Operation: Midnight Guardian (8 page)

“I’m going to get you out of those clothes, okay?”

“Gotta…sleep.” Her words slurred.

“Not right now.” Reaching behind her, he lifted her to a sitting position and glanced down at her clothes. She was still wearing the tattered black wool suit jacket and slacks. A white blouse. She was soaked to the skin.

Propping her against his right arm and shoulder, he used his left to unbutton the jacket. Mattie was like a rag doll in his arms as he worked the jacket from her body and tossed it to the floor. The blouse clung to her like skin. Beneath it, he discerned the lace of her bra and the swell of her breasts. His fingers shook as he began unbuttoning the blouse.

“Wha’r you doing?” Mattie thrashed and brushed at his hands.

Cutter didn’t stop. “You’ve got hypothermia,” he said firmly. “These wet clothes need to go so your body can warm up.”

He tried not to look when her blouse fell open. But his gaze was irresistibly drawn to the swell of her generous breasts encased in lace and cotton, a flat belly and the kind of curves a man liked to sink his hands into.

She slapped at his hand. “Please. Don’t.”

Cutter caught her wrist. “Easy,” he said. “I have to do this. Then we’ll put you next to the fire, okay?”

The mention of the fire seemed to calm her. Cutter quickly removed her blouse. He tried not to touch her skin as he undid her slacks. Tried even harder not to look as he peeled the material
down her long, shapely legs. But while Sean Cutter was a MIDNIGHT agent first and foremost, he was also a man.

The memory of the way her body had felt against his assailed him. The softness of her mouth. The warmth of her breath against his cheek. Not even hypothermia could keep the blood from rushing hotly to his groin….

How could he be so damn attracted to the woman he’d been hired to take back? A woman who’d betrayed her country?

Annoyed with himself, Cutter ground his teeth. Quickly, and as impersonally as possible, he removed her shoes, then her slacks. Her bra and panties were wet as well, but there was no way he was going to remove them. Covering her with the blanket, he then dragged the bunk closer to the fire so she would get maximum heat.

He hung her clothes over the back of a chair and set it next to the hearth for quick drying, then set to work removing his own wet clothing. He had begun to shiver, which was a good sign. His body was coming to life, trying to warm itself and raise his body temperature back to a normal level. But even with the fire blazing, the temperature inside the cabin was below freez
ing. If they were going to recover enough to walk out of there under their own power, he was going to have to do a hell of a lot better.

Aside from the fire, the next best source of warmth was body heat. As much as he didn’t want to think about crawling onto that cot with Mattie Logan when they were wearing nothing more than underwear, he knew it was the smartest thing to do. Not only for him, but for her. Her body temperature was dangerously low. Warming too quickly could shunt cold blood from the surface of the body to the internal organs, causing shock. Body heat was the perfect solution.

Shivering uncontrollably, he lifted the blanket from Mattie. She was lying curled on her side. Trying not to notice her beauty, he bent and touched her shoulder with the back of his fingers. Her skin was cold to the touch, but her lips were no longer blue. He checked her pulse, found it slow.
Too slow,
he thought.

Decision made, he climbed onto the cot and lay down behind her with his body spooning hers. Pulling the blanket over both of them, he wrapped his arm around her torso. He willed himself not to think of her in inappropriate terms, but his body had no such reservations.
The mattress smelled moldy, but it was the scent of rosemary and lemon that filled his nostrils as he drifted into a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Seven

Mattie woke to blessed warmth and the sensation of a muscular male body snugged up against hers. Her first thought was that she’d just wakened from a very bad dream. She was back in her condo in D.C. She’d finally slept with Daniel. But none of those things explained why every part of her body ached. Or why the wind was howling and snow was battering the windows with the force of tiny missiles.

The urge to shut her eyes again and snuggle closer to the warm—and evidently aroused—male body was powerful. But as the fog of exhaustion-induced sleep lifted, the events of the past twenty-four hours flooded back into her brain. The crash of the prison van. The cold-blooded murders of the U.S. Marshals. Running for her life in hostile mountain terrain. The man
with icy blue eyes carrying her through blizzard conditions…

Mattie sat up abruptly. The ramshackle room was cold despite the embers glowing in the hearth. Then she noticed she was wearing only her bra and panties, and as far as she could tell the man lying next to her was half-naked, as well.

