Maggie punched the basement button and then made sure she stood opposite Shep. He looked very unhappy. Clasping her hands, Maggie internally rebelled against the wedding ring set. She kept running the bands around and around on her finger. The elevator felt claustrophobic to her. Shep Hunter filled it with his size, and with the incredible quiet charisma that radiated from him like a thousand glowing suns.
As soon as the doors whooshed open, Maggie strode confidently out of the elevator. Choosing a table and chairs near the window, on one side of the cafeteria, she sat down. Shep sauntered over and placed the briefcase on one of the empty chairs.
“Can I get you some coffee?” he asked. “If I remember right, you like it sweet and blond.”
Maggie sat very still. She looked up at him. She saw the struggle in Shep’s normally inexpressive face. His voice was low and intimate. Her flesh prickled. Oh, how tender a lover he could be! All that hard invincibility melted away to leave a man with breath-stealing sensitivity in its wake. Maggie found herself aching to be with that man once again. Stymied, and afraid of her own heart, she muttered with defiance, “Yes, coffee would be fine, thank you.”
He smiled a little at her petulance. “And if I’m reading you correctly, a shot of brandy in it to quell your nerves?”
Shutting her eyes, Maggie felt her heart blossoming beneath his gentle cajoling. No, Shep was still the old Shep she knew. Oh, how was she going to survive this? She was more afraid of him than the damned assignment!
Opening her eyes, she fearlessly met the warmth that now filled his blue gaze. “Right now, a shot of whiskey would be my choice.”
Nodding, he said, “I think I understand why. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Just watching him saunter over to the serving area, Maggie sighed. She was being nasty to him when he didn’t deserve it. Yet he seemed to be taking her in stride and not letting her attitude get to him personally.
When Shep arrived back at their table, he held a tray filled with food. He set a cup of coffee in front of Maggie, and then a saucer that contained a huge pecan sticky bun. He placed a second plate, piled high with fluffy scrambled eggs, six slices of bacon, hash browns and grits, on his side of the table.
“I’m not hungry,” Maggie said, pushing the plate with the sticky bun toward him as he sat down.
“I remember it was your favorite pastry,” he told her, unruffled, as he settled into the chair. The look on her face was one of puzzlement and heartbreaking sadness. With a one-shouldered shrug, he murmured, “But look, if you aren’t hungry, I’ll eat it.”
Not hungry? Maggie was starved for his touch. Even the briefest of ones. But Shep could never know that. “Thanks…you can have it.”
Scooping up a forkful of the eggs, he gazed across at Maggie as she wrapped her fingers around her coffee mug. “You still get cold fingers when you’re upset.”
Nodding, she took a sip of the coffee. “I switched to drinking tea a long time ago, Hunter. Being around you makes me want to have coffee again.”
His mouth curved in a slight smile. “So, is this good or bad, Dr. Harper?” he deliberately teased her. For a moment, Shep saw her shoulders, which were gathered with tension, begin to relax slightly.
“Being around you is like a bad cold returning.”
“Thank you.”
“Only you would take that as a compliment, Hunter!”
Chuckling, he spread some strawberry jam on his toast. “You haven’t changed at all, Maggie. I was wondering if you had, but I can see you haven’t.”
“Well,” she said under her breath, leaning forward so only he could hear her, “you haven’t, either.”
Gazing at her was like looking at a delicious dessert to him. “So, where does that leave us?”
“At odds with one another. As usual.”
“Eighteen years is a long time, Maggie.”
“And it’s like a blink of an eye, because you were the same then as you are now.”
“Thank you—I think.”
“Don’t start preening, Hunter, because it wasn’t a compliment and you know it.”
“How’s your coffee? Did I get the right amount of cream and sugar in it?”
Flushing, she refused to meet his gaze. Hands gripping her cup, she looked down at it. “Like I said, nothing has changed.”
“We’re older, if that helps?”
