His voice tweaked a raw nerve in Sherry’s spine, reminding her that she had decided she did not like him. She stared at the wide yellow strip running from the creature’s snout to its tail. If she had woken hungry, her appetite had already made a hasty retreat. She looked up at the man as he quickly skinned the lizard with a large knife and lay strips of its flesh in the coals.

The firelight danced off broad, muscled shoulders. He knelt over the coals and she thought his calves must be twice the size of her own. The broad band of tape still clung to his thick thigh. A makeshift Band-Aid perhaps. Dark hair lay close to his head. His eyes glimmered brown in the dim light. Camo paint was still plastered on his face, unwashed by the rain.

Whoever he was, she doubted he was simply a DEA scout who’d grown up in Caracas. In another world he could easily bear the title “the Destroyer” or “the Emancipator” or some other such stage name. The likeness resonated.

Smoke stung her eyes. “Is there a way to get rid of the smoke?” she asked. Her cold had worsened through last evening’s rain. She cleared her sore throat.

He looked at her and blinked once. “No.” He returned to the preparation over the fire, and she realized he would probably insist she eat the meat.

She unfolded her cramped legs and stretched them before her, leaning back on her hands. Mud had dried on her shins and thighs, no doubt covering a dozen cuts and bruises. She rested one boot over the other and edged close to the fire, watching the man’s face. He glanced at her legs quickly and then back to the lizard meat now simmering in the red coals.

“Look, Casius.” She cleared her throat again, thinking she sounded like a husky man with the cold. Her chest felt as though a vise had moved in over night. “I realize this is all a terrible inconvenience for you. We’ve crashed some terribly important mission you were dying to complete. Life-and-death stuff, right?” She flashed a grin, but he merely glanced at her without responding. A wedge of heat rose behind her neck.

“The fact is, we are together. We might as well be civilized.”

He pulled the meat from the fire, laid it on the moss, and sat back to his haunches. “You’ve thrown a kink in my plans.” He lifted his eyes and studied her for a moment.

Sherry shoved herself up and crossed her legs. “Is that how you see us? A kink?”