Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

would choose to spend time in such a hole, and sympathy that they had no more appealing choices.
    The three women sitting together at the bar were especially hard for her to watch. Their hair was dyed, lacquered, and hadn’t been combed for too long. They smoked constantly, squinting through eyes that had seen too much, none of it good. Their mouths were painted on in bright, hard colors. So were their clothes.
    When a man walked up, squeezed one of them low on her hip, and held up a twenty-dollar bill, the women glanced among themselves as though deciding whose cigarette break was over and who was still off duty. Finally the woman with the biggest hair tossed her cigarette on a mound of dead and dying butts and strolled toward the door at the back of the bar. The man followed, already reaching into his fly.
    Hannah looked at the tired bubbles that barely covered the top of her mud-colored beer, but it wasn’t the beer she was seeing. It was the past, when a young girl had taken one look at Len McGarry and decided that he was her knight in shining armor, come to rescue her from the green dragon of the rain forest. And no matter how much the voice in the center of herself warned, Not this man, she simply ignored it.
    Len was the first western man she had met in three years who wasn’t a Catholic priest, married, or old enough to be her grandfather. It was Len’s wildness that drew her. It was his laughter that convinced her. It was determination to escape the green hell that made her endure the first uncomfortable bouts of sex. It was her own sexuality that finally ignited, surprising Len even more than it surprised her.
    She decided to make Len hers, and to hell with the consequences and the voice whispering inside her, Not this man. Surely nothing could be worse than eating monkey parts stewed over a sullen fire.
    Very soon she discovered that there were worse things. One of them was confronting the streets of Rio de Janeiro alone and broke, seeing her own future in the jaded, opaque eyes of prostitutes. Then Len came back with cuts and bruises on his face and said, Fuck it, why not get married? It’s the one thing I’ve never done.
    She was so relieved she almost blacked out. When she could focus again, she was clinging to him, watching him as though he was fire and she was freezing. She didn’t notice the other man with him until Len dragged her arms from around his neck and introduced her to Archer Donovan.
    The anger in the other man’s eyes struck her like a blow. Archer didn’t want her to marry Len. She didn’t know why, but she was sure of it. Just as she was sure that something about Archer fascinated her. He watched her with such darkness, such savage intensity, silently demanding . . . what?
    She didn’t know.
    Couldn’t know.
    Wouldn’t know.
    So she turned her back on Archer and watched Len with eyes full of hope, certain that everything would turn out all right now. Yet when she dreamed that night, it was Archer’s face that haunted her, Archer’s silver-green eyes that followed her, Archer’s hands that ignited the newly discovered fires in her body.
    She hadn’t understood her reaction then. She didn’t understand it now. But it was real, as real as the quickening of her heart and her body each time Archer touched her.
    “What are you thinking?” he asked softly.
    Hannah jolted, then sighed. “The day Len came back for me in Rio.”
    He followed her glance toward the bar, where the two remaining prostitutes lit cigarettes from the smoldering ends of other cigarettes. “You wouldn’t have ended up like that.”
    “I was one night away from it,” she said simply.
    “Len and I were both looking for you. He found you first.”
    Shocked indigo eyes focused on Archer. “He never said anything about you looking for me.”
    “No, he wouldn’t have.”
    “Is that why you were so angry with me when you first met me? Because you’d spent the night looking for me?”
    “You were innocent, terrified, and completely alone. Len never should have abandoned you. That’s why I was angry. It was as close as I ever came to giving Len the fight he thought he wanted, no holds barred. All that kept me from beating him unconscious was that two of us had a better chance of finding you than one.”
    In the dim light of the bar, Archer’s eyes were narrowed, feral. Dangerous. Hannah swallowed uneasily. “I’ve often wondered why Len came back. At first I thought it was because he loved me.