Lindsay McKenna - Hunter's Woman

“Yes,” Morgan replied, “and that’s why it’s so important to get down to Brazil and find out what was used. Knowing at least that much will be a help.” He tapped his fingers on the cedar desk. “Not much, but a help….”

Ty rose. “You got the mission brief prepared for me? I’ll get out to the airport pronto.”

Morgan nodded. “What there is of it. My secretary had a helluva time collecting stuff last minute. She managed to scare up photos of two of the four OID team members. Unfortunately, Dr. Alborak’s isn’t in there, but you’ll know her. She’s the only one with red hair on the outbreak team.”

Ty brightened momentarily as he took the file from Morgan. “Redhead, eh?”

“Yeah. You like redheads?”

“My favorite,” Ty said with a chuckle.

“Well, don’t be too happy about this particular redhead,” Morgan warned him, one eyebrow moving upward as he looked in his direction. “Around OID, Dr. Alborak is known as a Texas hellion. She doesn’t put up with fools, from what I understand from Casey. This woman is a one-woman army. She shoots from the hip. She’s got no diplomacy. She’s all action and demands results. You get in her way and don’t operate at the speed of light like she does, she’ll chew you up and spit you out before you can say boo.”

“Sounds like a military-officer type.”

Morgan said, “She’s not, but she could be. Casey thinks highly of her. She said if things get bad, Dr. Alborak is the person you want at your back to protect you.”

Grinning slightly, Ty said, “Sounds like a woman right down my alley. I like Type A go-getters.”

Snorting, Morgan rubbed his watering eyes. “Today OID had a major computer crash involving their personnel department. I have nothing to give you on Dr. Alborak presently, just what Casey told me. By the time they get the software problem fixed, you’ll be down in Manaus and on her trail.”

“That’s okay,” Ty said, “I’m sure with this kind of description, I won’t have a problem knowing who she is or how she operates.”

“Casey said to warn you that Dr. Alborak is intense, focused, stubborn and bullheaded. She’s also got one hell of a temper if you cross her.”

“Must be that Texas breeding?” Ty chuckled.

Morgan lightened momentarily. “Maybe. But in this arena, we need someone with Dr. Alborak’s gutsiness. Casey said she can shoot and spit with the best of ’em. I guess that’s a Texas euphemism?”

Ty headed toward the door. “I don’t know. I’m from Colorado, remember? But Texans do have a helluva reputation.”

Morgan raised his brows. “Just don’t tangle with this hellion, all right? Work with her, not against her. I just hope she can take well-meaning direction from you.”

“My taste in women has always run to the independent types,” Ty assured him smoothly. “I’ll find a bridgehead with Dr. Alborak and make it work. Too much is at stake not to.”

Morgan raised his hand. “Rafe is expecting you. He’s the only one who knows who you really are. He’ll do all he can to assist you. Just ask. Trust him and rely on what he knows. After ten years, he knows that area like the back of his hand. Literally.”

“Yes, sir.” Ty opened the door. “I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Come home in one piece,” Morgan growled in warning. “Or else…”

Nodding, Ty quietly closed the door behind him. As he moved through the darkened passage to concrete stairs that led up to the first floor of the house, his heartbeat quickened. He reveled in the opportunity to be on a mission where so much was at stake. He had no idea what he was going to step into. If Black Dawn had delivered a deadly biological disease via aerosol spraying, that meant he and everyone on the OID team were also in jeopardy until they could verify what it was.

As he reached the top of the stairs, opened the door and stepped into a carpeted room at the rear of the house, Ty wondered what Texas hellion Catt Alborak was like. A brief smile lingered at the corners of his mouth. She might be the best part of this mission. Was she married? He resisted the temptation to open her file. Once he was on board the Perseus jet, he’d sift through all the information, commit it to memory and then try to get some sleep during the long journey south to Brazil.

Stepping out on the ornately carved front porch and automatically eyeing the thick cape of snow on the shoulders of the Rocky Mountains rising above the tiny hamlet of Philipsburg, Ty smiled. He was between relationships. Dr. Alborak sounded alluring. He liked a woman who knew her own mind, who had a definite sense of herself, who she was and where she was going in life. And if she was a little spicy and hotheaded, well, all the better. Ty liked women who challenged him. And he never ran from a fight. He stepped off the porch into the glare of bright sunlight. Putting on a pair of sunglasses, he hurried to a dark blue car parked out front.

As he settled in the back seat, the driver took off for the airport. Frowning, Ty amended his earlier musings. He had run from one relationship, he remembered now. A twinge in his heart made him unconsciously rub his chest. But that was a long time ago. He was thirty-one now and that relationship had happened ten years before. Long gone, but somehow, never forgotten. With a sigh, Ty opened up the file, his curiosity getting the better of him. The facts collected there were meager, but one of them piqued his interest. Dr. Alborak had attended Stanford University. So had the woman he’d loved so many years ago. Ty considered that a sign of good luck, if nothing else. He smiled to himself. Soon he’d be on Brazilian soil again. And he’d be facing this infamous Texas hellion in the flesh….

