by Cherry Adair
He shot out a hand, gripping her elbow to keep her from careening into him. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
A cut on his arm bled sluggishly, and he was dusty and disheveled. But to Kess, whose heart had literally stopped when he’d suddenly materialized behind her, he looked like a million bucks. She wanted to fling herself at him and wrap her arms and legs around his body. She wanted to bury her nose in the damp place on his neck where she could see his strong steady pulse beating.
“Your arm looks like it needs stitches. The medical team should be here—”
“Fuck!” Simon said, looking over her shoulder.
One minute Kess was standing, the next she was flat on the dusty ground with Simon’s large body covering hers. Just as she was about to tell him that this might work better if they were facing each other, a loud, reverberating bang blotted out her world.
Four
SMAW. Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon. The rocket launcher took out the Range Rover in one fiery blast. Since its aimed trajectory was five hundred meters, the sons of bitches were relatively close. Close enough to make toast out of an armored Range Rover and singe Simon’s eyebrows.
While he was digesting this piece of unexpected intel, he was made shockingly aware that he had a warm female pressed between his body and the unyielding dirt when said female bucked and tried to get him off her.
When she lifted her head, the back of it connected to Simon’s chin with a teeth-jarring thunk. She slewed around to look up at him. Her face dead white under the light tan and freckles, her eyes were unfocused and hazy. “What in God’s name was that—”
No time for answers. Simon simply threaded his fingers through the silky hair at her nape and squeezed gently. Kess’s eyes rolled, and she slumped back, unconscious.
“Sorry, honey. But we need to get the hell out of Dodge before they aim one of those bitches at us. And I’m praying that my powers hold long enough not to drop-kick us right into the enemies’ laps.” Crouching to present a smaller target, he lifted Kess’s limp body into his arms. “Here we go.”
He shimmered, teleporting into the hills a good thirty miles away. Finding a small cave in the rocky hillside, Simon carried Kess inside, then cast a protective spell across the mouth of the cave. The protective spell he’d put on the Range Rover hadn’t worked worth shit. He hoped this one fared better.
“Good thing you don’t listen worth a damn,” he muttered, laying her limp body on the down sleeping bag he materialized beneath her. If she’d stayed put she’d have been collateral damage. Shit. This vacation was definitely turning into work. He needed to call this in, then go see exactly who these assholes were.
Her hair felt like hot silk as it twisted and curled around his fingers, binding him to her. Simon found himself reluctant to let her go. He did, of course. Touching this woman was a mistake. A big mistake. Her pheromones called to his in the most primitive, compulsive siren song Simon had ever encountered. She was hard to resist. He stared down at her face in repose. She was prettier when she was awake and animated. Now she looked vulnerable and quite sweet with her eyes—and mouth—closed.
He rocked back on his haunches. “Kess, wake up.” She didn’t so much as flicker an eyelash. He touched her cheek. The side that was slightly sun burned. “Come on, sweetheart.” He stroked the warm silky skin with his thumb. An almost involuntary movement that set off a faint, but unmistakable, warning contraction of his heart. “Time to rise and shine.”
She turned her face into his hand. “Hmm. One more hour.” Her soft mouth brushed his palm, sending a zing of electricity up his arm, through his chest, and down directly to his groin. “Kess.” He tapped her cheek. “Wake up. Now.”
Her lashes fluttered on his skin, and she opened sleepy eyes, focusing with apparent difficulty on his face. Her brow pleated. “What happened?”
“The bad guys blew up the Rover.”
“Which bad guys?” She pulled the band out of her hair as she sat up, then raked her fingers through her hair. Even in the dim light inside the cave her hair was on fire. And of course, a mess of curls and twigs and God only knew what else. Simon wanted to smooth and neaten…No he didn’t. What he wanted to do was comb his fingers through the strands, pull her face up to his, and—Lose his mind.
“Not sure,” he said shortly, checking her pupils because he was close enough to do so. She was okay. He, however, felt a disproportionate rush of heat just looking at her.
