Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart of the Jaguar
Once they were seated at a small round table covered in expensive white linen and decorated with colorful flowers in a cut-glass vase, Ann smiled gratefully at the waiter. When he delivered their coffee a moment later, she cautiously sipped the tiny, fragile cup of espresso, and studied the man before her. Mike Houston was simply too large for the white wrought-iron chair, the table or even this small café. But it was there that he frequented because the owner, Federico, had recognized him instantly. There had been a lot of backslapping, smiles and greetings. And it seemed the two young waiters knew him, too. She was beginning to wonder who Houston didn’t know, but then, he’d been down here more than ten years, and in his line of business, it was good to know a lot of people.
“Well?” Mike demanded. “What do you think?” He’d already drunk half of his espresso, while Ann had only hesitantly tasted hers. He supposed she was like that with everything in her life: cautious and slow. Why? She had that shadowed look back in her eyes as she lifted the English china cup to her lips and looked at him over the rim.
“It’s sweet…and tastes surprisingly mild.” Ann set the cup down. “I thought it would taste bitter because it’s so concentrated.”
Chuckling, Mike finished off his first cup. A second magically showed up seconds later, Federico himself brought it over with a flourish. Mike nodded and thanked the restaurant owner. “What you poor folks up in Norteamérica get for coffee beans, is a sin,” he said to Ann with a laugh. “Sudamericanos aren’t stupid.” He raised the cup in toast to her. “We keep the best beans down here, and that’s what you’re drinking—Andean coffee raised on slopes so high that the condors fly over them daily. Coffee growing in some of the finest, richest lava soil in the world. It has to taste good.”
Ann couldn’t help but smile. “You are so passionate about everything. I’ve never met anyone like you before.” It was Mike’s passion that was somehow encouraging her to tap into her own desires on such a primal, wonderful level of herself as a woman.
His reckless grin broadened. “My mother often told me when I was a young kid growing up that if I didn’t love whatever I was doing, I’d eventually curl up and die. She told me to do things that made my heart sing, that made my heart soar like the condors that hang above the Andes.” He sobered a little and sighed. “She was a woman of immense intelligence, I realized as I got old enough and experienced enough to really understand what she was telling me.”
“To live life with passion,” Ann murmured. “That’s not one I’ve heard of late.”
“So,” Mike said, “do you live your life with passion? Do you love what you do as a medical doctor?”
“I like what I do. It feels good to be able to stop a person’s pain, to stop death from cheating a life…but passion? I don’t know about that.” She frowned and picked up her cup once again. “I certainly don’t live with the gusto you do.”
“A little while ago,” Mike murmured in a low intimate tone, as he turned the tiny cup around and around between his massive, scarred hands, “I saw a different Ann Parsons out there. Not the one I knew for eight weeks in Arizona. This woman, the one I kissed today, was—different. Provocative…passionate…committed…”
“Translated, that means what?”
“Just that I felt a much different woman,” Mike said in a whisper, so that no one could eavesdrop.
Avoiding his heated look, Ann tinkered nervously with the cup in her hands. “Mike…give me time. I—I’m just not prepared to say much right now.”
Holding up his palm in a gesture of peace, he added huskily, “You’re a woman of immense feelings. I understand. You’re like a deep, deep well of water. Not many are privy to the real feelings you hide so well.”
Ann couldn’t deny any of it. Stealing a glance at him, she whispered, “I don’t know what happened to me today, Mike. Maybe something changed in me when I saw Antonio almost die. I usually protect myself from personal feelings in these situations….” Her words trailed away as she became pensive. Mike deserved her honesty here. Setting the cup down, she forced herself to add, “I guess your passion for living life with emotion has rubbed off onto me a lot more than I realized. Watching your friend almost die probably shook that loose in me. It was time, I guess….”
Mike nodded, feeling the gravity of her statement. She was being honest on a level he’d never experienced with her before—due to that magical connection forged between them earlier, in that beautiful moment when he’d kissed her. He decided to return some of her honesty. “When I was trying to save Tony, I was afraid,” he admitted. “I was afraid he was dead. I wanted him to live so damn bad I could taste it. I could feel myself willing my heartbeat, my energy or whatever it was, into his body. And when I looked up at you in that moment, I felt hope. It spurred me on.” With a shrug, he added a little shamefacedly, “I can’t tell you what went on between us in that split second, I only know that something did. And somehow, it gave me hope when I didn’t really have any left.”
