Close Pursuit
Close Pursuit
Cindy Dees
ON THE RUN, AND UNDER FIRE…Providing medical relief in a war-torn region helps Alex Peters forget his past and focus on the job: delivering babies. Less easy to overlook is his blonde comrade-at-arms, who knows nothing of the trouble he’s running from. Katie McCloud makes the assignment bearable, although her perky innocence proves to be an arousing distraction. Then, as combat explodes around them, their only option is flight.A kindergarten teacher seeking adventure, Katie hoped this humanitarian mission—and the mysterious, sexy doctor sharing it—would push her out of her comfort zone. With Alex, she starts taking tantalizing risks and becoming the survivor she knew she could be.But back on U.S. soil, Alex and Katie face a new threat, and this time they’re the target. Forced into close confines, neither can believe the other isn’t the intended mark. With only each other to depend on—and suspect—Alex and Katie can't avoid the simmering attraction between them. But to stay alive, they’ll have to trust more deeply than ever before…
On the run and under fire
Providing medical relief in a war-torn region helps Alex Peters forget his past and focus on the job—delivering babies. Less easy to overlook is his blonde comrade-at-arms, who knows nothing of the trouble he’s running from. Katie McCloud makes the assignment bearable, although her perky innocence proves to be an arousing distraction. Then, as combat explodes around them, their only option is flight.
A kindergarten teacher seeking adventure, Katie hoped this humanitarian mission—and the mysterious, sexy doctor sharing it—would push her out of her comfort zone. With Alex, she starts taking tantalizing risks and becoming the survivor she knew she could be.
But back on U.S. soil, Alex and Katie face a new threat, and this time they’re the target. Forced into close confines, neither can believe the other isn’t the intended mark. With only each other to depend on—and suspect—Alex and Katie can’t avoid the simmering attraction between them. But to stay alive, they’ll have to trust more deeply than ever before….
RT Book Reviews raves about Cindy Dees
Night Rescue
“Dees’ exciting, action-packed story speeds along on all cylinders, with a smoking-hot pair at the center of it all. Your fingers will get exercise as they rapidly turn the pages of this compulsively readable tale.”
Flash of Death
“Dees brings readers into an action-packed world, with superhuman operatives. Add to that a sympathetic heroine and a sizzling romance, and this is a book you can’t put down.”
Deadly Sight
“Dees crafts the perfect blend of romance and suspense with her latest story featuring members of the special ops group Code X. A solid, suspenseful plot, tormented, vulnerable characters and beautiful, compelling writing will keep you turning the pages.”
The 9-Month Bodyguard
“There’s action and hot attraction galore in this addition to the Love in 60 Seconds series. Dees does a terrific job of advancing the overall series while lending her unique talent to her vibrant individual contribution.”
Close Pursuit
Cindy Dees
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book brings my writing journey to date full circle to where it began with a love story based on a real person’s tragedy. It seems fitting, then, that I dedicate this book to those who have been with me since the beginning.
To my family, who’ve put up with this crazy writer’s life and kept me laughing.
To my literary agent, Pattie Steele-Perkins, for keeping me sane and talking me down off bridges.
And to my BWFF—Best Writing Friend Forever—Jade Lee, for sharing everything else.
I couldn’t have done it without you guys.
Contents
Chapter One (#uf50d244b-e0a8-5e66-81a7-367015ed960f)
Chapter Two (#u0512a49f-d381-521f-9aca-1b8cc819ade6)
Chapter Three (#u19af9aa1-5340-5755-b19f-9ffba3f27187)
Chapter Four (#u9a018783-8bb8-5121-819e-ed9b334db22d)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
KATIE MCCLOUD STUDIED the barren valley at her feet and shook her head. Mars. It looks like freaking Mars. Who’d have guessed anywhere on Earth looked like this? Of course, she’d had to go to the foothills of the Himalayas at the intersection of Nowhere and Uninhabitable to find it.
She ducked inside the makeshift shelter tucked between two giant boulders and looked around. It would be a tight squeeze for two people and their gear. But this trip wasn’t about having all the comforts of home. She really was trying hard to think of it as a grand adventure, but her personal pep talk wasn’t sinking in at the moment. Her brother had promised it would be like primitive camping. Maybe if she was primitive camping in hell.
“Come help me,” her partner-in-crime, Alex Peters, called low from outside. She slipped out just as a cloud of dust rained down on the opening. Coughing, she batted the local gray grit out of her hair and glared at him on the hillside above her. “What are you doing?”
“Camouflaging our tent.”
“You didn’t have to camouflage me.”
A rare smile crossed his face. “You do want us to remain hidden, right?”
“Well, yeah,” she groused. “If they find us, we’ll be killed.”
Which was pretty crazy if she stopped to think about it. And which was why Katie was trying hard not to stop and think about it. Her brothers did this kind of stuff all the time, and everything always turned out fine. How tough could it be? She’d spent most of her adult life insisting to all of them that she could do the same sorts of wild things they did. And getting laughed at for saying it or, worse, patted on the head like some kind of cute puppy. This was her chance to prove she was the real deal once and for all.
Her confidence temporarily bolstered, she joined Alex on the steep slope above their little hideaway. She stumbled on rolling gravel, and his hand shot out to grab her elbow and steady her. As always, her pulse leaped at the contact. Surely he knew how totally hot he was. If he did, he didn’t give any hint of it as he let go of her arm and turned his attention back to hiding their tent. She gathered up an armful of scrawny, dead weeds and scattered them across the canvas surface.
“Too much,” he said critically. “The tonal value of the tent’s green contrasts too much with the dead grass. It draws the eye to the tent.” He slid gracefully down to the edge of the tent roof and removed most of the plant material.
“And when did you become an expert on the tonal values of tent canvas?” she asked tartly. Not that she doubted for a second that he was correct. In the few days she’d known him, he’d surprised her multiple times with the esoteric tidbits he knew. Her brother had warned her that Alex Peters was brilliant. As in off-the-charts-genius brilliant. But in her experience, intellect and common sense were two entirely separate things.
Alex stared at Katie warily. He did that a lot—look at her as if he thought she was about to leap on him and tear his shirt off or something. Not that it hadn’t crossed her mind. He was pretty gorgeous in a dark, tortured kind of way. That combination of dark hair and light eyes was surprisingly sexy.
He answered her question laconically, “They made me take an art class my last year as an undergrad at Harvard.”
“How old were you then? Twelve?”
“I didn’t start college until I was thirteen,” he replied absently, obviously already focused on something else entirely.
Her brother had told her Alex graduated from Harvard at sixteen with a degree in mathematics. Master’s in statistics and probability from MIT at seventeen, and well into PhD work in cryptography there before the wheels had come off his life. Maddeningly, her brother hadn’t said a word about what that meant. Just that the wheels had come off.
At thirteen, she’d been trying to convince her parents to let her wear makeup and her brothers to quit calling her Baby Butt. As she recalled, she’d developed an abiding hatred of math that year, too, compliments of pre-algebra. Thankfully, her degree in early elementary education only required basic mathematics.
The sun slid quickly behind the looming mountains, and day became night in minutes. The temperature dropped nearly as precipitously. The two of them retreated into the tent to huddle near the propane heater.
“You’re sure they’ll come?” she asked Alex over a pouch of freeze-dried beef stew reconstituted with water warmed on the top of the heater.
“D.U. put the word out,” he answered. “They’ll come.”
Doctors Unlimited was a low-profile international aid organization that sent medical personnel into the most remote and dangerous corners of the planet. Katie still didn’t know a whole lot more than that about the group, even after she’d gotten the call from her brother that it needed her help. Mike was military intelligence, although he couldn’t officially admit it. But everyone in the family knew he’d been a SEAL and probably still worked with the teams as an intel analyst.
She’d half suspected this trip was some sort of undercover SEAL op until she’d met Alex, who no way, no how was a SEAL. It wasn’t just that he ran to the lean and elegant rather than stupidly buff. He was more...cosmopolitan...than she associated with most of the guys on the teams. He was James Bond, not Rambo.
And then, of course, there was the whole bit about his actually delivering babies out here. She didn’t doubt SEALs could deliver babies—Lord knew, they could do just about everything else—but she couldn’t see one successfully posing as an obstetrician for weeks or months on end. Although, how Alex had gone from mathematician to physician during the black hole of time her brother wouldn’t speak of was a mystery to her.
“This area looks completely deserted,” she announced.
He shrugged. “You saw the same maps I did. Karshan’s a good-sized village, and it’s less than a mile up the river from us.”
“How will word spread that we’re here? And to whom?”
“Women gossip faster than the internet,” he murmured absently.
She’d already lost him again. His gaze was fixed on the heavy boxes of medical equipment they’d carried up there from the Land Rover, which was hidden under a brush pile down by the river at the bottom of the narrow, steep valley. Emphasis on steep. Her legs and back were going to kill her tomorrow.
She bloody well hoped they didn’t have to move this camp anytime soon. Their first two camps had been in caves in much more accessible locations than this mountainous crevasse. Twice Alex had woken her up with an urgent warning that the rebels were coming, and it had been relatively easy to throw their gear in the Land Rover and bug out.
At this time of year, Zaghastan, high in a remote region of the Hindu Kush, was as barren and lifeless as the moon with vast stretches of gray granite mountains and wind-scoured valleys. She huddled deeper into her high-tech mountain climber’s coat as a burst of frigid air rustled the canvas overhead. “Feels like snow,” she commented.
“Humidity’s under ten percent. Any snow will fall as virga.”
“And what is virga?” she asked with the long-suffering patience she’d learned working with kindergarteners.
“Precipitation that falls from clouds but evaporates prior to reaching the ground. Although technically snow is a solid, so the correct term in this case would be sublimation and not evaporation, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed drily. Being with this guy was like traveling with an encyclopedia. And he had about as many emotions as one. Either that, or Alex Peters was freakishly, inhumanly self-disciplined. Either way, she felt completely inadequate in his presence. As for her, she let everything she felt and thought hang right out there for everyone to see. It was so much easier that way. No secrets. No surprises. No head games.
Still, there was one thing she knew that he didn’t—the local language. The natives of this region spoke an ancient tribal tongue not used anywhere else on earth—except in a small community of Zaghastani expatriates living in Pittsburgh. She’d learned it during her three-year stint there with Teachers Across America, educating their children.
It turned out she had a gift for languages. Absorbed them like a sponge. That, and the rules of hospitality in Zaghastani culture dictated that teachers be invited into parents’ homes. She’d picked up the dialect like candy. It had helped her teach the kids English.
“Storm’s blowing in,” Alex observed.
She huddled closer to the tiny heat source, and her knee accidentally bumped his. He drew his leg away fractionally, and her fantasies about him were dashed yet again. Clearly, he didn’t think she was in his league. Either that or he was gay.
“I thought you said we’d only get virga,” she said a tad peevishly.
“That doesn’t mean it won’t get cold and windy. At this altitude, it’s not uncommon for temperatures to drop well below zero.”
She winced at the thought. Give her a nice, cozy fireplace, fuzzy socks and a cup of hot chocolate, and she was a happy camper. Less than one day on this mountainside and she was ready to pack it in and head home. Even a cave would be a step up from a canvas-covered crack in the rocks. At least they had the mountain at their back to block the wind a little.
“We should have some business before morning,” he announced.
“Why’s that?” she asked curiously. Was he psychic, too?
“Female mammals tend to give birth in the worst possible weather. It suppresses the movement of predators and enhances survivability of the gravid female and her offspring during the birth process.”
Well, okay, then. This trip was going to be nothing if not educational, apparently. Alex commenced rummaging through his boxes of equipment. He looked frustrated, as though he’d misplaced something. “Can I help?” she asked.
“No.”
That was Alex. Mr. Monosyllable.
Intense silence fell around them, disturbed only by the flapping of canvas.
“Seems like the only predators around here are the husbands of the local female population,” she remarked to fill the void. She hated quiet. She hadn’t grown up with five older brothers for nothing. Their house had been a zoo. But Alex seemed to prefer the transcendent silence.
He lifted one of the boxes effortlessly and shifted it into the corner. He might run to the lean side compared to her buff brothers, but he was stronger than he looked. He commented, “I doubt the husbands are the problem. It’s an eighty-five percent probability, plus or minus about three percent, that conservative religious zealots have been the ones killing the midwives.”
Slaughtering them, more like. Religious extremists were killing not only the midwives, but all women who advocated women’s rights or who represented female power in their communities. It was obscene. And largely unreported in the media. The massacre had prompted Doctors Unlimited to fund this secret mission into Zaghastan to deliver babies, in fact. When her brother had asked her to go along and translate, she wasn’t about to say no to helping women just trying to survive childbirth. She’d also just finished her gig with Teachers Across America and had yet to land a permanent teaching job or even decide where she wanted to live. And then there was the bad breakup with the latest rotten boyfriend to get away from. Her friends called her the asshole magnet for good reason.
“I’d suggest you get some sleep,” Alex said briskly. “You look like you need it.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Hasn’t anyone ever taught you women don’t like to be told they look like crap?”
He looked vaguely startled—a first for him. “I beg your pardon?”
OMG. He really doesn’t know that? “Women don’t like to be told they look bad.”
He frowned, his formidable mind obviously examining her statement from ninety-two different angles. “I suppose that’s logical if a woman is insecure about her appearance for some reason.”
“News flash, Einstein—all women are insecure about their appearance.”
“I have no context within which to place that remark.”
Oh, for the love of Mike. “Are you always such a geek?”
For just a second, something incongruous—and totally non-geeky—flashed in his eyes. Amusement. Male appreciation. Desire.
What. The. Heck? Where did the geek go?
She did a sharp double take, and his eyes were back to being as guarded and clueless as ever.
* * *
ALEX CONSIDERED KATIE—or at least the tip of her nose where it poked out of her sleeping bag. She could prove to be a serious problem. For a self-professed dingbat blonde, Katie had already showed herself to be deeply intuitive. Smarter than she let on. God knew, she was easy on the eye. The first thing he supposed most people would notice about her was the lush, golden hair falling in soft waves around her face. Or maybe her bright blue eyes. Or maybe even her slender, attractive figure.
Frankly, the thing he’d keyed in on first was her smile. It was warm and genuine and filled a room. He would like to think his mother had smiled like that. But, knowing his father, the man would never have gone for an open, loving woman. His old man would have gone for an ice bitch with a heart as hard and cold as a diamond.
Which would, of course, be more in keeping with his mother’s early and complete disappearance from his life. He had no memory of the woman whatsoever. Had no idea what happened to her. Never seen a picture. Never even heard a name.
A loose rock rolled outside, and he jerked to full alert. He shed the sleeping bag he’d wrapped around his shoulders and slid into the shadow beside the tent flap. He shook a razor-sharp scalpel out of his sleeve and slid it into his palm.
A low voice whispered on the other side of the canvas and then devolved into the persistent cough most of the locals had. Dammit. He didn’t understand a word of what the voice was saying. But it was female. He pulled the flap back, and two lumps of black cloth crouched in front of him. He gestured for them to come inside. The scalpel went inconspicuously back inside his sleeve as he moved to the back of the tent.
“Katie, wake up.” He gave her shoulder a shake through the down sleeping bag. She felt small and fragile under his hand. A temptation he couldn’t afford, dammit.
“Wha—” she mumbled as she rolled onto her back. Heavy sleeper. Must be nice to be so naive. It had been a long time since he’d thought the world was safe enough to sleep like that.
“I need a translator.”
She sat up sharply. “Oh!” She looked over at the two women huddled by the door and said something in the native tongue. It was a guttural and clumsy-sounding language.
“You’re on, Doc,” Katie announced. “The one on the left is in labor. Older one is her grandmother. Says she’s worried because her granddaughter is young and small.”
“How young?” he bit out.
Another exchange of words. Then Katie answered grimly, “Fourteen. Her first baby.”
One of the burka-wrapped shapes bent over just then and gave a low moan. Grandma propped up the girl as the contraction gripped her.
All the deliveries had been routine so far. Adult women, mostly on at least their fourth kid. But a first-timer barely into her teens? This could get interesting. His training in obstetrics was superficial; he was primarily a trauma surgeon. But all doctors were required to pull an obstetrics rotation in medical school. The men in prison with him who had constituted much of his on-the-job medical experience hadn’t given birth to a hell of a lot of babies—which was to say, any babies.
He’d pulled a short stint in a maternity ward to deliver a few more kids before he’d been sent out here. But he’d never seen a case like this. Nothing like trial by fire to earn his stripes as an obstetrician.
“Get the girl onto a cot. I need her out of her clothes but covered enough to keep her warm. I’ll crank up the heater while you ladies take care of all that,” he instructed.
It was forbidden for males of any stripe, even doctors, to look at any part of a woman in this part of the world, especially where he’d have to look to deliver a baby. But with all the local midwives dead, he was the only show in town. The Doctors Unlimited folks in Washington, D.C., had explained that it would be a death sentence for him and his patients to be caught. But the D.U. staff had believed—correctly—that local women would risk it anyway.
Crazy thing, that. Women wanting to have a fighting chance at surviving childbirth. What were they thinking? He snorted sarcastically as he turned up the propane heater. Without proper care, one in three women in this part of the world died in childbirth or soon after from complications. Doctors Unlimited and other aid organizations had spent the past several decades training midwives, and the mortality rate had dropped to rates commensurate with the West. Until this past winter and the midwife massacre.
He commenced meticulously scrubbing his hands and forearms over a bucket of water so cold it made his fingernails turn blue. How in the hell was he supposed to work under these conditions?
A muttered argument ensued behind him, and Katie announced, “The girl doesn’t want you to examine her or help unless things go badly.”
“And how am I supposed to know things are going badly if I can’t look at my patient?” he snapped.
She sighed. “They want you to tell me what to look for.”
“That’s absurd. You have no medical training whatsoever.”
“That’s what I told them. She’s adamant, though. And embarrassed.”
“But I’m a doctor—”
“And she’s a young, terrified girl who cannot read or write and will be beaten to death by her husband if he catches her here.”
“Then why did she come?” he demanded, low and angry.
Katie came over to stand directly in front of him. Her eyes were huge and beseeching as she looked up at him. “Because she’s more scared of her baby dying than of dying herself.”
He stared down at her, seared by the zeal in her eyes. He grumbled, “This sucks.”
“Welcome to life as a female a thousand years ago.”
He just shook his head. “The first thing to do is see if the baby’s presenting headfirst. You’ll have to use a speculum and a flashlight since it’s so dark in here.” The lone lantern was barely bright enough to read by, let alone perform surgery by.
Katie gulped and headed for the laboring girl, who was moaning again. He glanced at his watch. Contractions were under two minutes apart. “Do you know what a speculum is?” he asked.
“Every woman who’s ever had an ob-gyn exam knows what one is,” Katie replied frostily.
His lips twitched with humor, and he was glad her back was turned to him. “How far is she dilated?” he asked.
“There’s about a silver-dollar-sized opening,” Katie reported a moment later. “What does a head look like?”
“Like a wet, hairy balloon pressed against the cervix.”
“Then we’ve got a problem. I’m seeing pink skin. And it’s kind of pointy. Maybe bony. Like, umm, a baby bottom?”
“Breech presentation,” he bit out. “You’re going to have to talk our reluctant patient into letting me help.”
But Mama was having no part of it. It was outrageous that he had to stand there and do nothing when he could be attempting to turn the baby before it entered the birth canal. Although given how small Mom was, that would be a dicey proposition at best. He really needed to consider a C-section sooner rather than later.
“Tell her I want to discuss a C-section.”
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.
Alex Peters remained a mystery to her. Why would a guy like him shift from math to medicine? Where was he from? What was his family like? Did he have any hobbies? What kind of women did he prefer? What kind of sex?
She started as his eyes opened without warning; his gaze drilled into her like a silver laser. “Is there a problem?” he rasped. His voice was husky with sleep and so sexy her toes curled in her clunky hiking boots.
“Nope,” she answered cheerfully to hide her embarrassment at being caught staring at him. She hastily opened her tablet reader and turned it on.
“You were looking at me.”
She looked up innocently. Not a chance she could lie her way out of it. He’d caught her red-handed. So instead, she took the direct route. “I wasn’t aware that’s a crime.”
He took his arms out of his sleeping bag and linked his fingers behind his head. His naked arms. The upper reaches of his bare chest peeked out of the nylon shell. A sprinkling of dark hair was visible on it. And muscles. Lots and lots of mature-man muscles that, truth be told, she found intimidating. The guys she’d dated had been college types or recent grads who still acted and looked like students. She revised her opinion of Alex from lean to deceptively muscular. The guy must wear a tuxedo like a god.
“You’re staring again,” he announced.
“It’s rude of you to point it out,” she retorted. “Ladies are allowed to look.”
“Are gentlemen allowed also?”
If she didn’t know better, she’d say the doctor geek was flirting. Would wonders never cease? She fanned the tiny flame carefully by flirting back slightly. “Hello? It’s expected that guys will check us out. Why else would we girls go to so much trouble to look so good?”
“I haven’t gotten the impression that you’re a big primper.”
“That’s because there’s no power outlet for my blow-dryer, and the wind makes my eyes water too much to keep on eye makeup long enough to make it worthwhile.”
“You brought a blow-dryer out here?” he blurted. He had the bad grace to burst into laughter.
She scowled at his amusement. “Hey, I brought power converters. In my world, primitive camping is a motel instead of a Marriott. Nobody told me there would be no electricity at all in this godforsaken place. I was under the impression there would be, oh, I don’t know, walls and a roof for us.”
“You don’t need to primp. You’re fine the way you are,” he replied.
Hark, a compliment out of the good doctor! “Apology accepted,” she replied magnanimously.
