“Let’s hope so.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “And let’s hope his favor holds out twelve more hours until you and I are in the clear.”
Even the sight of her rounded little rear end shining up at him couldn’t stop that statement from garnering his full attention. “What?”
Her hands stilled where she was busy spreading the mattress and blankets into a pallet. “We could have been exposed today. I mean, I’m sure we’ll be fine, but…. It’ll be morning before we’ll know for sure. In the meantime, it looks like you and I will be spending the night together.”
The Ranger didn’t say a word, but his stiff expression made Macy feel that he’d rather jump into a pool of leeches than spend the night with her.
Well, why shouldn’t he? Jennifer Lopez she was not. And there was the little matter of her being responsible for an epidemic that could kill thousands of his friends and neighbors.
Not to mention the Ranger himself.
Suddenly embarrassed, she turned away from him, moved across the tent and busied her hands at the instant coffeemaker that had seen more of the world than most diehard travelers. She filled the battered carafe from a gallon jug of water on the floor. “I’m sorry I can’t provide better accommodations, but the Ritz was all booked. There’s an air pump in the footlocker.”
She glanced over her shoulder without thinking about it, found him staring at her and shuddered.
How could a man’s expression be so inscrutable and his eyes so…penetrating? She’d never been good at hiding what she was feeling, but when the Ranger looked at her, she was sure he could read her every thought.
Given what she’d been thinking when she’d made up a bed for him, she found the possibility distinctly uncomfortable.
He eyed the pallet, dragged a hand through his close-cropped hair and blew out a breath. “Guess it could be worse. I was assigned to a tent with Skip Hollister.”
A harsh laugh burst out of her. “Glad to know I’m not quite the bottom of the roommate barrel.”
“He snores like a freight train.”
“How do you know I don’t?”
He eyed her up and down, bringing the blood up her neck. “Do you?”
“You won’t have to worry about it tonight.” She pulled her lower lip between her teeth, the seriousness of their situation eating its way through her mind like slow poison. “I doubt I’ll be sleeping much.”
He didn’t ask why. Guess he didn’t have to.
Without a clue what to do next, she sat on the edge of her cot while he blew up his air mattress, then realized she still had the coffee carafe in her hand and got up to pour the water in the reservoir. Her nerves didn’t need the caffeine, but she didn’t know what else to do with herself. The Ranger finished inflating his bed about the same time the coffeemaker quit gurgling.
After he put the pump away, she handed him a cup and reached for another mug for herself. “I don’t have any sugar or cream.”
“Black is fine. Thanks.”
They both stared into their coffee in silence. The Ranger sipped, blew the steam off the cup and drank again.
She wrapped her fingers around the mug, absorbing its warmth. Time seemed to thicken. To pass the way molasses poured from a bottle. Painfully slowly. At this rate, morning would never come.
Macy sat on the edge of her cot again, fiddled with her cup. “So, what were you doing responding to a plane crash out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? Seems like a strange place to find a Texas Ranger.”
He paced to the door of the tent, back. “We go where we’re needed.”
“Big crime wave in Hempaxe, Texas, population 384, is there?”
“I was…on leave. Staying at a cabin on Lake Farrell. Saw the plane go down.”
“Skip Hollister said he knew you when you were a boy. Did you grow up around here?”
He shook his head. “Just summers.”
“Where did you live the rest of the year?”
“You got a sudden desire to write my memoir?”
“Just trying to make conversation.”
He stared at her a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry. Cop habit, not giving out personal information. The cabin belonged to my grandpop. I visited for a couple of months in the summer, traveled all over the world repairing oil rigs with my dad the rest of the year.”
“You didn’t have a permanent home?”
“Just hotels and oil-field bunkhouses.”
Pity twisted through her chest like a corkscrew. She couldn’t imagine moving all the time. Not having a place to call home. A doorframe to notch the kids’ heights in as they grew.
She wanted to tell him she was sorry, comfort him somehow, but he neatly changed the subject before she had a chance.
“What about you?” he asked. “What did you do as a kid, besides play so far out in the bayou the gators couldn’t find you.”
She smiled as she remembered throwing that tidbit of her childhood over her shoulder at him as she’d marched off into the woods that afternoon. It was true, if a bit of an exaggeration.
“How does a girl from the bayou wind up as a virus hunter for the CDC?”
“What better place to learn about bugs than the bayou? The ones I play with now are just a lot smaller.” The warmth of the coffee spread through her chest along with memories of happier days. “Truth is, there was a time when I wanted nothing more than to hang out my shingle as a family doctor in some small town where I could make a difference.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Sometimes fate has other plans for us.”
And sometimes we’re too afraid to poke our heads out of our shells and see what fate has in store.
After a disastrous affair with a visiting surgeon who’d told her he loved her, but neglected to mention the wife and two kids waiting for him in California during her second-year residency, Macy had found the solitary world of viral research science comforting. Unlike people, viruses were predictable. They could be studied. Understood. The laboratory environment, with its bulky suits and airtight work chamber provided her some necessary emotional distance from her coworkers.
