“Rumor has it you went to medical school.”
He’d bet his med kit that rumor had focused on his loss of sanity even more than his aborted medical career, not that he had any interest in digging up either subject. Besides, he doubted she’d gone to the effort to track him down to drill him about his schooling.
“And?” He scanned her inflexible figure and the heat in his belly spiked.
She looked fine. Okay, not exactly fine—she was too thin to fit that description.
He’d noticed how skinny she was four and a half months earlier at gate C-18 in Sea-Tac Airport. He still wasn’t sure why she’d caught his attention back then—she sure as hell hadn’t looked like a terrorist. But something about her had snared his gaze over and over again.
Her thinness had been readily apparent when they’d broken into her incinerated lab six days earlier and stumbled upon her shimmying her way beneath the particle accelerator. The woman seriously needed to eat, although if she hadn’t been thirty pounds underweight, she’d never have fit beneath the machine. Hell, she’d been light as a kitten, and as combustible as C4, when he’d dragged her out from beneath the machine and half carried her from the building.
She’d also been covered in scratches. Scratches she’d refused to let him tend . . . He swore beneath his breath and ran a palm over his head. “I knew I should have ignored your objections and insisted on dressin’ those gashes—”
“The cuts are healing appropriately,” she interrupted.
His gaze was drawn to the thick band of freckles marching across her upper cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her coloring was . . . unusual. Freckles were more visible on people with fair coloring. Yet her skin tone had a distinct olive tint to it, and her hair shone with blue-black luster.
And her eyes—deep, dark blue . . . He jerked his gaze away, struggling to remember where he’d been going with his train of thought.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you moron, kiss her already. Get her out of that shirt. Let’s see some tits.”
Pachico’s loud voice knocked him out of his stupor. He stepped back, scanning her face—relieved to find her expression unchanging. At least she hadn’t noticed his momentary lapse.
“I’ll bite, sweetheart,” Rawls said, working overtime on his drawl. “If you don’t need me to tend them cuts, what do you need me for?”
Her eyes widened for a moment and then narrowed again. The tight skin of her forehead furrowed as she pressed her lips together.
Just maybe that question had come off more sexual than he’d intended.
“Never mind,” she said, and pivoted with such precision, she would have done the naval ceremonial guard proud.
“Now, darlin’.” He stepped forward, fixing to chase after her. “Don’t—”
“Rawlings.” A deep baritone barked from behind him.
Rawls spun to face the new threat and found himself face-to-face with the bulky, broad-shouldered frame of Kait’s Arapaho friend. Hell, the man moved as silently as an operator—of course, according to Kait, he headed some super-secret Special Forces team, which elevated him to an operator of sorts.
He shot Faith’s departing back a frustrated glance and forced an easy smile as he turned back to Wolf. “Thought you knew better than surprisin’ a person like that, hoss. Surefire way to get yourself gutted.”
Then again, it was a good thing Wolf didn’t have a hankering to use that wicked knife strapped to his belt, ’cause Rawls would have been the one filleted.
He was in pretty sorry shape, damn it. First Faith had managed to surprise him, and now Wolf. Inexcusable. He needed to screw his damn head back on. If the bastards hunting them pinpointed their new camp and stumbled onto him lollygagging off in oblivion . . . hell, his mental meltdown was going to get him dead. Get his whole team dead. Time to man up and start acting like an operator.
“A word.” Wolf let go of Rawls’s arm and crossed thick arms across a wide chest.
Rawls shrugged, forcing himself to hold his host’s hard, black gaze. “Have at it.”
Wolf glanced from side to side, his black brows drawing together. “Is it here?”
Tilting his head, Rawls studied Wolf’s face. His new friend’s tone had been raspier than normal, with an undercurrent of unease. “What?”
“The biitei.” The normally velvety baritone roughened.
With a roll of his shoulders, Rawls sucked back a tired breath. Christ, he needed a few solid hours of sleep. “You’re gonna have to speak English, hoss.”
Wolf’s lips tightened, and the disquiet lurking in his voice shadowed his face. “The biitei. He who walked the other side. He who followed you across the threshold.”
