Undercover Cowboy

by Beverly Bird

  “With his fingers all wrinkly and a leech in his underwear,” Gofer supplied.

  Plank grunted in his sleep as though he heard them and remembered, and everyone laughed. How could everything seem so normal? Carly wondered wildly.

  Reggie finally shrugged and went into his tent. The others began standing and stretching. Holly dropped to her knees and crawled into her own small tarpaulin, but she gave a sly look back in the direction of Jack and Carly.

  After a moment, it was just Carly and Jack, Plank and Scorpion, and Plank remained unconscious. Jack didn’t move from where he lay beside the fire. Scorpion stood watching them. Carly’s nerves stretched out until they felt like live wires.

  “Uh…good night,” she managed finally, hoarsely. She turned for her tent, looking at Jack as she did. He’d said he was going to stay with her tonight, but he didn’t move. True, they’d agreed that he’d wait until after Holly went to bed before he came to her tent. But Holly had gone now, so why didn’t he do something?

  “Sleeping alone tonight, cowgirl?” he finally asked, but his voice seemed too deliberate, at least to her, and she finally understood. He wanted Scorpion to know that he’d be with her.

  She fought him out of sheer contrariness. Or maybe, she thought, maybe it was just disappointment that he was so purely the predator after all. “I’m…uh, pretty tired.”

  “Bet I could fix that.”

  “Talk’s cheap,” she shot back angrily.

  Something flared in his eyes, and suddenly she was positive that it had nothing to do with Scorpion after all. Her heart thundered.

  Scorpion looked back and forth between them, sharply, and, she thought, angrily.

  Angrily?

  Then Jack finally got to his feet, one of his brows raised, and she forgot about it.

  “Let’s find out,” he drawled.

  Chapter 15

  Carly ducked into her tent. She was trembling again. She told herself it was because this was the first time all day she had been out of the assassin’s sight. It was purely relief.

  A heartbeat later, the tent door snapped behind her and Jack came in. She whirled about to face him.

  “Is Holly going to be all right?” she demanded.

  “I asked Rawley to help keep an eye and an ear on her tonight.”

  “Is that good enough?”

  “I’ll be listening, too.”

  She turned away from him. “You wanted Brad to know you’d be in here, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her jaw tensed. “Well, does he? Does he know?”

  “I think so. He went to his tent first. Sometimes you just can’t be sure, Carly,” Jack said quietly. “There are no absolutes in this game.”

  A game. Was it all just a game to him? She flinched and searched his face.

  “How can you stand it?” she asked finally, quietly.

  He looked away from her. “That’s what makes it interesting. It’s all one big gamble.”

  “A gamble? With your life?”

  He closed the distance between them, gathering her close as he had wanted to do for hours now. The rigidity of her muscles relaxed a little. She groaned softly and wrapped her arms around his neck. He felt so solid, so strong, so good, she thought.

  “Maybe I’m as bad as Leigh,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m just trying to grab hold of life, but God, Jack, I need you right now.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t care why.”

  And he didn’t, he realized. Maybe his male pride was seriously lacking. Or maybe it was just strong enough that he didn’t sweat the small stuff. Either way, if she needed to use him, then he was glad to be used.

  He found her mouth and she almost literally melted into him. Everything drained out of her with the touch of his lips on hers. For a moment, she was free of the fear. And his alarm escalated.

  It would be so easy to forget Scorpion right now. And so deadly. He had tweaked him on purpose, letting him know he’d be in here with his woman. It had to be killing the bastard, even as twisted as he was and as cold as he could be. It had to be straining all the dispassionate common sense that was keeping him at a distance from her right now. And, Jack hoped, it would be an added incentive, on top of the imminent river, to move tonight, to take her away now or even to leave by himself, to do anything to put an end to the torment.

  “Do you have a lantern in here?” he asked against her lips, still thinking.

  Carly pulled back. It took her a moment to focus on him again. “What? Why?”

  “It’ll cast a silhouette. Then we can be sure that he knows I’m in here.”

  Carly felt something cold slide down through her. When it finally reached her toes, she felt as fragile as handblown glass.

  “You want to put on a show for him?” she whispered.

  “Nothing so explicit as that.” But then Jack realized how his words had sounded. Too late he knew that she thought that he was staging a scene for the assassin’s benefit again, that it meant nothing more to him than that.

  “You wanted to be sure,” he pointed out carefully.

  “Get out of here.”

  He flinched at the lack of venom in her voice, at the hollow hurt. He reached for her arm to try to pull her back to him, then he almost lost his balance in the cramped space when she came too willingly. Her fists began pummeling him as soon as she was close enough to reach him.

  “Carly, I didn’t mean—” He broke off, grunting as she got in a particularly good shot. Then she reeled back from him.

  “Yes, you did!” she cried. “Is that all this has been for you? Was touching me just part of your…your game?”

  “Stop it, Carly.” He caught her wrists. “Come on, don’t talk so loud.”

  That only inflamed her more. She shouted instead and struggled to pull away from him.

  “Tell me, Jack! Talk to me!”