She scrambled from the cot, taking the blanket with her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

Cutter instantly awoke and sat bolt upright. His eyes darted first to the door, then to her. “Judging from the look on your face, not what you’re thinking.”

Mattie couldn’t help it. Of their own accord, her eyes flicked down his body. He was wearing a shirt, but it was open. She saw a muscular chest covered with swirls of black hair; a six-pack stomach that was flat and rock hard; long, athletic legs. He wore navy boxer shorts, and she couldn’t help but notice he filled them out the way a man ought to fill out boxer shorts.

Banking the thoughts that were crazy at a time like this, Mattie glared at him. She’d heard of male members of law enforcement taking advantage of female prisoners. The thought had
always disgusted her, frightened her if she wanted to be honest about it. Even though she didn’t know him well, she couldn’t imagine Cutter stooping that low. Up until this point he’d been Mr. Professional Cop. But how had she ended up half-naked and in bed with him?

“You took off my clothes,” she accused.

“I removed wet clothing to keep you from losing body heat,” he said. “You were hypothermic.”

“You had no right.”

“If I hadn’t, you very likely would have died.”

She motioned toward him. “Is that why you took off your clothes, too?”

He reached for the dusty pillow and set it on his lap. “You weren’t the only one whose clothes were wet. We’d been in the snow for hours. We were both wet. We needed shelter and to get dry.”

Mattie remembered trudging through impossibly deep snow. She remembered the terrible feeling of exhaustion and confusion and the utter certainty that she was going to die. Only then did it dawn on her that this man had saved her life. That in the scope of things, her vanity was the last thing she ought to be worried about.

“Nothing happened,” he said.

“How long was I out?”

He glanced toward the window. “Judging from the light, I’d say we slept a couple of hours.”

She looked into his eyes. “You saved my life.”

“I did what I had to do.”

“I’m sorry I assumed…” Not sure how to finish, she let the sentence dangle.

“Hypothermia can cause confusion,” he said. “That’s how it works. You get tired. You get confused. You lie down and never get up.”

She released the breath she’d been holding. “Thank you.”

“I was just doing my job.”

Unable to meet his gaze, she looked out the window. Through the grime, she could see that the snow was still coming down hard. “What do we do now?”

“Rest. Find some food. Keep the fire going.” He parted the shirt and glanced down at his chest, shrugged. “Both of us are pretty banged up.”

Mattie caught sight of the angry red and purple bruises covering the flesh just below his left pectoral, gasping at the severity of them. “My God. Is that where you were shot back at the rendezvous point?”

He nodded. “My vest stopped the bullet, but it sure as hell didn’t keep it from cracking a rib or two.”

Mattie knew how painful broken ribs could be. When she was a teenager a car accident left her with two cracked ribs. She’d been laid up for a week and missed her junior prom. She couldn’t imagine having broken ribs and trudging through a blizzard. She certainly couldn’t imagine how much it had hurt him to carry her.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier if you’d left me behind to die?” she asked.

“My job isn’t about easy most of the time.”

Because she didn’t know how to respond to that, Mattie pulled the blanket more tightly around her and walked to the hearth. “Looks like we’re about to run out of wood,” she said, motioning toward the few remaining pieces of the table he’d been using.

“There’s no way we’re going to find dry firewood outside. Once that wood is gone, we burn whatever we can find, including the walls of the mud room and cabinets.” Rising, he walked swiftly to where his jeans hung near the hearth and stepped into them.

Mattie caught a glimpse of muscular male thighs. Lean hips encased in snug boxer shorts. The hint of a part of his anatomy she didn’t want to think about…

“What about The Jaguar?” she asked.

He shot her a sharp look. He always did that, she realized, whenever she mentioned the terrorist by that name. The Jaguar had reacted much the same way when his underling had mentioned Cutter’s name. She wondered if the men had some kind of history.

