Midnight Heat (20 page)

You know things have gotten desperate, Delahaye, when you’ll climb mountains to find a woman who wears white cotton underwear
. He wished now he’d packed more than a canteen. A little food would go a long way at the moment. He’d only planned to be out to see one last sunrise, to meditate a little, soak in the surprising peace he’d discovered in the wild, unpredictable beauty of these mountains and canyons. He needed one last moment alone before returning to Denver, before accepting another assignment that would take him God knew where. If he had any more time to think, he was afraid he’d decide not to return at all.

But he was returning. That afternoon. He had his doctor’s okay, and he had his plane ticket. It was just the lulling effect of his first break from the constant action in ten years that was making him think weird thoughts.

He cast another glance farther up the trail but shrugged and turned back. He’d endure one last lecture from Dave, get a good rubdown, then head out. He was scheduled for a debriefing with Scottie at the Dirty Dozen home base in Denver at three that afternoon. He was certain once he was back in the saddle, everything would fall into place. He’d feel like his normal, gung-ho self.

A sudden rushing noise followed by a high-pitched scream stopped him dead. He was running uphill, away from Paradise Canyon, his doctor, and his plane ticket, before he even made the conscious decision to do so. He focused on staying upright and not tripping, and ignored the rushing feeling of relief—and reprieve.

As soon as she came to a tumbling stop and realized she was still alive and mostly whole, Jenna let loose with every curse word she’d ever learned. Meticulous planning and attention to detail was her forte. In her profession it often meant the difference between life and death.
Yeah, but you don’t belong to that profession anymore
.

It was the first time she’d let herself even think it. It hurt. Badly. It was also no excuse for her current predicament. But she was too busy feeling sorry for herself to let that minor detail slow her down.

Scowling, she groaned as she slid the strap of the laundry bag off her shoulder. Even with her crude modifications, it made a lousy backpack. She was certain it had left a permanent three-inch groove in her skin. She was also disgusted with herself. For a woman who’d routinely hiked with over seventy-five pounds of gear through rough terrain, it was hard to accept that the same sort of terrain had demolished her in under three hours, and she’d had fewer than twenty lousy pounds on her back.

“Pansy,” she muttered, wanting to sound like the quick-thinking, self-disciplined Jenna King she used to be. Instead she sounded whiny.

She’d never tolerated whiners.

She didn’t think she’d done any serious damage to herself—any new serious damage anyway—but she took the time to test out each joint and run a quick probe of her legs with her hands. There was pain. Steady, throbbing pain. For the last six months that pain had been her constant companion. As her heart rate returned to something close to normal, she conceded that there was more pain than usual.

Great. Just great. She didn’t look up the incline behind her, not really interested at that moment in seeing how far she’d slid when the narrow path she’d been following around a large rock had suddenly crumbled under her feet.

She bent forward to carefully pick open the laces of her boot. Her hiking boots were the only item of clothing she’d forced her parents to bring to her. Not because she’d planned to go AWOL, but as a personal testament to her own will and drive. They had been a symbol to her, a goal.

She loosened the brown leather flap, giving in to a long, relieved groan as she slid the boot off. With increased blood flow, the pain intensified. She’d never get the thing back on. God, she thought, remembering her very vocal defiance six months before. In the face of insurmountable odds, she’d declared nothing would stop her from returning to her career as a forest firefighter and member of one of the elite smoke-jumping teams. How painfully pathetic she must have appeared to everyone, especially her parents.

Difficulties aside, and they had years of them under their belts, they loved her. That was one thing she didn’t doubt. It was why she’d agreed to come to Paradise Canyon Rehab Ranch instead of heading back to Missoula to lick her considerable wounds in private.

She stared at her discarded boot. A symbol still, but now of defeat. What in the hell was she going to do?

“Hey, you okay down there?”

Jenna jumped, instinctively reaching for her pulaski or chain saw, feeling foolish and unreasonably angry when her fingers encountered nothing more than a laundry bag stuffed full of clothes.