“Just more stuck in our same old patterns and personalities as far as I’m concerned,” Maggie retorted. She saw his gaze thaw considerably. When she realized he really wasn’t taking anything she said personally, she was stunned. Back then, he had. They’d fought all the time. Fought and made up. And the making up had been incredibly delicious.
“Maybe,” he said. “Life has thrown me a couple of curves. I hope I’ve learned from them.”
She sipped her coffee, feeling rebellious. Hunter always brought out her feistiness. Only he could. She wasn’t explosive like this with any other man she’d ever had a relationship with. Only around him. “Whatever the reasons, Shep, you bring out the worst in me. All we did then was fight, and from the looks of it, it’s starting up all over again.” Her nostrils flared. She hated it when her voice quivered with emotion as it did now.
Shep ate slowly, thinking about how he was going to handle Maggie on this mission. There was much more at stake here than she realized. He had to be the boss on this venture whether she liked it or not. At this moment, he wasn’t ready to tell her that. They had a day to get ready. One way or another, Maggie was going to have to bend to his way of doing things. Or else…
Three
“I’ll drive,” Shep said, heading around the car they would be using. The vehicle was parked in the underground garage of the OID building. The July morning was warm and humid, hinting of the high temperatures and humidity to come in the sultry afternoon hours.
“Hold your horses, Hunter.”
He turned, surprised at the warning in Maggie’s voice. As she stood near the passenger side of the car, Shep had a tough time keeping his gaze from devouring her, because to him, she looked beautiful in the comfortable khaki slacks and dark blue blouse she wore. The sleeves of the blouse were decorated with a touch of lace, giving her a very feminine look. Beneath the silk of the blouse he knew she wore her flak jacket, mandatory on this mission. He was wearing his beneath his white shirt and sport coat. Already the thing was beginning to chafe him, but he knew the wisdom of wearing it.
“What?” She was looking at him with her eyes narrowed. Shep knew that look. Halting, his hands on the top of the car near the driver’s door, he said, “What’s the problem?”
“How can you ask?” Maggie demanded. She tried mightily to ignore how handsome he looked this morning. His black hair was damp and gleaming from his recent shower. His jaw was scraped free of the shadow of beard that would inevitably appear in the afternoon hours. His eyes were bloodshot, and she wondered if he’d gotten much sleep last night. She sure hadn’t; too much of their tortured and passionate past had kept resurrecting itself before her closed eyes while she lay in bed. “Shep, this is not a replay of eighteen years ago. You think you know everything. You think that, as usual, I’m a hothouse violet incapable of being your equal.”
“Wait a minute—”
“No,” Maggie said coolly, locking her gaze on his frosty one, “it’s different this time, Hunter. And you are going to have to be a lot more flexible than you were two decades ago. Or else!” She held up the keys to the car and smiled a little. “I’m driving.”
“I suppose you’ve taken evasive driver’s training?”
“Yes.”
“And terrorist evasive training, as well?”
“I can see the surprise in your eyes right now, Hunter.” She gave him a smile that dripped with honey. “Yes. And just in case you ask me when, I’m certified for the next year. I just passed the two courses, for the fifth year in a row.”
One corner of his mouth flexed upward. “Maybe you have changed,” he admitted
sourly. “Okay, you drive for two hours, and then we’ll trade off in shifts. How’s that sound to you?” He decided to concede to her on this point, knowing there would be tougher battles ahead—things he couldn’t allow Maggie to do herself, for fear she’d get killed. Like Sarah.
Maggie was pleased that he was thinking in partnership terms right now. “That sounds fair and equitable, Mr. Hunter. Thank you for your consideration.” She saw his blue eyes glimmer with unease. And the slight downward movement of his hard mouth made her openly grin in triumph. “Nothing has changed at all with you, Hunter, through all these years. You are the same guy I knew way back when.”
“Some things don’t change,” he agreed grumpily. Shep moved around the rear of the car. As Maggie passed him, their hands brushed. How he ached to really touch her, to be able to slide his fingers knowingly up that smooth, warm flesh. He recalled how wonderful she had felt in his arms as they made torrid love to one another.
