Page 3 of Heart of Danger
A modern-day Grim Reaper, come to take her away.
“What do you want?” The voice was deep and low, carrying over the howling wind. Catherine was so shocked she couldn’t catch her breath. One big hand shook her slightly, as if to shake her out of a trance and the other moved to his face, lifted those insectoid eyes…up?
She was hallucinating. The cold was slowing her neurological processes down so much she was altering reality.
“What do you want?” The voice was a little more forceful now, a note of hostility in it. He shook her again.
Catherine took in a shuddering breath as reality realigned itself. This was no hallucination. It was a huge man, dressed for the snow, who’d been wearing night vision googles.
“T-tom,” she stuttered. Her voice was hoarse, the first words she’d spoken in 24 hours, her mouth dry with terror. There was no way her scrambled mind could put together any kind of reasoning. The naked truth fell out. “Tom McEnroe. Th-they call him Mac.”
She had no idea who Tom McEnroe was. For all she knew, this man had never heard of McEnroe. Or was Tom McEnroe’s worst enemy. He could either let her go or shoot her with that huge black gun strapped to his thigh. Or, considering the size of him, swat her away and off the mountainside with one blow of that huge hand.
What he did was drop a hood over her head, slap plastic restraints on her wrists, lift her over his shoulder and stride away.
A woman’s worst nightmare.
Catherine could barely breathe from the cold. Resistance was utterly beyond her. She couldn’t see anything in the swirling darkness, couldn’t feel her hands or her feet, couldn’t think straight.
And, lying over this man’s broad shoulder, she knew there was no resistance possible to the kind of male power she could feel. He walked through the drifts of snow, in the howling wind, carrying an adult woman exactly as if he were walking unencumbered on a summer’s day. There was no sense of strain or exertion on his part.
He was holding her legs down with one powerful arm. She tried an experimental kick but couldn’t move her legs at all under the arm.
His clothes were some kind of high-grade security material, hard and impenetrable. She tried to bite him but got exactly nowhere. The material scraped against her cheeks as he walked.
Wherever he was taking her, it wouldn’t make any difference in a while. Her heart rate was slowing. She couldn’t see herself but she knew she was becoming pale, as the blood in her body rushed in to her core, the last part of her that would die. She didn’t even have the energy to shiver any more.
The man stopped walking but she didn’t have time to wonder why because a darkness blacker than the night took her away.
CHAPTERTWO
Goddamn!
She’d fucking fainted on him. Or maybe she’d died on him. Crazy bitch, driving up Mount Blue in a snowstorm in a little eCar and with no winter gear. She deserved to die. He should just leave her in the drift to die because she was halfway there anyway.
Tom McEnroe eased the woman onto the passenger side seat of his vehicle, pulling off his Nomex gloves with his teeth. He frowned as he lifted the hood and put two fingers right over the carotid and waited.
She was alive. Barely. The pulse was faint, but there. There was nothing he could do for her here except keep her warm and get her to base as fast as possible.
He hated the thought of taking any outsider to the base, but this was a no-brainer. He had to know who the fuck this woman was because she knew his name.
She knew his fuckingname.
Nobody knew his name.
It had been wiped from all public records when he joined Ghost Ops. Members of the team had no relatives, no family, no friends. It was one of the conditions of joining. It made them better operatives. No distractions, no connections, no attachments.
But this woman knew his name. She was looking forhim!
This was serious shit because every goddamned law enforcement agency of the US government was looking for him too, not to mention the entire US military. And they weren’t going to be tender with him and his men when they found him.
He got into the driver’s seat and pressed the button for ignition. The baby started up with a smart purr. No one would know that she had an airplane’s engine in there. It was a hovercraft, powerful and silent and super classified.
Jon and Nick had liberated it from a top secret base a couple of months ago and it was worth its weight in gold. He turned the heat up to maximum, draped the woman with a thermal blanket and switched the seat heating up to high.
He ran back to her vehicle. Snow had nearly filled the footwell on the driver’s side. He grabbed her purse and a small case she had on the passenger seat and ran back to his vehicle, leaving the door open. The car was trashed anyway. An EMP had taken out all the circuits and nothing short of a new engine would make it run. He’d send some men out after the snowstorm to bring it into their communal yard.
She was awake by the time he made it back, sitting up straight, tugging at the restraints.
