Hidden Embers (4 page)

CHAPTER THREE

T
his couldn’t be happening to her. Not at—she glanced at the clock on her dashboard—close to midnight in the middle of the West Texas desert. But as her car shimmied and shook beneath her, the left side thumping, thumping, thumping, she knew it was indeed happening.

Cursing long and hard, Jasmine Kane pulled her ’67 cherry red Mustang off the highway at the nearest exit. Once stopped, she wasted no time in climbing out of the car and heading for the trunk. As she did, she prayed that she still had a flashlight rattling around back there somewhere. The glow from the closest streetlight was dim, and without the additional boost of a hand-held light, changing the flat tire was going to be a total bitch.

But the angels must have been smiling on her because, when she popped the trunk, her long, black flashlight was laying out in the open—right between the small suitcase and the medical bag she’d placed there sixteen hours before, when she’d started this journey all the way back in Atlanta, Georgia.

She knew she should have waited a few more days, knew she should have caught a flight like a normal person. But when her closest friend had called her with the story of a strange new virus sweeping through an indigenous population of New Mexico, she hadn’t been able to resist—not when she’d been sidelined from her own research for the last seven weeks because of what the disability paperwork listed as a “work-related injury.”

She snorted as she pulled out the bags and started digging in the trunk for her spare tire. Work-related injury, her ass. More like getting blown to hell and back by some amateur idiot’s idea of a bomb. Because of it—and the numerous surgeries she’d had to repair all the damage—she was sidelined for another four to six weeks before the CDC would even let her back in the door. And at the rate things were going, it would be at least another six months before she could even think about getting back into the field.

Being denied access to her work was as close to death as she could get and still be breathing—much worse than the car bomb that had gotten her in Sierra Leone. Which was why she’d jumped into her car and headed for New Mexico almost as soon as she’d gotten off the phone with Phoebe. She’d been too itchy to sit still for much longer.

Her arm twinged as she yanked out the tire, but she ignored it. It had only been two days since the cast had come off—of course her muscles were going to complain a little bit. It had been weeks since she’d done anything more strenuous than flipping the channel on the remote control.

But as she positioned the jack under the tire, her side did more than twinge, and she had to stop to catch her breath. When was the damn thing going to heal? Jasmine wondered as she braced her palms on her knees. When was she going to be back to normal? This whole weakness thing sucked ass.

The doctor side of her felt obligated to remember that it had only been forty-nine days since they’d pulled some heavy duty shrapnel out of her side.

It had been only forty-nine days since she’d broken four ribs, shattered an elbow, punctured a lung, cracked her ankle and sustained a pretty heavy-duty concussion.

Not to mention that it had been a whole lot less than that since the last of the surgeries to correct the muscle and ligament damage to her hip and shoulder. Maybe changing a tire
was
pushing things just a little.

The thought grated, and she blocked out the searing pain as she bent and started pumping at the jack. She’d been on her own since she had left home at sixteen, and she took pride in the fact that she was almost completely self-sufficient. She didn’t need—or want—some man to take care of her, to change her tires and tell her what she could or couldn’t do. She would rather eat dirt.

But self-sufficiency was one thing and stupidity another, she reminded herself as her torso caught fire. The ribs obviously weren’t healing up as fast as she’d thought—and taking off the binding today had been pretty damn stupid. But the thing had chafed after a few hours of driving, and she’d slipped it off in a restroom in Mississippi. Clearly, doing so had been a bad move. Maybe there was a reason doctors weren’t supposed to treat themselves, after all…

When the pain grew bad enough that she had trouble breathing, Jasmine stood up and leaned against her car. She gave up on changing the stupid tire by herself. Reaching into her back pocket, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed AAA. One of the things about having a classic car was that she had the auto service on speed dial.

Within minutes, she’d arranged for someone to come fix her tire, though the estimated time of arrival was about an hour and a half, which meant she had to put her plans of stopping in El Paso that night on hold. Her experience with tow trucks told her that an hour and a half was really more like two to three hours, especially after working hours, and she really didn’t want to be pulling up to a motel at five or six in the morning, hoping to get a little sleep just as the sun came up.

