Just a Kiss Away Read online

  When he didn’t say anything, she rambled on, “I’m from South Carolina. A LaRue of the Belvedere LaRues—you know, Hickory House, Calhoun Industries; my mother was a Calhoun, you see—and Beechtree Farms.”

  She pronounced the last word as far-ahms. She drawled on, reciting her pedigree like some prized filly. He’d met enough of her type in his thirty-odd years. Virginal little blue bloods with nothing between their fancy pearl earrings but air. Ladies—that breed of women who could barely think past their next party.

  Christ, but this one could talk. Now she’d gotten back about as far as the Revolutionary War—some great-great-grandparent on her father’s side who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

  Hell, Sam didn’t even know who his father was. He could still remember asking his mother once where he’d come from. His uncle had said to his stepfather—both of them drunk and laughing—that Sam had come from a long line his mother listened to. He’d been confused at the time, but a few years later he’d learned what his uncle meant.

  Growing up in a Chicago slum made a kid’s innocence a short-lived thing. The area he’d been born in was only a few blocks away from the Union Stockyards. They’d lived in a rat-infested one-room flat on the fifth floor of a crumbling old brick building where the stairs were rickety and half the railings broken away. Some of the tenants—a ginsotted woman and a couple of kids—had been killed falling from the open top landings. He could still remember the screams echoing a spine-raking, seemingly endless dirge up the stairwell only to finally cease with a dull thud and dead silence.

  Inside the apartment the windows were cracked and loose. Noxious, hot summer fumes of a nearby sweat factory seeped through the gaps, as did the ridged, brittle cold of the Chicago winters. At age seven, Sam had finagled a job at that factory, working twelve-hour night shifts shoveling coal in the heavy burn furnace just so he wouldn’t be cold anymore. His few dollars a week supplied them with bread, and some milk for his two half-sisters.

  Sam didn’t have a long pedigree, but he knew how to stay alive. He knew how to get what he wanted, and his years on the streets had taught him to outthink and outfight the most practiced, the most shrewd, and the most calculating minds.

  And in the last ten years he’d been getting paid for those skills, and paid well, by whatever faction needed him. He’d been in the Philippines for five months, hired by Bonifacio to train his men in guerrilla strategy and to use the Hotchkiss breech-loading rifles and, more importantly, those coveted Sims-Dudley dynamite guns that were due from his arms source any day.

  He glanced at his fellow prisoner. She was still at it, going on about rh-ice and indee-go on her mother’s side. Right now he wished he had one of those dynamite guns. He’d cram it in her mouth.

  She finally made eye contact. There was a moment of blessed silence, a very brief moment.

  “Don’t you think so?” she asked, referring to some dumb thing she’d been chattering about.

  He leaned back against the corner, his motion crackling the dry grass of the walls. He paused before he spoke, making sure he had her complete attention. “When you were growing up on your farms, did you ride around in one of those fancy black carriages—the kind with all that shiny brass and a team of horses whose pedigree was as perfect as your own?”

  He had her. Confusion lit her soft southern-sweet features, and she nodded.

  “I thought so.” He paused. “When we were kids we used to play a game.” He met her wide stare. “You know what that was?”

  She shook her head.

  “Whoever could hit those fancy carriages with the most broken tenement brick won.”

  Her face paled.

  “You know what the prize was?”

  Clearly shocked, she slowly shook her blond head.

  “If you were young—say, five or so—you got the best spot to pick pockets. As I remember, it was near Sixty-fourth Avenue, and there was a dark alley right next to it, a great place to ditch the copper. Now, if you were about eight, well, then, you got first crack at stealing the bread off of Grissman’s bakery wagon while the others bullied old man Grissman away from the wagon doors by heaving garbage and street muck at him. The children who were older than that . . . well, there weren’t many ‘children’ left who were older than that. You grew up fast on Quincy Street. If you wanted to survive.”

  She just stared at him, as if the life he described could never have existed in her sheltered, pampered little world. He’d finally found something that shut her up. So he closed one eye, feigning sleep. The sound of her gown rustling made him crack his eye open a bit to look at her. She still stared at him, a wealth of emotion in her expression. He looked down and missed the look of pity that crossed her face.

