Bear Claw Bodyguard

by Jessica Andersen

  The men—not the lab-coated figures that Jack had talked into leaving the lab trailer earlier, but rather two more toughs of the armed-and-dangerous variety—scowled and fell back. “What the hell?” one demanded, reaching for her arm.

  Jack yanked her away on the pretext of shaking her, giving a growl of, “Can’t believe you made me look like an idiot back there. And what the hell were you thinking, sneaking into the big trailer like that?” To the men, he said as an aside, “Sorry, won’t happen again.”

  “Wait,” one said, going for his radio.

  “Can’t,” Jack fired back. “This moron’s already made me late as spit.”

  Her breath wheezed in her lungs and she fought to keep her footing as he hustled her along, heading for the fuel stash she’d been hiding in before. They drew some attention, but nobody tried to stop them, and the two guys in the lab trailer didn’t raise an alarm. In fact, there wasn’t the slightest ripple of a response as they reached the fuel, bypassed the big drums and headed up the incline of the bowl, aiming for the tree line.

  Either the members of the Shadow Militia were so focused on their own tasks as the camp got ready to evac, or they were used to seeing senior soldiers dragging hapless underlings into the forest for punishment. Tori didn’t know why, but the suspicion that the latter was particularly true really reached inside and grabbed on, as did the utter strangeness of having fiddled with a DB-Auto—a normal, everyday machine—under such completely nonordinary circumstances.

  She had walked into and out of an armed encampment. She had fried their Auto, or at least locked it down tight enough that it would not only refuse to work now, but it would also refuse to release any of the info stored in its databanks. She had bumped into a guy wearing a machine gun slung over his shoulder.

  The ground pitched suddenly beneath her and the sky began to spin. She grabbed on to Jack, who still had her by the arm, and was hustling them up the slope of the next ridge. “Oh, God,” she wheezed, “I think I’m going to…”

  “Not yet.” He changed his grip, looping her hand over his neck and wrapping an arm around her waist, supporting her so that her feet were barely touching the ground. “Stay with me, sweetheart. We need to get far enough away that we’ll have a head start if they sound the alarm.”

  She let herself lean on him. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a wimp.”

  He shot her a look she was too strung-out to interpret. “Don’t be sorry. And you’re not a wimp. You’re about the furthest from a wimp I can imagine.”

  “For a civilian,” she said thinly.

  “For anyone.” He nudged her to a cluster of dull gray rocks within the shield of a thick stand of fungus-infected trees. “Okay, we’re going to stop here for a little while. Now you can feel free to faint, puke, have quiet hysterics…whatever you need to do. I won’t judge, I promise.”

  She sank down gratefully with her back against one of the big boulders, and rested her forehead on her knees while she concentrated on breathing. In. Out. In. Out.

  Beyond the small-feeling cage created by her body, she was conscious of Jack taking a quick prowl around the immediate area. Once he was reassured that they were as safe as they were likely to get right then, he sat down and leaned back against a rock opposite her, then stretched out his long legs on one side of her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body heat. Or maybe she just thought she could. Either way, it helped. It mattered. He was something solid and real when nothing else seemed that way right then.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  He pulled out the stolen radio and clicked it on, dialing through the channels to check whether there were other conversations going on. Finding just the one airwave in use, he settled on it, tuned the squelch and settled back to listen in on the chatter, which was focused on securing the last of the trailers to move out; checking maps but not revealing the coordinates of the “alternate site”; and berating somebody named Bert for being an idiot and denting one of the trailers with a Humvee.

  “Sounds like we’re in the clear,” Jack said to her.

  His voice was clear and undistorted, as if he was looking right at her. She didn’t want to think about the picture she probably made—huddled, bedgraggled, wearing a dead man’s hat and shirt—didn’t want to think about anything really, so she nodded without looking up, and concentrated on breathing. Nice and steady. Breathing meant she was alive. Slow and steady meant she was okay.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  After a minute or two more of that, the spins slowed and then receded, and she lost the need to faint, puke or have quiet hysterics. Instead, chilled, she crossed her arms, curled into herself, and concentrated on not rocking back and forth like the traumatized survivor of some mass tragedy when really, they had been damn lucky so far.

  Hopefully that luck would hold. Either way, though, she needed to pull herself together. Just because she could trust Jack to look out for her didn’t mean she should give him too much work to do in that regard.

  Exhaling a long, shuddering breath, she uncoiled, straightening to lean back against her rock and look at him. He was still wearing the camouflage jacket over his ragged button-down and jeans. The faux-military look probably should have given her the shakes after what they had just been through—and the fact that he was wearing dead guy clothes—but instead, her system leveled off at the sight of him, the reality of him.

  When their eyes met, a frisson of awareness moved through her, reminding her of the impression she’d gotten back in the lab, that something was different. His gaze had always been direct and confident, but now it seemed more wholly focused on her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  Perhaps for the first time with him, she didn’t weigh her answer for wimpiness before giving it. “I’m shaky.”

  He tipped his head. “Me, too.”

