Her Last Defense

“Afraid I’m going to seduce you, Clint?” Macy asked softly. The sun was setting outside, lighting the tower room in a dim peach glow like candlelight.

“I’m afraid you won’t have to,” he answered honestly.

His life was coming apart at the seams. How easy it would be to forget his troubles in her.

She deserved better.

Clint faced her and couldn’t resist tucking a strand of dark, wavy hair behind her ear while she studied him with luminous eyes.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he breathed.

“I don’t want to be hurt. But I would like to be held.”

She let him decide. He liked that about her. It wouldn’t have taken much to push him over the edge. A kiss. A touch. But she stood back and let him decide.

In the end, she didn’t have to push him over the edge.

He leaped willingly.

Her Last Defense

Vickie Taylor

VICKIE TAYLOR

has always loved books—the way they look, the way they feel and most especially the way the stories inside them bring whole new worlds to life. She views her recent transition from reading to writing books as a natural extension of this longtime love. Vickie lives in Aubrey, Texas, a small town dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country,” where, in addition to writing romance novels, she raises American Quarter Horses and volunteers her time to help homeless and abandoned animals. Vickie loves to hear from readers. Write to her at: P.O. Box 633, Aubrey, TX 76227.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Epilogue

Chapter 1

It was a perfect night in hell.

Autumn leaves flickered silver and gold under a harvest moon. The surface of Lake Farrell, the best fishing hole in southeast Texas, rippled like black velvet. And the air, sharp with the scent of pine, was clean enough to scrub a month’s worth of city smog out of a man’s lungs with each breath.

Once, Texas Ranger Sergeant Clint Hayes had thought the old fishing cabin his Grandpop Charlie had left him was the closest place to heaven on earth. But not any longer. Not since a pair of beady eyes and a sallow smile had begun their nightly torment from the pier where Grandpop’s old dinghy still bobbed on the swells.

Sitting in a weathered grapevine chair on the stoop of the cabin, his bare feet propped on the porch rail, Clint narrowed his eyes and stared into the darkness, the soul of the night. “All right, you son of a bitch. This is it.”

Only the silence answered. His gut cramped. The Glock .9-millimeter weighed heavily in his right hand. He took a moment to dry his fingers on his jeans, then jerked up the pistol and squeezed off three rounds.

The pale, yellow eyes of his personal demon never wavered.

Jaw clenched and a growl emanating from between his teeth, Clint emptied the clip in one long burst, then threw the gun at the hellish eyes, howling hopelessly because he knew it didn’t matter that his bullets hadn’t connected. The real monster wasn’t out there.

It was inside him.

Breathing hard, he stared at his right hand. Even as he watched, his fingers betrayed him, trembling beyond his control. Finally, he clenched his shaking fist, swallowed hard and accepted the inevitable.

He couldn’t hold a gun steady any longer, and a cop who couldn’t hit what he aimed at didn’t belong on the street.

His career was over.

The deep quiet of the night pressed in on him. Even the nocturnal critters that usually scuttled around the cabin in the wee hours were still, scared off by the gunfire.

An ache so deep it vibrated in his marrow pushed him to his feet and off the porch, over the carpet of pine needles toward the lake, where the yellow smiley face he’d painted on a beer bottle and set on a piling as a target goaded him in the waning moonlight.

“You win, damn it!” he yelled as he swiped at the bottle with his foot. “Are you happy now?”

Pain exploded up his leg as flesh and bone connected with glass and sent the bottle arcing over the water. He hopped and cursed, rubbing the sore spot.

Well, at least some of his nerves still worked right.

Hobbling back ashore, he allowed himself a single sardonic laugh. ‘Cool-hand Clint’ people called him. Wasn’t so cool now, was he?

Fresh out of good curses, he turned his eyes to the black canopy overhead. He wasn’t a Ranger anymore. Couldn’t be. And without the job to ground him, he felt like a spacewalking astronaut who’d come untethered from his ship. Weightless. Rudderless. Drifting in the vast vacuum of space.

