by Olivia Gates
Ten minutes later, he felt secure enough to turn his senses back to the man. Burke was keeping up with him. The rhythm of his feet said he was running faster than Harres to make up for the difference in the length of their legs. So not only an agile and ready fighter, but in great shape, too. Good news. He hadn’t been looking forward to hauling the guy to the sand car if he collapsed. But it was clear there was no danger of that. Burke was pacing himself superbly. No gasping, just even, deep inhalations and long, full exhalations.
And again something…inexplicable slithered down Harres’s body as those sounds seemed to permeate the night, even with his own ears being boxed by the wind. The sensation originated from somewhere behind his breastbone and traveled downward, settling low, then lower.
He gritted his teeth against the disturbance as they reached his sand car. He jumped inside the open-framed, dune-buggy-style four-wheel vehicle. “Get in behind me.”
Without missing a beat, Burke slid behind him on the seat, spread his legs on either side of Harres’s hips, plastered his front to his back and curled himself around him as if they’d been doing this every day.
A shudder spread through Harres as he revved the motor. In seconds, he was hurtling the sand car over the dunes, driving with even more violence than the urgency of the situation dictated.
He drove in charged silence, catapulting the car over dune edges, crashing it in depressions, spraying sand in their wake and pushing the engine to its limit. With every violent jolt, the man’s arms tightened around his midriff, his legs grabbing him more securely, his cheek pressing deeper into his back until Harres felt they’d been fused together.
His breath shortened by the moment as the heat of the man’s body seeped through every point of contact, pooled in his loins.
Adrenaline. That was what it was. Discomfort. At having someone pressed so close, even in these circumstances.
Yes. What else could it possibly be?
In minutes, the crouching silhouette of his Mi-17 transport helicopter came into view. It was the best sight Harres had ever seen. He’d not only managed to reach their way out, but now he could get the man off of him.
He screeched the sand car into a huge arc, almost toppling it before bringing it to a quaking stop by the pilot’s door.
He wrenched Burke’s hands from his waist and leveraged himself out of the car in one motion. The man jumped out behind him, again with the stealth and economy of a cat, then waited for directions.
He took in details now that his vision was at its darkness-adapted best. With his windswept golden hair and those iridescent eyes, Burke looked like some moon elf, ethereal, his beauty untouched by the ordeal—
His beauty?
“Jump into the passenger seat and buckle yourself up.” He heard his bark, knew all his aggression was directed at his insane thoughts and reactions. “I’ll stuff the car in the cargo bay—”
The crack of thunder registered first.
Second, comprehension. A gun’s discharge.
The shock in the man’s eyes followed.
Last, the sting.
He’d been hit.
Somewhere on his left side, level with his heart. He had to assume not in it. He didn’t feel any weakening. Yet.
Someone had slipped his men’s net, had managed to sneak up on them. This could be the last mistake he ever made.
He exploded into action, charged the man to stop him from taking cover. They had no time for that.
He shouldn’t have worried. Burke was no cowering fool. He was bolting to the helicopter even as more and more gunshots rang around them. He now knew the shot that had connected had been random. That was no sniper out there. That still didn’t mean whoever it was couldn’t hit a huge target like the chopper.
In seconds they were in their seats and Harres had the monster of a machine roaring off the ground, levitating into the sky.
He pressed the helicopter for all the altitude and velocity it was capable of. In less than a minute he knew they were too far for anyone pursuing them on foot or ATV to even spot anymore.
Only then did he let himself investigate his body for the damage it had sustained. It had no idea yet. All it reported back was a burning path traversing his left side back to front just below his armpit. Flesh wound, he preferred to assume. Maybe with some bone damage. Nothing major. If no artery had been hit.
But the idea of losing blood too fast and spiraling into shock gave way to more pressing bad news. The chopper was losing fuel. The pursuer had hit the tank.
