Robert Ludlum's (TM) the Bourne Retribution (Jason Bourne) by Eric van Lustbader

Author:Eric van Lustbader
Format: azw3

27

Maricruz lay back on her pillows after the man she knew as Javvy left her room. She fumbled for the bed’s controls but could not find the buttons. Annoyed more than she should have been by so small a frustration, she pressed the button for the nurse, who entered with her usual official stride.

“I want to lie down.”

Maricruz watched the nurse as she crossed the room and lowered the bed. She hated asking this nurse to do anything for her. At least the first couple of days, when she had to lean on her to get to the lavatory, were behind her. She shuddered at the thought; she had been as weak and helpless as a baby.

“Anything else I can do for you, señora?”

Was that a sneer on the nurse’s face? At another time, another place, Maricruz would have been incensed. Now she simply couldn’t be bothered.

“That will be all.”

She closed her eyes as the door sighed shut behind the nurse. She wanted to think about her last visit with Carlos, but instead her mind slipped its normally tight leash and kept drifting toward Javvy. He seemed a curious mixture of power and sorrow, a compelling combination in any man, but especially so in the surgeon who had restored her to health.

While she was with him she had felt a curious sense of being sexually possessed, as if she were submitting to him. That was not a feeling she had experienced before. She was used to dominating, something Jidan liked far too much, she realized with a start. This new feeling put her in terra incognita, harking back to the darkest days of her adolescence, when a potent combination of rage and raging hormones made her mutinous, barbaric, obsessed with sex. In those half-buried days and nights she had been eager to try anything and everything for the sake of needing to feel something—anything—real, that hadn’t been manufactured by her father.

As far as she was concerned, her marriage to Jidan had been something of a business transaction, though she knew full well he adored her. And yet that was part of the attraction for her—being married to a man who worshipped her, whose demeanor negated Mexican machismo, which, so far as she was concerned, was just another form of misogyny. On the other hand, China had once been ruled by the female emperor Wu Zetian, whose social, religious, and historical reforms outlived her. Not that there wasn’t a bias against females in China—there was, to varying degrees, outright or hidden, in all male-dominated societies the world over—but there was an undeniable history of females ruling from behind the bedchamber curtains, even when they didn’t rule outright.

All this brought her back to Javvy. He did not display the Mexican machismo, which, unlike her, many women inexplicably found attractive, but neither was he burdened with Jidan’s perverse form of ambiguity, which at times bordered on the androgynous.

The truth was, she had felt magnetized to him when he was near her,

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