  He stared at his bound hands and resisted the urge to shake his head in disgust. She was worse than most. The real world didn’t exist for her. The pale skin, her open mouth, and her appalled eyes said as much. That look told Sam what he’d always suspected. Those people in their carriages never bothered to look at the slums. There was no place in their perfect little worlds for the poor and the ugly, no mars in their finish, no flaws in their diamonds. If the world around them wasn’t perfect, then they’d wall it off and surround themselves with one that was. And they would never let that wall down. The ugly might get in.

  Finally quiet, she began to fiddle with some sparkly thing on her shoe.

  Ah, 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 unchanged. He sat against a corner, knees drawn up, mud-encrusted boots flat on the ground, khaki-covered arms across his bent, grass-stained knees, his bound hands hanging between them as still as a dead man’s. But the strangest thing was the tension that spread from him throughout the small hut. She had the feeling that even in sleep his muscles didn’t relax. Like a cornered cougar ready to pounce, the man slept as if waiting. She wondered if he’d learned to do that as a child.

  The picture he’d painted with his blunt words remained in her mind. It wasn’t easy to imagine what his childhood had been like. She glanced up at him. He was still asleep. She couldn’t imagine having to steal to live, spending a child’s playtime picking pockets and running from the police.

  At Hickory House the nursery was half a floor wide, with a hand-painted rocking horse, imported German and French dolls, complete with trousseaux, and bright spinning tops as big as leather balls. Hundreds of her brothers’ iron soldiers lined painted shelves also filled with books and puzzles. One whole corner contained stacks of wooden blocks, a huge tin of pickup sticks, and the precious bags of colorful glass marbles her brothers never allowed her to touch.

  She remembered the times when, as a child, she’d been bored with it all and complained she had nothing to play with.

  As a child this man had played with broken pieces of brick. Glancing at his eye patch she wondered if that was how he had lost his eye. She felt a sudden urge to take every toy in that nursery to the poor section of Chicago.

  Footsteps clumped around the outside of the hut. An instant later the sound of a wooden bolt rasped against the door. It opened, spilling daylight over her. She looked at the Yankee. He hadn’t moved an inch, but he was awake. She could feel it, and when she looked at his eye, it was wide open, staring back.

  “Well, well, what have we here?”

  Her head jerked back around. A man stood in the doorway, his features undiscernible with the glaring daylight behind him. He had a stocky build and wasn’t overly tall, but he towered above the two soldiers standing just inside the hut. Both held long, deadly sharp knives like the one the Yankee had held against her throat.

  Very slowly the man stepped inside. His skin was dark, his hair slick and black, the same color of his eyes, which were looking right into her. She willed away the goose pimples she got from his penetrating stare, but she didn’t avert her eyes. Fear made her continue to stare at this man, at his wide face, pitted cheeks, and broad nose, at his coarse black mustache and beard, which suddenly cracked to reveal uneven teeth and a smile too sly to be friendly. It reminded her of the way Jedidiah’s nasty hunting hounds bared their teeth. She suddenly felt as if she were seven, treed by a pack of dogs and back in that giant oak. She made eye contact again, afraid not to watch him. And she could tell he knew it, too. He was, after all, as they said at home, in the catbird seat.

  He walked straight toward Eulalie, never taking his black eyes off her. He stopped only a foot in front of her, and she had to crane her neck back to continue to meet his eyes. He broke eye contact first, raking down her body instead. Then he slowly walked around eyeing her the way her brother Harrison eyed a prime piece of horseflesh.

  She was scared and knew her shaking hands gave her fear away. He finished his inspection, stopping for an obvious moment to stare at her clasped hands. She willed them to stop. They shook more. He held out his palm. The soldier on his right slapped his long knife in the man’s hand, then returned to his position guarding the door.

  Those black eyes met hers, and he placed the deadly tip of the cold knife against the throbbing pulse in her neck. “Where are the guns?” He still smiled.

  “Leave her alone, Luna.” Those words were the first the Yankee had spoken, an order to Luna, the man who held a knife to her throat. She didn’t speak, just waited.

