Books by Linda Conrad

by Conrad, Linda

  “With herbal oil? Isn’t that a little strange for an FBI agent?”

  Kody shifted slightly in his seat. “I’ve been trained in the ancient medicines and therapies. Before…before I got a scholarship to college, I was apprenticed with a Dine medicine man.”

  A medicine man. So that’s what she’d sensed back there when he was rubbing her hands. He had an awesome bedside manner.

  “Well, thank you for being there. I thought I was going to die. It was certainly fortunate for me that you just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “Fortunate?” He hesitated. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  “I work in research for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, but I’m here on a personal errand. I’ve come looking for my father,” she told the two men who were seated opposite her at an old metal desk. “I got a late start from Albuquerque and managed to get turned around in the dark.”

  Reagan wasn’t sure how much to confide to the two Navajo brothers, one a uniformed tribal cop, looking very much like a typical gorgeous Native American movie star except for his startling blue eyes, and the other her dark, brooding FBI agent savior, with his short haircut, piercing brown eyes and gentle hands.

  “Is your father missing? Do you have reason to think he’s somewhere within the Navajo nation?” the cop, Officer Hunter Long, asked her.

  Her body felt nearly thawed out, but she was growing tired, and every inch of her ached beyond belief. Not sure she was up to an interrogation or to dodging questions she might not want to answer, Reagan tried to evade the whole discussion until she was stronger.

  “Sorry if I haven’t been making a lot of sense, but I’m suddenly exhausted,” she hedged. “Can one of you take me to a motel so I can check in? I promise I’ll come back tomorrow so we can talk after I call the rental car agency.”

  “Have you reserved a room at a motel? There aren’t many around, and most of them are booked due to an intertribal council going on this weekend.”

  “What?” Oh, God, she really had rushed off without her brain, hadn’t she?

  Reagan never did this kind of thing. Normally, she researched every move. Double checked every step. Not planning before jumping right in was the antithesis of scientific axiom. It embarrassed her to think she had been so unsystematic.

  Kody felt a twinge in the vicinity of his heart when he saw the woman’s shoulders slump and her chin drop. She looked so lost and alone.

  He’d never been lost in his whole life. But alone…now that he could relate to.

  “We really need to ask you a few more questions tonight,” he told her in as soothing a voice as he could manage. “But I can see you’re tired. Why don’t you go into the washroom and freshen up…maybe splash a little water on your face?

  “Meanwhile, Hunter can start a new pot of coffee and I’ll check with the motels. Maybe I can dig up a place for you to stay tonight.”

  He watched as her chin came up and she gave him a weak smile. “I’d appreciate it, thanks,” she told him. She stood, picked up her overnight bag and followed him to the washroom.

  Dr. Reagan Wilson wasn’t strictly beautiful, Kody mused. Not like his ex-wife had been. Her nose was too narrow and long and her chin too square.

  But Reagan stirred his blood whenever he looked at her. And when he’d touched her, something electric had sparked inside him. Something he hadn’t felt in many years.

  She was fairly tall for a woman, probably five-nine. And with her slender body, small but perky breasts and full, rounded hips, she was the stuff of men’s dreams.

  It was the tangle of shoulder-length red hair that really captured his attention. His fingers itched to glide through the silky mass of curls. To bring them to his nose and inhale the musky fragrance that belonged to her.

  He was daydreaming about diving into that rusty cloud as he came back to the office and his brother’s question brought him up short. “So what really happened out there?” Hunter asked. “I felt the trouble, and Shirley Nez called several hours ago to make sure one of us was defending against the attack.”

  “I’ll call Shirley and explain.” Medicine woman Shirley Nez was his mentor and an advisor to all the Brotherhood. If it hadn’t been for Shirley, the Dine would’ve been decimated by now.

  “It was killer bees this time,” he told Hunter with a grimace. “Not particularly inventive, but effective.”

  “But why the bilagáana woman? What possible threat could she be to the evil ones?” Even in private, it was against a Navajo’s better judgment to utter the name of the evil that had been a dreaded reality throughout tribal history and that now threatened to destroy all who stood in the way.

  Skinwalkers. Just the name brought terror to those who accepted the truth.

  He shrugged a shoulder in answer to his brother’s question. “We need more information.” Trying to keep his voice neutral, he reminded Hunter of the information they did have. “We know something new and different is going down with the enemy. There’ve been too many attacks, and too many bad vibes sounding false alarms over the last few weeks.

  “And we also know the feds are concerned about those rumors of Middle Easterners who’ve supposedly been seen on the rez,” he continued. “My field office is keeping surveillance around possible entry spots. Homeland Security has said they want to place even more agents on tribal land. Just in case.”

  “Yeah, I know. Your day job, right?”

  “You know my work as a special agent was the first thing that brought me home to the reservation last year.” And his mother’s family, the Begay clan, had been horrified that he would introduce such outside influences into their midst. “The FBI’s interests have not yet interfered with Dine interests. But in my gut, I’m starting to think both jobs are about to become intertwined.

