It wasn’t because night was coming. He still had time before sunset. The darkness came from the storm clouds hanging heavy over the bayou.
A few drops hit the windshield, like fingers tapping against the glass, a ghostly presence begging admittance.
His stomach had long ago tied itself in knots.
He’d snapped awake at seven in the morning, after an almost sleepless night, prepared to hear a phone call telling him that she’d changed her mind and was taking an assignment at the South Pole instead. But she hadn’t made the call.
Relief had been like a cool breeze blowing on his feverish skin. Still, he’d kept picking up the phone and putting it down. Finally, he’d checked in with her office on the pretext that he wanted to make sure of her arrival schedule. In truth, her itinerary had been engraved on his memory since she’d e-mailed it to him.
Her plane had landed three hours ago. She should have been here by now. Instead, he pictured her sitting in her car in the middle of the flash flood area.
The image turned him cold all over as he sped down the plantation road and onto the highway, his hands gripping the wheel so hard the knuckles turned white.
###
Morgan knew she was in trouble. The rain had picked up, restricting her vision. But when she opened the car door a crack, she could see that the sides of the ditch were even slicker than before. Her lips set in a grim line, she tried to back up, then rock the car forward, and onto the road. After several repetitions, all she succeeded in doing was making the tires sink farther into the mud.
“Damn!” It was raining harder now. She could huddle inside the car and keep dry. But the longer the vehicle stayed in the ditch, the less likely she was to get it out. Maybe she could put something under the wheels. Like what?
Rolling down the side window, she spotted a big patch of spiky ferns. They were worth a try.
Her face a study in resignation, she scrambled out again, this time slipping in the mud and almost dropping her gun.
Tucking it in the waistband of her skirt, she walked down the road toward the ferns, raindrops pounding her now.
She’d gotten a dozen yards from the car when she heard a roaring noise. Not the jaguar. Something much louder and more ominous. The sound was nothing like an animal would make. Instead she knew she was listening to an elemental force of nature bearing down on her.
Her head jerked up, and she looked in all directions. She couldn’t see the danger. Not yet. But she turned and started running back to the relative safety of the vehicle.
She had taken only a few steps when a wall of something plowed through the trees on the other side of the road.
It was a dark wave of water, sweeping away everything in its path, catching Morgan in its cold embrace.
With the force of a tornado, it lifted her feet off the ground. A scream tore from her throat as the current spun her around like a plastic doll and flung her into the bayou.
She screamed again as the water carried her farther from the road. She was a good swimmer, but it was impossible to do more than keep her head above the surface.
Things whipped passed her. A black snake. A plastic milk jug. A clump of vegetation. Her jacket, shoes and skirt were torn from her body as though someone had rudely yanked them away.
When she felt her shoulder hit something, her arms shot up and clamped on. It was a young tree, bowing under the force of the water.
Desperately, she clung to the trunk, even as the water tried to tear her away and send her to join the clothing that had disappeared downstream.
Rain pelted her head. The sound of the roiling water rang in her ears. She was scared. And that was a strange novelty.
For the past two years—since Trevor had died in an ambush in Afghanistan—she’d been afraid of nothing and no one. She’d walked into dangerous situations like someone else walking into a bedroom. She’d disarmed men twice her size. She’d chased a fugitive across the roofs of Baltimore townhouses—jumping a five-foot gap three stories above the ground.
She’d thought she didn’t care what happened to her. Yet now she fought the deluge that tried to sweep her away, inching into a better position so that the tree trunk partially shielded her from