by Cindy Dees
“My back doesn’t feel great, actually. It could have done without all that banging around in the Land Rover.”
“Can I take a look at it?” she asked gently.
“What? Are you a doctor or something?”
“Yeah, or something.”
His head jerked up. “Come again?”
She winced. She didn’t often admit her academic credentials to men. It always seemed to put them off. Apparently, intelligent, educated women put off the kinds of guys who were drawn to women who looked like her. The jerks. Praying under her breath that John didn’t fall into that class of men, she answered reluctantly, “Dr. Melina Montez, at your service.”
“What kind of doctor?” he bit out sharply.
“Medical. But I don’t practice. I do medical research.”
“For a pharmaceutical firm,” he affirmed neutrally.
She nodded. He didn’t sound tremendously put off by her education. Of course, the proof of the pudding would be if he tried to bed her again or not.
“Do you test medications?” he asked.
“I develop new ones, actually,” she corrected cautiously.
“Do you mistreat monkeys and run torture labs for rats?”
She laughed. “No. I don’t do any animal testing. I work with lots of boring chemical compounds in test tubes and use the occasional petri dish or Bunsen burner.”
He absorbed that with far more thoughtfulness than she would have wished for. At least he didn’t look completely put off by her profession. But she got the distinct impression he was making leaps of logic she could seriously do without him making just now. Did he always look for the angle behind what people said, the words unspoken? He certainly seemed to do it to her.
“Turn around,” she directed in her best doctor voice. “Let me see your back.”
He cocked an amused eyebrow at her. “You want me to take my shirt off?”
She pursed her lips. “You’d better not. It’s going to be distracting enough having to put my hands on you.”
He laughed quietly, a masculine sound of satisfaction.
Jerk, she thought without any real heat. She stepped up to him as he turned away from her. Even through the soft cambric of his shirt, his body heat scalded her palms as she laid them on his back. “Tell me where it hurts,” she murmured.
“My lumbar vertebrae.”
She nodded and slid her hands down heavy ridges of muscle to the small of his back. She expected to feel knots and corded muscles, but was surprised to feel smooth, supple tissue beneath her hands. “Any spinal injury?” she asked.
“MRIs showed hot spots on the L-3 and L-4 vertebrae where the bullet obliquely creased them.”
He’d been lucky, then. If a bullet had lodged in that part of his spine, he’d be paralyzed from the waist down right now. The potential tragedy of that was doubly poignant to her after having made love with him and felt all his vital power from the waist down. “How long ago were you shot?”
He recited emotionlessly, “Eight months ago.”
She frowned. That was plenty of time for the body to have laid in calcium deposits and strengthened the affected area. He shouldn’t still be in acute pain. But those painkillers back in the hotel said it all. “Did you lay off and rehab your back or did you keep pounding it after the initial injury?”
He was silent for a long time, as if reluctant to answer the question. Why? It wasn’t a hard one.
Finally, he exhaled slowly. “I walked and crawled on it for thirty miles right after I was shot. The bullet wasn’t removed for several days and it was pretty infected by the time a doctor saw it. I couldn’t really clean it out myself. It took some extra time to heal.”
Holy crap. Thirty miles? Shot in the back? Was that how far he’d been from a phone or help of any kind? Frankly, he was lucky to be alive. Bullet wounds were among the dirtiest of injuries. Not only was there the contamination from the lead, but then there was gunpowder, grease residue, dirt in an open wound and the deep, puncture nature of most bullet wounds to contend with. No bullet wound was supposed to go for days without treatment.
“Where in the world were you that it took so long to get medical care?”
“Just this side of hell.”
Hmm. That was certainly an evasive answer. But the shadows in his eyes were much more informative. She would bet the farm that the circumstances of his getting shot were floating through his mind and putting that grim line of white around his mouth. In an effort to get him to talk some more, or at least to lighten his mood, she asked, “How’d the other guy fare?”
John all but collapsed in front of her. The strong, competent, in-control man before her crumpled in on himself, crossing his arms over his chest in what almost looked like a hug of agony. What on God’s green earth could cause a man like John Hollister this much pain? Had he killed someone? If he had, she’d also bet it had been a bad guy, or had been an accident. He was far too honorable, too decent a man to have shot down anyone in cold blood with or without damned good reason.
“Talk to me, John. What happened? You can tell me. I’m a doctor. I’ll treat it with patient confidentiality if you need me to.”
The muscles beneath her hands turned to bands of tempered steel all of a sudden. He jerked away from her, spinning to face her. Whoa. Abruptly, his grief transformed into something dangerous. Dark. Lethal. He stared down at her with the blank, cold eyes of a killer. She recoiled sharply. Who was this man? He bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man who’d laughed and made love with her so recently. This man was terrifying.
“Don’t ask me that again,” he answered from between gritted teeth.
Frightened, she nodded up at him. Surely the man she knew and lusted after was in there somewhere. But he was buried very deep at the moment.
Apparently, he realized how badly he’d scared her, for he made a concerted effort to lower his shoulders. He even attempted a smile for her. He failed, and only produced a brief grimace, but it signaled the return of the moderately sane man behind the killer.