  Luna let his eyes run over her before he turned to the corner. “Nice, very nice, amigo.” He raised the knife tip to her lips. “Too bad.”

  She tried not to shake.

  He moved the tip of the blade to the top of her gown and sliced through the imported lace ruffle. She gasped, partly from fear and surprise but also because of what he’d done to her special dress.

  “I have my orders, amigo. Aguinaldo needs those guns at any price, even at the expense of this one.” Luna kept the knife point at her heart and stared at the bound Yankee, who no longer appeared ready to pounce. Instead he leaned against the wall as casually as if he were waiting for a ride, as if the knife this madman held against her heart couldn’t kill her, as if she were expendable. She began to wonder who was the real madman.

  Well, if the Yankee wasn’t going to save her, she would save herself. “I don’t know anything about any guns, and I don’t know him. I’m a LaRue of the Belvedere, South Carolina LaRues and an American citizen.”

  Luna’s face showed his surprise, then something akin to calculation. “LaRue—as in Ambassador LaRue?”

  “You know my father?” she said, relieved to know that her father’s influence would save her.

  The Yankee swore such a foul word that Eulalie couldn’t get enough air to gasp.

  Luna pulled back the knife. “Ambassador LaRue’s daughter.” He turned to the Yankee and began to laugh. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  There was no response, only the sound of Luna’s laughter. She didn’t think it was funny, but then she didn’t really care because this man knew her father and soon she’d be out of this awful place.

  Luna pulled the knife away from her chest and made a gallant little bow. “Forgive me, Senorita LaRue.”

  This was all a mistake. She smiled and sighed with relief. A moment later the Yankee swore again.

  Luna still smiled. “No more knives.” He handed the knife to the guard. “Now if you will excuse me. I have some . . . some messages to send.” He turned and crossed to the door, pausing to look at the Yankee. Luna laughed again as he stepped outside, closing the door behind him. Yet even with the door shut his laughter could be heard.

  She stared at the closed door, hoping and praying that her father would be at home when Luna’s note arrived.

  Chapter 5

  “He forgot to untie my hands,” said little Miss LaRue, daughter of one of the most influential Americans on the islands, and the perfect bait for Aguinaldo’s junta.

  “Colonel Luna doesn’t forget anything,” Sam told her, knowing the colonel’s reputation as Aguinaldo’s henchman. Luna handled any and all of the dirty work involved in suppressing other rebel factions, especially those that tried to supplant their power. Sam’s commander, Andres Bonifacio, led the most prominent of those other factions.

  “Well, of course he forgot.” She gave him a look that said he was the dumb one.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “He knows my daddy, so the colonel is obviously gonna send him a
note about me. He said he had messages to send.”

  “He’ll send him a note, all right.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “This was all some kind of mistake.” She stared in dismay at her bound hands and tugged at them futilely, then added, “You heard him laughing.”

  “He was laughing because you gave him exactly what he needed.”

  “Oh?” She jerked at the ropes. “What was that?”

  “A hostage.”

  “Me? A hostage? Now, that’s just plain silly.” She tried to wave a hand of dismissal but the ropes made it impossible. She frowned at them in obvious annoyance.

  Sam shrugged and watched while she struggled to get up. Her skirts rustled, and she braced her bound hands on the ground. She rearranged her legs until she was on her knees, pink-covered frilly bottom up. She pushed herself into a standing position, wobbling a bit when her hem caught on her foot.

  This was some show.

  “There,” she mumbled and hobbled over to the door, teetering on the squat heels of her fancy shoes. She raised her hands and knocked on the door. It swung open. One of the guards stood with his bolo knife pointed right at her. She looked at the knife with surprise and said, “Oh, good.” She held up her hands. “Would you cut these off, please? Colonel Luna must have forgotten before—”

  The door slammed in her face. Her back stiffened in surprise, and she muttered, “Well, I like that.”

  Sam shook his head as he laughed. She was so green.

  “I don’t think that’s the least bit funny!” She glared at him, then raised her hands again and pounded on the door for a good minute.

  It flew open again. This time both soldiers had their knives drawn.

  “That was very rude. I want you to cut these off right now, you hear?” She held out her hands.