Authors: Penny McCall
“Eidetic.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Jack said. “They offered her Analysis. That’s why she turned them down. And she’s not all that good at puzzles, anyway,” he added, wiping the smirk off his face when he saw Mike giving him a strange look.
“I’d think she’d be soured on field work after what happened,” Mike said.
“Nope. She wants to be in the field. Told me so herself.”
“You think she’d be good at it?”
Good at it? Hell, she left a damage trail a mile wide. It would be doing the general populace a favor to make sure most of the people she ran into were bad guys. Not an argument likely to convince Mike, though. “She doesn’t run away from danger,” Jack said. “She acts instead of freezing, and she’s resourceful. And she has no appreciation for her own mortality.”
“Sounds like someone I know,” Mike said.
There didn’t seem to be any response to that, so Jack didn’t make any, and the room settled into a comfortable, considering silence.
“Well,” Mike finally said, “there’d be places that kind of person, with that kind of memory, would come in handy.”
Jack nodded.
“’Course I’d have to find somebody to show her the ropes, train her up right.”
“That would take a hell of a lot of work.”
“Yeah, and I’d hate to put her on something dangerous until she knew what she was doing. I could pair her up with Tag Donovan. His assignments aren’t usually life-threatening.”
“They would be with Aubrey around,” Jack said.
Aubrey was finally done with the FBI and their incessant questions. The FBI wasn’t done with her, but that was beside the point. After Jack called she’d nursed her heartache for a couple days, then packed her things and made a plan to escape. The plan involved a large quantity of coffee and the sleeping pills she’d been pretending to take all week. Pretty simple; Jack would have expected her to pull something like this, but Jack—
A knock saved her from going back into self-pity mode. She opened the door, expecting to see room service flanked by the current shift of guard dogs. She was wrong. In a big way.
“Jack.” For a second she was simply numb, then came the pain. She nearly walked away from him, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurt to see him again. “You look great,” she said, “all healed up.”
Jack raised a hand to his forehead, shrugged. “You look pretty good yourself.”
Aubrey smoothed the wrinkles out of her blouse and skirt. Nothing fancy about the outfit, but Jack seemed to like it, judging by the way he was looking at her. And that was the cruelest thing he’d done to her, because the way he looked at her gave her hope. “What do you want?”
“You,” Jack said with a slight smile.
Aubrey wasn’t exactly in a nostalgic mood. “Go away.”
He took a long, slow look around the room, piled with what looked like half the contents of the Library of Congress. “You and the books want to be alone?”
“That had more impact when you were holding a gun.”
“I was hoping I wouldn’t need a gun to get you to come with me this time.”
“Been there, done that,” Aubrey said. “Didn’t turn out so well for me.”
“What else have you got to do?” Jack asked her. “You quit your job.”
“After the news reports labeled me a thief, it seemed like the best thing to do,” Aubrey said, but she had to turn away from him to make it convincing. It wasn’t easy holding her ground to begin with; being reminded of how little she had left, it was just too depressing to hide. “You know how people are, Jack. Some of them insist on being suspicious, even after you tell them the truth a dozen times. My coworkers would always wonder if I really did try to rob the library, and the only reason I got off was because I ratted out my coconspirators.
“So . . .” she turned to face him again. “I’m guessing you have a new assignment, right?”
Jack nodded.
Aubrey told herself she wouldn’t ask, but if there was one thing Jack had mastered that she hadn’t, it was how to milk a silence. “Fine,” she huffed, “what is it?”
“It ought to be keeping Tom Cavendish out of office.”
Aubrey almost smiled. She definitely relaxed. Marginally. “I heard he was running for his boss’s vacant seat,” she said. “Tom’s probably fueling rumors about Waters’s activities and making sure that certain members of Congress think he knows more than he does.”
Jack chuckled, but she could tell he was holding something back.
“You still haven’t told me what the new assignment is.”
“Maybe we should have this conversation elsewhere,” Jack said, looking over his shoulder to make sure the hallway was still empty.
“Wait a minute,” Aubrey said, realizing not only was room service absent, so were her guards. “You’re busting me out?”
