Read Online Camouflage Heart by Dana Marton - Free Book Online Page B

keeping a steady pace. “I think. I could have been hallucinating. I was fighting malaria at the time.”
    â€œWas it after you were captured?”
    He nodded. “I was pretty much out of it. The fever was so bad Jamil’s men didn’t even tie me up. I remember coming to in the middle of the night and deciding to escape. I made it about six feet before I collapsed behind some bushes and passed out.”
    â€œWere you attacked?”
    â€œIt was the strangest thing.” He stopped to look at her. “I remember coming around, feeling a hot breath on my face—boy, did it stink. Think dog breath a hundred times over. I looked up into the face of this enormous beast. I thought, this was it, I was finished.And it licked my forehead a couple of times then walked away.”
    She stared at him, her green eyes round. “It licked you?”
    â€œI’ll never forget it. He had a big tongue, rough. Maybe he liked the salt in the sweat.” He shrugged.
    â€œMaybe he was tasting you and decided there was something wrong with you and you might make him sick.”
    â€œCould be, although predators usually pick the sick and weak of the herd.”
    â€œTrue.”
    They moved on, and he held a bunch of vines out of the way to let her pass through, brushed off a giant beetle that had fallen on her shoulder before she noticed it.
    â€œDid the tiger get any of the guerillas?”
    He shook his head. “They found me in the morning. Never figured it out that I was trying to escape. They thought I went to relieve myself and passed out.”
    â€œThey didn’t keep you in the cage back then?”
    â€œThe first year they caught me, we spent on the trails, moving from one makeshift camp to another. Then we came across the place you saw, an abandoned poacher hideaway. It came with a handful of sheds and a tiger cage. Jamil took a liking to it.”
    â€œJamil?”
    â€œThe leader before Omar. Omar was the one writing by the fire—short guy with the broken nose.”
    They walked on in silence for a while. She was probably thinking about the guerillas.
    He was thinking about her lips on his.
    She was a shock to the system, no doubt about it. He should have felt relieved that she wasn’t scared of him, despite his appearance, but all things considered maybe it would have been safer for her if she were.
    He would never consciously take advantage of her and their situation, but too much civilization had melted off him over the years, and even he wasn’t sure what kind of man had walked out of that cage. He wasn’t sure if he knew himself, if he could trust himself. At one point in his life he’d had principles, he had lived by a code. But while in captivity, all that had been replaced by a single objective: survival, for which he would have done absolutely anything.
    He fought his way through some bushes and helped her. “We must be nearing the river. The closer we get, the more undergrowth there is.”
    As bad as visibility was in the jungle—no more than fifty yards—here they could barely see six feet around them. The tall plants gave a feeling of claustrophobia, putting him on edge, on alert for what might jump out at them.
    Thankfully, they didn’t have to fight the over-grown vegetation long. He spotted a winding trail a few minutes later.
    â€œDeer and wild pigs.” He examined the tracks, a jumble of hoofprints pressed into the soft soil.
    They still had to duck under vines that hung from the branches above, but the going was a hell of a lot easier.
    â€œHow far is the river?” She kept close, careful not to fall more than a few steps behind.
    â€œJust ahead, can you hear it?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œListen for the fishing birds.”
    They moved forward at a good pace, the soil growing soggier underfoot as they progressed. With all the rain, the river probably had been flooding a lot lately. High water would make