Page 4 of Hunter

“I—remember—” He stopped, looked perplexed.

Her breath stilled as she gazed into his eyes. He was waiting for something, and she didn’t know what. Slowly, as if controlled by some outside force, she raised her hand so that her fingers were pressed to his. She could feel the blood pounding in her fingers and wondered if he felt it, too.

For several heartbeats, neither of them moved, and she saw a look of wonder fill his dark eyes. It was replaced almost instantly by an utter bleakness that brought an answering tightness in her chest. “You are not afraid of me like the others,” he said in that same gritty voice as he pulled his hand back.

“What did you do to make them afraid?” she asked.

He shrugged, his face going as blank as a window when the shades are abruptly drawn.

Kathryn had utterly dismissed McCourt from her mind during the exchange. Now he made his presence felt with a muttered expletive. “That’s enough,” he snapped. “How many miles are left in your run?” he asked John Doe

The answer came back without hesitation. “Two.”

“Then finish up. And do an extra two miles to make up for the interruption.”

“Yes, sir.” He acknowledged the order crisply, though there was an undertone of insolence that she was sure McCourt couldn’t miss.

Before she could ask any more questions, the man who called himself John Doe crossed the road and started across the scraggly lawn, his long, muscular legs pumping. He picked up speed as he went, until he was moving in a blur of motion that seemed beyond the capacity of anybody but an Olympic sprinter. Yet he was settling into the fast pace for what was still a long run. In a few more seconds, he was out of sight.

Kathryn stared after him, but her attention snapped back to McCourt as he swore under his breath.

“Is he being punished?” Kathryn asked.

“Like he said, he’s being trained,” her escort snapped. Pulling a phone out of his pocket, he began to punch in a series of numbers. Then he turned his back to Kathryn, stepped to the far side of the car, and began to speak in a strained, rapid voice.

“Give me Beckton,” he demanded, then glanced in her direction and lowered his voice. Yet she still caught the tone of annoyance.

Unfortunately, the rest of his conversation was muffled. When she realized she was standing in the middle of the road, straining her ears to hear what he was saying, she grimaced and moved to the side of the car, resting her hips against the fender. The wind rustled her hair, and she smiled slightly as she remembered the caress of John Doe’s fingers. He was strong, yet his touch had been gentle, like a man stroking a wild bird. Something she didn’t understand had transpired during the few minutes they’d spent together. All she could say for sure was that she’d met a man who was so out of her realm of experience that he seemed to have dropped to earth from another planet. At the very least, she thought as she recalled his alternately clipped and formal sentence patterns, he sounded like someone who was still learning English.

Yet the two of them hadn’t needed brilliant conversation to make contact on a very human level. On the other hand, he hadn’t smiled the whole time they had talked, and she was hard put to imagine the harsh lines of his face softening into a smile.

Feeling suddenly sad, she swiped her hand through her hair, brushing it back from her face.

Who was he? What was he doing in this strangely controlled environment? She wanted some answers before she agreed to remain on this base.

McCourt terminated the conversation and dialed a second number. This time he spoke in a more deferential tone. As she watched him, she had ample time to start wondering if she was building fantasies around the encounter on the road. She’d hardly spent five minutes with the man who called himself John Doe. She shouldn’t be jumping to so many conclusions.

McCourt shoved the phone back into his pocket and returned to the car. Silently, they both climbed inside and closed the doors.

“John Doe isn’t really his name, is it?” she asked as she sat with her hands wrapped around the wheel, making no move to start the engine. “Who is he?”

“I’m not authorized to give you that information. You’ll have to address your questions to Mr. Emerson,” he said in a clipped, formal voice.

“But—”

“God help you; you’ll find out soon enough. And God help me if I don’t have you in the office of the Chief of Operations in the next five minutes.”

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His powerful legs pumped, and his feet pounded the ground, eating up the miles between himself and the woman with the red hair and the gentle expression in her blue eyes. She had looked at him with a kind of interest that was different from Swinton and Beckton and the rest.

Kathryn Kelley. Kelley with an extra “e” before the “y”, she had told him. She was of no importance to his mission. He should wipe her from his mind.

But his pace faltered as details bombarded him. Hair of flame. Blue eyes like still water. The rounded curve of breasts and hips. The hem of her skirt where it brushed the tops of her knees. The images licked at his nerve endings like the fire of her hair.

Somewhere . . . somewhere he had seen her before. In a dream. It couldn’t be in real life.

His hands clenched into fists as he forced the distracting visual images from his mind. Immediately they were replaced by words. His words to her. Her words to him. Every detail of the brief conversation was branded into his mind. She had talked with a soft voice, but she could hurt him—worse than the others.

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