The Perfect Stranger
Alison Kent
ISBN 0-7582-1115-5
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Some like it hot. The men and women of Alison Kent’s sizzling SG-5 series like it hotter. In this all new novel of steamy suspense, the jungle is the only place wild enough for a hotshot helicopter pilot and a renegade rich girl with one hell of an agenda…
Bachelor parties are fun, as long as you’re not the poor sap getting hitched…or slipped a Mickey and waking to discover you just became the poor sap. Not to mention that your “wife” is pregnant, and if you don’t go along to her village to meet the in-laws, the nice police comandante will be muy unhappy. Just another day in the life of helicopter pilot J. Jackson Briggs? Not so much. His Smithson Group gig wasn’t supposed to be dangerous, but the woman who drugs him, then knocks him out, then drugs him again certainly is. She also may or may not be a nun. She’s definitely a lying, scheming, lethally gorgeous…American. Jack’s light years from believing the story Jillian Endicott gives him about her noble cause in the sweltering wilds of San Torisco, but he knows one thing: he’ll get the truth—and plenty more—from her, one way or another…
Being an Endicott of the Boston Endicotts taught Jillian plenty about the haves vs. the have-nots—and made it easy to choose sides. But there’s nothing easy about her mission in San Torisco, and things only get harder when Jack Briggs is thrown into the mix. Six-foot-three of big Texas mouth and big…other things…Jack’s pegged her as a bored little rich girl. Hey, he can think what he wants, as long as he does what she wants. Do unto others what needs to be done—that’s Jillian’s motto. Problem is, Jack knows how to push her buttons from minute one—and the closer he gets to pushing her over the edge, the more she wants him to…
Now under dark velvet cover of jungle nights, two rebels with a cause are going deep—and falling hard—for the perfect stranger…
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Chapter One
Tequila and Mickey Finn.
A hell of a bachelor party guest list.
A jackhammer morning-after headache.
José Cuervo might be a sumbitch, but the bottle didn’t deserve the blame for the hangover that had J. Jackson Briggs pressing the heels of his palms to his eye sockets.
His spinning head was all about waking on a cold, concrete prison floor, an AK-47 five inches from his nose jump-starting his day with a jolt.
The stumbling trip he’d taken at gunpoint—from his cell, down a dark corridor, into a military command center—had terrorized him into nausea.
And now here he was, stuck holding his tongue because he wasn’t so backwater that he didn’t know not to piss off his host country.
He didn’t care that the charity-based Smithson Engineering crew had just signed on for another back-breaking, year-long stint in the jungles of San Torisco.
He didn’t care that the contentious nature of the military dictatorship characterized a nation on the brink of total disaster. He didn’t care that he was the construction site’s only chop per pilot. He was ready to go home. To the States. As soon as he was outta here, he was outta here.
And it couldn’t happen soon enough to suit.
Irritation spilled down his back along with his body’s physical response to San Torisco’s tropical climate. Ninety-eight percent humidity and a new sheen of sweat drenched his work shirt.
He didn’t want to know what had dried in his hair, matting it in a crust to his skull. He didn’t want to know what constituted the brown stains on his green fatigues.
He especially didn’t want to consider when or how his boot laces had been chewed through.
All he wanted was out.
The coat of puke green paint slapped across the floor in El Comandante’s headquarters did little for his mood or his stomach.
Rocked back on two legs of a rickety chair, he eyed the machine gun five feet away on top of the scarred and battered metal desk. The additional distance gave the weapon a new perspective, one no less menacing.
From here, however, he could see the eyes of the uniformed man behind it. They were as cold as the floor he had slept on, as black as the darkness summoning him down.
He refused to look at the woman sitting in the chair three feet from his side.
Twisting the tight gold band around his left ring finger, Jack released a sigh, then burped up a blast of the chemical churning in his gut.
The burn up his throat told him there’d been more in his glass than the shot of tequila he’d sloshed there sometime before midnight.
Then, his buddy Brad’s bachelor party had been in full swing, and Jack had been lucid, sober, and still the wedding party’s best man.
Six hours later he’d come awake to find himself a prisoner.
And the groom.
He wondered who’d slipped him the Mickey, who’d added the wife.
Most of all he wondered why.
“Once more, Señor Briggs. And this time be warned that my patience grows thin.”
Comandante Mosquera pushed the parchment document across the piece of furniture that was a scratch-and-dent reject, then sat back and swiveled his chair side to side. “Is this, or is this not, your signature?”