“I’m trying.”
“But won’t your friends come after me if I disappear?”
“They’re not my friends, and you couldn’t be too worried about them coming after you,” he nudged her pink leather backpack, sitting next to the door, “since you were already planning to disappear.”
First he’d complimented her, then the blatant nostalgia, and he was talking way too much. “What’s going on, Jack?”
“I can’t tell you very much—”
“Oh, no,” she interrupted, “I’m not going that route again.”
“—but if you decide to take the job with the agency—”
“What?”
“—as my partner—”
“What?!”
“—my
junior
partner, then I can tell you. It’s a federal job, Aubrey, so it doesn’t pay much more than the Library of Congress, but at least you won’t lose your house.”
“Now you’re worried about my house?”
“I know what it means to you.”
“You knew what it meant to me a month ago, when you tried to blow it up,” she reminded him, the small kernel of hope that had refused to die blossoming inside her, growing into something that dared to believe the impossible might just be happening. “Why does it matter now? Why does anything I do matter now?”
Jack looked at the floor, exhaling heavily. “I guess I feel guilty for kidnapping you and dragging you around and . . . everything.”
“No, that’s not it,” Aubrey said, smiling when his head whipped up, his eyes locking on hers. The scowl on his face made her heart sing, because there was just enough uncertainty behind it to confirm her hopes. “It’s not guilt, and it’s not because you’re worried about my ability to pay my bills and keep my house.”
“Now you’re telling me how I feel?”
“If you’d tell me, I wouldn’t have to put the words into your mouth. Why do you really want me to be your partner?”
“You wanted out of here,” he reminded her, “so why are you playing twenty questions?”
“Because I’m not going anywhere until I know exactly what I’m getting into.”
“Federal agents don’t have that luxury. We go where we’re told when we’re told.”
“I’m not talking about the agent part,” Aubrey said. “I’m talking about us.”
“Us?” It was really entertaining, the way Jack ran a finger under the collar of his shirt—his T-shirt. The way his voice went up a couple of octaves was pretty revealing, too. “What do you mean, ‘us’?”
“Us,” Aubrey repeated, crossing her arms and tipping up her chin. “You and me. Together. And not just as federal agents.”
“How I feel is beside the point,” Jack grumbled.
“How you feel is exactly the point.”
“No,” he said in his striving-for-patience voice. “I’m really asking you to be my partner, Aubrey. Some of the cases we work on are going to be dangerous. You need to make an independent decision.”
“Really?” She took a step closer to him. “An independent decision?”
“Uh-huh,” he mumbled, looking like he wanted to bolt but holding his ground. “You can have a gun, if you want. And a knife.”
“Maybe you should leave the talking to me, Jack.” She stepped closer still, so they were almost chest-to-chest, tipping her head to look up at him. “You’re so much better at action.”
His eyes dropped to her mouth. “Mike’s already got the paperwork started,” he said weakly.
“You’re pretty sure of yourself.”
“No.” His gaze lifted to hers. “I’m not.”
And she knew. Jack loved her. Maybe he wasn’t comfortable saying it out loud, maybe he’d give her weapons instead of flowers, but for Jack it was love, and if any of those things changed about him, she wouldn’t love him back.
He eased his arms around her and kissed her, and at least he got the important part right—or he would when he stopped being careful. She wrapped herself around him and poured herself into the kiss, thrilled when he crushed her to him, snugging her hips so tightly to his she nearly forgot what was at stake. She pulled away before it was too late, putting her hand on his cheek and waiting until he met her eyes.
Jack knew she wanted the words, and they were right there, on the tip of his tongue, but . . . He stepped away, scrubbing a hand back through his hair. He just couldn’t give in—not that easily anyway, and not if they were going to have a successful working relationship, too. He wanted to tell himself he’d be in charge, but thinking Aubrey would settle for being second banana was just delusional. The best he could hope for was equality. “I’ll say it if you will.”
“No way I’m saying it first,” Aubrey said, picking up her backpack and heading out the door.
