Page 16 of Close Pursuit

“Do you always intellectualize painful things?” she asked curiously.

That seemed to stop him in his tracks. At length he said, “Why not? It works.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Because it’s a good thing to feel your feelings from time to time? To acknowledge them and deal with them?”

“Why would I want to do that?” he said in distaste.

“Because it’s good for your mental and emotional health!” she exclaimed.

He snorted in patent disagreement and shot back, “Has anything truly terrible every happened to you?”

“Depends on how you define terrible,” she answered.

“Something devastating that knocks your world off its axis.”

She had to think about that. “I was really close with my grandmother. She was a nurse and was the reason I went into it. She didn’t live to see me graduate from nursing school.”

“Let me guess. She was a hundred years old, everyone who knew her loved her, and she lived a rich and productive life.”

“She was only ninety-four,” Katie answered a little defensively.

He stepped close, and she was abruptly aware of how much taller he was. He asked harshly, “You’ve never had everything you believed in ripped away from you? Never experienced regret so bad it burns a hole through your heart that won’t heal? Never made a mistake that costs you everything?”

She shook her head, her throat tight. He sounded as if all those things had happened to him. She opened her mouth to ask him when and how, but he cut her off.

“If you had any sense, you’d run away from me as fast as you could, little girl.”

She bristled at being called a little girl. “I’m not a child. I can handle anything you can throw at me.”

“We’ll see about that,” he muttered.

His eyes burned for a moment with a hot, unholy fire. But upon second look, it was just a trick of the late afternoon sunlight reflecting off his light gray eyes. Still, the fire inside him tempted her, arousing something restless and dangerous deep in her belly.

He swore under his breath in a language she didn’t recognize. But it was definitely cursing. He spun and headed outside, grabbing the water bucket as stormed out. She listened to his angry footsteps retreat down the path to the river and, very slowly, let out the breath she’d been holding.

Alex was completely uncommunicative when he returned from the river, his hair wet, and he retreated immediately into the tent to take a nap. She washed her hair with the bucket of water and perched on a flat boulder beside the tent to brush it out. While it dried, she watched the sun slide behind the mountains and tried to guess at what had happened to Alex to leave such darkness in his soul.

His question disturbed her. So what if nothing tragic had ever happened in her life? That wasn’t her fault. She and her family had been lucky. She got the feeling he hadn’t been so lucky, though. A desire to know him rattled around in her gut...along with trepidation at what she might learn. People didn’t get that cynical without some serious crap in their past.

It was windy today, and the dust in the atmosphere made for a spectacular sunset that stretched into the heavens overhead. As beautiful as it was, it also marked the passage of time. Would Alex insist on collecting his winnings when he woke up? He’d said he doubted she would get much sleep, tonight. Was he referring the bet, or patients, or something else altogether?

How had he been so certain he would win, anyway? Suspicion took root in her mind that he’d heard something on the radios or gotten inside knowledge of some kind and thrown the bet. He struck her as the kind of person to whom winning would be more important than splitting ethical hairs over how he won.

“Time to come in,” Alex said quietly behind her.

She nodded and slipped into the dark tent. Alex closed the hide flap and tied it closed before lighting the stove for the evening. Any light source in this non-electrified region would stand out like a sore thumb after dark, and they dared not announce their presence like that.

She figured local men had to be getting suspicious by now. Women sneaking out at night to have their babies, and all of them coming back alive? Something was up with that. The ones who gave half a crap about their wives and daughters might tacitly approve of a western doctor to the extent that they didn’t rat out her and Alex. But eventually, someone would say something to the seriously hardcore anti-western types in the area.

Desperate to keep Alex’s mind off sex as she pulled out two freeze dried meal packs and put water on the stove to boil, she asked, “How much longer do you think we’ll be able to stay here before we have to move?”

“I give it two more days. I give it a twelve percent probability of our being confronted and forced to leave, tonight. Double that tomorrow, and double it again the day after.”

Crud. Mental math required. Twelve times two was twenty-four, times two was forty-eight. “That’s almost even odds in three days,” she blurted.

“Like I said. Two days from now, we’re out of here.”

“Should we leave tonight?” she asked in alarm.

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