Читать книгу Hunter's Woman - Lindsay McKenna - Страница 10

Ty wanted to scream like a wounded jaguar. Struggling against this unexpected surge of emotion, he stuffed his feelings deep down inside, as usual. From his position at the rear of the tug as it left the dock, he could see Catt standing at the bow as the engine chut-chutted along. Her profile was silhouetted against the magnificent expanse of the headwaters of the Amazon, and the suffering evident in her face was tremendous. Not only did she have the responsibility of the epidemic and people’s lives in her hands, but she had him. Maybe that’s all he was feeling—remorse for Catt’s suffering. Lord knew, he’d made her suffer terribly. His unresolved feelings were like a knife twisting savagely in his gut. But tears and emotions had no playing ground within a mercenary or military person—none at all.

The tug bobbed gently as it putt-putted across the slightly choppy expanse as the waters of two different rivers met to form the Amazon. Ty tried to focus instead on the beauty of the mighty waterway, where the dark tea-colored water of the Rio Negro, so clear he could see fish swimming in the depths of it, met with the Rio Suhimoes, a milky, muddy river. It looked like someone had poured chocolate milk and iced tea together. The branching of the two rivers was known as encongtro das aguas, the “wedding of the waters.” And from this marriage, the muddy Amazon was born. There would be a patch of transparent water here, a spot of milky water there as the two currents met and mixed.

It was almost 3:00 p.m. The afternoon haze that always hung over the equatorial country made the sun look like it was shining through opaque white gauze, rather than clouds. The temperature was in the nineties and so was the humidity. Ty was sweating profusely. But then, so was everyone else. So far the rest of Catt’s team treated him with respect, not with the withering glares Catt sent him, as if he were some kind of pariah. He sure felt like one. Obliquely, Ty wondered if Morgan or Casey knew of his tragic history with Catt. Probably not. He figured since her name was no longer Simpson, Catt had gotten married, and put their affair solidly behind her. And she could easily have shortened her name from Catherine to Catt. That was a simple enough explanation. But the thought of her with another man made him ache inside. As he sat on the edge of the thick rubber coating that covered the first foot of the tug, Ty had to work to contain all his emotions.

It was absolutely impossible. Morbidly, he swung his gaze back to Catt. She stood on the bow with the cell phone in hand, talking to someone. Probably arranging to get him off the tug and out of her life. Grimly, he realized that wouldn’t happen. Casey knew the score. She knew why he was on this mission, though Catt, hopefully, would never find out. She and her team had enough to handle without thinking about the threat of terrorists lurking in the area. That was his job—to be the eyes and ears for the group and protect them, as well as alert the U.S. government of Black Dawn’s whereabouts.

Just looking at the way the soft, humid breeze lifted strands of Catt’s burnished hair made him ache again. He recalled that fiery red hair streaming freely, like a wild river, across her shoulders as she’d played that soccer game where he’d met her so long ago. Even then she had stood out like the champion she was. Catt was good at whatever she tried. Though she often won, she was a good sport about losing, too, satisfied to simply give her all to the game.

Other feelings, other memories, gently wafted to the surface of his roiling emotions as he sat there on the tugboat, charging down the wide, wide expanse of the Amazon. Closing his eyes, his clasped hands resting between his opened thighs, Ty remembered their wildly torrid lovemaking. Catt had been as hot, assertive, wild and free with him as she was in real life. She was truly an unfettered spirit inside a delicious woman’s body. Ty remembered how he’d teased her once after loving her to exhaustion in a motel not far from the gates of the naval air station.

“You know what you are?” he had whispered, placing one small kiss after another on her damp brow as she lay beside him, absolutely spent, a wonderful smile of fulfillment on her soft, glistening lips.

Languidly, Catt moved her fingers across his well-shaped arm and up across his broad shoulder as she gazed into his eyes. “No, what am I?”

“An Amazon warrior.” He picked up a strand of her long, damp red hair and held it up, critically examining it in the late afternoon light that peeked around the shade at the front window. “Part child, part woman, part Amazon warrior, part goddess, part sunlight, part warm, rich earth…”

“Mmm, I like that,” she sighed, nuzzling his jaw as he cupped her shoulder and pressed her more surely against him. “No one has ever said things like that to me before….”