Once inside the car Shep forced his mind back to business, taking note of the special equipment in the vehicle. An onboard computer showed the map of the area where they would be driving, including all the rural routes and all the country roads. Georgia was full of country roads, and if they got into trouble, they would have to know which one to take to try and escape their pursuers. There were two different radios, one connected to the state police and the other a direct line to the FBI van, a mobile headquarters that would shadow their journey. After testing each instrument to make sure it was operational, he glanced over at Maggie as she strapped in with a special seat harness and adjusted the mirrors.
“I hate flak jackets,” she griped as she scratched beneath her right arm.
Shep nodded and shut the door. “They’re necessary.” He strapped himself in, turned on the computer and opened a laptop, which was plugged into the car lighter. The laptop was mounted where the glove box should have been and sat on a small movable table in front of him, fitting comfortably above his thighs. “Part of the game we’re entering,” he warned her, in case she had any thought of ditching it because it was uncomfortable.
Glancing at Maggie once more, he felt his heart beat hard, underscoring how much he still…still cared about her. Nightmarish visions of Sarah’s death suddenly filled his mind. Blinking hard, he removed the specter. No, he wouldn’t let Maggie meet Sarah’s tragic end. It had been his fault that his one and only partner at Perseus had been killed in the line of duty. His fault. Only his. Shep would be damned if Maggie got caught in the line of fire because of him. No, he had to control this mission from the get-go—whether Maggie liked it or not. Her life was at stake. He’d lost one woman he’d loved to a bullet. He wasn’t about to lose Maggie, too.
“Everything up and running?” Maggie asked as she switched on the car’s engine. The Sedan purred to life.
“Roger that,” he said, doing a double-check on their computer map. “I’ll give you the directions to get on—”
“Never mind,” Maggie said briskly, “I memorized the route to Savannah last night.” She proceeded to verbally give him the details of where they were supposed to drive. Their route had been set up by the vigilant FBI, and there would be cars with agents placed along certain milepost markers, where other roads intersected the freeway, so that the FBI could give them help sooner rather than later, if they called for it. The unmarked white van would always be on the freeway, ten miles behind them, to relay such information to the awaiting agents.
She saw his face darken as she reeled off the routes in perfect order. What was the matter with Shep? He should be pleased with her preparation for this mission. Instead, he was looking at her oddly. And he seemed more controlling than she last recalled. Not that Shep had ever been Mr. Sharing. Nope, not him. Smiling a little, she put the car in reverse and backed out of the space.
“I take that look to mean I got it right. So, let’s go, Colorado Cowboy.”
Taken aback by her confidence and aplomb, Shep snapped to the business at hand, though hearing her old nickname for him warmed him unexpectedly. His heart swelled with feelings that he brutally squashed. If anything would put them in danger, it would be a lapse of concentration on his part. It was too easy to look at Maggie and drink her in like a tall, cool liquid. She could always quench his fire, satisfy his needs—every last one of them. In some ways, they’d been made for one another. They fit together in a special way that Shep had never experienced since Maggie. He had loved Sarah but she’d been different in many ways. Sarah didn’t have those qualities of self-confidence and inner strength that glowed in Maggie like the sun itself.
As they turned onto the road that led to the OID, a redbrick building on a knoll surrounded with manicured green lawns, Shep automatically began to sweep his eyes from right to left. To him, surveillance was a mental game of sorts: look for the cars, memorize their color, their style and how many occupants in each. If they were being tailed by Black Dawn, this was the only way to sort it out. The Mac laptop was hooked directly into police computers, so they could run license plates. A set of binoculars rested between the two front seats, so he could read the numbers from a safe distance.
“I felt you go into alert mode,” Maggie said. She pulled the visor down and put on a pair of gold-framed sunglasses. They brought out the highlights in her hair, which she’d gathered in a chignon at the nape of her neck. Already too warm due to the high humidity that was common in the South for this time of year, she adjusted the air-conditioning.
