.

  “My knee,” he said. “You can be a doctor later. Now we need to move.” She eased his arm around her shoulder and took on his weight. A tentative step confirmed the worst: his knee wasn’t going to bear any weight at all right now. They made slow progress away from the road, each step making him cringe at the knowledge that they’d just have to make their way back again. When he felt they’d gone far enough, Zoe eased him down onto a fallen log.

  “All right. We’re not going anywhere until I have a look at that knee.” She made him lie down on the ground and pulled this way and that, noting what hurt and what didn’t. He’d seen enough knee injuries in the field to know what she was going to say before she said it. “Probably an ACL tear, but I can’t tell how bad.” She rummaged around in her pack. “I can wrap it to stabilize your knee some.”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak through his irritation. The last thing they needed was for him to slow them down.

  Together they managed to fashion a rough crutch out of a tree branch. Zoe wrapped one of her extra shirts around the top to try and cushion it, but it was still going to be hellish getting back. Better the crutch than leaning on Zoe the entire way, though.

  With their progress slowed, he mentally tacked on another day to their trip home, at least.

  ***

  They were nearly ready to stop for the night when Zoe’s heart leapt at a new sound: an automobile motor. She should have guessed that walking along a road, however deserted it seemed, might lead to someone driving by. A good thing, too. Lee’s knee needed more treatment than she could give it, and the last thing he needed to be doing was trying to hobble along on it. If she thought he would have agreed, she would have rigged up some sort of travois and carried him back. She checked to see how he was doing, and he was stock-still, frozen with his head up, like a wild animal scenting a forest fire.

  “Lee? What is it?”

  “Run,” he said. “Run into the trees as fast as you can and don’t look back. Don’t come near the road unless you hear me yell ‘Zoe, the Yankees suck.’ You hear me yell anything else, stay away.”

  “What are you—?”

  “Go.” He gave her a push away from him.

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Yes, you are. Now, before it’s too late.” When she still didn’t move, he grabbed her arm and hissed, “Listen to me. If it’s who I think it is, you do not want to be here. If I have to fight, I can fight better if I’m not worried about you.” He gave her a little shake and looked in her eyes. “Trust me.”

  With those words, the same words he’d used to save her life before, she couldn’t do anything else. She dove between the trees and ran, with one backward glance at him standing by the side of the road. Once he was out of sight, the urgency faded a little. Oh, she was going to give him so much shit when it turned out to be a truck full of tourists.

  The minutes stretched by like hours as the motor sounds got closer, then stopped moving. She held her breath, waiting for Lee to call her back. Instead, she got an unfamiliar male voice: “Doctor Rodriguez, if you come out now, we won’t hurt your boyfriend.”

  She remembered Lee’s words: You do not want to be here. He promised he would be all right. She stayed where she was.

  Then came the sound of crashing through the trees, rustling through the leaves. Men shouted at one another in Spanish to spread out. They’d find her if she didn’t hide. Where? She moved as quietly as she could. There. That tree with low-hanging branches. It was better than running—she couldn’t run fast enough if they really wanted to chase her. She hauled herself up onto the first branch, reaching up and pulling her feet up past a layer of foliage just as someone burst through into the clearing beneath her tree. She pulled herself into a tight ball in the fork of the branches and prayed it was enough.

  “You find anything?”

  “Nah. Either he’s telling the truth and the bitch ditched him on the river, or she’s waiting back at that hotel at the end of the road.” Two of them near her tree. She didn’t breathe, didn’t so much as blink. Please don’t let them look up.

  “What do you think the boss will do?”

  “Do I give a shit? If he kills the boyfriend, I hope he does it here instead of somewhere it’ll make a mess.”

  Zoe had to fight the urge to reveal herself, beg them to let Lee go.

  “Come on, let’s get back. You get to tell him we didn’t find her. I got put in the shit last time.”

  They walked off, still complaining at each other. Zoe leaned back against the bark, conflicted. How long should she wait? She tried not to think about Lee fighting off all those men with a hurt knee and just his pistol.

  The first man yelled again. “Doctor Rodriguez, one last chance. Your man says you’re not here, but I think he’s lying.”

  Zoe bit her lower lip to keep from responding.

  The sound of the gunshot made her startle so hard she had to make a panicked grab for the branches to keep from falling. Just one shot, although in her head it echoed around her again and again. If he was fighting them, there wouldn’t just be one. She curled her fingers against the tree bark and focused on the bite of the wood into her skin. They shot him. Her vision went blurry and she blinked hard. She didn’t come out, so they shot him.

  Oh God oh God oh God. He was dead and it was her fault. All she felt was the sting of the bark in her fingers; everything else was numb.

  ***

  The police wound up calling it a mugging, which was so ludicrous Ana didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Thwarted muggers ran away, they didn’t chase you down and shoot out a store. One of the younger officers, probably a rookie, suggested that maybe they were after a doctor and a nurse to get access to the clinic’s drug supply, but he was quickly shut down by his superiors.

  They were on their own. Jacira had taken to keeping a loaded .45 hidden at the reception desk, and none of them went anywhere alone. Christiane kept advising them to close the clinic until Zoe was found. It had been days and no one had heard from her. No one wanted to suggest that she was probably dead. Ana wasn’t going to be the one to say it, but it
was what she believed. Those men on the llanos weren’t the forgiving type—that much they’d already seen.

  The only missing piece was that Will Freeman was still incommunicado as well. She didn’t know if the two were connected, but they did know each other. Had he gone after Zoe? The rest of the medical team—the team that had dropped Ana and Zoe off near Puerta del Ángel—came back after waiting for a day for Zoe, otherwise without incident.

  By the third day after the “mugging,” they’d all settled into a routine, life under siege and without Zoe. Ana had just finished with a patient when Jacira corralled her. “You have a visitor in Zoe’s office. She’s American.”

  Anyone from MI would speak to Maria or Susan before her. Curiosity drove her to scrub up quickly and get to the office. A tiny old white woman stood with her hands behind her back, looking at the pictures hanging on Zoe’s wall. Her clothes were pressed but practical, and she had short iron-gray hair.

  “Can I help you?” Ana asked in English.

  The woman turned around, and she looked Ana over. “You’re Ana Vasquez?” When Ana nodded, she sidestepped Ana and closed the office door before Ana could react. “I’m supposed to tell you that I’m finding the humidity in Bogotá exceptionally difficult to deal with this year.”

  Her tone was so matter-of-fact it took Ana a second to realize she’d just given the pass phrase Will Freeman set up with her. “But Bogotá is never humid,” she remembered to reply.