just managed not to roll her eyes when he inserted a tube of blood.
“We’re going to have to kill them from a distance or make certain our mouths and noses are covered and we’re wearing gloves the next time we go after them. Not just any gloves, the gloves from this lab. And that has to be after we get a little sleep. I want to make certain they don’t have any more of that virus on hand.”
“Did you expect to find antibodies in the blood you were examining?” Clearly, he was going to work a little longer. If he needed to bounce his ideas off her, she had to have a clearer understanding of what he was looking for.
“They did. The Williams brothers and Orucov. The three of them. Why do you suppose they left in such a hurry? They didn’t even try to cover their tracks. Could they have spotted you?”
“That’s just insulting. I was trained in the military. They are civilians and have no real idea of self-defense. They lived in their lab. They stuck together and didn’t have outside friends. No way did they spot me. They were gone just before I got here. Maybe even the same day.”
“Why do you think that?”
She watched him as he went from his machine back to the computer and entered information. He was fast on a keyboard, she noted. Very fast. His hands fascinated her. He glanced at her over his shoulder, reminding her she’d been asked a question.
“When I looked through the window, it appeared as if they were coming right back, not as if they’d made a hasty departure. I spent a day setting up in the ranger station and watching the hut through my binoculars. That night I set up a blind in two different trees on either side of the hut, but they hadn’t come back to the hut and it looked as if they were gone. In the morning I tracked them to the village where the terrorists are located. The tracks were fresh and led directly to the village. That was why I was doing surveillance there when you decided to strike.”
“You’re fearless, aren’t you?” He hesitated a minute. “You’re very good, Shylah. I ran right at you, and very few things get past me when I’m in hunting mode. I didn’t see you until I was practically on top of you.”
“You thought about killing me. I saw it on your face.”
“Then why didn’t you kill me immediately?” He looked as if he might shake her.
“We clearly were on the same team. You killed over a dozen of the bastards and I wasn’t about to reward you by killing you. They deserved it.” She kept her voice mild, but she felt very strongly about it. The moment she had spotted him, moving like a deadly shadow from guard to guard, to the commander’s house, the little infirmary, everything in her rose up to protect him. He had been magnificent. He had done what she wanted to do.
Her orders were clear. Find her targets and take them out. She couldn’t deviate from that, not even to retaliate against the Milisi Separatis Sumatra, no matter how much she wanted to. Personal retribution wasn’t allowed, not when the stakes were so high. “Why didn’t you? You could have killed me. You jumped right over me.”
He’d cleared her by several feet and had done it with ease. He hadn’t even been breathing that hard. She could run, not like Zara had been able to, but she could run when she had to. He’d made it look easy.
Draden turned away from her, staring down at his machine. “You were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
When he said things like that so casually, he stole little pieces of her heart. No one had ever talked to her like that. She had freckles. That was girl-next-door, not beautiful. She wasn’t exotic, a real beauty, like Zara, or tiny and perfect like Bellisia. She thought of herself as gangly, all arms and legs. For the longest time she was a string, thin and long with a mop of wild, untamable hair and eyes too big for her face. Her skin was so white she probably blinded people if she showed her tummy, and then there was always the freckles. No amount of makeup was going to cover them up completely, so she didn’t bother trying.
It had taken forever for her to get any kind of a figure, a butt and