Her Last Line of Defense by Marie Donovan Read Free Book Online Page B

best in crappy situations?”
    “The ones who know the most about the jungle, or wherever they get stranded.”
    “Wrong. The ones who want to live the most. Mothers, who are trying to get home to their children. Fathers, who walk fifty miles through snow for help for their families. The soldiers, who will be Goddamned if they let the jungle eat them up and spit them out.” He broke eye contact and stared into the tangle of brush on the riverbank.
    “Were you one of those soldiers?” Claire ventured timidly.
    His bleak black gaze lasered into hers and for a second, she thought he wouldn’t answer. “ Oui . I have been in the jungle. It was not my friend.”
    She started to ask when, and where, but he guided the boat along the bank, stopping as gently as a kiss. Unfortunate comparison.
    “From here, we walk.”
    “Walk? Where to?”
    “Wherever I say.”
    Oh, goody. Sharing time was over—as if it had ever started—and now the work would begin.

    “N ON, NON, NON! Merde! Who taught you to sharpen a knife like that?”
    Teaching her how to sharpen blades had been Luc’s first task. Claire looked into Luc’s sourpuss face from where she knelt over a wicked-looking knife and a whetstone. “The camp counselor.” Citronella-scented sweat ran down her face, stinging her eyes even more than regular sweat. At least her salt provided valuable minerals for the cloud of buzzing bugs around her.
    Luc made a uniquely French sound of disgust, a cross between a huff and snort. “Your camp counselor was an idiot. Either that, or you weren’t paying attention that day.”
    She wondered if the knife were sharp enough to stab him in the leg or something else nonvital. “Why don’t you show me the right way?” She gave him the best kiss-my-ass smile a Virginia-bred young lady could muster.
    Grumbling, he knelt behind her, fresh as a daisy. “Like so.” He grasped her hand that held the hilt of her brand-new survival knife, and the one bracing the whetstone. Claire froze as his arms encircled her. How did the man smell so clean and sexy in the middle of a swamp?
    He angled her thumb against the blunt edge and slowly helped her draw the blade back toward her in a smooth slicing motion. “Like that. Light pressure, gliding it smoothly. Stroke it across the stone.” He flipped over the blade and stone and showed her how to hone the other side.
    “That wasn’t too bad.” Claire fought the urge to fan herself, and not from the sticky heat or bugs.
    He let go of her and stepped away. “Now repeat that a dozen times.”
    “Oh. It’s not sharp enough now?”
    He sighed. “‘A dull knife is a dangerous knife,” he recited in a singsong voice. “It will slide when you want to cut and it will cut when it stops sliding—probably when it reaches your hand. Now get moving. I have a couple machetes for you to sharpen.”
    Claire bent over the stone and dutifully sharpened the edges, finally holding it up for his inspection.
    He gave a grunt and handed her a big, fat leaf. “Not bad. Cut through this.”
    It sliced the leaf cleanly. Geez. She hoped she wouldn’t cut herself.
    “Now the machetes.” He pulled them out of a bag, and she recoiled a bit. My goodness, were they big and nasty-looking. He grabbed the hilt of one and slid it from its sheath, looking like a pirate pulling out his cutlass for a bit of pillaging.
    And of course, there had to be a whole different way to sharpen machetes since the blade didn’t need to be quite as sharp as her knife. After much eye-rolling on his part, he proclaimed her work “adequate, but nothing to be proud of,” and she contemplated hitting him in the head with the hilt.
    Fortunately, her good breeding prevented violence like that. That, and the fact she had no idea how to get back to his truck. Her stomach rumbled. “What time is it?”
    He checked the sun from his cross-legged seated position. “Late morning. Why? You got somewhere you gotta be?”
    She gritted her teeth.