“Because?” Ty looked down at her with a grin.

Barely opening her eyes, she smiled up at him. “Because I’ve never fallen in love before, I guess.”

“Hard to imagine. You’re so beautiful. A free spirit. You’re like the wind in the thunderstorms I used to see every summer over the Rockies, where I grew up,” he murmured against her hair. “When I saw you on that soccer field, I thought you must have a hundred men waiting in line for you.”

Giggling, she said, “Not many men will take on a female Texas rancher, believe me. Most men feel as if they’ve met their match. More than met it! And that scares them.”

“Texas women are special, not to be feared or run from.” Ty smiled a little and pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose. He ran his fingers through her hair, then trailed them across her cheek, marveling at the smoothness of her skin. More than anything, he liked the dusting of freckles across her straight, thin nose and cheeks. Her lashes were thick and long, like dainty fans against her flushed cheeks. Ty savored every moment spent with Catt. They didn’t get to meet often because of their demanding schedules. He could never get enough of her, of her husky voice, her touch, her loving, fiery body and that wild, free spirit of hers.

As he lay there and felt her snuggle deeply into his arms Ty had sighed with contentment. He’d never known love was like this. Oh, he’d had girlfriends off and on, but never had he been smitten like this, his emotions bright, his joy higher than the tallest mountain in the world, his senses more alive than he could ever recall. All because of this beautiful redheaded woman in his arms who had crashed into his life two months earlier. He could feel his heart opening powerfully to her as he held her. He’d felt such a sense of fierce protectiveness toward her and he knew he wanted her as his mate for the rest of his life. He was helpless against his longing for her; all he could do was hold her. Simply hold her.

As he sat on the tug now, a ragged sigh of frustration issued from between Ty’s lips. He scowled heavily and worked to erase that scene from his memory. Glancing toward the bow again, he saw that Catt was off the phone and talking to Steve, her chief lab man, who would be setting up the work station once they reached the village. Ty knew the responsibilities on Catt’s shoulders. He’d worked with outbreak teams before. They had to move fast to chase down the bacteria or virus that was mercilessly killing people.

As he studied the group out of the corner of his eye, Ty considered them modern-day knights, heroes and heroines riding into battle against an unknown opponent—one that could easily kill them, sometimes in as short a time as forty-eight hours after contracting the infection. Most of the world didn’t know much about these outbreak teams, the chances they took with the unknown, even when the unknown was a killer of powerful proportions. It took real guts to walk into an area where people were dropping like flies, and hunt down the invisible killer with thorough, detailed, step-by-step analysis and plain hard work. To flush out the culprit meant constantly exposing themselves to it. One wrong move—a prick with an infected needle, or the entrance of the infection into the body through an open cut—would allow the disease to gain a foothold. Just the cough of a sick person could be dangerous if the germ was an aerosol-borne substance and could be breathed in.

There were so many ways to die if one was an outbreak chaser like Catt and the members of her team. Men and women composing such teams were truly courageous in the face of danger, and Ty’s respect for them was as high as it was for a military person going into war. The risks an outbreak team took were as lethal as any he’d ever encountered during warfare. Instead of a bullet potentially killing one of them, it would be an invisible bacteria or germ. And the death could be gruesome and painful.

Worried, Ty wondered if Black Dawn had spread a nervine-type gas, such as VX, that would affect the central nervous system and stop a person from breathing, over the village. If they had, the team would see a lot of central-nervous-system symptoms such as paralysis, shaking or trembling limbs or altered states of consciousness in the victims. And a bug like that could easily be inhaled by Catt and her team.

Running his fingers through his short hair, Ty waited until Catt was standing alone at the bow once more. Then he made his move.

Catt’s heart thundered as she saw Ty slowly ease to a standing position and head in her direction. She sat down on one of the trunks at the bow. Busying herself with a clipboard, she pretended not to notice his approach. Maybe he’d get the message and leave her alone.

“You got a minute?” he asked, coming to a halt in front of her. Ty saw the rest of her team at the other end of the tug, watching warily. Looking back at Catt, who had her head bowed over the clipboard on her lap in an obvious attempt to ignore him, he waited her out.