“Where the hell is that tugboat!?” Catt Alborak paced up and down the old, weathered wooden dock that jutted fifty feet out into the muddy headwaters of the Amazon. To her right was the distant skyline of Manaus. To her left was jungle. She saw her assistant, Maria Sanchez, pick up the cellular phone. Standing for a moment, her fists jammed on her hips, Catt glared up and down the river. There were a number of docks scattered along the bank, and plenty of tugs and tugboat captains. But where was their tug? Arrangements had been made before they arrived. A tug was to meet them at dock six and take them downriver for five hours, to the affected Juma village, where people were dying from some unknown bacterial or viral epidemic. Damn! People were suffering, and she and her team were standing here like they didn’t have a better thing in the world to do. Frustration ate viciously at Catt. She was never in good humor when things went wrong. She didn’t get paid to sit back, smile and be passive. No, responsibility for the lives of her team and those they were racing to help rested squarely on her shoulders.

Nostrils flaring, Catt started pacing again. Taking off her sunglasses, she stared out across the massive, slow-moving expanse of the Amazon. Two major rivers combined at Manaus, the largest city in northern Brazil. Once, there had been a very rich rubber trade here, which had made this city experience an economic boom for the first half the century. As the need for natural rubber died, so had the industry. Since then, Manaus had remade itself into a very profitable white-collar city, and with its high-tech computer companies, it was a leader in communications in South America.

“I could scream,” Catt muttered as she moved back to her team waiting on the bank. All around them were portable trunks filled with dry ice and antibiotics, boxes of lab equipment and laptop computers. The software contained information on every possible epidemic. The database would help them as they collected information about symptoms that would, she hoped, help them identify the killer of the Juma people. All would be needed to fight this epidemic. If they got to the Juma village at all!

“We’ve got to get a tug,” she said firmly to Maria, who had just gotten off the cell phone.

“You aren’t going to like this, Catt. The man who was hired to take us said he won’t do it. He doesn’t care how much money is involved. Word’s gotten out that half the people in the Juma village have died in the last two days. He’s scared,” Maria said unhappily, “and he said he loves his wife and kids too much to take us out there.”

“He’s afraid he’ll get infected and die,” Andy Foltz said. “Understandable, but that puts us in a hell of a fix.”

Catt’s patience was rapidly thinning. She ran her fingers through her short red hair in an aggravated motion. Her eyes burned with anger. “Maria, you call the city of Manaus. Get the mayor on the line. I’ll talk to him. I’m not going to beat around the bush. We’ll go to the top and take ’em apart one at a time if that’s what we have to do in order to get down there to help those people.”

Maria nodded sympathetically and rapidly punched in some numbers. She was of Hispanic blood and knew Spanish, which was a close cousin of Portuguese. Catt knew some Spanish because her father’s spread near Del Rio, Texas, was right across the border from Mexico. Still, Maria’s command of the language was stronger, and whether Catt liked it or not, Maria was her intercessor at the moment. Unfortunately, Maria wasn’t pushy like her, and Catt knew in order to get Manaus officials to help them, push was going to come to shove.

None of the team spoke Brazil’s first language, and they were at a decided disadvantage because of it. Now, Catt wished fervently that OID had either sent along an interpreter or brought in someone with field experience who spoke the language. It was too late now.

Catt saw a cab moving rapidly toward them, much like the one that had dropped off them and their medical supplies. This dock was out in the middle of nowhere. They’d been waiting for this tug for over an hour. A precious hour during which they could have been heading down the Amazon toward those suffering people.

Andy Foltz and Steve Tucker sat on large olive-green metal lockers, looking glum. They were just as frustrated as she was at not being able to get to those dying people. Aggravated to the point of blowing her infamous temper, Catt moved quickly back onto the dock. Immune to the beauty surrounding her, she jammed her hands into the pockets of her beige slacks as she walked quickly, her head down and filled with the turmoil of how to get out of this jam. Hearing the squealing of brakes, she stopped, turned and looked to where the asphalt ended, about a tenth of a mile from where she stood. The cab was delivering a passenger to their dock. Who? The tugboat captain? An official envoy from Manaus to help them? The man who emerged from the cab was tall and well muscled. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, jeans and work boots, from what she could tell at this distance.

He looked vaguely familiar, Catt thought, then shrugged off the notion. Worried for the dying people downriver, she turned her attention back to them and their ongoing plight. She shouldn’t just be standing here! She and her team should be on their way downstream right now. She snarled unhappily under her breath, spun around and headed back toward her team again. Maybe this man really was an official come to help them, someone who could get them out of this miserable mess. Catt wasn’t sure, but he looked like he knew what he was doing just by his proud carriage and the confident way he walked toward them. Her heart skipped a beat. Who was he? She frowned and halted near her team, waiting impatiently for him.

The way he walked reminded Catt of a lithe animal—a jaguar, perhaps. The man had dark brown hair, cut short and close to his skull. He wore sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, which to her were the most important feature in a person’s face. Catt knew from experience that looking into someone’s eyes told her everything she needed to know. What was this man hiding? Suddenly the sun was masked behind veils of misty clouds that moved sluggishly above them. The heat was oppressive and she was perspiring profusely beneath her white cotton shirt. Still, she couldn’t help but notice the way his own shirt clung to his upper body, shouting of his athletic shape. His chest was well sprung, his arms lean and tightly muscled, the dark hair thick upon them.