He blinked, startled, like he hadn’t meant it that way. The man might be as hot as a god, and he might be smart as a whip, but he had a lot to learn about women. He reached for his sleeping bag’s zipper, and she turned away hastily. Who knew how far down his nakedness extended? She’d already figured out that, as a doctor, he wasn’t tremendously inhibited about the human body.
She asked over her shoulder, “So, does your Spidey sense say we’re going to get a lot of business tonight?”
“No. We’ll get the night off.”
She turned in surprise— Whoops. He was just pulling jeans over spandex biker-short things. Okay, then. The deceptively muscular thing extended to his legs and ass, too. She silently dubbed him Gluteus Aleximus.
He glanced up, caught her staring and broke into a grin so hot her eyelashes singed. “Like what you see?”
“Uhhh...shrmph...wuh...hwa...sure,” she managed to get out.
His grin widened.
Jerk. He’d embarrassed her on purpose. Oh, two could play that game. She hadn’t grown up with a houseful of brothers for nothing. She could give as well as she got when it came to practical jokes.
While she pondered revenge, she busied herself heating up the little propane hot plate and scrambling the eggs someone had brought last night. She and Alex were frequently paid in bread, jugs of yak milk and these oversize eggs she hadn’t had the courage to ask the source of. Geese, maybe? Or something weirder?
Chickens. In her world, every egg came from a chicken, and she was sticking with that mental image. She’d tried to explain to the local women that Doctors Unlimited was paying the two of them, but that didn’t stop their patients from showing their gratitude.
“So, Doc. Why do you think there won’t be any babies tonight?”
He glanced up from the bucket, where he was washing his hands. “I listened to the radio while you were sleeping. A rebel force is moving into the area.”
“Again?” she complained. “I swear, it’s like they’re following us!”
“Noticed that, did you?” he asked drily.
She did a double take. Seriously? They were being tracked somehow? The thought chilled her to her bones. “Why would somebody track us?” she blurted.
“That’s a damned good question,” he bit out.
She recoiled from the tight fury in his voice. Did he think the rebels were chasing him? Why? What was the big mystery around him, anyway? The six-hundred-pound gorilla in the corner of the tent was why her intel–Special Forces brother had asked her to come out here with Alex in the first place. Surely she was not the only person in the entire United States who spoke Zaghastani. And why did Mike drop that cryptic comment as he dropped her off at the airport to keep an eye on Peters and see if she noticed anything odd about him or why he was heading out to Zaghastan to deliver babies? Only odd thing so far was that the guy seemed totally immune to her general hotness and willingness to let him jump her bones.
Alex circled back to the original conversation. “If fighting breaks out between the rebels and the locals, any women in labor tonight will stay home.”
“I dunno,” she responded. “These women are already braving pretty dangerous obstacles to get to you. I doubt a little gunfire will slow them down.”
“The rebels are well armed and violent. When they come, they’ll crush everything in their path.”
Yeah. Like the two of us. She shook her head, unconvinced, and declared, “I’ll bet you five bucks we deliver a baby tonight.”
The effect of her challenge on Alex was shocking. He went utterly still, and she thought she saw a shudder pass through him. From this angle, it looked as if he actually paled. The tension abruptly emanating from him was terrible in its intensity.
She was on the verge of asking him if he was okay when he turned abruptly. His gaze was hooded. Dark. And his entire being was suddenly sharply, dangerously alive. It was as if she’d woken a sleeping tiger. And now the beast was not only awake, but he was hungry...and on the hunt.
“Shall we make the wager a little more interesting?” he purred. The sexual energy in his voice raked across her skin like claws.
Whoa. She asked cautiously, “What did you have in mind?”
“What do you like best in all the world?” he asked.
“Ice cream,” she answered promptly. It was the first thing that came to mind.
“Better than sex?” He sounded skeptical.
She shrugged. “I stand by my answer.”
He replied huskily, “Then you haven’t had good sex.”
The promise of just that was thick in his throat. She didn’t dare let her gaze stray south to see if he was as turned on as she was, all of a sudden.
“I think we have the terms of our bet then.” Her gaze snapped to him as he prowled across the tiny space to less than arm’s length from her. “If you win, we have a date to eat ice cream together. If I win...” His mouth curved up in a smile that was pure sin.
Her jaw dropped. “No way!”
His heavy lids might hide the fire blazing in his eyes, but they in no way diminished it. “A woman daring enough to travel halfway across the world, to brave a war zone and death threats, living alone in the wilds with a stranger...” He shrugged. “I thought you were...more.”
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.
Her brother had been specific in his instructions to her. Earn Alex Peters’s trust. Get into his good graces. Find out if he was up to anything besides delivering babies out here in the middle of nowhere. She’d asked Mike what he suspected Alex of, but her brother had fed her a bullshit line about not wanting to taint her impressions of the doctor. What was the deal with Alex? Who was he? And why had she been sent into a war zone to watch him?
She paced the tiny tent until her legs ached. Finally, Alex woke enough to mutter, “Lie down, Katie. You’re keeping me awake with all your fretting.”
She did as he asked, but she tossed and turned for much of the night. Yet again she checked her watch. God. 4:00 a.m. Good news: the shelling was finally winding down. Bad news: no women had crept to the tent asking for the baby doctor.
She was so frantic not to lose the bet that she was seriously considering heading for the nearest village to go door-to-door looking for women in labor. Okay, she wasn’t serious about canvassing the neighborhood for business. But she wanted to do it.
As the first hint of dawn touched the peaks at the opposite rim of the valley, she reluctantly admitted defeat and burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag. What had she done? Why did she have a feeling deep in her gut that she had jumped off a cliff and just didn’t know it yet?
* * *
KATIE WOKE WITH a jolt and was stunned to see sunlight inching in the tent flap. “What time is it?” she demanded, disoriented. She looked around and was alarmed to see that the tent was empty. Where was Alex?
“Almost two o’clock,” he answered from outside.
She leaped out of the sleeping bag, shocked. Her feet hit the cold dirt, and she hopped uncomfortably from foot to foot until she could slip into her unlaced hiking boots. She gathered her hair up in a high ponytail. Today was hair-washing day, and she already dreaded dousing her head in ice water. But it was better than having greasy hair.
Alex ducked inside the tent and handed her a steaming mug of coffee. Their fingertips brushed as they made the handoff, and her pulse leaped wildly. She looked up at him involuntarily. One corner of his mouth turned up in sardonic amusement at her jumpiness. It was official. She’d made a deal with the devil. To have sex. Ho. Lee. Crap.
Freaked out, she stared down at her mug of coffee unseeingly. Slowly, slowly, her pulse returned to normal, leaving behind a low-level background hum of panic. She would figure out a way to dodge the bullet. After her coffee.
She inhaled the bitter aroma with great relish. It wasn’t that she was the world’s biggest fan of coffee, but it was the smell of home. Of the civilized world beyond this isolated valley. Of life’s little indulgences.
“Thanks,” she murmured. As usual, Alex didn’t reply as he moved past her to the back of the tent. But today, she followed up with, “Why don’t you ever say ‘you’re welcome’ or something to that effect?”
“It’s redundant. I’ve already done something polite or thoughtful and the recipient has acknowledged it. There’s no need for further exchange.”
“Are you always so...cold-blooded in your approach to human interactions?” she asked curiously.
He moved shockingly fast to stand right behind her. Her pulse leaped at his proximity. Was he going to collect on the bet right now? She started to feel light-headed, and her legs trembled so badly with an urge to bolt that they would barely support her weight.
“No, Katie.” His voice was barely more than a whisper sliding across her skin. “I’m not cold-blooded about everything.”
Her breath hitched, and she had to force herself to take her next breath.
A single finger touched the nape of her neck right where her hair met bare skin. It drew slowly down her spine to the top of her T-shirt. “For the record, I’m not going to fall on you and ravish you like some clumsy, horny American boy.”
She turned sharply, mostly to escape that disturbingly sensual caress, but also to stare at him in surprise. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“I am a citizen, yes.”
“But?”
“But I was born abroad. And my father did not raise me particularly American.”
“What about your mother?”
“No mother,” he bit out.
She replied drily, “Last I heard, there’s only been one documented case of immaculate conception.” She added even more drily, “Assuming, of course, that you accept the Bible as valid documentation. And even then, it was the male parent in absentia.”
His eyes were the roiling gray of a thundercloud as he stared down at her. What on earth was he thinking to send that turbulence through his eyes? She continued looking back at him expectantly.
After a moment, he muttered, “Let me guess. You’re not going to leave the subject of my missing mother alone until I give you an explanation.”
She smiled triumphantly. “Congratulations! You’re finally learning to read women, grasshopper.” A scowl crossed his face, but she waited him out. She had a lot of experience outlasting stubborn males in her family.
Finally he shoved a hand through his hair, standing it up in short dark spikes all over his head. “My mother left my father, or vice versa, when I was an infant. I never knew her, and, no, I don’t know the circumstances behind it.” He added sharply, “And don’t tell me you’re sorry. I never knew what it was like to have a mother, so I have no frame of reference to measure whether or not it was a loss.”
“Do you always intellectualize painful things?” she asked him.
Her question seemed to stop him in his tracks, and he studied her intensely. He looked as if he’d turned the full power of his formidable mind to analyzing her. His reply, when he finally spoke, shocked her. “Has anything truly terrible ever happened to you?”
She had to think about it for a minute. “Our dog died when I was in college. That was really sad. And my grandmother died a few years back.”
“Let me guess. She was a hundred and ten years old, lived a rich and productive life, died in her sleep and everyone praised her full life and bemoaned her premature passing.”
“She was ninety-five,” Katie answered a little defensively.
He stepped close to her, and she was abruptly aware of how much taller he was. His head tilted down toward her as he murmured, “But you’ve never had everything you believed in ripped away from you? Never experienced regret so bad it burns a hole through your gut that won’t heal? Never made a mistake that costs you everything?”
She shook her head, her stomach fluttering so much she felt sick.
“If you had any sense, you’d run away from me as fast as you could, little girl.”
She bristled at being called a little girl, and her spine stiffened. “I can take anything you can dish out to me.”
“We’ll see about that,” he replied so low she barely heard him.
If she didn’t know better, she’d say his eyes burned for a moment with a hot, unholy fire. But on second look, it was just a trick of the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off his light gray eyes. Still, the fire reached out to her, tempting her, enthralling her, arousing something restless and dangerous deep in her belly.
Eventually he swore under his breath in some foreign tongue she didn’t recognize. But it was definitely cursing. He turned away and headed outside, grabbing the water bucket as he went. She listened to his angry footsteps retreating down the path to the river and, very slowly, let out the breath she’d been holding.
Alex was surly and uncommunicative when he returned from the river, his hair wet, and he retreated immediately into the tent to take a nap. She mimicked him and washed her hair. She brushed it out as she perched on the flat boulder outside and waited for the sun to set beyond the mountains. It was risky to sit outside like this in plain sight of anyone who happened by, but she got horrendously claustrophobic inside the tent, especially when Alex’s brooding presence filled it so completely. She found it strange to sit in silence like this and just contemplate existence.
His earlier question disturbed her. So what if nothing tragic had ever happened in her life? That wasn’t her fault. She and her family had been lucky. She got the feeling he hadn’t been so lucky, though. A desire to know him, to know the source of the darkness she sensed in him, rattled in her gut...along with trepidation at what she might learn. People didn’t get that dark without some serious crap in their pasts.
It was windy today, and the dust in the atmosphere made for a spectacular sunset that stretched high up into the heavens. As beautiful as it was, it also marked the inevitable passage of time. Would Alex insist on collecting his winnings when he woke up? He’d said yesterday that he doubted she would get much sleep tonight. Was he referring to the bet, or patients, or something else altogether?
How had he been so certain he would win, anyway? Suspicion took root in her mind that he’d heard something on the radios or gotten inside knowledge of some kind and thrown the bet. He seemed like the kind of man to whom winning would be more important than splitting ethical hairs over how he won.
“Time to douse the fire,” Alex announced quietly from behind her.
She nodded and kicked dirt over the little campfire. Its light would be visible for miles after dark, and they dared not announce their presence like that. She figured the local men had to be getting suspicious by now. All the women sneaking out at night to have their babies, and all of them coming back alive? Something was up with that. The ones who gave half a crap about their wives and daughters might tacitly approve of a doctor to the extent that they didn’t rat out her and Alex. But, eventually, someone radical would say something to the seriously hard-core religious types in the area.
Desperate to keep Alex’s mind off sex as she ducked into the tent behind him, she asked, “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to stay here before we have to move?”
“I give it two more days. Call it a twelve percent probability of our being discovered tonight. Double that tomorrow, and double it again the day after.”
Crud. Mental math required. Twelve times two was twenty-four, times two was forty-eight. “That’s almost even odds in three days,” she blurted.
“Like I said. Two days from now, we’re out of here.”
“Should we leave tonight?” she asked in alarm.
“We should certainly think about starting packing.”
Awesome. Maybe he would be so tired after packing up tonight he wouldn’t want to collect his winnings. Although, part of her—a tiny part—was curious about what sex with him would be like. He seemed really sure of himself when the subject came up. Would he be gentle or fierce? Vanilla or...not? He probably wouldn’t fumble about clumsily; she would bet a hundred bucks he knew his way around the female body very well, indeed.
She dived into the task of packing with gusto. As long as she was moving, he couldn’t have his wicked way with her. For his part, he busied himself with the boxes of medical gear, hauling them one by one down to the Land Rover. To date he’d never let her look inside any of them. When she’d asked about them, he’d only shrugged and said he’d crack them open if and when they needed the supplies inside. Whatever was in the boxes was heavy. Alex moved carefully down the hill in the darkness before the moon came up.
She’d just gotten back from carrying down a bag of miscellaneous camping gear they could do without for the next day when an explosion ruptured the night.
“Uh, Alex?” she said quietly. “That was pretty close.”
She jumped when his voice came out of the gloom right behind her. “No more than a half mile.”
And how, exactly, did a physician know how to judge distance on artillery fire? She opened her mouth to ask him, but another explosion, even closer, silenced her. Alex’s arm went around her waist as he sprinted up the hill and all but threw her past him into the tent.
She tried to ask him what the heck that had been for, but his hand went over her mouth as he yanked her back against his hard body. Heat seeped through her clothing, and had she not been straining to hear what had flipped him out, she might have relished it. But as it was, she stood tense and silent in his arms.
There it was. The sound of people moving down by the river. Maybe a half-dozen by the sounds of their scuffling. A voice floated up the hill...a male voice...saying something in the local dialect about engaging the rebels in the lower pass.
Alex backed up, dragging her with him, and sat down on the cot in the back of the tent, which had the effect of landing her in his lap. She lurched as his hot breath touched her right ear. And then, oh, man, his lips moved against it.
“We’re going to have to wait out the battle until it moves on, and then we’ll bug out of here. We’ll take whatever supplies we can carry in one trip down the mountain. But until then, no lights and no sound. Understood?”
She nodded and felt her hair moving against his cheek. His hand fell away from her mouth, and he lifted her off his lap.
He stood and moved into the corner. When he came back, he pressed something cold and heavy into her hand. She recognized the rough grip and heft of a pistol.
“Do you know how to use this?” he breathed.
She ran her fingers over the weapon in the dark. “Luger .22 with an extended clip. Standard model. Check.” She loaded the clip he passed her, clicked off the safety and rested her index finger beside the trigger guard as she laid the weapon in her lap.
“You can tell the make and model just by feel?” Alex blurted. He added grimly, “If we get out of here alive, you and I need to talk.”
His right hand rested by his side, presumably with a weapon in it, as well. She shivered a little, belatedly registering that the night was growing cold around them quickly without their propane heater to ward off the chill. He held out his left arm, barely visible in the dark, and she accepted the invitation gratefully.
He tucked her close against his side. His body was solid and warm, and she had to admit she found it reassuring to cuddle up against him. A shell whistled overhead, and a tremendous explosion nearby sent dust raining down on them in the brief illumination.
How long they sat there listening to the artillery barrage blasting the valley to smithereens, she didn’t know. An hour, maybe. The explosions ebbed and flowed, sometimes close and sometimes farther away. Small-arms fire announced that the rebels and local ground forces were engaging in direct combat close by.
She heard the high-pitched engine whine again. Another drone. But this time, the scream of its engine was followed immediately by the sound of ordnance exploding in airbursts nearby. An attack drone? Who in the hell had access to that kind of weaponry out here?
Yet another whistling scream pierced the night. A big explosion deafened Katie as a flash illuminated the darkness. She looked up and a little scream escaped her when she saw a black figure looming in the doorway of their tent. She yanked up her pistol to shoot the intruder, but Alex was faster. He slammed his hand over her pistol, shoving it down to the cot before she could pull the trigger.
What the—
He was on his feet, moving as quickly as a cat to the shadow in the door. He took the person by the arm and guided him or her inside.
It dawned on Katie that the shadow was much shorter than Alex. And clothed in voluminous robes. Crap. She’d almost shot a local woman.
“Talk to her,” Alex ordered low. “But keep it quiet.”
Katie nodded and waited out a momentary lull in the shooting. As a spray of small-arms fire started up again, she used the noise to murmur, “Can we help you?”
“My baby. It comes,” a young voice moaned.
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Katie replied. “Lay down here, and Doctor Alex will take care of you.”
“Keep her dressed,” Alex ordered when Katie reached for the hem of the girl’s burka.
“Why?”
“We may need to move her.” He sat down at the foot of the cot to examine the patient with a flashlight he shielded with his hand.
“But she’s having a baby,” Katie replied blankly.
“Haven’t you ever watched Gone with the Wind?” he retorted. “Babies don’t care if the city is burning down around Mom. They come when they come.”
“This isn’t Atlanta, nor is it the nineteenth century,” Katie whispered back. She’d watched enough women struggle with all their might to push out babies over the past two weeks to understand that during the middle of childbirth was no time to move a patient.
“Tell that to the soldiers out there,” Alex retorted from between the girl’s knees. “She’s dilated eight centimeters. Time her contractions for me.”
Ten centimeters was the magic number when Alex allowed women to start pushing. Some women went from eight to ten in a half hour. A few had taken hours to get there. Katie waited in tense silence for the girl’s next contraction to start and end.
“Three minutes apart, one minute in duration,” she reported in the rumbling aftermath of some sort of incoming missile.
“We’ve probably got a little time then,” Alex remarked. “Stay with her. I’ll be back.”
Shocked, Katie watched him glide outside the tent and disappear into the night.
“Where—” the girl blurted in alarm.
Katie shushed her hastily. “He’ll be back. He’s just checking the battle. Stay as quiet as you can.”
“Cursed, greedy Tatars,” the girl muttered. “They think to destroy us. They are demons who rape our land. Steal the food from our mouths. Poison the wells, salt the fields. I curse them all unto the end of time—” She devolved into the local cough.
Katie frowned, not understanding the Tatar reference. Weren’t they nomadic raiders from southern Russia from the time of, oh, Genghis Khan? The girl’s language sounded old. Religious in nature. But clan rivalries and tribal feuding had been going on out here as long as humans had lived in these barren mountains. It was a revealing glimpse into mankind’s violent and harsh past. Frankly, she found it miraculous that humans had survived their own homicidal tendencies to populate the planet.
In the flashes of artillery explosions, the girl looked to be in her late teens. And pretty. Really pretty. Her eyes were big and dark and doe-shaped, her black hair lush around a heart-shaped face that high-fashion models would envy. It seemed strange, though, that a girl this young would have made her way to Alex by herself.
“Does anyone know you’re here?” Katie whispered to the girl.
Fear made the girl’s eyes even bigger as she shook her head vigorously. “My family does not know I am pregnant.”
Katie stared. “How is that possible?”
“I am not married. I wear big clothes. I pretend to eat a lot and tell them I am gaining weight. But I really don’t eat much and try to stay thin.”
In this culture, of all cultures, Katie supposed it might be possible to hide a pregnancy if a woman was really careful. Then the rest of this girl’s dilemma hit her. An unmarried girl, pregnant. In a society where sex outside marriage was punishable by death. No wonder the girl had hidden the pregnancy.
“What will you do with your baby when it comes?”
Anger flared in the girl’s eyes. “Kill it.”
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT? KATIE’S JAW dropped at the hatred in the girl’s voice. What the hell? She opened her mouth to ask what in the world was going on when a dark figure materialized in the doorway. She reached hastily for the pistol before she recognized Alex’s familiar silhouette.
“We’ve got a problem,” he murmured.
“No kidding,” Katie replied, jerking her head toward the cot. “She wants to kill her baby.”
Alex went still for a moment. Then he asked quietly, “Was she raped?”
Of course. Young. Beautiful. Unmarried. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Katie confessed. She turned to the girl and murmured a quick question.
The girl shook her head in the negative. Hmmm.
“Regardless,” Alex interjected, “we may have to get out of here sooner rather than later. A line of rebel troops is advancing up the valley. If Karshan’s local militia doesn’t hold the road until daylight, we’ll be overrun.”
Katie frowned. “If the fight’s on the road, how are we going to drive out of here?”
“As always, you grasp the crux of the situation unerringly,” he muttered.
We’re trapped? “Where will we go?”
He shrugged. “Up.”
“Up the mountain?” she demanded in disbelief. “With her?” She jerked her head toward the laboring girl again.
“I scouted around a bit. Karshani tribesmen are entrenched in the village up the valley. Rebels have the road and the lower pass covered. Over the mountain will be the only safe retreat for us.”