Jack brought his own chair down hard and snatched up the paper. Elbows on his knees, he forced himself not to sway to the maddening squeak-squeal, squeak-squeal of the other man’s seat for fear he’d tumble to the floor.
Instead, he focused one bleary eye on the Partida de Matrimonio. Certificate of marriage. The real McCoy. One hundred percent. Eighteen karat. Sure as sh—
“Señor Briggs!”
“Yeah, it’s mine,” Jack bit off. With a flick of his wrist, he spun the parchment back onto the desk. No one did that backward left-handed scrawl like J. Jackson Briggs. He’d recognize it in a heartbeat.
“Bueno. Muy bueno.” Comandante Mosquera dried his forehead in the crook of an elbow, the sweat stain one more service medal decorating his olive-drab uniform. Adjusting his beret over his slick black hair, he tapped his desk with a length of bamboo cane.
A sharpened length of cane, Jack ruefully noticed.
“You …you … Americanos.” El Comandante spit out the word with great disgust, gesturing in the air with the crude weapon. “You come to our island. You treat our homeland like you treat your own. Selfishly, you take what you want. Never do you give thought to the burdens you will leave behind when you go.”
“Look.” Jack raised his palms in a gesture of false concession. “You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not going anywhere or leaving anything behind. I’m here to do a job at the request of the Sabastiano government. Your government.
“In fact,” Jack said, on a roll, “your dictator, Carlos Sabastiano himself, is picking up the tab. The way I figure, you owe me—”
Whack!
Bamboo cane hit metal desk and snapped. Three inches of pointed stick landed at Jack’s feet. He glanced up.
The lethal-looking blade now protruding from the hollow rod wasn’t crude at all, and only slightly more intimidating than the malevolence in the other man’s eyes.
Comandante Mosquera spiked the blade into the desktop’s wooden surface. The cane quivered with the backlash. Jack swallowed hard.
“Why you are here does not concern me, Señor Briggs. What you do while you are here you will answer for.”
“Look. Sir,” Jack forced himself to add, when the commander’s nostrils flared. “All I’m doing here is working on the road the Smithson crew is cutting from Ciudad Torisco into the mountains.”
The Latino’s eyes narrowed dangerously. He eased to his feet, skirted the desk, stopped directly in front of Jack’s chair. With his feet planted shoulder width apart, the commander made an intimidating tower.
“You deny that you American men find our San Toriscan women to your liking?” Mosquera asked, smoothing down his thick mustache with forefinger and thumb.
At the change in conversational direction, Jack hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his fatigues and leaned back. “The scenery’s been great, yeah. Why do you ask?”
A keening sob rose into the air, a sound so awful Jack wondered whose grave he’d stepped on. Before he could so much as turn toward the screeching woman—his screeching wife— the AK-47 gouged the bridge of his nose.
He gagged back the bile shooting up his throat, closed his streaming eyes, and tried to pray.
Now I lay me down to sleep . . .
“Your wife seems to find your little . . . what do we say . . . disregard for the situation most inappropriate.”
Jack licked his dry lips and managed to croak out, “What situation are we talking about here?”
El Comandante answered with a growl and a sharp twist of the gun barrel.
Searing heat shot to the top of Jack’s head. He bit his tongue; the metallic tang of fresh blood seeped into his mouth. His face beat like a tom-tom, burning hotter with each pulse of blood.
And then, just like that, the pressure vanished.
Jack pitched forward. He caught himself before hitting the floor, then blinked, blinked again, and sneezed.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, then dried it on his pants, leaving behind equal parts mucus and blood as he focused a furious gaze on the man across the room.
Comandante Mosquera sat on the edge of his desk. The gun dangled from his fingers like an extension of his arm. “In our country, Señor Briggs, when a man takes pleasure with a woman he is no longer a free man.”
He picked up the marriage certificate and studied Jack’s scrawl. “Our women are taught their obligations from the day they are born. They are instructed by their own mothers to care for their future mate. To provide him children. To provide him a home. To provide him loyalty and service.
“In doing so, they honor our ancestors. They know nothing of the choices your American women have.” El Comandante ended his lecture with a snort.
Jack gingerly tested the split skin on the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, well, it’s not called the land of the free for nothing.”
He heard a tiny snuffle at his side, then a chuckle—no, a cough. Knowing he could avoid the bad news no longer, he peered between two fingers to get a good look at his wife.
From the look of things, he’d bagged himself a winner.
Worn brown fabric, drab and inclusive, enveloped the woman, from the top of her head, down her shapeless form, to the pink toenails at the end of ragged rope sandals.
A tendril of dark hair peeked from beneath the head covering, giving him a clue that she was—
