Raven's Prey

asked bluntly.
    “No. Trust me, honey. That is the best way to handle this mess.”
    “Trust you,” she echoed as if the words were in a foreign language. “Trust you?”
    His eyes hardened but he didn’t move away from the wall. “You told me once that you thought you could. You said that in my own way I was probably very trustworthy.”
    “But you don’t trust me. Not even after last night,” she whispered.
    “Honor, be reasonable. Last night didn’t prove a damn thing one way or the other. I’ll tell you what last night was, it was a commitment. You gave yourself to me and now I’m going to take care of you.”
    “You sound as if we made some sort of bargain in bed!”
    “I guess we did, in a way.” He shrugged. “But I think die outcome would have been the same even if we hadn’t gone to bed together. I’ve been realizing since that first night that there was something weird about this whole operation. I told you a couple of days ago I wouldn’t turn you over to the guys who hired me until I found out for certain they really were your family.”
    She smiled then, a bitter, cold smile unlike any expression he had ever seen shape that mobile, vulnerable mouth. “In other words I would have been in exactly the same situation this morning whether or not I’d taken the risk of sleeping with you, is that it?”
    Why did she have to talk about taking risks? There had been no risk in going to bed with him last night Hadn’t she known from the start that he would take care of her? “Honor, last night gave me the right to protect you. Don’t you understand? Before that I was willing to stand by you as long as you felt you needed me but after last night I have the [_right _]to stand by you. There’s a difference.”
    “Such logic,” she gritted. Slowly she got to her feet and started toward the tiny alcove that served as a bathroom. The sheet trailed behind her. “All logic and no trust.”
    “Honor!” Perhaps he should take a firmer hand with her this morning, Judd decided uncertainly. She was such a temperamental, vulnerable little creature and she’d been under a lot of strain during the past month, regardless of the cause.
    “Don’t worry, Judd,” she told him coolly from the doorway. “I’ll go with you. I’ll let you try your brilliant plan. But just in case it doesn’t work and we both wind up with a bullet in the brain, allow me to tell you now that
I told you so!”
    Judd winced as the door slammed behind her. At least some of her natural ire was returning. For a few minutes there he’d thought she’d turned into a block of ice on him. And he hadn’t liked it one bit.

----

    Most of the village turned out to wish them goodbye and the children watched with wistful eyes as Judd went through a careful preflight check and then taxied out into the center of the dusty road.
    Someday, he thought fleetingly as he taxied to the downwind end of the road and turned the Cessna into the wind, he’d like to give those kids a ride. He glanced at Honor’s rigid profile as she sat stiffly beside him. “What do you think about maybe coming back sometime and giving everyone a ride?” he asked above the sound of the engine. “I can still remember my first plane ride. It changed my whole life,” he added slowly.
    “If you ask me it wasn’t for the better,” she muttered, refusing to look at him.
    He sighed and concentrated on the tachometer once more before opening the throttle. She wasn’t going to make life easy, but she wasn’t actively fighting him. She might be furious, but at least she trusted him to some extent. Well, she’d get over her temper, Judd decided on a more positive note as he automatically corrected for the engine’s torque and guided the Cessna down the makeshift runway. A moment later they were airborne as the reliable little plane climbed quickly and steadily into the Mexican sky.
    “You know, you were damn lucky to get this far into rural Mexico without any major disasters,” he remarked shortly after takeoff. “This part of the world is still pretty wild. There are still bandits in the hills and a woman traveling alone—”
    “Might get herself kidnapped and killed?” she concluded laconically. “Well, what a coincidence. That’s exactly what seems to be happening to me, isn’t it? Except, of course, it wasn’t the local people who turned out to be a threat.”
    After that, conversation lagged, to say the least. Judd freely acknowledged to himself