“But the girl—”
“She’ll have to make do. I can’t stop the war for her to have a baby. I’ll do what I can for her.” He moved toward the rear of the tent and his patient. “Keep an eye outside. Watch the road down where the river bends. If you see any movement, tell me immediately.”
Katie nodded her understanding. The scene outside was surreal. Tracers streaked across the black sky like comets. Explosions peppered the hillsides, lighting up gun emplacements and clusters of shooters behind rocks and outcroppings.
The girl’s bouts of heavy panting inside the tent came closer together and longer in duration. Katie heard Alex demonstrating breathing techniques, exhaling in short hard bursts. The girl mimicked him obediently. It wouldn’t be long before the girl delivered. Thank God her labor was progressing quickly.
But not quickly enough. Headlights came into sight at the bend in the dirt road beside the river. “Vehicle’s coming up the road,” Katie announced.
“What kind?”
“Can’t see yet. It’s loud. Probably not civilian.”
Alex swore quietly, and the girl let out a groan from behind the towel she was biting into.
The vehicle came into sight. Crap. “Armored personnel carrier,” Katie reported urgently over her shoulder. It stopped halfway in view, and the front hatch opened.
“You’re kidding,” Alex muttered.
“I wouldn’t joke about something like that. And I know my military vehicles. It’s an APC. Late-model version with the wedge-shaped, anti-IED bottom.”
Alex swore quietly again.
“Special Forces troops exiting it now,” she mumbled. God knew, she recognized the gear and way of moving. Half her brothers were men just like that. She couldn’t count how many times she’d stood by her father during training exercises watching soldiers egress APCs into simulated combat.
“Special Forces?” Alex echoed in dismay from the back of the tent.
“Yes,” she answered with conviction. “They may be wearing civilian clothing and rebel colors, but no way are those regular soldiers.”
A barrage of machine-gun fire exploded from over her right shoulder, and she jumped violently. Where had that come from? She craned her head to the right and spotted the muzzle flash up the valley a little ways. A very little ways. The weapon rat-a-tatted loudly, and the soldiers at the river hit the deck, diving for cover.
This was nuts. She was standing in the freaking middle of a no-kidding combat zone. The unreality of it struck her forcefully. She might have wanted adventure, but she didn’t do combat. This was a bad dream. She was going to wake up any minute and it was all going to go away.
Alex joined her in the doorway, and she pointed out the action quickly. “Locals have the soldiers pinned down for the moment, but those troops will send out a patrol to flank the gunners and take out the position. The patrol will have to pass right by here to get to the gun,” she whispered frantically.
He nodded in quick agreement with her assessment and breathed, “Time to go.” He picked up a rucksack from the floor just inside the door and shouldered it. “Get the girl and follow me. I’ll find us a route up the mountain.”
Katie whirled and ran to the laboring girl. “We have to leave.”
The girl stared up at her in disbelief.
“I know. But we’re about to get overrun by soldiers who will shoot first and ask questions later. I’ll help you.”
Awkwardly, the patient sat up. Katie wedged a shoulder under her armpit and levered the unwieldy girl to her feet. A moan escaped her. Alex slipped outside and turned to the left, toward the advancing soldiers. Better them than the local gunners, Katie supposed, given that they had a laboring girl in tow. Although the soldiers would probably be inclined to shoot her and Alex for rendering medical aid to the locals anyway. Because it was such a huge crime to help innocent girls give birth to tiny, future terrorists, she thought bitterly.
Alex jumped up on the boulder beside their tent. The laboring girl reached up, and, with Katie hoisting from below and him pulling from above, they got her up onto the outcropping. What scrub there was up here was sparse and mostly dead. They had to rely on rocks and terrain for what little cover they could find.
Seeking cover and ways up the nearly impassable terrain, Alex doubled back to them often when one route dead-ended out and he had to find another. Katie put an arm around the girl’s shoulders to steady her as they moved a few dozen yards up the steep slope. Without warning, the girl bent over, breath hissing between her teeth as she grasped her swollen belly. She devolved into a fit of coughing interspersed with low moans of pain.
Alex looked over his shoulder impatiently as Katie and the girl fell behind. He slid back down the gravel-strewn slope to them, pistol in hand, to wait out the contraction. Finally, the girl exhaled and nodded. They resumed picking their way up the hill.
During the girl’s next contraction, Katie looked over her shoulder down the valley. She couldn’t see the unidentified, definitely military, patrol headed their way, but she could feel it as surely as she felt the girl’s fingers digging painfully into her forearm. A few more coughing breaths and the girl nodded once more.
They were able to go maybe thirty feet up the mountain between each contraction. It was agonizingly slow, particularly when the gun emplacement lit up once more. Sure enough, soldiers down the hill fired back. At least a half-dozen weapons returned fire in a wide arc that would roll right over their tent any second.
They were maybe a hundred yards from their shelter when another contraction gripped the girl. This one drove her to her knees, and she doubled over, grasping her belly. “I have to push,” the girl grunted.
“Not yet,” Alex snapped under his breath when Katie translated the girl’s words.
Katie relayed his order, but the girl shook her head. “You’ll die if we have to leave you out here,” Katie whispered frantically. “A few more minutes. We’ll find a place to hide and then you can push.”
“I can’t go any farther,” the girl moaned.
“Keep her quiet, or we’ll all die,” Alex bit out.
“I’m trying,” Katie retorted, panic climbing into her throat.
The girl’s contraction passed, and Katie heaved her to her feet. They made it only a dozen yards before the girl collapsed again, groaning into her hand pressed over her mouth.
Shouting erupted below them. Katie looked down as a burst of flame lit the night. The soldiers had just torched their tent. Cold terror washed over her. What if they hadn’t left when they did? They’d be dead right now. The rebels probably had mistaken it for a local headquarters of some kind. The more immediate problem, though, was the wash of firelight illuminating the entire hillside.
“Get down,” Alex ordered, yanking Katie and the girl down behind a waist-high boulder. A barrage of machine-gun fire raked the mountainside close enough to make Katie flatten herself to the ground.
Fear like she’d never known before roared through her. They were going to die. The three of them were not soldiers. They were barely armed, they had no gear and their only escape was up a forbidding mountain that only a seasoned climber—or a mountain goat—would attempt to scale.
Another drone flew past, barely higher than eye level, raking the ground with gunfire from a pair of machine guns mounted on its belly.
The girl’s hands clamped around Katie’s elbow just then and squeezed so tight the circulation in her hand felt entirely cut off. “Uh, Alex,” she whispered. “This girl’s going to deliver pretty soon.”
Alex had picked up a few phrases in the local dialect, and he used one now, biting it out succinctly. “Don’t push.”
“Can’t...stop...” the girl ground out from behind clenched teeth.
Katie translated grimly.
“We have to keep moving,” Alex whispered in English. “We’re not out of the line of fire, and the patrol will sweep the area looking for whoever was in that tent.”
They would never outrun highly mobile soldiers. Katie shook her head in disbelief and denial, but it made no difference. He was right. She told the panting girl, “Crawl if you have to, but keep moving. Do you understand me?”
“I can’t,” the girl wailed under her breath.
It was becoming a familiar refrain, but Katie replied fiercely, “Find a way. I’ll drag you if I have to.”
Katie had to give the girl credit. She pushed up to her knees, moved her burka aside and staggered up the hill after Alex, using her hands for support on the steep hillside before her. She fell twice, and each time Katie bodily lifted the girl back to her feet. The next time they dived for cover, though, the girl’s breathing changed. An element of really sharp pain entered her gasping breaths.
“She really can’t go on,” Katie told Alex. In a flash of mortar fire, Katie saw the frustration and futility that passed across his face. He nodded, though, and angled off to the right.
It was only a half-dozen yards to where he stopped and waved for them to join him, but Katie didn’t think she and the girl were ever going to make it to his side. Each step was a herculean effort for the girl, who was in so much pain she could not stand unaided. Only Katie’s arm around her kept her upright. Thankfully, Alex rejoined them and lifted the girl in his arms. He moved quickly into the shadows.
Katie made the mistake of glancing down and saw that they stood at the top of a nearly vertical cliff face. Only the narrowest of ledges kept her from plunging hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. Sick to her stomach with terror and vertigo, she plastered herself to the rock wall at her back and edged forward. Alex ducked into a low opening, and she fell to her knees beside him in relief.
The three of them were crouched in a tiny crevasse that didn’t rise to the exalted status of a cave. It was maybe eight feet deep at best and no more than three feet tall at the opening, narrowing to a few inches tall in the back. But it afforded them a little cover from the battle raging outside and a moment to catch their breaths.
The girl started swearing under her breath so colorfully that Katie felt an incongruous urge to laugh. Or maybe that was just hysteria threatening. Either way, the girl’s voice broke on what would have been a scream had she not jammed her burka in her mouth and bitten down for all she was worth.
It was Alex’s turn to swear. He unceremoniously shoved the girl onto her back to examine her. “Baby’s trying to crown,” he muttered. “Tell her to push with the next contraction.”
Katie was so relieved she could cry as she relayed the instruction to the girl. The contraction came, and the girl strained, bearing down in the age-old way as Katie supported her shoulders from behind.
“Again,” Alex ordered.
“Again.”
After several more contractions, Alex fumbled in the rucksack and pulled out a flashlight. Covering himself with the girl’s burka, he took a quick look at affairs. When he emerged, he spoke so calmly in English, Katie’s blood ran cold before she even comprehended his words.
“Tell her to rest for a while and just try to breathe through the contractions.”
He’d never told a woman to take a break in the middle of a delivery before. Just the opposite in fact. He always had her give the women pep talks and tell them at all costs to keep pushing until it was over.
She relayed the instruction and then murmured, “What’s up?”
“This kid’s head is too big to pass through the pelvic opening. The baby can’t be born.”
“What do we do now?” she asked as calmly as her exploding alarm would let her.
“Two choices. Leave the girl and her baby here to die. Or do a C-section and save the kid.”
“And the mother?”
“It’s a major surgery. If blood loss doesn’t get her, shock and hypothermia may. And then there’s the problem of noise. If I cut her open without anesthesia, she’s likely to scream her head off and get us all killed.”
Katie stared at the shadows wreathing his face. How in the hell were they supposed to choose between those options?
He stared back. At length, he muttered, “Welcome to playing God.”
A barrage of gunfire below them made her jump. For a minute there she’d forgotten about the war raging outside. The girl lying on the ground beside her panted fast and hard as another contraction gripped her.
“What would you do?” Alex asked quietly.
Katie shook her head, horrified to the core of her being. “Ask the mother. It’s her baby. Her life.”
“How very pro-choice of you,” Alex replied wryly. Then he said more sharply, “So do it. Ask her.”
Katie was shocked that he had declined to make a unilateral decision. It was so very...human...of him. She turned to the mother and waited out the end of the contraction.
Holding the girl’s hand, she said quietly, “Your baby is too big to be born this way. Doctor Alex can cut the baby from your belly, but he has no medicine for the pain. If you make any noise, we will all die.” She took a deep breath and added reluctantly, “You may die from the surgery.”
“If I have no surgery?” the girl asked.
Katie relayed the question, and Alex outlined the answer sentence by sentence as she translated.
“You will become exhausted eventually. The placenta will separate from your uterus. Your baby will suffocate and die, and you will begin to hemorrhage. That means you will bleed inside your body. You will die from blood loss.”
The girl was silent, considering her options. “I hate this baby. I do not care if it lives. But I want to live.”
Alex nodded briskly. “Then the baby must come out of you.”
Katie watched as he pulled out a scalpel, clamps and what she recognized as suture materials. He spread a towel on the ground under the girl and another beside himself.
“How are we going to keep her quiet?” she asked.
“If we’re lucky, she’ll pass out fast.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“Since we’re being so democratic about this, ask her,” he suggested. “I’ll try to time the incision for during an artillery barrage. She’ll have to do the rest.”
Katie spoke briefly to the girl. Determination entered the girl’s eyes, and Katie thought that she was more scared than the girl at this point. The girl twisted a length of her burka and told Katie to hold it in her mouth for her when the time came.
“Ready?” Alex murmured from his crouched position between the girl’s legs. The girl’s grotesquely distended belly, now bared to the cold air, was pale in the darkness. How on earth was Alex going to do a C-section in these conditions?
The girl put the gag in her mouth, and Katie grasped the ends of it, her entire body shaking with terror. The girl wasn’t shaking much less.
“Next explosion,” Alex murmured, scalpel poised.
Kaboom!
Alex slashed. The girl screamed. The night lit up and blood spouted black and wet from the girl’s belly. A second slash, and the girl thrashed wildly.
“Hold her down,” Alex ground out. “Placenta’s separating. She’s hemorrhaging.”
Katie leaned on the cloth gag, pinning the girl’s head to the ground. A knee across the girl’s shoulders helped hold her in place, while Alex knelt on the girl’s thighs. He worked fast, and Katie did her level best not to look at the gore unfolding.
Instead, she stared into the girl’s panicked, animalistic eyes. All humanity drained out of the girl as she screamed against the gag again and again. And then, just like that, the girl went limp. Her eyes glazed over.
Is she dead? Katie fumbled under the girl’s jaw for a pulse.
“Thank God,” Alex breathed. He worked even faster, hacking the baby free of its mother’s body.
Katie was shocked at how fast Alex had the baby out. Thirty seconds, maybe, all told. A lifetime for that poor girl, though.
“I can’t find a pulse,” she told him frantically.
“First things first,” he snapped. “Gotta get the kid breathing.”
The baby let out a wail that he quickly muffled with a hand over its mouth. Alex shoved the baby at her fast. “Keep it quiet.”
Like she had the first idea how to silence a newborn infant? The baby was slippery with blood and white, greasy gook. Quickly, she wrapped the child in the spare towel Alex had laid out and slipped the child down inside her coat for warmth, which was a trick while keeping a hand over the crying child’s mouth. She hoped she wasn’t suffocating the poor thing. What a hell of a way to be born.
“Hold the flashlight,” Alex ordered.
She didn’t have three hands, for crying out loud. But he was probably doing the work of three surgeons right now, so she didn’t complain. Kneeling awkwardly, she kept the baby’s mouth covered as it slid farther down in her coat and held the flashlight in her free hand where Alex pointed it.
He worked frantically on the mother, his hands flying.
“How’s she doing?”
“Bleeding all over the place. I’m losing her,” he gritted out.
Another round of gunfire from nearby made Katie jump and the baby cry even louder. She made hushing noises into her coat even though she doubted they would have any effect on the squalling infant.
Alex started to swear in a steady stream under his breath, and in the light of the next mortar, his face looked gray. She risked a glance down. There was blood everywhere. A huge pool of it lay under the girl. The formerly white towel was now black with it. And where Alex’s hands worked inside the girl, his fingers disappeared in a flowing puddle of it. Streams of blood trickled down the girl’s belly unchecked. Katie had never seen so much blood in all her life.
“Listen for a heartbeat,” he ordered.
She laid her head on the girl’s chest. The rib cage did not rise, and she heard only the swish of her own blood in her ear. God, she hated silence. But then a barrage of gunfire made it too loud for her to hear a thing, and that was worse. She hunted again, frantically, for a pulse under the girl’s jaw. Nothing.
Tears welling in her eyes, she shook her head at Alex.
He continued to work in grim silence for several more minutes. But finally he went still. He stared down at the girl’s body bleakly. And then all he said in a terrible, agonized whisper was, “Turn off the flashlight.”
Her second hand freed, she turned to the business of quieting the crying infant. She maneuvered the hot little bundle inside her coat until it lay across her, the baby’s head on her left breast. She remembered hearing somewhere that the sound of heartbeats calmed babies. It took a few moments, but it worked.
Alex shook himself out of wherever he’d gone mentally and crawled to the edge of the crevasse. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What about her?” Katie glanced down at the corpse of the girl who’d been so brave and angry and determined to live.
“We have to leave her.”
Every cell in Katie’s being protested the notion of just abandoning the girl here like a discarded hunk of meat. Thankfully, Alex crawled back to the girl’s side. Gently, he closed her eyelids before pulling the end of her burka across her face. He covered the bloody mess that had been the girl’s belly with a towel and arranged the girl’s robes over it all.
He placed his hand over the girl’s heart and murmured barely loud enough for Katie to hear, “Rest in peace, and be with whatever God you worshipped in life.”
The tears overflowed from Katie’s eyes then, and she sucked back a sob. She was shocked when strong arms wrapped around her, dragging her up against a hard body. Between them was the hot bump of an infant torn from its mother’s dying body. Katie didn’t even know what sex it was. A hand pushed her face down onto his shoulder; his own face was buried in her hair. He shuddered against her while she cried into his neck.
But as the ominous thwocking of a helicopter became audible in the distance, he stilled and muttered into her hair, “If you want that baby to live, grieve later. Follow me now. Fast and silent.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT HOUR was a nightmare. The mountain was no less steep at the top than at the bottom, and the baby fussed occasionally, sending her into a cold panic as she tried frantically to shush the newborn. It didn’t help matters that the battle raging below grew more intense as the night wore on. And who knew what lay over the mountain peak?
Alex was grim and silent, focused intently on finding a route up the mountain. He was quick to lend her a helping hand, though, or to haul her up over a particularly rough patch. As she’d correctly guessed, he was deceptively strong. And when her strength lagged and her will to go on faltered, he was indomitable.
And there was always that intense hug to think about. It had been more than simple comfort. He had let her inside his guard for just a minute. Made a human connection with her. Maybe even needed her for a second there.
Alex murmured from ahead, “Stay low. We’re cresting the mountain. We don’t want our silhouettes visible below.”
She crawled across the open peak and huddled in the lee of a boulder just over the crest beside Alex.
“How’s the baby?” he asked.
“Alive. It moves around now and then.”
“Let me see it,” Alex muttered.
She unzipped her coat and lifted the infant out. In a flash of mortar fire, she saw it was a baby girl. Said baby girl took immediate and loud umbrage at being exposed to the sharp chill, however, and started to squall.
Alex pulled a clean towel out of his pack and swaddled the infant in it after a fast examination. Thoughtfully, he passed the baby back to her, and Katie slipped the child back in her coat. It took a minute or so, but the baby quieted in the warm and dark next to Katie’s heart.
“We have to get food for her,” Katie whispered.
“She can go a day or two without eating, actually,” Alex replied. “Most babies don’t take in much nourishment in their first twenty-four hours.”
Huh. Live and learn. “What about us?”
He shrugged. “We’re another matter. We’ll need water before long.”
“Any bright ideas about what to do next?” she asked.
“Go downhill for a while.”
She liked that idea a whole lot better than continuing to scale mountain peaks in the dark. With no climbing gear. And a baby stuffed down her coat.
Trying to stay oriented as to where they were, she pictured the map of this region they’d been showed in the D.U. offices. Another village lay at the head of this valley. Its name was something like Ghan or Ghun. She couldn’t remember exactly. No telling if it was another Karshani clan village or belonged to some other clan entirely. As likely as not, the neighbors hated each other’s guts.
This side of the mountain was more a slope than a cliff, mostly made treacherous by loose, rolling gravel. She made much of the descent sliding on her butt; before long, they stood at the bottom of a narrow valley in deep darkness.
Alex shocked her by brushing off the seat of her jeans and finishing off by giving her ass the briefest of squeezes. So brief she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it or not. But not so brief that her breathing didn’t accelerate sharply.
“Altitude getting to you?” he murmured.
Yeah, right. Altitude. “Gee, I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe I should feel your butt and see if a sudden case of altitude sickness overcomes you.”
“I dare you.”
Oh, it was so on. She stepped right up behind him and slipped her hands down the waistband of his jeans. He lurched in shock as she slid her palms between his briefs and the denim and cupped strong, well-defined male cheeks that abruptly went rock hard.
“Not bad, Doctor. Not bad at all.”
He whipped around, effectively yanking her hands out of his pants, and stared down at her. Enveloped in darkness and lust that rolled off him like sin, it crossed her mind that, perchance, she was playing with fire by messing with this man.
“Think before you go there with me,” he rasped. “I’m not one of your milk-toast college boys.”
The warning in his voice was clear. Although what, exactly, he was warning her about, she wasn’t sure. That he wouldn’t stand for mind games from her? Or that his tastes were darker than the average college co-ed’s? Or maybe that getting involved with him would be an all-or-nothing proposition.
Was she prepared to go there with him? How far beyond her experience would he take her? Just how intense would sex with him be? Turned on and scared in equal measure, she let out a careful breath as he turned and stalked off into the night.
She’d wanted to be taken seriously. To be treated like an adult. For everyone to quit seeing a sweet, naive kid when they looked at her. But how much innocence was she willing to lose? If she didn’t miss her guess, being with Alex Peters could cost her damn near all of hers.
They’d been hiking for maybe an hour when the baby commenced crying and nothing she could do would quiet the poor little thing.
Alex muttered, “She’s hungry. Nursing after birth is an instinctive imperative. We probably won’t shut her up shy of feeding her something.”
“Any suggestions as to what to feed her?”
“Actually, yes.” He slid his pack off his shoulders and rummaged in it, emerging with an IV bag. He poked a pinhole in one corner of it while she opened her coat and maneuvered the infant close to the opening while keeping the baby mostly inside the garment’s warmth.
They tried unsuccessfully to squeeze some of the IV fluid into the child’s mouth, but the baby wouldn’t swallow it and only squalled louder.
“We’ve got to quiet her down,” Alex bit out. “Once the artillery fire stops, people for miles around will hear her screaming.”
“Any ideas?” Katie asked, frantically rocking the furious baby.
“She needs to suck to trigger her swallowing reflex.”
“I already tried getting her to suck my finger as a makeshift pacifier and she wouldn’t do it.”
“She needs to suckle. As in a female breast.” He threw her an expectant look.
