Close Pursuit (Love in Danger #2)

Chapter 1

1

Katie McCloud ducked inside their makeshift shelter of a tarp stretched across the gap between two giant boulders and winced. It would be a tight squeeze in here for two people and their medical gear.

This trip is not about comfort.

But there was roughing it, and then there was roughing it. She was pretty sure she hadn’t signed up for this degree of primitive in her accommodations.

What are a few scorpions in your boots, the odd cobra, and some dysentery for good measure? You’re helping people who desperately need medical care.

Nope. The pep talk wasn’t working. She was exhausted, sore, hungry, and just wanted a decent bath. Heck, she’d settle for a cold shower. The incessant winds in these arid mountains drove fine, gritty dust into absolutely everything, from her clothing to her food, and she constantly felt dirty. She didn’t think she was ever going to get the acrid taste of dust out of her mouth again.

The mysterious man who’d made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—he would pay off all her nursing school debts if she would take a job with Doctors Unlimited for a single summer—had assured her it would be the most rewarding work she ever did.

Sure, it would be a little off the beaten path, he’d said. She should think of it as an all-expense paid camping trip to an exciting, exotic location.

Too bad he failed to mention his idea of an exotic location was Hell .

Still. She couldn’t believe her luck. She’d expected to be paying off student loans for years to come.

There were three rather bizarre caveats to taking this job. First, she was forbidden from mentioning the existence of her anonymous benefactor. Second, she had to agree to have a small tracking device inserted under her left shoulder blade for in case anything went wrong. Not that the stranger anticipated any problems. It was just a precaution.

Third, she had to swear not to tell the doctor she would be working with that the benefactor or the tracker existed. Violating any one of these would result in him not paying off one penny of her student loans.

The tarp dipped ominously overhead, brushing against her hair and startling her into ducking sharply.

“Alex! The roof’s caving in!” she cried in alarm.

“I’m aware,” came the dry response from outside. “And keep your voice down. I don’t need you getting shot on your first day out here.”

Shot? Shot? She’d thought that part of the in-briefing on this aid mission was purely hypothetical!

Holy crap. What have I gotten myself into?

“I don’t need me getting shot, either, thank you very much,” she replied nervously.

“Any chance you can help me with the tarp?” he asked.

She ducked outside just in time for a cascade of dirt and gravel to slide off the gray plastic sheet and rain onto her head. And go down the back of her shirt. And in her eyes. And in her hiking boots.

“Hey!” she squawked, batting the dirt and grit from her hair.

“Sorry.”

Coughing, she gave up swiping at her hair, bent over to let her mahogany hair—now ghostly gray—hang down and gave her head a good shake. She must look like a dog who’d just been for a swim. If only. She could go for a nice swim right about now.

At this time of year, Zaghastan was as barren and lifeless as the Moon, with vast stretches of gray granite mountains, wind-scoured valleys, and only the toughest of living things struggling to survive here and there.

She realized with dismay that her exposed skin was coated in gray dust. She must look like some sort of weird apparition.

Alex let out a snort that sounded suspiciously like laughter. She looked up quickly, and he wasn’t quite grinning, but that was a definite a smirk on his face.

She huffed. It was way too soon to pick a fight with the man who was supposed to keep her alive out here and get her back to civilization safely.

When the snow melted out of the high mountain passes in springtime, a short travel window opened, making the remotest regions of this country accessible to outsiders for a few months each year. Doctors Unlimited, a private international aid organization, sent a doctor and a nurse up into the mountains each summer to offer medical services to villagers and farmers with no other access to healthcare. But last year, there’d been too much violence to risk sending a team.

Anticipating the need for medical care would be even more pressing this year, D.U. had sent them in a full month earlier than usual and instructed them to stay as long as possible without trapping themselves in the mountains for the whole winter.

Resigned to her filth and determined to get along with her partner, she asked as pleasantly as she could manage, “Why did you push all that dirt and rock onto the tarp?”

“Camouflage.”

She muttered under her breath, “Did you have to camouflage me, too?”

He shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

Dang it. Her comment hadn’t been meant for his ears.

“Is it true that, if the wrong people find me, I’ll be killed?”

“It is,” he answered evenly.

Which was actually pretty crazy if she stopped to think about it.

