by Dana Marton
She looked away.
At one time she’d been trained for hand-to-hand combat, but it’d been a while since she’d had practice, two years since she’d fought anyone in earnest. Her legs were shaking when she got up.
Mike was already going through the man’s clothes, pulling out Brady’s cell phone and the switchblade. “Good work.” He grinned at her. “Come on, we got a boat to catch.” He tucked the gun away in his parka.
The boat. The warheads. Their mission was far from over.
Her mind zeroed in on the task ahead, and she ran to the van on Mike’s heels without a glance at the body on the snow behind them.
“I drive, you call.” He rattled off a number.
She dialed and listened to the automated voice that rendered the phone useless. “Password protected,” she said.
“Keep it with you anyway.” He shook his head as he stepped on the gas.
The terrain was flat, the road manageable for now. Snow began to fall again, though, and it was coming down without mercy. The windshield wipers swished back and forth, the only sound as Mike concentrated on the road. He swore softly from time to time. She couldn’t blame him. They still had a long way to go, and if the snow blocked the road, they were doomed. No snowplows would come this way until morning, if then. If the road was already considered closed for the year, no snowplows would come this way until spring.
Still, they might have been able to win against the snow. But they couldn’t win against the caribou—not a whole herd of them.
With visibility being close to none, they didn’t see the animals until it was too late. Mike swerved, but still hit at least one. Brakes screeched, finding no purchase on the icy road. The airbag smashed into her face, hot enough to burn. They came to a halt when the van crashed into a frozen snowbank.
“Couldn’t life be easy just once?” she grumbled as she got out.
“If life was easy, this country wouldn’t need people like us,” he said.
It felt good to be counted in the same category with him.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he came after her.
“Fine. You’re bleeding.” She reached to the bloody spot on his cheekbone, but he shrugged, making light of it.
“Just a scratch.”
They checked out the van together. The front end was smashed up badly.
“Damn.”
“Let’s give it a try.” She walked back to the van, refusing to concede defeat, and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. She let her head rest against the steering wheel for a moment before gathering herself and getting out. “How far are we from town?”
“Too far.”
Which meant that, unless a good Samaritan drove by and offered them a lift within the next few minutes, there was no way they could make it to the harbor in time. And the chance of another vehicle on this remote road at this time was… There was no chance at all.
“Mike?”
He’d been staring at the crumpled hood, but his attention snapped to her.
“Where are the caribou? If we injured any, we should put them out of their pain.”
He glanced around. “They’re probably a ways down the road by now.”
She peered through the darkness as far as she could see, but spotted no large shadows on the ground. She walked back to the road, found the spot where they’d had the accident and shook her head in wonder as she took in the jumble of hoof prints, not a drop of blood among them.
The reindeer had been lucky. She looked up as other animals came to mind.
“What?” Mike was watching her.
“You know how a few days ago you asked about polar bears and I said we weren’t in their territory?”
He nodded cautiously.
“We are now,” she said.
He took a few seconds to glance around before going back to the van and lifting the hood. He was clanging around for a while then gave up with a disgusted string of obscenities.
She walked back to him. “Let’s get in the van while we figure something out.” They had a long walk ahead of them. No sense in getting a head start on hypothermia.
He nodded and followed her.
“Let me see that phone,” he said when they were both inside and the doors were closed behind them. He turned it on once she passed it over, played the buttons as if it were a video game.
“What are you doing?”
“Reprogramming it to get around the password.”
“You can do that?”
He flashed her a smile that was close enough to his old cocky self to give her hope.
When he was done, he dialed, swore and flipped the phone closed then stuck it into his inside pocket.
“Didn’t work?”
He turned to her with a raised eyebrow as if slightly insulted. “No signal. Damn storm.”
She turned on the dome light and squeezed into the back, looked around for anything that could be helpful. She picked up the blanket. They’d definitely take that. The tire iron, too, in case they came across any unfriendly wildlife. Mike had Brady’s gun, but she wasn’t sure what it had in the way of bullets.
She was crawling back to the front when the idea hit her. “Remember our first date?”
He looked at her with more than a little surprise. “What exactly here reminds you of Arizona?”
“This.” She grinned and shoved the blanket at him. They’d gone windsurfing during their twenty-four-hour leave from desert training.
He caught on quick and his lips spread into a smile. “You’re good.”
“I try. What else do we need?”
“You get two tires off the van, I’ll go find something for poles. Got anything useful on you?”
She shook her head. “Your emergency kit?”
“It’s back at our room.” He looked through the car, leaving no part of it unexplored. “If there were any trees out here, we’d be good,” he said.
She struggled with the tires but was managing.
“I have another idea.” He walked to the front of the car. “Forget the blanket. We’ll have a solid sail.”
