Breaking Danger (10 page)

He'd be on point of course. And he'd give her his stealth suit, which would leave him pretty much defenseless. One scratch, one bite, and he'd turn into a monster himself. He didn't know the latency of the virus, but it must be very, very fast, judging from the way it had spread. Before he knew it, his mind would be gone and he would turn on pretty Sophie Daniels and tear her apart.

She could beg and she could cry, but he wouldn't be himself anymore. He'd be gone in the smoky ruined depths of his own mind.

Like his parents.

He shoved that thought away, but it stuck in his head like barbed wire.

His parents had been druggies. When high, there'd been nothing there for their son. He'd spent most of his childhood watching his parents clock out. It hadn't mattered at all to them that he was cold and hungry and lonely. He remembered telling his mother that there was no food in the house and that he was hungry. She'd looked at him blankly and at that moment, Jon realized she didn't know who he was.

He'd been five.

At the age of nine, a good-looking blond kid, his parents had sold him to sex traffickers for a fix.

His parents had been monsters. All his life had been dedicated to being a good guy. Fighting against people exactly like them. Those two years undercover—a mission so dangerous he had a box full of medals he could never show anyone—had been all about that.

The idea that with one bite he could become a monster himself, hurt Sophie, kill her even, without feeling anything . . . that idea
terrified
him. More than any battle he'd been in.

Well.

He looked down at himself. He was only half erect now, dick drooping more with each passing second. That was a way to get rid of his boner. Even better than jerking off, since his dick didn't want his hand, anyway. Just think of becoming infected and not only not being able to protect Sophie, but hurting her.

Guaranteed dick deflation.

He stepped out of the shower and into the air dryer. Even that smelled like Sophie. His clean clothes were neatly folded on a chair. He picked up his long-sleeved tee and sniffed it. It didn't smell as good as Sophie, but then nothing did. He put on the tee and jeans and walked out barefoot to see Sophie at the kitchen door, smiling at him.

“Ready for some food?” she called out softly.

Hunger roared through him. Whatever she was cooking smelled wonderful. She stood framed in the door, shiny dark hair gleaming under the kitchen light, beautiful face lit with a welcoming smile, and his heart skipped a beat.

He was a dead man. If the zombies didn't get him, Sophie Daniels would.

Mount Blue

Haven

“If you don't stop right this minute, I'm going to throw you over my shoulder and tie you down to the bed,” Catherine's husband Mac growled.

When Tom “Mac” McEnroe growled most people cringed. His speaking voice was naturally low and very deep. When he growled it was the same timbre of a bear in a cave. Match that with a huge, muscled body and an ugly, scarred face, and most people would be terrified.

Catherine McEnroe wasn't terrified. Not at all. She knew the good man inside the terrifying exterior and she knew, above all, that he loved her.

“Why Mac,” she smiled and simpered, dramatically fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”

He made an exasperated noise deep in his throat and she laughed.

They were in Haven's infirmary. There was a massive rescue mission under way and new refugees were arriving hourly. None of them were infected. Everyone who arrived was placed separately in secure rooms, in quarantine, subjected to thermal scanning for half an hour and spot tests of pupils and body temperature. Infection showed up quickly. As soon as they passed the test, they were admitted into their community.

Before the outbreak, Haven had been an outlaw community. Mac, Nick, and Jon had been members of a super-elite group of warriors known as Ghost Ops. But they had been betrayed, accused of treason, and had disappeared. Mac had known of an abandoned mine inside a mountain, and from there they built their high-tech headquarters, Haven. By some mysterious process, Haven had attracted a community of geniuses and good people, most of them on the run from something.

Catherine herself had found her way here, to the home of her heart, by bearing a message from Mac's commanding officer, Lucius Ward. The three men had thought Ward had betrayed them, but Lucius had been betrayed himself, together with three young soldiers of Ghost Ops. The four of them had been hideously tortured and experimented on by Arka.

