A Candle in the Dark by Megan Chance Page B

clay cooking jar.
    Ana watched quietly while he clumsily prepared their meal, his talk fading to a meaningless buzz in her ears. It was so easy. It was always so easy. Men loved to hear themselves talk. She was skilled at getting them started, skilled at the subtle question, the turn in conversation, the interested murmurs. At Rosalie’s, she’d often worked to keep them talking even as they thrust into her, because it hid the fact that she didn’t move or respond at all.
    There were some men who hadn’t minded a still body, but others felt they were paying for her mind and emotions as well, and those were the men she hated most. So she let them talk, and ridiculed them silently, and let them leave thinking they knew her, when it was she who held their secrets and not the other way around.
    Ana sighed. When she got to San Francisco, when she ran her own place, she would only take the ones who didn’t talk. There, she would lay down the rules and make them understand they were paying only for her body, not her soul.
    “… but that is not my dream. I would like to be rich, to live in America and send money to them all, to not have to worry. It is hard,
Carina
, to be so far away, to worry so…” Jiméne talked on, gesturing in between his sloppy measuring of the rice.
    Ana watched him. He was like the others, telling her his dreams as if she cared what they were, as if she had a stake in his life. She knew what would come next. They all expected it; one intimacy traded for another. A man would tell her his dreams and suddenly believe she shared them. Soon he would ask something of her—a question, a favor, it didn’t matter. Soon he would be behaving as if she were a friend or a lover instead of a whore.
    She waited for Jiméne to turn and look at her with those same, glowing eyes. The eyes that told her that, in his mind, they were already intimate. She prepared herself for it, letting her disdain build, knowing he would see it in her face when he turned to her. It was an old defense, one she had used a hundred times to dissuade men from getting too close. Disdain, mockery, ridicule—they all worked. They all made a man realize what a fool he’d made of himself. All made a man remember that she was only a whore, a woman whose time and body was for sale.
    But Jiméne turned before she was ready, taking her hands in his before she could move.
    “Ah, Ana, I will admit I want you, that I try to impress you. If you would let me, I would kill that
perro
who says he is your husband.”
    His brown eyes looked bottomless in the darkness, full of a passionate yearning that made Ana uncomfortable. They were the eyes she’d expected. The look that asked for intimacy—begged for it.
    “Tell me the truth,
mi amiga hermosa
. Tell me he is not your husband. Tell me and I will take you away from this. I will take you to a place where we can make love in the sunshine…”
    Ana pulled away, wrapping her hands in her skirt. “Don’t be ridiculous, Jiméne.”
    She got to her feet, turning her back on him and walking to the opposite side of the fire. Then, gathering her rough skirts, she sank onto the dirt.
    Their silence seemed to intensify the jungle’s sounds: the soft pad of heavy animals over the swampy ground, the quiet splash of something sliding into the river. Monkeys chattered, the branches above their heads clattered and moved apart. The constant hum and clicking of insects rose from the shadows.
    Across the fire, Jiméne stirred the rice in the earthenware pot sullenly, his eyes downcast. Ana wished suddenly that she hadn’t hurt him. Jiméne was the closest thing to a friend she had on this trip. It was true he was like the other men she’d known, but that was exactly why he was no real threat.
    Ana looked over at him, feeling a familiar regret. Over the years she had wanted friends, but she couldn’t seem to let down the barrier protecting herself long enough to have them.
    She often wondered if she would ever