The other side?
That strange, ethereal dream rose in Rawls’s mind. “What’s a biitei?”
Wolf actually hesitated before offering a shrug. “Ghost.”
Pure shock rocked Rawls back on his heels. “You believe in ghosts?”
An asinine question since the big guy had just suggested Rawls had brought one back from the other side . . . which happened to be a pretty apt description of that eerie, silvery world in his dream.
“What makes you think I picked up a ghost?” Rawls asked.
“I know you crossed over. I know you walked the other side. I know you brought a biitei through the veil on return.” With each clipped sentence, Wolf’s voice hardened.
A denial teetered on Rawls’s tongue, but he couldn’t force it out. Damn it—he was tired of pretending. He was tired of not knowing. He wanted answers. “I died?”
“You deny this?” Wolf asked, anger flashing across his square face. He planted his thick black boots and glared.
“I ain’t denyin’ anything. Zane and Cos—they said I had a pulse.”
Wolf didn’t respond, but the anger faded.
“Hold up now,” Rawls said, studying Wolf’s inscrutable face intensely. “How’d you know there’s a ghost?”
Which was as close to a confirmation as he intended to get. While his teammates clearly knew something was wrong, they hadn’t identified the problem yet.
Thank you, Jesus.
Wolf’s black stare flattened. “Who was the biitei?”
“I reckon I ain’t sayin’ there is a ghost”—Rawls tried to lighten his drawl—“but if there was a transparent troll hangin’ around, it’d most likely be Pachico, our old friend from the lab.”
Which reminded him. It wasn’t like the asshole to stand on the sidelines when the conversation was so wickedly ironic. He glanced to the left, then the right, finally turning in a slow circle.
What the devil?
Pachico had vanished.
An icy chill washed down his back. For the second time in less than a week, the ground heaved beneath his feet. Pachico was gone? Rawls winced, massaging his temples, as a hell of a pounding shook his head.
What the hell? Had the asshole even existed?
Maybe he had been a hallucination.
But then Wolf’s words flashed through his mind. The big guy clearly knew there was a ghost. Hell, he appeared to know more about Rawls’s current situation than Rawls did himself.
Wolf dropped his arms, his body tensing. “The heebii3soo Jillian killed?”
“That’s the one,” Rawls confirmed absently, scanning the grassy field and scraggly brush surrounding him.
“Your shirt. The one you crossed over in. Where is it?”
“I tossed it.” The question, odd as it was, barely pierced his obsession with the whereabouts of Pachico.
Where had the ghost gone? How had he gone? For the past five days he’d been leashed to Rawls, unable to stray more than a dozen feet, expressing his frustration in the most annoying ways possible. And now he suddenly up and vanished? Why? What had changed? Rawls froze as the answer hit.
Wolf.
Wolf had appeared, and Pachico had disappeared. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Faith’s arrival hadn’t driven the ghost off.
He swung around t
o confront his host in time to witness the Arapaho warrior dive into the tree line, apparently heading back to camp at warp speed.
Rawls started after him, heading for the west edge of camp and the back of Wolf’s cabin. With luck, he could avoid the rest of his camp mates. But just as he dived into the forest at the camp’s perimeter, the distinct whop-whop-whop of chopper blades beat the air. The devil take it—there was no doubt in his mind that Wolf was on that bird. Rawls changed directions, heading for the north edge of camp and the helipad. He broke through the trees just in time to see the bird bank and climb into the sky, Wolf clearly visible in the passenger seat.
“Sure as hell they have eyes on your boys. You realize that, right? A rendezvous will spring a trap,” Commander Mackenzie growled, bracing his fists against the table.
Faith Ansell glanced at the drama taking place across the kitchen counter. The three SEALs might outweigh the petite redhead by a collective five hundred pounds, but Amy Chastain certainly held her ground. Did the woman’s self-confidence come from her years as a special agent with the FBI prior to her marriage and subsequent widowing? After all, climbing the ranks of the bureau’s good old boys’ club was certain to instill a belief in one’s own abilities.