Katie stared. “News flash, Doctor. My equipment is not currently in service for milk production.”
“She doesn’t need to get any milk. She just needs a breast to suck. Once she’s sucking strongly, then we can squirt some IV fluid into her mouth and she’ll swallow it.”
An embarrassed impulse to refuse speared through her gut at the same time intellectual certainty that she would do it rolled through her brain. She tried unsuccessfully to juggle the baby and her coat and her shirt, until Alex’s big, warm hands slipped inside her coat and took the baby. Awkwardly, she raised her shirt, baring her bra, which happened to be lacy and white and practically glowed in the dark.
“Not very practical lingerie for Zaghastan,” he murmured in amusement.
The bastard sounded like he was enjoying the view a little too much. She glanced up, irritated, and muttered, “I wasn’t expecting to show it to anyone while I was here.”
“So you wear sexy lingerie entirely to please yourself? That’s encouraging.”
“How so?” she blurted. She wished the words back as soon as they left her mouth.
“You struck me as too...virginal...for that naughty bra. I’m glad to see I underestimated you.”
Her gaze narrowed at the faint challenge simmering in his voice. She reached for the edge of her bra cup and slowly, deliberately, pulled it down. Alex’s gaze riveted on her flesh as the swell of her breast and its rosy nipple were revealed. His gaze flared like an arc welder, and her pulse spiked hard in response.
Without comment, he eased the infant to her breast. The baby was too mad or too inexperienced or both to know what to do, however.
“I apologize,” he muttered.
“For what?”
“For this.” He reached in front of the infant’s mouth with his fingers and pinched her nipple. Hard. She jumped and would have squawked were they not in the middle of a war zone. Involuntarily, her back arched into his hand, trying unsuccessfully to ease the sharp pressure.
“Oww,” she breathed.
He let go and made a small sound of satisfaction. “Better.”
She ventured a look down and realized her nipple now jutted out, swollen and full.
“Rub it on the baby’s face. Across her mouth,” he instructed.
She did so, stunned at how erotic it was to be doing this in front of him. Without warning, the baby latched on and gave a tug that shot sensations all the way to her groin. “Oh!” she gasped.
One corner of Alex’s mouth curved up knowingly. He reached between her breast and the baby with the IV bag and slipped the pinholed corner into the infant’s mouth. She felt the baby swallow against her flesh.
“It’s working,” she breathed. “Do it again.”
Working together, the two of them got a few ounces of IV fluid down the baby, who fell asleep quickly after that. Alex hooked his finger under the lace and lifted it into place, running the back of his knuckle lightly across her nipple in the process. Damned if it didn’t stand up proud and eager again, pushing impudently through the lace. And damned if he didn’t stare down at it, his eyes ablaze, until her breath came short and fast.
“Zip up,” he ordered sharply. “I don’t need either of you catching a chill.”
She scowled at his back until it occurred to her that it might have been sexual frustration putting that edge in his voice. Abruptly, she felt much better as she tucked the sleeping baby into her coat and zipped it up.
“We need to name her,” she announced. “We can’t just keep calling her ‘the baby.’”
Alex threw her a startled look over his shoulder. “You do it. But, for God’s sake, don’t name her something native. Pick something American-sounding.”
“Why?”
“We’ll need to take her back to the States with us. Which means we’ll need to pass her off as our baby. What would you name our daughter?”
Their baby? The notion was both thrilling and scary to contemplate. “How about Charlene?” It had been her grandmother’s name.
“Slut I went to school with was named that. Try again.”
“Alexandra?”
That earned her rolled eyes and a firm, “No.”
“Catherine?”
“You want to name a baby after a violent, dead queen?”
“Fine. You come up with a name you like!”
“Katrina.”
“Sounds a little grown-up for a tiny baby.”
“She won’t be a tiny baby for long. And you can call her a nickname like Kat or Trina in the meantime.”
“Teeny Treeny?”
He groaned under his breath. “Call her Dawn. The sun will be coming up soon.”
She actually liked the symbolism of a new day after the darkness of night. Goodness knew, this child had been born under the blackest of circumstances. And she couldn’t think of any horrible nicknames other kids might come up with for it. “Dawn, it is.”
“Speaking of dawn, we need to take cover soon,” he commented.
“Why?”
“Given the size of last night’s battle, I expect more drones will patrol the area today.”
“Isn’t the U.S. the only country with attack drones? Why would the good guys come after us?”
He whirled and demanded, low and angry, “Since when is the United States presumed to be the good guy?”
Her jaw dropped. She’d been raised among soldiers and cops dedicated to country and service...to the death. It was anathema in her home to suggest anything other than the United States was right and good and decent.
Alex huffed. “Don’t get me wrong. Democracy is a hell of a lot better than the available alternatives. But spare me the religious fervor for mom, apple pie and the Stars and Stripes.”
“What the hell did Uncle Sam do? Pee in your Wheaties?” she demanded.
Pain. Grief. Rage. Desolation. The emotions flitted through his eyes so quickly she could barely register them, let alone catalogue them. What the—
“Not on the list of approved topics for conversation between us,” he bit out. He turned around and stomped off without waiting to see if she followed.
“If there’s a list of approved topics, how come I didn’t get a copy?” she called after him.
A mumbled retort floated back over his shoulder, “Above your pay grade.”
Her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t about to let him get away with blowing her off. But first she had to catch him, and he was practically jogging toward the head of the narrow valley now. She’d always hated it when her brothers used their superior size and strength to ditch her. In retrospect, she’d probably been an annoying pest more often than not, but she’d just wanted to be included. To this day, she hated being left behind.
Her brother’s cryptic request to watch for signs of something weird with Alex resonated in her head. What was up with this guy?
“Slow down!” she finally had to call to Alex.
Nada.
“Please!”
That did it. He stopped without turning around and waited until she panted up behind him. The altitude was a killer when added to a strenuous hike. As soon as she drew within arm’s length of him, he took off again, but thankfully at a more reasonable pace. In a few minutes, he murmured, “Keep an eye out for movement on that slope ahead. We’re getting close to Ghun.”
Mostly, she was occupied staring at the ground so she didn’t twist an ankle or break her neck. She glanced where he indicated and saw a steep rock face looming. She groaned under her breath.
“I see caves up there,” Alex commented. “It’s too early in the year for shepherds to have brought their flocks up here, though, so they ought to be empty. No grass yet.”
She snorted. Nothing grew up here. She was surprised to spot what looked like an organized network of caves all over the steep slope ahead. How could so many people support themselves off the dirt and dust of this valley? No stream of any kind flowed through the area. In the past two weeks, she’d learned just how critical water supplies were to native peoples.
As the first gray of predawn peeked over the mountains, Alex scrambled up the steep hill while she rested a bit. He came back soon and led her to a cave blessedly not far up the slope. Overlapping slabs of stone mostly obscured the entrance. They slipped past the rocks into the dark, and Alex audibly sighed in relief. Had he been that worried, then?
In the green light of a Cyalume stick, she looked around the high-ceilinged cave. The floor was flat, dry and reasonably clean. A few animal droppings and scattered bones proclaimed the presence of some small predator. Off to one side was a stone ledge about hip high covered with a framework of woven boughs and dried grass that looked like a crude bed. Near the entrance, the stone walls were blackened as if fires had been lit there.
A stack of firewood was piled in a corner, and Alex moved to it quickly. In a matter of minutes, he’d built a fire her Boy Scout brothers would have been proud of. Out of the steady wind, the silence in the cave was palpable. And it got on her nerves fast.
“Where’d a city slicker like you learn to lay a fire like that?” she asked to break the quiet.
Alex didn’t deign to answer and merely shrugged as he pushed a series of smooth, melon-sized rocks close to the fire. The thin, dry wood crackled loudly and burned fast, but it heated up the small chamber surprisingly well. A thin layer of smoke accumulated near the ceiling, seeping sluggishly toward the rear of the cave. Must be a tunnel or vent back there. The back walls, which retreated into shadows—who knew how far back—were pocked with round holes at even intervals, big enough for her thumb to fit in. Maybe those were the vents.
Surprisingly little light seeped in as day broke outside, but that also meant very little cold seeped in, either. Before long, the cave was actually reasonably cozy, enough that she shed her coat and made a nest out of it for Dawn.
Alex unwrapped the infant and, at long last, trimmed the umbilical cord and wiped the last birth blood off her. He frowned down at her, and Katie moved to his side rapidly. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Take a look at her. Notice anything odd?”
She stared down at the pink, chubby baby, who had adorable blond peach fuzz hair. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes. Two ears. Limbs of equal lengths. No visible deformities... Whoa. What?
“Blond hair?” she said questioningly. Every baby they’d birthed so far had had black hair. All the locals she’d met were dark-haired.
“Exactly.” He stared at her significantly.
“How did that happen?”
“The mom was an unmarried girl. Good-looking, right?” Alex asked tersely. “What color was her hair?”
“Yes, she was stunning. And she was dark-skinned and dark-haired like all the locals.”
Alex murmured, “Too much pigment in Dawn’s skin for her to be albino. Only way for her to have blond hair, then, is for her father to be Caucasian.”
Katie’s jaw dropped. “Where did a local girl meet a Caucasian?” To her knowledge, she and Alex were the only Caucasians for hundreds of miles around.
Alex snorted. “Soldiers. Spies. Civilian contractors. Drug dealers.”
“And aid workers like us,” she added, appalled.
“The way I heard it, we’re the only aid workers foolish enough to venture into this area in years,” he retorted.
She grimaced. “That’s what the women have been saying to me, too. Okay, so strike aid workers from the list of possible fathers.”
They stared down at the baby, who was settling down to sleep in her warm nest.
Alex announced without warning, “Strip off your clothes. All of them.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He was already shrugging out of his coat and pulling the black turtleneck over his head. Lord, that man had acres of gorgeous muscle. He reached for his belt buckle and she squawked, “What are you doing?”
He looked up, and his gaze went from concentration on something worrisome to smoking hot in the blink of an eye. “Worried about delivering on the bet you lost?” he purred.
“No, I’m not worried,” she lied belligerently. “I just don’t think now is the time or place to collect.”
He moved to stand a little too close to her for comfort, and she was abruptly aware of how much bigger than her he actually was. And stronger. And they were so very alone out in the middle of nowhere. Literally. He could force himself on her and there wouldn’t be a soul around for miles to hear her scream.
“Angel, when I collect on our bet, it will not be in a squalid cave, and you will beg me for it.”
Her eyes flashed as she instinctively rose to the challenge. “I don’t beg.”
The corner of his mouth turned up in that sardonic half smile of his. “Wanna bet?”
“No, thank you,” she replied tartly. “I’m already indebted to you. I don’t need to add to it.”
“I still need you to strip. All the way down to your skin.”
“Why?”
“I need to check for tracking devices in our clothes.”
She blinked, shocked. “Excuse me?”
“Tracking devices. I need to make sure none were planted on the gear or clothing we bugged out with. I did a quick check before, but in light of last night’s events, I need to do a more thorough search.”
“Who on earth would want to track us?”
“I can think of any number of candidates, and some of them I’d rather not have knowing where we are.”
“Like who?” It was starting to feel like all she did with him was ask questions.
“Not on the list of approved topics between us.”
She scowled. “I’m not stripping unless you answer me.”
His gaze snapped up to hers, and this time amusement flashed before he banked all emotion. “Fine. The CIA. Their Russian counterparts, the FSB. The U.S. Army. Various mob groups. That’ll do for starters.”
“Why would the mob track you? And which mob? What did you do to them?”
“I relieved both the Russian mob and the American Mafia of substantial funds some years ago and have yet to give them an opportunity to win any of them back. For that matter, the Ukrainians don’t like me very much, either.”
“What did you do?”
“I hung out in casinos they owned. In my rebellious youth, I went on a short-lived, but highly productive, gambling spree.”
Math genius. Master’s degree in probability. Cryptography postgrad... “How much did you take them for?” she blurted.
“A lot.”
Huh. And he still had the money? Well, well, well. So the good doctor was rich, too? It hardly seemed fair given how smart, sexy and good-looking he was.
“Why would the CIA and FSB track you?”
He threw her a stubborn look and merely shimmied out of his black jeans. Dang, that man was built.
“Let me guess,” she said wryly. “Not on the list.”
“Bingo.”
Oh, Lord. There went his underwear. Yowza. The good doctor was blessed in every single department of his life. She spun away quickly lest he catch her looking at his junk. The temperature in the cave shot up at least ten degrees as sexual heat abruptly filled the air.
“I’m not kidding about your clothes,” he said grimly from behind her.
Which would be worse? Getting naked at the same time he was or waiting until he was fully dressed again and forcibly undressed her? Wow. That was about a toss-up. A tiny part of her loved the idea of him tearing her clothes off her.... Maybe it was the whole caveman vibe coming out of her deepest, darkest DNA. But she didn’t have any spare clothing and needed what she had on to stay intact. Practical necessity won out, and she pulled her pink turtleneck over her head reluctantly.
Ohmigod. He was watching her. And he was stark naked. Gloriously, unconcernedly so. He’d already seen her in her bra—less than her bra. This was no big deal, right? Except her heart was jumping in her throat and her hands shook like leaves in a hurricane.
She reached for her jeans and unzipped them slowly. Pushed them off her hips reluctantly. Heat blossomed in her face as her lace thong was revealed. She could literally feel his blazing-hot stare taking in her pert little rear end. Men had been commenting on her derriere since she’d been old enough for it not to be creepy. She knew it was firm and high and lush enough to turn men on without Alex having to tell her so.
“Nice.”
“Could you at least be a gentleman and turn your back?” she blurted.
“Kitten, I’m a lot of things, but a gentleman is not one of them. You owe me sex anyway. I’m eventually going to see you naked, so why not now?”
Because she barely knew him. Because he was naked, too. Because part of her wanted him to take advantage of the situation, and she was a big, fat chicken about that part of herself. Fantasizing about a dark, dangerous man like Alex Peters was one thing. Being naked and alone with him for real was another thing altogether. She didn’t want it to be that way, but it was. She was a fake, and she couldn’t handle a man like him.
Damn.
The promise of sex hanging thick and heavy in the air pulsed between them, pulling her toward him. An urge to run her hands over that magnificent body, to pull him to her, to make love to him, surged within her, startling her. Sure, she felt attracted to guys at work and joked around with her girlfriends about jumping various guys’ bones. But that was all in fun. This compulsion originated low in her belly, deep and primordial. Lust in its purest form. Mindless. Insistent.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
She resorted to mumbling, “You’re making me strip in front of you and you have to ask that?”
Something warm and soft dropped around her shoulders, making her lurch. It smelled of sandalwood and spice. His coat. “Sometimes I forget what an innocent you are. Wear this until I check out the rest of your clothes.”
The driving need she’d experienced at the sight of his naked body subsided, and she all but cried in her relief as she tossed her thong and bra over her shoulder to him. An innocent? Was she really, in spite of her best efforts to get people to let her grow up—and then it hit her. Other people weren’t preventing her from growing up. She was preventing herself from doing it. Chagrin roared through her. A real man was within arm’s length, naked or close to it, and she owed him sex. All she had to do was reach out and take it. And yet...
And yet. Fear held her back.
Alex worked in silence, turning each piece of clothing inside out, running his fingers carefully over each seam, examining tags and pockets and anywhere else a burr might be attached.
“How big would a tracking device be?” she asked curiously without turning around to see if he was still starkers.
“Depends on how big a battery it has and how long the person who plants it wants it to work. A short-term device, say, for a single day, could be the size of a pinhead. Something a little longer term, like I’d expect to get used on us, might be the size of a grain of rice.”
“Long grain or short grain?”
He chuckled briefly. “Okay. Your lingerie is clean.” A big, tanned hand emerged over her right shoulder, the lacy bits dangling from his fingertips. She snatched them from his hand and maneuvered into them awkwardly underneath his coat. Who would have guessed two tiny scraps of fabric could make her feel so much better?
Her shirt took longer, and her jeans longer still, to check. But eventually he passed them over her shoulder, and she was safely clothed once more. But no sooner had she pulled the shirt back over her head than Dawn started to fuss.
“She’s hungry again,” Alex announced.
Katie had been around a lot of little kids in her day, but not many infants. She would take his word for it. She scooped up the baby and the IV bag that he held out to her and moved over by the fire with her back to him to coax the baby to drink a little more.
It took giving Dawn her breast again to get the infant to swallow, and Katie pinched her own nipple, mortified at how turned on doing it made her, before Dawn could find it and latch on. The sensation of the tiny mouth sucking vigorously at her breast was overwhelming and confusing. It felt good, but not in a sexual way.
It also felt very wrong. Like she was co-opting a moment that belonged to someone else. That poor dead girl should be doing this. Although, given how much she’d hated Dawn, Katie doubted the mother would have fed the child. More likely, she’d have drowned the baby or suffocated her. Katie clutched Dawn more tightly and fell in love a little.
“I need my coat back,” Alex said apologetically. “I have to check it.”
She passed him the garment, and he stepped close to drape her coat over her shoulders. As he did so, he paused to watch the baby suckling at her breast and swallowing the IV fluid Katie was sneaking into the baby’s mouth.
“Beautiful sight,” he said in a hushed voice.
She looked up at him in surprise. That was the last thing she’d expected to hear from the dark, sexy bachelor.
He reached down to cup the baby’s tiny head in his hand for a moment. “Such a rotten start in life, baby Dawn. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save your mother.”
“You did your best. And if that girl had lived, I expect she would have killed Dawn as soon as they left us. Maybe this is how it was supposed to work out—that the baby lived and the mother did not. Goodness knows, that girl would have had some tall explaining to do if and when she married. Not only would she not have been a virgin, but her body would have shown the signs of having borne a child. She would have been beaten to death if she was lucky. Perhaps a quick end on that mountain was the merciful way for her to go.”
“God, the barbarism of it,” Alex muttered.
“If we take Dawn to America, she’ll grow up in a very different world.”
“There’s no ‘if’ about it. Not with that blond hair of hers. We have to take her with us. She’d be a pariah at best in this society and horribly abused at worst—assuming she were allowed to live at all.”
Katie shuddered and cuddled the infant a little closer. She was starting to feel downright maternal toward the small bundle of squirming warmth.
Alex went back to the business of inspecting his coat and then all the gear in his emergency pack, which he spread out over the floor of the cave. She was surprised to recognize an array of survival gear in among the medical supplies—energy bars, matches, Cyalume sticks, compass, water purification tablets.
“How is it that you had a whole backpack of medical and survival supplies ready and waiting to go last night?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Call it a hunch. Those rebel forces kept showing up at exactly our location and attacking, and it made me suspicious.”
“Of?”
“Do you always ask so many questions?” he demanded.
“When people are being cryptic with me, absolutely,” she declared.
He sighed. “I was suspicious of somebody not being happy we’re out here.”
“Are we in direct danger? And don’t dodge the question. I grew up listening to cops and soldiers. I know exactly what kind of danger we’re in if someone wants us dead.”
He shrugged. “I won’t ever bullshit you, Katie. That I promise. I may refuse to answer a question, but I won’t lie. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“I think someone not only knows we’re out here, but wants us dead. Which makes me question Doctors Unlimited. They are supposedly the only people who know we’re here. Someone within D.U. isn’t who they claim to be.”
“There’s a mole? Why would anyone spy on a humanitarian aid group?”
“That is the question, is it not?”
She thought hard. Placing and maintaining a full-blown mole had to be a difficult and expensive proposition for a spy agency. Why go to all that trouble to watch a bunch of doctors and nurses.... Unless they were not just doctors and nurses? She looked up at Alex and asked soberly, “What do you think D.U. does besides render medical aid?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess?”
He shrugged. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? They insert people right in the middle of the hottest conflicts on the planet with covers that make them more or less immune to attack or arrest.”
“Spies?” she breathed. “For whom?”
“You tell me.”
She stared at him, shocked. “I don’t know anything! I didn’t even work for D.U. until they needed a Zaghastani translator for you.”
Alex was studying her far too closely again. Like he was trying to look inside her soul and see what truth she was hiding from him.
“Maybe we’re just being paranoid,” she said a little desperately. “Maybe it’s coincidence that the fighting has flared up in the places we’ve been.”
He snorted. “I can calculate odds out to nine figures in my head in under a minute. And you don’t want to know how many zeros line up after the probability of it being random chance.”
She put her coat down on the rough bed and tucked Dawn back into her nest, now surrounded by hot rocks to keep her warm, and turned to Alex in the dancing firelight. “Do you trust D.U. enough to call and ask for transport out of here?”
A derisive snort was his only answer. Frankly, she shared the sentiment. If someone in the organization had set them up to be killed, she didn’t want to talk to D.U., either. She asked, “What do we do now?” Interesting that she had complete faith in him to have an alternative plan. No doubt about it, he was one of the smartest people she’d ever met.
“We’re going to get some rest and wait for dark.” A look of deep reluctance crossed his face. “There’s a place I know...not too far from here... I was really hoping not to have to go there.” Grim determination replaced the reluctance. “Can you hike twenty miles or so over rough terrain if we break it up into a couple of days of travel?”
“Depends on the terrain, but I guess so.”