Jack followed her, watching her narrow hips sway and getting ideas that made him regret that they had to leave the hotel room. “I have some interrogation techniques the other guys never tried on you,” he said, “and I’m prepared to use them.”
“There are several parts of the
Kama Sutra
we never got to.” She smiled at him over her shoulder. “You trot out your techniques and I’ll tap into my memory, and we’ll see who says what first.”
“Shit,” Jack said, “I’m toast. Again.”
“At least you’ll enjoy it this time,” Aubrey said, “trust me.”
Jack caught up to her and draped an arm over her shoulder. “I do.”
Good thing she was a mile away, and there was a mule deer between the two of them.
Alex waited until the cat went back to stalking its prey, then she carefully hung the binoculars from her horse’s saddle, fielding the look he sent her. Equine impatience. “Just a couple of shots,” she said, her hand moving over the rifle scabbard and stopping at the camera bag hanging from the saddle, “then we’ll pack it in for the day.” Jackass snorted, but he did it softly.
It was the plane that set everyone off. It wasn’t unusual for a small plane to fly through that part of the Rocky Mountain foothills without Alex ever seeing it, but the sound carried for miles. So did Alex’s curse. The doe leapt away, the cat froze and swiveled again to peer at Alex, its yellow eyes like lamplights through the late afternoon gloom and heavily falling snow. It would have made a hell of a photo if she’d been able to fumble the camera out before the plane flew over the crest of the hill to her right and dropped into the wide, treeless valley between her and the cat.
Instead of taking off after the rabbit, the cat froze. So did Alex, both of them watching the plane drop low enough to almost skim the snow drifts before it shot back up to about treetop level. The wings waggled back and forth, and there were a couple of pops that might have been the engines cutting out. Or . . . gunfire?
Nah, couldn’t be gunfire, Alex thought, but just as she’d almost convinced herself it had to be mechanical trouble, a man fell out of the plane. She didn’t believe it was a man at first, until he hit the slope right below her and rolled a couple of times, arms and legs windmilling—definitely human—before he came to a crumpled stop.
The plane buzzed away to the east, the sound of the engine growing fainter and fainter. Alex watched it go, mouth open, feet rooted to the spot, frozen in disbelief. But the second the mountain lion moved so did she. In the same direction. Toward the man.
Alex was closer, but the cat was faster. And the cat was hungry. Not hungry enough to attack an able-bodied adult human, but an incapacitated one? Survival was one of those instinctive things it was hard for a mountain lion to ignore.
Alex reacted just as much from a gut level, no thought of her own safety, no idea if the guy was even savable. No clue what she’d do when she got there and had to fend off a hundred twenty pounds of starving mountain lion.
To save someone who might already be dead.
The protective instinct that had set her feet in motion started to think better of itself, giving way to a feeling that was more along the lines of “what the hell am I doing?”
Unfortunately the cat was only about twenty yards away, still barreling forward in full attack mode, and Alex had downhill momentum behind her. A conflict of some sort seemed unavoidable—then the satellite phone clipped to her belt rang, the sound shrieking through the stillness.
The mountain lion started to backpedal, sliding another few yards before he found the traction to bound away at a right tangent.
Alex slid to a stop herself, looked at the readout, and wanted to run away, too. The mountain lion might be gone but a conflict still loomed. She almost preferred the cat. She considered not answering, but that wouldn’t work either. Moving two thousand miles away from her mother might have cut the apron strings, but it had notched up the guilt to something approaching monumental proportions.
She peeled off a glove and whistled up her horse, then wrenched at the satellite phone, ripping her belt loop before she managed to get it loose. It was an outdated piece of equipment, but it did the job in an area that had no cell phone towers. And at the moment it was way too modern. “I asked you not to call me on this phone, mother.”
“Alexandra, thank heavens, I heard there was a blizzard in Canada, and I was so worried about you.”
“I’m in Colorado, Mom. But you got the snow right.” Big wet clumps of it had been falling all day, adding ten inches to the foot and a half already on the ground and reminding Alex that although the calendar said spring, Mother Nature was running the show.
“Oh, darling! Can you get outside? I mean, I know you have to go out to . . . Well, you must be careful not to get chapped,” her mother lowered her voice, “you know, down there.”
