The Marriage Trap Read online

  ‘You have a better idea?’ Scepticism dripped from his voice.

  ‘You bet I do.’ j

  Even his argument that he was just protecting her infuriated her—not that she believed it for a minute. It was just another example of men always thinking they 3 knew best. If Aidan Sawyer thought he could just step in and run her life for her, he had another thing coming. Men! They were all alike. First her father, then Clarke, now Aidan!

  She wasn’t sure which made her maddest—that he was trying to coerce her into sleeping with him or that he was using such an underhand means of doing so. He hadn’t even told the chief why they were there, for heaven’s sake! The chief might even know her father. Without another word, she stalked back out of the hut and looked around.

  Several of the men from the group who had met them were standing not far away, their gazes straying to the hut she had just come out of. The one who had winked was talking softly, the others were grinning or laughing. Their grins widened when they saw Courtney.

  She brushed her hair back away from her face and looked around once more for the chief. Not seeing him, she approached the men.

  ‘Me desculpe,’ she said nervously, directing her words to the one who had been talking. ‘Eu necesito falar com o chefe.’

  He jerked his head towards the hut the chief had come out of.

  ‘Courtney!’ Aidan appeared in the doorway, scowling.

  But before he could stop her, she darted into the hut the man had pointed out. The chief was squatting on the floor of the hut. His initial surprise at seeing the intruder was obvious, though he schooled his features almost immediately. He rose slowly so that they were looking eye to eye, his expression forbidding.

  Courtney gulped, then reminded herself of the alternative. ‘Pardon me,’ she began, rediscovering her Portuguese as she went along. ‘I—I need your help. My name is Courtney Perkins, and I’m looking for my father.’ She paused, hoping he understood. He didn’t indicate that he had one way or the other, so she blundered on. ‘I hoped you might know him. Endicott Perkins. He’s a missionary.’

  She held her breath when she said that. There were Indians who had no use for missionaries. There were Indians who killed them. There were missionaries, she was willing to admit, who might deserve it. Not her father, though. Endicott Perkins was generally respected, even loved. He didn’t ‘preach at’ so much as ‘live with’ the people who were his mission in life. Still…

  ‘En-di-cott?’ The chief’s sober face broke into a wide grin. ‘Sim, sim. Eu o conhego hem. E voce easua filha?’ Courtney nodded, smiling herself. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m his daughter. That’s why I’ve come. I need to find my parents. And Mr. Sawyer—’ she paused significantly and looked towards the door beyond which she was sure he was lurking ‘—is only helping me find them. He’s my guide, not my novio.’

  The chief’s eyes widened. ‘Ah. Guia.’ He raised his eyebrows as if asking for confirmation.

  ‘Sim,’ Courtney assured him. ‘My guide.’ She repeated it in English, Portuguese and Spanish, just to make sure he understood.

  ‘So—’ he grinned at her ‘—you do not wish to share a hammock, yes?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. No hammock. Please. No hut, if possible.’

  ‘I understand.’ He stuck his head out of the hut again, saying something to the woman who was apparently just going to string the hammock. She looked from Courtney to Aidan and back again, then giggled. The men who were standing about snickered.

  Aidan himself, leaning against one of the supports to the hut, scowled at her. Serves you right, she thought and gave him a smug smile in return.

  * * *

  ‘He knows my father,’ she said to him the next time she spoke to him alone just as they were preparing to eat with the chief and his family. ‘He can help us find him. I don’t know why you didn’t ask.’ She paused. ‘No, that’s not true, is it? I know very well why you didn’t.’ She shook her head and patted him condescendingly on the forearm. ‘Tough luck.’

  Aidan just grunted and shook his head as if she had just done something very stupid.

  But she would have been far stupider, she thought, to let him get away with trying to sleep with her.

  They ate cooked plantains and some kind of meat, Courtney wasn’t sure what, for supper. There was much joking and talking, none of which she understood. Aidan, however, appeared to understand a part of it. She saw him cast a sidelong glance at her once or twice after one of the men whispered something to another. But she just gave him a blithe smile in return. He needn’t try to make her feel threatened. It was quite clear that the chief held Endicott Perkins in the highest esteem. He wasn’t about to mistreat such a revered man’s daughter.