She swore again, both at herself and at the fresh wave of hot pain lancing up her leg where she’d banged her ankle when she’d jumped. Wonderful. Out in the middle of nowhere, and she still managed to have an audience for her latest humiliation. Couldn’t she catch one break?

“Hey! Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she yelled halfheartedly. “I can hear you fine.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Just my ego,” she muttered. But she supposed that’s what she got for thinking it was okay to have one. “I’m fine,” she yelled. “Just peachy,” she added under her breath.

“I don’t have any gear. I’ll have to go for help. It’s gonna take an hour or so. Will you be okay until then? Or do you need immediate assistance?”

It was probably the acoustics of the canyon she’d half dropped into, but his voice was amazingly deep. It sort of rumbled down the slope and washed over her in a soft, soothing wave of sound that made her want to sigh and lie down to await rescue.

Jenna snorted and straightened. She must have hit her head on the way down. She’d always done the rescuing, not the other way around. She’d been on the other side the last time. Never again.

Of course, sticking by her decision was going to make getting off the side of the mountain a bit complicated.

She sighed, hating that she was once again forced to rely on someone else. She knew she should feel grateful. It was amazingly fortunate that another hiker had been close enough to hear her scream. But she really wanted to be alone. She’d started out that morning determined to make it on her own no matter what. One little detour down the mountainside wasn’t going to change that.

No matter what her ankle was telling her.

“I’ll be fine, really,” she called up. She turned to look up at her volunteer savior, but the rising sun had found a temporary hole in the growing cloud cover and sliced through it in a blinding dagger of light. Shielding her eyes didn’t do much more than show her a giant shadowy outline at the top of the embankment. She couldn’t discern how much was man and how much was boulder. “Thanks anyway,” she shouted.

There was a pause, then: “You sound a little rough. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait for you to catch your breath and make sure you can get back up here.”

He really did have the most amazing voice. There was such steady strength and command in his tone.

“Can you climb?”

She scanned the rocky slope. Six months earlier she’d have attempted it. Even then it would have taken considerable skill and control. She scowled and sat up straighter. So she’d find another way off the mountain, preferably a less direct route. She’d been heading for the highway on the other side of the ridge, not wanting to catch a ride from anyone who might be coming to or going from Paradise. She’d left a note and an address in case there was any further paperwork for her to sign.

Despite it being against her doctor’s recommendation, she was fully within her right to check herself out. The hike had become a personal challenge.

She’d taken short trails for the last month and during the last week she’d been making her own trails, progressively testing her ankle and the newly healed skin on her leg. The previous Friday, she’d hiked to the peak and back.

She wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet. She looked downslope. She was sitting in a narrow depression on an otherwise smooth drop almost straight down. The hill bottomed out in a shallow but rocky ravine. If she tried to so much as stand, she’d likely take a shortcut straight into it. Even if her ankle would have allowed it, the steepness combined with the unstable footing made a controlled slide impossible. That left a parallel route. But a quick scan to her left and right wasn’t too heartening. It was at least a hundred-yard crawl either way, and the indentation she sat on only spread out about twenty yards to each side of her.

Her options were quickly dwindling to one. A low, ominous rumbling cut into her thoughts. Cloud cover that was supposed to burn off as the sun rose had suddenly collected into a menacing-looking mass. She shivered, telling herself it was a reaction to the first gust of wind. It whipped up the fine rock dust, making her squeeze her eyes shut. Thunder rolled ominously overhead. She worked to tamp down the whispers of panic trying to edge into her mind.

Shielding her eyes against the wind and dust, she looked uphill. “You’d better go!” she yelled. “I’ll be okay!” Wet, but okay. She could—would—handle this.

“I can’t leave you out here,” he called back, his rumbling voice underscored by another roll of thunder. The combination sent new shivers over her skin. Stop it, Jenna. She’d spent too many hours—thousands of them—out in the woods to be afraid of a little thunderstorm.

A jagged bolt of light shot across the sky.

