Hard to Hold Read online

  The bus shifted backward, hard.

  “I’m assuming you want to live more,” Jake said, grabbed the kid and hustled off the bus. He’d barely set foot off the hunk of twisted metal, the kid’s whimpered cries in his ears—and shit, the kid would be lucky if they could save the arm at all, never mind the scars he’d incurred all along the side of his face and neck—when he felt the back-draft of the bus’s whoosh down the hill, toward the ravine.

  It wasn’t a huge drop, but where the kid had been positioned, he would’ve surely been crushed.

  A few people close enough to see what had happened began to yell and point toward the bus. Jake walked calmly past them and placed Shane on the ground.

  “We need a stretcher over here,” Isabelle yelled from where she was helping someone up off the ground, and two EMTs with a stretcher raced toward him. At least four had arrived on the scene, which was good.

  He helped lift Shane gently onto the stretcher.

  Shane grabbed Jake with his good arm. “You saved my life. You and the doc.”

  “You’ll owe me one in the field,” Jake said, shook Shane’s hand before they loaded him into the ambulance and was immediately accosted by the trooper who’d told him to stay off the bus earlier.

  “You don’t listen well, do you, boy?” The guy got right in his face, put a hand on his shoulder—and no, Jake didn’t much like either of those approaches. Especially the boy part.

  “Get your fucking hand off me,” he said, low and calm enough to make the guy follow his directive almost immediately.

  “Cut the crap—I need all the hands I can get,” Isabelle called out. She’d moved from a few feet away, assessing another patient, and as much as he wanted to be pissed at her, he couldn’t be. Mainly because she was still yelling at him, and saving her life and Shane’s didn’t garner him any special favors in her book.

  He liked that last part. A lot.

  The trooper backed off and Isabelle pointed to a man sitting in the snow near him. “Jake, get him up. Run an IV. Now.”

  Who knew that getting a command from a woman would be such a turn-on? And he’d much rather throw her back into the car and pull off her clothes and take her, the primal urge invading every single muscle in his body.

  She knew it too. He saw it in her eyes, the way she held his stare as she put on fresh gloves. The way she licked her bottom lip before she mouthed Now again and he got to work.

  Jake had been about to grab that policeman by the throat—Isabelle was pretty certain of that. He probably wanted to throttle her too, but they’d gotten Shane off the bus. That was what mattered.

  She’d deal with the consequences later. The mantra of her life lately, because getting on the bus had been more instinct than actual thought.

  On her very first trip to Africa—God, she’d been so green—she’d stepped out of the Range Rover after driving for fourteen dusty hours, only to be yanked at with no greeting by a young African woman. Isabelle had run with her twenty feet farther up the road to where a man lay gasping for air, and she’d performed an emergency tracheotomy. Trial by fire. No time for thinking, just action.

  The problem was, she needed to learn to balance those two things again.

  As the light snow turned to rain, she got the young man to an EMT, pointed out the bus driver and turned to find Jake.

  He was helping to change a tire on one of the ambulances along the far side of the road.

  Even though her body was still humming from the urgency of the situation, every single hormone pointed her solidly in Jake’s direction. Watching his forearms flex and his hands maneuver the tire onto the jeep, his body slicked from the rain and the ice, seemingly impervious to any and all weather, made her want him, right here in the middle of nowhere.

  Maybe she had a fever—that would explain the sudden, pulsating heat that flushed her from face to thighs and between her breasts, and fueled all the fantasies she’d had about Jake over the past months.

  “Isabelle, get into the car!” he called over his shoulder, and yes, he knew she’d been watching him. But he was right—the snow had turned into a light icy-rain mix and her teeth were chattering and so she went to the Blazer and turned the keys in the ignition and pulled the jacket Jake had lent her—the one he’d thrown back in here at some point to keep it from getting soaked—over her.

  The heat came on surprisingly quickly, although based on the way the car felt under her when she’d driven it last night—never mind the way combat man drove it this morning—she should’ve known that there was nothing ordinary about this car.

  Warmer now, she stretched to try to keep her lower back from stiffening up. Between the cold and the heavy lifting she’d done, she was going to be really sore by tomorrow morning. Although one glance at the sky reminded her that it was already morning. Dawn had started its arrival when she wasn’t looking.

  Jake was outside the passenger-side window, right next to her, but his attention to the barely noticeable lightening sky was rapt.

  As the day broke without much fanfare to wash minimal light over the snow, she hesitantly put her hand flat against the window. Although he still hadn’t turned to face her—still kept his face turned toward the rising sun—he flattened his hand on his side of the window directly over hers through the glass.

  Still, she knew getting close to Jake was not going to go down easy for him. She wouldn’t have it any other way.

  There was no other way for Sarah Cameron to get the shots she needed than to be in the middle of the action. She maneuvered through the brush as quietly as possible, heart pounding.

  This was a checkpoint search gone terribly wrong. She’d been put on the scent by a mercenary named Al who knew Sarah was in need of money—she always needed money, now that her family’s farm had been taken. She’d become a provider from age sixteen, unable to go to university, where she would have studied journalism and photography. Instead, she remained in her homeland to photograph her country’s ills for profit.