Even her relationship with David had been cool. Sterile. He had appreciated her for her mind. She liked his ambition. If there wasn’t much chemistry between them, there was at least safety.
She’d thought safety was enough, until recently when she’d found herself awake until all hours, reading steamy romance novels and crying over old Bogart and Bacall movies.
Like a tulip bulb that had lain dormant in the frozen ground until spring, she found herself slowly coming to life. Reaching for the sun. Warmth.
She needed heat in her life. Passion. Laughter and tears. So she’d broken off her engagement to David. And now he was dead, and here she was with the Ranger, the wrong kind of man for her in the wrong place at the wrong time…and all she could think was she wished he would put his arms around her. Just hold her for a moment.
Like that was going to happen.
Embarrassed to realize her eyes had filled with tears—and that the Ranger had reached down to wipe them away with his thumb—she swiped at her face with the sleeve of her sweater and sniffed. He pulled his hand back, his inscrutable expression unchanged, but the air between them had changed. Charged.
“I suppose you’ve always known you wanted to be a Texas Ranger. Life never threw you any curves?”
“Until recently.”
How could she have forgotten? She’d sat here wallowing in her own misery as if his life—or death—didn’t hang on a simple blood test to be performed in the morning. Without thinking she reached out and took his hand. His fingers were warm. There was heat inside him, after all. She wondered if there was passion, as well, beneath the stoic exterior, then chastised herself for the direction of her thoughts.
Wrong man. Wrong place. Wrong time.
He eased his hand from hers, but when he walked away, his back seemed more rigid, his gait stiffer. She wished she
could reassure him everything would be all right, but she couldn’t be sure it would. Besides, he obviously didn’t want her comfort.
Deciding not to poke the wounded bear, she sighed, dug through her footlocker for the playing cards she always carried on field missions, and laid out the first of many hands of solitaire.
Clint twitched at the sound of every voice outside the tent. Jumped at every footstep that sounded as if it might be coming his way.
The sun had come up an hour ago. Dr. Attois’s assistant, Susan, a large-boned woman with a wide mouth, had taken blood samples from both him and the doctor shortly thereafter. The tests should be done any minute.
“Pacing isn’t going to bring Susan back any quicker.”
She was still sitting on her cot playing solitaire. Said it relaxed her.
He hadn’t said so, but he found her choice of distraction sad. She shouldn’t need to play card games alone to relax. Wouldn’t need to, if she was his woman.
But she was not his woman. Never would be. Not in this lifetime.
However long or short that might prove to be.
Dragging his hand through the roots of his hair, he started back across the tent that seemed to be shrinking by the minute, then whirled when he heard the zipper on the outside tent flap open. A tall, blond guy in a full environmental suit stood outside the clear interior tent flap, which was still secured.
That couldn’t be good, could it?
Dr. Attois unfolded herself from her cot and hurried over. “Curtis?”
“Just wanted to let you know that Christian and I have finished screening all the workers. None of them are showing any symptoms, and their blood is still clean. They’re good to go.”
“Excellent.”
“Still no sign of José, but the military dropped a hundred traps baited with fruit into the woods last night within a three-mile radius of where you saw him. He’s got to get hungry. We’ll get him.”
“Good,” Dr. Attois said. Was Clint imagining it, or did her voice sound strained?
“Yeah,” the man she’d called Curtis said, and turned to leave. “It is.”
Two steps away, he stopped and looked back at them. “Oh, I almost forgot. Susan asked me to tell you she finished your blood work.” He peered at them solemnly through his face shield, then cracked a wide grin. “No virus. You’re in the clear.”
Dr. Attois’s breath shot out of her chest. She charged the door, grabbing for her gas mask. “Curtis Leahy, I’m going to kill you when I get out there!”
But she was smiling as she threatened him. He just laughed and strode away with a wave.
She dropped her mask back onto the table and turned, nearly running into Clint. He put his arms out instinctively to balance her. She wrapped hers around his back and squeezed.
“We’re clear. Did you hear? We’re clear! I knew everything would be all right.”
At the moment, Clint was anything but all right. The news that he and the doctor both had dodged the ARFIS bullet had his heart in high gear. That, and the press of her plump breasts against his chest, the friction of her thighs scraping against his as she hopped up and down on her toes in joy, had his blood roaring, his hands wandering from her shoulders to her back, then lower, and his mind conjuring up crazy possibilities about the two of them. Right here. Right now.
What better way to celebrate life?
She tipped her head back to look at him through the corkscrew locks of dark hair that shuttered her seductress’ eyes, to smile at him, and—
Oh, hell. Stifling a groan, he lowered his lips to hers. Kissed her. Tasted her. Memorized the shape and texture of her.
And realized that he’d dodged one bullet this morning, only to have another, in the form of a sexy, sassy little doctor, strike him dead in the heart.
