A Question of Intent Page 16

  "Cody, I..."

  "Stay still!"

  He disposed of her socks and soggy pants next. He groaned when he saw the fire-engine-red bikini panties she wore under her uniform, and almost wept with relief when he found no irritated swelling or fang marks on her feet, ankles or legs.

  "Come on," he growled, "let's get you out of here. Mac, hold that IV bag high."

  "The snakes..."

  "They're gone, Jill. It's just you, me and Mac."

  "No!"

  Agitated, she grabbed his injured arm. The yank had him gritting his teeth.

  "They were dead, Cody. The snakes. They were dead."

  "It's okay, babe. You're just a little confused."

  "I'm not hallucinating, dammit!" Her brow furrowed. "Or am I? No, I saw them. They were dead."

  Wincing, he tried to ease his arm out of her tight grip. "Okay, they were dead."

  Her fingers dug into him, refusing to let go. "Like our mascot, Cody. They were dead and they had gnats swarming all around them. Just like Sergeant Barnes's rattler."

  That got his attention. He dropped back on his heels, staring at her while his mind worked furiously.

  Was that it? Had Jill stumbled on the answer? Were the snakes in this area the source of the new, mutant virus? Was it being transmitted by the stinging little gnats everyone swatted at but no one paid much attention to?

  The insects were a minor annoyance down at the compound, where the dry desert air kept them at bay. Up here in the mountains, they swarmed thicker and darker and bred in...

  In pools like this one!

  Excitement shot through his veins. The researcher in him wanted a sample and immediate access to a lab. The physician had only one concern. His patient.

  Only after he'd scooped her up, his teeth grinding at the pain in his arm, did he realize the researcher and the physician had both taken a back seat to the man. He was just now beginning to recover from that fear that had tied him in knots.

  He could have lost her. Might still lose her if he didn't get her back to the clinic and control the fever still heating her skin.

  As he pushed to his feet, a protesting Mac stepped forward. "You're hit, doc. I'll carry her."

  "I've got her. You manage the IV."

  Cody would always swear the subsequent twenty-four hours shaved a good ten years off his life.

  Pegasus got them down to the desert and streaked back to the compound. Mac radioed in a condensed version of the events on the mountain. Captain West-fall wasn't the kind of man given to cheers, but when Mac advised that they'd found Major Bradshaw and were returning her to base, the whoops and shouts of the others at Test Control echoed through the headphones.

  Two of Cody's hospital corpsmen were waiting at the hangar. They bundled Jill onto a stretcher and rushed her to the clinic. Cody delayed only long enough to brief Captain Westfall on the possible source of the virus.

  "Get Sergeant Barnes to exhume the remains of his pet. We need to send them up to Decker Labs."

  "I'll take care of it," the captain promised. "You take care of Jill."

  "Yes, sir."

  The promise was easier than the doing.

  Her head laceration was just that, a deep laceration. X-rays showed no fracture and the cut itself required only a couple of stitches. The possibility of a concussion combined with her high fever continued to worry him. Despite cooling packs and a continuous IV drip, her temperature spiked off and on for the rest of that day.

  Luckily Cody's other two patients had made a full recovery. He discharged Private Harris late that afternoon. The cook went back to his quarters early that evening. Only Jill remained at the clinic, flushed, feverish, fretful.

  Cody stayed with her all through the night. When her fever spiked again around three in the morning, he came close, very close, to ordering a medical evacuation to Albuquerque. The hospital couldn't do anything for her he wasn't already doing, but his gut took another twist with every degree her temperature shot up.

  Finally, it leveled off at 102 and she dropped into an exhausted slumber. Cody sprawled in the chair beside her bed and kept from sliding into sleep himself by listing all the reasons he'd come to love this woman.

  She was smart. Stubborn. Tough Vulnerable. Sexy as hell in and out of those red bikini briefs. The first time they'd met, she'd had him facedown in the dirt. The wild, soul-searing hours they'd spent together in Albuquerque had rocked him right back on his heels. Today...

  Yesterday, he amended silently, scraping a palm over the stubble on his chin. Yesterday the woman had put a bullet through him. A wry smile tipped his mouth as he wondered what else she'd put him through in the next twenty or thirty years. Major Jill Bradshaw didn't know it yet, but Cody fully intended to become her full-time, attending physician.

