On Tanya’s left grew fifty acres of the plantation’s exotic crop: Cavash coffee beans, commonly regarded among connoisseurs as the finest coffee in the world. Shannon could be there working the fields, but she doubted it—he’d never taken much interest in his father’s farming.

His father, Jergen, had fled Denmark and carved out this living because of his hatred toward the West. The West is trampling out the earth’s soul, he would say in his booming voice. And Washington’s leading the charge. One of these days America will wake up and their world will be different. Someone will teach them a lesson and then they might listen. They were just words, nothing else. Jergen was a coffee farmer, not a revolutionary.

Shannon spouted his father’s rhetoric on occasion, but really, it was love, not hate, that drove his world. Love for the jungle.

And love for Tanya.

The thunder of gunfire boomed again. Tanya smiled and broke to her left, sprinting around the fields toward the firing range.

Tanya saw them when she cleared the last coffee bush—three blond Scandinavian heads bent over a rifle with their backs to her. Shannon’s father, Jergen, stood on the left, dressed in khaki green. The visiting uncle, Christian, stood to the right, a brother look-alike.

The bare-chested young man between them was Shannon.

Tanya’s heart jumped at the sight and she pulled up, stepping lightly.

Shannon stood tall for eighteen, over six feet, and wrapped in muscles that seemed to grow larger each day. Countless hours in the sun had darkened his skin and lightened his long blond hair. She often teased him, suggesting he take a comb to his head, but in reality she rather liked the way those loose strands fell down his neck and into those bright emerald eyes. It meant she could sweep his hair aside with her fingers, and she liked touching his face that way. His pectoral muscles flared from a rippling stomach and met broad shoulders. Today he wore only loose black shorts—no shoes on this man.

Tanya smiled at the image of being carried on those shoulders, down the mountain, while Shannon insisted she was as light as a feather.

His carefree voice drifted to her. “Yeah, the Kalashnikov’s good up to a few hundred yards. But it’s no good for long range. I like the Browning Eclipse,” he said, motioning to another rifle on the ground. “It’s good out to a thousand.”

“A thousand?” his uncle said. “You can hit targets that far?”

Shannon’s father spoke softly. “He can hit a quarter at eight hundred yards. He’s championship material, I’m telling you. In the States he’d win anything in his class.”

Tanya stopped twenty paces behind the three men and crossed her arms. For all of their manly prowess, they hadn’t noticed that she was watching them from the brush. She’d see how long a woman could stand behind them without being noticed. Ten to one when they did notice her, it would be Shannon’s doing. But the wind blew in her face—he wouldn’t be smelling her so quickly today. She smiled and stilled her breathing.