Mountain Investigation

by Jessica Andersen

  Mariah froze as heat raced through her veins and an unexpected flare of connection threatened to unlock a torrent of wants and needs too long denied. Her rational brain screamed that there was a cop at the door, and though Gray was the only one watching the in-room surveillance, everything was undoubtedly being caught on tape. More, experience had taught her that desire could make her do very stupid things.

  But as his mouth slanted against hers and his lips exerted subtle suction, teasing hers apart for a touch of tongue, a nip of teeth, she couldn’t find the strength to pull away.

  She hadn’t expected him to kiss her. Or at least not now, not under these circumstances. It seemed out of character for a man like Gray, who might push the boundaries of his position and his boss, but was always aware of himself, always on the job. Yet at the same time she could understand it, had felt—and denied—the chemistry from that first moment they’d met during her initial interrogations, and again when he’d rescued her from the cabin and shielded her with his own body.

  Now, realizing from the urgent press of his lips that he felt the same sharp, greedy attraction, she leaned into him, opened to him. And if a piece of her wondered whether this was another layer of manipulation, she told herself to enjoy now, analyze later.

  He groaned when her tongue touched his, a harsh rattle at the back of his throat, and he held himself tense for a moment, as though fighting the mad impulse that had roared up and was riding them both, spurring them on. Mariah knew she should pull away, knew they both should, but she couldn’t make herself break their partial embrace any more than she could force herself to assess his motives.

  Gray’s lips were clever and agile, and far softer than she would have expected, based on what she knew of the man. His skin was cool to the touch, which was definitely what she would’ve expected, but it heated rapidly, bringing an unfamiliar sizzle of feminine power surging through Mariah.

  Going with that power, which made her feel as though she were in control, in charge, she changed the angle of the kiss and added a light scrape of teeth, then feathered a breath along his jaw, and into the soft place behind his ear, where she herself was supersensitive.

  His breath caught on a second groan and he shuddered against her, then retaliated, dragging his lips across her throat, taking her earlobe between his teeth and biting down gently.

  Mariah angled her head, baring herself to the sensuous torture and moaning when he obliged. Then his lips returned to hers and she gave herself over to the kiss, losing her edge of control in the heat that rose up to surround them, consume them. She was vaguely conscious that she’d shifted, uncrossing her legs and leaning back as he stood and followed her down, so they were almost—but not quite—wrapped together on the narrow hospital bed. Still, though, their fingers were tangled together, a last hold on sanity.

  Wanting to touch the big, masculine body that rose above her, she released his hands at the same moment he let go of hers. They reached for each other. Touched each other. And froze.

  Reality returned with a cold, hard slap that did little to temper the burning heat rocketing through Mariah’s body. What the hell was she doing? What was she thinking?

  She eased away from him and he from her, so their lips were no longer touching. Still, they were wrapped in an almost-embrace, with her palms pressed flat against the hard planes of his chest, and his hands cupping her waist in a caress that had perhaps been intended to help soothe away the danger and complications that had brought them together in the first place.

  It was precisely those issues that rose up now, and had Mariah saying, “Bad idea.”

  She could feel the hammer of his heart beneath her palms, and hear passion in the rasp of his breath. A mad part of her wanted him to argue, wanted him to take the decision away from her, simply wanted him to take her, there on the hospital bed, with a cop standing guard just outside the swinging door and the video cameras taping away. The daringness of it surged through her bloodstream, a heady mix of heat and temptation. But instead of moving in to kiss away her reservations, Gray released her and stood up, stood back, his color draining.

  Feeling exposed, though she was wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, Mariah sat up and drew the thin hospital sheet around her waist. She focused on those small tasks, giving them both a moment to recover. But when she glanced back at Gray, she found that he still stood there, looking shell-shocked.

  Then she saw him retreat behind his cool agent’s façade; she could all but see the shields slam down, separating her from what little emotion he’d allowed to leak out during the kiss. When he spoke, his voice grated. “That can’t happen again.”

