Free Bear Claw Bodyguard by Jessica Andersen Page A

kitchen filled with the sounds of boiling water, bubbling sauce, and the low-pitched churn of the vent over the stove…and nothing else, as they stood there, staring at each other. After a moment, he said, “This doesn’t need to be weird. I wanted spaghetti and apparently Matt and Gigi don’t believe in the jarred stuff. So because I was cooking, I made enough for two plus leftovers. You want some or you don’t want some, that’s cool. You want to take it upstairs, go for it. Or we could sit down and share a meal. Your call.”
    A smart woman would have gone with takeout. Tori, though, grinned and said, “I’m starving and it smells great. Let’s eat.”
     
    T HEY STUCK CAREFULLY to neutral subjects as they ate—the case, her work, Bear Claw and a handful of other topics suited to a couple of relative strangers who didn’t need to get to know each other because they were only in each other’s lives very fleetingly. And if the careful neutrality of it irritated Jack, rubbing at the raw, edgy parts of him that had been worn down past the point of restraint by two days of being out in the wilderness with a woman who wasn’t like anyone he’d ever thought he would go for, yet had gotten thoroughly under his skin, he held himself in check, reminding himself of all the reasons he’d decided not to go there.
    He needed to focus on protecting her and she needed to focus on saving Bear Claw Canyon, and as distracting as the tension might be between them, the alternative would be even more distracting. Problem was, he was starting towonder just how much protection she really needed. Because aside from a couple of false alarms, the Forgotten had proven remarkably tame, and she was fully capable out in the backcountry—more than capable really.
    While she might not have hiked circles around him—his longer reach and greater strength gave him the advantage in places—she’d held her own out in the Forgotten, clambering out on edgy precipices and high into the gnarled limbs of the sickened trees to get the samples she wanted. She had brushed him off a few times when he’d wanted to rein her in, but her instincts had proven good and he’d eventually backed off even further.
    With the shooter’s story checking out and no concrete sign of the Shadow Militia—though he was keeping a damn sharp eye out—he’d had far too much time to think about other things. Like the Death Stare case…and Tori. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known before—an intriguing mix of occasional shyness when it came to him, guts when it came to just about everything else…including, it seemed, relationships.
    Their lives were completely different, their styles worlds apart, yet he liked her. More than liked, in fact, although he was fighting the urge to make it be anything else. He knew what worked for him, and quick and temporary wasn’t it. Which meant they needed to stay on a professional level, he reminded himself, and made himself focus on her rundown of the lab results, which he’d been only halfway paying attention to.
    One piece of information, though, had stuck out. “Hang on, back up. It’s a genetically engineered organism?”
    “It’s looking that way, possibly a hybrid of a mushroom, an air plant and a sulfur bacterium at the very least.”
    “Why would you want to cross those together?”
    She gave an eloquent shrug. “Your guess is as good as mine. The air plant allows it to live suspended. As for the others, we’re looking at a toxic fungus and an anaerobe. It’ll take more of an expert than me to figure out why you’d put those two together unless you wanted…I don’t know, a long-lived poison, maybe?”
    Jack stilled. “How about a drug that’s addictive at low doses but deadly at higher doses?”
    Excitement seared through him. Had they just found the source of the Death Stare?

Chapter Seven
    “A drug?” Tori frowned, then shook her head. “I’m not an expert, but I’d tend to say that would be