No, she wasn’t afraid of thunderstorms. It was the fire-igniting lightning that terrified her.

“This shouldn’t last too long,” she called out, her voice getting rougher from yelling but thankfully steady.

Big fat raindrops began to splatter the ground. She had no idea how experienced a hiker he might be, but if he wasn’t carrying rope, then chances were he was an amateur. She ignored the point that she, a highly trained professional, had nothing more than a laundry-bag string on her supply list.

She tried not to look at the rocky ravine below. If the storm was strong enough and hit hard enough, with nothing but a laundry bag as an anchor, she could easily end up at the bottom anyway.

“Find shelter,” she instructed, yelling louder over the growing noise as the storm gathered strength. “When it’s over, bring some help back with you.”

That should appease his sense of duty, get him off the mountain as safely as possible—and provide someone to help him scrape her stupid carcass off the side of this hill.

What was one more battering punch to her pride at this point anyway?

Wind whipped up again, enough so she could begin to feel the dampness right on through to her long underwear. Her Samaritan hadn’t responded to her last shout. A quick, bleary peek uphill between wind gusts showed the dark outline had grown smaller. Considerably smaller.

He was gone.

Good. She rubbed her arms. He’d be okay. And so would she. He’d get help. If she was really lucky, it would be from somewhere other than Paradise Canyon, but she knew it was the only place of any size around for miles. Was he a patient there as well? she wondered.

Thunder shook the ground, loosening small surface rock, sending it skittering down and around her. She scraped the curly hairs escaping her braid from her forehead and eyes and pulled the long, thick plait over her shoulder so it hung between her breasts. She grabbed for the laundry bag, stuffing it between her thighs and as much of it under her shirt as she could, hoping to keep something dry enough to change into after the storm. She grabbed for her boot, and was debating whether her swollen ankle would tolerate her putting it back on or if she should tuck it into the laundry bag, too, when a sudden shout rang out.

She shifted around in time to see a black shadow tip off the edge of the embankment from the other side of the boulder, sending a fresh shower of rocks hailing down on her. She batted them away, a scream locked in her throat as the shadow materialized, through the sheets of rain, into a man. A very large man. A very large tumbling man.

And he was heading right toward her.

Read on for an excerpt from Donna Kauffman’s

Santerra’s Sin

Diego Santerra made a killer salsa.

He also made a pretty damn good killer.

This was the first time he could recall getting paid to do both.

He pulled the dusty green Jeep around the side of the small stucco building and parked next to the shiny black Harley Fat Boy he knew belonged to the cantina’s owner. Blue Delgado.

He knew everything about Blue a person could learn from constant observation. The briefing he’d received in Miami three weeks before heading here to New Mexico had filled in the rest. Yes, he knew more about Blue Delgado than the Villa Roja residents who’d known her all her life.

Except for one thing. When would Jacounda strike? That was why he had agreed to abandon his anonymous surveillance and step inside the dimly lit little bar in search of a job. As a cook, of all things.

Diego hadn’t counted on the job being the one, and probably only, thing he did for himself, for whatever little pleasure there was in it. But he’d kept silent, agreed to the cover. He made it a rule to give away only what was absolutely necessary. And he had damn little to start with. So cook he would. Along with anything else that became necessary to get the job done.

It was that unshakable personal code that had made him first choice for Seve “Del” Delgado’s elite tactical squad, known since shortly after its formation as Delgado’s Dirty Dozen.

No one had to remind Diego that, almost ten years later, less than half the original team remained alive. And if Diego didn’t complete this mission successfully, the next to fall would be Del himself.

He pulled his black Resistol down over his forehead a bit farther and pushed open the door to the bar. Even though it was barely ten o’clock in the morning, there were two men occupying barstools, sipping beer. Three more were playing pool on one of the two worn tables wedged into the space between the door and the bar. Several small vinyl-covered tables lined the wall by the front window, but they were empty.

Diego glanced once at the men, then dismissed them. He strode over to the end of the bar, propped his foot on the rail, and pressed his hands on the teak surface.