He yanked on the hood. It gave, having been already damaged in the crash. When he was done, he pulled some tubing and wiring. Then they went to work on their contraption.
Mike placed the tire iron between the two tires to separate them and tied them on while she worked on securing their metal “sail.” She glanced at her watch. It was eight thirty in the morning. They still had time. The boat was set to leave at first light, after ten.
They rigged the hood to the tires, then carried the whole thing over to the road. They each pushed a tire, running behind. Mike pulled the “sail” standing, and with one hand, tied it off. The wind caught it just as they each jumped onto a tire. Then they were flying down the road, the smooth sides of rubber tires sliding easily on the frozen snow.
“Not too bad.” She grinned from ear to ear.
“This baby knows speed.” Mike grinned back at her.
They were making good progress, but getting colder and colder. The heat generated by their initial efforts wore off quickly, her good humor turning to thoughts of survival. They couldn’t snuggle up now, or even wrap their arms around themselves. They each had to hold one side of the hood steady and into the wind, no matter how their arms ached, or how the wind whipped their backs.
They raced against time, the lives of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands in their hands.
She glanced over at Mike’s hard-set face and felt a familiar tug on her heart. This was the Mike she had fallen for. He was the kind of man who would rush into danger if he thought he could help, without regard for race or nationality or religion. He would put himself on the line over and over, for people who needed to be saved.
He would go to Russia and try to get the warheads, even though if he got caught, he would be tried and imprisoned as a spy by the very people he was trying to save. But Mike wasn’t the type of man to count personal risk when it came to a mission.
; He had such a strength in him. It drew her and scared her at the same time, and how foolish was that, considering he had never once given her a reason to feel scared around him?
She had insisted on being treated as an equal, on making a team with him. But she hadn’t wanted a true team. She’d wanted two separate independent entities who happened to work and live together.
A real team meant more. The last couple of days they’d spent fighting for survival taught her that. A real partnership meant interdependence instead of independence. And for the first time, she started to consider that maybe it wasn’t a weakness.
If they got out of this mess alive— She had a hard time finishing the thought. She wasn’t sure if she could walk away from Mike again, wasn’t sure if she wanted to. But the only alternative was putting her heart on the line again. Could she do that? Or was it already too late? Was she just pretending to still have power over that decision?
NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE. Mike caught sight of one of the Russian fishermen pulling in the last rope, their boat slipping away from the dock. They were almost there. Just a little more. He walked as fast as he could without drawing attention. They lucked out in that department. The Nome harbor was nearly deserted. Two men stood talking at the far end, paying attention to little else other than the argument between them.
He watched the sailor wind up the rope.
“Come on, get inside,” he murmured to the sole man on deck, as if he could somehow send him a mental message.
They moved out of the shelter of the crates that lined the street. The wind had died down, but it was still snowing a little, and the cold was biting with full force.
There was a four-foot gap now between the boat and the dock, five feet, six feet and growing.
The man finally slipped inside the pilot’s house. Mike ran and jumped without hesitation, the boat big enough that he didn’t rock it. Tessa was making a run for it, following him.
No. Too late. The dock was too far now.
Relief filled him for a second. She would have to stay behind, stay safe.
But instead of slowing down, she picked up speed and flew off the end of the dock, her arms flailing as she swooshed through the air.
His heart stopped. Blood rushed loudly in his ears. The water. She was going to hit the water.
The next second he was lurching over the edge, reaching for her, prepared to go in if he had to. He didn’t. He managed to catch her by the top of her fingers. He grabbed for her wrist, needing a better grip, then pulled her up, and for a second crushed her to his chest, and just held her there, unable to talk or do anything more.
If either of them had had their gloves on, he would have lost her to the icy, churning water. The thought tore through his brain and he hugged her tighter still. “Don’t you ever—” He started to say, but then just shook his head and let her go.
There was no time to be mad at her for taking such a risk. They had to get out of sight before the man in the pilot house looked back. He opened the lid of the cargo hold and slid down first to make sure it was safe before signaling Tessa to follow him.
A fair-size space waited for them below. He made a more thorough inspection once his eyes got used to the dark and he could see farther. Crates and packages were piled high everywhere. Tessa moved first, and he followed her all the way to the back where they were least likely to be discovered if any of the crew came down.
They could hear men talking on the other side of a thin wooden wall where the cargo hold joined the crew’s cabin. He figured four or five of them, judging by the voices. It confirmed what he’d determined the day before, watching them coming and going from the boat.
He looked at Tessa, making a signal, and she nodded as she sat on a large crate, understanding his unspoken message. If they could hear the men, that meant the men would hear them. They would have to make the trip in silence. They couldn’t risk being discovered. The weapons smugglers were a day ahead of them, in Uelen already, prepared to move deeper into Siberia.
Chapter Eight
She was dying.