  Jill woke to a dry, gritty throat that felt as though it had gobbled down half the desert. Dragging up sandpapery lids, she focused her blurry gaze on the figure leaning over her. As he stuck something in her ear, she decided he looked as grungy as she felt.

  The bristly beginnings of a beard shadowed his cheeks and chin. Weariness had etched deep grooves on either side of his mouth. When he bent over her, his white lab coat gaped open to show a rumpled khaki uniform streaked with dirt and brown, splotchy stains.

  "Cody?"

  He glanced down at her, a smile in his blue eyes.

  "Hi. Hold still a moment."

  He removed the object from her ear. It was a thermometer, Jill saw, and whatever the little device recorded must have pleased him. His mouth relaxed into a smile that matched the one in his eyes.

  "How do you feel?"

  "Like someone ran over me with a Humvee."

  "That good, huh? Want to suck on some ice chips?"

  "Yes!"

  "Hang loose, I'll get you some."

  Since she was hooked up to an IV and as weak as a baby, Jill didn't see she had a whole lot of choice.

  It wasn't Cody who delivered the ice chips a few moments later, however, but her two roommates.

  "Hey, girl!" Kate exclaimed. "The doc said you were awake and lucid this time."

  "This time?"

  "You've been pretty well out of it since he brought you down from the mountain yesterday morning."

  Cari dug a spoon into a plastic container and held it out. "Here you go."

  Jill sucked on the ice chips greedily, swallowed and begged for more.

  "We'd better sit you up," Kate said, searching for the mechanism to raise the back of the bed. She hit the button, eased the patient up and untangled the sheet. Her green eyes glinted as she drew it over Jill's lower half.

  "Those are some eye-popping panties, by the way. Every male at the scene did a double take when Cody carried you out of Pegasus."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "He didn't tell you?"

  "Tell me what?"

  "The story he gave us," Kate drawled, "is that he stripped you down to search for a possible snakebite."

  Jill gulped down the icy chips. A snake. She remembered a snake. A black-tail. Dead.

  "Of course," the irrepressible weather officer added with a grin, "the strip act came after you pumped a bullet into him. One has to wonder if the doc was just getting some of his own back."

  Jill choked on the ice.

  "I shot him?"

  "You did."

  She remembered drawing her weapon now. She even remembered why. Vaguely.

  There was a call. From Jack Conway. He accused Cody of killing his daughter.

  Then there was that business with the virus and the fact that it had only infected people at the Pegasus site. That had preyed on Jill's mind all during the drive up to the higher elevations until...

  Until Cody had appeared out of nowhere, walked into her pistol sight, and everything blurred again.

  "Well," she muttered, her throat raw and tight, "that explains the splotchy red stains on his uniform."

  "He wouldn't leave you long enough to change into a clean
one," Cari told her gently. "Even when that lab in Albuquerque wanted him to fly up and verify their findings."

  "Decker Labs? What did they find?"

  "Exactly what you suggested they would," Cody answered, strolling back into the ward. "A very rare, very isolated disease that apparently infects only the large-fanged snakes in this particular corner of New Mexico."

  "Right," Kate quipped. "Large-fanged snakes. As opposed to...?"

  "Rear-fanged and small-fanged," he replied, grinning.

  "I think I just exceeded my limit on what I want to know about fangs of any kind," Cari said with a delicate shudder. "Come on, Kate, let's leave the doc to tend to his patient."

  The flame-haired weather officer gave Jill's shoulder a pat. "Get back on your feet quick, sweetie. Now that Cody's pinned down the source of our mysterious bug and Pegasus passed his mountain run with flying colors, Captain Westfall is ready to move us into Phase II."

  "Bill Thompson's replacement is supposed to arrive on-site in the next couple of days," Cari explained, yielding the plastic pitcher of ice to Cody. "As soon as he's in place and you're on your feet, we're back in business."

  The curtain dropped behind the two women, leaving Jill to demand the details from Cody.

  "What's the source of our bug, and when did Pegasus pass his mountain run?"

  "The answer to the first question is gnats," he told her as he reclaimed his seat beside her bed. "The answer to the second is yesterday. Open up."

  Jill accepted a spoon full of ice chips and listened while he calmly explained that the dead snakes she'd stumbled across had been infected with a hitherto unknown variant of a virus transmitted by tiny, stinging little gnats. In the past twenty-four hours, searchers had found more than a dozen more dead reptiles.