  “I doubt that, but appreciate the thought.” She paused, swallowing to clear the gritty taste of stale fear. “Do you think it’s safe to go back to the crash site?”

  Glancing at the radio, he considered the question for a moment, then tipped his hand in a “maybe” gesture that leaned toward the affirmative side. “The way I figure it, worst-case scenario is that the first transmission we overheard, the one about a business associate not getting the job done, means they went looking to confirm that we died in the crash, and know that we didn’t. But given that their response to that was to order an evac, and they don’t know yet that we messed with their equipment, they don’t have any new reason to come after us. Not to mention that they probably assumed we tried to hike out, or maybe got picked up already.”

  “They could have tracked us from the crash,” she said, not yet ready to feel reassured.

  “If they did that, they would have known we headed for the encampment.” He shook his head. “No, I really think we’re going to be okay here, Tori. We’ll keep the radio on and our eyes open, obviously, and we’ll set a hell of a perimeter around wherever we camp, and make damn sure there are a couple of ways out…but unless something changes drastically, I think our best bet is going to be going back toward the site, grabbing our gear from the cache and finding someplace to hole up for the night.”

  She thought about it for a moment, but couldn’t see a better option, and couldn’t really fault his logic. “Okay, I’m in. But first…” Reaching over, she tugged on the sleeve of the camo jacket. “Should we get this stuff back to the dead guy, in case they look a little harder for him, and actually find him this time?”

  “Good thinking.” He paused, glancing in the direction of the corpse. “You want to hunker down here and I’ll go take care of it?”

  She suppressed a shudder at the thought of the man’s bug-eyed stare and silent scream, but shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m coming with you, partner.”

  That earned her a raised eyebrow, but he didn’t comment or contradict. Instead, he nodded slowly. “Okay, then, partner. Let’s get moving.”

  THEY RETURNED the
dead man’s clothes and set off for the crash site with Jack in the lead. He kept them roughly parallel to their original track and watched intently for signs that they were being followed, but didn’t see any red flags. More, just before they got all the way out of radio range of the encampment, the chatter indicated that the Shadow Militia was moving out.

  Part of him hated like hell to hear that because the bastards had disappeared into thin air before, which meant there was a chance they were about to do it again. Granted, he and Tori had a ton of new info to add to the conversation, but still, there were no guarantees.

  That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? Life didn’t come with guarantees.

  Maybe that wasn’t the most original revelation ever, but hell, he’d never claimed to be all that original a guy. He had followed the family tradition by playing high school football, joining the Bear Claw P.D. and then marrying his high school sweetheart—or at least trying to. And when that last part hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped it would, he’d tried to find a woman the same way he built most of his cases, piece by piece and detail by detail, trying to make it all fit every step along the way. But just as there was no guarantee that methodical police-work would solve every case, there was no saying that the slow-and-steady approach would bear fruit either. It sure hadn’t done so yet.

  When he came down to it, he’d solved a handful of his most successful and most satisfying cases through luck and lightning-strike flashes of intuition rather than doggedness. Which meant…hell, he didn’t know what it meant in relation to Tori, but he knew one thing for damn sure: watching her shuffle across the encampment, out there in the open by herself, where any number of guys within a hundred feet of her could have caught on and gunned her down before he drew a bead, had been one of the worst things he’d ever lived through. And the knowledge that she could have died dozens of times over out there had slapped him across the face with his not-so-original revelation, along with the addendum that given the lack of guarantees in life, he should be careful not to miss out on something special because he was too set in old patterns that didn’t always work.

  Tori might be a flash of lightning rather than an eyewitness statement, but through the course of a solid and satisfying career, it was the lightning flashes that stood out and made him smile. Why hadn’t he seen that before?

  “We’re getting close to the cache, aren’t we?” she asked from behind him, sounding slightly winded but far stronger than she had right after their escape from the encampment.

  Sure enough, when he looked back at her, her eyes had traded dull shock for focus, and her lips had gone from being pinched and on the verge of trembling to a bow of determination. Warmth and respect centered in his chest in a devastating one-two punch, and he thought again of lightning.

  “Yeah, it’s just over that next ridge and off to the west.” Forcing himself to focus on their surroundings—because if a trap had been set, this would be the place—he got his rifle off his back and used the sight to scan the area. When nothing set off warning bells, he continued onward with her right behind him, both of them treading carefully and staying alert.

  They reached the cache without incident, retrieved their gear and then moved higher up the cliff above the roadway to a cave he’d scouted earlier. With a wide mouth, a crevice leading out the back, an eagle’s-eye view of the roadway and the busted-up SUV and a flat, wind-smoothed floor, it fit the bill of an overnight campsite, and then some.

  Together, they set a security perimeter, then pulled out the basics for an overnight, setting up an efficient, workable camp with minimal hassle, moving around each other as if they’d done this a hundred times before. And although she’d been the one to say the word, it really did feel like a partnership.