And very, very alone.

Searching for answers in the sky, he tried to focus on the points of light, the stars, not the boundless black void between them. Sailors used to navigate by the stars, he knew, but no matter how long he stared at them, how hard he concentrated, the chips of cold light charted no course for him.

Sighing, he turned to head back to the cabin when a flash over his right shoulder stopped him. The light flared blue for a moment, then flamed into an orange streak. A shooting star, he thought at first, then realized it couldn’t be. It was too bright and too close, moving too slowly.

An airplane, he realized a second later. And in trouble, by the sound of it. Its engine sputtered and whined as it passed overhead so low that Clint ducked reflexively. He just made out the shape of a small jet—blinking wing lights, oval windows in the fuselage, a flash of the white tail—before he lost sight of the aircraft behind the trees.

His breath stalled in his chest as he waited, listening.

The crash, when it came, wasn’t the booming explosion he expected. It sounded more like a distant car wreck. Metal screeched. Wood groaned and splintered. The air seemed to shudder around him. By the time silence had reclaimed the night, a pale glow, like a false sunrise, lit the treetops where the plane had gone down. Clint studied the fire, gauging its distance and how long it would take him to get there.

Tomorrow he would have to call the Ranger office and tell them the truth. Tell them he could no longer be the only thing he’d ever wanted to be.

But tonight, he was still a Texas Ranger.

From Macy Attois’s vantage point in a helicopter hovering above the wreckage, the tail of the aircraft jutting out of the east Texas thicket looked like the rear fin of a whale about to plunge beneath the ocean’s surface. But the scorched earth and shattered tree limbs around the crash site left no doubt that airplanes were not supposed to plunge. Or that when they did, it usually ended badly.

One white wing weighed down the boughs of a thick spruce. Bits of plastic and cloth, chunks of smoldering metal freckled the brambles along a trail of devastation hundreds of yards long. Emergency workers in reflective vests and hard hats picked through the debris, one spreading a white sheet over a hunk of fuselage that looked as though it might once have been a cockpit.

Tears filled Macy’s eyes as a firefighter stabbed a red flag—the indicator for the location of human remains—into the ground at one corner of the sheet. A thin plume of smoke curled upward from the spot as if to mark the trail of a soul leaving its earthly existence. Overhead a half dozen buzzards circled, hoping for a chance at the body left behind.

Grief rolled heavily in Macy’s chest. God, how many dead? Two in the cockpit. Then there was Jeffries, the man who’d been hired to tend the cargo. Cory Holcomb, the lab tech. Timlen Zufria, the Malaysian doctor working with them.

And David.

A strand of long, brown hair broke free from Macy’s braid to lash against her cheek. She turned her head away from the open door of the chopper as it banked low over the remnants of the once-sleek aircraft, scattering the buzzards.

Oh, David.

Closing her eyes, she choked back tears. She would not cry. Not in front of the others. Not when there was work to do.

How many times had David told her there was no room for emotion in medical research?

She’d never become as astute as him at separating her feelings from the job. Those feelings were the reason she’d become a doctor. She cared about people.

She’d cared about David.

“This is as close as I can get you,” the pilot’s voice crackled in her headset.

She opened her eyes, noting thankfully that they’d passed over the broken ruins of the jet. Below them now lay only a patchy gray-brown blanket of scrub mesquite west of the debris field. To the east the midmorning sun broke free of a cloud and flared brightly enough to burn Macy’s already-stinging eyes.

Squinting as she swept her gaze over the clearing, to the seemingly endless woods all around it, Macy gave the pilot a shaky thumbs-up. “It’ll do.”

At least the plane hadn’t crashed in a populated area. The souls aboard the chartered jet were gone, but there was still a chance a larger disaster could be averted.

As the Bell 429 descended, she hung her headset on the peg behind her seat and put on her helmet, careful to seal the double cuff between it and the neck of her environmental suit securely. The four other members of the team took her cue and donned their gear. She checked the airtight closure on each person’s wrists and ankles before they climbed out of the helicopter.

