Cowboy, Undercover

by Vicki Tharp

  Going in, she made a conscious effort to keep her eyes to herself, as she dumped the armload of supplies onto the counter. She handed Gil a pair of scrub bottoms. Without glancing over her shoulder, she said, “I hope these fit. I grabbed the biggest size I could find.”

  She waited with her back to him until he said, “I’m decent. You can turn around now.”

  He’d scrubbed a lot of the blood off his hands, but much of it remained in the creases and crevasses of his work-hardened hands. She pulled the plastic off a hand scrub brush—the kind surgeons use to scrub the dirt from their fingernails before surgery—and met him at the sink.

  “Let me help,” she said.

  She turned both faucets on until the water ran hot, but not scalding. She took Gil’s hands and placed them under the running water. From the soap dispenser on the wall, she put a large dollop on her hands, rubbing them together, then took his hands and started sudsing him up.

  Her hands looked like a child’s in his as she worked the lather between his thick fingers and over the callouses on the pads of his palms. Then she got the soft brush and scrubbed his hands until the suds turned a rusty red.

  “I can do this myself,” he finally said, though he made no effort to take the brush from her and do it himself.

  “I know.” She rinsed his hands, then wet the surgical towel. She pointed to the smears on blood on his chest. “Do you mind?”

  He shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  With firm strokes, she wiped the blood from his chest and abdomen. She had to rinse the towel twice to get it all. She tugged on the waistband of the scrub pants and wiped a bit of blood from his V trail that disappeared beneath the fabric.

  He caught her wrist with his hand and took the towel from her. “I can get it from here.”

  Holy moly, what was she doing? She held her hands up and took a step back. “Sorry, I was—”

  “It’s okay.”

  She shook her head that it wasn’t, but he placed a finger under her chin and tilted her head up, forcing her to look at him. “I appreciate the help, but…” he glanced down at his crotch. The thin fabric of the green scrubs couldn’t hide his arousal.

  “That damn adrenaline,” Tessa said, trying to give him an out.

  He grinned, and his face softened. He was no longer a warrior, but a regular man. “No, Sunshine. That’s all you.”

  She wasn’t into head games, so she didn’t fight the smile. “Good to know.”

  He stepped into her space and cupped one hand around the back of her neck, his thumb tracing the edge of her jaw.

  She leaned into the touch. “You about ready to head back out there?”

  “Give me a second.”

  “What for?”

  “For this.” He ducked his head and touched his lips to hers. Even with some washing, she could smell the gunpowder on his skin, and beneath that, the coppery scent of violence. The kiss wasn’t hard or demanding as she’d expected it to be.

  A fast-food worker would describe Gil as super-sized, but there was another side to this man. Different than what he projected to the outside world. Despite what this man did for a living, beneath the thick muscles and his intimidating exterior, behind the hard eyes, inside his protective shell, there was a softness, a gentleness to him that he couldn’t hide. At least not from her.

  Or maybe he hadn’t tried.

  Maybe like her, he’d found the one person he didn’t feel like he had to put up a front and shield his true self from.

  Yet he wasn’t all mush behind the rugged exterior. You couldn’t live the violent life he had and not have flame-hardened steel protecting your soul.

  She rose up on her toes, deepening the kiss, and tasted the bitter hospital coffee on his tongue. She wanted more. Much more. Not because it had been too long since she’d been with a guy. She couldn’t lie and say that it was. She’d been horny and lonely many times before and had managed not to throw herself at every handsome man that gave her a speck of attention. She was better—no, she was stronger than that.

  But this man…there was something special about this man, more than just the way he tripped all her sex-starved switches.

  You’d said the same thing about Bradley and look where that got you.

  Yeah, well, she’d gotten Jack out of the deal. Despite how hard it was to be a single mom, she had no regrets. She wrapped her arms around Gil’s neck, but he broke the kiss, caught her wrists and held them between them.

  The thumping of her heart screeched, like a needle skipping across a record. “Something wrong?”