Grimacing, he looked out the window. “It’s hard to imagine a pilot crazy enough to fly a chopper in this weather.”

“If I recall, you’d just said something similar at about the time said chopper swooped down and those men started shooting at us.”

“I’ve never been good at predicting when someone is going to do something completely insane.”

An uneasy feeling stole over her. “That means they could be on their way here at this very moment to kill us.”

“They could. But they have to find us first. Then they have to get here. This area is remote.”

“It’ll be dark soon,” she said. “That will help us, won’t it? Hide us? Hide the cabin?”

“I wish I could say yes, but I can’t. If they’ve got infrared, the fire in the hearth will stand out like a beacon. The best we can hope for is that the storm continues and they can’t fly.”

“Not very reassuring considering they already flew at the height of the storm.”

Looking out the window, he shook his head. “If that son of a bitch is crazy enough to fly, all we can do is hope we hear them coming.”

CUTTER HAD NEVER BEEN GOOD at waiting; he’d sure as hell never been good at staying idle. Especially when there was something important he needed to do—like stop a madman. But while being holed up in a dilapidated cabin was bad enough, it was infinitely worse being locked up with a woman he was attracted to.

Only, Mattie Logan wasn’t just any woman. She was his prisoner. An assignment. A convicted criminal he’d been charged with apprehending and transporting to prison. How could he feel anything but disdain toward her?

Frustrated and restless, Cutter paced from the window to the door and back to the window. Usually he saw the world in stark black and white. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Things were simpler that way. Mattie Logan was a gray area somewhere in between, and she was anything but simple.

Usually he had good instincts when it came to people. Those instincts had saved his hide
more times than he cared to count. So why couldn’t he shake the feeling that there was more to her than met the eye? Or was it his attraction to her that was muddying the waters?

“You should let me take a look at that bullet wound.”

He started at the sound of her voice and turned quickly to face her. She was standing a few feet away. Even in the semidarkness her beauty touched him in a place he didn’t want reached. He saw the cut on her temple. The bruise on her cheekbone. He wasn’t the only one who’d gotten banged up in the past twenty-four hours.

He wasn’t sure why he wanted to argue with her, because she was right. Maybe he wasn’t sure how he would react if she put those pretty hands on his body.

“I’ll melt some snow so we can clean up,” he heard himself say.

Ten minutes later he found her sitting on the single remaining chair next to the hearth. She looked up when he returned to the cabin carrying an old pan filled with snow.

“How long do you think this storm will last?” she asked.

“Hard to tell. It’s showing no sign of abating.”

“Do you think The Jaguar—”

“I don’t know,” he said abruptly.

She looked away but not before he saw the hurt in her eyes.

Annoyed with himself, he sighed. It was The Jaguar he was angry with; he shouldn’t be taking it out of her just because she was getting to him in a way he didn’t want to be gotten to.

Cutter set the pan of snow on the embers to melt. “I didn’t mean to snap,” he said.

She turned those eyes on him. “It’s okay,” she said. “The situation has made both of us tense.”

Silence reigned as he shoved the pan more deeply into the fire. “I don’t have a first-aid kit, so we’ll boil this water, use it to get our cuts cleaned up. Hopefully, it will be enough to stave off infection.”

“How long do you think it will be before someone finds us or before we can get back?”

The water had begun to boil so he pulled it from the hearth and carried it over to her. “I’m sure the agency is out looking for us as we speak.”

“The Jaguar is, too, though, isn’t he?”

His gaze met hers. Within the blue depths of her eyes he saw all the things he didn’t want to see. Fear. A softness no one could fake. Real emotions. An innocence he didn’t want to acknowledge. Cutter excelled at reading people—
especially the things they didn’t want him to see. That was one of the talents that made him such a good agent. The problem was he just couldn’t see this woman contacting and dealing with terrorists.

“Probably,” he said thickly.

“What do we do if he—”

“Look,” he said harshly. “I don’t know the answers to all your questions.”

“I think we should have some sort of plan,” she said. “You know, a worst-case scenario.”