“Remember.” Her respirator muffled the words. She raised her voice to make sure no one missed her point. “These suits may be the only thing standing between life and death out there. Your life and your death. Make sure you take care of them.”

Maybe Macy was being overly cautious, but at least worrying about her people distracted her from thinking about what lay ahead. Twisted metal. Twisted bodies. Her and David’s research—work that might have saved so many lives—gone up in smoke. Or maybe down in flames was a better analogy.

The research was inconsequential now. There would be no laboratory-controlled experiments. No computer-modeled projections.

No containment, if her worst fears proved true.

Curtis Leahy, the logistics officer with surfer-dude good looks and the shaggy blond hair to match, nodded. “We all know the risks.”

Sweat trickled into Macy’s eye. Texas was still warm in early October, and her anxiety wasn’t helping. Unable to wipe the perspiration away because of her face shield, she blinked the droplets out of her eyes. “Then let’s none of us become statistics, okay?”

Noting that Susan and Christian Fargier, the twin brother and sister lab techs who’d brought excellent references to the CDC from the Mayo clinic in Minnesota, wore properly concerned expressions, Macy led her people toward the wreckage and prayed they weren’t too late to stop a tragedy from becoming a catastrophe.

One by one, the firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and forestry-service employees working around the wreck turned toward Macy and her team. They leaned on rakes and shovels, their faces smudged with ash, eyes watery and red. Sweat plastered their clothes to their bodies, rolled from beneath the headbands of their hard hats. They stared at the crew walking toward them as if Macy and her team were Martians emerging from a flying saucer.

Which is exactly what they looked like, Macy supposed, with their orange biohazard suits and respirator packs, carrying medical supplies in dimpled silver suitcases that caught the sunlight in bright flashes.

Macy fumbled with the pouch at her waist, pulled out her ID and held it up in a gloved hand. “I’m Dr. Macy Attois with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.”

The workers’ eyes turned wary. Several dropped the tools they’d been carrying. A few began to back away.

Macy’s heart rate kicked up a notch. She worked to keep her voice steady. Her panic would only feed theirs.

“This site is a biohazard,” she continued as unemotionally as she could manage. Some of them looked so young….

“Biohazard?” a Boy-Scout-faced young man in a brown forestry service shirt asked, the whites of his eyes standing out against flushed cheeks.

The crowd rumbled behind him. “What the—?”

“Did she say bio—”

“Hellfire—”

Macy raised her voice to an officious tone. “For your own safety, it’s important that you move away from the wreckage. My team will set up a triage area and check everyone out.” She heard the latches on the portable suitcases snick open as Susan and Christian set up behind her.

“Triage, hell.” A wild-eyed young sheriff’s deputy with a mustache that looked like a horseshoe hung upside down on his upper lip edged away from the others. His hand gripped the butt of the pistol on his hip. “I’m getting out of here.”

“That’s the worst thing you could do,” Macy said. She didn’t add that the state troopers already setting up roadblocks outside the Sabine National Forest, where the jet had crashed, had been ordered to turn back anyone who tried to leave the area—with lethal force, if necessary. “If you’ve been exposed, you need specialized treatment.”

The deputy swayed as if unsure whether or not to make a run for it. A man in a sooty, blue-flannel shirt caught him by the epaulet.

“Exposed to what?” the man asked.

Macy’s first impression of him was rugged. He wore a tan that couldn’t be bought in a salon. His body was long and lean, not overly muscled, and yet exuding a sense of sinewy strength, like a high-tension steel cable. When he moved through the crowd, pulling the deputy with him, the workers parted like the waters before Moses to give him room.

Whoever he was, he commanded the respect of the locals.

She waited until he’d almost reached her before answering his question with one of her own. “Who am I speaking to?”

His hair was brown, tempered by shades of gray that might have been natural or might have been a dusting of ash from the fire. His cheeks were thin, not an ounce of extra flesh on them. His nose looked as if it might have been broken a time or two and his mouth slashed across his face in a stiff line that said he didn’t smile much. But most notable were his eyes, deep-set, with rims bloodshot from the smoke around irises so gray they appeared metallic. And completely unreadable.

