Page 23 of Her Reluctant Hero
“You’ve been down here half an hour. You should be—pruney.”
“I don’t want to be hot again. It’s not like I’m wasting water.”
“Well, you can’t trek through the jungle like that.”
“Is it time to go already?”
“Soon.”
She sat on one of the moss-covered rocks, dangled her toes in the pool. Shepard moved closer, took one of her feet in both hands to inspect it. Blisters swelled across her toes, some of the skin was rubbed raw, especially around the ankles. His expression grew somber.
“How are you walking on these?”
“You’re not giving me much choice.”
He looked up at her. “Maybe your friend the chief has something, salve or socks or better fitting shoes.”
“So that’s why you’re mad at me now? I was able to accomplish something you weren’t because I was nice?”
“You were able to accomplish something I couldn’t because you’re a beautiful woman. And I was nice.” He dropped her foot.
“You don’t know what nice is. It was fake and he could tell you were just using him.”
“You weren’t?”
“Of course. He had something I wanted. People do it all the time. But the point is to make them feel like they’re doing it because they want to, not because they’re intimidated.”
His nostrils flared. He did that a lot when he was angry. “I was being nice.”
“Please. You’re trained to intimidate, and you’re a master at it. I think part of the reason you don’t like me is that I talk back.” She slipped off the rock and into the pool. He took a step back, but only a step. “Am I right? Don’t lie to me.”
“I don’t like you because you use your body to get what you want.”
She wasn’t prepared for him to admit that he didn’t like her, though she couldn’t say why. Shepard had been nothing if not brutally honest.
So she’d be honest too. “I use my body to survive.”
“Because taking your clothes off and lying underneath men is the only way to survive? You seem smart enough that you could have found other options. You took the easy way out.”
“Trust me when I say nothing about my life has been easy.” She gave in to the urge to swim away, to put some distance between them. Honesty hurt.
“You’ve made your choices. How your life has gone is based on those choices. You don’t know what a hard life is unless you don’t have choices.”
“You’re right.”
She swept her arms back and forth in the water, treading water, angry at herself that he was making her ashamed of her body. She put her feet down and rose to her full height, gloating when his gaze dropped to her nipples and the water running down her body. His jaw tightened.
“I made bad choices. Coming here, letting myself be dazzled by Santiago. But that doesn’t excuse what he did to me, what I had to do to survive it. Yes, I became a whore, but that wasn’t the choice. See, Santiago couldn’t get it up after a few weeks, so he bought me the vibrators. Watching that excited him for a while, but then it was his guests he wanted to watch fuck me. He had a lot of guests. Old, smelly guests.”
Shepard watched her grimly, his eyes giving nothing away. “You could have refused.”
“Gee, thanks. That never occurred to me. The first time, I didn’t think Santiago would go through with it. It was too late to fight then. The next time, I was beaten—by both of them—until I couldn’t walk for days. The last time I tried to fight, he took my son away.” She hadn’t been ready to share that information, hadn’t decided if Shepard even needed to know. But now it was out in the open.
Shock flared on his face, finally an emotion. “You have a son?”