  In fact, she was treated like royalty all evening long. He struggled to speak to her in Portuguese once the meal was over. And Courtney took great pains to answer him. He asked about her life, if she had a husband, children. And he seemed shocked when she said she didn’t.

  ‘But you are old,’ he protested, looking askance.

  Aidan snickered. Courtney glared at him.

  ‘Not old by our standards,’ she said. ‘Twenty-two is not old.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, very old,’ the chief insisted. ‘White dolly born the year of the flood. My daughter born the year we kill the jaguars.’ He looked at Aidan for help in judging the difference in their ages.

  ‘She’s five years younger than you are,’ Aidan told Courtney.

  ‘Five years,’ the chief said. ‘And look.’ He pointed to the woman who must be his daughter. She had a child hanging on to her who looked about four. Another was nursing from her breast. Courtney swallowed. ‘And this one—’ the chief picked up a little boy about two ‘—is her son, too. So what do you have?’

  Courtney didn’t imagine that the mangy tomcat she had rescued from starvation last winter would count for much.

  ‘Tell him about the bunny books, sweetheart,’ Aidan suggested, grinning.

  She shot him a malevolent glance. ‘You should talk,’ she said. ‘Mr. Footloose.’

  His expression darkened. ‘I was married once,’ he said curtly. Then he turned his back on her and began to talk to the man next to him.

  They didn’t speak again for the rest of the evening. Many of the Indians turned in not long after the sun had set. But a few continued to talk on, squatting beside the ever-present fire, laughing softly. One of the men got out a reed flute and began to play. Courtney yawned. The chief’s daughter giggled.

  ‘You sleep?’ she asked Courtney in halting Portuguese.

  Courtney nodded.

  ‘Come.’ The girl shifted the baby to her hip and, with the four-year-old and the two-year-old trailing after her, she led Courtney to a hut across the round. She touched a newly hung hammock. ‘Here you sleep,’ she said. ‘Only old woman here. No bother you.’

  Courtney nodded and thanked her. She touched the hair of the two little boys and one of them shyly touched her shirt. Then the family turned and walked back to the fire. The girl said something to one of the younger men, probably her husband, and he got up to join her. They disappeared into one of the huts, arms around each other. Courtney’s throat tightened as she watched them go. She felt unaccountably bereft, lonely, turning back to her hammock alone.

  Maybe you wanted to share with Aidan Sawyer after all? she asked herself scornfully. No. It wasn’t indiscriminate sex that she wanted. It was closeness, sharing. And could she have got that from Aidan? Not a chance.

  Courtney could still see him sitting beside the fire. He was half sprawled, not squatting like the men he was talking with. The firelight flickered, lighting then shadowing the angles of his face. It was darker now with the addition of two days’ growth of beard. But it was, she acknowledged, even more attractive than before. It was a pity actually, that she wasn’t the sort to go in for affairs. He would be a beaut.

  But she would be a lifetime getting over it. So she turned resolutely back to the hammock the chief’s daughter had s
hown her and, kicking off her shoes, rolled herself into it. Across the way the old woman was already asleep. Her snores were quite audible above the voices she could still hear outside. But they were far less likely to keep Courtney awake than Aidan’s softer ones had the night before.

  She smiled, thinking of his chagrin when she had foiled his single hammock attempt. Poor Aidan. Well, perhaps he would find another woman to share with him. One of the women who had been lurking on the edges of the conversation all evening, perhaps? The thought was less pleasing than she would have wished.

  Don’t think about him, she told herself. Think about tomorrow, about finding Dad and Mom. Think about anything but Aidan Sawyer… even bunnies if you must! She smiled and closed her eyes. In seconds, she was asleep.

  She wasn’t sure what woke her.