And calm as the Dead Sea.

She shook herself mentally, ignoring the shiver his stare sent crawling down her spine. She would not be intimidated by dead-calm eyes. Calm was good. They could all use a little calm right now.

“You’d be speaking to Sergeant Clint Hayes, ma’am,” he answered. “Texas Rangers.”

Macy’s eyes widened. No wonder he commanded the respect of the locals. The Texas Rangers walked on water in this part of the country.

Hope made her heartbeat flutter. Hope, and those unearthly eyes he had fixed on her. Surely with his help, she could get this crowd to cooperate. How did the old saying go? One riot, one ranger?

“Sergeant, why don’t you gather your crew,” she said softly, calling on his leadership. “Help me get them lined up over by my assistants. Then I’ll explain everything to you.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the assembly murmuring behind him, then turned to her, his straight lips pressed thin. “Why don’t you explain everything right here. To all of us.”

She tried to warn him off with a look, but his steely gaze knocked hers away as easily as a master swords-man parrying the thrust of an inferior opponent. A flush she couldn’t blame on the confinement of the bio suit heated her cheeks, but she lifted her chin, nonetheless. She had a job to do. Lives depended on her doing it.

“This plane was bound for the CDC research facility in Atlanta.” Her heart thundered with an urgency she hoped didn’t carry into her voice. “It was carrying a contagion.”

“What kind of contagion?”

She hesitated. “The flight originated in Malaysia.”

“ARFIS,” one of the workers behind him said, fear riding high in his voice.

She nodded, grateful for the protective shield on her helmet that would hide her reaction to the statement. “Acute Respiratory Failure Infectious Syndrome. If containment has been breached…”

Tears welled up as the image of the mass graves required simply to keep up with burial needs in Malaysia, where the disease had originated, sprang to mind unbidden.

Among the workers, only the Ranger looked unaffected.

“Then we’re all dead,” he said, his voice as unmoved as his eyes.

Chapter 2

Outrage swirled in Clint’s chest like a cyclone, circling ever tighter and faster until it spun itself into a hard knot that sat on the floor of his stomach where it could be kicked aside like a pebble on a sidewalk. Nothing of what he felt showed on his face—he made sure of it.

After six-and-a-half hours of shoveling dirt over the smoldering remains of the airplane, suppressing a wild-fire that could have consumed thousands of acres of trees and wildlife, Clint’s bad arm ached like a son of a bitch. The smoke had burned his nose and throat raw. His eyes were watering like he’d been hit square in the face with a shot of Mace. But they’d saved the Sabine National Forest, him and the others who had worked through the dark and then dawn, so they weren’t complaining.

Until Typhoid Mary showed up and told them they might have traded their lives for it.

“ARFIS?” Clint nearly spat the word. “What in God’s name were you thinking, bringing that bug here?”

The woman squared her shoulders. At least he thought she squared her shoulders. It was hard to tell with her wearing that astronaut suit.

“I was thinking I might develop a vaccine.”

He narrowed his eyes. Oh, yeah. She’d squared off, all right.

She took a step forward, a chess piece moved to block his advance. Her respirator rasped with each breath, making her sound like some kind of neon Darth Vader. “I was thinking I might save a few million lives.”

“Playing God.”

“Playing doctor,” the woman spat right back at him. She took another step forward. The glare on her face shield dimmed and Clint got his first real look at her—and that pebble he’d discounted so easily a moment ago slammed back into his gut like a boulder tumbling downhill. She might not be too big, or too smart, playing with bugs like ARFIS, but she had a face that would inspire a horde of Huns to sing like angels.

A hint of wild, dark hair framed her heart-shaped face. Her mouth pursed into a perfect bow, her lips naturally rosy. Her skin tone was olive and her nose turned up just enough at the end to give the face personality. She was alluring, exotic and his body tightened against his will.