He eyed the gauge. With the rate of loss, the fuel wouldn’t take them back to the capital. Nor anywhere near the inhabited areas where he could make contact with his people.
He had to make a detour. Head for the nearest oasis. At fifty miles away it was still four hundred and fifty miles closer than any other inhabited area. The inhabitants hadn’t joined the modern world in any way, but once he and Burke were safely there, he would send envoys on horseback to his people. The trek would probably be delayed by a sandstorm that was expected to cut off the area from the world soon, a week or two during which his brothers and cousins—the only ones who knew of his mission—would probably think him dead. When weighed against his actual survival, and that of his charge, that was a tiny price to pay.
His new plan would be effective. Land in the oasis, take care of any injuries and contact his people. Mission accomplished.
Next minute, he almost kicked himself.
Of all times to count his missions….
The leaking fuel wasn’t their only problem. In fact it was their slighter one. The damage to the navigation system had taken this long to reveal itself. The chopper was losing altitude fast. And there was nothing he could do to right its course.
He had to land now. Here. Or crash.
He turned to Burke urgently. “Are you buckled in?”
The man nodded frantically, his eyes widening with realization. Harres had no time to reassure him.
For the next few minutes he tried every trick he’d learned from his stint as a test pilot to land the helicopter and not have it be the last thing he did in his life.
As it was, they ended up crash-landing.
After the violent chain reaction of bone-powdering, steel-tearing impacts came to an end, he let out a shuddering breath acknowledging that they had survived being pulverized.
He leaned back in his seat, watching the interior of the cockpit fade in and out of focus. Had he lost too much blood or were the cockpit’s lights fluctuating? He had no doubt the chopper itself was a goner.
He’d deal with his own concerns later. After he saw to his passenger.
He unbuckled his belt, flicked the cockpit lights on to maximum, turned to Burke. The man had his head turned against his seat, his eyes wide with an amalgam of panic and relief. Their gazes meshed.
And there was no mistaking what happened then.
Harres hardened. Fully.
He shuddered. What was this? What was going on? Was his body going haywire from the stress?
Enough of this idiocy. Check him for injuries.
He reached for him. The man flinched at his touch, as if Harres had electrified him. He knew how he felt. The same charge had forked through him. This had crossed from idiotic to insane.
He forced in an inhalation, determined to erase those anomalous reactions, drew Burke by the shoulders into the overhead light. The man struggled.
“Stop squirming. I need to check you for injuries.”
“I’m fine.”
The husky voice skewered through him even though he could barely hear it with the din of the still-moving rotors.
And a conviction slammed into him.
He would have thought he was beginning to hallucinate from blood loss. But he’d been feeling these inexplicable things long before he’d been hit. So he was through listening to his mind, and what it thought it knew, and heeding his body. It had been yelling at him from the first moment, just as his every instinct had bee
n. He always listened to them.
Right now they were telling him that, even in these nightmarish conditions, they wanted T. J. Burke.
And knowing himself, that could only mean one thing.
He stabbed his fingers into the unruly gold silk on top of T. J. Burke’s head, his body hardening more at the escaping gasp that flayed his cheek.
He traced the dewy lips with his thumb, as if to catch the sound and the chagrined shock at what he sensed was an equally uncontrollable response.
He smiled his satisfaction. “So, tell me, why are you pretending to be T. J. Burke, bearded investigative reporter, when a modern-day bejeweled Mata Hari would suit you far better?”
Two
T. J. Burke wrenched away from the cloaked, force-of-nature-in-man-form’s hold, panted, voice gruff and low, a tremor of panic traversing it. “Did you hit your head in the crash?”
The man bore down again without seeming to move, making the spacious cockpit of the high-end military helicopter shrink. The smile in those golden eyes that seemed to snare the dimmest rays and emit them magnified, took on a dangerous edge. The danger was more spine-shivering for being unthreatening, more…distressing, with the response it elicited.