  Oh, hell, Scorpion was going to love this. “We’ve already been through this!” he snapped. “No, it was—isn’t—part of a game!”

  She wrenched away from him. “All I wanted was to get my cows to Kansas!” she bit out. “And then…when you…when we…I just wanted you to want me…to honestly want me back!” And she had been fool enough to believe that maybe he had.

  God, how she hated being a fool! And she had played the role time after time since this man had appeared in her barnyard, doing things she never would have done for or with another man. And she knew again, suddenly and horribly, that for him, involvement went only as deep as a touch.

  “Listen to me,” he said quietly. “I’ve been hunting, chasing, playing this game for a lot longer than I’ve known you. It’s second nature. It has nothing to do with you. It’s in me. I can’t turn it off. I don’t know how to anymore, and even if I did, this is too important. But that doesn’t mean I want you less! One doesn’t have anything to do with the other!”

  But it did, she thought desperately, because even while he had been kissing her, he had been thinking about Brad, playing him, setting him up again. Because even while he was touching her, there was a part of him she couldn’t touch, that part of him that hid behind his excuses.

  “That’s why you do it, isn’t it?” she asked hollowly, realizing it suddenly like a light bulb going on in her head.

  “Do what?” He was instantly wary, recognizing that tone in her voice. She was going to start digging at him again.

  “It’s like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which was it, Jack?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He didn’t need this now, he thought. He needed to touch her, to lose himself in her. Maybe that was why he hadn’t minded being used, because his own needs were just as consuming. He didn’t want to talk. He could feel the heat of her in the darkness of the tent and he just wanted to steep himself in it, and Scorpion could be damned.

  Scorpion could almost be damned. He wondered a little crazily how she would feel about making love with his gun still strapped to his
calf.

  But she was relentless, and she wasn’t thinking about making love. When he made a move toward her again she took a half step back.

  He finally lit the lantern himself. In the new, dim light, he saw that her eyes blazed.

  “You don’t actually use your Scorpion as an excuse so you don’t have to stay in one place and settle down,” she accused, her voice lower so no one but Jack could hear her. “You chose your job in the first place because it won’t let you settle down.”

  Jack’s jaw clenched. “Wrong, cowgirl. I didn’t choose my work. It chose me.”

  She blinked. She hadn’t expected that. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t decide to go into the…the agency I’m a part of. They recruit you, out of college, the armed forces, wherever you happen to be when you snag their attention.”

  Her skin paled. In the light from the lantern, it looked translucent. He wanted his words back and couldn’t take them.

  “The agency?” she repeated carefully. “What agency? The CIA?” She’d just assumed that he was with the FBI, she realized. But he wouldn’t call that an agency. That was a bureau.

  “No,” he said shortly.

  She thought fast. “Secret Service?”

  “No.”

  “Even if I guessed, you’d lie, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” he said yet again. “I won’t lie, because you won’t ever guess.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Carly, there are so many more branches of the government than the public knows about. There are organizations that only the President knows of. There are teams that only investigate other teams.”

  “And what…what exactly are you?” she whispered.

  Without making a conscious decision, he decided to tell her. His head was pounding hard with tension, yet he knew he had to make her understand as Zoe never had. This woman wouldn’t be content with half truths, wouldn’t take comfort in them, and he had a sudden need for her to know the truth, or at least as much of it as he was allowed to tell her.

  He would examine why later. For now, if she was going to condemn him, then it was damned well going to be for something he was guilty of. And if she wasn’t, if she was going to accept him…well, then, she was going to know exactly what it was that she was accepting.

  He refused to acknowledge why he wanted her to do so so badly, why it even mattered since he was going to be gone in a few days anyway.

  “We chase Scorpion and guys like him,” he said flatly. “And when we catch them, sometimes we kill them. If we have to. If the opportunity presents itself. We do all the nasty stuff that the CIA and the FBI can’t get away with, stuff that would raise a hue and a cry among the American people if they ever got wind of it. We cross over gray areas that would have bleeding hearts and liberals up in arms. We pretty much do the same things the bad guys do, but we do it for the right reasons.”

  She took a little stumbling step away from him. It was no more or less than he had expected, yet the impact of it felt like a fist in his gut.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice seeming to hitch over the single syllable.

  “Because if the bleeding hearts had their way, guys like Scorpion would be ruling the world. Because while the liberals are preaching up on their soapboxes, whole countries are dying, are being deliberately killed off. Because it’s nice to talk about love and peace and flower power, but the fact of the matter is that the sixties are a long way behind us, and that stuff didn’t work then, either. Guns and killing and hatred are still what make the world go round, and more guns and more killing are needed to combat that. You need to meet guys like Scorpion on their own terms. They can’t be stopped any other way. They don’t respect anything else. They laugh at the CIA.”

  “Is that why you joined this…the agency?” she asked hoarsely. “Because you believe all that?” That was the important thing, she thought, not her own moral judgments. She didn’t have to go around shooting people to even the score. The important thing was how he dealt with it…and if he did it easily.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. “For the most part. Some instances are more painless than others.”

  “Just because they recruited you, it didn’t mean you had to stay with them. Did it?”

