Her Last Defense (14 page)

B
y that evening Ranger Company G headquarters officially moved into a hotel two blocks down LaGrange Avenue from Houston Community. Clint flicked the light on in room 306 and surveyed the antique reproduction furniture, the thirty-six-inch TV, demure seascape prints on the walls. “
Hmph.
Practically a palace compared to the Lonesome Pines.”

“Look,” Macy said, flopping down onto the bed closest to the door. “Two beds.”

“Wonderful.” Actually he’d rather wake up with her in his arms again. He could use something—someone—to hold on to tonight, with the world spinning out of control. He suspected she could, too.

As if she’d read his mind, her smile fell and she
stared at him through eyes that seemed to grow warmer with each passing second. Womanly eyes.

“Do you think we’ll find them in time?” she asked, her face soft.

He would have liked to ease her anxiety with false reassurance, but she deserved the truth. She’d earned it today. “We don’t have a lot to go on.”

“But the guys who have the virus have got to turn up sooner or later. I mean, every law-enforcement agency in the country is looking for them.”

“Yeah.” He laid his keys, gun and badge on the shiny walnut-veneer dresser. “Everybody’s looking.”

He didn’t add that the phrase
needle in a haystack
had never been more apt. In this case, the haystack was about the size of the continental United States.

He watched her watching him in the vanity mirror. She eased off the bed and walked up behind him. He turned to stand face to face with her, and caught the scent of her soap.

“I was thinking,” she said. “Maybe I’ve been taking a lot for granted the last few days.”

“Like what?” His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears. His heart slowed to a heavy clip-clop beat.

“Time,” she said, looking up at him through a heavy fringe of lashes. “I thought I wanted time to figure out what I wanted. Turns out we might not have all that much time left.”

“No one knows how much time they have left.”

“Which is why I’m thinking now that we should live every day as if it might be our last. Because it just might be.”

With a tentative stroke, she brushed her fingertips over the line of his jaw, down to his pulse, which leaped to her touch. He captured her hand in his, held it to his chest.

“Let me be real clear on this.” Because he would self-destruct if he started something between them and couldn’t finish it tonight. “Are you saying you’ve changed your mind about us? About me?”

Her smile was both shy and inviting. “It’s a woman’s prerogative, isn’t it?”

That was all the encouragement he needed. He pulled her into his arms, luxuriating a moment in the slide of her hips, her breasts, against him, and then kissed her, pouring the gamut of emotions they’d experienced today—fear, frustration, disbelief, and yes, love, into each nibble. Each gentle caress.

He lifted her and carried her to the bed, laid her down and then reared back to turn the lights down low and peel off his shirt.

“I’m scared, Clint.” The taut skin over her cheeks shone, luminescent in the dim light.

“Don’t be,” he told her, covering the length of her body with his. “Not tonight. Not with me.”

Tears stung Macy’s eyes as she pulled Clint closer to her, burrowed into him as if she could slip inside his skin. She needed this tonight. Needed him. Not just because she was scared, but because she’d finally realized what she should have seen a long time ago: she was better with him. She felt more alive than she ever had.

Maybe it was adrenaline released into her system because of everything that had happened, was happening.
Maybe it was fear driving her into the arms of someone bigger, stronger, who could protect her from shadowy terrorists. But she didn’t think so.

What she felt for Clint felt real. True to her heart.

Now that she realized that, she regretted every second she’d spent apart from him. Every time she’d pushed him away. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Not with ARFIS out there in the hands of terrorists. Who knew which day, which minute, which embrace would be their last?

“Make love to me, Clint?” she asked.

He lowered his head to the crook of her neck and teased the sensitive skin there. “All night long, darlin’. All night long.”

He made good on his promise, first undressing her one piece of clothing at a time and worshipping the body he bared. He kissed her breasts, the backs of her knees, her feet. He kindled fire in her blood, skimming his hands from her ribcage, across the dip at her waist, over her hips. He suckled her breasts, tugging on the tight cord of desire that ran from her nipples to her womb. And when he finally parted her thighs and plunged into her, he gave her everything she’d ever wanted in a man—honor, compassion, courage and love.

