Gage rubbed his eyes and sighed.
“You weren’t really asleep, were you?”
His gaze met hers. “No.”
She sampled her soup. It was hot and spicy and the chicken chucks were tender. Kelsey wasn’t much of a cook, but Gage took a bite and didn’t leap up from the table in disgust, so she took that as a good sign.
“You know,” she said, “I do know a few things about SEALs. I’m pretty close to my uncle.”
He watched her as he scooped up another bite.
“I know about BUD/S training, and Hell Week, and all those practice missions on San Clemente Island and up in Alaska.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, you don’t have to act like Superman all the time. I’m already impressed.”
Their gazes locked. She’d told him she was impressed. And she was. She had an incredible amount of admiration for these talented men who dedicated themselves to training and practicing and honing their skills in order to be part of one of the most elite fighting forces in the world. She felt the same admiration for her uncle.
But along with her admiration for Gage—and every other man in his profession—was something more. Something that had nothing to do with his job and everything to do with the way her pulse raced whenever he came near her. She’d never responded to a stranger this way, and she wasn’t sure exactly what to do about it. He’d be gone in a few days. She needed to remember that.
Maybe this was just about sex. And maybe, as Mia had so often suggested, Kelsey needed a rebound man. Her ex-boyfriend Blake lived in suits and went through life with a BlackBerry attached to his ear. He hated camping and kept hand sanitizer stashed in his glove compartment for emergencies. A hardened warrior he was not.
Kelsey eyed Gage’s T-shirt. Today’s was desert-brown instead of olive drab, and the collar was slightly frayed. It would be tough to imagine a man less like Blake, and maybe that explained her fascination. Ever since Gage had shown up she’d felt edgy.
But it was a good edgy. A warm-feeling-low-in-the-belly kind of edgy.
Gage tipped his bowl to get the very last spoonful. He glanced up at her with those impossibly blue eyes. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing was right. He was leaving soon, and this was going nowhere.
Kelsey got up and felt his gaze on her as she retrieved a couple of beers from the minifridge.
Gage raised an eyebrow. “Drinking on the job?”
“I’m done for the night.” She used the cuff of her sweatshirt to twist the cap off her bottle. “Here’s to silver-bullet assignments.”
He gave her a look she couldn’t read. Then he twisted his cap off and clinked bottles with her.
Kelsey made a mean bowl of soup and she liked Miller Genuine Draft. All the more reason for him to get his butt back out there in the rain.
And he would. Eventually. He planned to do some reconnaissance tonight while she was asleep. But for now sitting inside her messy camper and watching her put away dinner felt just a little too good.
And so he stayed. And watched her. She’d changed into boxer shorts and a sweatshirt and he tried not to notice how good her legs looked without any shoes on. Gage forced himself to look away and wondered, again, what the hell Joe had been thinking sending him out here. Did he realize what he was asking? It was like sending a man across the desert and then asking him to guard a glass of water.
Gage cleared his throat. “Guess we needed this rain, huh?”
She gave him an amused look over her shoulder. Shit, had he really just teed up a conversation about the weather?
“It’s okay, I guess.” She got them two more brews and joined him back at the table. “Not a problem for the dig, but I doubt it will help our search-and-recovery effort.”
It was a good point. A very obvious one, too. And when he got back to San Diego, Gage really needed to hit the bars with his buddies and brush up on some of his conversation skills.
She was sitting beside him now, looking at him. The only light in the place came from a battery-powered lantern across the room, and she was half in shadow.
“Are you ever planning to tell me about this favor you owe my uncle?”
He untwisted the cap from her bottle and slid it to her. Then he twisted the cap off his. “What favor’s that?”
She tucked a lock of that auburn hair behind her ear and smiled. “The one that gives him the right to put you on seven days of babysitting detail?”
Gage took a sip, stalling. He rested the bottle on the table. “He can put me on any detail he wants. He’s my CO.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, but you’re off duty. You said you were on leave.”
Gage shrugged. “Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.” It was a lame answer, but that’s all she was going to get. He wasn’t about to sit here and rehash the worst night of his life. He wasn’t going to sit here and tell her how he’d spent the past three months fighting depression and how he could easily be out of a job right now if her uncle hadn’t intervened.
“O-kay. I guess it’s off-limits.” She looked away, obviously stung by the brush-off, and he felt mean. She checked her watch. “It’s getting late, anyway. I should get to bed.” She started to stand up and he caught her arm.
“Joe Quinn’s the best Texas hold ’em player I ever met. You play?”
She looked at him as if he’d just asked her if she was a terrorist insurgent. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“He taught me when I was, like, seven or something. I’ll kick your butt.”
“Doubtful.” He reached under the table and retrieved a deck of cards from his seabag.
“Oh, sure. Like I’m going to let you provide the cards.”
He made a show of peeling off the cellophane, relieved that the awkwardness had disappeared. “It just so happens I picked up these cards a week ago.”
“Where?” she asked.
“You always this suspicious?”
“Joe taught me to gamble, so yes.”
“O’Hare Airport.” He removed the jokers and shuffled the deck. When he was finished he let her cut the cards.
