by Gayle Wilson
“What about the vials we’re short?” she asked.
Hand on the latch, Quarrels turned back. Still looking at her speculatively, he yelled, “Mapes?”
Without any livestock to manage, the old man had been sitting on his heels, his back against the fence and his head lowered. At the sound of his name, he struggled to his feet.
“Yes, sir, boss,” he called, hurrying toward the table. “What you need?”
“Go get two vials and a couple of syringes out of the office. Boxes are on the second shelf. And don’t you let another animal get loose, damn it. You been slowing things down all day.”
“Will do,” Ralph said.
He changed directions immediately and headed across the enclosure toward the gate on the cabin side. Quarrels didn’t wait to see if his order would be obeyed. He obviously had little doubt that if he said, “Jump,” Mapes would ask “How high?”
The foreman slammed the gate behind him and ran toward his pickup. As soon as he climbed into the cab and closed the door behind him, Nicki turned and yelled to the old man, “I’ll get the vials, Ralph. You need to take it easy.”
The unexpected offer stopped Mapes in his tracks. It was almost possible to trace the conflicting thoughts in his face as he considered it. For a moment it seemed as if his fear of Quarrels might win out. Then, almost physically wilting as he made his concession, he nodded.
As Nicki walked past him, he leaned against the fence. She cast a quick glance behind her when she reached the other side of the enclosure. The pickup was disappearing up the chert road that led behind the ridge.
Whatever the significance of the helicopter, its daylight appearance outweighed the foreman’s usual concerns about overseeing the sampling operation. That could only be to their advantage.
If she could get into the office and make her search without anyone seeing her, maybe they would have some place to start the investigation Michael had been sent here to conduct. Whatever the outcome, just the possibility that she might finally get her life back was worth the risk.
Chapter Twelve
It took her less than a minute to locate the boxes that held the vials and syringes. The next five she spent opening the drawers of the desk and filing cabinets and rummaging through their contents. Each racing heartbeat counted off another second of the diminishing few she could dare spend on this quest.
She expected one of the hands to enter the cabin at any minute and find her rifling through the files. She had no doubt that any of them, with the exception of Michael or Ralph, would be only too eager to tell the foreman what she’d been doing.
Frustrated by her lack of success, she closed the last of the file drawers, straightening to look around the room. Where could Quarrels have hidden the map she was convinced must exist? Her gaze fell on the only other piece of furniture in the room—the bookcase that held office supplies and a wide variety of miscellaneous items, including the vials and syringes Mapes had been sent here to retrieve.
She crossed the room, reaching high over her head to feel along the top. Her straining fingers encountered something light enough to roll away from their touch. Stretching on tiptoe and groping along the back edge, she found a long paper cylinder.
Her hand closed over it eagerly. She pulled it down, unrolling the stock as her eyes again considered the closed door. She wondered how much warning she’d have if someone were to approach. Without a porch outside the threshold, maybe none.
By the time she’d figured that out, her fingers had the paper smoothed open, revealing the map she’d been looking for. It was a standard topographical print rather than the type of map a surveyor would provide. Which meant there were no boundary marks on it, she realized in dismay.
There were penciled notations, however, mostly numbers, in a variety of places. And those could mean anything, she decided. Or nothing.
Since they were only single and double digits, it was obvious they didn’t represent altitude. She concentrated on memorizing them and their relationship to the surrounding topographical features. Before she could complete the task, there was a sound from beyond the cabin door.
She released the edge of the map, letting it roll up by itself. Almost in the same motion, she threw the cylinder onto the top of the bookcase, praying it wouldn’t fall back down on her head.
As the door opened behind her, the hand she’d used to pitch the map into place dropped to close over the front edge of the syringe box. She pulled it forward, tilting the whole thing toward her as if she had been studying the contents.
“Charlie know you’re here?”
She half turned, looking over her shoulder without releasing the box. Sal Johnson stood in the doorway.
“We ran short of vials,” she said. “He sent me to get some.”
Johnson’s face reflected his skepticism. “Charlie sent you in here?”
“I think that chopper threw him,” she ventured, wondering if Johnson, who lived in the main cabin, might be more informed than the rest of them about the mission of that helicopter. If so, maybe he’d be inclined to share some of that knowledge with her. “He seemed in a big hurry to get out there and meet it.”
“Charlie knows which side his bread’s buttered on,” Johnson said with a snigger.
Nicki debated pursuing that, but decided in this case discretion might well be the better part of valor. She didn’t want to do anything that would make Johnson remember this encounter or, more dangerous, bring it to the attention of Quarrels. After all, the foreman hadn’t told her to come here. With his own lack of compassion, he would probably question why she had offered to take Mapes’s place on the errand.
“Gotta go,” she said, scooping a couple of vials out of the box. She slipped them into her shirt pocket and then grabbed two syringes from the adjoining box. She turned to find Johnson still watching her.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
“Guess not,” he said, moving away from the door. “Not as long as Charlie knows you’re here.”