“All that in one look,” Ann murmured as she sipped the espresso. “I’m amazed, frankly.” Still, she felt good at Mike’s sincere praise, at the admiration in his eyes. She liked the feeling.
“You have a very healing effect on people, whether you know it or not,” Houston said sincerely.
“Something else happened back there, Mike,” Ann began hesitantly. “I think what I saw may have been a result of sleep deprivation.” She saw him frown. With a wave of her thin hand, she said, “Not that it was bad. It was just…shocking.”
“What happened?”
“Promise you won’t tell me I had a brief, acute psychotic episode?”
“No problem. You’re sane and well grounded.” Interested in hearing her experience, Houston asked, “This happened while we were bagging Tony?”
“Yes. At one point,” Ann continued, setting the espresso aside and folding her hands on the table, “something changed. You got far more intense than before. You’d hit him twice in the chest and he hadn’t started breathing again. I know you were desperate. You wanted your friend to live. That was normal behavior, but…” she folded her hands “…then something happened, and I can’t explain it or even begin to get a handle on it.”
“What?” Mike’s scowl deepened. He saw a flush stain Ann’s cheeks. “Something that upset you?”
“It didn’t upset me exactly, Mike. I just felt these incredible waves of energy striking me, like waves from the ocean, only…they were coming from you. I actually felt buffeted by them as you leaned over Tony, working so intently with him, willing him to live. And then, the silliest thing of all, I saw this shadow or something…. It descended over you. Well, part of you. And it was only for a split second. I’m sure it was a sleep-deprivation hallucination….”
“What did you see?” he demanded darkly.
Taking a deep breath, Ann dived into her experience. “I saw this dark shadow appear above your head. It just seemed to form out of nowhere. I’m not sure anyone else saw it.” Moistening her lips and avoiding his sharp, glittering gaze, she added, “I saw it come over you like a transparency of some sort, fitting over your head and shoulders.” Embarrassed, she gave an awkward laugh, and said, “For a moment, it looked like a jaguar or leopard over your head. I no longer saw your face, your profile. Instead I saw this huge cat’s head and massive shoulders. Well,” Ann murmured wryly, risking a look up at him, “I’m sure by now you think I experienced a psychotic episode.”
Mike shrugged. “Down here,” he muttered uncomfortably, “I carry a name.”
“Excuse me?”
His brows knitted and he stared down at his espresso cup. “I have a nickname….” He heaved a sigh. Lifting his head, he met her frank blue-gray gaze. “I’m sure you’ll hear it sooner rather than later, so I might as well tell you myself. I’m called the jaguar god. It’s a reputation I’ve garnered over the years. The cocaine lords started calling me that a long time ago. The name stuck.” He grimaced.
“It’s not a bad name,” Ann murmured. “Why are you so uncomfortable with it?”
Mike sat up and flexed his shoulders. “Someday, Ann, I’ll tell you more about it. More than likely my friends at the clinic will fill your ears about me, about the legend surrounding me, until you’re sick and tired of hearing that name.”
Ann frowned. “You mean there’s more to this? I wasn’t seeing things?”
Mike rose and pulled some sols from his pocket. “You’re a trained therapist. You know how sleep deprivation and emotional stress can make you hallucinate during intense moments of crisis,” he said, deciding that the truth would have to wait. He couldn’t risk her rejection of him. Not after that nourishing kiss. “Come on, that van should be ready by now and those medical supplies loaded in it.”
Chapter 4
Despite her extreme fatigue, Ann was wide awake as Mike drove the heavily loaded van from the airport to one of the poorest sections of Lima. She tried to minimize in her mind the power and influence of his hot, melting caresses, but it was impossible. It was almost as if her lips were still tingling from his branding, unexpected kiss. She tried concentrating on the road ahead of them, noticing that Mike avoided most of the major freeways and took smaller streets. He probably knew this city like the back of his hand. Even more, Ann was aware of his heightened state of alertness. He was behaving like a soldier out in the bush rather than a man driving in the relative safety of a city. It didn’t make sense and she wondered what dangers lay ahead of them.
