Franz yowled. Just once, but it was enough. Rio stiffened, lifted his head, listening to the sounds of the forest. He swore softly and pressed his forehead against hers, breathing deeply to regain control.
Rachael’s fingers twisted deeper into his hair. “What is it? What do you hear?” She didn’t care about her breathing. She didn’t want to stop kissing him, not now, not ever. Her body was already in meltdown and she wanted relief.
“Listen. Do you hear them talking? The birds? The monkeys? Even the insects are warning us.”
Rachael tried to still her pounding heart, tried to control her wild breathing to listen. It took a few minutes to separate the sounds. Strangely, she could hear individual notes, could tell there was a whisper of information. “What does it mean?”
“Someone is headed our way.”
“The leopard?” Her mouth went dry. Rio was serious. She listened again, much more closely this time. To her astonishment, she could hear the difference in the notes the birds sang, in the way the insects carried on—more hurried in their melodies. And the monkeys shrieked to one another. It took her a moment or two to realize the monkeys were also shrieking to Rio. “They’re deliberately warning you.”
He set her in the overstuffed chair away from the door. “I do them favors, they do me favors. It’s not a leopard, someone human. Someone they’re familiar with, they’ve
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seen before.” His hands lingered on her shoulders, the nape of her neck, massaging the tension out of her rather absently.
Rachael pulled the edges of the shut she was wearing together, noticing for the first time that the buttons were completely undone. She was becoming as bad as Rio at being immodest. She allowed her head to fall back against the chair, arching her back like a lazy cat, shifting a little to ease the steady pressure building in the core of her body. Exposed in the early morning air, her skin itched. She looked down and thought, for just one second, something ran beneath the surface, raising her skin slightly, just enough to be noticeable. Then it was gone, leaving her wondering if she were so in need of a man that she was having hallucinations.
“Rachael, how did your mother come to hear of the leopard people and this place?” Reluctantly Rio allowed his hand to drop away from her neck as he went to the window and pushed aside the blanket to peer out.
“I don’t know. To me her stories were just that, stories. I don’t even know if I have the stories right, Rio. I probably filled in the blanks with my own versions. Does it matter? Do you really think there’s truth in the stories? In the light of day it seems a little silly to think a man could be a leopard as well as a man. Or a mixture of both. What, the head and torso of a man and the body of a leopard?” She couldn’t look at him without having the impression of a dangerous cat. Without thinking of the way his face had changed from a human warrior to that of a dangerous animal.
“Does it? Here in the forest, it seems anything is possible. You have to have an open mind if you’re going to make your home here.” He stood with his back to her and wondered how he was going to let her go.
A soft one-two note, much like a songbird, reached his ears. He turned back to her. “Rachael, Kim Pang is approaching the house.”
“That’s not possible, he was on the other side of the
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river. It was already raging, and with the storms and so much rain, it can’t have gone down this fast.” Just like that her world was shattered, gone, and the running started again. The lies. She turned her face away from him, not wanting him to see the sheen of tears burning in her eyes. She knew the day would come eventually. It made her angry that she never wanted to accept it, that she pretended she would find a home.
“Kim is capable of getting across the river in the same manner I use.” He searched for the right words to make her understand. “He’s the closest thing I have to a friend outside my unit.”