“What are we betting?” she asked. “I don’t keep cash around ever since the break-in. Oh, wait.” She popped up and disappeared into the back of the camper. He heard her shuffling around, and then she returned with four rolls of quarters. “Laundry money,” she said, dropping the rolls on the tables.
Gage dug a twenty-dollar bill out of his bag and traded it for two of the rolls.
He dealt. She picked up her cards, and a wicked smile spread across her face, as if he’d just given her a pair of aces. But he saw straight through her bluff.
He checked his cards. He’d play five or six hands with her. Ten, tops. He glanced across the table. Her tongue swept over her upper lip as she contemplated her cards.
Gage’s gut tightened. This was a bad idea. He should be doing recon right now, not playing poker with his CO’s niece.
He looked at Kelsey. He looked at his cards. And he knew, with certainty, that this wasn’t going to be his lucky night.
Six
The bones were buried in a shallow grave about thirty yards west of the highway. It wasn’t ground-penetrating radar or a metal detector or any other gadget that led to their discovery, but rather the eagle-eyed gaze of a seventy-two-year-old anthropologist.
“Nature doesn’t like straight lines,” Dr. Robles had said, after calling Kelsey over to have a look at the rectangular pile of rocks. They hardly stood out against the stony creek bed but Robles was right—on close inspection the arrangement looked man-made.
After it became clear what he’d found, Robles returned to the shade of the caves, taking most of the students with him. A few stragglers loitered behind, clearly more interested in recent bones than ancient ones.
Kelsey shut out all distractions now as she worked within the string boundaries she’d staked out around the site. After thoroughly photographing the
area, she’d removed dozens of rocks, examining each for any sign of trace evidence before laying it aside. After just the first layer she’d begun to find scraps of rotten clothing and human bones: an ulna, a radius, several metacarpals. When the full arm took shape, she stood up and photographed it from multiple angles before moving on to the thoracic cage.
The sun blazed down. The minutes crawled by. She was at the digging stage now, and with every scoop of her trowel and swipe of her brush her sense of alarm grew. A leather belt. A scrap of rope. The tattered remnants of a pair of blue jeans.
A shadow fell over her, and she glanced up, expecting to see Aaron. Instead it was Gage, who’d spent the better part of the day on the hillside, watching God only knew what through his binoculars.
Kelsey returned her attention to the form emerging from the dirt. She carefully dusted a humerus with her boar’s-hair brush, knowing that any marks left behind by a metal tool could be mistaken later for signs of violence.
“Still no sheriff,” she muttered.
“A deputy’s on his way,” Gage said. “Sattler just called the phone at the dig site.”
Kelsey gritted her teeth. It was late afternoon. She could have used the sheriff’s help this morning.
Gage knelt beside her, respecting the string boundary she’d erected around the grave. He watched her for a moment.
“You all right?” he asked in a low voice.
“Fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Adrenaline,” she said. “It always happens to me.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“Not unless you want to be subpoenaed to testify at a murder trial.”
Gage glanced down at the remains as she brushed away another clump of dirt. It was the rope. Seeing this man’s wrists still trapped in their bindings made her feel . . . not anger, exactly, but a consuming sense of injustice.
Gage put a hand on her shoulder. “You need some water?”
“I just need to concentrate.” She glanced up. His blue eyes were filled with compassion, and she realized she was being brusque.
She sat back on her haunches and sighed. “I’m fine, thank you.”
He leaned over and kissed her. Just a soft brush of his lips against hers.
A few seconds ticked by before she could speak.
“What was that for?”
“I don’t know.” His hand dropped away. “You looked sad.”
For a moment, they stared at each other. Then he stood up, and she realized there was a car coming. She got to her feet and recovered her composure as a sheriff’s cruiser pulled off the road. The deputy parked and got out, then retrieved something from the backseat.
To her acute disappointment, it wasn’t a cadaver dog.
“Dr. Quinn?”
Both Kelsey and Gage turned around to see Aaron trekking across the creek bed. Everything about her field assistant, from his tone of voice to his expression, telegraphed disapproval, and Kelsey knew he’d seen the kiss.
She snapped off her surgical gloves and stuffed them in her pocket. “What is it, Aaron?”
“We’ve got a problem. Dylan is missing.”
“He’s on the escarpment, photographing the petroglyphs.” She looked around for her water bottle. Where had she left it?
“That was after lunch. No one’s seen him since two.”
“Where’s Jeannie?” Gage asked. “Maybe they’re taking a little break at the mine shaft.”
Kelsey looked at Gage, surprised how clued in he was.
“Yes, ask Jeannie,” Kelsey said. “She probably knows.”
“She’s the one who told me he’s missing,” Aaron said. “Apparently they had an argument, and no one’s seen or heard from him in two hours.”
“I have.” This from Rohit, who’d just walked over from the other side of the creek bed. “I saw him back at camp. He asked me to go get a beer with him, said he was knocking off early today.”
“He’s supposed to be working the ossuary,” Aaron complained.
