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achingly bright points of light. The night and the temple, with the jungle beyond the walls, seemed a place of enchantment from another time.
    Then she smelled the pipe smoke and knew she was no longer alone with the spirits. A shadow moved, detaching itself from the larger shadow thrown by a griffin statue guarding a corner of the wall. Rachel took a step backward, prepared to run. The figure coming toward her was not a boy monk in flowing saffron robes. He was a man; tall, broad-shouldered, Caucasian.
    He was also a complete stranger. She’d never seen him before in her life.
    â€œI wouldn’t run if I were you,” he said, as she made up her mind to do just that. “You might fall and break a leg. I don’t think the Acharya will feel enough namjai —enough milk of human kindness—to house a farang female for six weeks while you heal.”
    â€œNo, I suppose you’re right.” In the Buddhist way of things monks topped the social order with ordinary men next, then Buddhist nuns. Ordinary women were at the bottom of the heap. Rachel held her ground despite the heavy, frightened beating of her heart. The man moved two steps closer. He knocked the bowl of his pipe against the stone and ground the smoldering tobacco beneath the toe of his boot. “Who are you?” she demanded.
    â€œI might ask you the same question.”
    Rachel didn’t answer. She watched him, instead. He was tall, as she’d already noticed, with a full head of dark blond hair that caught and trapped the moonlight in its depths. There was a shading of silver at the temples. His eyes were dark and glittered in the moonlight. He wasn’t a young man. There were lines from nose to chinthat could only have been etched into his skin with the passage of time. His jaw was hard as granite, shadowed, more by a day’s growth of beard than by the night. She guessed his age to be very close to her own. He looked strong and dangerous.
    â€œAre you a friend of the men who brought us here?”
    â€œYes, I am.” He took another step forward and blotted out the moonlight. He was very close. Rachel could smell the smoke from his pipe that still clung to his skin and the faint, musky odor of his sweat. He was as tall and broad through the shoulders as her brothers, but his presence gave her no brotherly sense of security. Rachel took a hasty step back, tripped on an upthrust stone and almost fell. The man reached out, grabbed her arm, steadied her, then let her go in the blink of an eye when she flinched from his touch.
    â€œThank you,” she said automatically.
    â€œYou’re welcome, Mrs. Phillips,” he responded with equal courtesy and, Rachel thought, just a hint of amusement.
    â€œHow do you know my name? Who are you?” she asked a second time.
    â€œI thought by now you might have guessed who I am.” She could not be certain in the play of light and shadow that partially obscured his face, but she thought he was smiling more broadly now.
    â€œWhy should I recognize you?”
    â€œI assumed Micah would have described me to you. My name is Jackson.”
    â€œYou’re Tiger Jackson?” Micah hadn’t told her for a long time how badly things had gone wrong in Laos two years earlier. Her attack of malaria had caused themto miss their rendezvous with this man who could have led them safely out of the country. Instead, they’d been picked up by a Vietnamese army patrol and held for ransom by a corrupt army colonel.
    â€œI’m afraid so.” He lifted one leg to rest his booted foot on the parapet. He leaned one arm on his knee, his pipe held easily in his large, strong hands. Rachel knew instinctively he could hold a gun just as easily—and use it, too. The knowledge left her feeling cold and frightened again.
    â€œDid Micah ask you to keep an eye on me? Is that what you’re doing here in the middle of the jungle?”
    â€œWould you believe me if