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Cindy Dees
ON THE RUN, AND UNDER FIRE…Providing medical relief in a war-torn region helps Alex Peters forget his past and focus on the job: delivering babies. Less easy to overlook is his blonde comrade-at-arms, who knows nothing of the trouble he’s running from. Katie McCloud makes the assignment bearable, although her perky innocence proves to be an arousing distraction. Then, as combat explodes around them, their only option is flight.A kindergarten teacher seeking adventure, Katie hoped this humanitarian mission—and the mysterious, sexy doctor sharing it—would push her out of her comfort zone. With Alex, she starts taking tantalizing risks and becoming the survivor she knew she could be.But back on U.S. soil, Alex and Katie face a new threat, and this time they’re the target. Forced into close confines, neither can believe the other isn’t the intended mark. With only each other to depend on—and suspect—Alex and Katie can't avoid the simmering attraction between them. But to stay alive, they’ll have to trust more deeply than ever before…
On the run and under fire
Providing medical relief in a war-torn region helps Alex Peters forget his past and focus on the job—delivering babies. Less easy to overlook is his blonde comrade-at-arms, who knows nothing of the trouble he’s running from. Katie McCloud makes the assignment bearable, although her perky innocence proves to be an arousing distraction. Then, as combat explodes around them, their only option is flight.
A kindergarten teacher seeking adventure, Katie hoped this humanitarian mission—and the mysterious, sexy doctor sharing it—would push her out of her comfort zone. With Alex, she starts taking tantalizing risks and becoming the survivor she knew she could be.
But back on U.S. soil, Alex and Katie face a new threat, and this time they’re the target. Forced into close confines, neither can believe the other isn’t the intended mark. With only each other to depend on—and suspect—Alex and Katie can’t avoid the simmering attraction between them. But to stay alive, they’ll have to trust more deeply than ever before….
RT Book Reviews raves about Cindy Dees
Night Rescue
“Dees’ exciting, action-packed story speeds along on all cylinders, with a smoking-hot pair at the center of it all. Your fingers will get exercise as they rapidly turn the pages of this compulsively readable tale.”
Flash of Death
“Dees brings readers into an action-packed world, with superhuman operatives. Add to that a sympathetic heroine and a sizzling romance, and this is a book you can’t put down.”
Deadly Sight
“Dees crafts the perfect blend of romance and suspense with her latest story featuring members of the special ops group Code X. A solid, suspenseful plot, tormented, vulnerable characters and beautiful, compelling writing will keep you turning the pages.”
The 9-Month Bodyguard
“There’s action and hot attraction galore in this addition to the Love in 60 Seconds series. Dees does a terrific job of advancing the overall series while lending her unique talent to her vibrant individual contribution.”
Close Pursuit
Cindy Dees
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This book brings my writing journey to date full circle to where it began with a love story based on a real person’s tragedy. It seems fitting, then, that I dedicate this book to those who have been with me since the beginning.
To my family, who’ve put up with this crazy writer’s life and kept me laughing.
To my literary agent, Pattie Steele-Perkins, for keeping me sane and talking me down off bridges.
And to my BWFF—Best Writing Friend Forever—Jade Lee, for sharing everything else.
I couldn’t have done it without you guys.
Contents
Chapter One (#uf50d244b-e0a8-5e66-81a7-367015ed960f)
Chapter Two (#u0512a49f-d381-521f-9aca-1b8cc819ade6)
Chapter Three (#u19af9aa1-5340-5755-b19f-9ffba3f27187)
Chapter Four (#u9a018783-8bb8-5121-819e-ed9b334db22d)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
KATIE MCCLOUD STUDIED the barren valley at her feet and shook her head. Mars. It looks like freaking Mars. Who’d have guessed anywhere on Earth looked like this? Of course, she’d had to go to the foothills of the Himalayas at the intersection of Nowhere and Uninhabitable to find it.
She ducked inside the makeshift shelter tucked between two giant boulders and looked around. It would be a tight squeeze for two people and their gear. But this trip wasn’t about having all the comforts of home. She really was trying hard to think of it as a grand adventure, but her personal pep talk wasn’t sinking in at the moment. Her brother had promised it would be like primitive camping. Maybe if she was primitive camping in hell.
“Come help me,” her partner-in-crime, Alex Peters, called low from outside. She slipped out just as a cloud of dust rained down on the opening. Coughing, she batted the local gray grit out of her hair and glared at him on the hillside above her. “What are you doing?”
“Camouflaging our tent.”
“You didn’t have to camouflage me.”
A rare smile crossed his face. “You do want us to remain hidden, right?”
“Well, yeah,” she groused. “If they find us, we’ll be killed.”
Which was pretty crazy if she stopped to think about it. And which was why Katie was trying hard not to stop and think about it. Her brothers did this kind of stuff all the time, and everything always turned out fine. How tough could it be? She’d spent most of her adult life insisting to all of them that she could do the same sorts of wild things they did. And getting laughed at for saying it or, worse, patted on the head like some kind of cute puppy. This was her chance to prove she was the real deal once and for all.
Her confidence temporarily bolstered, she joined Alex on the steep slope above their little hideaway. She stumbled on rolling gravel, and his hand shot out to grab her elbow and steady her. As always, her pulse leaped at the contact. Surely he knew how totally hot he was. If he did, he didn’t give any hint of it as he let go of her arm and turned his attention back to hiding their tent. She gathered up an armful of scrawny, dead weeds and scattered them across the canvas surface.
“Too much,” he said critically. “The tonal value of the tent’s green contrasts too much with the dead grass. It draws the eye to the tent.” He slid gracefully down to the edge of the tent roof and removed most of the plant material.
“And when did you become an expert on the tonal values of tent canvas?” she asked tartly. Not that she doubted for a second that he was correct. In the few days she’d known him, he’d surprised her multiple times with the esoteric tidbits he knew. Her brother had warned her that Alex Peters was brilliant. As in off-the-charts-genius brilliant. But in her experience, intellect and common sense were two entirely separate things.
Alex stared at Katie warily. He did that a lot—look at her as if he thought she was about to leap on him and tear his shirt off or something. Not that it hadn’t crossed her mind. He was pretty gorgeous in a dark, tortured kind of way. That combination of dark hair and light eyes was surprisingly sexy.
He answered her question laconically, “They made me take an art class my last year as an undergrad at Harvard.”
“How old were you then? Twelve?”
“I didn’t start college until I was thirteen,” he replied absently, obviously already focused on something else entirely.
Her brother had told her Alex graduated from Harvard at sixteen with a degree in mathematics. Master’s in statistics and probability from MIT at seventeen, and well into PhD work in cryptography there before the wheels had come off his life. Maddeningly, her brother hadn’t said a word about what that meant. Just that the wheels had come off.
At thirteen, she’d been trying to convince her parents to let her wear makeup and her brothers to quit calling her Baby Butt. As she recalled, she’d developed an abiding hatred of math that year, too, compliments of pre-algebra. Thankfully, her degree in early elementary education only required basic mathematics.
The sun slid quickly behind the looming mountains, and day became night in minutes. The temperature dropped nearly as precipitously. The two of them retreated into the tent to huddle near the propane heater.
“You’re sure they’ll come?” she asked Alex over a pouch of freeze-dried beef stew reconstituted with water warmed on the top of the heater.
“D.U. put the word out,” he answered. “They’ll come.”
Doctors Unlimited was a low-profile international aid organization that sent medical personnel into the most remote and dangerous corners of the planet. Katie still didn’t know a whole lot more than that about the group, even after she’d gotten the call from her brother that it needed her help. Mike was military intelligence, although he couldn’t officially admit it. But everyone in the family knew he’d been a SEAL and probably still worked with the teams as an intel analyst.
She’d half suspected this trip was some sort of undercover SEAL op until she’d met Alex, who no way, no how was a SEAL. It wasn’t just that he ran to the lean and elegant rather than stupidly buff. He was more...cosmopolitan...than she associated with most of the guys on the teams. He was James Bond, not Rambo.
And then, of course, there was the whole bit about his actually delivering babies out here. She didn’t doubt SEALs could deliver babies—Lord knew, they could do just about everything else—but she couldn’t see one successfully posing as an obstetrician for weeks or months on end. Although, how Alex had gone from mathematician to physician during the black hole of time her brother wouldn’t speak of was a mystery to her.
“This area looks completely deserted,” she announced.
He shrugged. “You saw the same maps I did. Karshan’s a good-sized village, and it’s less than a mile up the river from us.”
“How will word spread that we’re here? And to whom?”
“Women gossip faster than the internet,” he murmured absently.
She’d already lost him again. His gaze was fixed on the heavy boxes of medical equipment they’d carried up there from the Land Rover, which was hidden under a brush pile down by the river at the bottom of the narrow, steep valley. Emphasis on steep. Her legs and back were going to kill her tomorrow.
She bloody well hoped they didn’t have to move this camp anytime soon. Their first two camps had been in caves in much more accessible locations than this mountainous crevasse. Twice Alex had woken her up with an urgent warning that the rebels were coming, and it had been relatively easy to throw their gear in the Land Rover and bug out.
At this time of year, Zaghastan, high in a remote region of the Hindu Kush, was as barren and lifeless as the moon with vast stretches of gray granite mountains and wind-scoured valleys. She huddled deeper into her high-tech mountain climber’s coat as a burst of frigid air rustled the canvas overhead. “Feels like snow,” she commented.
“Humidity’s under ten percent. Any snow will fall as virga.”
“And what is virga?” she asked with the long-suffering patience she’d learned working with kindergarteners.
“Precipitation that falls from clouds but evaporates prior to reaching the ground. Although technically snow is a solid, so the correct term in this case would be sublimation and not evaporation, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed drily. Being with this guy was like traveling with an encyclopedia. And he had about as many emotions as one. Either that, or Alex Peters was freakishly, inhumanly self-disciplined. Either way, she felt completely inadequate in his presence. As for her, she let everything she felt and thought hang right out there for everyone to see. It was so much easier that way. No secrets. No surprises. No head games.
Still, there was one thing she knew that he didn’t—the local language. The natives of this region spoke an ancient tribal tongue not used anywhere else on earth—except in a small community of Zaghastani expatriates living in Pittsburgh. She’d learned it during her three-year stint there with Teachers Across America, educating their children.
It turned out she had a gift for languages. Absorbed them like a sponge. That, and the rules of hospitality in Zaghastani culture dictated that teachers be invited into parents’ homes. She’d picked up the dialect like candy. It had helped her teach the kids English.
“Storm’s blowing in,” Alex observed.
She huddled closer to the tiny heat source, and her knee accidentally bumped his. He drew his leg away fractionally, and her fantasies about him were dashed yet again. Clearly, he didn’t think she was in his league. Either that or he was gay.
“I thought you said we’d only get virga,” she said a tad peevishly.
“That doesn’t mean it won’t get cold and windy. At this altitude, it’s not uncommon for temperatures to drop well below zero.”
She winced at the thought. Give her a nice, cozy fireplace, fuzzy socks and a cup of hot chocolate, and she was a happy camper. Less than one day on this mountainside and she was ready to pack it in and head home. Even a cave would be a step up from a canvas-covered crack in the rocks. At least they had the mountain at their back to block the wind a little.
“We should have some business before morning,” he announced.
“Why’s that?” she asked curiously. Was he psychic, too?
“Female mammals tend to give birth in the worst possible weather. It suppresses the movement of predators and enhances survivability of the gravid female and her offspring during the birth process.”
Well, okay, then. This trip was going to be nothing if not educational, apparently. Alex commenced rummaging through his boxes of equipment. He looked frustrated, as though he’d misplaced something. “Can I help?” she asked.
“No.”
That was Alex. Mr. Monosyllable.
Intense silence fell around them, disturbed only by the flapping of canvas.
“Seems like the only predators around here are the husbands of the local female population,” she remarked to fill the void. She hated quiet. She hadn’t grown up with five older brothers for nothing. Their house had been a zoo. But Alex seemed to prefer the transcendent silence.
He lifted one of the boxes effortlessly and shifted it into the corner. He might run to the lean side compared to her buff brothers, but he was stronger than he looked. He commented, “I doubt the husbands are the problem. It’s an eighty-five percent probability, plus or minus about three percent, that conservative religious zealots have been the ones killing the midwives.”
Slaughtering them, more like. Religious extremists were killing not only the midwives, but all women who advocated women’s rights or who represented female power in their communities. It was obscene. And largely unreported in the media. The massacre had prompted Doctors Unlimited to fund this secret mission into Zaghastan to deliver babies, in fact. When her brother had asked her to go along and translate, she wasn’t about to say no to helping women just trying to survive childbirth. She’d also just finished her gig with Teachers Across America and had yet to land a permanent teaching job or even decide where she wanted to live. And then there was the bad breakup with the latest rotten boyfriend to get away from. Her friends called her the asshole magnet for good reason.
“I’d suggest you get some sleep,” Alex said briskly. “You look like you need it.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Hasn’t anyone ever taught you women don’t like to be told they look like crap?”
He looked vaguely startled—a first for him. “I beg your pardon?”
OMG. He really doesn’t know that? “Women don’t like to be told they look bad.”
He frowned, his formidable mind obviously examining her statement from ninety-two different angles. “I suppose that’s logical if a woman is insecure about her appearance for some reason.”
“News flash, Einstein—all women are insecure about their appearance.”
“I have no context within which to place that remark.”
Oh, for the love of Mike. “Are you always such a geek?”
For just a second, something incongruous—and totally non-geeky—flashed in his eyes. Amusement. Male appreciation. Desire.
What. The. Heck? Where did the geek go?
She did a sharp double take, and his eyes were back to being as guarded and clueless as ever.
* * *
ALEX CONSIDERED KATIE—or at least the tip of her nose where it poked out of her sleeping bag. She could prove to be a serious problem. For a self-professed dingbat blonde, Katie had already showed herself to be deeply intuitive. Smarter than she let on. God knew, she was easy on the eye. The first thing he supposed most people would notice about her was the lush, golden hair falling in soft waves around her face. Or maybe her bright blue eyes. Or maybe even her slender, attractive figure.
Frankly, the thing he’d keyed in on first was her smile. It was warm and genuine and filled a room. He would like to think his mother had smiled like that. But, knowing his father, the man would never have gone for an open, loving woman. His old man would have gone for an ice bitch with a heart as hard and cold as a diamond.
Which would, of course, be more in keeping with his mother’s early and complete disappearance from his life. He had no memory of the woman whatsoever. Had no idea what happened to her. Never seen a picture. Never even heard a name.
A loose rock rolled outside, and he jerked to full alert. He shed the sleeping bag he’d wrapped around his shoulders and slid into the shadow beside the tent flap. He shook a razor-sharp scalpel out of his sleeve and slid it into his palm.
A low voice whispered on the other side of the canvas and then devolved into the persistent cough most of the locals had. Dammit. He didn’t understand a word of what the voice was saying. But it was female. He pulled the flap back, and two lumps of black cloth crouched in front of him. He gestured for them to come inside. The scalpel went inconspicuously back inside his sleeve as he moved to the back of the tent.
“Katie, wake up.” He gave her shoulder a shake through the down sleeping bag. She felt small and fragile under his hand. A temptation he couldn’t afford, dammit.
“Wha—” she mumbled as she rolled onto her back. Heavy sleeper. Must be nice to be so naive. It had been a long time since he’d thought the world was safe enough to sleep like that.
“I need a translator.”
She sat up sharply. “Oh!” She looked over at the two women huddled by the door and said something in the native tongue. It was a guttural and clumsy-sounding language.
“You’re on, Doc,” Katie announced. “The one on the left is in labor. Older one is her grandmother. Says she’s worried because her granddaughter is young and small.”
“How young?” he bit out.
Another exchange of words. Then Katie answered grimly, “Fourteen. Her first baby.”
One of the burka-wrapped shapes bent over just then and gave a low moan. Grandma propped up the girl as the contraction gripped her.
All the deliveries had been routine so far. Adult women, mostly on at least their fourth kid. But a first-timer barely into her teens? This could get interesting. His training in obstetrics was superficial; he was primarily a trauma surgeon. But all doctors were required to pull an obstetrics rotation in medical school. The men in prison with him who had constituted much of his on-the-job medical experience hadn’t given birth to a hell of a lot of babies—which was to say, any babies.
He’d pulled a short stint in a maternity ward to deliver a few more kids before he’d been sent out here. But he’d never seen a case like this. Nothing like trial by fire to earn his stripes as an obstetrician.
“Get the girl onto a cot. I need her out of her clothes but covered enough to keep her warm. I’ll crank up the heater while you ladies take care of all that,” he instructed.
It was forbidden for males of any stripe, even doctors, to look at any part of a woman in this part of the world, especially where he’d have to look to deliver a baby. But with all the local midwives dead, he was the only show in town. The Doctors Unlimited folks in Washington, D.C., had explained that it would be a death sentence for him and his patients to be caught. But the D.U. staff had believed—correctly—that local women would risk it anyway.
Crazy thing, that. Women wanting to have a fighting chance at surviving childbirth. What were they thinking? He snorted sarcastically as he turned up the propane heater. Without proper care, one in three women in this part of the world died in childbirth or soon after from complications. Doctors Unlimited and other aid organizations had spent the past several decades training midwives, and the mortality rate had dropped to rates commensurate with the West. Until this past winter and the midwife massacre.
He commenced meticulously scrubbing his hands and forearms over a bucket of water so cold it made his fingernails turn blue. How in the hell was he supposed to work under these conditions?
A muttered argument ensued behind him, and Katie announced, “The girl doesn’t want you to examine her or help unless things go badly.”
“And how am I supposed to know things are going badly if I can’t look at my patient?” he snapped.
She sighed. “They want you to tell me what to look for.”
“That’s absurd. You have no medical training whatsoever.”
“That’s what I told them. She’s adamant, though. And embarrassed.”
“But I’m a doctor—”
“And she’s a young, terrified girl who cannot read or write and will be beaten to death by her husband if he catches her here.”
“Then why did she come?” he demanded, low and angry.
Katie came over to stand directly in front of him. Her eyes were huge and beseeching as she looked up at him. “Because she’s more scared of her baby dying than of dying herself.”
He stared down at her, seared by the zeal in her eyes. He grumbled, “This sucks.”
“Welcome to life as a female a thousand years ago.”
He just shook his head. “The first thing to do is see if the baby’s presenting headfirst. You’ll have to use a speculum and a flashlight since it’s so dark in here.” The lone lantern was barely bright enough to read by, let alone perform surgery by.
Katie gulped and headed for the laboring girl, who was moaning again. He glanced at his watch. Contractions were under two minutes apart. “Do you know what a speculum is?” he asked.
“Every woman who’s ever had an ob-gyn exam knows what one is,” Katie replied frostily.
His lips twitched with humor, and he was glad her back was turned to him. “How far is she dilated?” he asked.
“There’s about a silver-dollar-sized opening,” Katie reported a moment later. “What does a head look like?”
“Like a wet, hairy balloon pressed against the cervix.”
“Then we’ve got a problem. I’m seeing pink skin. And it’s kind of pointy. Maybe bony. Like, umm, a baby bottom?”
“Breech presentation,” he bit out. “You’re going to have to talk our reluctant patient into letting me help.”
But Mama was having no part of it. It was outrageous that he had to stand there and do nothing when he could be attempting to turn the baby before it entered the birth canal. Although given how small Mom was, that would be a dicey proposition at best. He really needed to consider a C-section sooner rather than later.
“Tell her I want to discuss a C-section.”
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.
Alex Peters remained a mystery to her. Why would a guy like him shift from math to medicine? Where was he from? What was his family like? Did he have any hobbies? What kind of women did he prefer? What kind of sex?
She started as his eyes opened without warning; his gaze drilled into her like a silver laser. “Is there a problem?” he rasped. His voice was husky with sleep and so sexy her toes curled in her clunky hiking boots.
“Nope,” she answered cheerfully to hide her embarrassment at being caught staring at him. She hastily opened her tablet reader and turned it on.
“You were looking at me.”
She looked up innocently. Not a chance she could lie her way out of it. He’d caught her red-handed. So instead, she took the direct route. “I wasn’t aware that’s a crime.”
He took his arms out of his sleeping bag and linked his fingers behind his head. His naked arms. The upper reaches of his bare chest peeked out of the nylon shell. A sprinkling of dark hair was visible on it. And muscles. Lots and lots of mature-man muscles that, truth be told, she found intimidating. The guys she’d dated had been college types or recent grads who still acted and looked like students. She revised her opinion of Alex from lean to deceptively muscular. The guy must wear a tuxedo like a god.
“You’re staring again,” he announced.
“It’s rude of you to point it out,” she retorted. “Ladies are allowed to look.”
“Are gentlemen allowed also?”
If she didn’t know better, she’d say the doctor geek was flirting. Would wonders never cease? She fanned the tiny flame carefully by flirting back slightly. “Hello? It’s expected that guys will check us out. Why else would we girls go to so much trouble to look so good?”
“I haven’t gotten the impression that you’re a big primper.”
“That’s because there’s no power outlet for my blow-dryer, and the wind makes my eyes water too much to keep on eye makeup long enough to make it worthwhile.”
“You brought a blow-dryer out here?” he blurted. He had the bad grace to burst into laughter.
She scowled at his amusement. “Hey, I brought power converters. In my world, primitive camping is a motel instead of a Marriott. Nobody told me there would be no electricity at all in this godforsaken place. I was under the impression there would be, oh, I don’t know, walls and a roof for us.”
“You don’t need to primp. You’re fine the way you are,” he replied.
Hark, a compliment out of the good doctor! “Apology accepted,” she replied magnanimously.
He blinked, startled, like he hadn’t meant it that way. The man might be as hot as a god, and he might be smart as a whip, but he had a lot to learn about women. He reached for his sleeping bag’s zipper, and she turned away hastily. Who knew how far down his nakedness extended? She’d already figured out that, as a doctor, he wasn’t tremendously inhibited about the human body.
She asked over her shoulder, “So, does your Spidey sense say we’re going to get a lot of business tonight?”
“No. We’ll get the night off.”
