Her Baby's Bodyguard (6 page)

Despite Sergeant Norton’s disclaimer, Eva wasn’t about to make the mistake of underestimating his intelligence. His questions were continuing to prove his perceptiveness. “I simply didn’t want to be delayed by issues of child custody,” she replied, giving another part-truth. “I couldn’t predict how your people would have reacted.”

“They’d still want your information. Once you’re in the States, they’ll get you a good lawyer.”

“I was willing to offer myself as a pawn but not my daughter. Bureaucrats and courts don’t always put the interests of the child first. I’ve seen how your justice system handles international custody cases, and I won’t risk—” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat, annoyed that she’d once again shown weakness in front of this man. She cupped her hand over Katya’s head. “She belongs with me.”

Sergeant Norton pulled his chair forward until it was even with the bench where she was sitting. He straddled the chair once more, folding his arms over the back. “I read in your file that your mother was American and your father was Russian. You went to live with him after she died.” He paused. “Is that why you’re so worried about your daughter? Because of what happened to you?”

She should have realized that he would know her background. The American government would have investigated her thoroughly before agreeing to her deal. “What else did the file tell you?”

“It said your mother was a translator at the UN, and your father was a diplomat.”

She moved her thumb over Katya’s cheek. “They had very little in common. After their marriage dissolved, my mother and I went to live with my grandmother, and my father took a position in Bolivia. He didn’t see me again until the day after my mother’s funeral. He was a complete stranger to me, yet the court allowed him to take me from the only home and family that I’d known.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“My father had many influential friends, including American politicians. My grandmother was just an ordinary woman and didn’t have the resources to fight him in court.”

He extended his arm to touch her knee. “I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”

She shook her head. “Don’t waste your sympathy on me. It’s Katya I’m concerned about. I didn’t want to deceive you about her, but I felt I had no choice.”

“I can see why you thought that, after what happened to you, but your situation’s different. You’ve got plenty of influential friends of your own in our government now. They wouldn’t have scuttled your deal just because of a possible custody issue with one of your colleagues…” His words trailed off. “Katya’s father’s not just an ordinary scientist, is he? If he was, you wouldn’t be so worried.”

She’d realized he was perceptive. She hadn’t anticipated to what extent. “It’s not really relevant.”

He gripped her knee and leaned closer. “I think it is, or you wouldn’t be hiding it. Dr. Petrova, who is Katya’s father?”

There was no hint of a smile around the edges of his eyes now, yet she glimpsed sympathy in the depths, a softness at odds with the determination that showed in his tightened jaw. His hold on her leg was firm, but his touch was still gentle. She wouldn’t have expected that in a man of his size. It made her remember how carefully he’d cared for her wound and how tenderly his fingertips had skimmed over her bare skin.

At the thought, the sexual awareness that she’d thought she’d suppressed sprang back full force. He was leaning close enough for her to catch the scent of his body. It was the same clean tang of soap, wool and man that had clung to his coat. It enveloped her in a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire. She wanted him to touch her again. She wanted to feel the strength of his arms around her and the warmth of his breath on her ear….

All at once, she realized that she could no longer feel the tug of Katya at her breast. She glanced down. The baby’s eyes were closed, and her jaw was slack with sleep. A drop of milk drizzled over her chin as she let Eva’s nipple slide out of her mouth.

A blush seared Eva’s skin from her cheeks to her chest. She’d wanted to use conversation to distract both Sergeant Norton and herself from this intimacy. It had worked too well. How could she have relaxed? How could she have forgotten, even for one second, that she was still sitting with her breast bared in front of a veritable stranger? She quickly shifted Katya’s limp form to her shoulder, using her bent arm to cover herself. Only then did she risk a glance at Sergeant Norton’s face.

He swallowed, then withdrew his hand and curled it over the back of his chair. His casual pose didn’t change, yet she sensed a new tautness in the way he held his body.

She knew he couldn’t have missed seeing her bare nipple. The fact hung in the silence between them. And the sexual awareness she should not—
must not
—feel strengthened until it was as tangible as the crackle of the flames on the hearth.

