Deadly Hunter

by Rachel Lee

  “But no reports from hunters?”

  “Not yet. Although if you want the truth, after the warning we put out, they’re probably staying miles clear of the area. Game animals are mostly grazers, but given what happened to those cows...” She shrugged. “Would you want to risk bringing tainted meat home to the family?”

  He didn’t bother with the obvious answer. Always a man of few words, it seemed.

  “But you’re still worried about it,” she said finally.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  The statement warmed her, but it also zinged straight to her groin, causing an almost painful clenching inside her. How did he do that? A simple statement of concern and she was reacting sexually. Any casual acquaintance might be concerned about her but she wouldn’t react this way.

  “Why?” The word came out a little more ragged than she would have liked, but at least she got it out. She began to think he might be even more dangerous to her than the poison she was tracking. He had no roots here, no reason to remain that she could see. In a day or two or a few weeks, he might just vanish as stealthily as he’d appeared. And even if he didn’t, what did she really know about him? He didn’t talk much; she’d only spent a few hours with him. He could turn out to be an awful person, and if she was foolish enough to get involved, she might become wreckage in his trail, as she had become wreckage in her ex-boyfriend’s trail.

  She just wished her body would listen to her brain.

  “Why?” he repeated. “Because you’re out there tracking a poison that you tell me is so deadly it has to be used only in certain ways with special authorization. You say the chance of tracing it back to its origins is nigh impossible, but what if the guy behind this doesn’t know that? What if he thinks you’re trying to do exactly that?”

  “I haven’t been making a secret of what I’m trying to do,” she argued.

  “Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean you’ve told people everything you’re trying to do. Somebody did something wrong and they know it. They know a rancher lost two cows, which is probably very expensive, and maybe that what they did with that poison isn’t legal. Some guy could be looking at ruin if you figure out who it was.”

  She shook her head. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll make sure the whole damn world knows I won’t be able to figure out who did it.”

  “It might help. I’m not saying there’s a real threat, not yet. But there is your car window getting smashed.”

  “That had to be some stupid prank. You know eighteen-year-olds.” Her mind was trying to be rational about this, but she could feel her emotions fighting it. She didn’t want to believe this was possible. Not here.

  Damn, he was bringing his ugly world with him. Maybe she should usher him to the door right now.

  “It probably was a prank,” he agreed. “But what if it wasn’t? What if somebody wanted to get those samples out of the back of your car in case you had something that could be traced? What if he didn’t succeed only because he got interrupted. Heard someone coming?”

  She looked down, feeling every emotion rebel, but even as she tried to find a way to tell him he was wrong, her thoughts began to run over all the reasons he might be right.

  Someone using that poison might not understand how it spread. Few people did, mainly because those who used it had it safely contained in collars. That didn’t mean, however, that there weren’t leftover stocks of the stuff sitting in a barn or two somewhere. On hand just in case. Despite it having been outlawed. It’s not like anyone had gone around to collect all the stuff. She seemed to remember from her reading that at the time it had been outlawed, folks had been told to bury it.

  Well, how many people had decided it was easier to leave the cans sitting on a shelf than dig a deep hole to put them in? There could be dozens of stockpiles out there, forgotten until someone came across them and had a use for them.

  But what kind of use? To start with, you needed bait soaked in it so some animal would eat it. You couldn’t just sprinkle it on the ground. Odorless and tasteless, it wouldn’t have attracted any animal.

  So it couldn’t happen accidentally, unless some coyote had bitten a collar containing the stuff. And no one would blame a rancher for using a legal collar to protect against coyotes. At least not other ranchers, although environmentalists would create an uproar.

  “What are you thinking?” Jerrod asked.

  “I’m trying to figure the odds that a coyote bit a collar and got sufficiently poisoned to kill a raccoon. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”

  “No.” His eyes were boring into her again. She wished she didn’t feel as if they bored right to her womanhood. She shifted uneasily.

  “You’re thinking something else,” he said after a moment.

  She was, and not entirely about bait and poison. She shifted again and corralled her thoughts. Before she could speak, he did.

  “How would you use this poison if you didn’t have a collar?”

  “Mix it in water, soak a big piece of meat in it and put the meat out where you wanted to kill something. Hoping, of course, that you got your target animal. Lots of things eat meat.” She paused. “Like wolves.”

  “You’ve got wolves?”

  “A couple of packs up in the mountains. They came down here from Yellowstone a while back. They’re off the endangered list now, though, so if somebody had a wolf problem, he could get a hunting license. Or, if they’re bothering his stock, he could just shoot them.” She paused again. “Well...there’s an exception to that, too. In order to maintain a minimal number of breeding pairs, wholesale slaughter still isn’t allowed. Even so...”