Clutching the syringes, she walked across the office to the door. She opened it, aware that Johnson was following every move. She stepped through to the outside, turning slightly to pull the door shut behind her.
As she did, she made one last scan of the room. On the top of the bookcase the map lay at an angle, one end sticking out over the edge.
Not the kind of thing anyone else would notice, she comforted herself. Not unless they were looking for it.
Anyway, there was nothing she could do about it now. She closed the door behind her and began to run across the compound toward the enclosure.
“HERE. AND THEN HERE,” Nicki said, writing numbers on the map she’d sketched. “This one corresponds fairly closely to the location of the substation I told you about. I’m not sure I’ve ever been to the other.”
“So it could be the second substation,” Michael said, thinking out loud.
“Or something else,” she said. “Anything else, actually.”
She had looked up at his question, her eyes dark and wide in the low light of his trailer. The generator had been shut down for the night, so the only illumination was her small penlight.
Michael had held it while Nicki tried to recreate the map she’d seen this afternoon in the office. Since she was far more familiar with the property than he was, he was dependent on both her memory of the markings she’d seen, as well as her interpretation of them.
“Why don’t we go see what it is,” he suggested.
“Tomorrow?”
They had been assigned to check fence in the southeastern quadrant of the ranch. It wasn’t as if Quarrels or anyone else would know whether or not they’d done that.
All they had to do was ride out of the compound in the proper direction. As soon as they were far enough away from the ranch, they could double back toward the location Nicki had just marked on the sketch.
Michael wasn’t comfortable with Johnson having seen her in the office this afternoon. She had managed t
o hide her identity this long because she’d been careful to do nothing that would draw attention to herself. Now she had.
He also didn’t like the reappearance of the helicopter. Not when there were no blood samples ready to be picked up. Not when the craft appeared so openly over the compound, something Nicki had verified had never happened before. And he especially hadn’t liked Quarrels’s reaction to it.
All those things indicated that something on the Half Spur had suddenly changed. In an investigation like this, where they were pretty much stumbling around in the dark, change was not a good thing.
“The sooner, the better,” he said.
He had no doubt his instinct was right. The sooner he wrapped this up and got Nicki out of here, the better it would be for her.
He’d survived this long by never ignoring what his gut told him. The interior warning this time was as clear and unequivocal as any he’d ever had. The only difference was that the premonition of danger centered around Nicki. He understood why that was so, even if he hadn’t yet admitted it to himself.
If he screwed up, she was the one who would pay the price. And that was something he couldn’t afford.
“I’m not sure about the numbers,” she said, lowering her gaze to the drawing again. The pen she held hovered above the paper a few seconds until she made a tentative mark near the highest part of the terrain that surrounded the ranch.
“Maybe…here,” she said finally. It seemed almost a question.
The spot she’d marked was a more likely location for the lab Mapes had told him about, he thought. Isolated and remote, there would be little danger of someone from the ranch stumbling onto it by accident.
Not unless they had done exactly what Orbock had done and gone wandering around by themselves. Something Quarrels tried his damnedest to prevent.
“I think we ought to check there first,” he said.
“I’m less sure about this location,” she warned. “Johnson interrupted me before I could commit everything to memory. This is an estimate at best.”
Again her eyes lifted from the map to meet his.
“It’s more than we had yesterday.”
She nodded, seeming reluctant to take credit for how far she’d advanced their cause. As frightened as she must have been by the attack in Washington, it had taken real courage to do what she’d done this afternoon. It was past time for him to acknowledge that.
“Thanks for what you did today. It took guts.”
She shook her head, her brow wrinkling slightly as if she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Searching the office.”
The furrows cleared, but she shook her head again.
“I should have done it months ago. I told myself I’d come here to figure this all out. How Gettys and the attack were connected to this place. Instead, I just hid. I crawled into this rat hole and pulled it in over my head.”
“There’s nothing wrong with taking cover when you’re under attack.”
“But there is something wrong with never coming out again.”
“You have now. Just don’t start feeling too brave. Whether or not what’s going on here is connected to Gettys or to Washington, someone seems to have taken pains to make sure it remains undercover. We can’t know to what lengths they’ll go to keep it hidden.”
She nodded, but he wasn’t convinced she had bought into his concern. After months of being too frightened to make a move, she had obviously found action exhilarating. That heady sense of again being in charge of her own destiny could be addictive. And dangerous.
“We’ll start there in the morning,” he said, pointing to the location she’d called an estimate. It made sense to him that whatever they were most determined to hide would be as far removed from the main compound as they could manage, and this was. “We find nothing there, we’ll try the other locations.”
She nodded, flicking off the miniature flashlight. They stood together, unmoving in the sudden darkness.
