Hunter's Woman

“Sure. Just be careful, Catt. You and your team are too important in all of this.”

Catt pressed the off button and glumly walked to where Maria was standing. She felt as if her life was draining out of her with each hard beat of her heart. Ty Hunter stood like a proud warrior, his arms crossed against his chest, as the tug slowly paralleled the dock. She saw the triumph in his expression. The bastard was gloating. And then Catt chided herself. What the hell was really important here? People’s lives, not her private, sordid affair with Hunter. Somehow she was going to have to put it all behind her and focus on her mission.

She watched as Hunter jumped lithely, like the fabled and rare jaguar that ruled the Amazon jungle, onto the rickety wooden dock. He took the bowline and tied it to the post. Looking up, Catt saw Andy and Steve jogging back toward them, relief written on their sweaty features.

Ty decided that staying busy was the better part of valor with Catt, who stood tensely to one side. At that moment, she looked like a lost waif. He wanted to go to her, to try and smooth things out, but he knew it was impossible. Now was not the time to try and talk about the past, either. He saw the darkness in her glorious, cobalt-blue eyes. He felt her pain. Pain he’d caused her. Guilt ate at him, mixed with his own pain. He had a lot of questions for her, too. But they would have to wait. Walking off the dock, he went over to Maria.

“You need this equipment on board in any particular order?” he asked her.

Maria brightened. “Not really. It just all has to get on the tug.” She pointed to three dark green metal chests. “These contain our drugs and antibiotics in dry ice. Let Andy or Steve help you with them.”

Ty nodded and picked up a number of smaller boxes. He’d try and make himself useful—and stay out from under Catt’s feet, if possible. However, that tug was only sixty feet long and was going to be crowded at best. There’d be very little room to give Catt relief from his unexpected presence.

His chest ached. Hell, his heart was hurting, too. Every time he walked back for another load of equipment, he saw Catt standing there so alone, so apart from everything going on around them. Her shoulders were slumped. The look on her face was one of utter devastation. It agonized him to know that he was the cause of her turmoil. And more than anything, Ty realized, as he took another box to the awaiting tug, all the old feelings he had for Catt ten years ago were not only alive, but clamoring inside him. He needed to talk to her, to understand all that had happened on that day so many years ago.

Sighing raggedly, Ty handed the tug captain, who’d introduced himself as Hernandez, the box to be placed in the center region of the boat. He knew nothing of Catt’s life since their breakup so long ago. And there was so much he needed to know. She’d wanted to be a medical doctor and go on to become a pediatrician. She had always loved children…. Wincing internally, Hunter felt pain shoot through him. He turned on his booted heel and walked back for another box.

To his surprise, Catt was standing near the last box. She was waiting for him. He could see it in the challenging blue fire of her gaze, the hard set of her jaw and the way her body tensed as he approached.

Her voice was low and snarling.

“I don’t know what strings you pulled or why, Hunter. I don’t like it. I don’t like the fact that you’re here. And there’s nothing I can do about it. This smacks too much of our past together.” She jabbed her finger into his chest. “I don’t trust you at all. From here on out, I’m the boss. You carry out my orders or else. The first time you don’t, or you give me lip, I’m making a call on my cell phone to my boss and your butt is out of here. You got that?”

He felt her fear. He saw it in her eyes, even though he knew Catt was very good at making an opponent think she was fearless. Ty couldn’t be angry with her. He understood exactly where she was coming from—her last experience with him had hurt her badly. There was no way to explain. Not now…maybe never. That hurt. He didn’t like being seen as the villain in another person’s eyes. Especially Catt’s.

“We need to talk—”

“Like hell we do!” Her nostrils quivered, and her voice shook. “Hunter, you screw up just once and you’re out of here. Got it?”

He held her gaze, which was riddled with anguish and fear. “Yeah,” he growled under his breath, “I got it.”

Chapter Three

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.”