Close Pursuit

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.