  Mariah buried a small slice of hurt and nodded. “You were comforting me, and it got out of hand. That’s not a federal crime.”

  “Got out of hand is an understatement.” He grimaced, raking a hand through his brown hair, mussing it. The result made him look younger, like the man she’d thought she’d seen just before their kiss. His eyes, though, were hard and uncompromising, very much those of the soldier, or the special agent. “Look,” he said, seeming to make an effort to soften his tone, “this isn’t going to work. I’ll deal with the tapes of the last few minutes’ worth of surveillance, then find someone else to take over this part of the case.”

  “You’re quitting?” The thought brought a clutch of fear. She hated the idea of losing the one person she’d considered even partially an ally. And that, she realized, had been a mistake. Gray wasn’t her friend or her ally, and he certainly wasn’t going to be her lover. When had she lost track of that? How had she let herself be so foolish based on a spark of chemistry and the fact that he’d rescued her?

  “It’ll be safer for you if the agent protecting you isn’t emotionally involved in the case.”

  She felt a shimmer of warmth at that, but squelched it and said, “We can agree to keep our distance from each other.” She would’ve reached out to him, but didn’t dare touch him, not with the residual hum of their kisses still speeding through her bloodstream. So, instead, she curled her fingers into the hospital sheet, trying not to let his answer matter. “Please don’t leave because of what just happened.” There was a faint tremor in her voice, warning that her emotions were suddenly too close to the surface when she’d successfully kept them buried for so long.

  “I’m not leaving because of what just happened, or at least not the way I think you mean.” He paused, and in his eyes she thought she saw a flash of regret. But there was none of that in his voice, which went cool and remote, very much that of Special Agent Grayson when he said, “The emotions I was talking about, the ones that don’t have any place in an official investigation…they don’t have anything to do with you, or what just happened.”

  Ouch. That was direct, she thought. But even so, it took a moment before she got it. When she did, she sucked in a quiet breath and let it out again on a slow sound of pain. “You lost someone in the bombings.”

  She didn’t need his slow nod of confirmation to know she had it right. It explained so many things, from his cold, almost brutal demeanor during the first investigation and his insistence on being involved in the jailbreak case, to his disobeying orders to sneak up and spy on her cabin for no other reason than because he suspected that she might still be involved with Lee.

  “So you’ll understand why you’d be better off with someone else,” he said, his expression implacable.

  “No, actually, I don’t,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level, and conscious of the others who might be listening. “We both want the same thing. We both want Lee, al-Jihad and everyone associated with them either dead or behind bars, right? There’s no difference.”

  “There’s one very important difference.” Gray surprised her by moving into her space again, and leaning down so she could feel the heat of him.

  “Oh?” she said, damning herself for the weakness of her voice, which had gone nearly to a husky whisper. “What would that be?”

  “You want your e
x off the streets so you’ll be safe. I just want him off the streets.” His eyes bored into hers. In case she’d missed his message, he spelled it out: “In the second scenario, you’re expendable.”

  “Yet you kissed me.” It wasn’t the most important point, perhaps, but it was the one she wanted out there.

  “It shouldn’t have happened. Chemistry can make us imagine things that aren’t real. It can complicate things that shouldn’t be complicated.”

  But all of this is complicated! she wanted to snap at him, but didn’t, because she saw a flicker of something in his expression—a hint of wariness, maybe, or a crack in his armor.

  She wanted to lean in and touch her lips to his, and see if she could turn the crack into a split, and get him to tell her what was really going on inside his head. But who was she to presume to know what a man was thinking? Maybe it was exactly as he’d said. Maybe she was a means to an end—nothing more—and the kiss had been, just as they’d both said, a mistake.

  So instead of leaning in, she stayed put. “Please reconsider, Gray. I don’t trust Johnson to do the right thing.”

  He didn’t argue that point. He did, however, straighten and move away, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll take care of it. It’s the least I can do.”

