The Passionate G-Man

Taught her enough to know that if she never set foot in one of the damned things again, it would be too soon.

“Do it, Jasmine. I don’t want you bleeding all over me.”

“Why, because you’re afraid the scent of fresh blood might attract alligators?” She lost her rhythm. A blade caught the water and jerked at her arm, and she uttered a five-letter word. Tears trickled down her cheeks, making her rash itch all the more.

“At least when I hit the headlines—Actress Lost in Damned Dismal Swamp, Feared Dead—my grandmother won’t recognize my name.”

Three

The sky was beginning to grow pale when Lyon opened his eyes. Being careful not to move, he drew a shallow, experimental breath. He still hurt. Hurt like hell, in fact, and where he didn’t hurt, he ached. The difference was subtle, but it was there.

He toyed with it as his senses came quickly alive. Mental exercises served a purpose when physical exercise was out of the question.

Like now. A fourteen-foot skiff was no place to spend a night. Especially not with a broken back and a knee that was still none too reliable.

Especially not an open skiff. In February. The warm spell was over. The temperature must’ve dropped into the forties last night.

They’d stopped for a rest. Her hands had been hurting. He’d been hurting all over. He’d known there was no hope of reaching camp before dark, and rather than risk taking a wrong turn, he’d let her sleep. And then he’d fallen asleep himself. Not a smart thing to do, but then, his options weren’t exactly limitless.

“Ah, hell,” he muttered, gazing bleary-eyed at the woman still huddled in the stern of the boat. She’d turned up the collar of her shirt, rolled down her sleeves and done her best to cover those long, naked legs with a few rumpled tissues and the flap of her shoulder bag.

“Wake up,” he rasped.

She groaned and tried to draw her knees up to her chin. Her no-longer-whıte shorts weren’t particularly skimpy. They’d been designed to come halfway down her thighs, but when a woman had legs as long as hers, there was still a lot of flesh left exposed to the elements.

Not to mention exposed to the eyes.

“Jasmine, look alive. We’ve got to get some heat going.”

“Turnip therm’stat.”

“Right. You do ıt—you’re the closest.”

She opened one eye. The other one was swollen shut. Shivering, she mumbled something that sounded like “Where Nell ama?”

“By my reckoning, you’re approximately five miles north of Billy’s Landing, about half a mile west of Two Buzzard Ditch, and a mile or so east of Graceland.”

“Oh,.”

She scratched her cheek and then her ankle, and smiled. There was something dangerously disarming about a woman who woke up shivering, scratching, blinking one eye and still managed to smile.

She yawned, rearranging splotched remnants of calamine lotion. “Graceland? I thought that was in Tennessee.” Her voice was early-morning soft. Husky. In another woman, under other circumstances, he might have taken it as an invitation.

With Jasmine he took it as merely easy on the ears.

“Bad joke. Think you can do a few warm-ups without falling overboard? We need to get your blood circulating.”

“Too late. ’S frozen like a raspberry snow cone.”

He yawned, too. And then, unexpectedly, he grinned. Couldn’t recall the last time he’d smiled, especially before breakfast, but she seemed to have that effect on him.

Lyon had come here to be alone. If he had to have company, he’d have preferred a chiropractor or a physical therapist. Instead, he got Jasmine Clancy with her poison ivy and her blistered hands and her world-class legs. He wasn’t sure just what breed of woman she was, but she didn’t belong here. One way or another, he probably ought to get rid of her.

“How’re you doing? Back still broken?” she asked in a voice that reminded him of late nights, rumpled beds and soft women.

“It’s better.” It was worse. A hell of a lot worse, but there was no point in giving her all the bad news at once. “Are you hungry?”

“Starved. I don’t suppose this yacht of yours runs to a galley?”

“Chef’s night out If you can manage to get your hand into my left side pocket, you might find half a chocolate bar. It’ll be messy, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll take it.”

It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded. She eased herself up to a kneeling position, but in doing so, she was forced to straddle his legs. The boat rocked. She grabbed the sides, winced at the pain and waited for things to calm down again.

Lyon waited for her to recover her balance, grab the thing out of his pocket and get the hell off his lap. He would have dug it out himself if he hadn’t been afraid to move anything connected to his back. Which included his arms.

Fine pair they were. He shifted slightly to give her access. Cargo pants had plenty of storage room. He didn’t particularly want her exploring it all.

Cautiously, she dragged one knee alongside his legs and leaned forward to slide one hand into his left side pocket. Her hair tickled his face. It was wilder than ever—probably hadn’t seen a comb in days—and it smelled faintly of...lilac?

Oh, hell, if there was one thing he didn’t need it was a woman who smelled of lilacs. “Come on, come on, we don’t have all day,” he growled.

He was discovering—rediscovering, at least—things about himself that he’d just as soon have left safely buried for another few years.

Such as the fact that the male of the species was about ten parts brain to ninety parts testosterone. If there was one thing he didn’t need screwing up his ten percent at the moment, it was that other ninety percent.

Her fingers fumbled against his groin. He could ick himself for not wearing a shirt with pockets. He could kick himself for not eating the whole damned thing instead of saving half for the trip back to the campsite in case he ran out of energy.

She dug out a knife, a pocket calculator and a shapeless lump that was half a chocolate bar that had melted and stuck to the wrapper. “Don’t you want any? One bite, that’s all I need. Just enough to wake me up. Chocolate has caffeine, doesn’t it?”

“Nah, I don’t want any. You eat it all, you’re the one who’s going to have to get us out of here.”

So then he had to watch while she unwrapped the thing and licked it off the paper. Nearby, a small flock of fish ducks dived for breakfast. A great blue squawked a protest and lifted from the banks, long legs dangling gracefully.

He scowled at the birds and then he scowled at her long, graceful, mud-stained, briar-scratched legs. And then he scowled some more just on general principle. “We’d better get going. If you want to go ashore for a minute, there’s a place just downstream from here where the bank’s pretty clear.”

“I’m thirsty. I don’t suppose you have anything to drink, do you?”

“Warm beer?”

She shuddered. “I’ll wait for coffee, thanks. You will offer me a cup of coffee before I head back to the motel, won’t you?”

He shrugged, which was a painful mistake, but it was all the answer she was going to get. He’d offer her coffee, all right, but she wouldn’t be going back. Not anytime soon.

As dainty as if it were a perfumed finger bowl, she dipped her hands over the sides, swished them around, then wet a tissue and daubed at her face.

Pity. He’d been admiring the rım of chocolate around her mouth. Shifting painfully into the most comfortable position he could achieve for the long trip ahead, he said, “You missed the spot beside your nose. No—left side. Got it.”