She turned in surprise— Whoops. He was just pulling jeans over spandex biker-short things. Okay, then. The deceptively muscular thing extended to his legs and ass, too. She silently dubbed him Gluteus Aleximus.
He glanced up, caught her staring and broke into a grin so hot her eyelashes singed. “Like what you see?”
“Uhhh...shrmph...wuh...hwa...sure,” she managed to get out.
His grin widened.
Jerk. He’d embarrassed her on purpose. Oh, two could play that game. She hadn’t grown up with a houseful of brothers for nothing. She could give as well as she got when it came to practical jokes.
While she pondered revenge, she busied herself heating up the little propane hot plate and scrambling the eggs someone had brought last night. She and Alex were frequently paid in bread, jugs of yak milk and these oversize eggs she hadn’t had the courage to ask the source of. Geese, maybe? Or something weirder?
Chickens. In her world, every egg came from a chicken, and she was sticking with that mental image. She’d tried to explain to the local women that Doctors Unlimited was paying the two of them, but that didn’t stop their patients from showing their gratitude.
“So, Doc. Why do you think there won’t be any babies tonight?”
He glanced up from the bucket, where he was washing his hands. “I listened to the radio while you were sleeping. A rebel force is moving into the area.”
“Again?” she complained. “I swear, it’s like they’re following us!”
“Noticed that, did you?” he asked drily.
She did a double take. Seriously? They were being tracked somehow? The thought chilled her to her bones. “Why would somebody track us?” she blurted.
“That’s a damned good question,” he bit out.
She recoiled from the tight fury in his voice. Did he think the rebels were chasing him? Why? What was the big mystery around him, anyway? The six-hundred-pound gorilla in the corner of the tent was why her intel–Special Forces brother had asked her to come out here with Alex in the first place. Surely she was not the only person in the entire United States who spoke Zaghastani. And why did Mike drop that cryptic comment as he dropped her off at the airport to keep an eye on Peters and see if she noticed anything odd about him or why he was heading out to Zaghastan to deliver babies? Only odd thing so far was that the guy seemed totally immune to her general hotness and willingness to let him jump her bones.
Alex circled back to the original conversation. “If fighting breaks out between the rebels and the locals, any women in labor tonight will stay home.”
“I dunno,” she responded. “These women are already braving pretty dangerous obstacles to get to you. I doubt a little gunfire will slow them down.”
“The rebels are well armed and violent. When they come, they’ll crush everything in their path.”
Yeah. Like the two of us. She shook her head, unconvinced, and declared, “I’ll bet you five bucks we deliver a baby tonight.”
The effect of her challenge on Alex was shocking. He went utterly still, and she thought she saw a shudder pass through him. From this angle, it looked as if he actually paled. The tension abruptly emanating from him was terrible in its intensity.
She was on the verge of asking him if he was okay when he turned abruptly. His gaze was hooded. Dark. And his entire being was suddenly sharply, dangerously alive. It was as if she’d woken a sleeping tiger. And now the beast was not only awake, but he was hungry...and on the hunt.
“Shall we make the wager a little more interesting?” he purred. The sexual energy in his voice raked across her skin like claws.
Whoa. She asked cautiously, “What did you have in mind?”
“What do you like best in all the world?” he asked.
“Ice cream,” she answered promptly. It was the first thing that came to mind.
“Better than sex?” He sounded skeptical.
She shrugged. “I stand by my answer.”
He replied huskily, “Then you haven’t had good sex.”
The promise of just that was thick in his throat. She didn’t dare let her gaze stray south to see if he was as turned on as she was, all of a sudden.
“I think we have the terms of our bet then.” Her gaze snapped to him as he prowled across the tiny space to less than arm’s length from her. “If you win, we have a date to eat ice cream together. If I win...” His mouth curved up in a smile that was pure sin.
Her jaw dropped. “No way!”
His heavy lids might hide the fire blazing in his eyes, but they in no way diminished it. “A woman daring enough to travel halfway across the world, to brave a war zone and death threats, living alone in the wilds with a stranger...” He shrugged. “I thought you were...more.”
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.
Her brother had been specific in his instructions to her. Earn Alex Peters’s trust. Get into his good graces. Find out if he was up to anything besides delivering babies out here in the middle of nowhere. She’d asked Mike what he suspected Alex of, but her brother had fed her a bullshit line about not wanting to taint her impressions of the doctor. What was the deal with Alex? Who was he? And why had she been sent into a war zone to watch him?
She paced the tiny tent until her legs ached. Finally, Alex woke enough to mutter, “Lie down, Katie. You’re keeping me awake with all your fretting.”
She did as he asked, but she tossed and turned for much of the night. Yet again she checked her watch. God. 4:00 a.m. Good news: the shelling was finally winding down. Bad news: no women had crept to the tent asking for the baby doctor.
She was so frantic not to lose the bet that she was seriously considering heading for the nearest village to go door-to-door looking for women in labor. Okay, she wasn’t serious about canvassing the neighborhood for business. But she wanted to do it.
As the first hint of dawn touched the peaks at the opposite rim of the valley, she reluctantly admitted defeat and burrowed deeper into her sleeping bag. What had she done? Why did she have a feeling deep in her gut that she had jumped off a cliff and just didn’t know it yet?
* * *
KATIE WOKE WITH a jolt and was stunned to see sunlight inching in the tent flap. “What time is it?” she demanded, disoriented. She looked around and was alarmed to see that the tent was empty. Where was Alex?
“Almost two o’clock,” he answered from outside.
She leaped out of the sleeping bag, shocked. Her feet hit the cold dirt, and she hopped uncomfortably from foot to foot until she could slip into her unlaced hiking boots. She gathered her hair up in a high ponytail. Today was hair-washing day, and she already dreaded dousing her head in ice water. But it was better than having greasy hair.
Alex ducked inside the tent and handed her a steaming mug of coffee. Their fingertips brushed as they made the handoff, and her pulse leaped wildly. She looked up at him involuntarily. One corner of his mouth turned up in sardonic amusement at her jumpiness. It was official. She’d made a deal with the devil. To have sex. Ho. Lee. Crap.
Freaked out, she stared down at her mug of coffee unseeingly. Slowly, slowly, her pulse returned to normal, leaving behind a low-level background hum of panic. She would figure out a way to dodge the bullet. After her coffee.
She inhaled the bitter aroma with great relish. It wasn’t that she was the world’s biggest fan of coffee, but it was the smell of home. Of the civilized world beyond this isolated valley. Of life’s little indulgences.
“Thanks,” she murmured. As usual, Alex didn’t reply as he moved past her to the back of the tent. But today, she followed up with, “Why don’t you ever say ‘you’re welcome’ or something to that effect?”
“It’s redundant. I’ve already done something polite or thoughtful and the recipient has acknowledged it. There’s no need for further exchange.”
“Are you always so...cold-blooded in your approach to human interactions?” she asked curiously.
He moved shockingly fast to stand right behind her. Her pulse leaped at his proximity. Was he going to collect on the bet right now? She started to feel light-headed, and her legs trembled so badly with an urge to bolt that they would barely support her weight.
“No, Katie.” His voice was barely more than a whisper sliding across her skin. “I’m not cold-blooded about everything.”
Her breath hitched, and she had to force herself to take her next breath.
A single finger touched the nape of her neck right where her hair met bare skin. It drew slowly down her spine to the top of her T-shirt. “For the record, I’m not going to fall on you and ravish you like some clumsy, horny American boy.”
She turned sharply, mostly to escape that disturbingly sensual caress, but also to stare at him in surprise. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“I am a citizen, yes.”
“But?”
“But I was born abroad. And my father did not raise me particularly American.”
“What about your mother?”
“No mother,” he bit out.
She replied drily, “Last I heard, there’s only been one documented case of immaculate conception.” She added even more drily, “Assuming, of course, that you accept the Bible as valid documentation. And even then, it was the male parent in absentia.”
His eyes were the roiling gray of a thundercloud as he stared down at her. What on earth was he thinking to send that turbulence through his eyes? She continued looking back at him expectantly.
After a moment, he muttered, “Let me guess. You’re not going to leave the subject of my missing mother alone until I give you an explanation.”
She smiled triumphantly. “Congratulations! You’re finally learning to read women, grasshopper.” A scowl crossed his face, but she waited him out. She had a lot of experience outlasting stubborn males in her family.
Finally he shoved a hand through his hair, standing it up in short dark spikes all over his head. “My mother left my father, or vice versa, when I was an infant. I never knew her, and, no, I don’t know the circumstances behind it.” He added sharply, “And don’t tell me you’re sorry. I never knew what it was like to have a mother, so I have no frame of reference to measure whether or not it was a loss.”
“Do you always intellectualize painful things?” she asked him.
Her question seemed to stop him in his tracks, and he studied her intensely. He looked as if he’d turned the full power of his formidable mind to analyzing her. His reply, when he finally spoke, shocked her. “Has anything truly terrible ever happened to you?”
She had to think about it for a minute. “Our dog died when I was in college. That was really sad. And my grandmother died a few years back.”
“Let me guess. She was a hundred and ten years old, lived a rich and productive life, died in her sleep and everyone praised her full life and bemoaned her premature passing.”
“She was ninety-five,” Katie answered a little defensively.
He stepped close to her, and she was abruptly aware of how much taller he was. His head tilted down toward her as he murmured, “But you’ve never had everything you believed in ripped away from you? Never experienced regret so bad it burns a hole through your gut that won’t heal? Never made a mistake that costs you everything?”
She shook her head, her stomach fluttering so much she felt sick.
“If you had any sense, you’d run away from me as fast as you could, little girl.”
She bristled at being called a little girl, and her spine stiffened. “I can take anything you can dish out to me.”
“We’ll see about that,” he replied so low she barely heard him.
If she didn’t know better, she’d say his eyes burned for a moment with a hot, unholy fire. But on second look, it was just a trick of the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off his light gray eyes. Still, the fire reached out to her, tempting her, enthralling her, arousing something restless and dangerous deep in her belly.
Eventually he swore under his breath in some foreign tongue she didn’t recognize. But it was definitely cursing. He turned away and headed outside, grabbing the water bucket as he went. She listened to his angry footsteps retreating down the path to the river and, very slowly, let out the breath she’d been holding.
Alex was surly and uncommunicative when he returned from the river, his hair wet, and he retreated immediately into the tent to take a nap. She mimicked him and washed her hair. She brushed it out as she perched on the flat boulder outside and waited for the sun to set beyond the mountains. It was risky to sit outside like this in plain sight of anyone who happened by, but she got horrendously claustrophobic inside the tent, especially when Alex’s brooding presence filled it so completely. She found it strange to sit in silence like this and just contemplate existence.
His earlier question disturbed her. So what if nothing tragic had ever happened in her life? That wasn’t her fault. She and her family had been lucky. She got the feeling he hadn’t been so lucky, though. A desire to know him, to know the source of the darkness she sensed in him, rattled in her gut...along with trepidation at what she might learn. People didn’t get that dark without some serious crap in their pasts.
It was windy today, and the dust in the atmosphere made for a spectacular sunset that stretched high up into the heavens. As beautiful as it was, it also marked the inevitable passage of time. Would Alex insist on collecting his winnings when he woke up? He’d said yesterday that he doubted she would get much sleep tonight. Was he referring to the bet, or patients, or something else altogether?
How had he been so certain he would win, anyway? Suspicion took root in her mind that he’d heard something on the radios or gotten inside knowledge of some kind and thrown the bet. He seemed like the kind of man to whom winning would be more important than splitting ethical hairs over how he won.
“Time to douse the fire,” Alex announced quietly from behind her.
She nodded and kicked dirt over the little campfire. Its light would be visible for miles after dark, and they dared not announce their presence like that. She figured the local men had to be getting suspicious by now. All the women sneaking out at night to have their babies, and all of them coming back alive? Something was up with that. The ones who gave half a crap about their wives and daughters might tacitly approve of a doctor to the extent that they didn’t rat out her and Alex. But, eventually, someone radical would say something to the seriously hard-core religious types in the area.
Desperate to keep Alex’s mind off sex as she ducked into the tent behind him, she asked, “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to stay here before we have to move?”
“I give it two more days. Call it a twelve percent probability of our being discovered tonight. Double that tomorrow, and double it again the day after.”
Crud. Mental math required. Twelve times two was twenty-four, times two was forty-eight. “That’s almost even odds in three days,” she blurted.
“Like I said. Two days from now, we’re out of here.”
“Should we leave tonight?” she asked in alarm.
“We should certainly think about starting packing.”
Awesome. Maybe he would be so tired after packing up tonight he wouldn’t want to collect his winnings. Although, part of her—a tiny part—was curious about what sex with him would be like. He seemed really sure of himself when the subject came up. Would he be gentle or fierce? Vanilla or...not? He probably wouldn’t fumble about clumsily; she would bet a hundred bucks he knew his way around the female body very well, indeed.
She dived into the task of packing with gusto. As long as she was moving, he couldn’t have his wicked way with her. For his part, he busied himself with the boxes of medical gear, hauling them one by one down to the Land Rover. To date he’d never let her look inside any of them. When she’d asked about them, he’d only shrugged and said he’d crack them open if and when they needed the supplies inside. Whatever was in the boxes was heavy. Alex moved carefully down the hill in the darkness before the moon came up.
She’d just gotten back from carrying down a bag of miscellaneous camping gear they could do without for the next day when an explosion ruptured the night.
“Uh, Alex?” she said quietly. “That was pretty close.”
She jumped when his voice came out of the gloom right behind her. “No more than a half mile.”
And how, exactly, did a physician know how to judge distance on artillery fire? She opened her mouth to ask him, but another explosion, even closer, silenced her. Alex’s arm went around her waist as he sprinted up the hill and all but threw her past him into the tent.
She tried to ask him what the heck that had been for, but his hand went over her mouth as he yanked her back against his hard body. Heat seeped through her clothing, and had she not been straining to hear what had flipped him out, she might have relished it. But as it was, she stood tense and silent in his arms.
There it was. The sound of people moving down by the river. Maybe a half-dozen by the sounds of their scuffling. A voice floated up the hill...a male voice...saying something in the local dialect about engaging the rebels in the lower pass.
Alex backed up, dragging her with him, and sat down on the cot in the back of the tent, which had the effect of landing her in his lap. She lurched as his hot breath touched her right ear. And then, oh, man, his lips moved against it.
“We’re going to have to wait out the battle until it moves on, and then we’ll bug out of here. We’ll take whatever supplies we can carry in one trip down the mountain. But until then, no lights and no sound. Understood?”
She nodded and felt her hair moving against his cheek. His hand fell away from her mouth, and he lifted her off his lap.
He stood and moved into the corner. When he came back, he pressed something cold and heavy into her hand. She recognized the rough grip and heft of a pistol.
“Do you know how to use this?” he breathed.
She ran her fingers over the weapon in the dark. “Luger .22 with an extended clip. Standard model. Check.” She loaded the clip he passed her, clicked off the safety and rested her index finger beside the trigger guard as she laid the weapon in her lap.
“You can tell the make and model just by feel?” Alex blurted. He added grimly, “If we get out of here alive, you and I need to talk.”
His right hand rested by his side, presumably with a weapon in it, as well. She shivered a little, belatedly registering that the night was growing cold around them quickly without their propane heater to ward off the chill. He held out his left arm, barely visible in the dark, and she accepted the invitation gratefully.
He tucked her close against his side. His body was solid and warm, and she had to admit she found it reassuring to cuddle up against him. A shell whistled overhead, and a tremendous explosion nearby sent dust raining down on them in the brief illumination.
How long they sat there listening to the artillery barrage blasting the valley to smithereens, she didn’t know. An hour, maybe. The explosions ebbed and flowed, sometimes close and sometimes farther away. Small-arms fire announced that the rebels and local ground forces were engaging in direct combat close by.
She heard the high-pitched engine whine again. Another drone. But this time, the scream of its engine was followed immediately by the sound of ordnance exploding in airbursts nearby. An attack drone? Who in the hell had access to that kind of weaponry out here?
Yet another whistling scream pierced the night. A big explosion deafened Katie as a flash illuminated the darkness. She looked up and a little scream escaped her when she saw a black figure looming in the doorway of their tent. She yanked up her pistol to shoot the intruder, but Alex was faster. He slammed his hand over her pistol, shoving it down to the cot before she could pull the trigger.
What the—
He was on his feet, moving as quickly as a cat to the shadow in the door. He took the person by the arm and guided him or her inside.
It dawned on Katie that the shadow was much shorter than Alex. And clothed in voluminous robes. Crap. She’d almost shot a local woman.
“Talk to her,” Alex ordered low. “But keep it quiet.”
Katie nodded and waited out a momentary lull in the shooting. As a spray of small-arms fire started up again, she used the noise to murmur, “Can we help you?”
“My baby. It comes,” a young voice moaned.
“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Katie replied. “Lay down here, and Doctor Alex will take care of you.”
“Keep her dressed,” Alex ordered when Katie reached for the hem of the girl’s burka.
“Why?”
“We may need to move her.” He sat down at the foot of the cot to examine the patient with a flashlight he shielded with his hand.
“But she’s having a baby,” Katie replied blankly.
“Haven’t you ever watched Gone with the Wind?” he retorted. “Babies don’t care if the city is burning down around Mom. They come when they come.”
“This isn’t Atlanta, nor is it the nineteenth century,” Katie whispered back. She’d watched enough women struggle with all their might to push out babies over the past two weeks to understand that during the middle of childbirth was no time to move a patient.
“Tell that to the soldiers out there,” Alex retorted from between the girl’s knees. “She’s dilated eight centimeters. Time her contractions for me.”
Ten centimeters was the magic number when Alex allowed women to start pushing. Some women went from eight to ten in a half hour. A few had taken hours to get there. Katie waited in tense silence for the girl’s next contraction to start and end.
“Three minutes apart, one minute in duration,” she reported in the rumbling aftermath of some sort of incoming missile.
“We’ve probably got a little time then,” Alex remarked. “Stay with her. I’ll be back.”
Shocked, Katie watched him glide outside the tent and disappear into the night.
“Where—” the girl blurted in alarm.
Katie shushed her hastily. “He’ll be back. He’s just checking the battle. Stay as quiet as you can.”
“Cursed, greedy Tatars,” the girl muttered. “They think to destroy us. They are demons who rape our land. Steal the food from our mouths. Poison the wells, salt the fields. I curse them all unto the end of time—” She devolved into the local cough.
Katie frowned, not understanding the Tatar reference. Weren’t they nomadic raiders from southern Russia from the time of, oh, Genghis Khan? The girl’s language sounded old. Religious in nature. But clan rivalries and tribal feuding had been going on out here as long as humans had lived in these barren mountains. It was a revealing glimpse into mankind’s violent and harsh past. Frankly, she found it miraculous that humans had survived their own homicidal tendencies to populate the planet.
In the flashes of artillery explosions, the girl looked to be in her late teens. And pretty. Really pretty. Her eyes were big and dark and doe-shaped, her black hair lush around a heart-shaped face that high-fashion models would envy. It seemed strange, though, that a girl this young would have made her way to Alex by herself.
“Does anyone know you’re here?” Katie whispered to the girl.
Fear made the girl’s eyes even bigger as she shook her head vigorously. “My family does not know I am pregnant.”
Katie stared. “How is that possible?”
“I am not married. I wear big clothes. I pretend to eat a lot and tell them I am gaining weight. But I really don’t eat much and try to stay thin.”
In this culture, of all cultures, Katie supposed it might be possible to hide a pregnancy if a woman was really careful. Then the rest of this girl’s dilemma hit her. An unmarried girl, pregnant. In a society where sex outside marriage was punishable by death. No wonder the girl had hidden the pregnancy.
“What will you do with your baby when it comes?”
Anger flared in the girl’s eyes. “Kill it.”
CHAPTER THREE
WHAT? KATIE’S JAW dropped at the hatred in the girl’s voice. What the hell? She opened her mouth to ask what in the world was going on when a dark figure materialized in the doorway. She reached hastily for the pistol before she recognized Alex’s familiar silhouette.
“We’ve got a problem,” he murmured.
“No kidding,” Katie replied, jerking her head toward the cot. “She wants to kill her baby.”
Alex went still for a moment. Then he asked quietly, “Was she raped?”
Of course. Young. Beautiful. Unmarried. “I hadn’t thought of that,” Katie confessed. She turned to the girl and murmured a quick question.
The girl shook her head in the negative. Hmmm.
“Regardless,” Alex interjected, “we may have to get out of here sooner rather than later. A line of rebel troops is advancing up the valley. If Karshan’s local militia doesn’t hold the road until daylight, we’ll be overrun.”
Katie frowned. “If the fight’s on the road, how are we going to drive out of here?”
“As always, you grasp the crux of the situation unerringly,” he muttered.
We’re trapped? “Where will we go?”
He shrugged. “Up.”
“Up the mountain?” she demanded in disbelief. “With her?” She jerked her head toward the laboring girl again.
“I scouted around a bit. Karshani tribesmen are entrenched in the village up the valley. Rebels have the road and the lower pass covered. Over the mountain will be the only safe retreat for us.”
“But the girl—”
“She’ll have to make do. I can’t stop the war for her to have a baby. I’ll do what I can for her.” He moved toward the rear of the tent and his patient. “Keep an eye outside. Watch the road down where the river bends. If you see any movement, tell me immediately.”
Katie nodded her understanding. The scene outside was surreal. Tracers streaked across the black sky like comets. Explosions peppered the hillsides, lighting up gun emplacements and clusters of shooters behind rocks and outcroppings.
