Free Just a Kiss Away by Jill Barnett Page A

already learned about abstinence. She wondered what it was like to be really hungry, not because you had to be ladylike but because you had no food. Suddenly all the food she’d wasted over the years came to mind, along with a strong dose of guilt. She paused and glanced at him. He continued to eat as if it were his last meal.
    She set the bowl down and struggled to get into a standing position. Concentrating on keeping her balance, she bent down and picked up her meal, straightening very carefully so she wouldn’t spill the rice. She balanced the bowl in both hands and shuffled across the room until she stood barely a foot away from him.
    He looked up at her, suspicion on his hard-bitten face. She held out the bowl. He looked at it, but didn’t budge. “Here,” she offered with a smile, “you can have mine.” For one brief instant, confusion and something akin to embarrassment flashed across his face, but quickly melded into a hateful red look of male anger.
    She backed up a step, wary of his reaction.
    “Keep your damn food, Miss LaRue, and your misplaced pity. I don’t want either of them.” He looked as if he wanted to hit her.
    She was afraid he might just do it, too, so she shuffled back over to her spot near the door, a little hurt by his reaction. She was only trying to be nice. After plopping back down on the hard floor, she stared at the bowl of food, not understanding his anger. Where she came from a person accepted a gift graciously. He didn’t. Her eyes burned, and she swallowed hard around the dry knot of wounded feelings that had lodged in her tight throat.
    Hesitantly she scooped a small spoonful from the bowl and delicately placed it in her mouth. She put the spoon back in the bowl, intending to savor the flavor of the food.
    It had none. She stared at the strange food. Her appetite was gone. He didn’t want her food, but now neither did she. She looked around the primitive dank hut, at the rusty old splintered water pail and the green moldy mats. Nothing was familiar.
    There was nothing she knew here, nothing familiar, nothing to hold on to. And that scared her to death. More than anything, she just wanted to go home to Belvedere and her overprotective brothers. Right now, she’d have given anything for that protection, and for a shoulder to lean on.

Chapter 6
     
    “Ransom? Oh, my Gawd!”
    Two seconds . . . not too bad. Sam watched Lollie gape at the colonel, stunned into silence—a rarity—by the news that she was to be ransomed to her father for twenty thousand U.S. dollars—Aguinaldo’s own gun money.
    “The details are being negotiated now. The exchange will take place in a few days, if your father cooperates.” Luna walked slowly around her, letting what he didn’t say hang like impending doom in the air.
    Sam didn’t even have to count this time. He could tell by her expression that she knew exactly where she stood. Her light blue eyes flashed with doubt, then worry, then absolute despair. Even he felt sorry for her, his sympathy aided by the fact that she was being quiet, for a change.
    He regretted that thought real fast.
    She looked at him, then up at Luna, and she let loose with the noisiest bawling scream he’d ever heard. The hysterical high-pitched scream-crying was loud enough to bring down the wailing wall. And she didn’t stop.
    The cool Colonel Luna’s mouth hung open. The two guards had their hands pressed over their ears and clear expressions of pain on their contorted faces. The colonel began to dig through his pockets.
    Sam’s fingers itched. His ears rang. It had been a long time since he’d felt the need to choke the living daylights out of something. Her screams raked an irritating path down his spine. Every muscle in his body tensed. Her face was a vivid purple, her fists white, and her voice . . . God, her voice howled through the hut, almost echoing from the high rafters. The only sound he could compare it to was imaginary—thousands of sick,