Close Pursuit

Nope. Abruptly hysterical Mama was having none of that. Grandma wasn’t keen on the idea, either—something about not being able to hide the evidence of a doctor helping her granddaughter.

This was no way to practice medicine.

The tension in the tiny space mounted over the next hour as the girl’s labor progressed and her moans turned into sharp cries of pain. “Don’t let her push!” he ordered. “At all costs, she mustn’t push.”

The cries turned into screams muffled by a pillow the grandmother pressed over the girl’s mouth. God, this is barbaric.

“I can set an epidural. Give her painkillers. At least let me put a heart monitor on the baby,” he all but begged.

“I’m sorry, Alex. She’s not budging.”

“Katie,” he ground out urgently. “Find a way. Make her understand that she and her baby are in grave danger. This is why she came to me. Let me do my job!”

His impotent fury mounted as the girl’s screams turned into long, keening moans indicative of exhaustion and delirium. He didn’t need anyone to tell him the patient was no longer progressing in her delivery. Katie finally turned to the grandmother and said something sharp.

“Okay, Alex. Grandma says to ignore her granddaughter and come help.”

Thank God. As he expected, the girl was so far gone into the agony of a difficult birth that she barely noticed him working frantically to shift her baby into some sort of birthable position.

“I need her to push with the next contraction.”

Katie stood by the girl’s head, translating his instructions, although he doubted the mother was paying the slightest attention at this point. The girl’s body heaved of its own volition, and he went to work. He pulled the baby’s slippery ankles clear and hung on desperately until the next contraction. The girl screamed, one long continuous keen of agony as he all but tore the child from her body. It was that or risk the child suffocating in the birth canal.

“It’s a boy.” He suctioned the baby’s nostrils and rubbed the child vigorously. Finally, the infant drew a shuddering breath and let out a wail. Not as lusty as Alex would have liked, but the kid was alive. He cut the cord and thrust the child at Grandma to wrap up and warm up. He had bigger problems at the moment.

This girl was too narrow-hipped and too damned young to be having babies, and the delivery had torn the crap out of her. She was bleeding heavily, and one supply he and Katie had not been able to haul in had been refrigerated whole blood.

He went to work fast, racing against time. The mother’s screams quieted. Not that he wasn’t causing her intense pain. She was merely bleeding out. Dying.

“Tell her to fight,” he ordered.

Katie leaned down to speak in the girl’s ear.

“Say it like you mean it,” he growled.

Katie raised her voice and began demanding that the girl open her eyes. That she live for her son. And while Katie tiraded like a drill sergeant, he fought like hell, his hands flying to stem the worst bleeders. It took a full five minutes to avert disaster, and nearly a half hour to stabilize the girl. Once the meatball work was done, he settled down to the slower and more meticulous business of cleaning up the mess.

Of course, Grandma told him to make sure all the stitches were internal and hidden. There mustn’t be any evidence of modern medicine, no sirree.

After another hour, Grandma asked something and Katie translated. “She wants to know if they can go soon. They’ve got to get the girl back home before dawn.”

“She can’t move!” he exclaimed. “I just sewed her back together. I don’t need her up, running around and tearing out all her stitches.”

Katie threw his own words back at him. “We have to find a way to get her home.”

Sonofabitch. “Where do they live?” he asked in resignation.

A short conversation. “Family compound on the edge of the Karshan village.”

“I’ll carry her as far as it’s safe,” he announced.

Katie’s eyes flickered in surprise. “None of it is safe.”

He rolled his eyes and scooped the girl up off the cot. Aware of how rough the terrain was going to be for their little trek, he elected to haul the mostly unconscious girl in a fireman’s carry, slung across his back. Grandma led the way. Katie followed behind her, carrying the baby in a cloth sling in front of her. The child had yet to nurse and he had no idea if the difficult birth had injured the infant. But he was given no chance to examine the baby. The sky was lightening behind the mountain peaks across the valley.

The hike down to the river was hellish. It was frigid and dark, and the ground was slippery with frost. Plus, every stray noise could be a local religious hard core with a gun and no sense of humor about their presence in this valley. Grandma’s cough worsened in the cold night air, although the sound might work to their advantage by announcing that their little party was locals.

At least the sound of rushing water muffled it as they reached the valley floor. Grandma led the way along a footpath beside the river for nearly a mile. But then she stopped and whispered something to Katie, who translated.

“Their compound is over the next rise. She’ll take her granddaughter from here.”

He eyed the short, heavyset woman. “How?”