  “My instincts are seldom wrong,” Kody said as he felt a scowl crawl across his face. “Something beyond evil…something really nasty…is headed our way. And I have to wonder if this Anglo woman hasn’t brought some of that trouble onto Dinetah with her.”

  2

  R eagan used one of the rough brown paper towels to dry her face and hands. Hands that had finally stopped shaking. Looking at her image in the tiny washroom mirror, she shook her head and groaned.

  Her face was haggard, her eyes wild and sunken. And that red rat’s nest where her hair should be would never comb out in a million years.

  She didn’t ordinarily care about her appearance. Not much need, since she worked at a computer sometimes twenty hours a day.

  Just who was there to look good for? No friends, except for the guys she worked with and all her online buddies. Definitely no lovers. The couple of family members she had left, not including her father, were thousands of miles away in Boston. She couldn’t even remember the last time that her home phone had rung.

  Or come to think of it, yes, she did. Her great-aunt Claire had called two weeks ago and left a message on the machine, explaining that her mother had been sent back to rehab. But that wasn’t anything new. Reagan could barely recall a time when her mother hadn’t been in and out of treatment.

  But tonight, when the absolute last thing she should be thinking about was the way she looked, Reagan wished she was beautiful.

  Giving herself a mental reprimand, she tried to banish the picture forming in her head of her dark savior. Reagan had not been prepared for the forceful…awareness—she supposed that’s what it was—that hit her hard in the gut when they’d stepped into the office and she’d gotten her first clear look at his face.

  Over the years, in all those math courses and then in the various computer labs, she’d worked side by side with every sort of man. Most of them would qualify as geeks, she supposed, though some, like her one and only sexual experiment, George Bartholomew, had been attractive.

  But none had caused the same kind of extreme physical reaction as she’d had tonight when Kody looked into her eyes with that all-knowing stare. It seemed he’d perfected a way
of seeing right through a person’s body and directly into the soul.

  The chill she’d experienced with that gaze came packaged with a warm rush of blood to the base of her spine. Hot and cold.

  Now she had to decide how much to tell him and his brother about her father’s disappearance. She’d been intending to ask the local authorities for help in locating her father—or at least in finding out if he’d indeed come to the reservation, as his buddy had claimed.

  But that was before the local authorities included a bronzed god who brought a tingle to her every nerve ending with just one look. And who caused her mind to go blank with a simple touch.

  Oh, get yourself together, you geek. She chided herself for losing track of her mission.

  She barely knew her father. What he liked to do, what he enjoyed reading. They hadn’t even seen each other for more than a half hour in the last…well, maybe not since her mother had divorced him almost twenty years ago.

  But that wasn’t for lack of trying on Reagan’s part. And just when she thought they might have a chance to get together, just when they were living within a short flight from each other, the father she’d always loved from afar had disappeared.

  Pitching the paper towel in the trash and straightening her shoulders, Reagan prepared to face the two Navajo lawmen. They had to be able to help her.

  All she needed to do was forget that the tall, dark-eyed one not only gave her erotic goose bumps every time he looked her way, but had also saved her life.

  “Your father is a navy scientist working on a project at White Sands,” he repeated slowly. Kody was trying to judge Reagan’s truthfulness by reading her body language as she answered his questions.

  How much of what she’d told him was a lie? And what was she so obviously leaving out of her story?

  His brother was the tracker in the family. A man who could read the signs. And Hunter was superior at reading people, too.

  But Kody was the one who had been trained to read people’s body language at Quantico. The Bureau needed their agents to learn the secret language of liars, and how words could be manipulated to cover the truth.

  So Kody had the edge in ferreting out treachery and cunning—a very useful tool when it came to being part of the Brotherhood and uncovering Skinwalkers.

  Reagan nodded, and looked directly up at him from where she was sitting in one of Hunter’s wooden interrogation seats. The miserable chairs were once used in the principal’s office at the local boarding school. Kody remembered them well.

  “What kind of a project is that?” he asked, using his most charming and friendly tone of voice.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s classified.”

  “Well, now…” he crooned. “You’re in research, too. Don’t you and your father ever trade interesting, uh, research stories?”

  “I actually haven’t seen my father in many years. But even if I had, we wouldn’t have talked about classified projects.”

  He heard the wobble in her voice when she admitted to not having seen her father. Kody didn’t know whether that was caused by something that hurt her emotionally, or a lie. In a way, he hoped it was the former.

  “I’m sorry,” he began softly. “Have you and your father been estranged?”

  She shook her head, but her eyes darted from side to side. A lie? Or yet another uncomfortable truth?

  “Is that coffee ready?” she asked.

  “Hunter will be back here with it in a minute. In the meantime, can you tell me why you think your father is missing? If you two haven’t seen each other in a while, maybe he’s simply gone off on a trip without telling you.”

  “That’s just it,” she replied. “I was supposed to meet him in Albuquerque. Both of us are due a little time off and we were going to…spend some time getting to know each other again.”

  “He didn’t show?”