  She trailed off again, thinking. Or trying to. Amazing how difficult that could get around Jerrod. “Okay, if you know anything about wolves, you know it isn’t hard to wipe out a pack. You can break one up by killing a couple of them. You can break up a pack by burying its den. They’ve even used rubber bullets, hoping to teach them to stay away from certain places. At one time or another pretty much everything has been tried to appease the ranchers. They have a worse problem up north around the Yellowstone boundaries in Montana. You know what’s interesting to me?”

  “What?”

  “Wolves have tight-knit family groups. Those packs have the kinds of connections to each other we don’t think of animals as having. Yet despite all that social cohesion and interdependence, a wolf pack is easy to destroy. Once you do that, most of them will die.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “That’s the point I was coming to.” Fascinated now, she rose and got more coffee. “If you have a wolf problem, you don’t have to kill them all. All you have to do is destroy the pack structure. The rubber bullet thing I told you about? It didn’t teach the wolves to stay away, it broke up the pack. It’s amazingly easy to do.”

  “So why poison?”

  “Because like you, maybe somebody doesn’t know that. We have an ongoing fight around here, believe it or not. Some ranchers want them all exterminated. Others think they’re good for the environment—and studies would bear that out. But when losing one cow or a couple of ewes could be the difference between making it or going bust, even one wolf looks like a serious threat.”

  “So you’re thinking somebody went after the wolves in the mountains?”

  “Maybe. It would explain a lot. But it’s just a theory.”

  He surprised her with a smile that actually leavened his face. It was breathtaking, she realized, to see this man look as if he’d left his shadows behind, even if only for a few minutes.

  “I like it when you get excited about something,” he said. “You light up like a Christmas tree.”

  Now her cheeks really heated. “Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled. She wasn’t used to compliments of that kind.

  His smile remained, sur
prising her. “Well, if you’re going into the mountains, you’re definitely not going alone. Tomorrow?”

  “I guess so, after I get some more samples from the Madison ranch.”

  “What exactly would we be looking for?”

  She shook her head. “The bait would be eaten by now. The question is by what and how many. So I guess we’ll be looking for dead animals that have probably already been gnawed over pretty well. It won’t be pretty.”

  The shadow returned to his face. “I’ve seen worse. What time should we leave?”

  “Early. Say six. It’ll be light by the time we reach Jake’s place.”

  “Good enough. And this time I’m bringing coffee.”

  She laughed as she rose to walk him to the door, even as she felt disappointment that he was leaving so soon.

  He turned just before he left. She was following too closely and he bumped into her. He might as well have been a live wire. Heat and sparks sizzled through her, and she caught her breath.

  He caught her. She must have been tipping, she thought hazily, but didn’t give a damn. He could have steadied her by grabbing her elbow or something, but he didn’t. Instead, one of his powerful arms wrapped around her and the next thing she knew she was pressed to his chest.

  Still trying to catch her breath, she tilted her head and looked directly at his scarred face. Directly into his black-as-night eyes. But somewhere in those dark depths she could have sworn she saw hot, burning coals.

  “Damn,” he whispered.

  Before she truly registered the word, he bowed his head and kissed her. In an instant she went from feeling as if a high-tension wire sparked inside her to melting. She’d never reacted to a kiss that way before, with an amazing softening, as if everything inside her simply let go.

  She went nearly limp in his embrace, which he took as an invitation because his other arm wrapped around her, holding her tight. He made her feel safe, she realized dimly. Incredibly safe.

  And his kiss. His mouth astonished her by how supple it felt when he looked so hard. He didn’t crush her lips against her teeth or demand entry, but instead simply moved his warm lips against hers, caressing, offering, promising a surprising gentleness.

  The weakening in her grew even as the movement of his mouth over hers elicited a deep throbbing within her. She wanted him, and she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she had never felt this degree of longing for any man.

  But that was a mystery to ponder later. Right then all she wanted to do was enjoy this new experience of feeling utterly safe, utterly cherished, by a man who looked like a lethal weapon. The contrast enchanted her, holding her in thrall.

  Her breasts grew exquisitely sensitive, begging for a touch. Her center grew heavy until she wondered if she could bear her own weight.

  Then, before she could even absorb all he had created in her with the simplest, lightest of kisses, he lifted his head; his arms loosened their hold.

  “Tell me I shouldn’t have done that,” he murmured.

  “I can’t,” she answered on a mere breath of air. She didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want this to end.

  “Oh, hell,” he said.

  “Hell?” She opened her eyes to find him smiling.

  “I’m in trouble now,” he said without explanation. Then he stepped back, releasing her with evident reluctance.

  “Tomorrow at six. I’ll be out front.”

  She stepped out after him, watching him trot back toward his place. It was then she noticed the crews putting up Christmas decorations on the light poles. They’d probably decided that the way this winter had started, the earlier the better.

  Rubbing her arms against the chill, she hurried back inside, wondering how magic had just come out of nowhere and touched her.

  Because his kiss had been sheer magic.