The girl’s bouts of heavy panting inside the tent came closer together and longer in duration. Katie heard Alex demonstrating breathing techniques, exhaling in short hard bursts. The girl mimicked him obediently. It wouldn’t be long before the girl delivered. Thank God her labor was progressing quickly.
But not quickly enough. Headlights came into sight at the bend in the dirt road beside the river. “Vehicle’s coming up the road,” Katie announced.
“What kind?”
“Can’t see yet. It’s loud. Probably not civilian.”
Alex swore quietly, and the girl let out a groan from behind the towel she was biting into.
The vehicle came into sight. Crap. “Armored personnel carrier,” Katie reported urgently over her shoulder. It stopped halfway in view, and the front hatch opened.
“You’re kidding,” Alex muttered.
“I wouldn’t joke about something like that. And I know my military vehicles. It’s an APC. Late-model version with the wedge-shaped, anti-IED bottom.”
Alex swore quietly again.
“Special Forces troops exiting it now,” she mumbled. God knew, she recognized the gear and way of moving. Half her brothers were men just like that. She couldn’t count how many times she’d stood by her father during training exercises watching soldiers egress APCs into simulated combat.
“Special Forces?” Alex echoed in dismay from the back of the tent.
“Yes,” she answered with conviction. “They may be wearing civilian clothing and rebel colors, but no way are those regular soldiers.”
A barrage of machine-gun fire exploded from over her right shoulder, and she jumped violently. Where had that come from? She craned her head to the right and spotted the muzzle flash up the valley a little ways. A very little ways. The weapon rat-a-tatted loudly, and the soldiers at the river hit the deck, diving for cover.
This was nuts. She was standing in the freaking middle of a no-kidding combat zone. The unreality of it struck her forcefully. She might have wanted adventure, but she didn’t do combat. This was a bad dream. She was going to wake up any minute and it was all going to go away.
Alex joined her in the doorway, and she pointed out the action quickly. “Locals have the soldiers pinned down for the moment, but those troops will send out a patrol to flank the gunners and take out the position. The patrol will have to pass right by here to get to the gun,” she whispered frantically.
He nodded in quick agreement with her assessment and breathed, “Time to go.” He picked up a rucksack from the floor just inside the door and shouldered it. “Get the girl and follow me. I’ll find us a route up the mountain.”
Katie whirled and ran to the laboring girl. “We have to leave.”
The girl stared up at her in disbelief.
“I know. But we’re about to get overrun by soldiers who will shoot first and ask questions later. I’ll help you.”
Awkwardly, the patient sat up. Katie wedged a shoulder under her armpit and levered the unwieldy girl to her feet. A moan escaped her. Alex slipped outside and turned to the left, toward the advancing soldiers. Better them than the local gunners, Katie supposed, given that they had a laboring girl in tow. Although the soldiers would probably be inclined to shoot her and Alex for rendering medical aid to the locals anyway. Because it was such a huge crime to help innocent girls give birth to tiny, future terrorists, she thought bitterly.
Alex jumped up on the boulder beside their tent. The laboring girl reached up, and, with Katie hoisting from below and him pulling from above, they got her up onto the outcropping. What scrub there was up here was sparse and mostly dead. They had to rely on rocks and terrain for what little cover they could find.
Seeking cover and ways up the nearly impassable terrain, Alex doubled back to them often when one route dead-ended out and he had to find another. Katie put an arm around the girl’s shoulders to steady her as they moved a few dozen yards up the steep slope. Without warning, the girl bent over, breath hissing between her teeth as she grasped her swollen belly. She devolved into a fit of coughing interspersed with low moans of pain.
Alex looked over his shoulder impatiently as Katie and the girl fell behind. He slid back down the gravel-strewn slope to them, pistol in hand, to wait out the contraction. Finally, the girl exhaled and nodded. They resumed picking their way up the hill.
During the girl’s next contraction, Katie looked over her shoulder down the valley. She couldn’t see the unidentified, definitely military, patrol headed their way, but she could feel it as surely as she felt the girl’s fingers digging painfully into her forearm. A few more coughing breaths and the girl nodded once more.
They were able to go maybe thirty feet up the mountain between each contraction. It was agonizingly slow, particularly when the gun emplacement lit up once more. Sure enough, soldiers down the hill fired back. At least a half-dozen weapons returned fire in a wide arc that would roll right over their tent any second.
They were maybe a hundred yards from their shelter when another contraction gripped the girl. This one drove her to her knees, and she doubled over, grasping her belly. “I have to push,” the girl grunted.
“Not yet,” Alex snapped under his breath when Katie translated the girl’s words.
Katie relayed his order, but the girl shook her head. “You’ll die if we have to leave you out here,” Katie whispered frantically. “A few more minutes. We’ll find a place to hide and then you can push.”
“I can’t go any farther,” the girl moaned.
“Keep her quiet, or we’ll all die,” Alex bit out.
“I’m trying,” Katie retorted, panic climbing into her throat.
The girl’s contraction passed, and Katie heaved her to her feet. They made it only a dozen yards before the girl collapsed again, groaning into her hand pressed over her mouth.
Shouting erupted below them. Katie looked down as a burst of flame lit the night. The soldiers had just torched their tent. Cold terror washed over her. What if they hadn’t left when they did? They’d be dead right now. The rebels probably had mistaken it for a local headquarters of some kind. The more immediate problem, though, was the wash of firelight illuminating the entire hillside.
“Get down,” Alex ordered, yanking Katie and the girl down behind a waist-high boulder. A barrage of machine-gun fire raked the mountainside close enough to make Katie flatten herself to the ground.
Fear like she’d never known before roared through her. They were going to die. The three of them were not soldiers. They were barely armed, they had no gear and their only escape was up a forbidding mountain that only a seasoned climber—or a mountain goat—would attempt to scale.
Another drone flew past, barely higher than eye level, raking the ground with gunfire from a pair of machine guns mounted on its belly.
The girl’s hands clamped around Katie’s elbow just then and squeezed so tight the circulation in her hand felt entirely cut off. “Uh, Alex,” she whispered. “This girl’s going to deliver pretty soon.”
Alex had picked up a few phrases in the local dialect, and he used one now, biting it out succinctly. “Don’t push.”
“Can’t...stop...” the girl ground out from behind clenched teeth.
Katie translated grimly.
“We have to keep moving,” Alex whispered in English. “We’re not out of the line of fire, and the patrol will sweep the area looking for whoever was in that tent.”
They would never outrun highly mobile soldiers. Katie shook her head in disbelief and denial, but it made no difference. He was right. She told the panting girl, “Crawl if you have to, but keep moving. Do you understand me?”
“I can’t,” the girl wailed under her breath.
It was becoming a familiar refrain, but Katie replied fiercely, “Find a way. I’ll drag you if I have to.”
Katie had to give the girl credit. She pushed up to her knees, moved her burka aside and staggered up the hill after Alex, using her hands for support on the steep hillside before her. She fell twice, and each time Katie bodily lifted the girl back to her feet. The next time they dived for cover, though, the girl’s breathing changed. An element of really sharp pain entered her gasping breaths.
“She really can’t go on,” Katie told Alex. In a flash of mortar fire, Katie saw the frustration and futility that passed across his face. He nodded, though, and angled off to the right.
It was only a half-dozen yards to where he stopped and waved for them to join him, but Katie didn’t think she and the girl were ever going to make it to his side. Each step was a herculean effort for the girl, who was in so much pain she could not stand unaided. Only Katie’s arm around her kept her upright. Thankfully, Alex rejoined them and lifted the girl in his arms. He moved quickly into the shadows.
Katie made the mistake of glancing down and saw that they stood at the top of a nearly vertical cliff face. Only the narrowest of ledges kept her from plunging hundreds of feet to the valley floor below. Sick to her stomach with terror and vertigo, she plastered herself to the rock wall at her back and edged forward. Alex ducked into a low opening, and she fell to her knees beside him in relief.
The three of them were crouched in a tiny crevasse that didn’t rise to the exalted status of a cave. It was maybe eight feet deep at best and no more than three feet tall at the opening, narrowing to a few inches tall in the back. But it afforded them a little cover from the battle raging outside and a moment to catch their breaths.
The girl started swearing under her breath so colorfully that Katie felt an incongruous urge to laugh. Or maybe that was just hysteria threatening. Either way, the girl’s voice broke on what would have been a scream had she not jammed her burka in her mouth and bitten down for all she was worth.
It was Alex’s turn to swear. He unceremoniously shoved the girl onto her back to examine her. “Baby’s trying to crown,” he muttered. “Tell her to push with the next contraction.”
Katie was so relieved she could cry as she relayed the instruction to the girl. The contraction came, and the girl strained, bearing down in the age-old way as Katie supported her shoulders from behind.
“Again,” Alex ordered.
“Again.”
After several more contractions, Alex fumbled in the rucksack and pulled out a flashlight. Covering himself with the girl’s burka, he took a quick look at affairs. When he emerged, he spoke so calmly in English, Katie’s blood ran cold before she even comprehended his words.
“Tell her to rest for a while and just try to breathe through the contractions.”
He’d never told a woman to take a break in the middle of a delivery before. Just the opposite in fact. He always had her give the women pep talks and tell them at all costs to keep pushing until it was over.
She relayed the instruction and then murmured, “What’s up?”
“This kid’s head is too big to pass through the pelvic opening. The baby can’t be born.”
“What do we do now?” she asked as calmly as her exploding alarm would let her.
“Two choices. Leave the girl and her baby here to die. Or do a C-section and save the kid.”
“And the mother?”
“It’s a major surgery. If blood loss doesn’t get her, shock and hypothermia may. And then there’s the problem of noise. If I cut her open without anesthesia, she’s likely to scream her head off and get us all killed.”
Katie stared at the shadows wreathing his face. How in the hell were they supposed to choose between those options?
He stared back. At length, he muttered, “Welcome to playing God.”
A barrage of gunfire below them made her jump. For a minute there she’d forgotten about the war raging outside. The girl lying on the ground beside her panted fast and hard as another contraction gripped her.
“What would you do?” Alex asked quietly.
Katie shook her head, horrified to the core of her being. “Ask the mother. It’s her baby. Her life.”
“How very pro-choice of you,” Alex replied wryly. Then he said more sharply, “So do it. Ask her.”
Katie was shocked that he had declined to make a unilateral decision. It was so very...human...of him. She turned to the mother and waited out the end of the contraction.
Holding the girl’s hand, she said quietly, “Your baby is too big to be born this way. Doctor Alex can cut the baby from your belly, but he has no medicine for the pain. If you make any noise, we will all die.” She took a deep breath and added reluctantly, “You may die from the surgery.”
“If I have no surgery?” the girl asked.
Katie relayed the question, and Alex outlined the answer sentence by sentence as she translated.
“You will become exhausted eventually. The placenta will separate from your uterus. Your baby will suffocate and die, and you will begin to hemorrhage. That means you will bleed inside your body. You will die from blood loss.”
The girl was silent, considering her options. “I hate this baby. I do not care if it lives. But I want to live.”
Alex nodded briskly. “Then the baby must come out of you.”
Katie watched as he pulled out a scalpel, clamps and what she recognized as suture materials. He spread a towel on the ground under the girl and another beside himself.
“How are we going to keep her quiet?” she asked.
“If we’re lucky, she’ll pass out fast.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“Since we’re being so democratic about this, ask her,” he suggested. “I’ll try to time the incision for during an artillery barrage. She’ll have to do the rest.”
Katie spoke briefly to the girl. Determination entered the girl’s eyes, and Katie thought that she was more scared than the girl at this point. The girl twisted a length of her burka and told Katie to hold it in her mouth for her when the time came.
“Ready?” Alex murmured from his crouched position between the girl’s legs. The girl’s grotesquely distended belly, now bared to the cold air, was pale in the darkness. How on earth was Alex going to do a C-section in these conditions?
The girl put the gag in her mouth, and Katie grasped the ends of it, her entire body shaking with terror. The girl wasn’t shaking much less.
“Next explosion,” Alex murmured, scalpel poised.
Kaboom!
Alex slashed. The girl screamed. The night lit up and blood spouted black and wet from the girl’s belly. A second slash, and the girl thrashed wildly.
“Hold her down,” Alex ground out. “Placenta’s separating. She’s hemorrhaging.”
Katie leaned on the cloth gag, pinning the girl’s head to the ground. A knee across the girl’s shoulders helped hold her in place, while Alex knelt on the girl’s thighs. He worked fast, and Katie did her level best not to look at the gore unfolding.
Instead, she stared into the girl’s panicked, animalistic eyes. All humanity drained out of the girl as she screamed against the gag again and again. And then, just like that, the girl went limp. Her eyes glazed over.
Is she dead? Katie fumbled under the girl’s jaw for a pulse.
“Thank God,” Alex breathed. He worked even faster, hacking the baby free of its mother’s body.
Katie was shocked at how fast Alex had the baby out. Thirty seconds, maybe, all told. A lifetime for that poor girl, though.
“I can’t find a pulse,” she told him frantically.
“First things first,” he snapped. “Gotta get the kid breathing.”
The baby let out a wail that he quickly muffled with a hand over its mouth. Alex shoved the baby at her fast. “Keep it quiet.”
Like she had the first idea how to silence a newborn infant? The baby was slippery with blood and white, greasy gook. Quickly, she wrapped the child in the spare towel Alex had laid out and slipped the child down inside her coat for warmth, which was a trick while keeping a hand over the crying child’s mouth. She hoped she wasn’t suffocating the poor thing. What a hell of a way to be born.
“Hold the flashlight,” Alex ordered.
She didn’t have three hands, for crying out loud. But he was probably doing the work of three surgeons right now, so she didn’t complain. Kneeling awkwardly, she kept the baby’s mouth covered as it slid farther down in her coat and held the flashlight in her free hand where Alex pointed it.
He worked frantically on the mother, his hands flying.
“How’s she doing?”
“Bleeding all over the place. I’m losing her,” he gritted out.
Another round of gunfire from nearby made Katie jump and the baby cry even louder. She made hushing noises into her coat even though she doubted they would have any effect on the squalling infant.
Alex started to swear in a steady stream under his breath, and in the light of the next mortar, his face looked gray. She risked a glance down. There was blood everywhere. A huge pool of it lay under the girl. The formerly white towel was now black with it. And where Alex’s hands worked inside the girl, his fingers disappeared in a flowing puddle of it. Streams of blood trickled down the girl’s belly unchecked. Katie had never seen so much blood in all her life.
“Listen for a heartbeat,” he ordered.
She laid her head on the girl’s chest. The rib cage did not rise, and she heard only the swish of her own blood in her ear. God, she hated silence. But then a barrage of gunfire made it too loud for her to hear a thing, and that was worse. She hunted again, frantically, for a pulse under the girl’s jaw. Nothing.
Tears welling in her eyes, she shook her head at Alex.
He continued to work in grim silence for several more minutes. But finally he went still. He stared down at the girl’s body bleakly. And then all he said in a terrible, agonized whisper was, “Turn off the flashlight.”
Her second hand freed, she turned to the business of quieting the crying infant. She maneuvered the hot little bundle inside her coat until it lay across her, the baby’s head on her left breast. She remembered hearing somewhere that the sound of heartbeats calmed babies. It took a few moments, but it worked.
Alex shook himself out of wherever he’d gone mentally and crawled to the edge of the crevasse. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What about her?” Katie glanced down at the corpse of the girl who’d been so brave and angry and determined to live.
“We have to leave her.”
Every cell in Katie’s being protested the notion of just abandoning the girl here like a discarded hunk of meat. Thankfully, Alex crawled back to the girl’s side. Gently, he closed her eyelids before pulling the end of her burka across her face. He covered the bloody mess that had been the girl’s belly with a towel and arranged the girl’s robes over it all.
He placed his hand over the girl’s heart and murmured barely loud enough for Katie to hear, “Rest in peace, and be with whatever God you worshipped in life.”
The tears overflowed from Katie’s eyes then, and she sucked back a sob. She was shocked when strong arms wrapped around her, dragging her up against a hard body. Between them was the hot bump of an infant torn from its mother’s dying body. Katie didn’t even know what sex it was. A hand pushed her face down onto his shoulder; his own face was buried in her hair. He shuddered against her while she cried into his neck.
But as the ominous thwocking of a helicopter became audible in the distance, he stilled and muttered into her hair, “If you want that baby to live, grieve later. Follow me now. Fast and silent.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT HOUR was a nightmare. The mountain was no less steep at the top than at the bottom, and the baby fussed occasionally, sending her into a cold panic as she tried frantically to shush the newborn. It didn’t help matters that the battle raging below grew more intense as the night wore on. And who knew what lay over the mountain peak?
Alex was grim and silent, focused intently on finding a route up the mountain. He was quick to lend her a helping hand, though, or to haul her up over a particularly rough patch. As she’d correctly guessed, he was deceptively strong. And when her strength lagged and her will to go on faltered, he was indomitable.
And there was always that intense hug to think about. It had been more than simple comfort. He had let her inside his guard for just a minute. Made a human connection with her. Maybe even needed her for a second there.
Alex murmured from ahead, “Stay low. We’re cresting the mountain. We don’t want our silhouettes visible below.”
She crawled across the open peak and huddled in the lee of a boulder just over the crest beside Alex.
“How’s the baby?” he asked.
“Alive. It moves around now and then.”
“Let me see it,” Alex muttered.
She unzipped her coat and lifted the infant out. In a flash of mortar fire, she saw it was a baby girl. Said baby girl took immediate and loud umbrage at being exposed to the sharp chill, however, and started to squall.
Alex pulled a clean towel out of his pack and swaddled the infant in it after a fast examination. Thoughtfully, he passed the baby back to her, and Katie slipped the child back in her coat. It took a minute or so, but the baby quieted in the warm and dark next to Katie’s heart.
“We have to get food for her,” Katie whispered.
“She can go a day or two without eating, actually,” Alex replied. “Most babies don’t take in much nourishment in their first twenty-four hours.”
Huh. Live and learn. “What about us?”
He shrugged. “We’re another matter. We’ll need water before long.”
“Any bright ideas about what to do next?” she asked.
“Go downhill for a while.”
She liked that idea a whole lot better than continuing to scale mountain peaks in the dark. With no climbing gear. And a baby stuffed down her coat.
Trying to stay oriented as to where they were, she pictured the map of this region they’d been showed in the D.U. offices. Another village lay at the head of this valley. Its name was something like Ghan or Ghun. She couldn’t remember exactly. No telling if it was another Karshani clan village or belonged to some other clan entirely. As likely as not, the neighbors hated each other’s guts.
This side of the mountain was more a slope than a cliff, mostly made treacherous by loose, rolling gravel. She made much of the descent sliding on her butt; before long, they stood at the bottom of a narrow valley in deep darkness.
Alex shocked her by brushing off the seat of her jeans and finishing off by giving her ass the briefest of squeezes. So brief she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it or not. But not so brief that her breathing didn’t accelerate sharply.
“Altitude getting to you?” he murmured.
Yeah, right. Altitude. “Gee, I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe I should feel your butt and see if a sudden case of altitude sickness overcomes you.”
“I dare you.”
Oh, it was so on. She stepped right up behind him and slipped her hands down the waistband of his jeans. He lurched in shock as she slid her palms between his briefs and the denim and cupped strong, well-defined male cheeks that abruptly went rock hard.
“Not bad, Doctor. Not bad at all.”
He whipped around, effectively yanking her hands out of his pants, and stared down at her. Enveloped in darkness and lust that rolled off him like sin, it crossed her mind that, perchance, she was playing with fire by messing with this man.
“Think before you go there with me,” he rasped. “I’m not one of your milk-toast college boys.”
The warning in his voice was clear. Although what, exactly, he was warning her about, she wasn’t sure. That he wouldn’t stand for mind games from her? Or that his tastes were darker than the average college co-ed’s? Or maybe that getting involved with him would be an all-or-nothing proposition.
Was she prepared to go there with him? How far beyond her experience would he take her? Just how intense would sex with him be? Turned on and scared in equal measure, she let out a careful breath as he turned and stalked off into the night.
She’d wanted to be taken seriously. To be treated like an adult. For everyone to quit seeing a sweet, naive kid when they looked at her. But how much innocence was she willing to lose? If she didn’t miss her guess, being with Alex Peters could cost her damn near all of hers.
They’d been hiking for maybe an hour when the baby commenced crying and nothing she could do would quiet the poor little thing.
Alex muttered, “She’s hungry. Nursing after birth is an instinctive imperative. We probably won’t shut her up shy of feeding her something.”
“Any suggestions as to what to feed her?”
“Actually, yes.” He slid his pack off his shoulders and rummaged in it, emerging with an IV bag. He poked a pinhole in one corner of it while she opened her coat and maneuvered the infant close to the opening while keeping the baby mostly inside the garment’s warmth.
They tried unsuccessfully to squeeze some of the IV fluid into the child’s mouth, but the baby wouldn’t swallow it and only squalled louder.
“We’ve got to quiet her down,” Alex bit out. “Once the artillery fire stops, people for miles around will hear her screaming.”
“Any ideas?” Katie asked, frantically rocking the furious baby.
“She needs to suck to trigger her swallowing reflex.”
“I already tried getting her to suck my finger as a makeshift pacifier and she wouldn’t do it.”
“She needs to suckle. As in a female breast.” He threw her an expectant look.
Katie stared. “News flash, Doctor. My equipment is not currently in service for milk production.”
“She doesn’t need to get any milk. She just needs a breast to suck. Once she’s sucking strongly, then we can squirt some IV fluid into her mouth and she’ll swallow it.”
An embarrassed impulse to refuse speared through her gut at the same time intellectual certainty that she would do it rolled through her brain. She tried unsuccessfully to juggle the baby and her coat and her shirt, until Alex’s big, warm hands slipped inside her coat and took the baby. Awkwardly, she raised her shirt, baring her bra, which happened to be lacy and white and practically glowed in the dark.