  Most of the time, it turned her stomach.

  So did child soldiers, bought and sold like chattel, kept in line with promises of riches and a steady diet of drugs and threats.

  She’d given up trying to understand it—now she spent all her time simply trying to capture the moment. And live in it too.

  She didn’t expect to live very long, and realized that over the past few years, she’d gotten to the point where she didn’t care very much about that. It should’ve concerned her—would’ve concerned the old Sarah. But that was years earlier, and that woman no longer existed.

  Sell your soul and your country for money. Yes, she had, wasn’t proud of it, but her family needed her help. This was the best she could give them.

  When Mugabe had taken power in Zimbabwe, the coalition government, along with ZANU, decided that it was time for the Africans to take back the land from the whites. It didn’t matter that seven generations of Sarah’s family were born and raised in Africa, that her father had worked hard to buy that land.

  The worst part was that Sarah understood on an intellectual level what the new government was trying to accomplish. Why it had to happen. But she hated seeing everything her family had worked so hard to build destroyed in a single afternoon of violence and despair, hated suddenly being looked upon as an enemy and a traitor in the country that had nurtured her for sixteen years.

  A country she loved.

  Over the past years, the violence in Zimbabwe had escalated furiously. It was almost not safe for Sarah to go back without an escort. Not safe for her family to be there.

  As if in response to that, Sarah herself stayed in some of the most dangerous places her country had to offer.

  She’d been living at this clinic in Burundi for the past three months—it was one of the larger ones and she was pulling double duty, taking pictures for the book on Médicins Sans Frontières, or as the Americans called it, Doctors Without Borders, as well as documenting the ever growing political violence in the
area.

  The people at the MSF clinics were good to her—she was often a help translating, could teach the logistician a thing or two about fixing the ancient Land Rovers that took doctors and patients back and forth to airports and bigger hospitals when necessary.

  That was over as of next week—these shots should pay rent for her parents for the next few months. For her, maybe another week in a hotel in Kagera Region before looking for more work.

  This wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done—her stomach still twisted in knots over what she’d helped Rafe do two months earlier—for the promise of money and training.

  “The rumors aren’t true, Sarah,” he’d reassured her again last week. “Isabelle was fine when I left her. Safe. The American soldiers took her and we got our money.”

  “She was a friend.”

  “People like us don’t have any friends,” he’d said, and yes, that part was the truth.

  She’d done her part, had thrown the clinic in Djibouti off the track for the first forty-eight hours Rafe had taken Isabelle and made sure no one had reported her missing. She’d also been the one to phone the Red Cross a day later to let them know Isabelle’s location—and Rafe had been sending Sarah money ever since in small increments. Too small, but it was something. Until last week, when he hadn’t shown up with cash and she’d been forced to take on this job.

  He had promised to be at the clinic tomorrow in the same breath he’d promised he’d start to train her. Even though she carried her own weapon—a 9mm Glock—and could handle an M16 as well. As necessary, she had learned a variety of self-defense moves all guaranteed to help her take down opponents much larger than herself. Still, all the male mercenaries she’d known before Rafe had refused to train her. Including Clutch.

  Clutch was the one she couldn’t seem to get out of her mind. She’d been attempting to snap a picture of the elusive merc when he’d caught her. And then she’d spent what seemed like forever in his bed, in his arms, until she hadn’t wanted to leave. And she hadn’t left for anything other than photography work in the vein of what she was doing right now. Dangerous work.

  She’d come back to his house shaken one night after a near capture and asked him to train her. Clutch had offered her an office job instead, one she’d promptly turned down.

  She couldn’t help but think if she’d taken that job, where she’d be today.

  She couldn’t worry about that now. Not when the situation she was supposed to capture was unfolding before her camera’s lens. The African driver had been unsuccessful in trying to deal with the soldiers by himself, and his passengers were being ordered out of the car.

  You could save them … should save them. But she didn’t. She’d had to learn to steel herself, even more than she’d done before. Get rid of sentimentality.

  She didn’t want to have to depend on Rafe and his money. She didn’t want to have to depend on anyone. She’d come too close to that with Clutch, felt herself getting comfortable. Soft.

  She almost laughed out loud at that, as if she could ever be soft. No, she was all hard edges and angles. Clutch had been the one to surprise her with his sentimentality.

  This checkpoint was two miles away from the clinic—she’d fired up the ancient Land Rover and come here because the American newspapers paid well for pictures like this, pictures they were too afraid to come in and get themselves, and for good reason. She spoke the language, had the connections, and even so, her sense of survival often overrode her need for money.

  This time, the man she’d been hired by was an adventure seeker—a man who traveled the world in search of dangerous places but who didn’t have African citizenship, which would allow him to pass through the continent the way Sarah herself was able to do. She’d done work for him before—he paid on time and liked her pictures.