Right, she spent her days trekking in the wilderness, tracking an animal that could tear her to shreds inside of thirty seconds, and her mother was worried about her getting a chapped backside? “This isn’t Siberia, Mom. My cabin has every comfort I could possibly need.”
“Does it have a man?” Cassandra Shaw Scott Hanson Martin-dale Winston Hobbs demanded. “No. And you’re not going to find one there. Especially since you won’t use your title—not that it does you any good alone in that forest with no one around for three states.”
Alex headed toward the guy in the snow, more warily now, shifting the satellite phone so her right hand was free. “There’s a town about seventy-five miles from here, and the people who live there aren’t impressed with titles.”
Her mother made a sound that managed to be ladylike and derogatory at the same time. “I’m talking about
civilization
, Alexandra, not that little backwater filled with cowboys and farmers. You’ll never find the right kind of man out there.”
“I met the right kind of man once,” Alex reminded her. “I didn’t like it. Neither did he. And what he did to you—”
“Oh, well, water under the bridge,” Cassandra trilled in the kind of voice that came with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You mustn’t let one unfortunate experience stop you from looking.”
“You’ve found the right man five times, so I’ll take your word for it.”
“Alexandra!”
“Sorry,” she muttered, but really, it had only been a matter of time. She always had good intentions at the beginning of these conversations with her mother. Keep it cool, she’d say to herself; don’t lose your patience. The torture would be over sooner if she could only keep her mouth shut.
She could never quite pull it off. This was why they were better off on different sides of the continent—a concept her mother always failed to grasp.
“Alexandra? Are you listening? You’re not getting any younger, you know. It’ll take simply forever in a salon to repair the damage all that sunlight and fresh air has done to your skin. And then we have to ease you back into Boston society, find a way to explain where you’ve been, scare up some eligible men—”
“I wouldn’t want to scare anyone.”
“This is important, Alexandra. Do you think a man is just going to show up on your doorstep?”
“No,” she said, stopping beside the guy in the snow. “He missed by about a half mile.”
“What?”
“Gotta go, Mom.”
Alex disconnected mid-protest and stood there, torn between concern for the man at her feet and a gut-deep sense of self-preservation.
Concern won out, propped up on curiosity and bolstered by the more immediate fact that the guy seemed to be out cold, at the very least—and likely to freeze to death if the fall hadn’t killed him.
Alex’s cabin sat at the head of a valley, about a mile wide and two long. She’d been a good half mile away from home, collecting deadfalls, when she’d spotted the cat. Not a long distance for an able-bodied woman wearing cold-weather gear. Too far for a man in street clothes without even a coat.
She didn’t know what kind of man he was, but if he was still alive, she couldn’t leave him to die. That didn’t mean she intended to be foolhardy.
Jackass had ambled down the hill when she whistled, stopping not far away. Alex hung the phone over the saddle horn—ignoring the fact that it was ringing again—and pulled the rifle from its saddle scabbard. Jackass looked back at her as if to say,
you really think you’re going to need that?
“He dropped out of a plane,” Alex said, racking the gun so a shell was in the chamber. “I can come up with any number of reasons for that. None of them are good.”
Jackass snorted his agreement, waiting patiently while she strapped on her snowshoes, untied the ropes, and shoved the deadfalls she’d collected off the sled. Then he followed without hesitation where she led. The perfect male.
“He’s probably dead anyway,” Alex said. “I heard something that sounded like gunshots just before I saw him drop. If whoever else was on the plane didn’t kill him, I bet the fall did.”
Jackass had no opinion about the likelihood they were standing next to a corpse, but it didn’t take Alex long to find out. The man lay half on his side, twisted at the waist so he was chest down, both his arms beneath him and his left cheek resting on the snow. Alex stripped off her other glove and hunkered down beside him, hesitating when she got a good look at his face.
In all the speculating she’d done after he’d fallen, she’d never followed it up with the word angel. He had the looks for it, though: jet black hair, chiseled features, and a not-bad body to go along with the looks. Of course, Lucifer had fallen from heaven, too. If you subscribed to that sort of thing.
