got a shirt you can wear.” He wouldn’t have made the offer unless they were in dire straits, since seeing her in his clothes made him seriously hot for her. And possessive as hell.
Then again, looking at a woman in your clothes was only one step away from seeing her with your rock on her hand, and Romero didn’t have any intention of taking that kind of step no matter how possessive he felt about someone. He’d witnessed firsthand how marriage could change a person, with that ill-advised union in his twenties. For that matter, he and Shannon had probably started growing apart the minute he’d made the big leap of faith and asked her to move in with him. He’d try like hell to remember the fact once his Ramones shirt was hugging Shannon’s breasts.
She moved closer to him, frowning down at the contents of his overnight bag as he retrieved the worn black cotton.
“I’m not worried about my clothes so much as my shoes. I only brought high heels for the wedding.” She tucked his shirt into her bag, as if to put it on at a later date, then dropped down onto a flat rock near his leather satchel and stretched her long legs out in front of her.
The same long legs she used to wrap around his waist. Or twine around his in bed when she wanted him to touch her. He could see the outline of her thighs in the taut fabric of her jeans, long slender muscle neatly defined from all those hours on the treadmill. All that time in his bed.
“I can’t help you with the shoes,” he admitted, determined to focus on the problem at hand and not give in to another slow-motion inventory of the ways Shannon Leigh was sexy.
“Yeah. I guess you can’t help me with the shoes.” Her voice went flat. Cold. “Pretty damned ironic that this would have been the perfect time for me to have a pair of freaking hiking boots.”
Okay, so he’d walked right into that one. But if she thought he was going to engage in her war of words when they had hours of walking ahead of them, she had another think coming. He wouldn’t do the argument thing on a good day. And frankly, today sucked monkey butt.
He just hoped they found civilization faster than he feared they would, because while Shannon might have reached her boiling point with him, she had yet to see his. But, sure enough, it was building.
And the fallout wasn’t going to be pretty.
3
UN-FREAKING-REAL.
Big, ugly birds screeched overhead, and Shannon wondered if they were vultures as she pounded out random combinations of numbers on her cell phone. Maybe she could somehow jar the unit into working before the scavengers started to close in. How could she be in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of noisy birds, no real walking shoes and a man who’d put her heart through the wringer? They had no phone, no map, no navigational system, no car. Thankfully, Romero had traveled with two cases of water in the trunk, since he refused to drink any liquid besides alcohol while south of the border.
He unpacked bottle after bottle from the shrink-wrapped carton now, loading up his overnight bag with Evian. His movements were sharp, quick. Angry. His obvious decision to take the higher ground and not engage in an argument with her about the hiking boots might be admirable if he hadn’t taken that route every single time she’d ever had a bone to pick with him. How could they ever solve their problems when he refused to acknowledge them, let alone discuss them?
Residual frustration simmered inside her, but what was the point of rehashing old terrain? He obviously hadn’t thought their relationship was worth fighting over three months ago, since he’d lit out of town on two wheels. She’d heard he’d gone to stay with friends out on Catalina for a few weeks, then he’d taken up residence at a posh Beverly Hills hotel. And in case she wanted to know how he was faring, the supermarket newspapers posted pictures of him tooling around town on his motorcycle or attending glitzy music awards shows. She had no reason to think he’d want to defend his decisions or talk through their issues now.
She’d be better off focusing on getting out of Mexico and back to civilization, away from scrubby bushes and carnivorous birds. She would put Romero behind her. And with any luck, she’d make him eat his heart out at his loss, to boot.
Not that it would be easy while trekking through the desert in jeans and a blazer, since she couldn’t wear his T-shirt without getting seriously turned on. The scent of him lingered in that cotton, as did memories of other times he’d worn it. Other times she’d taken it off him. Hence the need to stuff the thing directly into her bag. But she would find a way to make him regret that he’d left her. Wasn’t that a woman’s best revenge? To have her ex realize he’d made a colossal mistake?
Sauntering over to the spot where he worked to strip down the contents of his bag now overflowing with purified water, Shannon figured she’d better follow his example and sort through the stuff she had to bring with her.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked, just because she hated pronounced silences.
Her mom had been either depressed or bored with her life for as long as Shannon could remember, and her silences had always meant trouble was brewing. Usually that she’d overstayed her welcome wherever her mom was filming and that Shannon would be on her way back home with a nanny before long. She’d worked damn hard to keep her mom too entertained to fall into the long silences and then send her away, but she’d had even less success as a daughter than as a serious actress.
“I tried to take a shortcut off Route 1 back in Insurgentes, where the interstate veers east before coming back west. But I stopped seeing signs a good five miles before we were run off the road.”
She recalled they hadn’t noticed any other vehicle besides the van once they’d left the main route, so even if they could scale the embankment they’d fallen down, it wouldn’t do much good to wait for traffic on a road that had looked more geared to ATVs than real cars. “So we can either backtrack to the highway or try to cut northeast and see if we can meet up with it ahead of us.”
She unzipped her biggest suitcase, the vintage trunk, one of her favorite pieces of luggage, and wondered how she would leave anything behind. Even though they couldn’t see any other signs of two-legged life right now, that didn’t mean looters wouldn’t crawl out from the bushes to make off with her stuff.
“Right.” Romero dug a knife out of a tool kit that had fallen out of his trunk, and stuffed it inside the bag he apparently planned to bring with him. “But if we backtrack, we know the phone won’t work for the whole trip. Whereas if we move forward, we at least have the possibility of finding some kind of cell coverage.”
Shannon glanced at her bridesmaid dress, her curling iron and her hot rollers. None of them would be helpful on a journey through the Mexican desert, but she couldn’t see herself leaving all of it behind either, especially as the dress was the single most expensive item in any of her suitcases. Romero’s trunk latch had broken when he forced it open, so they couldn’t lock it up again. Tugging out the pink garment, she rolled it up tight to pack in the medium-size carry-on bag.
“You’re not bringing that with you.” Romero seemed to be cutting the carpet out of the BMW, for no real purpose that she could see.
“Did I tell you what to pack?” The sun overhead went behind a cloud and she noticed for the first time the day turning overcast. The ugly birds that had been stalking them had taken off, but she didn’t know if that meant impending bad weather or that the carrion-eating rats with wings had gotten tired of waiting for them to die.
“No, but that’s
