Page 24 of Close Pursuit

“Go downhill for a while.”

She liked that idea a whole lot better than continuing to go up. In the dark. With no climbing gear. And a baby stuffed in her coat.

Trying to stay oriented as to where they were, she pictured the map of this region they’d been shown in the D.U. offices. Another village lay at the head of this valley. Its name was something like Ghan or Ghun. She couldn’t remember exactly. No telling if it was another Karshani clan village or belonged to some other clan entirely. Likely as not the neighbors hated each other’s guts.

This side of the mountain was more a slope than a cliff, covered with treacherous, rolling gravel. Much of their descent involved sliding on their behinds, before it had the advantage of being fast. And she was all good with putting as much distance between them and the fighters behind them as possible.

They stopped sliding at the bottom of a narrow valley in deep darkness.

Alex brushed off the seat of her jeans, and finishing off by giving her tush the briefest of squeezes. So brief she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it or not. But not so brief that her breathing didn’t accelerate alarmingly.

“Altitude getting to you?” he murmured dryly.

Yeah, right. Altitude. “Gee, I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Maybe I should feel up your ass and see if a sudden case of altitude sickness overcomes you.”

“I dare you.”

Oh, it was so on. She stepped right up behind him and slipped her hands down the waistband of his jeans. He lurched in shock as she slid her bare palms between his briefs and the denim and cupped strong, well-defined male cheeks that abruptly went rock hard.

“Not bad, Peters. Not bad at all.”

He whipped around, effectively yanking her hands out of his pants and stared down at her. Clothed in darkness and heat that rolled off of him like sin, it crossed her mind that, perchance, she was playing with fire by messing with this man.

“If you go there with me,” he rasped, “you’d better be prepared to follow through. I’m not some tame college boy.”

The warning in his voice was clear.Wasshe prepared to go there with him? And where wasthere, anyway?

How far beyond her experience would he take her? Just how intense would sex with him be? Turned on and scared in equal measures, she let out a careful breath as he turned and stalked off into the night.

She’d wanted to be taken seriously. For everyone to quit seeing a sweet, innocent co-ed fresh out of nursing school when they looked at her. But how much innocence was she willing to lose? If she didn’t miss her guess, being with Alex Peters might cost her all of hers.

They’d been hiking for maybe an hour when the baby commenced crying and nothing she could do would quiet the poor little thing.

Alex muttered, “She’s hungry.”

“Any suggestions as to what to feed her?”

“Actually, yes.” He slid his pack off his shoulders and rummaged in it, emerging with an IV bag. He poked a pinhole in one corner of it while she opened her coat and maneuvered the infant close to the opening while keeping the baby mostly inside the garment’s warmth.

They tried unsuccessfully to squeeze some of the IV fluid into the child’s mouth, but the baby wouldn’t swallow it and only squalled louder.

“We’ve got to quiet her down,” Alex bit out. “Once the artillery fire stops, people for miles around will hear her screaming.”

“I’m open to ideas,” Katie muttered, frantically rocking the furious baby.

“She needs to suck to trigger her swallowing reflex.”

“I already tried getting her to suck my finger as a makeshift pacifier and she wouldn’t do it.”

“She needs to suckle. As in a female breast.” He threw her an expectant look.

Katie stared. “Newsflash, doctor. My equipment is not currently in service for milk production.”

“She doesn’t need to get any milk. She just needs a breast to suck. Once she’s sucking strongly, then we can squirt some IV fluid into her mouth and she’ll swallow it.”

An embarrassed impulse to refuse speared through her gut at the same time intellectual certainty that she was going do it speared through her brain.

They would die if they didn’t’ find a way to quiet the infant.

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