“I’m busy,” she snapped.

“This will be the most unbusy time you’ll have,” he began. “When we land at that village, you and your team will work yourselves into exhaustion the first forty-eight hours. You won’t even have time to sleep, while you try to find the culprit that’s killing off those people. And you won’t want to talk to me then, either, so now is as good a time as any.”

Putting down the pen, Catt glared up at him. “What do you want?” She tried to hate him again, but it didn’t work. He stood there, open and accessible, every emotion he felt revealed in his eyes. Catt knew he wasn’t trying to hide anything from her—and she knew how good he was at hiding the truth when he chose to do so. For whatever reason, he was allowing her to see all of him without any walls.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked, pointing to a green metal trunk behind him. He knew that would put only about three feet between them, and he saw the wariness in Catt’s expressive features. It hurt to see how much she distrusted him. Well? Hadn’t he earned it? Yes. So now that he’d made his bed, he had to lie in it.

“You’ll sit whether I want you to or not.”

Grinning mirthlessly, Ty eased back onto the trunk. Opening his thighs, he clasped his hands between them and studied her in the late afternoon light. He could see the stress around her mouth and eyes. Her brow was no longer smooth, but looked permanently wrinkled with the intensity of her concentration on the mission ahead of them.

“Spit out whatever you were going to say and then leave. I’ve got work to do,” Catt warned him. She didn’t want to look at Ty. Every time she even glanced into his warm, inviting brown eyes, she felt her heart crying out with need for him. It was a ridiculous reaction on her part. Completely ridiculous!

“I just want to go over some logistics with you,” he began in a deep, soothing tone. “Casey wanted me to be a gopher and a guard dog at the same time, for you and your team.”

Head snapping up, Catt looked at him. “What do you mean, guard dog? Are the Juma in a territorial dispute with another tribe?”

“No…not that I know of. We’ll be meeting Rafe Antonio, a backwoodsman in this area. He works for the state and is the Brazilian equivalent of what we Americans would call a forest ranger.”

“He’s the one who contacted OID in the first place,” Catt agreed, though she felt like fleeing. Just being this close to Ty Hunter was like hell itself. Only it was a hell filled with sweet longing—the kind of longing Catt never would have thought she’d feel if they’d ever met again. Ten years had hardened her heart against him. Or so she’d thought.

“Yes,” Ty said tentatively. “He’s got a houseboat, which is how he gets around to the various tribes that live in the backwater channels off the Amazon. Casey wanted me to fill you in on the Juma and get you up to speed on the politics of what’s going down presently in Brazil regarding them.”

“Since when did you become a South American Indian expert?”

Her sarcasm assaulted him. Frowning, Ty refused to let her anger toward him distract him from what he needed to share with her. “I’ve batted around the world a lot since you knew me,” he said slowly and carefully. Noting her surprise, he added, “I left the Marine Corps five years ago. Now I work for the federal government as an expert on outbreak epidemics, with a specialty in South America and Africa.” He didn’t mention that his real knowledge was in bioterrorism. That would tip Catt off, and he didn’t need her knowing the truth—at least, not yet, and maybe never. If Morgan was wrong about this being a Black Dawn experiment, and this was an outbreak situation only, there was no reason to needlessly put more stress on Catt and her team. They’d have enough danger to handle with the epidemic alone, without the possible threat of bioterrorists in the vicinity.

Catt frowned. “I see.”

“I was also chosen for this team because I speak Portuguese. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Brazilian jungle the last three years.” He looked around, his voice softening. “It’s a beautiful place. Like a Garden of Eden. There’re so many plants and animals within the jungle itself. It’s like a living, evolving laboratory right before your eyes….”

She tried to remain immune to Ty’s unexpected vulnerability, to his obvious love of this humid jungle environment—an environment that only made her feel miserable and hot. “Pretty to you. Dangerous to us,” she accused sharply.

Shrugging, Ty studied her. Despite her personal dislike of him, Catt was gradually being less defensive and prickly as they spoke to one another. For that he was grateful. Opening his hands, he said, “No disagreement from me. Rafe will meet us at the head of the channel. He’s got a green houseboat with white trim.” Looking at his watch, Ty said, “We’ll be about an hour late, but that’s no big deal. He’ll be waiting, and he’ll guide us back to the village.”

