Page 24 of Breaking Danger
When Tom ‘Mac’ McEnroe growled most people cringed. His speaking voice was naturally low and very deep. When he growled it was the same timbre of a bear in a cave. Match that with a huge, muscled body and an ugly, scarred face, and most people would be terrified.
Catherine McEnroe wasn’t terrified. Not at all. She knew the good man inside the terrifying exterior and she knew, above all, that he loved her.
“Why Mac,” she smiled and simpered, dramatically fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”
He made an exasperated noise deep in his throat and she laughed.
They were in Haven’s infirmary. There was a massive rescue mission underway and new refugees were arriving hourly. None of them were infected. Everyone who arrived was placed separately in secure rooms, in quarantine, subject to thermal scanning, for half an hour, subjected to spot tests of pupils and body temperature. Infection showed up quickly. As soon as they passed the test, they were admitted into their community.
Before the outbreak, Haven had been an outlaw community. Mac, Nick and Jon had been members of a super elite group of warriors, known as Ghost Ops. But they had been betrayed, accused of treason and had disappeared. Mac had known of an abandoned mine inside a mountain and from there they had built their high tech headquarters, Haven. By some mysterious process Haven had attracted a community of geniuses and good people, most of them on the run from something.
Catherine herself had found her way here, to the home of her heart, by bearing a message from Mac’s commanding officer, Lucius Ward. The three men had thought Ward had betrayed them, but Lucius had been betrayed himself, together with three young soldiers of Ghost Ops. The four of them had been hideously tortured and experimented on by Arka.
Their nemesis.
The company was no more but it had unleashed this terrible virus before dying, like a scorpion’s tail delivering one last fatal sting.
“You are not going to joke your way out of this, Catherine,” Mac said in his laying-down-the-law voice. To most everyone he came across, that voice was the voice of God. Catherine obeyed him, too. When she wanted to. The other times…
She swept a hand at the infirmary. It was organized chaos. New arrivals were coming in hourly. Though there were no infected, there were plenty of people who’d been injured in the evacuation. Lacerations, broken bones, concussions were the order of the day.
They both sidestepped as a volunteer nurse rolled in a patient on a gurney. A young woman with a severely bruised face and a broken arm was wheeled past. Soon the infirmary would be full and they would have to start stacking them in the corridors.
Catherine looked up at Mac. “There’s so much to be done,” she said softly.
He closed his eyes and pinched his nose.
Catherine touched him, laying her hand on his muscled forearm. She had a gift. It had been a curse most of her life but here in Haven she came into it fully, and accepted it fully as a gift. She was an empath, and a powerful one. Each day refined her gift. She could feel people’s emotions at a touch. And if she was close to the person, she could almost read thoughts. And in Mac’s case, since she loved him, shecouldread his thoughts. He was an open book to her.
And she could read clearly, as if in a book, how much he loved her and how worried he was for her. How worried he was for the baby in her belly.
Mac had no family at all. Being without human ties had actually been a condition for joining Ghost Ops—a deniable team of elite warriors, completely off the books. They had to have no ties whatsoever, no family, no friends, no loved ones.
At the time, that had been fine with them. Mac had never loved a woman. Had sex, yes. A lot—though he’d told her he hadn’t had sex since the group’s betrayal the year before. He thought they had been betrayed by a man he idolized and it had been a nearly mortal blow.
She had changed all of that. She came to him with proof that he hadn’t been betrayed by his commanding officer, Lucius Ward, and it turned out she came with living proof that he could love.
The moment she and Mac had met—even though he had suspected her of being a mole, sent in to find him and his teammates—the relationship had exploded. And now they were married and expecting a child and it unnerved Mac completely. He hadn’t had a place in his head and his heart for love, had barely coped with the idea of falling in love with her and now there was a new life coming to love and to care for and—this still blew Mac’s mind—that new life would be his blood relative. His only blood relative in the world.
Mac had no idea how to cope with all these feelings and the only thing that made sense to him was to make sure nothing harmed her or their child. He was a warrior, a protector, and that he knew how to do. And the way to do that, apparently, was to make sure that she did nothing more strenuous than sit on the couch and read a book. Maybe listen to a little music.
While the world burned around them.
Catherine loved Mac and, more to the point, she understood him. Bone deep. So she cut him some slack even though he exasperated her enormously at times, like right now.
Refugees were streaming in hourly, their resources were strained to the limits, every hand with medical training was absolutely essential. If they ever hoped to survive this plague, everyone had to pitch in.
But fighting him would only get his back up. It was only the fact that Catherine understood deeply, bone deep, Mac’s fear of losing her which kept her from kicking him in the backside.
“Mac,” she said softly, taking one of his big hands in both of her own. Under his skin she could feel the emotions skittering, something that would surprise people who thought of him as an emotionless hulk of a man, cold as ice. Her Mac wasn’t cold, just controlled. She knew, too—and this was brand new to her—that her touch soothed him, as if she were cool water poured over a burning wound. That had been his description of what happened when she touched him while he was upset. “My darling, we’re fighting not just for our lives here, but we’re fighting so that something remains when this—this thing burns itself out. We’re bringing a child into the world and I want there to be a world for her, or him, to grow up in. And you know that?—”
“Make a hole!”Larry Vetter, one of their engineers, rushed by with a bleeding man on a gurney. Catherine and Mac pressed themselves against the wall. Larry caught Mac’s eye as he rushed past. “Bakersfield’s gone, Mac. No one left. Just got word.”
Bakersfield gone.
Just like that. A city of over four hundred thousand, all dead. Or worse. Infected.
Catherine’s eyes followed the gurney. Beyond the door were over a hundred patients, tested to make sure they were uninfected, but still wounded and bleeding. She needed to help the way she needed to breathe.