“This is why we have a sign-out sheet.” Kelsey checked her watch, annoyed. It was nearly four and Sattler’s deputy was just now arriving. He trudged toward them with a sour look on his face and a metal detector in his hand.
She turned to Aaron. “See if you can reach him by sat phone. If he’s in town, maybe his cell is working. In the meantime, I’ve got to get these bones out of the ground before nightfall.”
Aaron walked off in a huff, but Kelsey didn’t much care. She didn’t have time to track down truant grad students. The forecast called for rain tonight, which meant the clock was ticking on this excavation.
“If you’re good here—”
“I am,” she told Gage.
“In that case, I’ll help the deputy. Maybe we can locate a shell casing.”
“Start here first.” Kelsey glanced around, looking for any unnatural rock patterns. “I think there’s another grave.”
“You’re saying we’ve got two victims?”
She stared down at the remains protruding from the soil. “At least.”
“How do you know?”
She lifted her gaze to his. “Because this one isn’t missing a femur.”
Gage stood in Kelsey’s camper and practiced the SEAL art of making himself invisible. He didn’t contribute to the debate. Not because he lacked an opinion, but because no matter what Kelsey and Robles concluded Gage had already decided on a battle plan.
“I don’t see how much more secure it could be,” Kelsey was saying. “We’ve got a sheriff’s deputy patrolling the area and a”—she turned to Gage and seemed to bite her tongue on the word “SEAL”—“an armed law enforcement officer right here in camp.”
Robles nodded. “And their presence is appreciated. But I can no longer overlook the situation. Our dig is located near a dangerous highway. Two fresh graves are ample evidence—”
“Those crimes occurred months ago.” Kelsey turned to the stove and stirred the soup she was making. “And what about the students? Some of them are conducting research for their dissertations. They paid good money to attend this field school, and we haven’t finished what we came here to do.”
Robles shot Gage a look that seemed to say, “Help me out here.” When Gage didn’t throw him a lifeline the old man stood up from the table.
“Dissertations don’t matter in the scheme of things, Dr. Quinn.” He picked up his gray fishing hat and arranged it on his head. “Given the way you spend most of your professional time, I would think you’d know that by now.”
Kelsey stood silently, her expression a mixture of frustration and acceptance. She knew she’d lost.
“When the students arrive in the morning we’ll start packing. I want all the equipment loaded by ten.” Robles nodded at Gage. “Good night, sir. I thank you for keeping an eye on my field supervisor this evening.”
The incensed look on Kelsey’s face as he left the camper was comical, but Gage didn’t dare laugh. He kept his expression carefully neutral as she slammed around the kitchen.
“This is bullshit,” she muttered. “If I were a man, this wouldn’t even be up for discussion.”
“Yeah, but you’re not a man,” Gage felt compelled to point out. “And he’s right. This isn’t a safe place to be right now. Ultimately, Robles is responsible for everyone here, and you can’t expect him to take risks with their safety.”
“I’m responsible for my safety.” Kelsey waved her wooden spoon at him. “I’ve got my own private security detail. How much safer could I get? And I still haven’t finished my work here.”
Gage pulled two soup bowls from the crate where she kept her dishes. He was starving, and he was pretty sure she was in no mood to wait on him. “You were too busy getting mad to listen. Robles didn’t say anything about you leaving. He was talking about the field school.”
Kelsey rested a hand on her hip and watched him ladle soup. “You’re saying I should continue helping Sattler?”
He put the
bowls on the table and sat down. “Eat,” he ordered. “And no, I’m not saying you should do anything. But I know you’re going to. I know you’re invested in this thing, and you’re not going to leave until you’ve finished. I plan to stick around until that happens.”
She watched him warily, then joined him at the table. “You’ll really stay?”
“I said I would.” He scooped up a bite of beef stew. It tasted incredible, and he knew he’d never be able to look at the MRE version with quite the same gusto.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“I’ve got some rules, though.”
“I knew it.”
“We’re moving you into town, starting tonight. You can get a room at the lodge. And you’re only going to work during daylight hours. And no driving alone. You can pack after dinner.”
He held her gaze as anger flashed in her eyes. This woman didn’t like taking orders. Too damn bad. He wanted her in town, in an actual building, behind an actual door, not camped out in this piece of shit RV.
Gage needed a break from this place, too. If he had to spend another night in that sleeping bag that smelled like her, all the while knowing she was curled up, soft and warm in that bed just a few feet away, he was going to start howling at the moon.
Gage considered himself a disciplined man, but he didn’t have nearly the willpower he needed to spend another night alone in Kelsey Quinn’s sleeping bag. He’d already slipped up once today by kissing her at the creek bed. It had been pure impulse, a gut reaction to something he’d seen in her eyes. It had also been a mistake.
“What?” Gage asked, as she gave him a peevish look.
“I’m just thinking it’s no wonder you’re a lieutenant. You’re very comfortable giving orders. Reminds me of Joe.”
Gage watched her get up and take a pair of beers from the minifridge. He realized he knew very little about her background besides the fact that she was his CO’s niece.
As she sat down, he twisted the caps off both beers and slid one to her. “I take it you’re from San Diego?” he asked.
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