“I just tried to raise him on the cell phone,” Catt said. “No answer.”

“I’m not surprised,” he told her in a low voice. “Cell phones don’t work real well out in the jungle. Around Manaus,” he continued, looking back upriver, where the skyline of the modern city had disappeared from view, “they work fine. Out here, I’m afraid you’re going to find that old-fashioned pony express will be the communication of the day.”

Nodding, Catt said, “No different from any other outbreak situation we’ve been in before—cut off from the outside world except by Jeep, Land Rover, horseback or a good pair of hiking boots.”

Ty nodded and grinned a little. Thrilled that Catt was settling down now and speaking to him without such rancor, he breathed an inner sigh of relief. How badly he wanted to reach out and touch her long, elegant fingers. How badly he wanted to tell Catt that the coals of his love for her were still there after all this time. It was a surprise to him, one that made him feel unstable and unsure of himself. He’d thought the love he’d had for Catt had died long ago.

“You should set your lab up near Rafe’s houseboat,” he suggested. “You don’t know what kind of epidemic we’re facing yet, and his boat is about as safe as it will get.”

“I’d already thought about that. Do you know how far back from the channel the Juma village sits?” Catt found herself falling into companionable conversation with him—once again. Oh, Ty Hunter had always been easy to talk with. How many times had she replayed those wonderful, stolen moments from the past? Far too many. Catt recalled the endless tears she’d cried when he’d abandoned her. In her greatest hour of need, when she’d craved Ty’s comfort, his arms, his support, he hadn’t been there for her. Tears pricked the backs of her eyes now, and she blinked several times to push them away. Looking at him, she dropped her gaze to his strong, capable mouth. Hotly, she recalled how wonderful his kisses had been. How his mouth had moved with such silken power across her lips, taming her, guiding her, cajoling her and meeting her hunger with his own.

Taking a shaky breath, Catt closed her eyes and rubbed her brow.

“Headache?” Ty asked gently, as she continued to gently massage her wrinkled brow. He ached to reach out and rub the tension out of her shoulders as he had in the past.

“Yes,” she muttered uneasily. “It’s a migraine coming on.”

“Some things don’t change, do they?” And he smiled a little as she opened her dark blue eyes and stared at him. The silence stretched between them. Ty recalled that headaches, the migraine variety, had always plagued Catt. In the past, when they had been going together, he would turn her around and gently knead and massage her tight neck and shoulders, and miraculously, the oncoming migraine would disappear. And when he looked in her eyes now, he saw that she remembered, too, how he had cared for her. And then he saw anger wash the warmth in her gaze away. Realizing he’d overstepped the bounds of their present, tenuous relationship, he said, “Sorry, I just don’t like to see you in pain.”

Her fingers slipped from her brow and she sat up, fury sizzling through her. “Really?” Sarcasm made her voice brittle, nearly acidic.

Heat raced up his cheeks. Ty realized he was blushing beneath her blistering stare. Well, didn’t he have it coming? “I have a friend, a homeopathic doctor,” he said, trying to steer their conversation back on track. “She saved my life with this alternative medicine when I contracted Congo fever in an outbreak over in Africa. They had flown me to London to die. The priest had already given me the last rites when Dr. Rachel Donovan-Cunningham came in, gave me one of her little white pills and told the priest to go away, that I wouldn’t be needing his services.” Ty’s mouth stretched a little as he held Catt’s furious gaze. Already, as he began his story, he could see her anger fleeing, replaced with curiosity. That was one of the many things he had loved about Catt: her emotions were so open, so easily read on her face. Yes, she had a temper, but it never lasted long. She was like a Texas thunderstorm, erupting suddenly, but quickly returning to calm. In some ways, she hadn’t changed at all, and he gloried in that small discovery.

“I’ve heard of homeopathy. So it saved your sorry neck?”