Then the colossus drawled in that deeper-than-the-desert-night baritone. “The only hit to the head I got tonight was courtesy of those neatly trimmed, capable hands of yours.”
“Since I hit you with the intention of taking your head off, I probably dislocated something in there. Your good sense, seemingly. Maybe your whole brain.”
The man pressed closer, the freshness of his breath and the potency of his virility flooding every one of T.J.’s senses. “Oh, both my sense and my brain are welded in place. It would take maybe…” his eyes traveled up and down T.J.’s body like slow, scorching hands “…ten of you to loosen even my consciousness.”
“It took only one of me to do so earlier,” T.J. scoffed, not sure the supply of air in the cockpit would last much longer. “I almost took you down. With both hands literally tied, too.”
“You can sure take me down, just not by hitting me. Your effect on me has nothing to do with your physical strength and is certainly not proportionate to your size.”
“Is that all you got? Cheap shots at my size?”
“I’d never take any kind of shot at you.” Again the man’s eyes seemed to emit a force field that gathered T.J. into its embrace. “And then, I think your size is perfection itself.”
Drenched in goose bumps and feeling the heart that had barely slowed down start to hammer again, T.J. smirked. “Sure you’re not concussed? Or is this the way you usually talk to other men?”
The insult seemed to burn to ash in the rising temperature of the man’s smile. “It’s not even the way I talk to women. But it’s the only way I’ll talk to you. Among other things. Every other possible thing.”
T.J. pressed against the passenger door. “So you somehow got it into your head that I’m a woman? And now you’re all over me? Just minutes after barely surviving a devastating crash and landing God knows where in this forsaken, sand-infested land? And you can’t hear how ridiculous you sound?”
“What’s ridiculous is that you thought a fuzzy beard and an atrocious haircut would disguise the femininity blasting off you. It got me by the…throat, from the first moment. So why don’t you drop the act and tell me who you really are?”
“I am T. J. Burke!”
Painstakingly chiseled lips spread to reveal teeth so white they were almost phosphorescent in the dimness. “My bearded beauty, only one of us has testosterone coursing in his bloodstream right now. Don’t make me offer you…tangible proof.”
T.J. glowered at him, tried not to show any weakness, to meet him on the same level of audacity. “Is it the…tangible proof proving that you’re attracted to small blond men?”
A chuckle rumbled deep in that huge predator’s gut, zigzagged all through T.J.’s system like deadly voltage. “First thing you have to learn about me so we can move on is that I am insult-proof. I wouldn’t even sock you if you were a man. But my body knew you weren’t from the moment I laid eyes on you in that filthy hole, against all evidence and intel. So will you admit it on your own, or will you make me…establish proof myself?”
T.J. shrank back farther against the door as the man’s right hand rose. “Lay a hand on me, buster, and have it chomped off.”
“With the way I’m reacting to you, there’s nothing I want more than your teeth on every part of me. But if anything proves your femininity, it’s that so-called threat. A man would have told me he’d break my hand or tear it off, or something suitably macho.”
“So you have men regularly threatening to do that? And women chomping away at any part of you they can reach?”
The man narrowed his eyes, concentrating the intensity of his amusement. “You’re an expert at diversion, aren’t you? Give it up, already. I’m on to you. So on to you that not even a bullet is dulling my response.”
“A bullet?” T.J felt both eyes almost pop out with shock. “You’re hit?”
The man nodded. “So will you take pity on an injured man and bestow your name on me? Make it your real one this time. And let me see how you look without that rug on your face.”
“Oh, shut up. Are you really injured or are you playing me?”
The man suddenly sat up from his seemingly indolent pose, tugged T.J.’s right hand. T.J. ended up pressed against him, chest to chest, face in his neck, arm around his massive torso. The sensation of touching a live wire came first. Then that of sickening viscosity scorched everything away.
Before T.J. could jerk back in alarm, the man meshed his right hand in T.J.’s hair, pulling gently until their gazes once again melded. “See? I’m bleeding. For you. I might die. Can you be so cruel as to let me die without knowing who you are?”
