"The man's totally bloodless!" Marguerite exclaimed as she whacked at the undergrowth, only to have a vine chew at her already ragged trousers. She had to break her rhythm and carefully pull its prickly length free from the tan gabardine. It had taken Marguerite most of a week to stitch this outfit from John's discards and look at it! Just look at it! Ready to return to the dustbin, and that after only a few miles of hard-worn progress!
She'd already had a narrow escape. A flock of knee-high dinosaurs had chased her up a tree and kept her there a half hour while they'd barked and hopped around below. She'd finally lost them when a herd of tall, feathered creatures, somewhere between birds and reptiles on the evolutionary scale, had trotted by and her erstwhile jailers had run after a laggard. She'd stayed up there another fifteen minutes just to be safe.
Why hadn't John told her it'd be this bad?
Marguerite took an angry swing with the machete. The whip thin branch she'd hit smacked her back. To be fair, John had warned her.
Panting and sweaty from pushing her way through chest-high grass, ferny undergrowth and the nameless vines that slithered like thin snakes everywhere, snapping and wrapping her ankles as though John had ordered them to prove him right, Marguerite called a halt and leaned against one of several dead tree trunks nearby. Her back skidded down the gray, smooth bark until she sat on a relatively dry bit of earth.
After a few peaceful seconds spent catching her breath and admiring the blackness inside her eyelids, she sighed wearily and took off her left shoe to inspect the blister developing on the tip of her big toe. Her once respectable purple satin Parisian pumps with their pointy heels and toes had been selected for a night at the Louvre, not a mucky, yucky hike through a South American jungle. They'd turned into fat cakes of sticky brick-red mud.
"All I want is to go home! Why can't John see that?" Marguerite moaned to the shoe she held. It remained reticent, which would be natural for a staid English shoe but bordered on the aberrant for Gallic, even allowing for the pasting of filth.
John couldn't see anything and was more close-tongued than her shoe. Well, he could just keep his petty little secrets and rot here. She was going home, now, today. How hard could it be? A plateau had an edge. She'd find this one's and follow until there was a way down. Who needed John anyway?
Reaching behind her, Marguerite vigorously scraped her shoe on the tree trunk then put it back on her foot. "'Not interested' is he? 'Seen better'?" she asked her other shoe as she began working on it. "I'll bet he's paid for every woman he's ever had." The shoe prudently kept its peace as she continued. "And paid double too!" She jammed the second shoe back on.
Finished re-treading, Marguerite leaned back and experimentally huffed a few times, trying to sound both irritated and virtuous. Even to her own ears, she sounded more like a frog in gastric distress and she didn't forget why she was out here. Despite her best efforts, the memories were creeping back. Again she felt John's soft mouth sucking hers and the tingles sparking under her skin and the hard male body beneath her and the trembling of their clasped hands.
Once more bright bliss, an ecstasy, a paradise of sensation buried her fears of tomorrow and yesterday or any thoughts but the moment. She soared. She flew.
Then once again John was pushing her off and rolling away and Marguerite was asking, "Oh, you like it rough?" and stretching like a cat to show John everything she had. That's what men always wanted -- everything -- and John would be no different. And he looked, despite himself he looked, and his eyes burned with something indefinable and dark.
And then John was making a sound between a snarl and a sneer and his sweaty chest was pushing her down, the weight heavy and hot, and his hands twining through her hair and his breath on her, smelling of male and harsh with his heat. He looked ready for murder but Marguerite didn't move, hoping she was misreading and that he still wanted her. She wanted him so badly.
And John was growling that cheap women cost too much. Take it somewhere else, Miss Smith, he said. I'm not interested. And I've seen better in …
Marguerite hadn't stayed to find out where John had done his whoring. She'd squirmed out of his hold and escaped. She'd barely paused to snatch up her clothes, her gun and one of the machetes hanging on the wall. Stumbling into the weak early morning light, she'd hurried down the gentle slope to the forest, buttoning up her shirt as she went, John's two-ton lapdog at her heels. Cammie had followed only to the first thick banyan and then stopped, bawling disapproval.
Now five hours later Marguerite thought that between the two of them, Cammie and herself, the dinosaur had shown the greater intelligence. Marguerite had no provisions, not even water or a piece of dried meat, and what kind of fool walked into a trackless monster-infested wilderness with only a long knife, a pistol and five bullets? No, she was down to three bullets. She'd used two when those little dinosaurs had chased her up the tree.
The answer, of course, was the kind of fool that wouldn't last a day on her own. (And please let's not think about food again!)
Marguerite picked up her machete and considered the broad blade and square tip. She couldn't survive out here for long and even if she found the plateau's edge and a way down, from what John had told her, the closest civilization, a small trading outpost on the Orinoco River, involved a week's travel by canoe through headhunter territory. Although at the time Marguerite hadn't believed him, she did now. All of John's incredible warnings of flying, running and leaping dinosaurs, six-inch insects and plants that ate you alive had proven true. If anything, he'd understated the danger.
She'd been a fool … an idiot … colossally blind. She had to go back and beg John's forgiveness if she wanted to live another day. He'd forgive her, Marguerite felt sure of that. She'd never met a man more gentle or kind. He would forgive her foolishness and take her back under his protection.
The thick tree trunk behind Marguerite flexed and with three nearby trees began thunderously strolling through the rainforest, knocking down the banyans and palms in their path and trailing a solid thundercloud of flesh above. A day was going to be too long for her remaining lifespan. It had become measurable in seconds.