Her fear subsided somewhat, but she continued to eye him cautiously.
He ground out, “Thanks for your concern, Doc. But I’ve got it handled.”
Right. And she was the Easter bunny. He stepped away from her and headed around the front of the Land Rover.
“Get in,” he ordered from the other side of the vehicle.
Thoughtfully, she did as he said. He started the engine and pulled away grimly into the night.
Chapter 6
John didn’t know what time it was when he finally pulled off the dirt road and hid the Land Rover behind a thick clump of bushes and vines. Melina disappeared into the darkness to relieve herself with strict orders not to go far. Meanwhile, he pulled armfuls of the vines across the top of the Land Rover, further disguising its presence. When he was satisfied that even a thorough look at this spot wouldn’t reveal the vehicle, he moved their gear up to the front passenger seat, folded down the rear seats, and made a makeshift bed for them out of a couple blankets and her soft-sided suitcase full of clothes for a pillow.
He’d slept in worse. A personal favorite was the op he’d led in a Turkish sewer-running with raw sewage. It had taken him a month to get rid of the stink and longer to get the taste of that mission out of his mouth. But they’d gotten the kill, and one less psychopath was loose upon the world. And not one of his guys had complained about the conditions. It was the only approach to the target, so they’d sucked it up and gotten the job done. Good men. Dead men…
“Whatchya lookin’ at?”
He jumped violently at Melina’s cheerful voice behind him.
“Easy, Cowboy,” she murmured. “It’s just me.”
Afraid she’d do that disconcerting thing again where she looked into his soul and stripped him bare, he mumbled, “Which half of the bed do you want?”
“As in left/right or top/bottom?”
His gaze snapped to her in surprise. He commented cautiously, “Mos
t women find a good car chase and getting shot at too scary to be turned on by it.”
She shrugged. “Life’s short. Why waste a little privacy and a hot guy?”
He didn’t know whether to laugh at her forwardness or be depressed that he was only some convenient stud for her. Faintly alarmed that he actually gave a damn what she thought of him, he settled for arching an eyebrow. “Hot, huh?”
She flashed a coquettish dimple. “Want me to show you how hot?”
The laugh won out and he chuckled. “Naughty and she likes to play doctor. You’re some woman.” The kind of woman who could make an honest man out of him. In different circumstances, of course. Another time and place, before his life went to hell and he forgot to die before he went there.
She tossed her head, sending her honey hair bouncing around her shoulders. “That’s what they all say.”
The undertone of dishonesty in her voice caught his attention. Not a lot of men in her life, huh? A surge of possessive pleasure startled him. He might not be able to keep her for the long term, but for the moment, she was his. And because that seemed like enough for her, he wasn’t going to feel too guilty about taking advantage of her.
He took a step forward and laid his hands on her slender waist. His fingers didn’t quite span it, but he didn’t fail by much. “You don’t have much to do with men, do you?”
She blinked up at him in surprise. “Why do you say that?”
He gazed down at her, the thick blanket of night wrapping around them, hiding them from the rest of the world. “You’re not jaded enough. Which probably means you haven’t made the rounds of the dating scene a whole lot.” But then he cocked his head, studying her further. “Or maybe it’s that you’re so jaded you’ve checked out on romance completely. Us guys do a number on beautiful women like you. Mess with your heads. By the time you’ve been dating for a few years, you start to get cynical. You swear off men for the most part. Which camp do you fall into?”
Momentary surprise flickered across her face. Uh-huh. He’d gotten it right on the second guess. She was one of those women whom men wouldn’t leave alone. He murmured almost to himself, “But I think there may still be hope for you.”
“What in the world makes you think that?” she asked, far too casually.
So, she’d declared herself lost long ago, had she? “You looked into my eyes last night. And you let me look into yours. That’s a dangerous thing.”
“Dangerous?”
He shrugged. “It takes guts to let someone look into your soul.”
“You looked into my soul?” she asked, in what sounded suspiciously like dismay. “What did you see?”
“Honestly?”
She nodded up at him, her eyes dark and shuttered. Was she aware that her fingers were twisted in the front of his shirt, clutching almost violently at the cotton fabric? He reached up to save his shirt from a premature shredding, gently disentangling her fingers. “You can turn my shirt loose now.”
“You’re stalling,” she accused. “What did you see?”
He sighed. “Probably the same thing you saw in my eyes.”
“Which was?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She went still all over, absorbing that with a pained intensity that surprised even him-and he’d been expecting her not to like his observation. She spun away, staring out into the night, which was to say, she was looking at nothing. It was damned dark out here, and there wasn’t anything to see in this gloom anyway but a bunch of rocks and scrawny trees.
He opened the Land Rover’s rear hatch and said, “Climb in. We both could use some rest.”
“You’re not going to insist on one of us standing guard while the other one sleeps?” she asked in surprise.
“I’m a light sleeper.” Usually. Too bad he hadn’t been sleeping light the night of the ambush. Maybe a few more of his men would still be alive today if he’d heard the Taliban patrol sneak up on their position. Hell, maybe they’d all be alive. Sure, there’d been other guys standing guard. But he was the commander. Ultimately responsible for all their lives. And he’d been asleep on the job. Hell, unconscious on the job.