  How long had it been since he’d had a partner? The rookies didn’t count, and even his two prior detective-grade partners had been more along the lines of guys he hooked up with for this case or that, while working on his own most of the time. As for women…yeah, he’d dated, even had relationships. But a partner? He hated to admit it, but he had to go back to college and the first few years after, when he and Kayla had done the same things, wanted the same things.

  It hadn’t escaped him that Tori had a lot of the qualities he’d loved the most about Kayla back then: she was smart, sassy, spunky and not afraid of dirt, sweat or bugs. Better yet, Tori had brought those qualities into her adult life rather than outgrowing them, and she didn’t apologize for that, or anything else really.

  She had a bone-deep integrity he admired and a grit that had seen her through the day they’d just had. If she could get through that and still be focused now, she should be able to do most anything. Which made him picture her back out in the Forgotten with him, only this time there wasn’t any militia and the trees weren’t sick; it was just the two of them, their backpacks and the mountains for as long as they wanted to stay out there together.

  And he so shouldn’t be thinking along those lines. Especially not when he was supposed to be assembling the collapsible propane stove they were going to use in lieu of starting a too-bright, too-smoky fire.

  Not wanting to know how long he’d been sitting there, staring off into space, he bent over the disassembled stove and got to work. He was so intent on the job that it took him a minute to realize that Tori was sitting motionless a few feet away from him with a couple of carbon dioxide ampoules and the second of the inflatable mattresses in front of her. And she was staring at him—not accusingly, but rather bemusedly, as if she were coming to some startling new revelation.

  Yeah. He knew how that felt.

  “Listen,” he began. “I’ve been thinking—” He didn’t get any further, though, because she gave a small, strangled sob, lurched across the short distance separating them, and kissed him.

  It wasn’t a kiss of passion so much as one of connection, affirmation. Her lips were closed, her hands fisted in his shirt and hair, her body sprawled partly atop his.

  Surprise was quickly followed by the heat that hadn’t fully died since the night before when he’d truly gotten a taste of her. More, there was exultation because this wasn’t the cautious, reserved Tori who had ridden up the mountain with him, not making eye contact. Now she clung to him, shaking, as if things had changed for her, too.

  She broke the kiss and pressed her forehead to his as she whispered, “I’m so glad it was you there with me today. If it hadn’t been…” Drawing in a shuddering breath, she shook her head slightly, the movement transmitting from her to him through the slide of skin against skin. She pulled away and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Enough.” Even as his blood burned from the caresses, he eased away from her, catching her wrists so she couldn’t go too far as she drew back, surprised, her cheeks going from the pink of desire to the deeper flush of mounting embarrassment. “No,” he said when she started to say something, “it’s my turn. I don’t want to argue semantics with you, so I’ll start by saying ‘You’re welcome’ and that yeah, I did my job. But you’ve got to know that you stopped being a job that first night, Tori, when you held it together during the shooting and then refused to leave when your bosses pulled the plug. And every day since then, guarding you has been less about the job and more about me admiring your determination and wanting to help your investigation in any way possible.” He paused as she went even wider-eyed, then went ahead and said, “Plus, it’s been about protecting you because I don’t want to imagine a world without your energy and enthusiasm in it… And most of all, I’ve been right there with you every step of the way these past few days because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.” He paused. “I want to be here for you, Tori. I want to be with you.”

  Her eyes darkened. “But last night…”

  “Was last night, and I think the things that have happened today have put what’s going on between the two of us in a different light. At least they have for me.” He raised an eyebrow in question.

  She nodded slowly, new c
olor flooding her face, coming not from embarrassment this time, he thought, but from desire. “Me, too.” It was a whisper but carried the force of a shout.

  Heat leaped within him, flaring from the lust he’d been suppressing for days, which already eclipsed the feelings he’d had for any of the women he’d dated in the past few years. This was it, he thought. She was what he’d been waiting for, what he’d needed. Who would have guessed it?

  Not him, that was for sure. But while they might not look like they should work given the evidence, the lightning said he needed to make the leap. So he shifted, touched his lips to hers and took them both under with a kiss that had nothing to do with gratitude or the adrenaline of having gotten into and out of the encampment undetected, and everything to do with the two of them, then and there.

  When he pulled away, her eyelid fluttered open to reveal pupils dilated with desire. Still, though, need, tension and a hint of nerves strung him tight as he said, “Will you lie down with me, sweet Tori, and finish what we started last night?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Tori. Couldn’t. Breathe.

  It was a first for her really. Always before, she’d rolled with the flow of an encounter, letting it stay simple and easy. But there was nothing simple about the way her heart shuddered in her chest, and there was nothing easy about the emotions that churned inside her. Because she might have thought last night that she could be Jack’s lover for as long as it felt right, and then walk away unscathed, but in the light of day she knew differently.

  She liked and respected him, had gotten attached to him, and it was the attachment that worried her. Kneeling there on the sandy cave floor, in a universe that suddenly seemed to have contracted down to the two of them and the question that hung between them, she couldn’t remember what it had felt like to be anywhere else, couldn’t remember wanting to be with anyone else.