  He could have told her that he hadn’t known exactly what he was getting into until it was too late. He truly hadn’t. He’d been flattered at first, proud. Somebody had wanted him. Then he’d understood what was expected of him, the kind of amazing leeway he had, how very few laws he had to salute to. He’d understood…and he’d stayed.

  Because she was right, he realized. As long as he was with the agency, there was no possibility of laying down roots. If he’d really wanted out, if he’d really wanted to go to Florida, there would have been no way Paul could have talked him into this last foray.

  That rocked him.

  “They need guys like me,” he pushed on. “And yeah, I do believe that men like Scorpion have to be stopped in any way it takes. That prime minister and the senator I told you about sure as hell didn’t deserve to die.”

  Carly remembered the picture in his wallet and what he had told her last night. “They need guys without strings, without family and messy attachments?”

  Jack stiffened. “Good enough.”

  “Did they know about your parents? Is that why they picked you?”

  She was good, he thought. Astute and sharp…and not afraid to use the edge. “They pulled me out of the Navy. I was a SEAL. They liked what I could do in pressure situations.”

  “But it couldn’t have hurt that your mom and your dad were both gone.”

  “Damn it, Carly! Leave that alone!”

  Her thoughts raced on, sharp and curious. “But you had a wife,” she realized.

  “Later,” he snapped. “I had a wife later, not when they took me. I got married after I made the commitment to the agency. They warned me that it wouldn’t last and they were right.”

  Suddenly it occurred to him that they probably wouldn’t have been right if they had been talking about this woman. It astounded him…and it panicked him all over again. It made something prickle his skin and roll in his gut and it made his heart skip a beat.

  He needed to put an end to this conversation after all.

  “Well, I guess that answers my question,” Carly said.

  “It does?” He eyed her warily.

  “The chicken came first.”

  She staggered him. He had almost forgotten that part of their conversation.

  “I guess you’re going to tell me why,” he said slowly.

  “Sure. You tell yourself you can’t settle down, that your job won’t let you. ‘It’s in me. I can’t turn it off,”’ she mimicked. “Convenient, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer. His heart was pounding.

  “I bet you could, cowboy.”

  “I could what?”

  “Turn it off.”

  She turned away from him and switched off the lantern again, then waited as though defying him to turn it back on. Finally, he felt her moving close to him again in the darkness.

  “I bet you could,” she repeated quietly, “if you had the guts.”

  He felt her breath at his jaw, then her teeth closed on his earlobe, and he wondered what an Oklahoma cowgirl thought she was going teach him about guts. And then he realized that he didn’t want to know. He was too relieved that her temper had fizzled out to care if he was meeting her challenge.

  She was in front of him now. He reached out for her in the darkness, and slid his hand beneath her braid to cup the back of her neck. He held her still, plunging his tongue past her teeth, and now Carly kissed him back because she did need to feel life. In the end she needed him just the way he was, a predator standing between her and the killer who was lurking out there in the night. She shuddered and met his tongue desperately, groaning and closing her eyes.

  She hadn’t unrolled her sleeping bag, but it didn’t matter. The rocky dirt wasn’t as kind as the creek-bed sand, but th
at didn’t matter either. They eased down to the ground together, and if it was inhospitable, if some part of him really did keep listening for Scorpion, then he was too relieved to care and she didn’t seem to sense it.

  She knelt above him, straddling him, then she lowered herself to touch her mouth to his again. Peace, warmth, all the things he had mocked earlier were there in his kiss, she thought.

  She slid down his body, a slow, deliberate friction against every one of his nerve endings. She popped the buttons on his shirt as she went, trailing small, hot kisses along the skin that was exposed. Jack groaned.

  She reached his belt buckle and undid it, and pulled his jeans off, then his boots. This time she didn’t hesitate when she came to his gun. She unstrapped it from his calf.

  Jack struggled back to sanity. “Put it up here, Carly,” he said evenly. Where I can easily get to it. He didn’t add that aloud, but she knew. He waited for her temper again, but her eyes only burned with determination. She gave him the gun.

  “I’m going to make you forget, Jack,” she breathed. “For just a minute, for just a little while, you’re going to be all mine and Scorpion can go to hell.” Then she stroked her hands over his hardness, and he was.

  Jack plunged his hands into her braid. She hadn’t taken it down this time but he dug his fingers into its folds, forcing it loose, until her glorious hair spilled through his hands. Her mouth followed her hands, hot and wet, and it tortured him. His muscles ached with the pain of restraint, but she was right. He didn’t think about Scorpion and he didn’t think about the agency, and he didn’t think about the void that was his life.

  Just when he thought he would lose control, she slid back up over him again slowly. Her clothing dragged over his heated skin. Her grin was wicked and satisfied.

  He couldn’t let that challenge go unanswered. “My turn, cowgirl.”

  He dragged her T-shirt over her head, and worked her jeans down her hips. His hands slid beneath the elastic of her panties, holding her against him for a moment while he caught his breath and tried to take back the upper hand. Then he dived into her mouth, seeking forgetfulness once more.