Katie’s answer was sober. “She’ll find a way.”

Reluctantly, he transferred the new mother to the old woman’s back, draping the girl’s arms over Grandma’s shoulders while Katie looped the cloth sling holding the baby around her neck so it hung down her front. The old woman nodded her thanks and slowly trudged away from them under her load.

Madness. This is utter madness. He muttered, “It will be light any minute. We need to get under cover.”

He gestured for Katie to lead the way back. Or more accurately, he took the rear guard position that put his body between her and the most likely direction gunfire would come from. The hike back to their hidey-hole seemed to take forever. Maybe it was because his shoulder blades kept anticipating a bullet between them. Or maybe it was because he’d gotten no sleep last night. Or maybe it was because he was more than half convinced the two of them weren’t going to make it out of this damned valley alive.

* * *

GLANCING FURTIVELY AROUND the mobile command post to make sure no one was close enough to overhear him, Mike McCloud pinged Alex Peters’s satellite phone and scribbled down the current GPS coordinates on a scrap of paper. As soon as he had it memorized, he would destroy it.

“Hey, Mikey,” someone said behind him. He forced himself not to whirl around guiltily and greeted the uniformed soldier casually. He checked his watch. Too late to set out tonight. But tomorrow he’d track down Peters and his little sister and set up surveillance on the mysterious doctor.

Why in the hell a man with a past like Alex Peters would wander out here to deliver babies—as if it was actually some sort of humanitarian calling for the brilliant bastard—was anybody’s guess. Maybe Katie, who’d been sent in to live with the bastard, would catch wind of what Peters was really up to at the end of the world.

But in the meantime, he’d be damned if he was letting his baby sister get hurt on his watch.

CHAPTER TWO

AFTER THE FIGHT to save the girl, something changed between her and Alex. But she had no idea what, exactly, it was. He watched her more than before. Studied her, even. He still didn’t talk much, but his interest was tangible. Had he finally figured out she was a reasonably attractive person of the female persuasion, or was he merely observing her like bacteria growing in a petri dish?

The next few days settled into a pattern for Katie. Haul water up from the river. Haul supplies up from the Land Rover. Sleep. Eat. Attempt to wash herself, her hair, her clothes. And at night, help deliver babies. Women came from all over the valley to have them. Most times, they brought someone with them—a mother or sister or cousin.

Alex taught the companions all he could about the basics of childbirth and safe aftercare while Katie translated for him. She got good enough at the speech that she could do it without prompting from him.

She slept mornings and evenings, and he slept most of each day, which left her at loose ends to entertain herself much of the time. She had a fully charged tablet reader she’d loaded up with books before she’d come up there. The battery was supposed to last several weeks, but at the rate she was using it, the charge would run out in a week. She dreaded not knowing what she would do to keep herself from going stir-crazy then. Never in her life had she been anywhere this completely disconnected from...everything. No television, no internet, no phones, no electricity, no people. It was just her and Alex. The last two people on earth until some laboring woman crept to their door. No wonder Adam and Eve had been tempted. Sheer boredom would have driven them to having sex if the serpent hadn’t tricked them. Goodness knew, her own mind was wandering in that direction more frequently than she’d like. It was hard not to think about sex with a man as hot as Alex living in such close proximity.

That flash of fire she’d seen in him when he’d fought off death and saved that girl and her baby riveted her. She was a little ashamed to admit to herself that she’d taken to teasing him. She went out of her way to brush close to him, to incidentally touch him now and then. But he remained frustratingly unresponsive in the face of her broad hints. The man was a machine of self-control. Frankly, it made her a little crazy. Just once, she’d love to see him let go and show her that passion again.

Sometimes, she watched Alex sleep. His face looked completely different then. Relaxed and open, his features were handsome. More striking than ever. His hair was coffee-colored, hovering between brown and black, and his skin retained a hint of a tan.

Must be nice. She had two skin colors: porcelain white and lobster red, the latter achievable by either unfortunate sun exposure or the ever-popular “see who can make Katie blush the worst” game. If she was really careful, summertime yielded enough freckles close enough together that, from a distance, she could pass for a little tan. But that was as good as it got.

Parked on the camp stool, she planted her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands to study Alex Peters, M.D. She guessed he was around thirty. Although his eyes sometimes looked like he’d lived hard for that age. What was his story? Mike hadn’t told her much. And she’d been so desperate to get out of the wreck of her love life and move on to a fresh new start that she’d let her brother talk her into coming halfway around the world—literally—with a total stranger.