She laboriously climbed to join Alex, huffing in the thin air at this altitude. He pulled on one side of the tarp while she pulled on the other. She tried to pound in the stake closest to her, but the hammer lying beside it didn’t drive the stake in more than a few inches.

Alex successfully pounded in his stakes with a hefty rock— show off —then made his way over to help her.

She registered with shock that his surgeon’s hands were tanned and callused. But his touch was gentle as he brushed her hands aside and took over pounding in her stakes, anchoring the tarp firmly.

She eyed him sidelong as he studied the valley below. He was gorgeous in a dark, brooding kind of way. She could definitely see herself getting together with a man like him?—

She cut off that train of thought sharply.

Her benefactor had been blunt about this aspect of the job, telling her to keep things professional and stay away from any personal entanglements.

She turned her gaze to the valley, as well. The ribbon of light gray road snaking through its dark gray basin was deserted, the same way it had been since they’d stopped for the day to make camp.

The stillness of this place was so huge it was hard to absorb. Only the wind made noise up here. Not even birds disturbed the silence.

Alex seemed oddly at home in this harsh place. Which made no sense to her. When they’d met a week ago in Karachi, Pakistan, he’d told her briefly that he went to Harvard Medical School, took some time off medicine, and now lived in Washington D.C. How did a successful, urban professional like that fit in so well in a completely uncivilized wilderness halfway around the world from his home?

They’d spent two days driving from the south coast of Pakistan to its northernmost corner and another two days crossing the border into Zaghastan and making the slow, arduous drive east into this mountainous region. In all that time, he hadn’t said another word about himself.

In fact, he barely spoke at all. And when he did, the man had fully mastered the art of conversing in single syllable words.

She came from a big, loud family that talked and laughed incessantly. Her challenge growing up had been getting a word in edgewise. Whenever she got away from her family, she tended to talk non-stop. Some pair she and Alex made. The chatterbox and Monosyllable Man.

He was as inscrutable and remote as the region they’d been sent to. Zaghastan was a tiny, isolated spot tucked between the huge land masses of India and China. Poor and with no industry besides yak farming and poppy growing, it went mostly unknown and unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Today, her companion’s taciturn nature and the heaviness of the silence out here were getting to her worse than usual. To break it, she asked Alex, “When did you learn to build shelters like this?”

“Childhood.”

“Did your mom or dad teach you?”

“Brothers.”

“Did you camp a lot?”

“Explored.”

“As in you wandered around in the woods, building shelters?”

He shrugged.

She frowned. “Who lets their kids wander around in the woods by themselves these days?”

“I didn’t say there were trees where I grew up.”

Hey. A full sentence out of him! Pressing the rare conversational opening, she asked quickly, “Where did you grow up?”

Another shrug.

He’d done that a lot in the short time they’d known each other. Whenever he didn’t want to talk about something, he ignored her or shrugged her off. She’d been putting up with it for nearly a week, but if she had to put up with it for months , she was definitely going to become resentful and bitchy with him. Sooner rather than later.

“Here’s the thing, Alex. It’s not polite to blow me off like that. If you want, I’ll never tell another living soul anything you say to me out here. But I’m a social person. I’m going to lose my mind if I’ve got no one to talk with for the entire summer.”

He frowned, seeming to weigh her words. It was clear he didn’t like the idea of being chatty with her, but at length he sighed and said, “My family moved around a lot when I was young. Mostly, we lived far from cities or other people, so my mom didn’t much care if we boys wandered. My father encouraged it. He believed in…toughening us up.”

Whoa. A world of bitterness was packed into that last comment.

Alex continued, “My brothers and I figured out how to build shelters using whatever was available. Does that answer our question?”

“Yes. Thank you,” she said quietly, acknowledging his effort to converse. She pressed her luck, asking, “How many brothers do you have?”

“Two that I know about.”

“That you know about?” she echoed, surprised.

He started to shrug but stopped his shoulder mid-lift. He exhaled audibly. “My father likes women.”

“How does your mother feel about that?”

“She left him. Although it’s more accurate to say she stayed in Russia my Father, brothers, and I came to the States.”

“She let him take her children?”

“She had no choice.”

“Why’s that?” Katie blurted.

“Do you ever stop asking questions?” he responded wryly.

“Not really. I’m naturally curious.”

“Some might call it being nosy.”