“Not very practical lingerie for Zaghastan,” he murmured in amusement.
The bastard sounded like he was enjoying the view a little too much. She glanced up, irritated, and muttered, “I wasn’t expecting to show it to anyone while I was here.”
“So you wear sexy lingerie entirely to please yourself? That’s encouraging.”
“How so?” she blurted. She wished the words back as soon as they left her mouth.
“You struck me as too...virginal...for that naughty bra. I’m glad to see I underestimated you.”
Her gaze narrowed at the faint challenge simmering in his voice. She reached for the edge of her bra cup and slowly, deliberately, pulled it down. Alex’s gaze riveted on her flesh as the swell of her breast and its rosy nipple were revealed. His gaze flared like an arc welder, and her pulse spiked hard in response.
Without comment, he eased the infant to her breast. The baby was too mad or too inexperienced or both to know what to do, however.
“I apologize,” he muttered.
“For what?”
“For this.” He reached in front of the infant’s mouth with his fingers and pinched her nipple. Hard. She jumped and would have squawked were they not in the middle of a war zone. Involuntarily, her back arched into his hand, trying unsuccessfully to ease the sharp pressure.
“Oww,” she breathed.
He let go and made a small sound of satisfaction. “Better.”
She ventured a look down and realized her nipple now jutted out, swollen and full.
“Rub it on the baby’s face. Across her mouth,” he instructed.
She did so, stunned at how erotic it was to be doing this in front of him. Without warning, the baby latched on and gave a tug that shot sensations all the way to her groin. “Oh!” she gasped.
One corner of Alex’s mouth curved up knowingly. He reached between her breast and the baby with the IV bag and slipped the pinholed corner into the infant’s mouth. She felt the baby swallow against her flesh.
“It’s working,” she breathed. “Do it again.”
Working together, the two of them got a few ounces of IV fluid down the baby, who fell asleep quickly after that. Alex hooked his finger under the lace and lifted it into place, running the back of his knuckle lightly across her nipple in the process. Damned if it didn’t stand up proud and eager again, pushing impudently through the lace. And damned if he didn’t stare down at it, his eyes ablaze, until her breath came short and fast.
“Zip up,” he ordered sharply. “I don’t need either of you catching a chill.”
She scowled at his back until it occurred to her that it might have been sexual frustration putting that edge in his voice. Abruptly, she felt much better as she tucked the sleeping baby into her coat and zipped it up.
“We need to name her,” she announced. “We can’t just keep calling her ‘the baby.’”
Alex threw her a startled look over his shoulder. “You do it. But, for God’s sake, don’t name her something native. Pick something American-sounding.”
“Why?”
“We’ll need to take her back to the States with us. Which means we’ll need to pass her off as our baby. What would you name our daughter?”
Their baby? The notion was both thrilling and scary to contemplate. “How about Charlene?” It had been her grandmother’s name.
“Slut I went to school with was named that. Try again.”
“Alexandra?”
That earned her rolled eyes and a firm, “No.”
“Catherine?”
“You want to name a baby after a violent, dead queen?”
“Fine. You come up with a name you like!”
“Katrina.”
“Sounds a little grown-up for a tiny baby.”
“She won’t be a tiny baby for long. And you can call her a nickname like Kat or Trina in the meantime.”
“Teeny Treeny?”
He groaned under his breath. “Call her Dawn. The sun will be coming up soon.”
She actually liked the symbolism of a new day after the darkness of night. Goodness knew, this child had been born under the blackest of circumstances. And she couldn’t think of any horrible nicknames other kids might come up with for it. “Dawn, it is.”
“Speaking of dawn, we need to take cover soon,” he commented.
“Why?”
“Given the size of last night’s battle, I expect more drones will patrol the area today.”
“Isn’t the U.S. the only country with attack drones? Why would the good guys come after us?”
He whirled and demanded, low and angry, “Since when is the United States presumed to be the good guy?”
Her jaw dropped. She’d been raised among soldiers and cops dedicated to country and service...to the death. It was anathema in her home to suggest anything other than the United States was right and good and decent.
Alex huffed. “Don’t get me wrong. Democracy is a hell of a lot better than the available alternatives. But spare me the religious fervor for mom, apple pie and the Stars and Stripes.”
“What the hell did Uncle Sam do? Pee in your Wheaties?” she demanded.
Pain. Grief. Rage. Desolation. The emotions flitted through his eyes so quickly she could barely register them, let alone catalogue them. What the—
“Not on the list of approved topics for conversation between us,” he bit out. He turned around and stomped off without waiting to see if she followed.
“If there’s a list of approved topics, how come I didn’t get a copy?” she called after him.
A mumbled retort floated back over his shoulder, “Above your pay grade.”
Her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t about to let him get away with blowing her off. But first she had to catch him, and he was practically jogging toward the head of the narrow valley now. She’d always hated it when her brothers used their superior size and strength to ditch her. In retrospect, she’d probably been an annoying pest more often than not, but she’d just wanted to be included. To this day, she hated being left behind.
Her brother’s cryptic request to watch for signs of something weird with Alex resonated in her head. What was up with this guy?
“Slow down!” she finally had to call to Alex.
Nada.
“Please!”
That did it. He stopped without turning around and waited until she panted up behind him. The altitude was a killer when added to a strenuous hike. As soon as she drew within arm’s length of him, he took off again, but thankfully at a more reasonable pace. In a few minutes, he murmured, “Keep an eye out for movement on that slope ahead. We’re getting close to Ghun.”
Mostly, she was occupied staring at the ground so she didn’t twist an ankle or break her neck. She glanced where he indicated and saw a steep rock face looming. She groaned under her breath.
“I see caves up there,” Alex commented. “It’s too early in the year for shepherds to have brought their flocks up here, though, so they ought to be empty. No grass yet.”
She snorted. Nothing grew up here. She was surprised to spot what looked like an organized network of caves all over the steep slope ahead. How could so many people support themselves off the dirt and dust of this valley? No stream of any kind flowed through the area. In the past two weeks, she’d learned just how critical water supplies were to native peoples.
As the first gray of predawn peeked over the mountains, Alex scrambled up the steep hill while she rested a bit. He came back soon and led her to a cave blessedly not far up the slope. Overlapping slabs of stone mostly obscured the entrance. They slipped past the rocks into the dark, and Alex audibly sighed in relief. Had he been that worried, then?
In the green light of a Cyalume stick, she looked around the high-ceilinged cave. The floor was flat, dry and reasonably clean. A few animal droppings and scattered bones proclaimed the presence of some small predator. Off to one side was a stone ledge about hip high covered with a framework of woven boughs and dried grass that looked like a crude bed. Near the entrance, the stone walls were blackened as if fires had been lit there.
A stack of firewood was piled in a corner, and Alex moved to it quickly. In a matter of minutes, he’d built a fire her Boy Scout brothers would have been proud of. Out of the steady wind, the silence in the cave was palpable. And it got on her nerves fast.
“Where’d a city slicker like you learn to lay a fire like that?” she asked to break the quiet.
Alex didn’t deign to answer and merely shrugged as he pushed a series of smooth, melon-sized rocks close to the fire. The thin, dry wood crackled loudly and burned fast, but it heated up the small chamber surprisingly well. A thin layer of smoke accumulated near the ceiling, seeping sluggishly toward the rear of the cave. Must be a tunnel or vent back there. The back walls, which retreated into shadows—who knew how far back—were pocked with round holes at even intervals, big enough for her thumb to fit in. Maybe those were the vents.
Surprisingly little light seeped in as day broke outside, but that also meant very little cold seeped in, either. Before long, the cave was actually reasonably cozy, enough that she shed her coat and made a nest out of it for Dawn.
Alex unwrapped the infant and, at long last, trimmed the umbilical cord and wiped the last birth blood off her. He frowned down at her, and Katie moved to his side rapidly. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Take a look at her. Notice anything odd?”
She stared down at the pink, chubby baby, who had adorable blond peach fuzz hair. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes. Two ears. Limbs of equal lengths. No visible deformities... Whoa. What?
“Blond hair?” she said questioningly. Every baby they’d birthed so far had had black hair. All the locals she’d met were dark-haired.
“Exactly.” He stared at her significantly.
“How did that happen?”
“The mom was an unmarried girl. Good-looking, right?” Alex asked tersely. “What color was her hair?”
“Yes, she was stunning. And she was dark-skinned and dark-haired like all the locals.”
Alex murmured, “Too much pigment in Dawn’s skin for her to be albino. Only way for her to have blond hair, then, is for her father to be Caucasian.”
Katie’s jaw dropped. “Where did a local girl meet a Caucasian?” To her knowledge, she and Alex were the only Caucasians for hundreds of miles around.
Alex snorted. “Soldiers. Spies. Civilian contractors. Drug dealers.”
“And aid workers like us,” she added, appalled.
“The way I heard it, we’re the only aid workers foolish enough to venture into this area in years,” he retorted.
She grimaced. “That’s what the women have been saying to me, too. Okay, so strike aid workers from the list of possible fathers.”
They stared down at the baby, who was settling down to sleep in her warm nest.
Alex announced without warning, “Strip off your clothes. All of them.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He was already shrugging out of his coat and pulling the black turtleneck over his head. Lord, that man had acres of gorgeous muscle. He reached for his belt buckle and she squawked, “What are you doing?”
He looked up, and his gaze went from concentration on something worrisome to smoking hot in the blink of an eye. “Worried about delivering on the bet you lost?” he purred.
“No, I’m not worried,” she lied belligerently. “I just don’t think now is the time or place to collect.”
He moved to stand a little too close to her for comfort, and she was abruptly aware of how much bigger than her he actually was. And stronger. And they were so very alone out in the middle of nowhere. Literally. He could force himself on her and there wouldn’t be a soul around for miles to hear her scream.
“Angel, when I collect on our bet, it will not be in a squalid cave, and you will beg me for it.”
Her eyes flashed as she instinctively rose to the challenge. “I don’t beg.”
The corner of his mouth turned up in that sardonic half smile of his. “Wanna bet?”
“No, thank you,” she replied tartly. “I’m already indebted to you. I don’t need to add to it.”
“I still need you to strip. All the way down to your skin.”
“Why?”
“I need to check for tracking devices in our clothes.”
She blinked, shocked. “Excuse me?”
“Tracking devices. I need to make sure none were planted on the gear or clothing we bugged out with. I did a quick check before, but in light of last night’s events, I need to do a more thorough search.”
“Who on earth would want to track us?”
“I can think of any number of candidates, and some of them I’d rather not have knowing where we are.”
“Like who?” It was starting to feel like all she did with him was ask questions.
“Not on the list of approved topics between us.”
She scowled. “I’m not stripping unless you answer me.”
His gaze snapped up to hers, and this time amusement flashed before he banked all emotion. “Fine. The CIA. Their Russian counterparts, the FSB. The U.S. Army. Various mob groups. That’ll do for starters.”
“Why would the mob track you? And which mob? What did you do to them?”
“I relieved both the Russian mob and the American Mafia of substantial funds some years ago and have yet to give them an opportunity to win any of them back. For that matter, the Ukrainians don’t like me very much, either.”
“What did you do?”
“I hung out in casinos they owned. In my rebellious youth, I went on a short-lived, but highly productive, gambling spree.”
Math genius. Master’s degree in probability. Cryptography postgrad... “How much did you take them for?” she blurted.
“A lot.”
Huh. And he still had the money? Well, well, well. So the good doctor was rich, too? It hardly seemed fair given how smart, sexy and good-looking he was.
“Why would the CIA and FSB track you?”
He threw her a stubborn look and merely shimmied out of his black jeans. Dang, that man was built.
“Let me guess,” she said wryly. “Not on the list.”
“Bingo.”
Oh, Lord. There went his underwear. Yowza. The good doctor was blessed in every single department of his life. She spun away quickly lest he catch her looking at his junk. The temperature in the cave shot up at least ten degrees as sexual heat abruptly filled the air.
“I’m not kidding about your clothes,” he said grimly from behind her.
Which would be worse? Getting naked at the same time he was or waiting until he was fully dressed again and forcibly undressed her? Wow. That was about a toss-up. A tiny part of her loved the idea of him tearing her clothes off her.... Maybe it was the whole caveman vibe coming out of her deepest, darkest DNA. But she didn’t have any spare clothing and needed what she had on to stay intact. Practical necessity won out, and she pulled her pink turtleneck over her head reluctantly.
Ohmigod. He was watching her. And he was stark naked. Gloriously, unconcernedly so. He’d already seen her in her bra—less than her bra. This was no big deal, right? Except her heart was jumping in her throat and her hands shook like leaves in a hurricane.
She reached for her jeans and unzipped them slowly. Pushed them off her hips reluctantly. Heat blossomed in her face as her lace thong was revealed. She could literally feel his blazing-hot stare taking in her pert little rear end. Men had been commenting on her derriere since she’d been old enough for it not to be creepy. She knew it was firm and high and lush enough to turn men on without Alex having to tell her so.
“Nice.”
“Could you at least be a gentleman and turn your back?” she blurted.
“Kitten, I’m a lot of things, but a gentleman is not one of them. You owe me sex anyway. I’m eventually going to see you naked, so why not now?”
Because she barely knew him. Because he was naked, too. Because part of her wanted him to take advantage of the situation, and she was a big, fat chicken about that part of herself. Fantasizing about a dark, dangerous man like Alex Peters was one thing. Being naked and alone with him for real was another thing altogether. She didn’t want it to be that way, but it was. She was a fake, and she couldn’t handle a man like him.
Damn.
The promise of sex hanging thick and heavy in the air pulsed between them, pulling her toward him. An urge to run her hands over that magnificent body, to pull him to her, to make love to him, surged within her, startling her. Sure, she felt attracted to guys at work and joked around with her girlfriends about jumping various guys’ bones. But that was all in fun. This compulsion originated low in her belly, deep and primordial. Lust in its purest form. Mindless. Insistent.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
She resorted to mumbling, “You’re making me strip in front of you and you have to ask that?”
Something warm and soft dropped around her shoulders, making her lurch. It smelled of sandalwood and spice. His coat. “Sometimes I forget what an innocent you are. Wear this until I check out the rest of your clothes.”
The driving need she’d experienced at the sight of his naked body subsided, and she all but cried in her relief as she tossed her thong and bra over her shoulder to him. An innocent? Was she really, in spite of her best efforts to get people to let her grow up—and then it hit her. Other people weren’t preventing her from growing up. She was preventing herself from doing it. Chagrin roared through her. A real man was within arm’s length, naked or close to it, and she owed him sex. All she had to do was reach out and take it. And yet...
And yet. Fear held her back.
Alex worked in silence, turning each piece of clothing inside out, running his fingers carefully over each seam, examining tags and pockets and anywhere else a burr might be attached.
“How big would a tracking device be?” she asked curiously without turning around to see if he was still starkers.
“Depends on how big a battery it has and how long the person who plants it wants it to work. A short-term device, say, for a single day, could be the size of a pinhead. Something a little longer term, like I’d expect to get used on us, might be the size of a grain of rice.”
“Long grain or short grain?”
He chuckled briefly. “Okay. Your lingerie is clean.” A big, tanned hand emerged over her right shoulder, the lacy bits dangling from his fingertips. She snatched them from his hand and maneuvered into them awkwardly underneath his coat. Who would have guessed two tiny scraps of fabric could make her feel so much better?
Her shirt took longer, and her jeans longer still, to check. But eventually he passed them over her shoulder, and she was safely clothed once more. But no sooner had she pulled the shirt back over her head than Dawn started to fuss.
“She’s hungry again,” Alex announced.
Katie had been around a lot of little kids in her day, but not many infants. She would take his word for it. She scooped up the baby and the IV bag that he held out to her and moved over by the fire with her back to him to coax the baby to drink a little more.
It took giving Dawn her breast again to get the infant to swallow, and Katie pinched her own nipple, mortified at how turned on doing it made her, before Dawn could find it and latch on. The sensation of the tiny mouth sucking vigorously at her breast was overwhelming and confusing. It felt good, but not in a sexual way.
It also felt very wrong. Like she was co-opting a moment that belonged to someone else. That poor dead girl should be doing this. Although, given how much she’d hated Dawn, Katie doubted the mother would have fed the child. More likely, she’d have drowned the baby or suffocated her. Katie clutched Dawn more tightly and fell in love a little.
“I need my coat back,” Alex said apologetically. “I have to check it.”
She passed him the garment, and he stepped close to drape her coat over her shoulders. As he did so, he paused to watch the baby suckling at her breast and swallowing the IV fluid Katie was sneaking into the baby’s mouth.
“Beautiful sight,” he said in a hushed voice.
She looked up at him in surprise. That was the last thing she’d expected to hear from the dark, sexy bachelor.
He reached down to cup the baby’s tiny head in his hand for a moment. “Such a rotten start in life, baby Dawn. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save your mother.”
“You did your best. And if that girl had lived, I expect she would have killed Dawn as soon as they left us. Maybe this is how it was supposed to work out—that the baby lived and the mother did not. Goodness knows, that girl would have had some tall explaining to do if and when she married. Not only would she not have been a virgin, but her body would have shown the signs of having borne a child. She would have been beaten to death if she was lucky. Perhaps a quick end on that mountain was the merciful way for her to go.”
“God, the barbarism of it,” Alex muttered.
“If we take Dawn to America, she’ll grow up in a very different world.”
“There’s no ‘if’ about it. Not with that blond hair of hers. We have to take her with us. She’d be a pariah at best in this society and horribly abused at worst—assuming she were allowed to live at all.”
Katie shuddered and cuddled the infant a little closer. She was starting to feel downright maternal toward the small bundle of squirming warmth.
Alex went back to the business of inspecting his coat and then all the gear in his emergency pack, which he spread out over the floor of the cave. She was surprised to recognize an array of survival gear in among the medical supplies—energy bars, matches, Cyalume sticks, compass, water purification tablets.
“How is it that you had a whole backpack of medical and survival supplies ready and waiting to go last night?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Call it a hunch. Those rebel forces kept showing up at exactly our location and attacking, and it made me suspicious.”
“Of?”
“Do you always ask so many questions?” he demanded.
“When people are being cryptic with me, absolutely,” she declared.
He sighed. “I was suspicious of somebody not being happy we’re out here.”
“Are we in direct danger? And don’t dodge the question. I grew up listening to cops and soldiers. I know exactly what kind of danger we’re in if someone wants us dead.”
He shrugged. “I won’t ever bullshit you, Katie. That I promise. I may refuse to answer a question, but I won’t lie. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“I think someone not only knows we’re out here, but wants us dead. Which makes me question Doctors Unlimited. They are supposedly the only people who know we’re here. Someone within D.U. isn’t who they claim to be.”
“There’s a mole? Why would anyone spy on a humanitarian aid group?”
“That is the question, is it not?”
She thought hard. Placing and maintaining a full-blown mole had to be a difficult and expensive proposition for a spy agency. Why go to all that trouble to watch a bunch of doctors and nurses.... Unless they were not just doctors and nurses? She looked up at Alex and asked soberly, “What do you think D.U. does besides render medical aid?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess?”
He shrugged. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? They insert people right in the middle of the hottest conflicts on the planet with covers that make them more or less immune to attack or arrest.”
“Spies?” she breathed. “For whom?”
“You tell me.”
She stared at him, shocked. “I don’t know anything! I didn’t even work for D.U. until they needed a Zaghastani translator for you.”
Alex was studying her far too closely again. Like he was trying to look inside her soul and see what truth she was hiding from him.
“Maybe we’re just being paranoid,” she said a little desperately. “Maybe it’s coincidence that the fighting has flared up in the places we’ve been.”
He snorted. “I can calculate odds out to nine figures in my head in under a minute. And you don’t want to know how many zeros line up after the probability of it being random chance.”
She put her coat down on the rough bed and tucked Dawn back into her nest, now surrounded by hot rocks to keep her warm, and turned to Alex in the dancing firelight. “Do you trust D.U. enough to call and ask for transport out of here?”
A derisive snort was his only answer. Frankly, she shared the sentiment. If someone in the organization had set them up to be killed, she didn’t want to talk to D.U., either. She asked, “What do we do now?” Interesting that she had complete faith in him to have an alternative plan. No doubt about it, he was one of the smartest people she’d ever met.
“We’re going to get some rest and wait for dark.” A look of deep reluctance crossed his face. “There’s a place I know...not too far from here... I was really hoping not to have to go there.” Grim determination replaced the reluctance. “Can you hike twenty miles or so over rough terrain if we break it up into a couple of days of travel?”
“Depends on the terrain, but I guess so.”
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Cindy Dees
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ON THE RUN, AND UNDER FIRE…Providing medical relief in a war-torn region helps Alex Peters forget his past and focus on the job: delivering babies. Less easy to overlook is his blonde comrade-at-arms, who knows nothing of the trouble he’s running from. Katie McCloud makes the assignment bearable, although her perky innocence proves to be an arousing distraction. Then, as combat explodes around them, their only option is flight.A kindergarten teacher seeking adventure, Katie hoped this humanitarian mission—and the mysterious, sexy doctor sharing it—would push her out of her comfort zone. With Alex, she starts taking tantalizing risks and becoming the survivor she knew she could be.But back on U.S. soil, Alex and Katie face a new threat, and this time they’re the target. Forced into close confines, neither can believe the other isn’t the intended mark. With only each other to depend on—and suspect—Alex and Katie can′t avoid the simmering attraction between them. But to stay alive, they’ll have to trust more deeply than ever before…