Which meant she was stuck here in Fort Stockton for the night.
Fantastic
. She looked around the deserted street, noting lights about half a mile away, but decided she wasn’t comfortable leaving her baby alone on the side of the road. So, with a disgusted sigh, she crawled back into her car, locked the doors and prepared to sleep until the tow truck finally showed up. But while her body was exhausted—nearly seventeen hours on the road could do that to a woman—her brain was wide awake. She’d spent much of the drive mulling over the information that Phoebe had given her, trying to match it up to any of the hemorrhagic viruses she’d worked with.

She’d come up empty, but it was early days yet. Besides, Phoebe hadn’t given her much to go on. That could be why—

A knock on her window. Jasmine bolted upward, reaching for the can of pepper spray she kept in the console between the front seats. She had another one attached to her keys. A girl could never be too careful.

Turning on the flashlight she’d deposited on the passenger seat, she shined it out the driver’s-side window—and then wished she hadn’t.

Two men were standing there, and neither looked sober—or skilled—enough to change a tire. Which probably meant they weren’t knocking on her car window to offer her a hand.

Her heart sped up a little and tiny frissons of fear worked their way down her spine even as her mouth tightened in annoyance. Why was it that a woman broken down on the side of the road was a beacon for every asshole in a fifty-mile radius? Normally she wouldn’t have been the least bit nervous about her ability to take these guys, but as recent events had brought home, she wasn’t anywhere close to her usual fighting form.

One man knocked again, and with a resigned sigh, she cracked the window. Neither looked as though they were going to go away—at least not without talking to her first. And the last thing she wanted was for one of them to get the bright idea to pick up one of the rocks by the side of the road and smash her window in an effort to get in.

“Hey, lady, do you need some help?” one asked with a drunken leer.

“Yeah. We’re really good at working on cars.”

Since neither looked like they knew how to bathe let alone work on a classic car, Jasmine couldn’t keep the doubt from her voice as she said, “No, thanks. I appreciate the offer, but I’ve already called triple A. They should be here any minute.”

“You don’t need them,” said the first guy, reaching for her door handle. “We can help you with whatever—”

Her fingers tightened on the pepper spray, and she cursed herself for leaving her gun at home in Atlanta. She usually carried it only when she was going into an area of the world a lot more dangerous than Texas. Here at home, she’d always felt able to defend herself without a weapon.

And she was able to now, Jasmine assured herself, broken body or not. These certainly weren’t the first drunk guys she’d ever run across, and they probably wouldn’t be the last.

“Really, guys. I’m fine. I appreciate the offer, but I’m good.”

“Aww, come on now, sweetheart. Open up.” The second guy went around to the passenger door and yanked at it. When she made no move to let him in, his voice turned mean. “I said, open up.”

“No.” Her fear was growing more pronounced, drowning out her annoyance, but she shoved it back. There was no way she had survived working in half the developing nations in the world only to fall victim to two drunk idiots on the side of the road. She wasn’t sure of much anymore, but of that she was absolutely certain.

“Listen, bitch, we just want to help you out.” The first one sounded a lot less drunk suddenly. Interesting, but definitely not encouraging.

“And I already told you, I don’t need your kind of help.”

“You could have fooled me.” He kicked her front tire. “This thing is flat as a pancake.”

She didn’t answer, just rolled the window back up, which infuriated the two of them even more. The first one walked to the front of her car and started shoving up and down on her hood, making the Mustang bounce crazily. This really pissed her off, seeing as how she’d just had new shocks put in.

Gritting her teeth, Jasmine weighed her options. She could call the police, but who knew how long it would take them to get there?

Or she could take care of the problem herself.

As always, the second solution was the one she liked the best. Reaching for the ignition, she turned the keys. Her engine roared to life at the same time she hit her headlights. In an instant, the two idiots were bathed in yellow light, and she took a moment to note what they looked like—just in case. Then she revved her engine once in warning.

