Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart of the Jaguar

Morgan's Mercenaries: Heart of the Jaguar
Lindsay McKenna

His spirit was tied to the jungle…Nine years ago, mercenary Major Mike Houston had faced death and won. So he knew his Quechua Indian blood made him different from other men. And the force of that knowledge kept love and the life he wanted out of reach.Until he was assigned a new mission with the one person he could love without fear. Dr. Ann Parsons knew he was the only man she could trust when her latest mission took her deep into enemy territory. But loving anyone in danger-prone Lima was risky. And now she had so much more at stake….

“I need you,” Mike rasped, placing his hand against her cheek and guiding her face upward.

In one heated moment out of time, all Ann longed for was finally happening. It was all so crazy. So mixed-up. Yet as she lifted her chin and felt his strong mouth settle upon her lips, nothing had ever felt so right. So pure. So devastatingly beautiful. His strong arms moved around her back and she felt him put her against him.

There was no mistake about his gesture; it was clearly that of a man claiming his woman….

Morgan’s Mercenaries: Heart of the Jaguar

Lindsay McKenna

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

A homeopathic educator, Lindsay McKenna teaches at the Desert Institute of Classical Homeopathy in Phoenix, Arizona. When she isn’t teaching alternative medicine, she is writing books about love. She feels love is the single greatest healer in the world and hopes that her books touch her readers on those levels. Coming from an Eastern Cherokee medicine family, Lindsay has taught ceremony and healing ways from the time she was nine years old. She creates flower and gem essences in accordance with nature and remains closely in touch with her Native American roots and upbringing.

To all my wonderful readers who have been

with me over the years. You are the greatest!

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Prologue

“Oh, hell…I’m dying….”

The thought slammed through Captain Mike Houston’s spinning mind and then, in disgust, he uttered the desperate words out loud. Sliding his long, muddied fingers along his camouflaged right thigh, he looked down to see bright red blood spurting like a pulsing fountain. A bullet had ricocheted off a tree and nicked his femoral artery, and he was bleeding like a butchered hog. Instinctively, because he was trained as a paramedic, he put direct pressure on the wound with his dirty hand.

Lying in the midst of the Peruvian jungle, Mike knew there wouldn’t be any rescue coming. No, the helicopter he’d been in had been shot down by Eduardo Escovar’s drug cartel mercenaries, who were intent on hunting him down and murdering him. As far as Mike knew, he was the only survivor of the flaming wreckage. The redness and blisters on his forearms, the tightness of his face, told him he hadn’t gotten away without being burned. Gasping, he threw back his head. Sweat trailed down the sides of his hardened face as he began to feel each single beat of his heart in his heaving chest.

Though he’d leaped from the falling bird before it hit the triple canopy of trees, Mike knew his Peruvian army team hadn’t survived the attack. The helicopter had been hit by a rocket at five hundred feet and had slowly turned over on its side like a wounded, shrieking eagle, twisting around and around until it hit the thick jungle cover.

In the distance, he could hear flames from the downed aircraft still snapping and popping. He heard the excited voices of Escovar’s men as they searched through the jungle, hunting for any survivors. It was only a matter of time now, actually. A pained, one-cornered smile twisted Mike’s mouth. Helluva place to pack it all in: in his mother’s homeland. She was Quechua Indian and had been concerned when he was assigned by the U.S. Army to teach Peruvian soldiers how to begin ridding their land of the cocaine lords. She’d wept in his arms, pleading with him not to go down there, that he’d die.

Well, it looked like she was right. Mike scowled. At twenty-six years old, he didn’t want to die. Hell, he’d barely lived yet. He’d only been an Army Special Forces officer since he graduated from college at age twenty-two. He had his whole career—his whole life—ahead of him. But as he lay in the shallow depression, the surrounding green, leafy jungle effectively hiding him, the soft, spongy ground beneath him damp with rotting vegetation, he began to feel light-headed. That was the first sign of shock, he noted coldly. Pretty soon I’m going to dump, my blood pressure will drop through the floor and I’ll lose consciousness and die. It would be like going to sleep.

Still, he’d been in so many close calls over the years as he’d directed Peruvian army teams against the continuing battle with drug lords in the highlands of this jungle country that he believed he might have a chance. He had luck—his mother’s Indian luck. She prayed for him constantly. It made a difference.

He could feel his heart thudding hard in his chest. And, he became aware of the pulse of blood through his body. The sticky red substance had completely soaked the material around his thigh. He tried to put more pressure on the wound. No, he thought gravely, this time there would be no help, no helicopter coming, no relief to make up the difference. He knew that the copilot had gotten off a mayday message shortly after they were hit because he’d heard him scream out their location as the out-of-control helicopter plunged toward earth. But who knew if anyone had picked up the transmission? There was little chance of a rescue being organized.