  He touched his forehead to hers. “No. Something’s right, and I don’t want to screw it up by taking you against the wall of a hospital bathroom.”

  His directness, his honesty, was something she’d already fallen for. She couldn’t, wouldn’t fall for the man. A hot, sweaty affair? No problem. But after her experience with her ex, she was now deathly allergic to anything that resembled a commitment.

  Besides, she already had a little man in her life that she’d given her heart to the moment she’d set eyes on him. Jack’s happiness, Jack’s safety, was all that mattered. There would come a time for her, but that time wasn’t now.

  “You ready to go back?” she asked.

  He glanced down at the tenting of his pants, then back up at her. If he was embarrassed, he did a damn fine job hiding it. “You go ahead. I need a few minutes.”

  Lang and Rivera’s surgeons came in together, their surgical masks dangling around their neck, their caps still on their sweaty heads. The shorter and heavier of the two doctors addressed the room at large. “We’ve spoken with the families, and they’ve given us permission to update everyone. Rivera should make a full recovery. He lost a lot of blood, but the bullet went through and managed to miss anything vital.”

  The other doctor, a thin man with excess nervous energy, despite the hours in emergency surgery said, “Lang…” the doctor looked away, then met the eyes of the anxious men and women of the task force. “The family asked us not to sugar coat it. He’s in rough shape and has a long recovery ahead of him. The bullet had lodged next to one of his vertebrae, at this point, he’s lost all feeling in his legs, but it’s too soon to know how much of the paralysis is permanent.”

  “When can we see them?” Gil asked.

  “Tomorrow sometime,” Short Doctor said. “They’re in recovery, and we expect them to be in ICU at least for the rest of the night.”

  Gil let out a huge breath and scrubbed his hands down his face. Then he nodded his head. “Okay,” he said, but to Tessa, it seemed like it was more to himself than to anyone else.

  She reached over and gave his hand a quick squeeze.

  He glanced at her then, blinking a few times. “This is good news.” The tone of his voice was off, the hope false and manufactured. “Lang won’t let a little paralysis slow him down. He’s a fighter. It will take more than a bullet to stop him.”

  “Yeah,” Tessa said, but the word came out strangled as if she really didn’t believe her own words. “Yeah,” she repeated with more conviction, for Gil that time.

  He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her in for a side hug. Quinn came over and clapped Gil on the back. “Nice job out there.”

  “Lang’s paralyzed.” The anger had crept into his voice, replacing the worry. “He may never walk again.”

  “Yeah, but because of you, he’s not dead.”

  Gil pulled a face that said, maybe he hadn’t done his friend any favors, but he didn’t voice his concern.

  The door to the waiting room burst open, and Spinks blew in, his face red, his hair on end, and his expression set on detonate. He looked like a man who’d almost sunk in a bureaucratic shit-storm.

  “Sterling, Powell,” he bellowed like an Eastern shore fog horn. Everyone in the hospital wing must have heard him. “Come with me.”

  Spinks turned on his heels and left the room.

  “Aw, shit,” Quinn said. “This can’t b
e good.”

  Tessa went to follow Quinn out of the waiting room. She stopped and looked back at Gil. He gave her a wink, and she turned and followed Quinn down the hallway. They caught up with Spinks near the nurse’s station. Their boss was pacing back and forth, his hands on his hips, with enough steam pouring out of his ears to pull a coal train from coast-to-coast.

  Spinks stopped and narrowed his eyes first at Tessa and then at Quinn. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t fire the both of you right here, right now.” But Spinks didn’t stop long enough for them to give him an answer. “You disobeyed a direct order.”

  Tessa knew there was no excuse, but the truth was, if they hadn’t disobeyed, it was likely two good men would be dead. So yeah, she’d violated a direct order, but it was hard to argue with the outcome.

  “It was my idea,” Quinn said.

  “What?” Spinks and Tessa said at the same time.

  “That’s not true,” Tessa said. No way was she letting Quinn take the fall for this. “I was the pilot. I was the senior officer. If you want to blame anyone, blame me. It was my call. But if you want to know the truth, sir, given the same situation, I would do it again.”

