Close Pursuit

More what? her brain shouted. More than average? More than a nice little schoolteacher? More than a desperate wannabe in a family of adventurers and warriors? More than a fraud?

Stung, her gaze narrowed and she glared at him. She thrust her hand out truculently. He stared down at it uncomprehendingly.

“Are we shaking on the bet or not?” she demanded.

His gaze lifted to hers, and if it had been hot before, it was an inferno now. Never breaking eye contact with her, he reached out slowly with his right hand and grasped hers. Heat built between their palms that scalded her all the way up her arm and down to her core. His fingers were strong. Capable. She’d watched that hand perform miracles. And right now, it claimed her fingers possessively, promising heretofore unimagined sensual delights.

His grip finally fell away and he broke the stare, turning away from her sharply. His rib cage lifted once short and hard. At least he wasn’t entirely unaffected. As for her, she was panting like a dog in a sauna.

Holy crap, I just agreed to have sex with him. What on earth had she been thinking? She’d known since she was about seven years old not to let boys goad her into accepting dares. He’d just manipulated her like a master, damn him.

Of course, if she was lucky, she’d win the bet and get an ice-cream sundae out of the deal. That was the lucky outcome...right?

* * *

ALEX STRETCHED OUT on the cot in the corner. He’d turned down the lantern hanging over the bed, intentionally wreathing himself in dark shadows. It was easier to watch Katie that way. She was pretending to read—she hadn’t advanced the screen on her e-reader for ten minutes.

She’d been as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs and squirt guns ever since they’d made their bet. It was highly entertaining watching her alternate between wishing to win the bet and wishing to lose. Her face was a constantly changing mosaic of emotions ranging from chagrin to suspicion that he’d set her up—which he had, blatantly—to reluctant lust and back to chagrin.

If he were going to lie to himself, he’d say he’d made the bet with her to relieve the boredom and distract her from the building danger. To add a little spice to an otherwise tedious and miserable assignment. But the truth was he found her fascinating. She was such a girlie girl. But more compelling was how she reminded him of a shiny new penny that had never been nicked or tarnished. What must it be like to never have had anything bad happen in one’s life? To be good. The concept was completely beyond his comprehension.

A shocking compulsion to end all that innocence rolled over him. Most men would call it simple lust. But he knew it to be more.

The girls at his various universities had all been many years older than him, deeply intellectual and far too cool to pay any attention to the skinny kid blowing out all the grade curves in their classes. At the opposite end of the spectrum had been the groupies in the casinos. Hookers, showgirls and hangers-on looking to trade their bodies, and even their souls, for access to his bank account. Not that he particularly held it against them. They were using what tools they had to climb out of life’s cesspool, while he used them to climb into it.

There had been a few older women looking to take on the role of his missing mother—social workers, counselors, even a professor or two—who tried to mentor him along the way. Their hearts had been in the right place. Hell, they might even have had decent advice for him. But he hadn’t been ready to hear it. Not back then. Not before his life imploded and he sent himself to hell.

Some would say he’d always been in hell and had just managed to find a stairway down to a deeper circle of it. They were also the ones who tended to declare him a lost cause. Doomed to wallow in his own black pit of despair, forever. He was inclined to agree with that crowd.

A faint rumble rolled down the valley, and Katie looked up sharply, startled.

“It’s just thunder,” he murmured drowsily, pretending to be half-asleep.

“No, it’s not. That was a mortar explosion,” she retorted tersely.

“And you know this how?” he asked with more alert interest.

“Three of my brothers are in the military, the other two are in law enforcement and my dad’s an ex–Green Beret. We lived on army bases when I was a kid.” Another explosion sounded, closer this time, and she announced with certainty, “And that was a rocket-propelled grenade.”

Fuck. Supposedly harmless little Katie McCloud kept throwing him monkey wrenches. He needed her to be no factor in this mission. A know-nothing civilian translator who’d never been overseas and had no field experience. Naive. A bit of a dingbat. Manageable, dammit. But instead she was a dangerous wild card. What the hell was going on out here around them? Around him?

This job was supposed to be about redemption. About doing something decent with his life at long last. About escaping the clutches of his father, at least for a little while. Was it too much to ask to have one moment in his life to do what he wanted with it? If it wouldn’t have been completely paranoid of him, he would half suspect his father was behind the rebels managing to stay on their heels like this.

Katie was so damned quick on the uptake. Hell, he already had her half-trained to be a decent surgical nurse. She was intuitive. Attractive. And she could fricking tell mortars from RPGs. He swore silently and with great fervor. Why hadn’t anyone told him that about her?

“A patient will come to us tonight,” she declared.

“Still holding out hope for that ice cream?” he asked lightly. Her gaze snapped unwillingly to his. Mmm-hmm. She was thinking hard about what would happen if he won the bet instead of her. Hell, so was he.

Ever since they’d come out here, he had exercised iron will not to let his mind stray to the possibilities between them—alone in the wilds, bored, attracted to each other. He didn’t know what had come over him when he’d suggested the bet this afternoon. She’d broken through his self-discipline somehow, and he didn’t have a clue how she’d done it. And that worried him.

