Isolated. Cold, which was good for the materials the bombers used. And, oh yeah, isolated. Great.
“Word is tonight’s the night they’re testing some new product,” Tibbs drawled. “We’ll need to catch them in the middle of their private fireworks show.”
That worked for Hawk. He picked up the file and flipped through it, reading about the barn that’d been found loaded to the gills with incriminating equipment, complete with an elusive owner they hadn’t been able to pin down.
Abby shifted closer to read over Hawk’s shoulder, making him extremely aware of her tension as it crackled through the air like static electricity.
“You’ve got two hours,” Tibbs told them. “You fly out together.”
“Together?” Abby repeated, her voice actually cracking.
Surprised at the unexpected chink in her armor, Hawk looked at her.
“You’ll run the show from the van, Abby,” Tibbs said. “And Hawk from the field. There’ll be a team in place.”
Abby blinked. “But…”
Both men eyed her as two high splotches of color marked her cheeks. Interesting, Hawk thought. She was usually cool as ice. So what had her riled up? Him? Because she sure as hell got to him. He couldn’t help it, beneath her veneer there was just something about her, something…special. Sure, he wanted to do wicked things to her body and vice versa, but that alone wouldn’t have kept him on edge around her for six months. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ve done this once or twice before.”
“Ha.” But her brow puckered, her kiss-me-mouth tightened.
Normally this would make him wonder how long he’d have to kiss her before she softened for him, but not now. “What is it? You don’t trust me out there?”
“Hawk,” Tibbs said quietly.
He heard the warning in his boss’s voice, but he didn’t care. “No, I think it’s time, past time, that we get this out in the open. I want to know, Abby. What exactly is your problem with me?”
“Nothing.” She hit him with those baby blues, which were suddenly void of any emotion whatsoever. “There’s no problem at all.”
Bullshit. But hell if he was going to keep bashing his head against a brick wall. “Okay, then. Fine.”
“Fine.” She gestured to the file in his hands as she gathered her control around her like a cloak. “Flight’s at two.” She said this evenly, back to being as cool as a cucumber. In a freezer. In Antarctica. “Be late and I leave without you.”
1
ABBY ENTERED THE COMMUNICATIONS van, and the men stopped talking. Typical. Men complained that women were the difficult gender, but it seemed to her the penis-carrying half were far more thorny.
Not to mention downright problematic.
Not that she cared, because when it came to personal relationships, she’d given them up. A fact that made her life much simpler.
Sliding the door shut behind her, she shivered. Late fall in the high altitude Bighorn Mountains meant that razor-sharp air cut right through her, layers and all. As she rubbed her frozen hands together, her gaze inadvertently locked on Hawk, who had his long-sleeved black shirt open and the matching T-shirt beneath it shoved up so that he could get wired.
He stood there, six feet two inches of solid badass complete with a wicked, mischievous grin, topped with warm, chocolate eyes that could melt or freeze on a dime. From beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt peeked the very edge of the tattoo on his bicep, which she knew was a hawk.
The women in the office practically swooned at it, every time.
But not Abby. Nope, she was made of firmer stuff.
There was a four-inch scar, old and nearly faded, along his left side between two ribs, and another puckered scar above his left pec. The first was a knife wound, the second a bullet hole. She could also see his smooth, sleek flesh pressed taut to hard, rippled sinew. One long, lean muscle, not an ounce of extra on him.
Maybe she wasn’t made of firmer stuff after all… But regardless, she was over men.
Where for the first time, she hesitated. That in itself pissed her off. So a year ago she’d nearly died out in the field. She hadn’t. And she wasn’t going to this time, either. Shrugging off her nerves, Abby looked around and caught the long, assessing look Hawk shot her as he pulled on a flak vest. He was sharp, she’d give him that. Clearly, he sensed her hesitation, but hell if she’d let him see her sweat. She lifted her chin and sat down.
But if she was a good actress, then he was a great actor, because she had no idea what he was thinking behind that perpetually cynical gaze.
And she didn’t care. She was here for the job. She would remain in the van, in charge of communications, while the team made their way to the farmhouse, and then to the barn a half mile beyond that, where they’d execute the raid.
“There,” Watkins said to Hawk as he finished wiring him.
Hawk shrugged back into his shirt. “You fix the problem from the other day?” he asked.
Abby’s eyes had wandered again to Hawk’s body-bad eyes-but her ears pricked. “Problem?”
“Bad wire.” Watkins lifted a shoulder. “Happens.”
“It shouldn’t,” she said. “Make sure it doesn’t.”
Watkins nodded.
Hawk let his T-shirt fall over his abs, hiding the wires as his gaze again met hers. One eyebrow arched in the silent question:
Of course he’d had a personal interest. They’d had a burgeoning friendship, at least on her part. For his part, he clearly wished for more, far more. In any case, he couldn’t have known how bad it would all go…
And it had gone extremely bad. One minute she’d been listening to Gaines’s quiet, authoritative voice in her ear, telling her she was doing great, just to hold her position while his team to the west “handled it,” and then the next, there’d been a 12-gauge shotgun to her temple and she’d been taken hostage.
Now, a year later, in another time and place, someone murmured something in a low voice that she couldn’t quite catch, and several of the men behind her laughed softly.
Releasing tension, she knew, most likely with an off-color joke that she didn’t want to hear. Living as a woman in a man’s world was nothing new, but she had to admit, tonight, it was grating on her nerves.
Granted, her nerves were already scraped raw just by being here, but that was no one’s fault but her own. Gaines had transferred her at her request after a leave of absence. She’d wanted to prove to herself that she could still do her job, that she hadn’t let the “incident” take anything from her.
But with damp palms and butterflies bouncing in her gut, she wondered if maybe she had more to overcome than she’d thought.
“Hey.”