Mackenzie’s voice rose at Amy’s lack of response. “You go in half-cocked and you’ll get yourself and those boys killed. I guarantee it.”
Faith flinched as Mackenzie’s voice scaled the walls of the combined kitchen, dining room, and strategy center. The commander, she’d discovered, employed two volumes—normal and nuclear. Too bad he didn’t come with a kill switch, like Big Ben, the particle accelerator in her lab. If Benny threw off his calibration and started thundering, she just flipped the switch and shut his bellowing down.
“I’m not asking you”—Amy’s cool hazel gaze touched Mackenzie’s face, and then Zane’s, and finally Cosky’s—“any of you, to come with me.”
In contrast to the commander’s voice, Amy’s was calm, the very definition of moderation. Yet it hit the edgy air like an electrostatic generator, shedding high-voltage sparks.
“The hell you aren’t. You know damn well we can’t let you go alone,” Mackenzie thundered, even louder than before.
Faith winced and rubbed her temples. Lord, the man gave her a headache.
“This isn’t open to debate. I’m going.” Amy set her jaw, pulled back her shoulders, and squared her feet, settling into a boxer’s stance, but with weapons composed of words rather than fists. “They aren’t safe with my parents. And Mom and Dad aren’t safe with the boys there. I’m taking them. Period.”
Faith sighed with admiration before turning back to the oven. If she had a pictogram of Amy’s confidence and self-possession maybe she wouldn’t be entrenched in her current dilemma.
She opened the range door, backing off slightly to let the heat escape. Once the worst of it had dissipated, she leaned down, sticking a butter knife into a loaf of golden-brown zucchini bread. The utensil emerged with a smear of grainy, yellow-brown liquid.
As she straightened, the cuts on her shoulders and collarbone stung. It had been six days since Rawls had pulled her out from under the particle accelerator. While the cuts she’d inflicted on herself while shimmying beneath Big Ben hadn’t turned septic, as Rawls had so obviously feared, they weren’t healing quite as fast as normal. It had been the height of foolishness to refuse his ministrations during the van ride to Wolf’s Sierra Nevada home. She couldn’t afford to let the injuries become infected.
Her health was already compromised thanks to her twice-daily palmful of pills. It was the immunosuppressants’ job to prevent her body from rejecting her heart, which left her wide-open to infections. She knew better than to ignore a possible threat to her well-being. She should never have ignored Rawls’s offer to dress her wounds.
So what if the man’s mere presence brought on butterflies and goose bumps? So what if he plunged her limbic system into hyperdrive. She was a normal woman in the prime reproductive stage, with a fully functioning amygdala. Of course her hands would get all sweaty and her stomach tingly. The guy was gorgeous, after all. There was absolutely no reason to feel embarrassed about her reaction to him, or fear his awareness to said reaction.
“And you think they’ll be safer here?” Mackenzie snapped. “For Christ’s sake, use your head. We’re in a Goddamn war zone. At any moment—”
“I’m not bringing them here,” Amy interrupted with the same cool collection as before.
Faith shot a quick glance at her camp mates. The main lodge, which housed the kitchen and dining room as well as the command center, was an open-air design. One huge rectangular area separated into individual rooms by waist-high counters and the arrangement of furniture.
“Where are you taking them?” Zane cocked his head, his brilliant green eyes sharpening as he focused on Amy’s face.
There were pros and cons to the layout of the room. On the plus side, she had a front-row seat to every strategy session or informational briefing and would know the instant they located her kidnapped coworkers.
If they located her fellow scientists . . .
A wave of regret and horror seared her chest at the thought of her friends.
An image pushed into her mind, a memory—a short, wide hall, the smell of fireworks stinging the air . . . a limp body stretched across the gray-and-red linoleum . . . a rumpled, bloodstained peach skirt pushed high on plump thighs . . .
Faith shuddered, hurriedly shoving the memory aside. There was nothing she could do to help her friends. And wallowing in horrific memories served no purpose. It certainly didn’t benefit her coworkers. Or herself.