  He pushed through the door and was gone before she could ask what he meant by that. Did he mean he owed her because he’d rescued her, and therefore felt partially responsible for her safety? Was it because he and his coworkers hadn’t yet brought the escapees to justice? Or, in the end, was it because of the kiss?

  Mariah touched her lips, feeling the phantom press of his mouth against hers. “Leave it,” she whispered, trying not to dwell on what had just happened, and what it had made her feel, a response that had been so much stronger than she’d expected or wanted. But unexpectedly, the words brought a new urge, strong and fierce. Leave it. She should just go, take off, disappear someplace where neither Lee nor the Feds could find her.

  The thought was so liberating, the desire so strong, that she was on her feet before she was even aware of having moved. She was halfway across the room when the door swung open again. She looked up, her heart kicking at the thought that Gray had come back to argue some more, or maybe apologize, though he didn’t seem like the sort of man to apologize for telling the truth, hurtful or not.

  It wasn’t Gray, though. It was a uniformed officer, presumably the one who’d been guarding her out in the hallway.

  He blocked the door and avoided her eyes, making her wonder how much of her and Gray’s exchange he’d heard, and what else Gray had told him. But the cop said only, “Special Agent Grayson said I should guard you eyes-on until he gets back with his replacement.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly. “I was just…” She trailed off. “Never mind.”

  She got back in bed and lay on her side, facing away from the officer, who ducked through the door to pull his chair inside the room. She knew it was rude of her to all but ignore him, knew she’d feel bad about that later, but she didn’t care right then. She was tired, sad and hurting, and just wanted to be left alone with the realization that Gray hadn’t agreed to protect her because of the attraction that snapped between them or because he was a good guy at heart. He’d agreed to the plan because, like his boss, he’d seen the value in using her. She’d been right—the kiss had been another layer of manipulation, though seemingly not a calculated one. There had been nothing personal about it at all. Worse, the cop inside the room was proof positive that Gray didn’t trust her one bit.

  Which is fine, she told herself. Because I don’t trust him, either. They’d moved from what she’d thought was the beginning of a truce that might’ve become more, to…nothing. He was gone and she had a feeling that he wasn’t coming back.

  More important, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.

  WITH MARIAH SAFELY GUARDED by the officer on duty, Gray found an empty room down the hall and snagged a landline to dial out. When the phone rang for the fourth time on the other end, he started cursing under his breath. “Come on, come on. Pick up.”

  The line clicked live, and a familiar voice said, “Jonah Fairfax here.”

  “It’s Gray. I need your help.”

  “Anything,” the other agent said without a moment’s hesitation. “What can I do?”

  It still surprised Gray how quickly the two of them had become allies, especially given that the first time they’d met, Gray had arrested Fax none too gently. Granted, at the time Gray had not known that Fax was undercover, and that the prison break had been a setup. Fax had gone into the ARX Supermax Prison undercover on the orders of his boss, Jane Doe, and hadn’t realized that she’d turned and was working for al-Jihad until too late—after the jailbreak and subsequent chaos. He’d managed to avoid totally compromising the mission by hooking up with Bear Claw Medical Examiner Chelsea Swan and several of her friends. The small group, which had included a few trusted members of the FBI and the Bear Claw PD, had averted a disaster and captured one of the escaped convicts, al-Jihad’s closest lieutenant, Muhammad Feyd.

  In the aftermath, Fax and Chelsea had paired up and eventually gotten engaged, though they had put off the wedding until Chelsea was finished with her FBI training. She’d pursued FBI training as part of a long-delayed dream. Until then, Fax was committed to chasing down al-Jihad and the others, while doing his bit for the wedding plans—which, he’d admitted to Gray privately, had so far consisted mostly of staying out of Chelsea’s way. Gray had nodded and tried to grin, but as with the subject of holidays, the topic of weddings and marriages made him cringe.

