Page 13 of Close Pursuit

Alex stretched out on the cot in the corner, wreathed in dark shadows. It was easier to watch Katie this way. She was pretending to read—she hadn’t advanced the screen on her e-reader for several minutes.

She’d been as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs and squirt guns ever since they’d made their bet. It was highly entertaining watching her alternate between wishing to win the bet and wishing to lose. Her face was a constantly changing mosaic of emotions ranging from chagrin to suspicion that he’d set her up—which he had, blatantly—to reluctant interest, and back to chagrin.

If he were going to lie to himself, he would say he’d made the bet with her to relieve her boredom and distract her from the danger building around them. Frankly, it add a little spice for him, as well, to an otherwise tedious and miserable assignment.

If he were to be honest with himself, he would admit he found her fascinating. She was such a girly girl. Moreover, she reminded him of a shiny new penny that had never been nicked or tarnished. What must it be like to never have had anything bad happen in one’s life? The concept was beyond his comprehension. What was it like to begood?

A compulsion to end all that innocence rolled over him. Most men would call it simple lust. But he knew it to be more complicated than that.

The girls at his various universities had all been many years older than him, deeply intellectual, and far too cool to pay any attention to a kid who spoke with a funny accent blowing out all the grade curves in their classes.

At the opposite end of the spectrum had been the groupies in the casinos. To pay his mounting medical school debts, when he’d turned eighteen, he’d parlayed his childhood talent for doing complex math computations in his head to a short but successful career as a gambler.

Hookers, show girls, and hangers-on looking to trade their bodies for access to his bank account had offered themselves to him. Not that he particularly held it against them. They were using the tools they had to climb out of life’s cesspool, while he used them to climb in.

A few women had tried to step into the role of his missing mother—social workers, counselors, even a professor or two who mentored him along the way. Their hearts had been in the right place. Hell, they might even have given him decent advice. But he hadn’t been ready to hear it. Not back then. Not before his life imploded and he sent himself to Hell.

Some would say he’d always been in Hell and had just managed to find a stairway down to a deeper circle of it. They were also the ones who tended to declare him a lost cause, doomed to wallow in his own black pit of despair. He was inclined to agree with that crowd.

A faint rumble rolled down the valley outside, and Katie looked up sharply, startled.

“It’s just thunder,” he murmured drowsily, pretending to be half-asleep.

“No, it’s not. That was a mortar explosion,” she retorted tersely.

“And you know this how?” he asked with more alert interest.

“My dad was a Green Beret. We lived on army bases when I was a kid.” Another explosion sounded, closer this time, and she announced with certainty, “Andthatwas a rocket-propelled grenade.”

Fuck. Supposedly harmless little Katie McCloud kept throwing him monkey wrenches. He needed her to be no factor in this mission, a know-nothing civilian who’d never been overseas and had no field experience. She was supposed to be naïve. A bit of a dingbat. Manageable, dammit.

But instead she was turning out to be a dangerous wildcard. She was so damned quick on the uptake. Worse, she could sense a lie from a mile away and read his moods like very few people he’d ever known. She could even accurately tell how he wasfeeling.

And she could fricking tell mortars from RPG’s?

He swore silently and with great fervor. Why hadn’t anyone told him that about her?

“Someone will come to us, tonight,” she declared.

“Still holding out hope for that ice cream?” he asked lightly. Her gaze snapped to his and then slid away. Mmm hmm. She was thinking hard about what would happen if he won the bet instead of her. Hell, so was he.

So far on this mission, he’d exercised iron will not to let his mind stray to the possibilities between them, together in the wilderness, bored, attracted to each other. His control had slipped—badly—when he’d suggested the bet. She’d broken through his self-discipline somehow, and he didn’t have a clue how she’d done it. Andthatworried him.

He’d carefully locked away the darker side of his soul long ago and kept it under tight wraps. But damned if he wasn’t dying of curiosity to see how she would react to that other side of him. The dangerous side.

He’d never dreamed she would actually accept the bet. No woman like her—sweet, pure, and kind—would make a wager with the Devil. And yet, she had, revealing a risk-taking streak he’d totally missed in his initial assessment of her.

Unpredictable, she was. An outlier in his experience with women. Worst of all, it made her damn near irresistible.

She seemed so straightforward on the surface. An all-American girl. Her insistence on washing her hair every other day, even if the water from the river was barely above freezing, spoke of care for her physical appearance. And the way she accessorized her mannish mountain jacket with frilly, fringed scarves and fuzzy earmuffs shouted of her need to demonstrate her femininity. Growing up in the house full of brothers explained that, he supposed.

Ten-to-one she polished her toenails?—

He swore violently at himself. No more odds. No more bets. He was done with all of that. Down that path lay damnation and ruin.

As darkness fell, she moved to stand in the tent’s doorway, gazing down the valley, her arms wrapped around her middle. She became a willowy silhouette against the twilight and then a mysterious shadow blending with the night. A need to consume her, body, mind, and soul, burned in his gut like brimstone.

A gentleman would let her out of their bet since it seemed to disturb her so much. But then, gentlemen didn’t often make it down to his end of Hell. And a deal was a deal, even if it was with the Devil.

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