Page 2 of Close Pursuit

“Camouflage.”

She muttered under her breath, “Did you have to camouflage me, too?”

He shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

Dang it. Her comment hadn’t been meant for his ears.

“Is it true that, if the wrong people find me, I’ll be killed?”

“It is,” he answered evenly.

Which was actually pretty crazy if she stopped to think about it.

She laboriously climbed to join Alex, huffing in the thin air at this altitude. He pulled on one side of the tarp while she pulled on the other. She tried to pound in the stake closest to her, but the hammer lying beside it didn’t drive the stake in more than a few inches.

Alex successfully pounded in his stakes with a hefty rock—show off—then made his way over to help her.

She registered with shock that his surgeon’s hands were tanned and callused. But his touch was gentle as he brushed her hands aside and took over pounding in her stakes, anchoring the tarp firmly.

She eyed him sidelong as he studied the valley below. He was gorgeous in a dark, brooding kind of way. She could definitely see herself getting together with a man like him?—

She cut offthattrain of thought sharply.

Her benefactor had been blunt about this aspect of the job, telling her to keep things professional and stay away from any personal entanglements.

She turned her gaze to the valley, as well. The ribbon of light gray road snaking through its dark gray basin was deserted, the same way it had been since they’d stopped for the day to make camp.

The stillness of this place was so huge it was hard to absorb. Only the wind made noise up here. Not even birds disturbed the silence.

Alex seemed oddly at home in this harsh place. Which made no sense to her. When they’d met a week ago in Karachi, Pakistan, he’d told her briefly that he went to Harvard Medical School, took some time off medicine, and now lived in Washington D.C. How did a successful, urban professional like that fit in so well in a completely uncivilized wilderness halfway around the world from his home?

They’d spent two days driving from the south coast of Pakistan to its northernmost corner and another two days crossing the border into Zaghastan and making the slow, arduous drive east into this mountainous region. In all that time, he hadn’t said another word about himself.

In fact, he barely spoke at all. And when he did, the man had fully mastered the art of conversing in single syllable words.

She came from a big, loud family that talked and laughed incessantly. Her challenge growing up had been getting a word in edgewise. Whenever she got away from her family, she tended to talk non-stop. Some pair she and Alex made. The chatterbox and Monosyllable Man.

He was as inscrutable and remote as the region they’d been sent to. Zaghastan was a tiny, isolated spot tucked between the huge land masses of India and China. Poor and with no industry besides yak farming and poppy growing, it went mostly unknown and unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Today, her companion’s taciturn nature and the heaviness of the silence out here were getting to her worse than usual. To break it, she asked Alex, “When did you learn to build shelters like this?”

“Childhood.”

“Did your mom or dad teach you?”

“Brothers.”

“Did you camp a lot?”

“Explored.”

“As in you wandered around in the woods, building shelters?”

He shrugged.

She frowned. “Who lets their kids wander around in the woods by themselves these days?”

“I didn’t say there were trees where I grew up.”

---