  He and Fax might have met as adversaries, but in the months since then they’d become cautious and somewhat unlikely friends, drawn together because both of them were viewed with serious suspicion by the bulk of the local and federal law-enforcement professionals. Fax was distrusted because no matter how much evidence proved that he’d been acting on orders, the fact remained that he’d helped al-Jihad and the others escape from prison. Heck, even Gray would’ve probably mistrusted the other agent, if he himself hadn’t come under a similar cloud of suspicion not long after he’d arrested Fax. Back then, when Johnson had accused him of colluding with al-Jihad, Gray’s only and best defense had been to blame his personal problems for the choices he’d made, when, in reality, he’d gone with his gut and had been wrong.

  Well, after what had just happened with Mariah, his gut was 0-for-2. He’d thought he could use her without letting things get complicated. He’d been dead wrong.

  “From your utter silence, I’m guessing that whatever’s going on, it’s complicated,” Fax said. “Are you in the hospital?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I just hit the parking lot, and I’m about to get in the elevator. See you in a couple of minutes.” Fax hung up.

  At least something was going his way, Gray thought. If Fax was already there, he could take over Mariah’s protection immediately. That’d be better for everyone involved. And if the decision kindled an acid burn in Gray’s gut, nobody else needed to know about it.

  Gray was standing by the elevators when Fax stepped out. Just shy of six feet, with close-clipped black hair, hard blue eyes and the faint thread of a scar running through one dark eyebrow, the other agent was a tough, no-nonsense scrapper from a police family, not unlike Gray’s own. Fax kept his own counsel, went outside the box when the situation called for it and had only one vulnerability Gray was aware of—namely Chelsea.

  Fax was one of the few men Gray would trust at his back in a firefight, which made him the man for this particular job, too. And if a small voice at the back of Gray’s head pointed out that he’d just put Mariah’s safety on a par with his own, when he’d been so careful to tell her that wasn’t the case, then he ignored it just as he’d ignored the sense of disquiet that had poked at him when he’d put the cop in her room and abandoned his surveillance post. Those were gut-level twinges, and his gut had been less than reliable of late.

  F
ax nodded in greeting. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Any news?” Gray asked, though he had little hope that the case had broken in the thirty minutes since his last update.

  “More of the same,” Fax replied. “There’s a good chance that al-Jihad is out of the country, and there’s been no word on Mawadi, Jane Doe or the others. The Bear Claw PD’s Internal Affairs Department is taking a look at the local cops, trying to figure out whether there’s an in-house conspirator, and, if so, who it might be. The investigation’s being led by Romo Sampson. Career cop, has the reputation of being a hard-ass, but usually he calls it right. At the moment, he’s looking long and hard at the coroner’s office. I guess the head coroner has both friends and enemies in high places, and she and Romo have a past.”

  “None of which gets us any closer to Mawadi,” Gray said, frustration riding him hard. Aware that they were exposed even with the normal hospital bustle swirling around them, Gray moved them into a nearby alcove and kept his voice pitched low. “I need you to take over the protection detail. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Fax’s scarred eyebrow rose, but he said only, “You’ve got another angle to work?”

  If he said yes, Fax would accept that without further explanation, Gray knew. But it would be a lie. Shaking his head he said, “I’ve got to get out of here. This assignment’s making me crazy.”

  “The assignment or the woman?”

  Gray shot his friend a quick look. “Why? What have you heard?”

  “Nothing. I saw the two of you together in the interview tapes, and again the other day when you pulled her down off the ridgeline. From the way you were acting with each other, I thought there might be something going on. Sparks, at the very least.”

  Scowling, Gray muttered, “I think all that wedding planning has fried your brain. She and I weren’t sparking, we were arguing.”

  Fax snorted. “Whatever. Are you trying to tell me it’s my imagination?”

  Gray started to…and then exhaled on a curse, scrubbing both hands across his face in a vain effort to relieve some of the tension—and wipe away the memory of a very big mistake that had felt like something else entirely. “I kissed her. Just now, in her room, under the damn surveillance cameras. We were fighting over something—I don’t even remember what. One second we were going at it, and then we were…” He trailed off.