Just as his mouth went to her cheek, she pulled back. Put a few feet of distance between them. Cleared her throat. Basically threw up every emotional wall between them. In a flash she morphed from soft and open to all business.
“Let me check your injuries.” She lifted his shirt again. Acted as if the tear along his side was the most interesting thing in the world.
The moment came and went, leaving him with a familiar kicking in his gut. She shut down, pushed him out. The cycle of hot to cool left him reeling. But this wasn’t the time to argue it out or debate her communication skills. He needed to be on top of his game and get her out of the danger zone before they could dissect every moment of their fucked-up relationship.
Until then, if she wanted to stay serious and on task, he’d give her that. “You have two minutes.”
“Fine.” With minimal supplies, she cleaned the wound. Patted and disinfected. Poked until he suspected the jabbing went beyond actual medical assistance.
He refused to squirm. Concentrated on keeping watch instead. “If you insist on doing this—”
“I do.”
“Then I’m going to use the downtime to ask you a few questions.”
“Of course you are.”
He could hear the smile in her voice but didn’t let it sidetrack him. “Tell me about this expedition.”
She peeked up at him for a second before returning to whatever she was doing that seemed to cause more bleeding than it stopped. “The cover is the documentary.”
“On that old hiking incident.” He now had heard more about this dead hiking group than about her real reason for being here. That wasn’t annoying or anything.
“Right.” She stepped back and frowned at his side. “The bullet went through but you need stitches.”
“No time.” He gestured at her backpack and was surprised when she handed it to him. Before she could change her mind, he pulled out the packet of sealing powder. “Use this.”
She stared at the envelope but didn’t take it. “Do you want to die?”
“Not especially.”
“Then stop fighting me.”
“You’ve been in the field for your work. I’m sure the medical person who comes along has some version of this.” He turned her hand palm up and put the sealant package there. “It will form a scab until we can get somewhere safe and take a closer look.”
“No one shoots anyone while I’m in the field.”
He decided not to remind her about the last two days. “Just do it.” He met her glare with one of his own. “And keep talking about the real reason you’re here.”
After some head shaking and general mumbling, she applied the powder to his skin. It immediately mixed with the blood to close the wound. But she kept dabbing. “We were conducting other experiments while we’re here. They—”
“Who is ‘they’ in this context?” he asked, because that struck him as a pretty integral piece of information.
She shrugged. “Someone like you. Covert types.”
That really didn’t help him at all, but he wanted her to give him whatever intel she had, so he stopped after one question. “Ah, I see. Go on.”
“There was a lot of activity at an old work camp way up north in the Urals. The place is icy and desolate. It’s one of those camps that’s not supposed to exist and certainly isn’t supposed to be active now, but there was a lot of in and out. Trucks and personnel.”
With the adrenaline rush gone and the tension ratcheted down to nonlethal levels, his muscles started to burn. He leaned hard against the rocks behind him in an effort to conserve energy. “Military.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “Armed men protecting scientists.”
Not the answer he expected. And he hated that. “What?”
“The camp-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-exist appeared to be a place to conduct experiments. Then it blew up. A month later word leaked that an entire village of Nenets died.”
He knew a little about the region. Enough to get by when an assignment called for him to travel to Russia, but that word didn’t jar his memory. “I don’t understand.”
“An ethnic group indigenous to the northern Urals, near the Arctic area of Russia. Mass deaths without explanation. Russian authorities blamed it on some sort of delayed reaction to a meteor strike from 2013.”
He remembered something about the meteor strike and all the destruction. He’d been undercover in Germany at the time, but that sort of news played everywhere. Splashed on the front page of every newspaper.
Still, the explanation raised lots of red flags. “That sort of delay doesn’t sound even a little believable.”
She pocketed the empty packet. “I still need to sew this up.”
He twisted a little to get a better look but stopped when he felt his skin tug and pull. “It’s fine.”
“I’m the one with the doctorate, so I decide.”
Talk about convenient. “Your degree isn’t in medicine.”
“As between the two of us, who gets to be called doctor?”
“That’s a terrible argument.”
She shot him a triumphant smile. “It’s also a winning one.”
“Once the powder seals there is a whole process before you can stitch me up. You can’t just grab a needle and start ripping into my skin.” That was sort of true, so he went with it. “Keep talking about the expedition.”
“They—and by ‘they’ I’m still referring to some sort of intelligence type like you—worried Russia was developing a new weapon.” She pocketed the rest of the medical supplies and zipped up her backpack. “Something that has a lot of people who do what you do for a living very scared, which was why I agreed to take the position and come up here and run some tests.”
Tasha hadn’t briefed the team on any of it. One more reason mandatory time off sucked. Now they’d have to double-time it to get caught up and set the network in place to investigate all of these allegations. He hated being out of the loop and one step behind.