  Chapter 5

  Jerrod was sure that kissing that woman numbered among his greatest acts of idiocy. If he’d wanted her before, he wanted her worse now, and now he couldn’t pretend to himself that she didn’t reciprocate. Waiting for 6:00 a.m. seemed like an eternity, which didn’t surprise him. He’d had plenty of eternal waits at the start of a mission when the clock seemed almost to move not at all. He was used to it.

  But he wasn’t used to it happening because of a woman. Reason told him to clear out of this town before he got involved with her. It wouldn’t be good for her, not when he had so much to sort out about himself, and at this point he couldn’t make any promises more than a day or two down the road. Nor was he fond of flings. He’d had his share, and figured in the end they left the most important things unsatisfied.

  But while hitting the road again might be wise or even necessary, he was worried about her. She was planning to go into the woods and look for additional dead animals. If someone was worried that he could be found out, he might be watching and might try something.

  Hell, she wasn’t even following the most basic of security rules—to vary her schedule. Where would you find Allison McMann on Saturday? Out taking samples from a toxic mess. Then there was her school schedule, cast in stone, although it probably put her pretty much beyond reach because it was unlikely she was alone much on campus.

  The thing with her car window bugged him, too. He supposed the folks around here knew better than he what fit in the normal category, but whether they thought it was some kind of hazing incident, or simply vandalism, he couldn’t rest easy about it. Coming as it did right after she collected those samples, he found it a whole lot easier to think someone had been trying to steal them from her car.

  And yes, he knew how eighteen-year-olds could do stupid things on impulse with little rhyme or reason. Half the time if you asked them why they’d done it, they wouldn’t be able to provide an answer.

  Nor had Nate Tate calmed him down any. It sounded like the Wild West out here. Screw with a man’s livestock and get killed?

  That sounded more like a motivation to him than a reassurance, and Allison had walked right into the middle of a potentially deadly situation. At least by his lights, and he was as aware as anyone that his lights might be too tightly focused from all his years in covert ops.

  He still couldn’t ignore it. So he had to hang around until this was past, until she wasn’t collecting any more samples or hunting any more dead animals. Until a poisoner would feel that he was safe from discovery.

  He remembered, too, that he had felt they were being watched out on the Madison ranch, and then again here in town. The latter could just have been someone on this street looking out the window, but the former? Allison herself thought the hunters were avoiding the area now, so who would have been there?

  That bugged the hell out of him.

  He glanced at the clock and checked the time. Ten more minutes. So he let his eyes close and considered the shape of the situation. If someone had asked him to explain what he meant by that, he doubted he could have explained.

  A combination of things would come together inside him, from highly honed senses to experience. It happened outside rational thought, at a more visceral level. But even as he tried to get the shape of what he was sensing here, he knew something wasn’t right. Either he lacked an important piece of information, or he was misleading himself somehow.

  Neither one would have surprised him at this point. At some level beyond conscious reach, he sensed something very wrong. Or that something teetered on the brink of going wrong. It might not even have anything to do with Allison or her samples and the poison. Anything was possible.

  Turning the pieces around inside himself, he waited for them to fall into place like tumblers in a lock, but they stubbornly refused.

  Great. Something was bugging him, he trusted that feeling implicitly, but as yet the only direction he had for it was Allison.

  So Allison it would be. He’d
keep an eye on her until this was over.

  He could think of plenty of worse things to do with his time.

  But few as dangerous to his soul as this one. A grim smile came to his mouth as he tugged on his outerwear and picked up two big thermoses of coffee. He patted his sides to check that his weapons were still firmly in place.

  He possessed a card that allowed him to carry concealed weapons anywhere. They hadn’t taken that from him yet, and might never. Given his skills, he was well aware that he could be reactivated in an emergency. A knife in one belt holster, a 9 mm in the other.

  He had all he needed in that regard. But he had to admit, trying to turn into a civilian when he knew that if something blew up he might be called back on an instant’s notice didn’t make the transition any easier.

  To hell with it, he thought. It would never happen. In the meantime, he had to protect Allison without becoming an emotional threat to her himself.

  * * *

  Allison had just started loading the back of her vehicle when Jerrod appeared. “You didn’t get a snowmobile suit,” she remarked in what she hoped was a teasing tone. She also hoped that he’d put her instant blush down to the cold this morning, and not to last night.

  “It’d just get in the way,” he said enigmatically, then trotted up to the porch to pick up the last case and bring it to her.

  “Thanks.” She slammed the back hatch, and once again faced the taped-up window. “Can I admit that every time I look at that window I get a burn on?”

  “You can.”

  With surprise, she saw that his eyes almost danced. Talk about lightening up. He sure had in some ways. “I’ll be glad when the new window is in. Then I won’t keep feeling the urge to shake some young idiot.”

  “I can’t blame you for that. There’s something maddening about being treated this way and not being able to confront the miscreant. Leaves things all bottled up.”