Heart of Danger (2 page)

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 goggles.

“T-Tom,” she stuttered. Her voice was hoarse, the first words she’d spoken in more than twelve 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 he 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 right off the mountainside with one blow from that huge fist.

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 because of the hood, 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.

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 turning white as the blood in her body rushed in to her core, the last part of her that would die. She barely had the energy to shiver anymore. All she could do was endure.

In the cold and darkness there was no way to tell time, but after what felt like hours the man stopped.

Wherever it was he was taking her, they had arrived.

Chapter Two

Goddamn!

Crazy bitch, driving up Mount Blue in a snowstorm in a little eCar and with no winter gear. He should have just left her in the snowdrift to die.

Tom McEnroe eased the woman onto the passenger side seat of his hovercraft, frowning.

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 fucking
name
.

Nobody knew his name.

It had been wiped from all public records when he joined Ghost Ops. Members of Ghost Ops 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 for
him
!

This was serious shit because every goddamned law enforcement agency was looking for him, too, not to mention the entire U.S. 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 purr. There was an airplane’s engine in the hovercraft. It was 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 tugging at the restraints when he got back. “Stop that,” he said, and she stilled, instantly.

Smart woman. He was dangerous when he was pissed, and she could probably read that in his voice.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, working hard to keep the tremor out of her voice.

He had to give her marks for courage. She wasn’t screaming and crying to be let go, flailing about, trying to hit him. He didn’t have any chemical restraints with him and this weather strained even his driving skills. He’d have to knock her out if she interfered with his driving. He wouldn’t like it but he’d do it.

“I’m taking you to somewhere warm, for starters, Dr. Young.”

She quieted.

Mac looked down at the IDs he had in his hand, taken from her purse. California driver’s license, two credit cards, company security pass, medical insurance hologram. All made out to Dr. Catherine Young.

She worked for a company called Millon Laboratories. He had no idea if she was a medical doctor or a scientist.

No matter. He’d find out soon enough. For the moment, they needed to get back fast.

Mac pressed the button that lifted the vehicle, moved the directional stick forward and glided off the road and in the direction that would take them back to HQ.

Catherine didn’t realize they’d moved until she was pressed against the back of her seat. For a second her befogged brain thought the man in black was pushing her, but that wasn’t right. He was next to her. She could hear him breathe, feel his heat.

They were in a vehicle that made no noise and, crazily, seemed to . . . to
glide
. The road she’d been on—track more than road—had been rutted, studded with stones, slippery with snow.

One of the many mysteries that would be cleared up, or not.

There was absolutely nothing Catherine could do so she did the only thing she could. Sit still and wait.

They traveled for a long time, though she had no way of knowing exactly how long. Maybe she was traveling toward Tom McEnroe, as she was compelled to do. Maybe she was traveling to her death. Maybe she was traveling to both.

However much she’d tried to avoid the bitter consequences of her gift, it had led her to this moment in which she was as powerless as a stick carried by a raging river down to the sea.

She was hooded and her hands were restrained but she wasn’t uncomfortable and she wasn’t cold. The strange vehicle was warm and the man had thrown a blanket over her. It was very thin, almost like a cotton sheet, but underneath it, she was incredibly warm.

It was a lucky thing she wasn’t suffering from severe hypothermia. People died from rewarming collapse, a sudden drop in blood pressure that sends the system into deep shock, then death.

They rode in silence.

For one of the few times in her life, Catherine was tempted to just reach out and touch, touch the driver. Skin against skin. She never touched anyone if she could help it. Often the results were painful, sometimes dangerous.

Her hands were bare. Bringing her restrained hands over and touching him would at least tell her if he meant her harm. If she was being driven to her death.

If his mind was filled with hatred and violence, as many minds were, she’d fight to the death when they got out of the vehicle.

But there was nowhere she could be sure to touch his skin. He seemed to be covered all over in that light, tough material, including his hands.

Once again her gift was useless, dangerous. Driving her to danger, but giving her no way out of it.

She could do nothing but sit and try to keep her heartbeat calm and slow, try to empty her mind of all thought, try to just . . . be. If she was going to fight to the death at the end of this ride, she couldn’t afford to waste energy on useless speculation.

She was on a mission to find this Tom McEnroe, propelled by forces beyond her control. And—God help her—propelled by overwhelming love for this McEnroe, for a man she’d never met.

Mac drove into the base of HQ, entering a vast cavern. Their security was tight—he’d designed it himself—but the remote sensors situated along the hidden route to the mouth of the cavern recognized the ID signals given off by the hovercraft. If they hadn’t, an electromagnetic pulse would have shut the vehicle down well before it came within sight of the hidden entrance. The same EMP that had fried her car’s circuits.