She had enough problems of her own. She needed to focus and concentrate on what she could do. What she needed to do. And right now she needed to slow her galloping heart rate and find a way to relax.
In the past, baking had provided the serenity her condition required, but being in such close proximity to the men with their loud, often argumentative voices . . . well, that wasn’t particularly calming at all. And she needed that blissful tranquility, needed the relaxation of baking.
Her donor heart had been damaged during harvest, leaving her with a bad case of ventricular tachycardia. Double-blind testing indicated that arrhythmia was often a result of stress. Baking relieved stress—at least for her. Ergo, her baking might hold the tachycardia at bay. For a while, at least. Until she could get her prescriptions filled.
“I haven’t decided where we’re going yet.” Amy turned toward Zane. “I’ll pay cash so I don’t leave a trail.”
Faith’s lips twisted. Well, at least she’d done something right after escaping the lab. She’d known better than to go home. And since the men after her could track her by her credit and debit purchases, she’d headed to the closest ATM and withdrawn her five-hundred-dollar daily limit on her debit card before bolting from the vicinity. Another ATM and a different debit card for another five hundred. She’d hit a third ATM for a cash advance on her credit card, and then another ATM for another cash advance. By the time her cards stopped working, she’d collected twenty-five hundred dollars. Enough to last her several weeks—if she remained frugal.
It was too bad all that money was sitting in the motel room, along with her medications. Assuming the desk clerk or one of the maids hadn’t absconded with her belongings. If she had a dram of Amy’s fortitude, she would have insisted that Commander Mackenzie swing by her motel and collect her meager possessions before hauling her off to the Sierra Nevadas.
Of course, back then she hadn’t been sure she could trust them—she still wasn’t sure she could trust them . . . at least not with everything. Besides, even if she had insisted they swing over to her motel to collect her belongings, those possessions would be ashes along with Wolf’s Sierra Nevada home now anyway.
Zane frowned and ran a palm over his short-cropped hair. “You could head to where my dad took my mom. It’s a secure location, manned by a team of ex-special forces turned survival
ists—doomsday preppers. They’re hard-core fringe riders and conspiracy nuts, but you and the boys will be safe there.”
With a curt shake of her head, Amy dropped her arms. “Fringe groups like that don’t take in strangers.”
“They’ll take you if Dad asks them to,” Zane countered. “These guys are good, they know what they’re doing. Hands down, it’s the safest place you’ll find.” He paused, shot Cosky a quick glance. “Mac’s right. This place—hell, any place we settle is a hot spot. I’m sending Beth down there. Cosky’s sending Kait.”
Amy studied Zane’s face, then switched to Cosky. After a moment she raised ember-red eyebrows. “I take it you haven’t told them yet?”
The men’s silence spoke volumes.
Faith smiled wryly. She didn’t know Kait and Beth that well, but she’d spent enough time in the kitchen watching the interaction between the SEALs and their women to know they wouldn’t be happy about this plan. Indeed, the room was about to get extremely loud—assuming they informed the women of their imminent abandonment in the command center and didn’t finagle them off somewhere private and sweet-talk them into the news.
Of course, the SEALs were probably planning on shipping her off to this survivalist group too. Faith frowned. From what little she knew about doomsday preppers, they kept to themselves, avoided civilization, and set up their camps in the wilderness. Rather like this place, but without the benefit of helicopter service. Still frowning thoughtfully, she turned back to the stove and yanked open the oven to recheck the zucchini bread.
It would be even harder to fill her meds from such a camp. As she slipped the butter knife back into the bread, she released a frustrated breath. She’d been so close earlier . . . if she hadn’t lost her nerve on catching sight of Wolf, she might have a line on her meds by now. In retrospect, she should have stayed put and explained the situation. Wolf would need to know about her need for medication at some point anyway.
“What do you suggest?” Amy asked, her voice more polite than curious.
“That you don’t contact your parents or brother until we’re on scene and we give you the all clear.”
Forged in Smoke (A Red-Hot SEALs Novel Book 3) Page 4