Hunter chuckled. “For better or worse, yes, it did.” He gestured toward her left shoulder. “I remember you got migraines from a tight neck and shoulders. Dr. Donovan-Cunningham taught me a lot about homeopathy as I recovered in that London hospital. As a parting gift, she gave me a repertory and materia medica on the medicine. Over the years, I’ve gotten more training when I could. I’m not at her level, but I can use it for acute situations like your migraine if you’re interested.”

Catt didn’t like the idea of Ty helping her. All too vividly, she recalled how he’d made her migraines go away before—with his marvelous, kneading fingers that worked a special magic on her tight flesh. Glaring at him, she said, “With you on board, my migraine is coming back. I’ll take anything to make it and you go away.”

Ty understood. “If I thought jumping overboard and swimming back to shore would cure it, I would.”

“Try it.”

Stung, but trying not to show his hurt, he took out a pad of paper and pen from his shirt pocket. “If you can answer a few questions about your symptoms, maybe I can find the right remedy to get rid of it. But unfortunately, I won’t be able to rid you of myself just yet.”

“Fire away,” she muttered, as she ruefully rubbed her neck to ease the tension.

He opened the pad and asked, “What does it feel like?”

Grimacing, Catt growled, “Like someone is pulling all the skin on the back of my head and neck so tight that it’s going to crack and break.”

He wrote some notes down. Pleased that she was going to cooperate despite the fact that she saw him as her archenemy, Ty asked, “The pain? Can you describe it?”

“Dull and aching. Why are you asking me so many questions? Why can’t you just give me the pill for migraines?”

“Because in homeopathy, we take all the symptoms of your case first, look them up in the repertory as a unit and then find the one single remedy that fits most of your major symptoms.”

“Humph.”

“This isn’t like the pharmaceutical drugs you’re used to,” he warned.

“Obviously. What else? This thing is coming on slow but sure.”

“When did it start?”

“When I saw you.”

He nodded and looked at his watch. “So it’s a slow-moving migraine?”

“You know it is.”

Unruffled, he said, “What makes it feel worse?”

“Having you sit here. Having you on this tug with me.”

The corners of his mouth rose slightly. “I won’t find those symptoms in my repertory. Any others?”

She tried to remain immune to his charm, to that little-boy smile lurking around his mouth. Why did Ty have to be so damned ruggedly handsome? He could charm a snake if he wanted to. Nostrils flaring, she lifted her head and rubbed her neck. “I just had a cup of coffee, and that helped ease it a little.”

“So, it gets better with stimulants?”

She eyed him. “I guess you could say that. Coffee is a stimulant of sorts.”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “What else?”

It hurt to think at this point. Catt wished Ty would go away, and at the same time, her heart was absorbing his nearness like a desert that hadn’t seen rain in years—a decade to be exact—and that made her scared of her own emotions toward him. Fumbling for a response, she muttered, “Bad news.”

“Me,” he said, scribbling again. “Anything that makes your symptoms worse?”

“With this damned humidity cranking up, I always feel horrible. So I guess you could say heat and sunlight like we’re having right now, okay?”

Ty finished writing and got up. “I’ll be back in a bit with a remedy.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” She watched as he nodded and carefully picked his way past the boxes stacked on the deck of the tug. The humid air felt somewhat cooler, but not much. Catt had the desire to leap into the cool waters of the muddy Amazon. She squelched that idea because among the denizens that lived in these fabled waters were schools of flesh-eating piranhas. No, she had no desire to be stripped to her skeleton by those hungry little monsters.

Rubbing her neck once more, Catt sighed heavily. Being around Ty was like holding her hand over an open flame and letting herself be burned. What recourse did she have? None. Her migraine was intensifying. It was because of the shock of seeing him once again, she knew. If only her stupid heart would let him go! Why did she feel hope? Joy when he was nearby?

“I feel like a damned thunderstorm—up one second, down the next,” she muttered under her breath. She saw Ty sitting down on the deck, a book in hand and another at his side, deep in concentration. Turning, Catt looked out across the bow of the tug. The Amazon River was nearly half a mile wide at this point, a yellow-gray color against the jungle along the banks. Trees of varying types, including palms, were so thick that light rarely reached the jungle floor, and she could see the darkness within. A flight of red-and-yellow macaws flew overhead in a V pattern. Their color stood out against the clouds that seemed to perpetually hang overhead. Would she ever see direct sunlight again?

