hate it, too.” The words sounded lame, even to him, but he’d say anything to keep her talking. “But you’ll be okay. The cavalry is on its way.”
The muscles of her cheek against his shifted; he hoped she was smiling at his lame joke. “This is probably the last thing you expected when you came out here to dig plants,” he said.
“Yeah.” The shaking wasn’t as violent now—only a tremor shuddering through her every now and then. Her hands had relaxed, no longer gripping the dirt. He resisted the urge to smooth his hand along her back; she might take it the wrong way. As it was, he was becoming all too aware of the feel of her body beneath his, the side of her breast nestled beside his arm, the soft curve of her backside against his groin.
“This is just a little too familiar,” she said.
He realized she wasn’t talking about the feel of their bodies pressed together. “You’ve been pinned down by a sniper before?”
“Oh, yeah. That was the thing about being over there—the unpredictability of it all—not knowing when an IED would explode or a sniper would fire, not knowing who you could trust.”
You can trust me, he wanted to say. But he didn’t. Trusting him didn’t change the fact that there was somebody they couldn’t see determined to kill them if they so much as lifted their heads. He hadn’t done a very good job so far of protecting her. The best he could hope for was to provide a distraction. “Have you always been interested in plants?” he asked. “Did you always plan to study biology?”
“I was going to be a television news anchor,” she said. “Or a model. This scar on my face put an end to that.”
Only a deaf man would miss the bitterness in her words. She was certainly pretty enough to be a model—but she probably didn’t want to hear that, either. He tried once more to get the conversation back on track. “What you’re doing now—finding plants that could cure cancer. That sounds a lot more rewarding.”
“Yeah.” She fell silent again. Okay, so she didn’t want to talk. At least she’d stopped shaking.
“Mostly, I like the solitude,” she said after a moment. “It’s so peaceful out here. Usually.”
“Yeah. Usually it is. You just got lucky.”
She actually chuckled then—the sound made him feel about ten feet tall, as if he’d done something a lot more heroic than make lame jokes.
“Why do you think he’s shooting at us?” she asked. “Is it because we found the dead man?”
“I doubt it’s that. My guess is the dead guy’s an illegal. He won’t have any ID on him, or anything to tie him to anyone or anything. Most likely the sniper is protecting something. A meth lab or something like that.”
“But doesn’t firing at us give away the fact that there’s something out here worth protecting?”
“Yeah, but it keeps us from getting too close and buys them time to move the operation. When we finally make it out to investigate, whatever is going on will be long gone.”
“What happens after that?”
“We have a starting place for our search. From there we try to track them to their new location.”
“Like in the war,” she said.
“Yeah. A lot like in the war.”
“Just my dumb luck that I come out here to get away from all that and end up in the middle of it. Do you ever feel that way?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I thought my job would mostly be inspecting shipments and checking passports—looking for drugs and illegals, for sure. I knew I’d carry a weapon, but I didn’t expect to ever have to use it. But then I think, maybe I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. Maybe my military training can help me put an end to some of the violence, at least.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked. “That things happen for a reason?”
“Yeah. I mean, don’t you think it’s more than coincidence that we met up again after all this time?” Five years in which he’d never really forgotten about her. “I mean, what are the odds?”
“That’s why it’s called a coincidence,” she said. “It’s random. Just like me ending up out here in the middle of your little drug war. It’s the way life works, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
* * *
MICHAEL DIDN’T SAY anything after Abby shot down his theory that the two of them were meant to meet up again. Well, sorry, but she didn’t believe in fate. She wasn’t meant to be flat on her stomach, squashed by some big guy in fatigues while another guy took potshots at her, any more than she was meant to disappoint her family by becoming a recluse who wandered the desert in search of rare plants. Life was life. Things happened and you rolled with the punches. She liked looking for plants in the desert, and she hoped the work she did now would help somebody else someday. But that didn’t mean she’d been guided by fate. She made her own choices and accepted the consequences.
She closed her eyes, thinking she might as well catch a nap while she waited for whatever Michael’s partners were doing out there. But closing her eyes was a mistake. As soon as her eyelids descended, she was back in Kandahar, pinned down by a sniper, her face in the dirt just like it was now. Only back then, there had been no cavalry to come to the rescue—the rest of her unit had been pinned down by enemy fire or already wiped out. For six hours she’d lain there with her face in the dirt while the guy next to her silently bled out and the guy on her other side freaked out, sobbing like a baby until every nerve in her was raw. In the end, the shooter must have decided they were all dead and moved on. Her own company thought the same thing—she woke up with two men slinging her onto a stretcher and someone shouting, “Hey, we’ve got a live one here!”
She opened her eyes again. Time to think about something else. Mariposa. Where were she and Angelique right now? Was she safe? Was she somehow mixed up in whatever illegal operation the sniper was protecting? What was she—somebody’s wife or girlfriend, along for the ride, in over her head now? Was she as surprised by the violence that intruded on such peaceful surroundings as Abby was?
“When you were out here before, collecting your plants, did you see anybody else?” Michael asked. “Besides the men who were after our dead guy?”
What was he, a mind reader or something? “No, I didn’t see anybody,” she lied.
“No other hikers or campers?”
“I saw two hikers three days ago. They were tourists from Australia. And I pass people on the roads and see campers in the campground.”
“That’s it?”
“Why? Don’t you believe me?”
“In interrogation training, they tell you that if you ask the same question in several different ways, you sometimes get different answers.”
“So now you’re interrogating me?” What she wouldn’t give to be able to look him in the eye when she spoke. Instead, she was forced to address the ground while he lay on top of her. She appreciated that he was