She kept her shotgun in her right hand, feeling with her left for the pulse in his neck. He still had one—which ruled out tying a rope to his ankle and letting Jackass drag him back to be stacked outside the cabin like cordwood. Dammit. She’d have to get him on the sled, and then she’d have to get him back to her cabin and lug him inside somehow. Alex had a feeling she wasn’t going to enjoy any of that. He looked heavy. And he looked like trouble.
He didn’t waste any time proving her right. She rolled him over and found herself looking down the barrel of a pistol. She went still, eyes crossed on a half-inch black hole that looked roughly the size of a cannon. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a gun aimed at her. She’d never gotten used to it, and she was having the predictable reaction, ringing ears, pounding heart, the fight-or-flight spike of adrenaline.
It took a lot of effort to hold her ground and drag her gaze up to meet his, as piercing and feral as the cat’s had been, though his eyes were blue instead of gold.
“Back off,” he rasped, reaching for her rifle.
She handed it over, easing off a few steps.
He tried to clamber to his feet. He wasn’t having much luck.
He wasn’t looking very dangerous either, Alex decided the second time he sank to his knees. And then he got the brilliant idea to use her Winchester as a crutch. Alex stepped forward, but he waved her off. With the pistol.
“I’m trying to keep you from blowing your arm off,” she said. “Or my head.”
He’d made it to his feet, but he was obviously in pain and half out of it, weaving and fighting to stay conscious. He tucked the pistol in his waistband—on the second try—and pointed the rifle at her. Most of the time. Kind of hard to aim a gun when you could barely stand upright.
“You’re practically unconscious,” she said, although she wasn’t quite brave enough to go for the gun. If it had just been the pistol he was holding on her, maybe, but a shotgun blast at fifteen feet was sure to hit her. “Put the guns down and let me help you before you freeze to death.”
He blinked a couple times, squinting fuzzily in her direction and mumbling something that sounded like, “two to one.”
“There’s only one of me,” Alex said, reconsidering her decision to go for the gun.
He shook his head a couple of times, looking a lot more alert. “Just a girl,” he said. “Not much of a threat.”
“Neither are you.”
“I’ve got the gun.”
“And no coat, no idea where you are or how to get to safety,” Alex pointed out, sounding a hell of a lot steadier than she felt. “You shoot me and we’re both in trouble.”
“I could take the horse.”
Jackass swung his head around and nipped at him, just grazing his hip but sending him stumbling. He caught himself with the rifle, not giving Alex enough of an opening to try for either gun.
“Jackass doesn’t let anyone ride him but me,” she said. “And even if he did, you’re half frozen already, not to mention you could be injured from falling out of the plane. Yep,” she crossed her arms and nodded, “you’re probably bleeding to death internally as we speak.”
He slammed a hand flat against his chest, well, flat except for the pistol, moving it around like he was searching his insides for pumpers—until he caught her smirking. “Stop thinking so much and get us out of here,” he said. He pointed the gun at her again, but he was clearly on his way back to oblivion, shivering uncontrollably and struggling to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head.
“Why should I help you? You can barely stand upright. All I have to do is wait . . .”
He looked up at the sky at the same time Alex heard the plane again. “That’s why,” he said, and then he fell on his face in the snow, unconscious.
This time Alex hesitated, weighing the intelligence of rescuing a man who’d just pulled a gun on her against the possibility he wouldn’t survive the guys in the plane long enough for hypothermia to do him in.
She didn’t debate for long. “He didn’t even have the courtesy to collapse onto the sled,” she said to Jackass, her voice shaking with the aftermath of having a gun pointed at her.
She forced herself to ignore the plane coming closer, to stop and take a few precious seconds to calm herself. Then she led Jackass around until the supply sled was lined up where she wanted it. She rolled him over, took her rifle and stuffed his gun in her pocket, then shoved and tugged until he was sprawled on the sled, except his head and shoulders. She straddled him and the sled, fisted her hands in the front of his shirt and jerked him up and over in one fast Russian weight-lifter move.