He blinked away the nightmare swimming before his eyes yet again, and instead of seeing his men’s bloody corpses, he was suddenly staring at a denim-cupped, juicy tush that would make any grown man sweat. He silently cursed himself as Melina crawled into the back of the Land Rover. He didn’t deserve even one second’s pleasure in this life while his men lay six feet under.
She took the passenger’s side of the back, and he took the driver’s side. They tossed and turned until they finally settled into positions of rough comfort. He propped his head and shoulders on her suitcase, and she curled up against his side, tucked under his outstretched arm, her head resting on his shoulder, her knee nestled far too comfortably against his groin. His bent knees flopped against the tire housing and the ribs of the truck bed only mildly dug into his back.
Damn, he could really use a pile of sleeping pills right about now.
And as soon as the thought entered his mind, there was no dislodging it. He couldn’t think about anything but the sweet relief of chemically induced nothingness coursing through his veins, wiping away everything in its path. Blessed oblivion, come to Papa…
Except a freaking doctor was lying on top of his arm, effectively trapping him in more than one way. Who’d have guessed the hot chick in a short skirt who’d sashayed into Pirate Pete’s was an M.D.? He swore under his breath at his rotten luck.
“John?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you scared?”
Hell yes, he was scared! Scared he couldn’t make it through the night without his pills, scared he’d get another nightmare and wake up screaming or worse, crying like a baby. The shrinks said the nightmares would go away with time, but it had been months, and they were as vivid as ever, dammit. He really didn’t need to embarrass himself in front of Melina.
Lying his ass off, he answered, “Nah, nothing scares me. Why? Are you?”
A small nod against his shoulder.
“Why?” He asked as gently as he could, infusing that simple question with as little interest as he could muster. Didn’t want to scare her off completely of talking to him. And after his nearly violent outburst with her earlier, he’d better soft-shoe around her for a while. He’d seen the stark terror in her eyes when she looked at him, and it hadn’t been pretty. He cursed himself yet again for putting that look in her eyes. He hurt everyone who got near him, dammit. He had no intention of killing her, too.
“I like being alive,” she murmured.
The words shot through like an electric shock. His men had liked being alive, too. Yet he’d gotten them all killed.
As misery washed over him, drowning him in its icy depths, she added in a whisper that he thought maybe he hadn’t been supposed to hear, “I don’t want to die.”
“Must be nice.” He jolted to realize he’d made that comment aloud.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind,” he replied hastily. He had no intention of explaining that being alive held no great appeal to him, personally. He might have promised Brady Hathaway that he wouldn’t kill himself until Mel was safely delivered to her final destination. But after that, he was checking out with all due haste. And that was that.
Melina could have all that perky, zest-for-living crap. But it did beg the question of why she’d made the comment. Why was she thinking about death? And why was she expressing her fear of it in terms that led him to believe she expected to die-and soon?
She snuggled in a little closer, her left hand roaming across his belly to lodge somewhere in the vicinity of his lower right rib cage. He’d get her to talk eventually. Her naturally honest and outgoing nature would betray her. She would either come to trust him enough, or he’d simply take advantage of a gregarious moment to get the truth out of her.
She was a hell of a woman. If he’d been planning to stay alive, he�
�d have to give serious consideration to giving up his career for her. He’d never been married-he was the kind of guy who didn’t do anything halfway, and he’d never figured out how to have as demanding and capricious a career as the Special Forces and still manage to do a marriage justice. But nobody stayed in his business forever. The ones lucky enough to live eventually got out of the service and settled down to something approximating normalcy…assuming they could tame their demons enough to sleep at night.
He’d decided long ago that the woman didn’t exist for whom he’d actually consider getting out of the business. But he hadn’t met Melina Montez when he’d made that decision. She was something special, no doubt about it.
Her fingernails scraped lightly across his side, and he sucked in his breath, startled into momentary ticklishness.
“The big bad commando is ticklish?” she laughed.
“Commandos are human, too, you know,” he retorted. “We have families and live normal lives and coach Little League and mow the lawn.” Not that he’d ever gone for that, but several of his guys had-very successfully and happily. Until he’d gone and gotten them killed.
He shoved away recollection of those agonizing marches up front sidewalks to tell Judy Gill and Samantha Criswell and Marley Ledbetter that their husbands were coming home-but in flag-draped caskets. It had been the hardest thing he’d ever done to hand that folded flag to Bobby Criswell, who’d been all of nine years old and trying so damned hard not to cry at his daddy’s funeral.
He swore violently under his breath. He needed something. Now. He didn’t care if it was carisoprodol or a bottle of vodka or a sledgehammer between the eyes…something, anything to take away the pain!
He shifted restlessly. Abruptly, the back of the Land Rover felt suffocatingly small, its sides closing in on him inch by inch.
“Are you okay?” Melina murmured.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just longer than the backseat of a Land Rover.”
“Do you want to shift more diagonally so you can stretch your legs out?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m sorry to disturb you. Go to sleep.” He managed not to snap at her…he thought.