Their nemesis.

The company was no more, but it had unleashed this terrible virus before dying, like a scorpion's tail delivering one last fatal sting.

“You are not going to joke your way out of this, Catherine,” Mac said in his laying-down-the-law voice. To most everyone he came across, that voice was the voice of God. Catherine obeyed him too. When she wanted to. The other times . . .

She swept a hand at the infirmary. It was organized chaos. New arrivals were coming in hourly. Though there were no infected, there were plenty of people who'd been injured in the evacuation. Lacerations, broken bones, concussions were the order of the day.

They both sidestepped as a volunteer nurse rolled in a patient on a gurney, a young woman with a severely bruised face and a broken arm. Soon the infirmary would be full and they would have to start stacking them in the corridors.

Catherine looked up at Mac. “There's so much to be done,” she said softly.

He closed his eyes and pinched his nose.

Catherine touched him, laying her hand on his muscled forearm. She had a gift. It had been a curse most of her life, but here in Haven she came into it fully and accepted it fully as a gift. She was an empath, and a powerful one. Each day refined her gift. She could feel people's emotions at a touch. And if she was close to the person, she could almost read thoughts. And in Mac's case, since she loved him, she
could
read his thoughts. He was an open book to her.

And she could read clearly, as if in a book, how much he loved her and how worried he was for her. How worried he was for the baby in her belly.

Mac had no family at all. Being without human ties had actually been a condition for joining Ghost Ops—a deniable team of elite warriors, completely off the books. They had to have no ties whatsoever, no family, no friends, no loved ones.

At the time, that had been fine with them. Mac had never loved a woman. Had sex, yes. A lot—though he'd told her he hadn't had sex since the group's betrayal the year before. He thought they had been betrayed by a man he idolized and it had been nearly a mortal blow.

She had changed all of that. She came to him with proof that he hadn't been betrayed by his commanding officer, Lucius Ward, and it turned out she came with living proof that he could love.

The moment she and Mac had met—even though he had suspected her of being a mole, sent in to find him and his teammates—the relationship had exploded. And now they were married and expecting a child, and it unnerved Mac completely. He hadn't had a place in his head and his heart for love, had barely coped with the idea of falling in love with her, and now there was a new life coming, to love and to care for and—this still blew Mac's mind—that new life would be his blood relative. His only blood relative in the world.

Mac had no idea how to cope with all these feelings and the only thing that made sense to him was to make sure nothing harmed her or their child. He was a warrior, a protector, and that he knew how to do. And the way to do that, apparently, was to make sure that she did nothing more strenuous than sit on the couch and read a book. Maybe listen to a little music.

While the world burned around them.

Catherine loved Mac, and, more to the point, she understood him. Bone deep. So she cut him some slack even though he exasperated her enormously at times, like right now.

Refugees were streaming in hourly, their resources were strained to the limits, every hand with medical training was absolutely essential. If they ever hoped to survive this plague, everyone had to pitch in.

But fighting him would only get his back up. It was only the fact that Catherine understood deeply, bone deep, Mac's fear of losing her, which kept her from kicking him in the backside.

“Mac,” she said softly, taking one of his big hands in both of her own. Under his skin she could feel the emotions skittering, something that would surprise people who thought of him as an emotionless hulk of a man, cold as ice. Her Mac wasn't cold, just controlled. She knew, too—and this was brand-new to her—that her touch soothed him, as if she were cool water poured over a burning wound. That had been his description of what happened when she touched him while he was upset. “My darling, we're fighting not just for our lives here, but we're fighting so that something remains when this—this thing burns itself out. We're bringing a child into the world, and I want there to be a world for her, or him, to grow up in. And you know that—”

“
Make a hole!”
Larry Vetter, one of their engineers, rushed by with a bleeding man on a gurney. Catherine and Mac pressed themselves against the wall. Larry caught Mac's eye as he rushed past. “Bakersfield's gone, Mac. No one left. Just got word.”

