Free Flirting with Disaster by Jane Graves Page A

her head, and, after wearing a confused expression for several seconds, closed her eyes and dropped her head back down to the mattress.
    She moved her legs over the side of the bed and sat up with a muffled groan. “What time is it?”
    “Ten after eleven.”
    Dave hoped that the next words out of her mouth would be something like Boy, I must have been out of my mind before, or I bet you thought I was a little nuts, huh? or maybe just Gee, Dave, false alarm. Sorry for dragging you all the way down here for nothing.
    Instead, she looked toward the door, then craned her neck to peer out the window. “Nobody came looking for me, did they?”
    Dave sighed. Yeah, he still had a problem here. It remained to be seen whether that problem had to do with injury-induced paranoia or something straight out of an action-adventure movie.
    “How are you feeling?” he asked.
    “Like I got hit by a truck.”
    “Do you think you could eat something?”
    “Maybe in a minute.”
    Dave dug through the bag he’d brought and pulled out a bottle of water. Sliding off the bed, he came over to sit beside her. She took the bottle, drank, then bowed her head, expelling a long, weary breath.
    “You need water. Drink more.”
    She did.
    “You were a little out of it when I got here.”
    She glanced at him, then looked away. “If you’d been through what I’d been through, you’d have been a little loopy yourself.”
    “Does your head feel better now?”
    She looked at him warily. “Yeah.”
    “Are you thinking a little clearer?”
    Her eyes narrowed. “Are you asking me if I’ve gotten over the silly notion that somebody is trying to kill me?”
    “Take it easy, Lisa. I just need to know what’s going on here. That’s all.”
    “I told you what’s going on here. Drugs. Sabotage. Plane crash. Men with machine guns. How much clearer do I have to make it?”
    “Are you sure that’s what happened?”
    “Stop patronizing me.”
    “I only want to know—”
    “Damn it, will you listen to me? I’m not crazy! Somebody is trying to kill me! I found the drugs. My plane went down. They came after me—” She let out a breath of disgust. “Forget it. You’re not going to believe it until you see it.”
    She stood up, wobbling a little. She righted herself, then strode toward the door of the bunkhouse.
    “Where are you going?” he asked.
    She ignored him and walked outside.
    “Lisa!”
    He went to the door and watched as she stepped toward the edge of the woods, looking left and right the whole time as if she expected somebody to leap out of the bushes and grab her. She reached the place where he’d found her sitting last night and picked something up off the ground. As she walked back, he realized it was her backpack.
    She came back through the door, slapping the backpack against his chest. He grabbed it in a reflex action, and she stalked on past him and sat back down on the bunk with a weary sigh.
    “Open it,” she said.
    He walked back over to the bunk where he’d been sitting, tossed the backpack down, and unzipped it. Inside was a thick plastic bag. He pulled it out.
    Holy shit.
    Pills. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. What the hell . . . ?
    “They’re made to look like Lasotrex,” Lisa said. “A vasodilator.”
    Dave knew that counterfeit pharmaceutical operations went on all over the world, and Mexico was definitely a hot spot. If she’d found something she wasn’t supposed to, somebody could very well want her dead. If so, the moment she showed her face . . .
    Damn. His mission to get medical help for a delusional woman had just turned into something potentially more treacherous.
    “So what do you think now?” Lisa said. “Still think I’m imagining things?”
    “I think,” he said, “that we need to talk.”
    Lisa’s mind still felt fuzzy and disoriented, but maybe the sleep she’d had meant she’d be able to put a few consecutive thoughts together and tell Dave exactly why she’d asked him to come