by Julie Rowe
Dozer added the body armor to the go-bag. He’d ordered it a few months back but hadn’t seen the need for her to wear it until now. He also opened his ammunition lockbox and packed three extra clips for his service weapon. He tossed in a fourth clip, just for fun.
After putting his backup gun into his ankle holster, he dug out the Bluetooth earpiece for his work phone. He didn’t change out of his jeans and Henley shirt, but he did shove his Homeland Security ID into his back pocket.
Rawley ended his call and stopped typing.
Dozer glanced at him. “Ready to go?”
“Almost. Since there are two locations, I’ve requested a dozen agents, plus a dozen more local assorted law enforcement personnel to form a security team.”
Dozer nodded. “Sounds reasonable. Just make sure they all know I’m riding herd on Dr. Rodrigues. If they get in my way, I won’t be nice about removing them.”
“With your list of injuries”—Rawley’s tone was scathing—“I don’t think that’s much of a threat.”
He was done taking Rawley’s shit. “What the fuck is your problem?”
Rawley rubbed his face. “These people are going to be a disaster to look after. When a bomb goes off, they go toward the danger. They don’t stop and consider the security risks, and they don’t look for follow-up bombs, attacks, or attackers. A dozen people looking after them at each site isn’t enough.” He paused for a moment, looked Dozer up and down, then continued. “And you, you’re as bad as they are.”
“These people aren’t law enforcement. Their focus is on looking after public health. They go to the bomb site, hospital, or refugee camp because that’s their job. Outbreaks like this one are their responsibility. Our job”—Dozer gestured at himself and Rawley—“is to keep them as safe as possible while they go about their work. We don’t get in their way. We don’t bitch to our command or theirs. We help. If you can’t or won’t do that, say so now. Rodrigues will need to request a new liaison ASAP.”
“Or you reclaim the job yourself,” Rawley suggested with a smug smile.
“What part of I’m not officially here did you not get?” Dozer demanded. “I don’t have medical clearance to go back to work yet. So I’m doing the only thing Dr. Rodrigues will let me do, and that’s protect her back. Unofficially.”
“What does that even mean?” Rawley asked, not backing down an iota.
“It means that I don’t get to do any investigation or coordination or speak for Homeland Security. I’m not going to flash my ID around or offer sound bites to the media. As far as you, the entire HS department, and the public are concerned, I’m in an apartment somewhere slowly losing my mind to boredom.”
“You’re not going to shove your way back into the liaison role? Really just sit back and passively watch for threats?”
Dozer threw his hands in the air and said to the ceiling, “I think he’s finally got it.”
“If you’re not tagged medically fit, how are you here, doing what you’re not supposed to be doing?”
Was the guy really this dense?
Dozer took in a deep breath. Maybe using small words would help. “I’ve been working with the CDC for several months now. In that time, none of their employees have ever given less than one hundred and ten percent. They serve America and the world. They’re willing to put their lives on the line in the interest of public health. They’ve earned my respect. They’ve earned the director’s respect. Yeah, I’m beat up. My chest hurts, since my ribs are still knitting themselves back together, but it’s nothing that will slow me down or hamper me from ensuring Rodrigues is safe from any outside safety concerns.”
“Outside?”
“Bacteria and viruses are out of my league.” He studied the man’s confused, frustrated face. “Are we good now?”
Rawley finally nodded.
Dozer picked up his go-bag and left the room.
Narrow-minded, ambitious prick. A prick who could cause a lot of trouble if he didn’t lose his shitty attitude toward the people he was supposed to protect.
The hallway had a variety of people in it in small huddles, their go-bags at their feet. Dozer counted ten.
He made his way past people, knocked on Carmen’s doorjamb, and stuck his head inside. “How’s it going?”
She had changed out of her business attire and into surgical scrubs, including what looked like combat boots on her feet. Scuffed, scratched, and scarred boots. She looked damned sexy in an outfit that was designed not to give that impression—it was the woman who was sexy, not the clothes.
“Need any help?” he asked her.
She pointed at the far wall. “Could you grab those two bags over there?” She pocketed a small tablet, then zipped up the bag on the desk and lifted it. “Let’s get to the airport. We can pick up the rest of our people along the way.”
Our people. He basked in the glow of the warm fuzzy feeling those two little words produced. “Got a hazmat suit for me?”
“Yes. Henry is bringing it up.”
A few minutes later, Henry arrived with another large duffel bag. By that time, the hallway was full of people and their gear, including Rawley.
CDC vans were waiting to take them and all their gear to the airport. He said little but followed Carmen wherever she went. As they trooped into the parking garage, she said, “It’s like I have a huge, armed shadow.”
Dozer smiled. “That is exactly what it should feel like. You’re not going anywhere without me.”
She sucked in a breath, her mouth pulled down and her eyes tight. As if he’d punched her in the stomach.
What the hell was going on with her? “Carmen?”
She put up a hand, palm facing him. “No. Just…no.”