  Spinks crossed his arms over his chest and rested his chin on his hand, contemplating her words. Spinks had a temper, and he could be an ass at times, but there was a reason he led the task force. “Explain.”

  Tessa didn’t even look at Quinn. Like she said, this was on her. “Things were developing quickly, they already had a man down, and from the amount of suppressive fire, Lang and his men looked to be outgunned. Having another man on the ground could mean the difference between them walking away, or them all getting slaughtered. I took that chance.”

  “It wasn’t your chance to take.” Spinks stepped into her personal space, and she stared straight ahead, like the old days in basic training. “Luckily for you, it worked. The Brass wanted your ass on a platter, but I managed to talk them down. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “No, sir,” Tessa said. “I won’t, sir.”

  Spinks focused his attention on Quinn. “And you, I expect you to keep her in line. You got me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You two get that bird back to the airport, pronto.” Spinks stormed off, his boots echoing down the empty hall.

  Tessa pulled her hair out of its messy ponytail, combed her fingers through it and tied it back up. “That was pleasant.” She turned her back to Quinn and glanced at him over her shoulder. “Tell me, do I have any ass left?”

  “Enough,” Quinn said, as they started back toward the waiting room. “Gil won’t be too disappointed.”

  Tessa came up short. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you and Gil were gone a long time.”

  Quinn kept walking, and Tessa had to jog to catch up. “I was helping him get cleaned up. He had a lot of blood on him and—”

  “That explains the time, maybe. But it doesn’t explain that flush on your face when you returned.” If she’d had a baby brother, she imagined this was the kind of torment he’d have fun giving her.

  They were almost back to the waiting room, and there was no way she wanted to discuss this with any more ears around. She grabbed his arm and pulled him to a stop. He wasn’t exactly smiling, but he wasn’t exactly not smiling either. “Nothing happened, and if you say anything to any—”

  “Sterling,” Quinn leaned in, his voice going low as if he were a confidant telling her all his dark secrets. “I’m giving you shit. Gil deserves to have something go right in his life.” He bumped her with his shoulder. “You do too.”

  “Gil and I work together, we can’t—”

  “There are ways around that.”

  “Maybe, but I have a kid and an asshole for an ex and—”

  “Sometimes you have to forget all the reasons why you can’t and concentrate on all the reasons why you should. Think about it.” Quinn backed through the waiting room door and disappeared inside.

  The problem was, for the last couple months, sometimes that was all she could think about, even when the last thing a single woman needed to do was gift wrap another reason that could get her fired.

  “Where’s Spinks?” Gil asked when Quinn and Tessa entered the waiting room. Everyone else had left after getting the update from the doctors. There wasn’t much they could do for Rivera and Lang besides work hard and catch the bastards that did that to them.

  “I think he’s heading back to Murdock,” Quinn said.

  Tessa went around the room and policed all the half-drunk cups of coffee the guys had left lying around. “We’ve got orders to head back ourselves. Are you coming with us or are you staying here?”

  “I’ll go with you. I’d rather not be stuck here without transportation. Can you give me a minute? I want to see if I can catch up with Spinks.”

  “Better hurry. Spinks was making tracks.” Quinn headed for the door. “We’ll meet you at the helipad.”

  Gil followed them out, then jogged through the mostly empty halls, taking the stairs down two at a time and bursting out of the stairwell and into the back parking lot. That late at night, the lot was nearly empty, except for what he suspected were employee cars along the back row. A black Bison County SUV’s engine rolled over, and the headlights came on, but the truck didn’t move. Spinks was on his phone, the blue glow of the departmental computer in the front passenger seat highlighted Spinks’ grim face. No doubt Spinks had had better days on the job.

  He hustled over before Spinks could finish his conversation and pull out. He knocked on the driver’s window. The SAC didn’t startle, but his lips got thinner when he saw Gil standing at his door. Spinks raised one finger in the universal sign to give him a minute.