One thing for sure, Mike was right about Lima. The city was set like a crown jewel on verdant green slopes and surrounded by the raw beauty of the Andes, which towered like a backdrop in the distance. The day was sunny, the sky a soft blue, and Ann found herself enjoying her first views of the city.
“Lima reminds me of Buenos Aires,” she said to Mike, as he turned down a dirt road that led into a poor section, what he called a barrio.
Nodding, Mike divided his attention between driving and watching for enemies. He was on his own turf now, and the drug lords had hundreds of spies throughout the city looking for him, trying to pin him down so that a hit squad could corner and murder him.
“Lima and Buenos Aires are a lot alike,” he said, distracted. “Plenty of trees, bushes and flowers all over the place.”
“Nothing like New York City?”
He grinned tightly. “That place…”
“For once we agree on something,” she teased. Moments later, the scenery changed as they crept down the dirt road, which was rutted with deep furrows where tires had chewed into the soil. The winter rains had left the area in a quagmire as usual, and the city certainly wasn’t going to waste money on asphalt paving in a barrio. Houston’s gaze was restless, his awareness acute. His eyes were scanning their surroundings like radar. Ann felt uncomfortable. Or more to the point, endangered. By what? Whom?
When Mike saw her brows dip, he tried to lighten the feeling of tension in the truck. “Hang around and you might decide I’m not the bad hombre you think I am.” He winked at her and delivered a boyish smile in her direction to ease the concern he saw in her eyes. “I’ve got six weeks to change your mind.” He scowled inwardly. What was he saying? He was loco, he decided. There was no way to have a relationship with Ann. Though he’d always known that, the truth of it hit home as he drove through the city. He couldn’t place her in that kind of danger. He simply couldn’t. The price was too high for her—and for himself.
Ann slanted a lingering glance in his direction. Houston had taken off his sport coat and rolled up the sleeves of the white cotton shirt he wore revealing his strong, massive forearms which were covered with dark hair. The window was open, allowing the spring air to circulate in the van, mixed with the scents of fires and food cooking in pots in the nearby village. “Where are we now?” she asked, sitting up and rearranging the seat belt across her shoulder.
“This is the barrio our clinic serves,” Houston said with a scowl. “My home away from home.”
“Where do you live the rest of the time?”
“Anywhere in Peru where I can find the drug lords first before they find me and my men,” he answered grimly. “Usually I stay at the BOQ—barracks officers’ quarters—up near the capital when I come in off a mission.” He took a beeper from his belt and looked at it. “Matter of fact, they know I’m here. I’ve already got five phone calls to make as soon as we get this stuff to the clinic.” He snapped the beeper back onto his belt.
Ann shook her head as she surveyed the neighborhood. Most of the ramshackle houses were little more than corrugated tin held up with bits of wood, with cardboard as siding. Huge families crowded the doorways as Ann and Mike slowly drove by. “No one should live in these conditions,” she murmured. “The city at least ought to put sanitary sewage systems into a place like this. So many children will die of infections from drinking water from open cesspools.”
“You’ve got the general idea.”
She heard the tightness in Houston’s voice and studied the hard set of his mouth. As they drove deeper into the barrio, living conditions deteriorated accordingly. People were thin and hungry looking, their dark brown faces pinched. They were wrapped in rags and threadbare clothing to try and keep warm. As Mike drove, more and more people greeted him, calling out and lifting their hands in welcome. He called back, often by name, and waved in return.
“It seems like everyone here knows you.”
“Just about.”
“Because of the clinic?”
“Yeah, mostly. Sister Dominique goes around once a week and makes house calls. She carries her homeopathic kit from house to house, family to family, doing what she can.” He shook his head. “Oftentimes it’s not enough.”
“Hopeless?”
“No,” Mike said, making a slow turn to the left, down another very narrow street lined with cardboard shacks and crowded with people. “Never hopeless.” He grinned suddenly. “I hold out hope for the hopeless, Ann, or I wouldn’t be down here doing this stuff. No, the clinic makes a difference.”
Ann admired his commitment to improving the sad conditions. “Can’t governmental agencies help you?”
“They won’t,” he said, gesturing toward a redbrick church ahead, its gleaming white spire thrusting above the mire of human habitations. “Peruvians in Lima don’t view Indians as human. We’re animals to them. Big, dumb brutes to be used as pack animals, is all.”
