Page 24 of No Escape

“You don’t run all that fast,” he reminded her in a slightly breathless tone. “What do you have in your hand?”

“A stick. I thought an animal was chasing me.” She dropped it to the ground.

“That wouldn’t have offered you much protection against an animal.” He pivoted and began walking, obviously expecting her to follow him. “We still have a way to go before stopping for the night.”

“There’s more than one kind of animal out there,” she said in her defense, referring to the two-legged kind. She would have used her stick on either one if it meant the difference between life and death. “What happened back there? You weren’t gone very long. Did you get the bad guys?”

A mocking chuckle escaped him, his tone revealing more than words. “There was only one, probably a scout. What do you think?”

“We’re not running anymore,” she pointed out, careful to keep her voice as low as his. “Did you…” Did she really want to know whether or not he’d killed someone? She’d already seen him in action once.

A disgusted snort escaped Clint. “Do you think I left him tied up to a fucking tree for his friends to find later?” The grit underlining his steel-laced words was a clear warning that he’d done what had to be done, and it had been done to save her butt.

“I suppose you had to kill him?”

“Sarah, I don’t like killing anyone unless I absolutely have no choice. Use your fucking head for once. Leaving him alive could mean the difference between life and death for us. Hasn’t it sunk in yet that this is for real? We’re not playing some sort of fucking survival game where the winners walk away with a million bucks. Those guns are spitting out real bullets and will leave you resembling Swiss cheese in a heartbeat.” He paused before asking, “What would you have done?”

Sarah contemplated her response. There was no way she could ever take another life. “I would have probably tied him up and taken his gun away.” Even to her ears it sounded lame.

“Just what I thought. You should have blown his fucking head off. These people are pissed. If they catch us, you can bet they’re going to hurt us.” He sounded annoyed at her. “We still have some ground to cover before we can stop for the night. Once our friend is discovered back there, it will send up a warning flag about our location which we don’t need since we still have a long way to go before we’re safely on that plane tomorrow.” He turned and started walking.

“How much ground?” She didn’t know how much further she could go before collapsing.

“About an hour before we reach the outcropping of boulders that will serve as our hotel room for the night.”

They broke through the jungle, and Clint was forced to stop when they came to a lake, almost slipping on the slimy bank. He managed to right himself before going down.

Behind him, Sarah gasped before asking the obvious, “How are we going to get around that?”

He didn’t bother looking at her. “It will take too long to go around. We’re going to cross it.”

Cross it? Sarah glanced back at the massive blackness before them, the moon shining on its surface like a giant white plate. Lord knew she could use a bath, but if Clint thought she was going into the water, in the dark, he was crazier than she thought. She immediately thought about the possibility of alligators.

“There’s no way I’m going in there,” she balked, turning to go back the way she’d come. Suddenly, her chances with Raul didn’t seem as bleak. Besides, she’d much rather die by gunshot than being eaten alive by an alligator.

“Sarah…”

She ignored the threat she detected in his tone, not bothering to look back at him. “No, I mean it, Clint. I’m not going.” There was nothing he could say that was going to change her mind, either. “You might as well kill me now and be done with it because I’m not going swimming tonight.”

“Fuck!” She heard him curse. “That can be arranged,” he muttered, reaching her within a few strides. His hand curled around her upper arm, and he whipped her around. “Just where the fuck do you think you’re going, angel?” His tone was treacherously soft, yet edged with the steel of a man out to win. Sarah got the impression Clint always won when it mattered.

She strained against him, trying to pull her arm free. Her eyes shot up to meet the glitter of his in the darkness, panic like she’d never known before welling inside her. You didn’t live in Florida all your life and not become well educated about the dangers of alligators. Sarah had been up close and personal with one when she was nine years old and remembered with stark clarity the day she’d lost her dog to one. “I’m not going into the lake.”

His fingers relaxed against her arm, but he didn’t release her. “After all your fucking sass and spunk, you’re frightened about crossing a little lake?”

“It looks like a great big lake to me,” she corrected, her gaze moving past him to the glimmering surface. The panic gripping her body paralyzed her into unusual compliance. She had to make him understand! “Clint…”

Something in her tone must have finally gotten through to him. “Relax, I don’t want to go in either,” he finally said, downplaying the situation. “I’m not crazy. There could be anything in that water. There’s another way.”

“How?” She was thinking along the lines of lying on top of his body and using him as a surfboard. That might work. She let him pull her along until they stopped at the water’s edge again. He glanced down along the bank. What were they looking for? “What?”

She frowned when her eyes adjusted to their surroundings, examining the faint outline of a raft. It only seemed big enough for one person. Clint would fill it to capacity. It was a pitiful excuse for any kind of watercraft. A rat would be able to bite through it without any problem. “Doesn’t look like much,” she observed.

“It floats,” he was quick to point out.

“With both of us in it?” she said with disbelief. “Can you blow it up any bigger?”

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