She felt his love in every lunge, every rock of his hips against hers, every word of passion whispered in her ear.

And she felt his heat. Flames licked at her heels. His hands left scorching trails over her breasts, down her abdomen past her navel to the sensitive spot just above where he penetrated her. Her body burned with his, but
this time she wasn’t afraid. He moved his thumb and forefinger in small circles, and she stepped over, let herself go, falling gladly into the fire.

With the inferno blazing around her and inside her, she struggled to hang on to conscious thought. She wanted to give back as much as he gave her, show him the same love, twofold, so she lifted her head and murmured encouragement. She clasped him while spasms shook her and her breath roared in her ears. She heightened his sensation by sliding her hands as far down his back as she could reach and pulling him close, drawing on his hard, male nipples with her supple lips.

“Take what you need, Clint,” she told him with what was left of her breath. “Take what you need.”

As her release faded, his hit hard. He groaned and shuddered. His back went stiff and he buried himself one last time inside her, impossibly deep, impossibly hard. She held him there, stroking the back of his neck and murmuring soothing words, wishing she would never have to let him go.

But all too soon he levered his weight off her and rolled to the side. In an instant, she missed the contact. She felt as though part of herself was missing, and she reached for him, mewling a needy sound.

He pulled her on top of him and smiled. “You didn’t think we were done, did you?”

She toyed with him idly, knowing it was too soon to get much result, but enjoying the pleasure written on his face as clearly as a grade-school teacher’s ABC.

He pulled her down to his chest and kissed the shells of her ears, her eyelids.

My, how she loved this man. She just hoped she had time to show him how much. Preferably many years.

But if that wasn’t to be, she planned to make the most of the few hours she had.

“Not by a long shot did I think we were done,” she said, and increased the pressure and pace of her stroking. “You promised me all night long, and I plan to hold you to your word.”

Macy and Clint rose quietly in the morning. They made love against the shower wall without words, the hot water streaming over their bodies, into their eyes, blinding them to everything except sensation. The feel of their bodies joining, slapping together in a perfect rhythm. A perfect union. It was a morning Macy would never forget. One of those idyllic moments in life where all a person’s problems disappear, no matter how grave.

Like spending the moment in a snow globe, she thought with a small smile. Where everything was beautiful and clean.

At least for a little while.

They picked up coffee and bagels on the hotel’s continental breakfast table and took them to the hospital, where they were supposed to meet the rest of the team at eight. Bull was pacing, his cell phone to his ear when they walked into the old treatment room the ICU staff had cleared for the Rangers to use. Kat and Del sat at desks, hunched over laptop computers.

“Any news?” Clint asked his partner.

“Not much. Kat is checking with customs to see what foreign nationals—especially Middle Eastern and
African—have come into Texas through the Houston and Dallas airports in the last five days, but I don’t expect to get a hit there. We don’t know how long these guys have been in the country, and they could have made their entry in some other city, and then taken a domestic flight here.”

“So Del is checking rental-car agencies,” Kat said brightly. “Trying to find out if anyone rented a car with a foreign driver’s license.”

“What about the farmhouse? Did the cleanup team find anything?”

Del hesitated, then said, “Nothing that would tell us who they are or where they went.” He glanced at Clint, then at Macy. She had the feeling some unspoken communication had just occurred between them. Cop communication.

“What?” she asked.

“She may as well hear it all,” Clint said. “She’s in this as deep as us.”

Del nodded once. “The bodies of the homeowners were in the basement.”

Macy sucked in a breath. “My God. ARFIS?”

“No. They’d been shot with small-caliber weapons.”

Macy felt like someone had stuck a fist in her diaphragm. The rocking chairs. She knew she should feel sad about the deaths of two innocent people, but for some reason what stood out in her mind was the incomprehensible loneliness of the image of those two rocking chairs on the porch that would now sit forever empty, only the wind to rock them.