Her big gray eyes mirrored her confusion as she glanced around the unfamiliar surroundings. After a few moments she looked back at him. “Where are we, and how did we get here?” Direct and straight to the point. She wasn’t afraid that they’d switched location, just puzzled. Nothing seemed to squash her zest for life. Energy radiated off her in waves.
“Cave in the hills, and I carried you.” Close enough. He plucked a six-inch-long twig out of her hair. Strands of silk twined around his fingers, snagging on the calluses as if holding him there, tied to her in a way that made him want to unwrap her like a long-awaited present.
He wanted to see her slender body naked, spread before him like a feast. He wanted to touch her mouth with his and kiss her senseless. Kiss her until she sobbed with need. He imagined himself inside her, giving her exquisite pleasure, her legs wrapped around his hips, her head thrown back as she came apart in his arms.
He had lost his mind.
Not particularly pleased by her continued effect on him, Simon made his expression blank as he studied her for any ill effects after the teleportation.
She appeared fine. Just fine.
“There aren’t any hills anywhere near—” Her eyes widened and he noticed that the soft gray was surrounded by a charcoal rim. Her lashes were long and thick…He was close enough to count her individual eyelashes, for God’s sake. Simon shifted back, out of range.
“The hills and any caves are miles away. You carried me miles?”
He shrugged, digging in his pocket. Before pulling out his hand he materialized a blue ruffly thing similar to the one he’d seen her wearing. “Here.” He handed it to her. “You don’t weigh that much.”
Taking the tie, she grimaced comically. “Gee, thanks.” She sat up fully, crossing her legs as she finger-combed her hair.
She looked at the fabric donut he’d handed her, then back at him.
“Where did this come from? Did I drop it in the president’s office?”
“Somewhere,” he answered noncommittally.
“Thanks. I lose these things all the time.” Glancing around as she secured her hair, she asked, “Where did all this stuff come from if the car was blown up?” She indicated not only the sleeping bag, but the stack of supplies Simon had materialized along with the bedding.
“Just stuff some camper left behind.” He rose, dusting off the knees of his jeans. “I’m going out to look around.”
“Okay,” she said absently. “Why do you think someone would lug all this stuff up here, only to leave it behind? Where are they? Who are they?”
“No idea.” He looked out across the gently rolling hills in the distance. The light was going fast, casting long shadows as the sun melted into the horizon. He wanted to get back to the camp and see if he could pick up any clues as to who these guys were, and why they’d targeted—hell, massacred—the doctors.
“They’ll probably come back, don’t you think?” Kess asked, getting to her feet and walking toward him. She meant the nonexistent campers.
Simon kept his back to her. A useless endeavor since he had three-sixty vision. When it worked. Which it did now. She chewed her lip as she looked down into the valley several hundred feet below them. “That’s a hell of a climb.”
He needed her to look somewhere else while he switched out with Nomis. Leaving his other self here was more expedient than sending Nomis to track the warrior. Nomis could do pretty much everything Simon could do, but he didn’t quite have Simon’s physical strength. Kess was safe here with
him. And if a problem arose, Simon would know it the second Nomis did, and he’d be back in a flash.
He mentally checked in through Nomis’s eyes to see how Abi was doing. The president was at a gala party surrounded by hundreds of people and in full view of his bodyguards. Nomis was, at this moment, redundant. Simon called him in. They couldn’t appear in the same place at the same time, but his alter ego waited to materialize at Simon’s word. While they had separate bodies, their minds were one. What Simon knew, Nomis knew, and vice versa.
Something he’d enjoyed as a kid. His invisible playmate was all too real.
“I’m going to take a walk. Look around for a few minutes,” he told Kess. “I put a gun next to the sleeping bag. Take the safety off, and keep it with you at all times.” He paused. “Do not leave the cave until I get back. Got it?”
Kess saluted. “Be careful.”
He cocked a brow. “I’ll be back in five. Stay out of trouble.”
