Close Pursuit

“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.