Eva lifted her chin. She wasn’t going to allow herself to be uncomfortable over this. She hadn’t been deliberately exposing herself. She certainly hadn’t been trying to entice him. Under the circumstances, that would have been absurd.

Therefore, it was also absurd for her pulse to be accelerating. And for her blush to be deepening. She was no innocent young girl, she was a thirty-year-old woman, a mother. She had nothing to blush about. Above all, she certainly shouldn’t be studying Jack’s large, long-fingered hands and thinking about how before tonight it had been almost a year since she’d felt a man’s touch.

She shouldn’t be thinking of him as Jack either. He was Sergeant Norton.

The door swung open behind her to the sound of men’s voices and the stamping of boots. Flames crackled and shot up the chimney as cold air swirled along the floor. In one swift motion, Sergeant Norton got to his feet and placed himself between her and the other men. “Hang on for a minute, Kurt,” he said. “We’re not done.”

“Come on, Jack. You said you already slapped on a Band-Aid. What more do you need to do?”

“Do I tell you how to drive?”

“All the time.”

While the men spoke, Eva laid Katya on her lap and hurried to fasten her bra and straighten her clothes, a task made more difficult because her hands were trembling. The sergeant was using his body to shield her and Katya again, only this time he wasn’t trying to protect them from bullets. He was blocking them from the view of the other soldiers.

His gallantry only made her feel worse. He was doing his best to act respectfully. She really shouldn’t be thinking about his touch on her body.

“Leave the firewood by the door, junior.”

“We’ll need more before the night’s over,” Matheson said, moving toward the fireplace. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I left Wyoming.”

Sergeant Norton shot out his arm to stop him from going farther. “I said wait.”

“It’s all right,” Eva said, settling Katya against her shoulder once more. She rose to her feet. “I’m finished.”

Matheson shouldered Sergeant Norton’s arm aside and deposited an armload of wood on the other side of the hearth from the bundles of Katya’s supplies. He nodded a greeting to Eva, discarded his coat and went back to retrieve a pack he’d left near the door. Lang was already leaning over the table to set up the equipment that Colbert had been using in the truck. He gave Eva a quick smile before he bent to his work.

The hut had seemed small before, but with the arrival of two more of the men, the space shrank again. Like Sergeant Norton they were large and fit, and in a rough-edged way they could be considered handsome, as well. The men Eva was accustomed to exercised their minds far more than their bodies. Not that she thought for a moment these soldiers weren’t intelligent. It’s just that they were different from the intellectuals she worked with. More, well, virile. They were giving off male pheromones the way their coats were shedding snow.

And a minute ago, the handsomest of these soldiers had been looking at her naked breast.

No. She would
not
think about that. Or him. Holding Katya to her shoulder, Eva squeezed past Sergeant Norton and bent to retrieve one of her bundles.

“Hold on, Dr. Petrova,” he said.

“I thought you already looked at my bandage.”

“This isn’t about your wound. It’s about what you were saying before the guys came in.”

She straightened. “I need to change Katya’s diaper before I put her down for the night.” She used the bundle she held to gesture toward the wooden platforms that stood beside the wall. “I’d like to use one of those bed frames. There aren’t any mattresses, but my coat should be thick enough to provide padding for her.”

He snagged her elbow before she could go by him. “I had asked you who Katya’s father was.”

“Yes, I remember you did.”

“So, who is he?”

She could see that Sergeant Norton wasn’t going to let the point go. From what he’d said earlier, he likely had guessed the answer. So why was she stalling? Perhaps part of the reason she hesitated was because she didn’t want to acknowledge how big a mistake she had made. She’d been such a fool. And there was a very real possibility that her poor judgment could come back to bite them—just as the sergeant had said. “I had hoped we’d be on our way out of the country by now and there would be no need to mention this.”

“Eva? We need to know what we’re up against.”

“I know.” She pressed her cheek to Katya’s head. “Her father is Burian Ryazan, the director of the complex.”

Chapter 4

“W
ill you look at that? I don’t know how the old girl got this far,” Kurt Lang muttered, leaning under the hood of the truck. “Next time try stealing me a decent ride.”

