Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 140965 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 705(@200wpm)___ 564(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140965 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 705(@200wpm)___ 564(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
I’ve never smelled a peony, she admitted. Whitney grows flowers, but most of them are exotic.
Classics are far better than exotics. Nothing rivals a cut peony. Seriously. They have a beauty about them no other flower has. And longevity. They look delicate and elegant, but they’re strong survivors.
She knew he was trying to tell her not to give up. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t in her nature. Maybe I’m more like a peony than I realized.
I saw the resemblance immediately. He paused. Perhaps not the scent at this precise moment.
Shylah muffled the laughter welling up. She ran along the branches, switching from one tree to the next in the way a cat might. She knew when to duck to avoid getting hit with other branches and several times she forgot to warn Draden. He read the route in her mind and had no problem maneuvering, making her believe he had been genetically engineered even better than she had been.
They covered several miles before she began the descent to the forest floor. They were inland, away from the river. She would rather rely on the trees instead of water as an escape route.
You set up camp quite a distance from the MSS.
It was an observation, not a judgment. Shylah liked the way Draden seemed to reserve his conclusions until he had the facts. I’ve never met a man like you before.
Have you met a lot of men?
I was in one of Whitney’s compounds. Sometimes he moved us from place to place. There were always soldiers around us. Yes, there were a lot of men.
From the tone of your voice, I’m grateful you don’t think I’m anything like the others.
Shylah stopped the continual flow of conversation in the branches of a thick dipterocarp tree, holding on to the limb above her while she took her time scanning the area carefully.
It was an observation, Shylah admitted. A good one. If I’m going to die a really ugly death, it’s nice to like the person I’m going to share that with. She made every effort to sound impersonal. He was dying too. She wasn’t looking for sympathy.
Let’s hope my friend Trap is as brilliant as I think he is.
She glanced at him. He was looking at the forest floor, toward their back trail. No one could have followed them through the arboreal highway other than another trained GhostWalker. That was one of the many reasons she chose to go high.
“I think we’re safe enough to talk out loud,” she decided. A part of her wanted to continue to use telepathy and keep him in her mind, but it felt too intimate. “The reason my camp is a good distance away is because I wasn’t looking for the terrorists. I was looking for the three virologists who designed the virus as a weapon. I thought they would have set up shop in the city, but they didn’t.” She began the climb down to the forest floor. “They felt safer out here and thought their experiments wouldn’t draw any notice.”
Draden followed her lead, staying just behind, climbing instead of jumping across the expanse—and she had the feeling he was very capable of jumping long distances without getting hurt. She liked that he didn’t try to take over because they were away from the danger of those hunting them.
“You found them out here? In the middle of nowhere? You aren’t even close to the river.”
Shylah made the jump to the ground. It was a good twenty feet, but her legs acted like springs absorbing the shock. Draden landed right beside her. She glanced up at him. The wound on his head was still leaking.
“I hid right out in the open. There’s a forest ranger cabin just up ahead. I’ve been using it. If a ranger should come along, I’d come up with an excuse. It’s really got all the amenities, including a shower. I lucked out.”
He flashed her a heart-stopping grin. “It was a bold move.”
She couldn’t help but smile as she put on her boots. He was really beautiful. If she was going to die, it wasn’t a bad deal to die looking at him. She didn’t bother to hide her tracks. She wanted anyone nosing around to think the forest ranger was in residence. Anyone in that area was most likely up to no good.
Poachers were in abundance, going after the rarest species protected in the rain forest: sun bears, clouded leopards, Sumatran tigers, rhinoceroses, orangutans and even elephants. Nothing seemed to be sacred, not even the birds, especially the rarest species. The forest rangers dismantled the traps poachers set and tracked them through the remaining viable rain forest. They also looked for signs of illegal logging.
“I’ve dismantled a few traps myself.”
He shot her another look, but this said she was taking chances and he didn’t like it. She knew she was, but she pretended she was just solidifying her cover, pretending to be a ranger.