When she turned away as if that moment of pain hadn’t happened, he discovered he’d had enough of this pretending shit.
He leaned in close so he could whisper in her ear. “We need to talk on the plane.” He was sick and tired of her putting up barriers between them. Their chemistry was as mind-blowingly combustible as it was the first day they met, and they’d had the hottest sex he could remember last night, but now she wouldn’t talk to him.
She didn’t look at him or say anything, but her whole body became rigid with what he was guessing was anger. Good. Maybe if he pissed her off enough, she’d yell at him. That would be better than the silence he’d been receiving for months.
Their ride to Orlando was a commercial flight, but the only people on board were Carmen’s people. He made sure to sit next to her. Folks settled all over the plane, and since they didn’t fill it, little groups sat together with space between them.
No one sat immediately behind or in front of Carmen’s and his seats. If they kept it down, he might have time to figure out what was bothering her.
After they took off, he nudged her shoulder. “Are you going to explain why you flinch every time I say something that even remotely refers to a relationship?”
And there it was again: another wince.
“Are you scared of me?” he asked in a low, tense tone, trying to keep his volume down.
“No.” Her answer was knee-jerk fast. “It’s just…complicated.”
“It seems fairly simple to me,” he muttered. “I’m hot for you—you’re hot for me…”
She chewed on her bottom lip.
“What am I missing?” he asked.
She sucked in a deep breath, let it out, then turned her head to meet his gaze. “How old am I?”
For a moment he was too surprised at the question to think straight. He settled on exasperation. “That is a fucking trick question.”
She smiled that irritatingly sad smile again. “Yes, it is, but the trick isn’t on you. It’s on me. How old am I, John?”
Shit. She was using his first name. She only ever used his first name when he was in trouble. The kind of trouble no man wanted to be in. “I don’t know.”
One brow rose. “You never looked it up in my file?”
“W
hy would I?”
“Curiosity?”
He leaned closer. “Your age isn’t what holds my interest.”
She stared at him steadily, unmoved by his attempt to flirt. “An estimate would be fine.”
“You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “Fine, but I want your assurance you won’t get angry with my answer, no matter how off the mark I am.”
“I won’t get angry. You have my word.”
Of all the questions a woman asked a man, this one was completely unfair. They’d met nine years ago, and back then, she was fresh out of medical school. She even joked about still having a price tag attached. She wasn’t just a doctor, though; she specialized in infectious diseases. That would add a few years to her schooling.
Her hair was silver and all-natural. She’d had more than a couple of gray hairs when he first met her. Now, it was almost solid silver. Yet her face didn’t match the age her hair tried to tell you she was. No wrinkles. A few laugh lines, but not many. Not enough.
Maybe she was one of those geniuses who finished high school early. So, maybe she was seventeen when she started university. That would mean at least eight years in medical school, plus nine years since they met.
“Thirty-four.”
She smiled slowly. “That’s not bad. Most people guess older, which, when I tell them my actual age, makes for a lot of awkwardness.”
Everything she said punched him in the stomach. “How old are you, Carmen?”
“Thirty.”
“That would make you…twenty-two when I met you?”
“Twenty-one. I had my birthday while we were running for our lives that…night.”
“Twenty-one.”
Nine years ago, he’d been twenty-nine, nearing thirty, and she’d been… Holy fuck. “You had boyfriends before Afghanistan, right?”
Chapter Thirteen
4:22 p.m.
Carmen watched John out of the corner of her eye and snorted. “When would I have had time?” She shook her head. “I was years younger than all my fellow students. They weren’t interested in me, and the one or two who were, well, I had a well-developed sense of who was a creep and who was safe.” John Dozer hadn’t rung a single warning bell. Her gut had said he was safe, but he hadn’t been.
He stared at her now like she’d grown an extra arm.
“You were my first in all respects.”
His silence was becoming uncomfortable. Finally, he said, “That explains a few things.”
“Oh, which things?”
He shifted in his seat, like he was a small child trying to pass along a handwritten note. “Your hesitation.” His gaze heated. “I almost had to coax you into that first kiss.”
He was reliving the moment in his head. So was she. Despite the danger and dirt they’d been in, he’d damn near lit her on fire. “I wanted to kiss you, John. I just didn’t know how.”
He glanced at her hair, and the heat in his eyes died. “Why me?” His question came out hoarse and strained.
She blinked. “I thought we were going to die, and…I wanted…you.”
He swore and rubbed his face with both hands. “You should have told me.”
He could not have just said that. “When, exactly, should I have done that? While we were running from whoever was trying to kill us, or when we were hiding in that bombed-out building unable to speak for fear of discovery?”
He leaned in so close she could feel his lips move next to her cheek. “I made love to you in that building.”
“Yeah,” she said in a drawl. “It was so romantic.”
He reared back. “You didn’t want—”
“Oh, I wanted, all right, but you”—she poked his chest with one index finger—“left out some personal information of your own.”
He frowned. “I did?”
Seriously?
“Your marital status, asshole.” The words sounded like grit between her teeth.