T.J. wrenched away from him, one hand drenched in the thick heat and slickness of his blood. “Oh, just shut up.”
Those lethal lips twitched. “I will if you start talking.”
“You don’t need me to talk, you need me to take care of this wound.”
“I’ll take care of it. You talk.”
“Don’t be stupid. Your intercostal arteries might be severed, and those bleed like gushing faucets. You might think you’re stable, but there’s no telling how bad your injury is, what kind of blood loss you’ve suffered. Your blood pressure could plunge without warning. And if it does, there’s no bringing it back up!”
“Spoken like an expert. Been shot before?”
“I’ve treated people who were. People who weren’t too stupid to jump at my offer to help them.”
“Is that any way to talk to the man who took a bullet for you? And will you peel that thing off your face, already?”
“I can’t believe this! You might slip into shock at any moment and you’re still trying to prove this lame theory of yours?”
He just smiled, imperturbable, immovable.
“Okay,” T.J. gritted. “I’ll talk. After I take care of you.”
“I’ll let you take care of me. After you talk.”
“Come on. Where is this chopper’s emergency kit?”
“I’ll tell you after you tell me what I want to hear.”
“Not the truth, huh? ’Cause I already told you that.”
The man backed away when T.J. lunged at him, hands reaching out to expose his wound. “Uh-uh-uh. No touching until you admit you’re a woman. I only let women touch me.”
T.J. glared into eyes that had a dozen devils dancing in them. “You’re really out of touch with the reality—the gravity—of your situation, aren’t you? But what do you care if I admit it or not? You know it, after all. And then, I’m not going to merely touch you, I’m going to bathe in your blood.”
The appreciation in the man’s eyes expanded, enveloped T.J. whole. “I knew you were a bloodthirsty wench when you almost sliced me in half with the power of your glare alone. Then you tried to powder my teeth and
transform me from a baritone to an alto.”
T.J. felt a smile advancing, dispelling the frown that by now felt etched on, and had to admit…
That man was lethal. In every sense of the word.
But though he was teasing, his irreversible deterioration might actually come to pass. There was no telling how serious his injury was without a thorough exam. “And to think you seemed intelligent. Guess appearances can be deceiving.”
The man’s lips twisted. “You can talk.”
“Oh, but I thought my appearance didn’t deceive you for a moment, that my ‘femininity’ kicked you like a mule.”
The man sighed, nodding in mock helplessness. “Aih. But if I do succumb, remember, it’s your doing, in every way.”
“Give me a break.” T.J. exhaled forcibly then scratched at the beard.
Then she snatched it away.
She yelped as a blowtorch seemed to blast her nerve endings, forcing her to leave the beard dangling over her lips. She rubbed at the burning sensation, gave her tormentor a baleful glance. “Happy now, you pigheaded, mulish ox?”
“A one-man farm, eh? No one has ever flattered me as you do.” She glared at him as he oh-so-carefully removed the rest of the beard, making the adhesive separate from her skin with a kneading sensation instead of a stinging one.
Then he pulled back, massaged her jaw and cheeks in an insistent to and fro, soothing her skin with the backs of those long, roughened, steel-hard fingers. She moaned as a far more devastating brand of fire swept her flesh from every point of contact.
He groaned himself. “Ya Ullah, ma ajmalek. How absolutely beautiful you are. I thought I’d seen all kinds of beauty, but I’ve never laid eyes on anything like you. It’s like you’re made of light and gold and energy and gemstones.”
Heat rose through her at his every word. When she’d first seen him, she’d been freezing with dread and the desert’s chill. But when she’d turned to him in that filthy bathroom, his very presence had sent animation surging into her every cell. The crash had drained her, but the heat of his solicitude, his awareness and appreciation, the stoking of his challenge, had been melting away the ice that seemed to have become a constituent of her bones.