She scowled. “Fine. I’m nosy. But I can keep a secret and I’m no gossip.”

His shoulder started to move, but she wagged her finger at him and said in her best threatening nurse voice, “If you shrug at me one more time, I’m going to ask you questions nonstop all summer.”

He came suspiciously close to smiling before he resumed his poker face.

So. There was a human being with feelings under his robotic facade, after all. Good to know. Now to draw out that human and get him to relax around her.

She said casually, “Tell me about your brothers.”

“They’re both older than me. One by six months and one by two years.”

She frowned. “Six months? The math on that doesn’t math unless you were ridiculously premature.”

“Or unless my father had a mistress and I hadn’t gotten around to saying they’re my half-brothers.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say in response to a mistress. Her parents were devoted to each other and would never dream of getting involved with anyone else. What must it have been like, growing up in a family where his parents weren’t close? Or maybe they had marital problems serious enough to send one or both of them outside the relationship in search of…what? Companionship? Sex? Love?

“Hark. I managed to silence Katie McCloud.”

She shot him a grin. “Not for long. I was just thinking. Anyway, now it’s your turn to ask me something. That’s how conversations work, you know.”

He rolled his eyes but played along. “Fine. Do you have any siblings?”

She smiled in approval. “If I were like you, I would merely answer yes. But since I have excellent manners, I’ll answer, I have five older brothers. I’m the only girl.”

“That sounds…terrible.”

She shrugged. “They could be overprotective. I spent most of my childhood trying to prove I could take care of myself.”

Alex nodded. “Same.”

“It’s not like that, anymore. I have my own life and make my own decisions. In fact, my brothers were strongly against my coming here.”

“They were right.” And with that, he half-ran, half-slid down the steep slope, coming to a stop below their shelter, turning back to study it with the intensity of an art critic.

She had no desire to pick up a head of steam, lose her footing, and tumble the hundred feet or so down to where their Land Rover was hidden in a pile of dead brush and picked her way down the slope cautiously. But as she neared Alex, she stepped on a loose patch of gravel and pitched forward, arms flailing.

Alex lunged in front of her so fast she hardly saw him move. His arms shot out and hooked her under both armpits, dragging her upright against his body and using himself as a barrier to keep her from falling on down the mountain.

Her pulse leaped as she slammed into him. She registered his thighs against hers, her belly against his. Even her breasts were mashed against his chest. Lord, he was hard everywhere. He wasn’t a particularly bulked up guy, but he didn’t even budge when she crashed into him. He was strong .

She looked up at him, and he was staring down at her, his eyes blazing so intensely with awareness of her that her gaze slid away.

“Thanks. Sorry about that,” she mumbled.

“This isn’t a place for civilians. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Aren’t you a civilian?” she asked, startled at how breathless she sounded.

“Technically. But I’ve spent time in places like this, and I’ve been here before.”

“You’re not some sort of chauvinist, are you?”

“Not at all. But women aren’t even second-class citizens here. A good milk cow is more valuable than a woman in some of the places we’ll go.”

“Great. I always did want to compete with a cow for a man’s attention.”

A wry smile briefly flashed across his features. He set her back on her feet and moved away, resuming his scrutiny of the crude tent. But she noticed the tops of his ears were red, and not from sunburn.

“So. You are capable of smiling,” she said lightly. “I was beginning to wonder.”

He threw her a wary glance. He did that a lot—look at her like he thought she was about to leap on him and tear his shirt off.

Not that it hadn’t crossed her mind. But they had to live and work together in very close quarters for the next several months, and things could get very awkward between them if he rebuffed her or if they hooked up and it went badly?—

Interrupting her wholly inappropriate speculation, Alex commented, “I’m told I can be somewhat reserved when I meet new people.”

“You think?” she replied sarcastically.

“Sorry. I was always much younger than anyone I went to school with. I was isolated or ignored a lot. Got used to keeping to myself.”

The D.U. in-briefer told her Alex was a math prodigy, had graduated from medical school “young” and finished a residency in surgery before the wheels had come off his life. Of course, the D.U. guy had declined to explain what that meant. Apparently, Alex had recently finished a residency in obstetrics, which made him the ideal candidate for medical missions to remote places where he was as likely to deliver a baby as perform emergency surgery.