Cute. Like she could get into trouble way the hell and gone out here. Kess watched Simon navigate the rocky slope with the ease of a mountain goat. She grinned at his retreating back—nice ass—then went back into the cave to see what their unsuspecting hosts had planned for dinner. She was starving. Hell, she was always starving.
The first useful item she pulled out was a small camp lantern, which she lit right away. The light dispelled the black-and-whiteness of dusk quite nicely and illuminated the rough wall of the shallow cave with flickering golden light. Unpacking a cardboard box of supplies, she found two ice-cold steaks in a cooler, two enormous potatoes, butter, cream, and, for God’s sake…chives! Strawberries and a bottle of wine. She had no clue about quality—to her, wine was wine was wine, good, bad, or indifferent. It either tasted acidy, fruity, or sweet, in which case she’d have a glass. Or not. She’d rather go for a soda loaded with sugar and caffeine. No way—there were a couple of cans of those as well.
Kess tried the eyebrow-lift thing that Simon did so eloquently. She couldn’t quite manage it. “Who are you guys and what kind of evening were you planning?” This was no kind of camp food she’d ever seen. But hey, she wasn’t one to look a gourmet gift in the mouth.
The box also held a small propane three-burner cookstove and a frying pan. These guys had thought of everything. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Kess muttered, “to find a white linen tablecloth and napkins in here.” She dug through the box. Glasses. Not plastic. Real glass. Silverware. Ditto. “Ah, man. No tablecloth? Who do you think we are? Savages?”
“Do you always talk to yourself?” Simon asked behind her. She didn’t shriek at his unexpected arrival, but her heart did a few aerial calisthenics.
“Frequently,” she told him, standing up and tossing him a companionable smile. The dancing light from the tiny lantern on the floor flickered around his features, making him look a little demonic. And, oh, Lord. So sexy, her blood pressure went up, and she felt as though her body was bathed in the heat of the sun. Her brain was having a total eclipse as she tried not to lean into him. His chest was so nice and broad and solid-looking, and there was a shadowy place on his throat that she bet tasted salty and delicious.
Get a freaking grip, for God’s sake! “I find my self vastly entertaining,” she told him cheerfully. “Especially when I’m alone. Did you discover any thing interesting out there?” While she would’ve liked him to take a bit longer checking their perimeter, considering they’d been the target of some kind of missile, she didn’t blame him for coming back to be surrounded by three solid walls of rock.
“You could’ve looked around a bit longer.” She gently probed the hot side of her face.
“I saw what I needed to see.” He glanced at the box and cooler near her feet, and the flickering light on the walls.
“I’m going to start dinner. It won’t be ready for half an hour or so. Think it’s okay to have the light? What about cooking? Will the smell of food give us away?” Kess asked suddenly. Somebody had just attempted to blow them to smithereens. It wasn’t smart to draw attention to themselves. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. We’ll just waste all this scrumptious food—it’s probably the bad guys’ anyway—and hang out in the dark.”
“No. It’s fine. Leave it. Find what you need for a meal?”
She pulled a face. “Only if you can stomach a thick, juicy steak, baked potatoes, and green salad, followed by strawberries marinated in something fabulous. Camp food, you understand. We’ll have to tough it out and eat it to keep up our strength.”
His lips twitched.
Kess cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “You look different. What did you do?” Well, he’d almost smiled. Which was certainly different. But that wasn’t it. “Ah! You combed your hair the other way.”
The twitch turned into a small smile. Good Lord, his eyes were an almost eerie green in this flickering light. “You think I went outside to groom myself?” he asked easily.
Kess thought he’d probably gone out to pee. She shrugged. “No clue.” He did look slightly different, though. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it bothered her that she couldn’t figure out what about him was different.
“I need to ah…use the facilities; can you get that stove going?”
“I prefer you don’t go outside.”
“Well, it’s good to want things, but I have to go.” He hesitated and Kess could practically hear him trying to figure out how to make her crouch in the far corner of the cave. Was not going to happen. She managed the whole eyebrow-cock thing quite well, and waited him out.
