She rolled her eyes at him when she noted his hesitancy to leave her there. “Go. Finish. Seriously, Rafe. You said it yourself. You pack quite the punch. It’s probably best if you stay far, far away when you slip out of your skivvies.”
He wanted to argue with her, but the jut of her jaw told him there was no point. “Fine. But you damn well better holler if you need me. We haven’t come this far for you to drown in three feet of water.”
*
Penny took a deep breath when Rafe finally turned his back. Fighting against a woozy head, she managed to shed her sneakers and clothes, and she imagined each scrub of her hands washed away more than jungle grime.
Rafe was one of the reasons she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—quit. Even if his belief in her had been nothing but a prettily wrapped speech, it was a damn good one. She loved the way he could make her feel like she was capable of anything.
Her heart told her to hang onto that feeling, take whatever Rafe could give her, for however long, and run with it. Her head told her to be rational. Both options had perks and drawbacks. Neither took into consideration how addictive he was—not just his touch, or even his smile. It was him.
Penny trudged back to her clothes. With the help of the faint moonlight, she could now see the quarter-sized gash on her thigh. It wasn’t too bad. But it wasn’t pretty either. Up to a half inch of redness circled around the darkened edges of the wound. Dried blood had already crusted over, creating a rough scab, but she didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
She patted it dry before slathering it with a generous amount of antibiotic ointment from the bug-out bag and then covered it with a piece of gauze and a bit of first-aid tape. Penny finished tucking her shirt into her pants when Rafe finally turned around.
He nodded toward the starlit sky. “We have another hour or so until daybreak. Do you want to stop for the day?”
“As excited as I am about tying ourselves to another tree, I say we keep going.”
Ignoring the burn in her thigh, Penny accepted his offered hand. She slipped her fingers through his and let him lead the way back into the jungle.
*
Another day came and went, and when evening returned, it was back to hiking. They’d made good time, the land around them slowly changing from jagged mountain peaks to wooded jungle plains. Flat and level was a good thing, because with every hour that passed, the more Rafe expected Penny to do a face-plant into the jungle floor.
Worried, his gaze drifted over his shoulder to where she clumped through the heavy brush. Every gentle curve of her face had long glazed over in a haze of exhaustion. Sweat glistened over her forehead, and her mouth was tight in a permanent, white-tinged grimace.
He’d ask her if she was okay or wanted to take a quick break, but he knew he’d get the same answer as he had the dozen other times he’d asked: a terse I’m fine; let’s keep going.
Fine. That damn word now topped his pet-peeve list right up there along with reality television and those damn commercials with photoshopped infants speaking like adults. Anyone with fucking eyes could see it for the lie it was—both the commercials and Penny’s continued insistence that she was fine.
Eventually, Rafe had enough. He threw the backpack to the ground and leveled her with a stern look. “We’re bunking down. I’ll keep first watch while you get some rest.”
He waited for her wrath, or at the very least, a death glare. Instead, her shoulders slumped as she gazed up the length of a nearby tree. “Up there?”
Every protective cell in Rafe’s body wanted to wipe away the defeated look on her face. He gentled his voice, for once at a loss as to what to do. “No. No tree climbing this time around, Red. I’ll make sure nothing crawls into your unmentionables.”
Penny folded her legs to the ground, plumped the backpack into a pillow, and lost consciousness in a flat three seconds, shifting Rafe’s concern straight to stratospheric levels. He’d been pushing them hard, hoping to get the maximum distance between them and Fuentes’s compound that they could. Now two days out, he was finally starting to feel like there wasn’t a thick-necked goon about to pop out from behind a tree.
Rafe sat next to her, unwilling to be more than an arm’s length away, and watched her sleep. It definitely wasn’t a restful one. Her murmurs, mostly indecipherable mumbles, ran through cycles of unease and agitation.
“It’s all right, Red,” he murmured, stroking her back in slow, soothing circles. “Rest. Sleep.”
None of his friends would call him a nurturer. When things didn’t go as planned, he sucked it up and soldiered on, and he expected anyone in his company to do the same. Failure wasn’t an option, and neither was exposing or admitting weakness.
Penny wasn’t a soldier. She hadn’t been trained to endure extreme situations. Half the men in his first Delta unit would’ve at least made a grumble or two in their time hauling themselves through the jungle. But Penny…nothing. She still claimed to be fine.