  Camera balanced on one knee, she lit a cigarette with her free hand, let it dangle from her mouth as she refocused the lens. Things were going to get uglier at any moment—the soldiers were bearing arms and yelling, and the three men and one woman, all of whom appeared to be missionary types, were frantically digging in their pockets for anything that would allow them to cross the line.

  When the soldiers began to force one of the men onto his knees, Sarah snapped pictures and crossed the line herself.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Jake might’ve been sweet—well, sweet was probably the wrong word—when he was outside the car, but once inside with her, he let her have it. With both barrels.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” He slammed the car into reverse and took to the road with a vengeance. “You know what, don’t bother to answer that. I know the answer—you weren’t thinking.”

  “I was working. Doing my job. And I’m tired of people telling me what I can’t do,” Isabelle muttered, well aware of how defensive she sounded.

  “I never said can’t, Isabelle. Obviously, you’re more than capable of getting yourself into trouble.”

  “I want to do exactly what I feel like doing—I want to do everything. The way I used to.”

  “Your uncle would kill you if he knew what you did.”

  “When did you become my keeper?”

  He didn’t answer, just muttered and shifted in his seat. “You’re stubborn.”

  “Yes. I’m not an easy person. I never have been.”

  “You’re not back to the way you were,” he muttered.

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re taking stupid chances. That’s how I know.”

  “You took the same chance I did.”

  “I’m trained to take chances like that, Isabelle. Last time I looked, surgeons don’t get that kind of training.”

  “So it’s all right for you to do something dangerous—”

  “You should’ve let someone—anyone—know what you were going to do.”

  “Did you?” she asked.

  “It’s different for me.” He curled his hands around the wheel and took a hard turn. “Look, I get it, all right? Probably more than anyone. But you’ve got to give yourself some time.”

  “I don’t have the patience for this kind of healing,” she admitted. “Surgery’s simple. There’s a start and a finish. It’s not something that can go on indefinitely. I’m not used to open-ended things.”

  “You shouldn’t have done something like that when you’re having trouble in small spaces,” he said, and she jerked her head toward him in surprise. “If you’d had a panic attack, collapsed, I might not have been able to get to both of you without the bus pitching backward.”

  “Are you done with the lecture?” she asked as he swerved into a parking space outside the clinic, not wanting to think about how easily he’d assessed her vulnerabilities.

  He slammed the gears into place, stared out the windshield for a second before he spoke. “I scared you last night—when I kissed you.”

  That certainly hadn’t been what she’d been expecting. Did he scare her? He’d turned her on, gave her back the sexual feelings she’d been pushing down anytime they surfaced. The thing was, she’d known that would happen once she got around Jake, had hoped for that.

  “It wasn’t the kiss,” she said, hated the way her face flushed.

  “It was because I held you, pulled you down.” He held the steering wheel with both hands, hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

  She wanted to reach out, caress his hands and loosen them from the wheel, but kept her hands in her lap instead, balled into fists so tight her short nails bit into her palms. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not that I don’t want you to hold me. I just didn’t expect it.”

  “I should’ve known better.” He said it much more to himself than to her. “Pushing you like that didn’t help anything—it’s making you do things you shouldn’t.”

  She stared at his profile for a few seconds before slamming her door open and climbing out. “I didn’t go onto the bus because you kissed me, so fuck you, Jake. Just fuck you,” she told him
before she slammed the door closed.

  She turned away before his eyes could catch hers—that made it easier to walk away from him, because really, she didn’t know for sure if she was telling the truth. She’d wanted Jake’s arms around her, tugging her down, his touch making her hot and satisfied.

  She didn’t want to think about why she couldn’t let that happen yet. Didn’t want to think about why she went off so quickly, like a lit firecracker with a busted fuse, anytime Jake tried to help her—because that would mean revisiting those awful days.

  Anyone holding her, touching her, beyond Jake that first night was too much. She got panicky when people hugged her or stood too close. At work, those two weeks she was back, she’d forgone the elevator in favor of the stairs whenever she could.

  She’d gotten so claustrophobic there that there were two separate times she swore she actually saw Rafe at the hospital—once in the cafeteria where she’d met Daniel for lunch and the other in the empty corridor leading to the blood labs.

  For an hour afterward, her hands had trembled—never a good thing for a surgeon’s patients to see. She’d had to tell herself over and over, It wasn’t him. He’s in prison. He can’t hurt you again.

  At least he’d never followed her into her dreams. That was one place she eluded him. During the day, the minefields were too numerous for her to avoid.

  Even at the clinic, she sometimes felt the walls closing in. She’d stand outside, taking deep gulps of air until she felt better, the way she found herself doing now at the entranceway; she’d do that and tell herself she was healing.

  She wondered how many times she’d have to tell herself that before it became true, before her body stopped reacting with fear when she thought about what happened.

  No, going back to Africa was the right thing to do, the only way to allay those fears—until she did that, she was sure she wouldn’t feel complete. Going back to Africa wasn’t anything like her rushing onto that bus this morning—and she’d keep telling herself that until she believed it fully.