And if by some wild chance the vehicle didn’t stop dead, whoever was manning the security monitors would give the order to one of their drones overhead and a tiny, powerful precision missile would be unleashed that would leave a smoking crater and some splashes of protoplasm and nothing else.

The hovercraft stopped, the cushions dropping them to the concrete floor.

Mac got out and opened the passenger side door. The woman, Dr. Catherine Young, sat still and unmoving. He would have thought her a statue if it weren’t for the slight trembling of her hands. They were beautiful hands, he had to admit. And she was a beautiful woman, no doubt about that, either.

That made him uneasy. Beautiful women were trouble, always.

The woman he’d pulled out of the freezing car had been whitefaced with cold, startled, then terrified, and with all that, so beautiful he’d taken her for a model. Some airhead, both stupid and crazy because otherwise what the fuck would she be doing on their deliberately crap, almost-impassable road at night in the middle of a snowstorm?

She wasn’t an airhead, she was a doctor, so that left crazy. What the fuck did she think she was doing?

He’d been about ready to invent some story about being out hunting and being caught in the snowstorm and offering to drive her back to Regent, forty miles back down the mountain, when she’d dropped her bomb.

I’m looking for Tom McEnroe
.

Mac didn’t do surprise, but that—well, that was a real shocker.

After dropping the bomb, there was no question of driving the clueless, pretty civilian back down the mountain. She wasn’t a civilian and she wasn’t there by chance.

This was one dangerous woman.

A woman who knew where to look for him when the entire U.S. government didn’t have a clue. She was possibly a spy, definitely a threat. And she wasn’t leaving their compound until he knew who had sent her and why and how the hell she knew where to look in the first place.

And he wouldn’t bet on her leaving the compound alive.

“Out,” he said.

Mac trained hard men to do hard things. He trained men he knew perfectly well would be sent straight into lethal danger. They’d stay alive only if he trained them hard. Under fire, team cohesion was everything and he was team leader. He was used to being instantly obeyed because he
had
to be instantly obeyed. The alternative was death, and not a good one, either.

So his command voice was the voice of God, screamed straight into his men’s ears.

Normally, he moderated his command voice for women. But right then he was mad and suspicious and he wasn’t about to moderate his voice for someone who might be endangering his entire world.

No matter how pretty she was.

Her whole body shrank in on itself at that one barked word, which was the reaction of any small animal to a threat from a larger animal. Hunker down, become small. Then, to his astonishment, the woman straightened up, head high under the hood, shoulders back, visibly trying to give herself courage.

Well . . .
shit.

Mac recognized that.

He knew all about trying to give yourself courage in bad situations. He’d been a prisoner of fundamentalist fucks in Yemen for two hellish months in which he’d been kept hooded and uncertain, knowing that at any moment he could have a blade to his throat or a muzzle to the back of his head. He knew precisely what she was feeling because he’d felt it himself.

If she was going to clock out, she wanted to go with her head high. Man, he knew what that was like. Knew it inside out.

For a second, just a fleeting moment, he identified with her, flashed on what this must be like for her. But then it passed.

Fuck that.

He couldn’t afford to let himself feel anything for this woman. She’d come to him. Found him against all the odds. She’d cracked security designed by three men who were the world’s greatest experts and he had no idea how she’d done it.

She was a menace—to him, to his men, and to this crazy community they’d gathered around themselves.

“Come,” he said, injecting impatience in his voice.

He had to interrogate her as soon as possible. If this woman, however soft and pale and helpless she looked, turned out to be the tip of the spear of an invasion, he and his men had to scramble. The faster he found out what she wanted, and who was behind her, the better he could defend them.

She swung her legs out the open door, feeling for the ground with one booted foot. At least she’d had the sense to wear woolen pants and boots. Though her legs looked like they went up to her neck, she was only of medium height. Her foot tapped down tentatively, seeking firm ground. Finally, exasperated, Mac fit his hands around her small waist and bodily lifted her out and down to the ground. Like a dancer, she pointed one foot at the ground and seemed to land like some goddamned ballerina.

She felt good between his hands.

God-
damn.

Shocked, Mac took a long step back. He had no business thinking that way. He was a soldier, now and forever. He hadn’t left the military, the military had left him.

At heart he was
still
a soldier, protecting his own, and this woman represented danger. What the fuck did he care if she felt light and graceful under his hands, if she was beautiful, if she was brave? That made her doubly dangerous.