She’d spent two years working in labor and delivery while she got her master’s degree in surgical nursing. As it turned out, moms in labor were a lot harder to manage than a nice, unconscious surgical patient. She supposed her unusual nursing skill set was why her anonymous benefactor had recruited her to come out here to the end of nowhere.

“How old were you when you started college?” she asked curiously. For him to complete an undergrad degree, medical school, and two residencies before the age of thirty, he must’ve started college really young.

Alex answered reluctantly, “Fourteen.”

Dang. At fourteen, she’d been trying to convince her parents to let her wear make-up and get her brothers to quit calling her Baby Butt. That was also the year Algebra 1 nearly did her in and her best friend stole the boy she had a crush on. She couldn’t imagine navigating college at that age. No wonder Alex had felt isolated and ignored.

The sun slid behind the mountains, and day slipped rapidly into night. The temperature dropped precipitously. They retreated into the tent and Alex carefully tucked in the edges of the tarp he’d hung across the front opening. She wasn’t sure if he was more worried about heat escaping or about light that could give away their presence.

He showed her how to operate the tiny propane stove and let her huddling over its meager warmth as it heated water for their supper.

Her stomach was growling by the time Alex lifted the small pot of steaming water and poured its contents into pouches of freeze-dried beef stew. He stirred the contents, resealed the tops, and passed one to her. She clasped it gratefully in her freezing fingers.

He said quietly, “Tomorrow, we’ll reach the first village on our itinerary. Get all the sleep you can tonight because patients will come at us hard and fast.”

“You’re sure we’ll have patients…and they’ll let us treat them?”

“D.U. put out word that we were coming a few weeks ago,” he answered. “They’ll come from all over this region.”

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how her employer “got word out” in a desolate place like this. Doctors Unlimited was a low-profile outfit she’d never heard of until she was recruited to work for it. Apparently, the organization had ties in all sorts of dangerous places most charities didn’t dare to venture.

Even her brother, Ian, hadn’t been able to find out much about D.U., and she was convinced he worked for the CIA or a similar agency. He claimed to work for a think tank so secretive it didn’t even have its own website, and he assiduously avoided saying what he actually thought about in his job.

She’d half-suspected he was behind sending her on this trip and had initially wondered if this was some sort of spy operation. But then it had dawned on her he would never put his baby sister in danger.

She could totally see Alex being a spy. He was ultra secretive, fit, and smart. He didn’t strike her as the military type, though. His vibe was more James Bond than Rambo. Not to mention there weren’t any weapons in the boxes of supplies filling the back of the Land Rover.

She commented, “I doubt we’ll have many patients. This area looks completely uninhabited.”

“Looks can be deceiving. Karshan’s a good-sized village, and it’s only a few miles from here.”

She huddled deeper into her mountaineering coat as a burst of frigid air rustled the tarp door-wall. “Feels like it might snow.”

“Humidity’s under ten percent. Any snow will fall as virga.”

“What’s virga?” she asked.

.“Precipitation that falls from clouds but evaporates prior to reaching the ground. Of course, snow is a solid, so the correct term is sublimation, not evaporation.”

“Of course,” she echoed dryly.

She scooted closer to the tiny heat source and her knee accidentally bumped his. Electricity sparked through her. He drew his leg away fractionally. She sighed. It sucked when the attractive guy wasn’t the least bit attracted back.

“You are right, though. A storm is blowing in,” he observed. “It’ll get windy and turn cold tonight.”

“You mean this isn’t windy or cold?” she exclaimed.

“This area gets one-hundred-mile per hour winds pretty often. And temperatures drop well below zero. Unfortunately, we’re here early enough to catch the end of winter.”

Ugh. Give her a nice cozy fireplace, fuzzy socks, and a cup of hot chocolate, and she was a happy camper. This was the exact opposite of all that.

“Get some sleep,” Alex said briskly. “You look like you need it.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Didn’t anyone teach you not to say things like that to women?”

He looked startled—a first for him. “I beg your pardon?”

OMG. He really didn’t know that? “Women don’t like to be told they look like crap.”

He frowned, his formidable mind obviously examining her statement from ninety-nine different angles. Eventually, he said, “That’s only logical if a woman is insecure about her appearance.”

“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.

Where did the geek go? And who was this guy?

She did a double-take, and his eyes were back to being as guarded and unaware as ever.

What. The. Hell?

* * *