  Gil waited, hands on his hips as he caught his breath. He really needed to up his running game. He’d been in denial about his fitness since recuperating from being shot, but as the lactic acid slowly dissipated in his quads, Gil couldn’t deny he’d been slacking.

  Finally, Spinks hung up and buzzed down his window. That wasn’t the face of a happy and content man. “What now?”

  “Whatever you got going on, I want in.”

  Spinks studied him, the SAC’s expression never wavered. “We’ll see.”

  Dawn was a couple of hours off by the time the Blackhawk’s wheels set down at the Murdock municipal airport. Gil had managed a short combat nap on the way back, but it wasn’t nearly enough. He shook his head to clear all the cobwebs as light from the helo pad lit the dim interior.

  As the rotors slowed to a stop, Gil eyed the helo’s cargo area. Disaster. War zone. You name it. In his effort to keep Lang alive long enough to get him into the hands of the surgeons, he’d dropped all the packaging from the medical supplies on the deck.

  Mixed in with the trash were blood-soaked gauze and lap pads. You could read Gil’s movements in the lines of bloody boot prints where Gil had waded through the pools of clotting blood.

  The coppery stench was as thick as the helo’s exhaust. His gut didn’t turn. Gil had been around the spilled blood of his teammates too often for that to happen, but that didn’t mean the sight of all that blood didn’t affect him.

  Tessa and Quinn climbed out of the cockpit, but the movement hardly registered with Gil. Then the side door slid open, and Quinn said, “You coming?”

  “I think I’m going to stay and clean this up.”

  Quinn looked at him as if he’d grown a horn in the middle of his forehead. “You know we have guys for that, right?”

  “Yeah, but I feel like this is something I should do.”

  “Okay then,” Quinn said. “Should go fast with the three of us.”

  Before Gil could say anything, Tessa put a staying hand in the middle of Quinn’s chest to stop him from climbing into the helo. “You go on home. We’ll take it from here.”

  “I’m not leaving you two here to clean up this mess on your own.”

  In no mood to argue, Gil went to the aft of the helo and left T
essa to deal with Quinn. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tessa pull Quinn aside, her words lost beneath the low growl of the oncoming fuel truck. Gil scrounged around until he found a trash bag in one of the storage compartments. He donned a pair of latex gloves and got to work.

  The next time he glanced up, Quinn had disappeared, and Tessa was returning from the hanger with a sloshing bucket of water in one hand, and a work light in the other. He jumped out of the helo to help. Under her arm, she’d managed to carry a roll of paper towels and a scrub brush as well.

  The work light made the task more manageable, if not more gruesome. They didn’t talk. They worked and wiped and scrubbed and sweated. By the time they were done, the deck of the Blackhawk wasn’t as good a new, but the inside no longer looked like the inside of a slaughterhouse.

  He closed the helo door facing the hanger and went to dump the last bucket of blood-tinged water on the grass by the fence. When he returned, he boosted himself up onto the helo’s deck, his legs dangling over the side. Tessa made a return trip from the hanger with a couple of paper bags. She handed him one. It was the To Go order from the diner. His stomach rumbled.

  “Come eat.” Gil dug into the bag. “We can finish that later.”

  “I want to replenish the medical supplies. Eat up. I’m almost done.”

  Gil laid out the sandwiches and limp fries, using the paper bag as a plate, but he didn’t dig in. He’d waited that long to eat. He could wait a few minutes more.

  At last, Tessa dropped down beside him with a groan. Sweat was drying on her forehead and tendrils of wispy hair that had fallen from her ponytail framed her tired face. She looked done in. “The bottoms of my feet are killing me, and I’m pretty sure my heels have tarantula sized blisters. These boots may be great for riding horses, but they weren’t made for walking.”

  “A good foot massage will help the soreness.” He didn’t mean it to come out as an invitation, but somehow it had.

  She held his gaze for a beat or two. There was a shine in her eyes that wasn’t there a moment before, like she wouldn’t mind taking him up on the offer, but then she said, “My feet are sore, but it’s my ass that may never be the same.” She reached for her sandwich and took a bite.