Bakersfield gone.

Just like that. A city of over four hundred thousand, all dead. Or worse. Infected.

Catherine's eyes followed the gurney. Beyond the door were over a hundred patients, tested to make sure they were uninfected, but still wounded and bleeding. She needed to help the way she needed to breathe.

“Let me go, Mac.” She turned and met his dark eyes. “If we all work together, maybe we can ensure there are enough people to start again. I don't want to think about what the world could become. I don't want our child to grow up in the Dark Ages.”

She was still holding his hand and she could feel the emotions in him, strong and pure. He was so easy for her to read. Love. Pride. Fear.

Love won.

“Okay,” he grated. He stepped away. “Go save the world, Catherine.”

She smiled sadly at him. “Just our corner of it, my love.”

She tugged at the front of his shirt and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. When their lips broke apart, she hooked a hand around the back of his neck and put her lips to his ear. “Thank you, darling. You are definitely getting lucky as soon as I can take a breather.”

San Francisco

Beach Street

If they could tune out the sounds of violent mayhem from outside, it could almost have been a . . . a date. A romantic one, at that. Sophie had pulled her curtains and lit candles. No real way of telling if the infected had a tropism toward light, but better safe than sorry.

And it did create an atmosphere.

If it weren't the end of the world, it would be pretty cool. Jon Ryan sitting next to her at her table—he refused to let her set his place across from her. He wanted to sit right by her. As dates went, he was a ten, an impossibly handsome and attractive man. The candlelight just loved him. He was so attractive it was almost overkill. Strong, sharp features limned in the glow of the candles, which picked out the gold highlights in his long hair. Much, much more handsome than Brad Pitt had been, back in the day.

For all his looks, he didn't have an actor's softness. No, this guy was all tough male. Hard muscles that didn't look like they'd been built in a gym. They looked like they'd been won in battle. Hands not actor-soft but hard and callused and nicked. Hands that were used.

Hands that knew what they were doing.

Heat flashed through her body at the memory of him touching her as they made love. Hard and callused, yes, but his hands had also been expert and tender. She'd felt clearly the calluses on his fingertips as they circled her where she had been so slick and tender . . .

Sophie's face was probably beet red by now.

She worked with people who had special psychic gifts. She'd worked with empaths, who could read a person's emotions with a touch. Thank God Jon didn't give any signs of being gifted in that way because she would just sink to the floor and die.

“Here.” She gently pushed the platter with her zucchini omelet over to him, afraid that if she held it out, he'd see that her hands were trembling. “Have some more.”

He'd already eaten half of her eight-egg omelet. His manners were impeccable, but clearly he'd been hungry.

“Don't have to ask me twice.” He smiled at her and cut himself another wedge.

Oh God. It was the first real smile she'd seen from him and . . . he had a dimple. It appeared, unexpectedly, in his right cheek. A dimple. Oh, this was too much. She took in a deep breath and slid the wooden cheeseboard over to him as well.

“These are all great,” he said as he cut himself a slice of goat cheese.

“Yes, well, it's San Francisco,” she said before she could think her words through.
“Was
San Francisco,” she corrected. Who knew when the Ferry Building Farmer's Market would open again. If it could ever open again. To open, it would need the rebuilding of a subculture of farmers and cheese makers and vintners. She gave a crooked smile. “Maybe rat brains cooked over a trash fire will figure large in our future.”

Jon put his hand over hers and squeezed gently. His big hand was so warm, so comforting. She looked down at her hand under his. She had a scientist's hands. Soft and pale, with only the strength necessary to pipette liquids into vials and pound the keyboard. His hand looked as if it could haul a tank.

“There won't be any rat brains in Haven. Put that image out of your mind. We're completely self-sufficient in energy and water and food. The refugees will put some strain on us but we have enormous reserves. Mac, Nick, and I are used to military planning and—well, we planned for a siege right from the start.”