The heavy jungle growth felt comforting to him. In his green-and-tan camouflage uniform, he was well hidden. With a mirthless smile, Mike lay on his left side, placing his arm beneath his head like a pillow while his right hand closed more firmly over his hard, massive thigh. It was only a matter of time. Escovar’s men were local villagers. They knew how to hunt and track. They’d eventually pick up his trail. He hadn’t been able to hide his tracks this time. Usually, he was just as good as they were in hiding his whereabouts, but not on this misty, cool morning. Blinking through the sweat dripping off his bunched brow, Houston looked up through the wide, wet leaves.

Humidity lay like a blanket above the canopy. On most days, sunlight never reached the jungle floor. His eyes blurred briefly and everything went hazy. The beat of his heart became pronounced. As he lost more blood, his heart pumped harder, trying to make do with less. It was a losing battle. His mind was shorting out, too. He wondered if he’d bleed to death before the cocaine soldiers found him. He hoped so, because what they’d do to him wouldn’t be pretty. He laughed to himself. The Geneva Convention didn’t mean a damn thing down here. Its declaration of the rights of prisoners was a piece of paper in some far-off land. Here, the law of the jungle prevailed. Any prisoner taken could expect horrendous, painful torture until death released him from the agony. To torment one’s enemy wasn’t just permitted, it was a right.

Pain throbbed up and down his leg. He had to try and get his web belt around his thigh and make a tourniquet. Mike laughed at himself once again. Why the hell was he trying to save his own miserable life? So Escovar’s men could finish him off, an inch at a time? He kept his hand gripped on his thigh. No belt. Screw it. I’ll die instead. He shut his eyes, the black, spiky lashes resting against his ashen, glistening features. Ordinarily, he looked like a Peruvian Indian, his skin not copper colored, but a dark, dusky hue that hinted at the norteamericano blood interfaced with Indian. He spoke Spanish and the Quechua language as easily as he did English, thanks to his mother’s influence.

“Never forget your upbringing, Michael!” she would remonstrate, shaking that small, brown finger in his face. “Your father might think you’re all norteamericano, but you are not! Your heart belongs to my people. Your spirit belongs to the Jaguar Clan in the jungles of Peru. Never forget that.”

Mike chuckled softly, his face pressing into the scratchy leaves and branches where he lay. He was weakening further. In spite of the humid hell that surrounded him, he felt cold, and he was dying of thirst. Oh, for a drink of water right now! Somewhere in his hazy mind, he knew he was going to go through every classic symptom of shock as the blood leaked out of his body. For a moment, he felt lighter, the heaviness of his body, the belts of ammunition he wore criss-crossed around his chest no longer pulling him downward. Despite his tightly shut eyes, he saw the dull, whitish yellow glow of clouds that always embraced the jungle. The light always reminded him of his mother’s belief that the clouds were actually the veil between the worlds. On this side was the “real world,” she’d told him, when he was a child on her knee, listening as she spun story after story of her Indian heritage. But the other side…ahh…that was the world of the shamans and the Jaguar Clan. It was a world full of magic, danger, mystery and terror. Only trained medicine people could go between the worlds and come back alive from the experience. Anyone else foolish enough to try it would die.

I’m dying now. I’m going between the worlds. Part of him, the norteamericano side, laughed derisively at the thought. But his mother’s Indian blood, that part of him connected deeply with Mother Earth, believed it. Until now, Mike hadn’t really thought much about his mother’s belief system. In these moments before his death, her words were more important to him than he’d ever realized.

Mike heard the shout of a soldier no more than a hundred feet away from where he lay. He knew he’d done a bad job of hiding himself beneath the damp, rotting leaves and branches that filled the shallow depression he’d dug, but his leg wound had taken most of his attention. Now consciousness was draining from him. His fingers began to slip away from his wound and he felt the pulse of warm blood spreading across them. He didn’t have the strength to hold pressure over the bullet hole in his thigh any longer.

He was breathing shallowly now. His heartbeat was growing weaker. He was dumping. His blood pressure would plummet any second now, and he’d die. Opening his eyes, he saw nothing but that humid, moist veil to another world. Funny, he couldn’t see anything else anymore. He supposed that was part of dying. Blinking away the sweat running into his eyes, he realized he no longer felt its sting. Yes, he was definitely going through the dying process. He began to lose his fear of being discovered. Absorbed by the white-and-gold light that now surrounded him, he realized the cold that had been flowing up his legs and into the center of his body had stopped. He blinked again.

A voice inside his head told him to look down at his arm, which was flung out before him. He shifted his gaze slightly across the surface of the ground, thinking he would only be able to see the white light. But he could make out his darkly haired arm, the camouflage material torn away, leaving the lower part exposed.

His vision was changing. As if he were looking at his arm through a microscope, Mike saw each black hair and his darkly tanned flesh beneath. His focus moved to his large-knuckled, heavily scarred hand. Suddenly, he felt something shift within him.

The feeling wasn’t that noticeable, just a vague sense of readjustment. Mike wasn’t sure what caused it, but there was a rumbling feeling in his chest, like a heavy truck grinding up a steep hill in low gear.