Midnight Rainbow by Linda Howard Page B

couldn't take another step, he turned and
surveyed her with an impersonal professionalism.
                  "Stay here while I find some sort of
shelter for us. It's going to start raining in a little while, so we might as
well sit it out. You look pretty well beat, anyway."
                  Jane pulled her cap off and wiped her
streaming face with her forearm, too tired to comment as he melted from sight.
How did he know it was going to start raining? It rained almost every day, of
course, so it didn't take a fortune-teller to predict rain, but she hadn't
heard the thunder that usually preceded it. He was back in only a short while,
taking her arm and leading her to a small rise, where a scattering of boulders
testified to Costa Rica 's volcanic origin. After taking his knife
from his belt, he cut small limbs and lashed them together with vines, then
propped one end of his contraption up by wedging sturdier limbs under the
corners. Producing a rolled up tarp from his backpack like a magician, he tied
the tarp over the crude lean-to, making it waterproof. "Well, crawl in and
get comfortable," he growled when Jane simply stood there, staring in
astonishment at the shelter he'd constructed in just a few minutes. Obediently
she crawled in, groaning with relief as she shrugged out of her backpack and
relaxed her aching muscles. Her ears caught the first distant rumble of
thunder; whatever he did for a living, the man certainly knew his way around
the jungle.
                  Grant ducked under the shelter, too, relieving
his shoulders of the weight of his own backpack. He had apparently decided that
while they were waiting out the rain they might as well eat, because he dug out
a couple of cans of field rations.
                  Jane sat up straight and leaned closer,
staring at the cans. "What's that?"
                  "Food."
                  "What kind of food?"
                  He shrugged. "I've never looked at it
long enough to identify it. Take my advice: don't think about it. Just eat
it."
                  She put her hand on his as he started to open
the cans. "Wait. Why don't we save those for have-to situations?"
                  "This is a have-to situation," he grunted. "We have to eat."
                  "Yes, but we don't have to eat that !"
                  Exasperation tightened his hard features.
"Honey, we either eat this, or two more cans exactly like them!"
                  "Oh, ye of little faith," she
scoffed, dragging her own backpack closer. She began delving around in it, and
in a moment produced a small packet wrapped in a purloined towel. With an air
of triumph she unwrapped it to expose two badly
smashed but still edible sandwiches, then returned to the backpack to dig
around again. Her face flushed with success, she pulled out two cans of orange
juice. "Here!" she said cheerfully, handing him one of the cans.
"A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a can of
orange juice. Protein, carbohydrates and vitamin C. What more could we ask for?" Grant took the sandwich and the pop-top can
she offered him, staring at them in disbelief. He blinked once, then an amazing thing happened: he laughed. It wasn't much
of a laugh. It was rather rusty sounding, but it revealed his straight white
teeth and made his amber eyes crinkle at the corners. The rough texture of that
laugh gave her a funny little feeling in her chest. It was obvious that he
rarely laughed, that life didn't hold much humor for him, and she felt both
happy that she'd made him laugh and sad that he'd had so little to laugh about.
Without laughter she would never have kept her sanity, so she knew how precious
it was.
                  Chewing on his sandwich, Grant relished the
gooiness of the peanut butter and the sweetness of the jelly. So what if the
bread was a little stale? The unexpected treat made such a detail