Then there was the issue about the source of the intel. Someone hired this team. The “they” Cara kept referring to. Likely some idiot at the CIA who thought endangering untrained scientists was a good way to get the needed intel.
He’d yell about that later. Right now he had to pull the rest out of her. With her practical nature and adherence to rules, she didn’t exactly volunteer information. “Go on.”
“Specifically, I’m here to check for radioactive materials, any indications of chemical weapons.” She wrinkled up her nose. “The usual.”
“Shit.” That was some rough stuff. Just hearing about the possibility sent a new flash of energy pumping through him. No time to recuperate and analyze. They needed to move . . . and that meant keeping her on the ground with him until he could get the needed new samples. Bringing another geologist in from the U.S. didn’t make much sense when they had one standing with them on Russian soil. But that didn’t mean he liked the idea. “Why did you have to be chosen for this task?”
“I’m going to ignore the part where that sounds a little insulting.”
He hadn’t even realized he’d said the words out loud. “I didn’t mean you weren’t qualified.”
“This area, all of the Urals, is sort of a geologist’s playground. It’s rich in coal and minerals. Gold, precious metals, oil. You name it.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “I’ve been here several times. Spent a lot of time in and around Perm, a city to the south. That experience got me on the team.”
Reid had been scanning the area during their entire talk. He took a second and looked over the top of the rock pile. A new attack could come from any direction. But the firmness of her tone brought his attention zipping right back to her. “You don’t need to read your résumé to me.”
“Kind of feels like it.”
There was no way to win that battle, so he didn’t even try. “Did you find any evidence of weapons?”
The answer to that question would determine how much risk he took with he
r safety. His inclination was to keep that probability as close to zero as possible, which meant limited field time and not one second spent alone.
“It’s not that easy.” She held up a hand as she bit her bottom lip. “Okay . . . I’m not sure how much you know about this.”
He felt a lecture coming on. In this case that might not be a bad thing, since he knew almost nothing about geology. “Talk to me like you’re explaining the science to a kid for the first time.”
“Radiation is all around us. Some of it occurs naturally. Some is man-made. Then we have the problem that plutonium plants in this area used to dump radioactive waste into the surrounding rivers.”
“That sounds bad.” But not even a little surprising. Governments thrived on secrecy. The former Soviet Union, with this vast swath of unchartered land along the Urals and through Siberia, had a geographical advantage in the secrecy game.
“Like, three-legged cows bad.” She slipped the pack over her shoulders as her gaze wandered over the open land. “On top of that there were a series of explosions which further polluted the entire region. That was back in the forties and fifties, and the testing still puts the exposure above normal limits on certain areas.”
He was starting to wonder why anyone came to this part of the world. “Don’t drink the water. Got it.”
“My point is that field testing equipment doesn’t always give the whole picture. The plan was to gather samples from a wide area and then test them at the makeshift lab in our compound.”
He searched his memory. Ran through the mental layout of the compound. “I didn’t see a lab.”
“We can add that to our list of problems, because there was one and now it’s gone.”
“Great, now we have more things to find.” The fact that the Alliance wasn’t already on the ground and moving on this problem had his temper ticking up. “So, to sum up in nonscience language, you had only started your work when the attack—or whatever—happened out here. Now your team, equipment, and samples are missing.”
“That’s pretty much it.” She nodded. “Yes.”
“Which suggests someone doesn’t want you and your team investigating.” There was no other conclusion to draw. She was too smart not to get that, and he wasn’t in the mood to make up less end-of-the-world-sounding scenarios to explain the reality away.
“That’s how I see it.”
“Who hired you?” That was the key. The one piece he needed to know and get back to Tasha so she could start banging heads together.
“Cliff.”
This was the wrong time for practiced ignorance. “You know what I’m asking, Cara.”
“The assignment came through the U.S. Geological Survey. A government job.” She wrapped her fingers around the strap to her backpack. “I didn’t find out the real job until I had been interviewed, vetted, and was on the plane.”
Not the way the Alliance did business. Not the way anyone should, but he needed to take the assignment-handling up with Tasha or the CIA regional director. Someone who wasn’t Cara.
He searched his mind for the right words to ask the next question but nothing came to him. In the end he went with straightforward and clear. He didn’t have the energy or time to do much else. “Do you remember any other details about the night of the attack?”
Her grip on the material in her palm tightened. “It’s a blur. Pieces come back, like I have this vision of Cliff shredding the inside of our tent with a knife.”
For some reason that information shot through Reid. Pierced something deep and hollow inside him. “You shared with him.”
She tilted her head a bit. “Do you have a question you want to ask?”
That was a dare and he didn’t take it. “Nope.”
“It was work only.”
Relief whooshed through him. He pretended it had more to do with them evading capture than anything she’d said. “Right.”
“But I can date whomever I want.”
The words sliced into him. “We’re not going to argue about that now.”
“As if you haven’t dated anyone since we broke up. Parker already said otherwise.” She shifted to stand next to him. Leaned against the rocks and looked out over the landscape. Didn’t give him eye contact.