  The constant soft scuttling sounds in the roof thatch were a part of the background now. As long as she didn’t think about what was making them, she was fine. And the old woman’s snores continued unabated. But all at once Courtney felt a stab of fear, an unnamed apprehension. She lay perfectly still in her hammock, not even breathing. Her ears were attuned to anything odd, anything strange. But for long moments there was nothing.

  Then she heard it again. A soft thrush-thrush. Then silence. Then the same noise again, slow and barely discernible. Bare feet.

  She turned over, feigning restless sleep. Through slitted eyes she could still see the fire through the hut opening. It had burned down, no more now than glowing coals and embers casting everything into shadow. And two of the shadows were moving—one several yards behind the other.

  She bit down on her lower lip, watching intently. Perhaps they were simply hunters getting an early start. But they didn’t move like hunters. Or rather, they moved like hunters closing in on the kill, she thought frantically. And they were coming directly towards her!

  She squeezed her eyes tight shut and the faint glow behind her eyelids that had been there moments before because of the firelight was suddenly gone. The first man stood in the doorway of the hut. She could hear the quick, heavy rasp of his breathing. The smell of wood smoke and human sweat invaded her nostrils. She twisted away in the hammock, still trying to feign sleep. He moved again, and a strong hand touched her arm.

  She jerked, opening her mouth to protest. A hand closed over it. Her eyes flew open and she found herself staring into the hungry eyes of the man who had met the boat yesterday, the one who had winked at her.

  He was smiling now, keeping his hand over her mouth while the other stroked her arm, her stomach, her breasts. He murmured something to her softly, something that was supposed to soothe her and calm her no doubt.

  Courtney shivered, trying to shrink inside herself, to get away from him while she thought what to do. She reached up to push his hand away. Afraid of crying out. Afraid of offending. Afraid of what would happen if she did. Afraid of what would happen if she didn’t!

  He bent his head closer to her, then removed his hand from her mouth and replaced it with his own, his lips hard on hers. Abruptly fear of offending vanished. She grabbed for his arm to push him away when all of a sudden he jerked away of his own accord.

  She stared, bug-eyed in the darkness, as she discovered that it hadn’t been of his own accord at all. He had been yanked backward at the same time as a hand closed over his mouth and a fist came around and drove itself into his belly.

  ‘Ooof.’

  ‘Damn.’ She heard the muffled curse, then saw that the interloper had been spun around and socked once more. In the jaw this time. His head whipped back and he slumped to the ground.

  ‘Don’t just lie there, for God’s sake,’ Aidan’s voice snapped at her. ‘Get your butt out of that hammock and get your gear. I’ll be back for you in a minute.’

  Hoisting the unconscious man over his shoulder, he staggered back out of the hut leaving Courtney to stare after him.

  In seconds everything was back to normal. The shrill sounds of tree frogs, the snores of the old woman, the unending rush of the river in the distance. It might as well never have happened.

  She shook her head, half thinking it was all a bad dream. Had a man actually touched her, stroked her? And had Aidan suddenly appeared like an avenging angel and—

  ‘I said, get moving,’ Aidan hissed. He was back, looming in the doorway, cutting off her light. It hadn’t been a dream. ‘Or would you rather I’d let him have his way with you?’

  ‘He wasn’t—’

  ‘He damned well was! And I’m not standing around arguing about it.’ He was bending over, stuffing whatever he could see that belonged to Courtney into her duffel bag. Then, shouldering it, he turned and tipped her out of the hammock on to the ground.

  ‘Come on,’ he growled and set off across the round without looking back.

  She scrambled to her feet, rubbing her bottom where it had hit the hard-packed floor. Then, unsure of whether she was going from the frying pan into the fire, she hurried after him.

  He stalked quietly through the forest, his pace quick. Courtney had almost to run to keep up with him. He led her unerringly back to the river, untied the boat and waited until she got in, then shoved it off and climbed in after her. He thrust a paddle in her hands and took the other in his own. Then he propelled them swiftly out into the main channel. Within minutes they had left the village far behind them.

  He didn’t speak to her until they had put about an hour between themselves and the village. Then he eased up on the paddling long enough to button his shirt. Noting the sudden change in their speed, Courtney turned around to look at him.

