The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  There were some snickers going around the cargo hold, tired laughter that was drowned out as the engine noise built to a roar and the plane began moving. Jina didn’t care. They knew what she meant, and so did she. They were all her guys. They were a team.

  Seventeen

  Levi opened his eyes a slit and looked across the cargo hold to where Babe lay curled on her side, fast asleep. She was using her equipment bag as a pillow. The roar of the engines drowned out even the snores he knew would normally rattle the rafters of a building, but cargo planes weren’t built to be quiet inside. About two feet away, on her far side, Voodoo was slouched against some boxes, his chin on his chest as he too grabbed some sleep.

  Sleep would have been nice, but Levi couldn’t quite get there. His shoulder hurt just enough to be annoying, especially when he leaned back. Not only that, he was still too rattled from those brief nightmarish moments when he’d thought Babe had been shot. He could see she was alive and moving—he’d have sworn she was glaring at him—but fuck, for a minute there he’d been ready to burn the fucking rain forest down and destroy everything in it. Reining himself in hadn’t been easy.

  But she was okay. The relief hollowed him out, knocked him sideways. And somehow she’d kept the FARC asshole from shooting Voodoo, though she’d said it was an accident. How she “accidentally” tackled someone was beyond him, but maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. With her thought processes, it was tough to tell. However it had happened, she’d finally won Voodoo over so at least now they wouldn’t have to listen to his bitching. What rattled Levi most of all was that “accident” or not, she’d thrown herself into the middle of a hot situation. Being heroic wasn’t in her job description, and he had a hard time handling the idea.

  Then he got on the damn plane and had to watch Ramirez coming on to her. He’d barely been able to change the “I” to “we” when he’d threatened to break the bastard’s legs.

  Shit. Keeping his distance kept the team working smoothly, but on another fundamental level it wasn’t working at all, because it didn’t do anything to lessen his attraction to her. He’d hoped that like most of the time when he was attracted to a woman, after a while the attraction started fading whether or not he did anything about it. The fact was no matter how much he’d enjoyed the various relationships he’d had, in the end the work had always been more interesting. But he’d been around Jina for months now, and he still got off on it. Damn, he liked looking at her, liked being with her.

  She was sexy, with those two-toned blue-and-gold eyes of hers, all that long, heavy hair, the way she laughed and cussed and tackled life. Her expression was usually that of someone who was about to get up to some mischief, or at least enjoyed the thought of mischief even if she didn’t do anything about it. She was funny, gutsy, and had a level head; she finessed keeping that fine balance between being friendly with the team members without letting anything sexual intrude. She treated them like brothers. She got along with Terisa and Ailani. She did her job and did it well. She laughed and joked, and sometimes he didn’t pay attention to what she was saying because he was too busy just watching her. To keep any of the guys from noticing, he tried not to look at her all that often, but sometimes he let himself tease her because all of them did, on one level or another.

  All in all, he couldn’t find a damn thing about her that he didn’t like, except that she was off-limits.

  And when he relaxed, like now . . . that was when he couldn’t stop his imagination from stripping her naked and pulling that fine, toned body of hers under him. In his mind he ran his hand over the curve of her ass, then reached lower to where she was hot and wet, pushed his fingers in and got her ready for his cock. The one time he’d had her under him, touching her, kissing her, she hadn’t tried to hide anything. She’d been honest, and real.

  She was the only woman he’d ever felt jealousy over. He hadn’t been kidding about breaking Ramirez’s legs.

  The truth was, since he’d met her, all he’d been doing was marking time: waiting for her to quit, then waiting for her to fail, and now just waiting.

  He could feel his patience stretching thinner and thinner. He was fighting to maintain the status quo, and the internal battle was turning all his inner barricades to rubble. Nothing had ever broken him; he’d always maintained that inner surety of his center. He knew what he wanted out of life, knew his own guidelines, his strengths and weaknesses. Doing what he did gave him the kind of challenge and satisfaction he needed. This was different; Jina was different. Sooner or later, he’d break under the strain.

  Restlessly, he changed positions, finally managed to get halfway comfortable. He was able to grab some sleep, waking when the thunderous sound of the engines changed. He’d been on so many planes that his subconscious recognized the altered pitch as a signal that they were slowing in preparation for approach and landing.

  He stretched and got more water; around him, the others were stirring, too, alerted by the change in the noise level. Jina slept on, her soft lips barely parted, but she didn’t look particularly blissful; faint, fleeting expressions gave her a troubled look. He watched her for a minute, then nudged her sneaker with the toe of his. She gave a quick little frown, pursed her lips, and that was it. He nudged harder. Another frown, and this one looked as if it meant business. On the third try, he gave the sole of her shoe a light kick and said sharply, “Babe! Wake up!”

  She sat up with a jerk and blindly threw a punch that would have de-balled him if he hadn’t jumped back, but he’d been halfway prepared for that sort of reaction. The other guys started laughing. Scowling, she looked around at them all, then scrubbed her face. “I was dreaming,” she muttered. “About the dead guy on my foot.”

  “Thought you might be,” he replied, keeping his tone neutral. “We’ll be landing in a few. There’s a forward lav, if you need to go.”

  Without a word she jumped to her feet and headed forward, weaving her way through the secured pallets and boxes. She needed to piss more often than the men did, so over the months they’d all adjusted to stopping for more piss breaks and letting her go first. Levi sat down again, thinking philosophical thoughts about the realities of traveling with a woman.

  Actually landing took them another half hour; according to his watch, there were a couple of more hours until sunrise. At least they’d had some sleep and none of them were as jet-lagged as they had been the previous mission. He and Ramirez would go straight to debriefing, but the rest of them could catch a little downtime.

  The plane rolled to a stop and the big ramp lowered. They got their gear and wearily trudged down the ramp and toward where they’d left their vehicles. As soon as they were off and clear, the ramp was raised again and the plane taxied around to take off for its final destination.

  “C’mon, you can ride with me,” he said to Ramirez, striding past him toward his truck.

  Ramirez gave him a wary look. “Will my legs be okay?”

  “As long as you stay away from Babe,” he replied equably. He unlocked the doors, leaned in to insert the key and start the engine, then began scraping frost off the windshield.

  “Like seven big brothers, huh?” Ramirez said as he slid into the passenger seat.

  “She has brothers. We’re the mean-ass guys she works with.” He didn’t want to be her damn brother. He wasn’t content with being the mean-ass guy she worked with, either, but for now he’d have to settle.

  As he drove the mostly deserted pre-daylight streets to headquarters, Ramirez—evidently he had more balls than brains—said, “She’s a grown woman.”

  Levi grunted. “Noticed that, did you? Did you also notice that she’s more than capable of telling us to shut up and mind our own business if she was interested? What does that tell you?”

  Ramirez frowned. “Okay. Shit. I get it. She wasn’t interested.”

  “She’d have thrown something at us if she had been.”

  They reached headquarters and entered the nondescript building, signed in.