“Ummm,” she whispered back, “Was this worth waiting for or not?”
He leaned his head back so that he could look into her green eyes. He put his other hand on her hips and pulled her pelvis tight against his straining penis. “What do you think?”
She laughed again, shaking water out of her hair and planting her full, throbbing lips against his and spreading her thighs, allowing him to enter her as she arched against him, shuddering.
Then he shuddered too, exploding inside her as he climaxed, throbbing again and again in wondrous release.
She quickly followed, gasping and jerking as she came with him, her fingers digging into his back and her thighs squeezing him as if she would never let go.
Breathing heavily, he inched his way toward the bank and into shallower water and sat back down, with her still on his thighs and their bodies still locked together.
He laid his head back onto the sandy shore and took deep breaths, waiting for his heart to slow.
After a moment, she eased off him and lay on her back beside him in the shallow water, her breasts heaving up and down as her breathing slowed.
He turned on his side and leaned over to capture a nipple between his lips, gently nipping it with his teeth. Again it hardened and rose into his mouth as she gasped in delight at the feeling.
She looked down and put her hands on his cheeks and slowly raised his head so she could kiss him again, her tongue darting between his lips.
After a moment, her hand drifted down under the water and between his legs to discover that he was hard again. She groaned happily and leaned back to look at him, smiling. “Wow, that was a quick recovery.”
He grinned proudly. “I’m not as old as I look.”
“It’s either that or you’ve been out in the field and away from female company for much too long,” she said, caressing him for a moment before finally letting him go.
“Oh, don’t stop,” he begged, reaching for her as she moved out of his reach and toward their clothes on the rocks nearby.
She glanced back at him, shaking her head. “As much as I’d like to lay here making love to you all day,” she said, “we’ve got important work to do. Millions of people are counting on us, Mason.”
“Just my luck,” he groused as he rose from the beach and waded toward the boulders. “Falling for a woman with a sense of moral responsibility.”
“Oh,” she said mischievously, “and have you ‘fallen’ for me?”
He grinned, spreading his arms. “What? You think I let just any old girl have her way with me on our first date?”
She laughed again and shook her head. “Mason, men are notoriously easy to bed, and you are most definitely a man.”
He took her by the shoulders and turned her so that she was facing him, standing waist deep in the water, her breasts pressing against his chest. “Lauren, I know you’re teasing, but don’t make light of this. I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you.”
She reached up to caress his cheek. “I know, Mason. I’ve felt the same way, but I need to take it a little bit slower. It’s been a long time for me since… since I’ve felt like this about anyone and I want to make sure of my feelings before going off the deep end.”
He nodded. “All right, we’ll take it slow. But don’t expect my feelings to change. I know the real thing when I feel it.”
“That’s a deal.”
When they got back at the village, they entered Maria’s shack and found six handwoven baskets full of herbs and flowering plants. Each basket had only one kind of plant in it and they were arranged along a shelf against a back wall of the one large room in the house.
On the floor, six boys were squatting in front of stone mortar and pestles, busily grinding the various plants and flowers into green paste.
Maria moved back and forth between them, supervising the boys and offering suggestions and advice here and there.
She looked up when they entered the room. “I am having the boys prepare the herbs for you to carry with you back to your camp. Guatemotzi told me that is where you have your laboratory and where you will use these plants to make medicine to cure the bleeding sickness.”
While Mason began to take pictures of the various plants with his sat-phone, Lauren moved closer to Maria. “Maria, this is wonderful, and it will go a long way toward curing the bleeding sickness, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to impose on you and the villagers even more.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Motzi told us that many in your village have a natural resistance to the bleeding sickness and do not get ill even when outsiders come into the village carrying the illness.”
Maria nodded. “Yes, that is true. The missionaries told me that is because we carry the blood of our Aztec ancestors and that protects us from the illness.”
Lauren nodded. “That is true, Maria. And if you and the villagers will permit us to take samples of your blood that may make an even better medicine to not only cure the sickness but to prevent it from ever infecting anyone again.”
“This taking of the blood… is it painful?”
Lauren smiled, shaking her head. “No worse than the sting of an ant, or a small bee.”
“Then I will explain to my people the need for this and I am sure they will agree.”
Chapter 29
Bear lay on his stomach, observing the village through high-power binoculars. He was on the crest of a small hill a couple of hundred yards from the village, hidden by a clump of thorny bushes.
Blade sat about ten yards behind Bear. He slowly moved the blade of one of his knives over a sharpening stone, while his eyes glared at Bear’s back. He was thinking it wasn’t going to take many more smart-mouthed comments from Bear before he was going to slit him from crotch to gullet.
Bear felt Blade’s eyes on him and he had already loosened his 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol in his shoulder holster, just in case the idiot finally got the courage to act on what Bear knew he was thinking.
Bear knew that being the leader of a group of men as dangerous as his crew was like walking a tightrope. On one hand, you had to be tough and not take any shit from anyone, or soon discipline would be lost and all of their lives wouldn’t be worth spit. On the other hand, you had to rule with a little bit of flexibility because these men needed to cut loose occasionally. By definition, as mercenaries they weren’t real good at following orders. That’s why they’d all been kicked out of the military — an organization that valued following orders above all else.
Bear knew that Blade thought he could run the crew as well as or better than he could. But what Bear knew was that Blade, while tough as skull-steak, was dumb as a pole. Tough wasn’t enough in this new world of electronic surveillance. You had to be smart as well, and that’s where Blade fell far short of leadership material.
Bear also knew that after this mission, he was going to have to do something about Blade. Either cut him loose or kill him, and it didn’t make much difference to Bear which it would be.
Mason finished taking pictures of the plants and flowers in Maria’s baskets and stepped outside the shack to use his sat-phone to message the pictures back to their camp. While none of his team were experts in botany as such, he felt that Suzanne Elliot would be best to send the flower pictures to. With her experience in epidemiology, she’d probably spent the most time of any of the team checking out indigenous species of plant life in previous cases she’d handled.
He added a text message:
Suzanne, here are the plants the curandera says will cure the plague if given soon enough in the course of the disease. Will check with her about specific order of use and different dosages if there is such. Will get back with you shortly. Mason.