He tried to stop the physical reaction without success, then tried to ignore it and failed almost as miserably.

What was wrong with him? Women did not affect him this way. Ever.

“It’s what I do,” she finished, though he hardly heard her past his clamoring pulse.

She stepped past him to face the gathered workers. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she told them. The raspy respirator only made her French-Cajun accent sultrier. Sexier. “We don’t know that the virus has escaped the containers it was packed in, yet, much less whether any of you have been exposed to it. There’s no reason to panic.”

She was good, Clint gave her that. Had a nice soothing way about her that sounded like she really cared. But the workers were beyond soothing. As his hormones cooled, Clint could feel the tension mounting behind him, fear rising.

“If it’s so safe here,” someone called out. “Then why are y’all wearing them spacesuits?”

“The suits are just a precaution. I’m sure you can understand—”

“I understand that we ain’t got no suits.”

A wave of murmured “Yeahs” rippled through the crowd. Their growing restlessness had the hairs prick-ling on the back of Clint’s neck. Trouble was brewing. The lady was in over her head. She didn’t know these people. Didn’t understand that they weren’t city folk, conditioned to expect the unexpected. They lived a quiet, routine life. The possibility of being at the epicenter of an epidemic was going to scare the hell out of them. And fear could make people do crazy things.

“I seen those people on TV,” Deputy Sheriff Slick Burgress spoke up, finger-combing his long mustache anxiously. “The sick ones in Malaysia. They drowned in their own blood.”

“Those were extreme cases—”

“Then you admit it could happen!” someone shouted.

“People, please. Even if the virus did escape, it can only live in the air for three, maybe four minutes. Once it settles from the air it can only survive if it lands in some sort of moisture, oil- or water-based. You’d have to touch it—”

“Lady we’ve been climbing over this wreck since before dawn putting out fires. There’s hydraulic oil and fuel and water all over the place, and we done touched every bit of it,” Cal Jenkins, an EMT from Hempaxe, the closest town, admitted. His voice rose, shook. “I got a wife. Kids.”

“The best thing you can do for them is allow my team to examine you.”

“Screw that. I’m gettin’ out of here.” He threw his shovel down.

“Me, too.”

“I’m with you. She can’t stop us.”

“That’s the worst thing you can do,” the woman cried.

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint saw some of the workers edge away. The fear in the air was palpable, and ready to combust.

Damn.

He didn’t like the way she’d sauntered in here, safe behind her protective face shield and airtight suit, and told two-dozen men they might have contracted a fatal illness. He didn’t like that she asked them to line up to be poked and prodded before they’d had time to absorb the information and he especially didn’t like the way his heart dropped between his legs just from looking at her.

Stiffly, careful to keep his gaze on the crowd and not her, he clenched his free hand into a fist in an uncharacteristic display of frustration and turned to stand shoulder to shoulder with her, dragging the deputy along with him. He didn’t like taking her side against his own folk, but until he actually turned in his gun and badge, he was still a Texas Ranger. He had an obligation.

“She’s right.” Clint met each worker’s gaze, one by one. He stopped the deserters in their tracks with a hard look.

“You standin’ against us, Hayes?” a gray-haired firefighter in threadbare turnout gear asked.

“I’m not standing against anybody,” he answered carefully, setting his face in the mask of composure that had served him well in situations even more volatile than this one.

Skip Hollister, the pot-bellied mechanic and captain of the volunteer fire department, spat and wiped his face with his arm, leaving a black smear across his pudgy cheek. “If you’re not standing with us, then you’re against us.”

“I’m just saying maybe you ought to think a minute before you go rushing off.” And just to make it clear that wasn’t a request, he moved his hand to his hip, purposely drawing attention to the bulge of his gun under the untucked tail of his shirt. Habit had made him clip the holster to his belt when he’d rushed out of the cabin before dawn, even though the weapon was useless to him now.

“What are you going to do, shoot me?” Hollister inched away from the crowd. His fingers tightened around the shovel he carried until his knuckles went white.