Running Wild by Susan Andersen Read Free Book Online

suitcase to one side of the doorway just inside the cramped accommodations. Then he took one look at the narrow bed and any inclination to smile was wiped away. “I’ll take the floor.”
    Given a choice, he’d have taken a different
room
. But of the three townships they’d come across during the hours spent driving south toward the Amazon, this was the only one that had offered a place with rooms to let. And this room had been the sole vacancy.
    “Don’t be silly,” Mags said. “You
paid
for the room—you oughta sleep in the bed.”
    “I’m a hiker, darlin’.” He tapped his backpack with the side of his foot. “I have everything I need right here.”
    Looking around, he gave the room a closer inspection. The bedspread was threadbare but immaculate, and not so much as a fleck of dust marred the small scarred dresser next to the bed or the carved crucifix hanging above it. The only other amenity to grace the tiny room, a sturdy wooden chair, held two neatly folded towels and washcloths. All four were thin in texture but blindingly white beneath the light from the dresser lamp.
    He turned back to Mags. Her I-don’t-need-your-stinking-help attitude, which seemed to blink on and off like a light in a defective socket, was nowhere to be found at the moment. During a stop a couple of hours back—the last one just before the sun went down with such startling speed—she’d washed off the dark makeup she’d applied in the gondola. And sometime between then and now her fair skin had lost its natural glow, her cheeks their wash of pink.
    Squatting in front of his pack, he pulled his ultralight sleep pad out of the deep pouch on the pack’s side and unfastened the straps that attached the sleeping bag to the rucksack’s bottom. He carried both to a spot as far removed from the bed as he could manage and unrolled them. In less than a minute he had his nest prepared and, giving it a pat, he glanced up at Magdalene.
    Only to see her sitting on the side of the bed, staring vacantly down at the long, pale fingers she’d threaded together in her lap.
    “Hey,” he said softly, rising to his feet. He reached to stroke soothing fingertips to her shoulder, making her jerk and her gaze lock with his. He stroked his thumb over the spot he’d touched. “Didn’t the lady at the desk say something about a bathing room?”
    She nodded. “Down the hall.”
    “Why don’t you go grab a shower and I’ll see about getting us some food.”
    For a moment she simply looked at him, then visibly gathered herself. “You speak Spanish?”
    “Sure.” When she merely looked at him, he admitted, “A smidge, anyhow. I understand more than I speak—provided it’s not too rapid-fire.”
    Her lips tipped up in a slight smile. “Unfortunately, it requires more than a smidgen in most of these out-of-the-way villages. The people who live in them tend not to travel far from home, so they don’t have the same familiarity working with tourists that their city counterparts do. Add to that how late it is and—” She rose to her feet. “You take the first shower and I’ll go talk to Senora Guerrero about where we can buy some food. I didn’t realize until you brought it up, but I’m starving.”
    He watched as she walked from the room and wondered where this weird urge to comfort her, or cheer her up had come from. Hell, he’d grown up with sisters who could manipulate like nobody’s business to get what they wanted. Consequently, his more usual first response when presented with a female who looked at him with big, sad eyes would be to question if he was being played. Not to feel an urge to fix what ailed her.
    So why the hell had he wanted to fix things for Magdalene?
    He shrugged and let it go. She wasn’t his sister and she’d spent most of their time together bending over backward trying to get him to step
away
from her problems, not take care of them for her. Besides, offering her the shower had led to her assigning herself a