  "The Center for Disease Control is speculating that this disease has similar characteristics to EHD— Epizootic hemorrhagic disease. It affects white-tailed deer and pronghorn antelope only in the driest months, when they congregate at waterholes where gnats breed. The difference is EHD is rarely transmitted to humans."

  "Well, thank God that mystery's solved."

  Jill decided she really didn't need to tell Cody she'd entertained the hazy notion that he or Jack Conway might have deliberately introduced the bug into the Pegasus site. She was a cop. It was her business to suspect everyone, even the man she was pretty sure she'd tumbled into love with.

  She knew for certain just moments later, when he pulled a small plastic toy out of the pocket of his lab coat.

  "Where did you find him?"

  "Right where you left him. Your troops had to take what remained of your ATV apart to get the pieces back to the site. I asked them to retrieve Goofy. I thought you might like to have him looking over your shoulder while you recover your strength."

  Since the outbreak of sickness at the site, Cody probably hadn't snatched more than a few hours of sleep. He'd been tending to patients, trying to figure out the source of their infection, and attempting to identify a rare variation of a bug. He'd just taken a bullet in the arm. According to Kate, he'd carried Jill to Pegasus, then hauled her out again. Despite everything else coming down on him, he'd still remembered her old buddy.

  Jill never cried. Not since she'd strapped on a side-arm, anyway. Yet she couldn't quite swallow the silly, sloppy sniffle that accompanied her gruff request.

  "Stick him in the drawer, Doc."

  He cocked a brow. "You sure? I thought he was your good luck charm."

  "I'm sure. You're the only one I want looking over my shoulder while I recover."

  Or anytime else.

  She didn't say it. She didn't have to. He said it for her.

  "I'll take good care of you," he promised softly. "Real good."

  He kept his promise.

  Jill's fever had subsided completely by the following morning. By midafternoon, she was bathed, dressed in a clean hospital gown, up and prowling the ward. Her head throbbed dully with the aftereffects of a mild concussion, but she was antsy and impatient to get back to work.

  Cody refused to release her. She discovered why later that evening, when he strolled into the ward area.

  "Helluva a thing when two adults have to sneak around to neck," he commented.

  She slanted him a startled look. "Are we going to neck?"

  "Oh, yeah."

  "What about Specialist Ingalls?"

  "I sent her to the chow hall for supper."

  "She might eat fast."

  "I locked the clinic door."

  The wicked gleam in his eyes stopped her breath.

  "Ever wonder why hospital gowns open down the back?" he asked, reaching behind her for the tie that held hers at the neck.

  "Not anymore," she replied with a shaky chuckle.

  Her laughter ended on a strangled gulp when he dipped his head and dropped a tender kiss on her scar. The gulp gave way to a sensual groan as his lips trailed along her bare shoulder.

  "Any chance this session is going to go further than necking?" she asked with a catch in her voice.

  "Nope." He nuzzled the hollow just above her collarbone. "I'm too weak for anything more. You shot me, remember?"

  If he was weak, she was Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. But Jill had to admit there was something exquisitely pleasurable in his gentle, roving hands and the warm wash of his breath against her skin.

  Not to mention his husky admission when he raised his head and caught her gaze.

  "I think you should know I'm considering appointing myself your personal physician for the next twenty or thirty years."

  "You are, huh?" Her hand came up to cup his cheek. "How about we see Pegasus through his final paces, then talk about it?"

  "How about we talk about it now, and get married after we see Pegasus through his final paces? Or engaged," he amended at her startled gasp. "I don't want to push you."

  "I can see that!"

  His expression sobered, and a trace of the regret Jill had glimpsed when he'd told her about his wife came into his eyes.

  "I realized something up there on the mountain. Listening to you struggle for every breath when your fever spiked only reinforced it. I love you, Jill. I don't want to look back five or ten or twenty years from now and kick myself for not telling you when I had the chance. I intend to keep telling you until you get tired of hearing it."

  She had to fight for breath again, only this time it wasn't due to a fever. "Sounds...sounds like a plan to me."

  "Good!We're engaged to get engaged."

  His crooked grin melted the last of Jill's resistance That and the long, heart-hammering kiss he gave her.

  Matching his grin, she nodded. "We're engaged to be engaged. "

  * * * THE END * * *

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  SILHOUETTE BOOKS

  ISBN 0-373-27325-8

  A QUESTION OF INTENT

  Copyright © 2003 by Merline Lovelace

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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