He’d carefully locked away the darker side of his soul and kept it under tight wraps. But damned if he wasn’t dying of curiosity to see how she would react to that other side of him. The dangerous one that corrupted everything and everyone it touched. He’d never dreamed she would actually accept the bet. The odds had been overwhelming that she would run screaming from such a risky wager. Unpredictable, she was. An outlier in his experience with women. It made her damn near irresistible.

She seemed so straightforward on the surface. An all-American girl. Her insistence on washing her hair every other day, even if the water was barely above freezing, spoke of care for her physical appearance. And the way she accessorized her mannish mountain jacket with frilly, fringed scarves and fuzzy earmuffs shouted of her need to demonstrate her femininity. Growing up in the houseful of brothers explained that, he supposed. Ten to one she polished her toenails.

He swore violently at himself. No more odds. No more bets. He was done with all that. Down that path lay damnation and ruin.

She moved to stand in the doorway as darkness fell, gazing down the valley, her arms wrapped around her middle. He watched her become a silhouette against the twilight and then a mysterious shadow blending with the night. A need to consume her, body, mind and soul, burned in his gut like brimstone.

Was she regretting their bet? A gentleman would let her out of it since it seemed to disturb her so much. But then, gentlemen didn’t often make it down to his end of hell. And a deal was a deal, even if it was with the devil.

He announced grimly, “I’m going to get some sleep. You should do the same. We won’t get many nights off while we’re out here.”

She turned to glare at him. “Are you always so sure of yourself?”

“If you’re asking if I’m always right, pretty much, yes.”

“That’s arrogant.”

“Just stating the facts.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Odds are you won’t get much sleep tomorrow night. Therefore, you should sleep tonight when you can.”

Her mouth sagged open. Amused at her burgeoning outrage and disinterested in enduring a lecture from a ruffled female, he lay down on his cot, presenting his back to her.

“Someday, Alex Peters, something or someone is going to come along and knock you off that pedestal of yours. I sincerely hope I’m there to see it.”

He snorted. That had been taken care of a very long time ago. But she had no reason to know it, and he had no reason to tell her. The past was over and done with. They’d told him to start a new life. To move forward. Too bad no one had told him how.

* * *

KATIE LISTENED TO the quiet sound of Alex’s breathing. Every minute or so, it was punctuated by an explosion of one kind or another from outside. She identified ground fire and artillery and heard the change in pitch when attack helicopters rolled in on the distant battle. Even if it was still several miles away, gradually, gradually, it was moving closer to their position.

What if Alex was right? What if this area was overrun by the low-intensity brush war raging across this barren region? She’d heard war stories around her family’s kitchen table for long enough to know that no war was low intensity if a guy was on the ground, caught in the middle of it. If only she could call whatever brother of hers was closest to this corner of the world and ask him to find out exactly what was going on. She hated not knowing what was headed their way. But no. She’d been determined to do this on her own. Heck, her cell phone wouldn’t work even if she went hundreds of miles in any direction from here.

A new sound outside sent her to the door of the tent. It was a high-pitched scream, like a fighter jet, yet too quiet to be an airplane. Still, it sounded close. Perplexed, she scanned the sky. Her jaw dropped as she spotted a drone. It was big—the size of a small airplane. More interesting, it had a huge, bulbous protrusion on its belly. That was some sort of radar scanner.

She ducked under the tent instinctively. Alex had mentioned something about the tent canvas having metal fibers woven into it that prevented radar and infrared systems from seeing through it. Apparently, the special tents were standard gear for D.U. doctors. It helped them avoid being detected when they were treating patients in a hostile area.

The drone moved on, cruising at a leisurely pace. It pulled a big one-eighty turn at the head of the valley and commenced flying back down it. That looked like some sort of search pattern. What on earth was it looking for? More to the point, who was flying the darned thing? Who had that kind of military resources, and what were they doing in this remote corner of the world?

She was tempted to wake Alex, ask him to pull out the satellite radio and have him get an update from the neutral observers who were tracking the rebels and their movements. Alex hadn’t turned the thing on since they’d fled their last cave. Of course, she was also tempted to get down on her knees and pray for a woman in labor to stumble through the door right about now, too.

Sex with Alex Peters? The notion had her tied in so many knots she could hardly see straight. Surely he wouldn’t make her go through with it if he won the bet. Thing was, she’d been raised to keep promises and honor her word. And he struck her as the kind of man who would demand no less of her.

What in the heck had she been thinking to agree to such a crazy wager? She hadn’t been thinking. Her impulsive nature had gotten her into a pickle again. Like it always did. Would she never learn?

Although how bad could sex with the good doctor be? He’d been genuinely shocked when she’d chosen ice cream over sex. Did he know something about it that she didn’t? He was a doctor. Did they talk about...that stuff...in medical school? Teach students the anatomical secrets of fantastic sex? Lord knew he was attractive. Strike that. He was a hunk. Smexy—smart and sexy.

She didn’t usually go for the silent, brooding types. But she had to admit, he wasn’t so bad to be around. Exuberant guys had a tendency to exhaust her with their drama. Sure, she was the exuberant type herself, but, at the end of the day, drama wasn’t her thing. At least Alex was predictable...most of the time...when he wasn’t making shockingly inappropriate bets with his coworker. Predictably intellectual. Predictably clueless about women. Predictably—and infuriatingly—enigmatic.