pursuing why she was crying, she announced, “You’re so busy demanding to know everything about me and my life, but I don’t see you telling me a whole hell of a lot about yourself.”
“I’m the hired gun you bought to get you to your destination. I’ve played ball in this part of the world before. I know the players and I know the rules of the game. I can get you where you’re going, and you’re paying me top dollar to get you there in one piece. What more is there to know about me?”
She cast around for something personal to ask him. “What are you taking muscle relaxants for? And how did you get that gunshot wound in your back?”
He shoved away from the Land Rover and whirled away from her abruptly. Her eyebrows shot up as he presented her his back and shut her out in no uncertain terms. Uh-huh. That was what she thought. He was all hot and bothered to know her secrets, but he wasn’t about to share any of his with her. It was okay for him to act all dark and tortured and mysterious, but it wasn’t okay for her to be the same way.
He paced a few yards away and then spun and stalked back to her. She held her ground but not for lack of an urge to flee in the face of his advance.
“I hurt my back a few months ago. And to anticipate your next question, no, I’m not telling you how I got shot. So don’t ask.”
She reared back from the vehemence in his voice. Wow. She must have really hit a nerve. She asked casually, “How’s your back feeling now? Are you up for a hike through the high Andes?”
“My back doesn’t feel great, actually. It could have done without all that banging around in the Land Rover.”
“Can I take a look at it?” she asked gently.
“What? Are you a doctor or something?”
“Yeah, or something.”
His head jerked up. “Come again?”
She winced. She didn’t often admit her academic credentials to men. It always seemed to put them off. Apparently, intelligent, educated women put off the kinds of guys who were drawn to women who looked like her. The jerks. Praying under her breath that John didn’t fall into that class of men, she answered reluctantly, “Dr. Melina Montez, at your service.”
“What kind of doctor?” he bit out sharply.
“Medical. But I don’t practice. I do medical research.”
“For a pharmaceutical firm,” he affirmed neutrally.
She nodded. He didn’t sound tremendously put off by her education. Of course, the proof of the pudding would be if he tried to bed her again or not.
“Do you test medications?” he asked.
“I develop new ones, actually,” she corrected cautiously.
“Do you mistreat monkeys and run torture labs for rats?”
She laughed. “No. I don’t do any animal testing. I work with lots of boring chemical compounds in test tubes and use the occasional petri dish or Bunsen burner.”
He absorbed that with far more thoughtfulness than she would have wished for. At least he didn’t look completely put off by her profession. But she got the distinct impression he was making leaps of logic she could seriously do without him making just now. Did he always look for the angle behind what people said, the words unspoken? He certainly seemed to do it to her.
“Turn around,” she directed in her best doctor voice. “Let me see your back.”
He cocked an amused eyebrow at her. “You want me to take my shirt off?”
She pursed her lips. “You’d better not. It’s going to be distracting enough having to put my hands on you.”
He laughed quietly, a masculine sound of satisfaction.
“My lumbar vertebrae.”
She nodded and slid her hands down heavy ridges of muscle to the small of his back. She expected to feel knots and corded muscles, but was surprised to feel smooth, supple tissue beneath her hands. “Any spinal injury?” she asked.
“MRIs showed hot spots on the L-3 and L-4 vertebrae where the bullet obliquely creased them.”
He’d been lucky, then. If a bullet had lodged in that part of his spine, he’d be paralyzed from the waist down right now. The potential tragedy of that was doubly poignant to her after having made love with him and felt all his vital power from the waist down. “How long ago were you shot?”
He recited emotionlessly, “Eight months ago.”
She frowned. That was plenty of time for the body to have laid in calcium deposits and strengthened the affected area. He shouldn’t still be in acute pain. But those painkillers back in the hotel said it all. “Did you lay off and rehab your back or did you keep pounding it after the initial injury?”
He was silent for a long time, as if reluctant to answer the question. Why? It wasn’t a hard one.
Finally, he exhaled slowly. “I walked and crawled on it for thirty miles right after I was shot. The bullet wasn’t removed for several days and it was pretty infected by the time a doctor saw it. I couldn’t really clean it out myself. It took some extra time to heal.”
Holy crap. Thirty miles? Shot in the back? Was that how far he’d been from a phone or help of any kind? Frankly, he was lucky to be alive. Bullet wounds were among the dirtiest of injuries. Not only was there the contamination from the lead, but then there was gunpowder, grease residue, dirt in an open wound and the deep, puncture nature of most bullet wounds to contend with. No bullet wound was supposed to go for
“Where in the world were you that it took so long to get medical care?”
“Just this side of hell.”
Hmm. That was certainly an evasive answer. But the shadows in his eyes were much more informative. She would bet the farm that the circumstances of his getting shot were floating through his mind and putting that grim line of white around his mouth. In an effort to get him to talk some more, or at least to lighten his mood, she asked, “How’d the other guy fare?”
John all but collapsed in front of her. The strong, competent, in-control man before her crumpled in on himself, crossing his arms over his chest in what almost looked like a hug of agony. What on God’s green earth could cause a man like John Hollister this much pain? Had he killed someone? If he had, she’d also bet it had been a bad guy, or had been an accident. He was far too honorable, too decent a man to have shot down anyone in cold blood with or without damned good reason.
“Talk to me, John. What happened? You can tell me. I’m a doctor. I’ll treat it with patient confidentiality if you need me to.”
The muscles beneath her hands turned to bands of tempered steel all of a sudden. He jerked away from her, spinning to face her. Whoa. Abruptly, his grief transformed into something dangerous. Dark. Lethal. He stared down at her with the blank, cold eyes of a killer. She recoiled sharply. Who was this man? He bore no resemblance whatsoever to the man who’d laughed and made love with her so recently. This man was terrifying.
“Don’t ask me that again,” he answered from between gritted teeth.
Frightened, she nodded up at him. Surely the man she knew and lusted after was in there somewhere. But he was buried very deep at the moment.
Apparently, he realized how badly he’d scared her, for he made a concerted effort to lower his shoulders. He even attempted a smile for her. He failed, and only produced a brief grimace, but it signaled the return of the moderately sane man behind the killer.
Her fear subsided somewhat, but she continued to eye him cautiously.
He ground out, “Thanks for your concern, Doc. But I’ve got it handled.”
Right. And she was the Easter bunny. He stepped away from her and headed around the front of the Land Rover.
“Get in,” he ordered from the other side of the vehicle.
Thoughtfully, she did as he said. He started the engine and pulled away grimly into the night.