  ‘That’s one,’ he said.

  One? She stared at him blankly.

  He gave her a bitter smile. ‘You remember, sweetheart. We had a little discussion about how you were going to be responsible for yourself, about how I wasn’t going to have to get you out of jams.’

  Courtney glowered at him. How like him to say, ‘I told you so.’ ‘It was your fault,’ she told him bluntly.

  He stared. ‘My fault? How the hell do you figure that? It never would have happened if you’d done what I arranged in the first place and stayed with me.’

  ‘It was because you arranged it that I didn’t!’

  ‘Huh?’ He blinked. ‘Run that by me again.’

  ‘You tried to manipulate me into going to bed with you,’ she accused him furiously.

  And she was even more furious a moment later when he merely shrugged. ‘You would’ve been safer.’

  Oh, yeah? she wondered. She wouldn’t have bet on it. ‘I didn’t like the way you did it,’ she told him.

  He gave her a wry look. ‘There was a better way? Would you have done it if I’d asked you?’

  ‘Gone to bed with you? Of course not.’

  ‘Forget going to bed with me, damn it! Would you have stayed with me?’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Then maybe you can understand why I did what I did.’

  She glared. ‘That doesn’t excuse it. I don’t like being manipulated!’

  ‘Neither do I.’ He gave her a hard stare. ‘You beat me hands down in the manipulation department, sweetheart. Who got us here in the first place?’

  There was no way to answer that.

  Aidan dipped his paddle in the water, never taking his eyes off her, letting the full implications of his words sink in. They did, making Courtney increasingly uncomfortable.

  Finally she scowled and said, ‘We’re even, then.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘The chief respected my father,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He respected me. I thought it would be all right.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Aidan gave her a sardonic grin. ‘But at least one of those guys respected your body more.’

  Courtney was glad it was still quite dark. Aidan didn’t need to see how pink her face had become. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last and with great reluctance, her voice gruff. ‘I didn’t try to entice him.’

  ‘That wasn’
t a little come-on smile I witnessed?’ Aidan raised an eyebrow. His scepticism would have been evident even on a moonless night. ‘That one when you were still in the boat.’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t intentional, Mr. Sawyer,’ she said sharply. ‘I was being pleasant.’

  His immediate bark of laughter showed what he thought of that. ‘Right. Our very own Miss Manners.’

  Courtney gave up. There was no use talking to the stubborn idiot. He would think whatever he wanted, no matter what she said. She concentrated on being as unobtrusive as possible for the remainder of the day. And Aidan seemed to like it like that.

  * * *

  They paddled in silence until daybreak. Then he cut in the engine and they made better time. They ran into one group of Indians scouting along the river shortly before midday and before Courtney could say a word, Aidan said, ‘Keep your eyes down and your mouth shut.’

  Having learned that polite smiles were capable of misinterpretation, she did as he said, only bristling at him afterwards, ‘You could have said please.’

  ‘I could have,’ he agreed, ‘but I don’t see why I should. You aren’t the pretty please type.’

  Courtney didn’t want to know what ‘type’ he thought she was, but she was sure it would be unflattering in the extreme. She ignored the insult and went back to trying to ignore him as well.

  At lunch she helped with food when he asked her to, and later on she didn’t complain when they continued travelling far into the evening because he decided that he didn’t want to camp where the Indians had reported seeing miners.

  He didn’t explain why, but she could guess. If one lusty Indian had considered her fair game, she could imagine what a camp full of miners would think.

  When at last he did find an area that might be suitable for camping, several miles downriver from the mining area, he tied the boat up, then made his way several yards into the jungle until he found a satisfactory spot. There he hung both hammocks in silence, then bent to start a fire.

  ‘Want some help?’ Courtney asked him. It was the first time she had spoken to him since lunch. Silence had seemed the better part of survival. He had spoken barely ten words since he had bawled her out in the morning, and she thought if she started a conversation she might incur his wrath further. But he looked less fierce tonight. His scowl had vanished, and he looked more tired than anything else.