Page 4 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
She stood there looking at him a moment, sticky from the humidity, acutely aware of the way the material of her damp T-shirt was clinging to her breasts.
Why was she aware of her breasts?
She asked, “What’s your name?”
His brows lifted. He hadn’t been expecting that.
“It’s a journalist thing. Who, what, where, when . . . you know.”
He just kept looking at her, brows cocked, but once Jack decided she wanted an answer to a question, she didn’t relent until she had it.
“So? What is it?”
He paused for a beat, and she realized he had a habit of that, as if he carefully deliberated each and every word.
Interesting. She knew several people with the same habit, all of whom had warehouses of skeletons they were trying to hide.
Finally, he relented and gave her his name in a clipped monosyllable.
“Hawk.”
It was Jack’s turn to raise her brows and pause. “Hawk? As in, a bird?”
For the first time, he smiled at her. It was carnal and lazy, a sensual upward curve of his lips that transformed his entire face and made her heart skip a beat from the sheer, unexpected beauty of it. The smile softened all the hard lines of his face and brought out that dimple in his cheek again, and she felt its effects in some very sensitive places in her body. She swallowed, surprised at herself, and none too pleased.
Hawk drawled, “As in, eyes like a.”
Oh Christ. It’s a nickname. Of course he’d have a nickname. He probably thought it up himself.
Because she was still a little off-balance from his smile, she said, “Funny, I would’ve guessed something more along the lines of . . .” She cocked her head and gave him the same assessing once-over he’d given her. “Rock. As in, head like a.”
“You mean, body like a,” he responded, and had the nerve to wink.
That’s when it occurred to her that one, the hulk was flirting with her, two, she liked it, and three, she wanted that drink more than she wanted to get back to the Mercado Municipal and finish the story.
Jack was an expert at compartmentalizing, so she filed that disturbing fact away under her mental What the Hell? drawer for later examination. She never, never was more interested in men than work. Except for right this second. With this man with a silly bird nickname, sizzling eyes, and body to match.
Sky out, as her father would say, which in military parlance meant “time to go.”
“Okay, Hawk,” she said stiffly, “great meeting you. Have a nice life.”
Jack turned and began to walk toward the end of the alley, back out to the street.
From behind her he called, “You’re welcome for saving yours!”
Without looking back or answering, she lifted her hand in salute, then kept right on going.
She couldn’t get back to the Mercado because the police had cordoned off the area and blocked the surrounding streets. No press was being allowed in, so she made do with interviewing a few bystanders and getting some long-distance shots of the smoke billowing into the sky from the burning building.
By the time she made it back to her hotel, it was fully dark, she was exhausted, and she’d finally stopped thinking about her encounter with the hulk. Taxi service had been curtailed to daylight hours because of the recent unrest and she’d had to walk back because the hotel shuttle had dropped her off early in the morning before the outbreak at the Mercado Municipal.
She was lucky to be right there when the riot started. Her intuition had told her to go downtown this morning, and it had been right.
To say that Brazil was in a state of turmoil would be a gross understatement. The country had fallen into total chaos. In Manaus—a bustling, cosmopolitan city situated in the center of the country at the confluence of the Rio Negro and Solimões rivers—stores were being looted, fires were being set, government buildings had been vandalized . . . things were a mess. There were daily marches by a public outraged over the corrupt government and the hike in bus fares in advance of the World Cup that would help to pay for ten additional stadiums.
She’d been sent here on assignment from the Times without her usual photographer. Dwindling readership had sent the cash-strapped newspaper into conservation mode, so anything deemed an unnecessary luxury had been axed. Jack was competent with a camera and never minded working alone, so she hadn’t been as disgruntled as many of her colleagues had been over the cutbacks. She’d been raised to soldier on without whining, so that’s what she did.
The hotel room was more luxurious than she’d expected, with a king-sized bed and an enormous bathtub set against a wall of blue and saffron Moroccan tiles. While the bath was filling, Jack stripped out of her dirty jeans and T-shirt and stood in front of the mirror at the sink in her underwear, delicately picking bits of glass from her cheek with a pair of tweezers.