He paused, his focus inward, and then his expression cleared. “Holy shit, that was right before the divorce papers went through.” His gaze sharpened on her face. “How did you know about that?”
“Martin.” The man’s name came out of her mouth like it tasted bad.
“That sneaky, sick, son of a bitch,” John said.
“No, Martin is an honest, sneaky, sick, son of a bitch. You…you weren’t honest.” She let the implication that he and Martin shared the rest of those attributes build a wall between John and her. “You should have told me you were married.”
“My marriage was over. The only place it existed was on paper.”
“Which is more of a promise than I ever had from you,” she said, going nose to nose with him.
He bared his teeth at her. “I made lots of promises to you. Promises I wanted to keep, except you took off without any warning. I never had the chance to tell you about my failed marriage or anything else.”
“You should have told me before we had sex.” The words came out of her mouth in an angry hiss.
“Things were chaotic. I was terrified we were both going to die, and in the moment…I just wanted to make it good for you.” He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against his seat. “That was a shit day none of us planned for.” He ran a hand down his face. “And I sure as hell wasn’t prepared for what you do to me.”
“So…it’s my fault?”
“No, I had no intention of…” He floundered for a word but couldn’t seem to find it.
“You flirted with me.” She made it a statement.
“It wasn’t serious. You were nervous around me and the rest of the regular soldiers. I was trying to establish a rapport so you wouldn’t freeze if I had to shout an order at you.”
“So you were just doing your job? Really?”
“That’s not what I—fuck.” He punched the seat in front of him. It attracted the attention of several people around them.
He glared at them until they looked at something else, then leaned as close as his seatbelt would allow. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low and lethal. “I wanted you from the moment I first saw you. It was like the fucking sun walked into the room, so beautiful and radiant I knew I should stay away from you. You deserved a decent man, not someone with the amount of blood I had on my hands.”
He lifted them up and looked at them briefly. “Still have on my hands.” He lowered them and kept talking. “Then, that bottom-feeder Martin went after you, and I couldn’t stay away. Every moment I spent with you just made me more and more hungry for you. When that IED went off, I didn’t know if we were going to make it. I hoped and prayed that I could keep you safe, but there was an equal chance we’d get shot.”
He paused to suck in a breath, as if he’d run a long-distance race. “I had every intention of telling you about my miserable marriage when we got to safety, but we were separated as soon as we made it back to base, and then you were gone.”
She considered his arguments. She didn’t like them, but she couldn’t pretend they didn’t make sense. She hadn’t told him her chronological age until now, either.
“I need to know something,” he said.
“What?”
“Did Martin bother you?” He looked her over. “Did he touch you?”
“I told you—I kicked him in the balls.” That wasn’t the only thing she’d done. “I also told him that if he tried another stunt with me, I would show him what an autopsy was like from the perspective of the corpse.”
The smile that slid over John’s face was both delighted and naughty.
She cleared her throat. “He left me alone after that. Everyone did.” She hesitated, then asked, “Why didn’t you try to get in touch with me? Afterward, I mean.”
“I couldn’t. As soon as I was medically cleared, I was given a long-term assignment working with a Special Forces unit and an Afghan warlord. I was in-country for four months. By the time I got back, you were back in the States. I did try to reach you through the CDC, but I was to
ld that due to the trauma you suffered in Afghanistan, you wanted no contact with anyone who’d survived the mission.”
“What?”
He gazed at her. “You didn’t know about that?”
“No.” She recalled talking to her then-supervisor about how emotionally taxing the assignment had been. How losing so many of the people on her team to an IED had left her emotionally compromised. “But I could see my supervisor at the time, Dr. Francine Setterer, issuing that kind of response to anyone trying to find me.” She looked away. “I was in rough shape for a while there, emotionally.”
“Fuck.” John said it softly, but she still heard it. He looked off into space for several seconds before speaking again. “What are the chances…?” He looked at her with wide, hopeful eyes. “We could start over? I’d like to find out where this thing between us could go. For real. No secrets, no lies, just…us.”
That was a tall order. “When I found out you were married, I was angry and embarrassed and hurt. I can’t just pretend it never happened. Can you pretend it never happened?”
4:41 p.m.
He thought about the years between when he first met her and when he’d found her again. He’d done some horrible things in the name of freedom and justice and been places he didn’t want to ever think about again. Places full of pain and death. He wasn’t the same man he’d been nine years ago. Back then, he wanted to take on the world; now…he wanted a home, a partner in life, a lover who understood him and wanted him just as badly as he wanted her.
The pain on Carmen’s face told him her wounds hadn’t closed. Wounds he’d ripped wide open. Maybe his explanations put a bandage on them, but they sure as hell needed more time to heal.
So what the fuck could he do?
Something thick clogged his throat, and he had to clear it before he could talk. “No, and worse, I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen.” She pressed her lips together so tightly the skin around her mouth turned white. “Look, let’s just figure out this assignment. After that, we can talk again and decide what we want… Set some…boundaries.” Don’t give up on us.