“Yes, you did.” Shep studied her profile. She expertly wove the Sedan into morning rush hour traffic. Maggie had always been a good driver, he recalled from his days with her at Harvard. More memories poured back about her and her family. Her father bred race horses for the major tracks in the United States. He was a speed freak and Maggie had certainly inherited those genes. “Your father still racing horses?”
Chortling, Maggie nodded and said, “Yes, Dad is still trying to breed that Triple Crown winner. And Mom continues to go to her bridge parties every week.”
Nodding and continuing to look around Shep asked, “What about racing sprint cars? Does he still do that? He’s pretty old now, I’d think.”
Pleased that he remembered so much about her family, Maggie briefly met his thawing blue gaze. When Shep let his guard down—which wasn’t often—he was open and approachable. The hard line of his mouth had softened, too. This was the old Shep she knew from Harvard. How she desperately wanted him back! Not the hard, controlling warrior who thought he was in charge of this mission.
“Dad stopped racing sprint cars about ten years ago. Mother pressured him into realizing that as he got older, he needed to start taking better care of himself. She wanted to enter old age with him intact, not in tatters.” Maggie chortled at the thought of her mother. “My prim, steel-magnolia Southern mother had a real plan of attack to get my dad away from the sprint car races. I watched her apply that so-subtle pressure on him over a year’s time. It was like watching an army general plan strategy and tactics—and win.” She smiled fully as she saw Shep’s mouth turn up in as wide a smile as he ever gave.
“Southern women have their ways,” Shep agreed. He knew Maggie’s father was a Northerner, her mother a Southerner from Atlanta. “Does he still have his horse farm in Kentucky?” Because Maggie’s father was also a computer manufacturing tycoon, Shep knew the man never wanted for money. He was a billionaire. That status had afforded Maggie the best colleges in the country. But then, she’d earned the right to attend because she was a brilliant woman.
“Yep,” Maggie said. She kept most of her attention on the traffic in front and behind them as they moved out of Atlanta, heading in a southeasterly direction toward beautiful Savannah, near the Atlantic Ocean.
“And what about you?” Shep’s heart beat a little harder. He really wanted to find out about her life. Had she married and divorced? That information wasn’t available in the file he’d read on her. Did she have someone she loved now? Was she in a live-in relationshi
p? In his heart, he didn’t want the answer to be yes. Getting to see her again like this was such an unexpected yet wonderfully sweet surprise. Shep found himself jealous of her attention, and confounded by his emotions and reactions. He’d never thought that he could feel now what he had at eighteen years old.
Maggie felt heat stealing up her neck and into her face. Blushing again…With an internal groan, she realized that no matter what her age, she would always be a blusher. Maybe it was because of her red hair; she wasn’t sure. Hands tightening momentarily on the wheel, she said flippantly, “Me? I’m up to my rear in bugs at OID. I love my work. I like going into the field and hunting down and identifying an epidemic virus.”
“Just like your daredevil father, only you’re not racing Thoroughbreds, you’re doing something even more dangerous—looking for bacteria and viruses that kill people.”
“Are you griping? Or making a statement?”
He chuckled. The sound came from deep within his chest. “You haven’t lost your sense of humor, either.”
Smiling a little, Maggie moved the automobile into the fast lane and set the cruise control at sixty-five. “My sense of humor has kept me alive, Hunter.” She gave him a knowing glance. “Living with you for a year, I had to have a real sense of humor.”
Nettled a little by her wry comment, he dropped his brows slightly. Pretending to be checking their route on the onboard computer, he muttered, “It wasn’t all thorns and thistles, you know. Or is that all you remember?”
“What do you recall?” Maggie wasn’t about to step into that trap. No way. She was too frightened of her own feelings, too afraid her clamoring emotions would make her tell Shep how she really felt. Maggie didn’t want to put herself into that kind of vulnerable position with him. Besides, he’d never give her the same satisfaction. Shep was hard to read. And getting him to talk about how he felt—well, she might as well be a dentist pulling teeth!
The Untamed Hunter Page 4