“I think I got your remedy.”

Catt jumped. She didn’t mean to, but Ty’s voice was so close, she couldn’t help it. Jerking to look upward, she saw he was standing in front of her, a couple of white pellets in the hand extended in her direction. Eyeing them and then him, she growled, “What is it?”

Ty saw that strain was deepening around Catt’s eyes—pain from the oncoming migraine encroaching. “It’s a remedy called Gelsemium. In layperson’s language, it’s yellow jasmine.” He crouched down in front of her and kept his hand extended. Catt was eyeing the pellets jadedly. “In its natural state, the herb is poisonous and could kill you. But—” he pointed to the pellets “—these are made so that there’s no longer any of the crude substance left in it to hurt you.”

“Then what’s left?” Catt demanded. “Air?”

He grinned. “Energy. I know we don’t have time to talk much about this kind of medicine, but trust me that the energy signature of Gelsemium is in these pellets.”

“And these things will stop my migraine?”

He heard the disbelief in her voice. He saw the distrust in her eyes. “Yes, it will.”

She stared at him. “Give me one reason to trust what you say, Hunter.”

His heart ached in that moment. He knew her question grew from the way he’d made her suffer in the past; he could hear her pain in her low, hoarse tone. As gently as possible, he rasped, “This isn’t about me. This is about you and trying to help you be pain free. You don’t need a migraine going into an outbreak situation. You don’t have to trust me in order to take this remedy. If it works, you’ll know it in twenty minutes. Your migraine symptoms will start to go away.” Holding her challenging blue gaze, he moved his hand a little closer to her.

Disgruntled, Catt held out her palm. “Give them to me.”

He tipped his hand. Their fingers met and touched briefly. Catt instantly jerked hers away. The white pellets fell to the deck of the tug. Ty heard her mutter a curse of desperation mixed with anger.

“Just stay put,” he told her, unwinding and straightening to his full height. “I’ve got more. I’ll bring you another dose.”

Feeling foolish, Catt refused to look at him. Ty was being incredibly tolerant and gentle with her despite the sarcasm, the anger she continually aimed at him. Her fingers tingled where they’d briefly touched his. A wild flurry of heat had jolted up through her body from that contact. It had shocked her. Scared her. Feeling very stupid at jerking her hand away as if it had been scalded, Catt watched him pick up a black plastic case that looked like a small fishing tackle box. He wound his way back to her and sat down on the trunk opposite her.

Opening the case, Ty showed her some two-dramsize amber bottles with black caps on them. “I carry fifty homeopathic remedies with me all the time.” Maybe if he showed her some of what he knew, she’d settle down and not be so jumpy. But Ty knew why she’d jerked her hand away. She hated him so much she didn’t want to be touched by him. The hurt moving through him was as wide as the Amazon they floated on. There was nothing he could do; he felt the wound in his heart expanding. He felt his need for Catt all over again, along with the pain of knowing they could never be together again.

Taking out one bottle, he handed it to Catt, making sure he didn’t touch her hand in the process. “Here’s the Gelsemium. Open it and put a few pellets on the palm of your hand. And then put them under your tongue. They’ll melt away real quick. They’re sweet-tasting, so you’ll like them.”

Doing as she was instructed, Catt hurriedly recapped the bottle and handed it back to Ty. Because she was distracted, her fingers brushed his again. This time she forced herself not to jerk away and drop the bottle.

“Look,” she rasped, “I’ve got more work to do….”

Ty understood. He put the bottle back in the case and closed it. “No problem. Let me know if your migraine goes away?”

“Yes, sure….” Catt didn’t believe for a moment it would go away because of this “energy” medicine of his. From her point of view as a medical doctor, it was snake oil or hocus-pocus at best. As he rose and left, she dragged in a sigh of relief.

Being around Ty was like being around a raging fire that was out of control. Catt was both attracted to and afraid of him. What was she going to do? How would she handle his nearness at the village? Someway, Catt realized, she had to get Ty away from her. A plan began to form in her aching head. Yes, if she could just keep him away from her and her silly, pining heart, maybe, just maybe, she could survive this time with him.