Chapter 7
Macy’s body softened like warm wax under the Ranger’s onslaught of a kiss. Her senses were overwhelmed with his woodsy smell, the feel of hard muscles and heat. Had she wondered if there was heat in him? There was fire inside this man. Molten lava, bubbling, unseen but felt, just below the surface of that stoic exterior.
How did he hide it so well?
Why did he hide it at all?
What was she doing thinking when there was so much to feel, to experience? To enjoy.
She stretched up onto her toes to give him fuller access. His hands slid down her back, pulling her closer, leaving her skin tingling along their trail. His hips surged forward, tantalizing her with an intimate impression of him against her thigh.
Oh, my.
“Macy, we need to know what you want to tell—Oh. Ahem.”
Macy jumped away from the Ranger, dizzy. Her thoughts whirled. Her senses shorted out for a moment at the sudden loss of the high-voltage charge they’d been receiving only a moment before.
Susan stood outside the clear plastic tent seal, her cheeks as red as strawberries behind her face mask. “Sorry to interrupt.”
Gathering herself, Macy tugged her sweater down and cleared her throat. “You weren’t interrupting. We were just— That is—” She looked over her shoulder for help, found none. “We got a little carried away with the good news. What is it you said you needed?”
Susan’s gaze jumped from Macy to the Ranger and back. “Umm—”
“It’s okay. Whatever it is, he can hear it.”
“We need to know what you want to tell the workers. Some of them are asking about going home.”
Macy studiously avoided looking back at the Ranger. “Ask them to be patient a little while longer.”
Susan nodded as she backed away. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”
Macy could feel the Ranger behind her. The air vibrated with his presence. Or maybe that was her, shaking in her tennis shoes.
“You’re not going to let them go, are you?”
A moment ago, she would have given this man her body, if he’d asked. The least she could do now was give him the truth. “I can’t.”
“You can’t keep them here forever.”
“Just until we catch the monkey.”
“If you catch the monkey.”
“We’ll get him. But we can’t let the men go back to town until we do.”
“Because they know the truth,” Clint said.
“They’ll start a panic.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that when you decided to lie to the public, to tell them you were out here looking for a rabid monkey, to begin with.”
“I didn’t lie to anyone. I put my career on the line, trying to help you get the truth out, if you remember. And besides, I’m not just keeping them here because I don’t want them talking in town.”
His eyelids flickered, almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t much, but she interpreted it as intrigue. He wondered what she was up to, she realized, and took some small measure of satisfaction in the fact that she recognized it.
Maybe the Ranger’s control wasn’t so iron-clad after all. He showed his emotions, if subtly. A girl just had to pay attention, and know how to read them.
She was learning.
“You said they were good men,” she answered his unspoken question. “They know these woods. They know how to hunt, to track animals. I’ve got a bunch of city boys out there, and we’ve got a hundred traps to check, and keep checking until we catch that monkey. If we pair them up, they’ll make better time, cover more ground.” She looked at him through her lashes. “I need their help. Assuming your guys are willing.”
“You give them protective gear, they’ll be willing. This is their town that monkey has put at risk.”
“We’ll give them gear, but I won’t lie. There are still risks. Comes with the job.”
“Some things are worth the risk. I figure their town, their families fall into that category.” He trailed along on her heels, watching her gather her gear. “You’re going out there, too, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t ask my people—or yours—to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.” She pressed her lips
thin. “Besides, it might be their town, friends, neighbors and families, but it’s my damned monkey. My virus.”
He picked up his respirator and followed her to the door. “Then I guess you’re going to need a partner, too, partner.”
She turned and looked up at him, her heart going soft and slushy. “Fate’s smiled on you twice. You sure you want to test her again?”
“I’m a Texas Ranger. I live to test fate.”
“Is that why you kissed me, Ranger Hayes?” The words popped out before she could stop them. Mortified, she stared at the ground.
He lifted her chin with a finger. She hadn’t realized how close they were. How large he was. How daunting.
His pupils dilated a fraction. His lips parted and she thought he might kiss her again, but instead he said, “No. But since we do seem to have moved beyond the handshake and formal greeting stage, Macy, maybe you could call me Clint.”
He dropped her chin. She wanted to ask why he had kissed her, if it hadn’t been to test fate, but she couldn’t seem to form the words. Could barely think coherently.
But she did remember one thing. Under the table behind her sat a plain stainless-steel bucket with a plastic lid that sealed airtight. The gas pellets should have done their sterilization trick by now.
She picked up the bucket, opened it and pulled out his badge and then his gun with her thumb and forefinger. “If we’re going to be partners, Clint, then I guess you should have these.”
“Thank you.”
The corners of his mouth crinkled a fraction as he took them.
She took that as a Texas Ranger smile.
Yesterday’s sunshine and blue skies were gone. As Clint followed Macy’s lead into the woods, titanium clouds weighed as heavily on his shoulders as his mood. He was grateful to her for giving his gun and badge back. For reminding him he was still a Ranger, if only for another day. For as long as he carried it, he had a duty to the badge. A duty to the people of the state that gave it to him.
He had no business letting himself be distracted by a woman.
Her Last Defense Page 6