When the jackasses didn’t take the hint, she rolled her eyes and crept forward.
Bent rim, be damned
, she thought. She’d rather pay for a new tire
and
rim than deal with these assholes for one more second.

Cracking her window a second time, she snarled, “You have two choices. Get the hell out of my way,
now
, or get pancaked. And truth be told, I really don’t care which one of those options you choose.”

The guys glanced at each other, but they were either stupider than they looked or they must have thought she was bluffing, because neither moved.
Their loss.
Shifting the car into reverse, Jasmine rolled back about ten feet and then hit the gas, aiming straight at the two men caught in her headlights.

For one long moment they just stood there, staring at her with their mouths agape. And then they jumped out of the way.
Chickens
. But at least she had the satisfaction of knowing she’d clipped the one on the right with her bumper. If he wanted to go around hassling “helpless” women, he was going to have to get faster on the uptake—or suffer a hell of a lot of injuries.

She didn’t stop the car even after the men jumped to safety. Instead she proceeded down the street toward the closest lit parking lot, her tire thumping out a warning the entire way.

She sighed in relief as she realized the lot belonged to a bar, and judging from the number of cars parked there, it was still hopping. A glance in her rearview mirror told her the idiots weren’t following her; they must have decided to cut their losses.
Good.
She really didn’t want to deal with them any more that night anyway.

After a quick call to the auto club informing them of her shift in location, Jasmine took a second to look around. The only people in the parking lot were the couple leaned up against the big red truck at the front of the lot, going at it for all they were worth.

Still, she didn’t relinquish her hold on the pepper spray. A woman never knew when she needed the element of surprise—Jasmine had learned years ago, the hard way, never to go anywhere empty-handed. But after that last encounter, she’d decided that hanging out in the car until the tow truck arrived might not be the best idea—even in a relatively quiet little town like this.

Grabbing her purse, she climbed out of the car and headed for the bar’s door at a fast clip. Her keys were in one hand, the sharp length of one jammed between her fingers as a makeshift weapon, and the pepper spray was in the other. She kept her head up, her eyes alert, and ignored the quick, staccato beat of her heart. The jerks who’d hassled her were long gone, she reminded herself, as she beat time across the parking lot. But that didn’t mean there weren’t more out there. She’d feel a lot better once she was inside.

She hit the door a few seconds later, read the name scrawled across the top in neon lights. The Lone Star. It sounded like her kind of place.

His beast went crazy the second she walked into the crowded bar. He wasn’t facing the door, didn’t even know who it was that had crossed the threshold—only that it was a woman and something about her had whipped his other half from its regular state of preternatural stillness into a near frenzy.

As the beast struggled to burst through his skin, struggled to get to her, Quinn slammed on the restraints. Held them tight even as the thing fought against the unnatural captivity. Unlike a lot of the men in his clan, he and his dragon usually existed quite peaceably together, but judging from the way it was suddenly slamming against him in its desperation to get out, it looked as if that was about to change.

He was not impressed.

Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Quinn all but roared as her scent coasted over the stale cigarette smoke and raw whisky odor of the place and sent him spinning.

She smelled rich and ripe, like blackberries in the summertime and the night-blooming jasmine that grew along the back fence at his house. His beast liked the scent, wanted to glut himself on it until he was drunk, and the man wasn’t far behind.

Unable to resist, he turned toward the door, grinding his teeth together as he realized that a number of other men were doing the same thing. Not that he could blame them—she was, by far, the hottest thing in the bar, despite the fact that she looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. Or maybe because of it.

Unlike the rest of the women in the bar who were wearing tiny skirts and enough makeup to keep Maybeline in business for a long damn time, this one was dressed in a pair of black yoga pants and a matching tank top. There was no makeup on her face, at least none that he could see, but her lips were a rich, cherry red anyway, her cheeks flushed a soft, pale pink.