Just a Kiss Away by Jill Barnett

sweet peace. He bit back a satisfied smile and watched her try to come to grips with her situation. Her pensive gaze went to the old, moldy woven mats on the floor. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. She looked toward the opposite corner, where an ancient water bucket, its bands rusted a burnt brown, sat with an equally rusty tin ladle. Sam had tasted the water inside. He doubted she would. Just the murky color would send her running. He wondered how long it would take this pink flower of the South to wilt without water.
    Her gaze went up to the high-pointed ceiling of the hut, where bamboo rods crisscrossed as support for the long, dry savannah grass that formed the primitive roof. It was a haven for bugs, those huge, abundant bugs that lived in the tropics. He doubted she knew that, or cared, the bugs not being part of her ancestry.
    Now she stared in dismay at the locked door. Her shoulders sagged in defeat, and she sighed a huge, lung-windy sigh that could only have been missed by a deaf man, or a dead one. Its lack of subtlety was so ludicrous and it struck him so funny that he had real trouble holding back a smile.
    He turned away, knowing his face showed his amusement. He’d always prided himself on his ability to hide his thoughts and emotions. Seldom had he found anyone or anything who could weaken that skill. In his profession he couldn’t afford to.
    She had managed to do it twice in one day. He wrote it off to lack of food and sleep.
    Now she chewed on a fingernail, her attention still held by the locked door. Maybe she was catching on; maybe she even had enough sense, after all, to realize the seriousness of her situation. Yet experience told him otherwise. Ladies had no common sense, especially little pampered pink belles who deigned to glide down from their pedestals long enough to wreak havoc on the real world—the tough one he lived and fought in, the life that kept his mind sharp just in order for him to exist.
    No, he thought, with a shake of his head, she didn’t have a clue to that world. She survived on the world of her past, her precious bloodline. He survived on a line of blood, too, a line of spilled blood that trailed behind him longer than her precious pedigree.
    He also knew that trail wouldn’t end, not today or tomorrow. On that last thought, he drifted off, knowing his body needed sleep to watch and wait, for timing was essential to his escape.
    He’d been asleep for a while. She had no fingernails left. It had taken her a while to chew them down to the quick. Madame Devereaux would have taken one look at her hands and plastered hot pepper oil on them. She could almost feel it burn her lips. She squirmed, looking around the dark hut. The ground was damp and musty and hard, the air stuffy, and she was right scared.
    She ventured a glance—her third in as many minutes—at the Yankee. He was so still. She’d never seen anyone sleep so quietly. All of her brothers snored louder than hurricane winds, Jeffrey, the eldest, being the stormiest of the bunch. When she was about five, he’d had to change bedrooms. At the time his room had been right below the nursery, and his nightly snoring had given her hourly nightmares. Finally her other brothers had made him change rooms, claiming that her screaming was keeping up the whole county.
    Since her brothers snored, she’d assumed all men did, figuring all that hot, arrogant air had to go somewhere. Based on her brief and frustrating encounters with the rude Yankee, she’d have thought he could snore the roof down. She glanced up, staring for a long moment at the high roof. She could have sworn something moved in the thick grass. She squinted to see better, but when she saw nothing she figured it was just a slight breeze ruffling the grass roof.
    She turned back to her fellow prisoner. Not a sound from him. He was so still it was almost eerie. Not even his breathing was detectable. There was no rise and fall of his chest; even his position remained