“You left me.” She’d already driven that point home and now had him saying it. Wasn’t that fucking great?
She turned to face him. “Reid.”
It was not the time or the place for this. They needed to move. Focus on the job. Get her to safety then double back for her team. Still . . . all good in theory. In practice, he wanted to be clear that she ripped them apart. Her, not him.
“We were engaged and you got up one day, packed everything and took off.” Visions of half-open drawers and stray socks littering the floor filled his head.
He could call up a memory and see the position of every stick of furniture and every item she’d taken with her. Not much. Neither one of them collected things. He could fit most of his life into two oversized duffel bags. That probably said a lot about him. So did the fact she never unpacked the boxes of books she brought with her when she moved into his place before she took off again.
“You know the reality of what happened.”
Women always said things like that. Expected him to pick up cues and understand arguments that made absolutely no sense to him. This time he wanted the long version of his sins. “Explain it to me.”
“I tried to talk to you back then. I wanted us to pull back, stay engaged while we did the sort of dating normal couples do.” She lifted her hand as if she wanted to touch him, but then let it fall again. “Make sure we were compatible. Admittedly, that would have been hard with your schedule but I wanted to try.”
He remembered every argument she made. Each one boiled down to the same thing: I want out. “No, you wanted to put off the wedding.”
“I was asking for the time for us to get to know each other.”
Excuses, nothing more. “You suggested we live apart.”
“Are you not hearing me?” Her voice rose, getting louder with each word. “God, Reid. What I felt for you . . .” Her voice faltered and she stopped.
“What?” He didn’t want to care about the rest, but he did.
“It was so big. So overwhelming.” She shook her head. “I fell so hard, so fast.”
She could not sell that. Not to him. “That’s not true.”
“There I was, going under, and I didn’t even know if you really loved me.”
“How can you say that?” He was not shouldering the blame for that. He’d told her he did. Repeatedly.
She’d said she loved him. Cried about how she worried they’d rushed into the engagement and made a mistake. Asked him all those questions that didn’t really matter for their future. He’d tried to reassure her, but she still left.
Later, when he turned over every sentence, every minute, while sitting in the shadows looking at a sneaker she left behind, he decided she’d never felt anything for him but sexual attraction. Even that had been fleeting. Because she hadn’t just walked away. She cut off all contact.
But now, looking at her, seeing the pleading in her eyes and stark pain written on her face . . . “What are you not saying?”
“It—us—took over everything. Every part of my life.” She gulped in a huge intake of air. “When it came down to talking things through, actually communicating and fitting our lives together, we couldn’t.”
“Did we really try?” Sure, he hadn’t seen the need to discuss every little thing about his past. Still didn’t get why she couldn’t accept the man in front of her and leave it at that.
“Maybe not enough.” She shook her head. “I should have stayed and fought, but I really thought I was the only one fighting.”
“I don’t understand how you can say that.” But he could tell from the hurt in her voice that she did.
“You refused to see that anything was even wrong.” Her voice returned to a safer whisper. “This cra
zy high-adrenaline situation happened. We got whipped up and excited. I kept thinking we jumped in too quick, made a rash decision.”
“And you still see our relationship that way.” He didn’t have to ask because he knew the answer.
“I don’t know what to think.” She glanced away, talked into the wind. “But I didn’t go in looking for a way out. The doubts and worries that we made a bad decision came and I couldn’t shake them off.”
Every word cut and shredded him. “You.”
She looked back at him and frowned. “What?”
“You mean you made a bad decision.” He stood up straight, putting full weight on his fatigued muscles and clamping down on a groan that rattled up his throat.
“Us.”
“I didn’t ask you to marry me as part of some sort of adrenaline afterburn.” The idea sounded ridiculous to him. He dealt in danger and death every day and had proposed exactly one time in his entire life.
Right when he would have walked around the rocks and restarted their journey, she put a hand on his arm. That’s all it took to stop him. All it took to thaw the deep freeze that had settled inside him when she left.
“You act like I didn’t feel anything for you.”
The lukewarm statement made his head pound. He had to force his body to go numb, to not feel anything. “You did? Lucky me.”
“You have to agree the situation back then was intense and unreal.”
The words clicked inside him. Threw a switch that he could not turn off again. “You were the one woman I ever proposed to. So that we’re clear, it was pretty fucking real to me.”
And that was all he wanted to say on the subject. He told her he loved her, she said it back and then a few weeks later ended it. Gave him this speech about how they didn’t want the same things and how the danger colored everything.
She’d moved on. Fine, she could keep on walking . . . just as soon as he got her back home.
“Reid, I need you to know—”
“No.” He moved away from her when she went to touch him.
Actually, he had one more thing. It crept up on him and demanded he say it out loud. “For the record, I have dated since you. Parker didn’t make that up.”
Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover Page 11