Jack directed the flashlight where Kurt was working. The shed was open on the south side, so they were spared the worst of the wind. Still, it was cold enough to numb his fingers. “Nah. I know how much you like a challenge.”

“What’s wrong, Kurt?” Tyler moved into the shed, using his hat to slap the snow off his coat. He stopped beside Jack to peer over the fender.

“For starters, the sparkplugs are covered in crud, and this air filter looks as if it took a mud bath.”

“Maybe it did. The roads around here probably turn to soup when the ground thaws.”

“And look at this slime.” Kurt drew out the dipstick and wiped it on a rag. “No one’s changed the oil in this crate since the last ice age.”

Jack knew that nothing irked Kurt more than a poorly maintained engine, just as nothing pleased him more than the chance to tinker with one. He turned to Tyler. “Has Duncan picked up any chatter on the radio, junior?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Tyler replied. “Base has been monitoring the cell traffic around the complex, too. They’d let us know if it sounded as if anyone noticed our lady is missing.”

Jack wasn’t reassured. In fact, he was getting increasingly restless. He looked past the truck to the strip of darkness that was visible at the front of the shed. There were only a few hours to go before sunrise. The snow was no longer falling, but the wind was whipping what was on the ground into stinging, horizontal sheets that limited the visibility to nil—not the best conditions for anyone wanting to travel a mountain road.

Chances were good that the patrol they’d run into the day before had holed up someplace because of the weather, too, yet for how long? Eva had claimed that no one would notice her absence for at least a day, but Jack found that hard to believe. Too many things could go wrong. He didn’t know how the scientists at that place worked, but someone might decide they needed to ask Eva a question, or schedule a meeting or even hold a surprise fire drill. Maybe one of her neighbors would come over to borrow a cup of sugar. Any one of those scenarios could unravel her plan.

Still, he didn’t think the alarm would have been raised yet, since she spent her nights alone. She hadn’t told him that specifically, but that’s what he figured since she did say no one would notice her bed sheets were gone, and she’d said she’d broken up with her baby’s father.

If the man had been anyone else, the fact they were no longer an item would have been a good thing. But Burian Ryazan was no ordinary man. Intelligence had provided information on him, too. Ryazan was a brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning scientist who’d parlayed his distinguished looks and razor wit into pop-icon status in Russia. He’d been the guiding force behind establishing the fortified bioresearch complex in this next-to-inaccessible region of the Caucasus. He also had the political savvy to cultivate powerful allies, enough so that the complex got away with having its own little private army.

In short, Ryazan was smart, powerful and behaved like royalty. As ex-boyfriends went, they didn’t get much worse. Eva was right to be worried.

The rest of the team hadn’t been any happier than Jack when he’d broken the news to them. They’d known Ryazan would order a pursuit when he learned one of his scientists was missing. Things would go to a whole different level when he learned his child was gone, too.

This was going to get real personal, real fast.

Then again, it was already getting personal. As far as Jack was concerned, his own objectivity had gone up in smoke the instant he’d seen Eva nursing her baby.

Sure, he’d told himself not to look, but that wouldn’t have helped. Even if they’d been in pitch darkness he would have heard the quiet swish of that baby drawing in milk, and he would have smelled the sweet, uniquely feminine scent that rose from Eva’s bare skin. He’d have to have been dead to ignore all that.

What he couldn’t understand was why it had affected him so powerfully. He’d seen plenty of breasts up close and personal, starting with Lise Thibault’s in the backseat of her daddy’s car when he’d been fifteen. Even though that particular encounter had ended embarrassingly quickly, he’d learned quickly, too. Getting there was half the fun, and there were countless creative ways to both give and take pleasure from a woman’s breasts. Having a baby attached to one wasn’t exactly provocative.

It should have been a major turnoff to see Eva’s swollen, milky nipple. Yet it hadn’t been. She was a woman, doing what a woman was made for. And he’d never been more conscious of being a man. Hell, his pulse was speeding up now just thinking about it.