  “No. I was worried, so I went to his apartment in White Sands to see if he was sick or injured.” Reagan took a deep breath. “One of his neighbors told me Dad had left a few days ago to…uh, take his vacation…on this reservation.”

  Well, something she’d just said was a lie. But Kody would have to figure out what later.

  “Since you seem surprised by that,” he began, “I assume you two hadn’t talked about coming here.”

  Once again she shook her head. This time she was telling the truth.

  Hunter came bustling back into his office, carrying three steaming mugs. “Finally managed to stop watching that ornery pot long enough to let it boil,” he said with a chuckle.

  Reagan gratefully took one of the mugs and lifted it to her lips.

  “Careful, little lady,” Hunter cautioned. “It’s damn hot. I just burned my fingers.”

  Hunter surreptitiously gave Kody the sign that he was prepared to take her prints off the mug whenever she set it down. They would at least find out whether she was who her I.D. said she was.

  Reagan blew across the top of her coffee. “Thanks. I’m getting so groggy I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  Kody leaned his butt against the desktop. “Reagan was just telling me that one of her father’s neighbors in White Sands told her that her dad was headed for Dinetah.”

  “Is that so?” Hunter turned to her with raised brows. “Where exactly on the rez was he planning on going? There’s twenty-seven thousand square miles of Navajoland, and over a hundred thousand people. You’ll need to narrow it down.”

  “I didn’t realize the reservation was that big,” Reagan told him after she swallowed a gulp of coffee.

  There it was again. That look she got that said she was in over her head and totally lost. A tiny bud of protectiveness blossomed in Kody’s gut and began growing toward his heart, threatening to undo all his hard-earned professional cool.

  The three of them remained silent for a few moments as they sipped coffee. He could see the wheels turning in her head as she decided how much to tell them.

  “Well, the neighbor did say something about Dad going to visit Canyon de Chelly. That’s fairly near, isn’t it?”

  Hunter shot him a quick sideways glance, then evened out his features to talk to her. “If your father was headed for Canyon de Chelly, he’ll be easy to find. Visitors are not allowed to roam around the monument without an authorized Navajo guide.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Kody wanted to be the one to give her the answer. “Reagan, the Dine consider themselves an extension of what you call Mother Earth. We are as one with the land and we treat all nature with great respect. Please don’t take this too personally, but tourists…non-Native American tourists…don’t always have the same respect.

  “Canyon de Chelly is ancient ground,” he continued. “There are places within its depths that are sacred to the Dine, where no outsider is ever allowed.”

  “Oh, I see.” She looked so tired all of sudden that Kody’s resolve to finish his interrogation tonight, before she got her strength back, began to weaken.

  He set his mug down and went to her, then put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t we finish talking about this tomorrow? In the morning, Hunter can check with the few canyon guides that are working this time of year and see if any of them have seen your father.”

  “Did you find me a motel room?”

  “No, sorry. They were all booked.”

  “What am I going to do? My rental car is still back beside the highway with a flat tire. I’m so tired I don’t think I could drive very far, anyhow.”

  “There were no vacant motel rooms, but I did manage to find you a room for the night.”

  She brightened and raised her head to look at him. “Oh, good. Where?”

  “Let’s gather up your things. I’m taking you home.”

  Her eyes widened and she raised her shoulders. “To your place? I don’t think that’s such a…”

  He felt his heart grow lighter as his lips turned up in the first smile he could remember in many years. “Not to my place, exac
tly. But it’s the place where I feel the most comfortable, and you will, too.”

  He tried to rein in the smile, but couldn’t manage it. “I’m taking you home to my mother’s. She’s expecting us.”

  Fear bubbled up inside Reagan as she sat in the pickup’s passenger seat and watched the winding asphalt roll by. What had she gotten herself into?

  Luckily, she also felt a good deal of anger mixed in with the fear. Parts of the mess she now found herself in had not been her own fault.

  If her father’s superior at White Sands had given her a few honest answers instead of hinting that her father had somehow defected—of all the ridiculous things—with classified information, she never would’ve taken off in such a rush.

  And if the car agency hadn’t rented her a lemon with a fussy engine and bald tires, she wouldn’t have had a flat by the side of the road. And if…well, she guessed she couldn’t be too mad at the bees. They were just doing what came naturally.

  She stopped looking out at the blacktop road and the broken white dividing lines flashing down its middle, and turned to focus on her savior. It seemed he was taking up more than his fair share of the pickup’s front seat. She’d tried ignoring him and the physical reaction she’d been having to his overpowering presence.

  He was so different from anyone she had ever known.

  Unfortunately, that sudden uncomfortable thought brought back the shiver of fear she’d been trying to overcome. And it also brought with it the odd jolt of physical awareness she’d thought she had conquered back in his brother’s office.

  In all her studies, she’d never read anything about fear being erotic. But then she wasn’t entirely positive it was true fear she’d been feeling whenever he was close.

  “Are you sure your mother is okay with you bringing a stranger to her home so late at night?” Reagan asked, breaking the long silence between them.

  “My mother would never turn away anyone in need. Unlike some, it makes no difference to her who she takes in…or when. She welcomes all who need help.”