Frowning, Ann said, “You said you were Yaqui?”
“My mother’s part Yaqui, from Central America, and part Quechua Indian. She was born in Peru, but her family moved north to Mexico when she was six years old.”
“How did your mother meet your father?”
“When you get me good and drunk sometime, I’ll tell you,” Mike told her with a grin.
He braked the van and turned at the redbrick church, which was surrounded by a white picket fence. Despite the mud, filth and poverty of the neighborhood, the Catholic church was spotlessly clean, with no trash littering the well-kept green lawn. The church stood out like a sore thumb in the dirty barrio, but Ann supposed it was a symbol of hope. A beacon of sorts. When he drove the van to the rear of the church, she saw a one-story brick addition to the building.
“That’s the clinic,” Mike told her proudly, slowing down. Putting the van into Reverse, he backed up to the open gate of the picket fence. “Sisters Dominique and Gabriella live here. They’re the ones who are in the trenches every day, keeping the clinic doors open for the people.”
Ann saw at least fifteen mothers with children standing patiently in line outside the doors. Her heart broke as she noticed their lined, worried faces. Some carried babies in thin blankets, pressed tightly to them; others had crying children who clung to their colorful skirts. They were all Indians, Ann observed.
Houston turned off the van and set the brake. He glanced over at Ann. The devastation in her exhausted eyes spoke eloquently of how deeply moved she was by the horrible conditions the Indians lived in. She was easily touched, he was discovering, and it said something about her he’d already known intuitively. Still, he wondered how she would fit in with the nuns here, and he worried that the cool demeanor Ann had displayed toward him when they’d worked together on the ranch might put the nuns off. “The two little old nuns are French. They’re from Marseilles, and they’re saints, as far as I’m concerned. They’ve been ministering to the poor since they came here in their twenties. They’re in their seventies now and should’ve retired a long time ago, but they’re like horses in a harness—it’s all they know and they have hearts as big as Lima. They speak French and Spanish and some English.”
He wrapped his hands around the steering wheel and gave Ann a measuring look. “I know how you reacted to me off and on for eight weeks up in Arizona. They don’t need a norteamericana coming in here and telling them what to do. They’re homeopaths, not medical doctors. If you don’t know anything about homeopathy, try to suspend your disbelief about it, watch them work and watch what happens to the patients they serve before you make any judgment about it, okay?”
Ann met and held his searching gaze. Because she’d kept him at a distance until now, he probably thought she would carry on that way here. “You’re remembering my attitude toward you in Arizona and predicting that I’ll treat everyone at this clinic the same way?”
Mike castigated himself. “There are times when I wish I had more diplomacy, but lack of sleep is making me a little more blunt than usual.” He opened his hands over the wheel in a helpless gesture. “I owe you an apology.”
Ann accepted his apology—the second one to come from him since they’d traded parries on the plane. “Look,” she said, sighing wearily, “I understand your being wary. I know I haven’t been easy to get along with. But let’s just forget our personal feelings about one another, shall we? I have a commitment to honor in Morgan’s name for the next six weeks. In a clinic situation or a hospital environment, I’m not the ice queen you think I am. So don’t be concerned that I’ll ride roughshod over two old nuns. I’ve got better things to do with my time than pick at them or complain about what type of medicine they practice. No, I don’t know a lot about homeopathy. But it obviously works or they wouldn’t have been using it here for fifty years, would they?” But despite her assurances to Mike, Ann knew she would have to make an effort to suspend some of her rational approaches and training. Her medical background was different from a homeopathic practitioner’s. This was another situation in which she would have to yield her scientific bent to a more mysterious, even mystical kind of medicine. If she was going to survive these six weeks, she understood that she had to adjust to Mike’s world, and that included the nuns’ medical procedures.
Mike saw Ann struggling to not be hurt by his request. That said a lot about her. She was confident and didn’t let her ego get in the way of better judgment. “I didn’t mean to accuse you of being close-minded. It’s just that I know a lot of conventional medicine types in the medical field who look down their nose at homeopathy. Hell, the clinic was so poor financially that we couldn’t afford to buy the prescription drugs we needed, so homeopathic meds took up the slack instead.”
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