She didn’t hate the general feeling of misery as much as she hated her helplessness. That really ticked her off.
The boat rocked violently from side to side, the waves crashing above them as they washed over the deck. Tessa heaved, but nothing came up. Her stomach had been emptied hours ago.
Mike had cleaned up her mess and found some water for her to rinse her mouth.
He sat next to her on top of the large crate where she was sprawled out on her back, and held her head on his lap. He smoothed her hair out of her face with long, gentle fingers.
“Feeling any better?”
She didn’t have the strength to answer.
Her first time on a boat. She hoped it would be the last. If she’d had the strength for it, she would have felt embarrassed. Here she’d been trying to prove how tough and strong she was, how no obstacle could get in her way when she was on a mission, and she’d been undone, undone to the point of defenselessness, by some choppy water. All she could do was moan when the boat pitched again and her stomach flipped over.
The place smelled musky, a mixture of seawater and old wood, and other smells left behind by various cargoes of the past. She turned her head and pressed her face to Mike’s leg, inhaled his familiar scent of sweat and maleness that was neither sharp nor unpleasant, reminding her of cedar wood. She closed her eyes to pretend they were on solid ground.
The small pup tent her imagination brought forth wasn’t a huge stretch from the dark belly of the ship. Mike and she had been a team, each carrying half of the tent during the endless exercises, sharing it, huddled in their separate sleeping bags at night.
He’d been trying to get into her pants for months by then, so had half of the platoon. Except that, unlike with the rest of the men, she was attracted to Mike, and to more than his quick, lethal smile and combat-honed body.
They were all tough and brave, but Mike was more. You got to know a man when you fought side by side with him. He had honor and a surprising side of gentleness that came out at the oddest moments and took her breath away.
And yet she’d ignored whatever it was that drew her to him. She hadn’t wanted to be wanted because she was the only woman in sight.
She remembered the night when that had changed, when she’d finally come to him. They had done really well that day, and they talked about strategy, making plans for the morning. She’d been so optimistic and grateful for getting a partner who didn’t resent her presence there, who was open-minded enough to give her a chance. Not all of the five provisional female recruits had been that lucky.
She had thrown her arms around his neck and brushed her lips over his, just about jumping with excitement, meaning it a gesture of… Well, however she had meant it wasn’t the way he had taken it. His arms locked around her like a steel cage, his lips crushing down on hers so suddenly that she had panicked, pulled back and butted her head with full force against his mouth to make him release her.
He had, swearing as he stepped away.
She had drawn her arm back, ready to follow up with her best hook to the soft of his stomach, but the look in his eyes had stopped her, as had the drop of blood that rolled off his split lip.
Her own lips had still burned from his kiss.
“I’m sorry,” he had said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t.” She’d drawn herself up. Admitting to being scared went against her grain.
“I thought you wanted to.”
“I didn’t.”
He’d nodded, then looked at her warily when she stepped closer, but all she’d done was wipe off the drop of blood. Her fingertips had tingled where she’d touched his lips, the strange sensation running up her arms and tightening her nipples.
She had been scared, and it had infuriated her. She’d hated the weakness of it. But beyond the panicky urge to flee, another sensation blossomed in her body and it proved hard to ignore.
�
�I want to now,” she had said to prove she wasn’t afraid of anything, and brushed her lips gently over his swollen one. She’d kissed him and he’d let her, allowing her to take as much or as little as she had wanted. He had kept his hands by his sides.
Her body had been humming with need by the time she was done. “I want more,” she had said, and he had given a strangled laugh.
“If I touch you, are you going to try to maim me?”
“Scared?” She had turned the tables on him.
“Nah. I’m thinking it’s worth the risk.” He had kissed her then, softly, but making it clear he meant it.
When his hands had stolen up her arms, she hadn’t pulled away, not even when his palms cupped her aching breasts.
“I’ve never done this before,” she’d murmured against his lips.
He had drawn away. “Are you sure you want to? With me?”
She had nodded, unable to say the words.
He’d nodded back solemnly and kissed her again.
He hadn’t taken her—they had taken each other. It had been petrifying and glorious at the same time, small drops of pain mixed in with an ocean of pleasure.
God, it seemed like a million years ago.
The boat rolled again, and Tessa’s fingers curled into Mike’s thigh, the contact bringing her back from the past. Her stomach seemed a little more settled, probably because she had managed to keep her mind off her wretched state for a while.
He bent to her ear, his warm breath tickling her earlobe when he spoke. “Feeling any better?”
The clamor of the storm was loud enough to drown out any other noise, so they no longer had to worry about detection, but still they kept to whispering.
She nodded hesitantly.
“I didn’t realize this would be your first time on a ship.”
“If you say one more time how you wish you’d left me behind in Nome, I’m going to gather up enough strength to hit you if it kills me.”