Maybe she was waiting for her eyes to adjust. Or maybe, as he was, she was thinking about the last time she’d come here.
Once more he could smell the soap she’d used during her shower. There was nothing feminine about the scent, except that it was associated in his mind with the night he’d kissed her. Trying to punish her for not being what he’d thought she was. Now both the fragrance and the darkness evoked the memory of her body trembling in his arms.
She turned to head toward the door, and he realized that, despite everything, he didn’t want her to go. The courage that had prompted her to take Mapes’s place today was what had attracted him from the first.
From the moment Nicki had pulled that knife on him, defending herself against a man she believed had come to kill her, he had been interested. A strange aphrodisiac, perhaps, but one that, given his background, was probably inevitable.
As soon as she’d moved, his fingers had closed over her forearm. As he stopped her forward motion, he sensed rather than saw that she’d turned back to face him.
“What is it?”
He said nothing of what he’d been thinking. He exerted pressure on her arm instead, urging her to him.
Surprisingly, there was no resistance. She stepped into his arms as if there had been no conflict between them.
Despite the darkness, his mouth found hers, unerringly fastening over her lips as if by right of possession. Her response was immediate. Her hand lifted to the back of his head, her fingers threading through his hair.
It was not a reaction he had any right to expect. Not after what had happened the last time she’d come here.
He had touched her then in a fury that was almost despair. Neither of those was the emotion that tightened his groin tonight, creating an aching hardness that deepened as she turned within his arms, fitting her body more closely to his.
The incredible trust that response required, especially after what he’d done, created a knot at the back of his throat. And a determination that this time would be different.
He’d seen no proof that Nicki Carson was anything other than what she claimed to be. There had been no evidence in any of her actions that she was the kind of woman who would be involved in a call-girl ring. Colleen was right. The media stories could have been fabricated to discredit anything she might say about the senator.
As he reasoned his way to that conclusion, his fingers were already busy with the top button of the shirt she wore. When they’d succeeded, he began to press kisses along the satin-smooth column of her throat, his lips trailing downward into the opening his hand created.
There was no undershirt tonight. After her shower she had apparently pulled a clean shirt over her head in order to make the short journey to his trailer. As his fingers forced the last button through its hole, the front of the garment parted, exposing her nude body to his touch.
His hands cupped under the small, perfect globes of her breasts. He lowered his head, putting his mouth against the faint heartbeat between them. The texture of the fragile skin seemed sweetly, infinitely familiar, as if he’d kissed her there a thousand times.
His lips encountered a fine chain, lying within the valley between her breasts. The fingers of his right hand traced its delicate links to the heart-shaped locket they bore.
His first reaction was anxiety. Wearing the ornament seemed risky, given her disguise. If anyone saw it—
Even as the thought formed, he realized the ridiculousness of that particular concern. In order for anyone to see the chain, they would have to do exactly what he had done. They would have to undress her. If they did, then the chain and locket would not be the most revealing evidence of her femininity.
Releasing that worry, he turned his head, deliberately allowing his late-night whiskers to graze the skin of her breast. His lips found her nipple, provoking a quick inhalation.
He ran his tongue around and then over the nub, which tightened in response. He rimmed it with moisture once more before he raised his head to blow over the damp
ness he’d left on her skin. She shivered in response, her hands clutching his shoulders.
Her breathing faltered again as his mouth closed over the tip of her breast, suckling strongly. Suddenly she leaned into his touch, as if her knees had given way, and whispered a single syllable into the darkness.
“Yes.”
A permission which had already been given, in ways that required no verbal expression. That initial movement into his arms as if she knew she belonged there. Her fingers gripping his shoulders, short nails pressing so hard into bone and muscle that he was aware of them even through the fabric of his shirt. The shuddering breathing that mirrored every caress of his tongue.
It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. Not with the physical barriers that remained between them.
He wanted the hair-roughened, sweat-dampened skin of his chest moving over her breasts. The long, smooth muscles of her thighs lifting to meet his downward stroke. The soft sounds she made growing into breathless climax as their bodies exploded together. He wanted it all. Everything that soft “yes” had promised.
Straightening, he fumbled for the metal buttons at the front of her jeans. As he did, her fingers began to work at the ones on the chamois shirt he wore.
Too many clothes, he thought. Too long to remove them. Too long. Too long.
Impatiently, he stopped what he was doing and reached over his shoulder, grabbing a fistful of material and jerking his shirt off over his head. The white T-shirt came with it, despite the fact that both had been tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
When the night air touched his bare chest, the sensation reminded him of what he’d just imagined. The cool smoothness of her skin moving against the heat of his.
He closed the distance that separated them by pulling her into his embrace. For a fraction of a second, her body stiffened before the softness of her breasts collided with his chest.
He closed his eyes, fighting for control. “Too long” echoed in his consciousness, the connotation subtly different this time. Too long without a woman. Too long alone. Too long without this.