“It looks like our bad guys picked the place at ran
dom. Somewhere out of the way, but that Jeffries could get to without too much trouble. His text pager was in the bedroom where we found him with that address on it. They must have contacted him, ordered him in.” Del glanced back at his screen and tapped a few keys. “We’ve got BOLOs out on our unknown subjects, but without more of a description than two Middle Easterners and two Africans, there isn’t going to be much anyone can do. We don’t even know if the four of them are still together. They could have split up.”

Clint grunted. “Taken the virus to two cities, or four. Nice thought, Del. Thanks for that.”

“Aim to please,” Del said, his lips set in a grim line.

Captain Matheson snapped his flip phone shut. “Dr. Attois, I need you to check on our patient. Talk to his doctors. See if there’s any way we can get him to answer a few more questions. Anything we can give him to bring him around.”

“I’ll check,” she promised, “but it’s doubtful. He should be nearly comatose by now, and it won’t be long before the seizures begin.”

She didn’t have to say that death would soon follow. Excusing herself, she left them to their detective work and went to suit up for the iso bay. Outside the door, she double-and triple-checked the seals around the tops of both pairs of the gloves she wore, a heavier pair not unlike dishwashing gloves on top and a thinner latex set next to her skin, then fortified herself with a deep breath against the despair she was sure to encounter inside and pushed the button to unseal the airlock.

A nurse in full gear stood by Ty’s bedside adminis
tering a blood coagulant. When she was done, Macy asked. “Could I see his chart, please?”

The woman set down the used hypodermic and handed her the clipboard with a pen attached on a string, then excused herself from the room.

A glance at the patient record told Macy that Ty’s condition was as bad as she’d expected. His fever had been over 104 degrees for nearly ten hours, and was climbing steadily. His pulse was too fast, his blood pressure too low.

She lifted one of his eyelids. The fine blood vessels of the sclera had ruptured, turning the whites of his eyes deep red and brown like a monster in a picture show. Only this man was only a monster by his deeds, not his genetics. It disturbed Macy to see the human body so abused. To see a human being suffering.

To her surprise, his other eye fluttered open. He choked on the tube in his throat. Trying to speak?

“Ty? Can you hear me?” He gagged again. “You can’t talk because we have a tube in your throat to keep your airway open. If you can hear me, if you understand, move your right hand.”

The fingers on his right hand wiggled.

Behind her in the observation room, Clint stepped to the window and laid his palm against the glass.

Encouragement? Or a warning?

No time to find out. Ty’s lucidity wouldn’t last long. She was amazed he was coherent at all at this stage of the disease’s progression, but elated nonetheless. She’d take every second she could get to try to pull information from him. Millions of lives were at stake.

“Who did this to you, Ty?” She leaned over him, but realized he couldn’t see her. The pressure in his eyes had blinded him. His hand moved, but she didn’t have any way to interpret the meaning of his gestures. She realized she’d have to simplify the questions to get any meaningful information out of him. “Did they just come into the country, or have they been here a long time? Move your hand if they’ve been here a long time.”

His fingers quit twitching.

“Good. They came into the country recently.” She searched her mind for anything else that might help the Rangers prevent a biological attack in the U.S. “Do you know how they’re going to release the virus? Move your hand if it’s in the air, stay still if they’re planning to contaminate the water.”

Again, his fingers were still.

“Water.” She threw a frightened look at Clint. “My God, they’re going after the water.” She didn’t know why that shocked her so much. Seeding ARFIS into the water was no worse than releasing it into the air in a populated area. She guessed knowing the plan of attack just made the possibility seem all that more real.

Ty squirmed, becoming agitated. She needed to hurry. Get more information before he drifted away from her. But what else could she ask?

“When?” the next question popped into her mind and out of her mouth at the same instant. “Do you know when they’re going to release the virus? Move your hand if it’s more than a week away.”

Oh, no. His fingers didn’t move. She wanted his fin
gers to move. She willed his fingers to move. They needed more time. More than a week!