Free Operation: Midnight Guardian by Linda Castillo Page A

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 hidemore 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