“Here.” He bent to pick up the gun on the sleeping bag. “Take this.” He handed it to her. “And be quick about it. Another ten minutes or so and it’ll be pitch-dark out there.”
Again she gave him a smart salute, almost putting her eye out with the barrel of the gun. “Yes, sir.”
“Here, take the lantern, too.”
It was going to be pretty damn hard to do what she needed to do with her hands full. “Aye, Captain.”
“Go,” he said, and Kess swore he was grinning behind her back.
Simon walked through the aid camp, looking at the scene with fresh eyes. Even though he sensed no immediate danger, he maintained invisibility. So far so good. The moon was high and a brilliant white, spotlighting the area so that shadows were deep, and objects appeared as crisp and clean as a black-and-white still life. He didn’t need the mag light he carried, and clipped it back into the holder next to the Ka-Bar knife strapped to his left thigh.
Christ. Poor bastards. Even he, who was used to the worst of inhumanity from man, found the breadth of the massacre to be nauseatingly graphic and horrific. Talk about overkill.
Intel had sent him images and bios of the medical team before he left Quinisela. Flipping down the mono eyepiece from his headset to download the data, he walked through the devastation, attempting to ID everyone. It wasn’t easy. With the help of the optical scanner he was able to look at a body, and the electronics scanned through the intel on each individual until a positive visual ID was made. The eyepiece was also capable of capturing digital fingerprints and doing X-rays. But the visual identification was enough for this application.
It was a quick and extremely efficient form of identifying remains. Also gave him a bitch of a headache as the data flashed in front of one eye like a movie on fast-forward, while the view from the other eye was stationary. A hot, mild breeze ruffled the tops of the eucalyptus and intensified the rank smell of the rapidly decomposing bodies. What the heat and animals hadn’t finished off, the insects would. Food was never wasted in the bush.
Fresh tire tracks indicated several heavy trucks had arrived and departed. Hastily. Smart move. The supply trucks sent by Abi with the relief workers to replenish supplies weren’t needed now. And while Simon suspected that the new personnel were armed, he was damn sure that anyone in their right mind, seeing what had happened to the predecessors, would blast out of there PDQ. He rolled a body with his boot. A half-masticated face stared up at
him from bony sockets. All he could tell was that she was female. The woman had shoulder-length hair; in the moonlight it looked like a washed-out orange. A knot formed in Simon’s gut as he imagined it to be a vibrant red—the hairstyle was similar to Kess’s.
Jesus. What the hell did the relief doctors think had happened to Kess? Had they even bothered to pause and check the IDs of the corpses as he was doing? Given the relative similarities between the corpse and Kess—height, weight, hair color and length—had anyone even considered that Kess may have been a target on her return?
He used his sat phone to contact Abi’s aide to have the bodies removed. Next he called in to his Control to report in.
Vacation over.
The body count revealed two people missing. One was Dr. Konrad Straus, the other Dr. Judith Viljoen. There was no mistaking either of them by their physical descriptions. Had they managed to flee before the Hureni soldiers arrived? Had they managed to get away safely, or had they been killed a distance from camp and their bodies not yet discovered? Hell, it was possible animals had dragged them off. Simon wanted to track down the Hureni who’d done this, but more pressing was ID’ing these people before every trace of them was gone, which would certainly be long before the T-FLAC forensics team could get here. He was it, and every moment counted.
Using a special tetrabyte image capture feature on the headset, Simon transmitted all the data directly to HQ in Montana for analysis. While he worked the scene, he tuned in to Nomis and Kess.
Nomis was shimmering—invisible, he was following Kess outside, roughly thirty feet away from the mouth of the cave. While the lantern lit Kess’s way, Nomis shielded it from anyone else’s view. Turning his back on her, Simon’s alter image looked up to enjoy the stars in a navy blue sky to give Kess some privacy.
The protective shield around her was in place. Nomis was there, and would get her back inside the cave where that protective shield would bind with hers. Simon knew Kess was safe. He, however, was in deep shit.
