The Complete Mackenzie Collection Read online

  “Did you tell him?” she asked, the first time she had spoken. He was a little startled at the harshness of her tone.

  “No. I’ve never told anyone, until now. If you knew my dad, you’d know why. He would have gone after the guy and literally killed him with his bare hands, and I couldn’t stand to lose Dad again.” He steeled himself to turn and face her, braced for the pity he would see in her eyes, but what he saw was a long way from pity. She was standing with her fists clenched, her face savage with rage. If that long-ago man had been standing there right then, Caroline Evans would have killed him, too. She wasn’t a half-breed Comanche warrior, but her spirit was just as swift and fierce, and her sea-colored eyes were blazing. Startled, he began to laugh.

  “Don’t laugh, don’t you dare laugh!” she roared. “I’ll kill him—”

  “You don’t have to, sweetheart,” he soothed, jerking her into his arms when she evaded his more gentle attempts to embrace her. “He’s dead. He died two years after the welfare people took me away. After I had graduated from the Academy I decided to check, just for the information. Hell, who am I kidding? There’s no telling what I would have done if he’d still been alive.”

  He pushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. “Maybe I was tougher than most kids, but he didn’t damage me permanently, except for always wanting to be in control. He didn’t warp me sexually. Being around Dad was probably the best therapy I could have had, as far as sex is concerned. He was always totally open about it, treating it as just part of nature. And we had the horse ranch. A kid learns the basics damn fast on a ranch. I was okay with in six months of getting back with Dad. There was a bedrock of love there that never let me down.”

  “Except you’re still a control fanatic,” she growled.

  He had to laugh again. “You can’t even lay all the blame for that on what happened. I’m a fighter pilot. My life depends on being in control. It’s part of my training as well as my personality.”

  She nuzzled her face against his sweat-dampened chest. “Well, you have a reason for it, but that doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “No, I don’t guess you would,” he said in amusement. “That’s why you continually push me, trying to make me lose control. Well, lady, you succeeded. Are you pleased with yourself?” His voice turned deep and serious. “I could have hurt you, sweetheart.”

  She looked like the cat who had had an entire gallon of cream, not just a measly saucerful. “It was wonderful,” she purred. “And I wasn’t frightened. You can’t hurt me by loving me. The only way you’ll ever hurt me is if you stop loving me.”

  His arms tightened around her. “Then you’re safe for a lifetime.” He held her close for a long, long time, and he felt something relax within him, something that he hadn’t even known was tightly wound. She was inside his defenses now, and he no longer had to keep his guard up. Defeat had never been sweeter, because he’d come away with the grand prize.

  At the moment his grand prize was bruised and half-naked, but still valiant. He released her with a little swat to her bare backside. “Get your clothes on, woman. It’s sundown, and we have to get back to the base.”

  Chapter 14

  It was almost anticlimactic. The danger the night before had been very real, but it wasn’t long after dusk when they veered back close to the road and a car came by, cruising very slowly, shining a spotlight off to the side. Caroline gasped and started to hit the dirt, but Joe kept her upright with a firm grip on her arm. His eagle eyes had spotted something she couldn’t make out in the darkness: the row of lights on top of the car. Literally dragging her in his wake, he strode out into the road.

  The car stopped. The spotlight wavered, then settled on him. “I’m Colonel Joe Mackenzie, out of Nellis,” he said. His deep voice carried that unmistakable note of command. “I need to get back to the base as soon as possible.”

  The state trooper switched off the spot and got out of the car. “We’ve been searching for you, sir,” he said in a respectful tone. Military personnel or not, there was something about Joe Mackenzie that elicited that response. “Are you all right, injured in any way? A van was found—”

  “We know about the van. We were in it,” Joe said dryly.

  “We were ordered by the governor to give every assistance to the military in finding you. A statewide search was started this morning.”

  Joe put his arm around Caroline and ushered her into the back seat; then he went around and took a seat up front. Caroline found herself staring at the back of his head through steel mesh.

  “Hey,” she said indignantly.

  Joe glanced back and began to laugh. “Finally,” he said, “I’ve found a way to control you.”

  “The sensor alarms went wild,” Captain Hodge said. “Once when Ms. Evans entered the work area after she was already recorded as being inside, and again when you entered without your ID tag, Colonel. The first guard was there within two minutes, but the building was empty. They must have dragged both of you out immediately and then panicked. They loaded you in Mr. Gilchrist’s van and bolted.

  “Ms. Evans’ quarters were checked and she was discovered missing. Amazing. I didn’t know anyone could get out a window that small,” he said, glancing at her.

  “I’m not very thick,” she replied coolly.

  He cleared his throat at the look in her eyes. “I tried to notify you, Colonel, and found that you were missing, too, though there was no record of you leaving the base. Nor had Ms. Evans attempted to leave. There was a record, however, of Mr. Gilchrist leaving immediately after the alarm had sounded.”

  “The other guy must have been hidden in back with us,” Joe said.

  “Who was he?” she asked. “He looked familiar, but at the same time I didn’t know him.”

  Hodge looked at his ever-present clipboard. “His name was Carl Mabry. You’d probably seen him in the control room. He was a civilian working with the radar.”

  “How did Gilchrist get involved with him?” Joe asked. “And there are others. Have you found out anything about them?”

  They were sitting in his office. Both he and Caroline had been checked over by the medics and declared basically sound. Somewhere along the line, Caroline’s clothes had vanished and the well-meaning nurses had tried to stuff her into one of the too-revealing backless, shapeless gowns that were standard for every hospital. Caroline’s sense of style had been outraged, but the green surgicals had appealed to her. She was wearing a set now and somehow looked dashing in them.

  “Evidently, Gilchrist was recruited after he began work here,” Hodge said. “Mabry belonged to a radical group that opposed defense spending. You know the type. They want the money for humanitarian purposes, even if they have to kill to get it.”

  “Then just how,” Caroline asked in an awful tone, “did he get security clearance?”

  Hodge winced. “I—uh, we’re still checking on that. But he didn’t have clearance into the laser building.”

  “So how did he get in without triggering the alarms?” Joe asked impatiently.

  Caroline snorted. “The program has a major weakness. The alarm is set off by a body entering or leaving without a card—but not a card entering or leaving without a body.”

  Hodge’s hair was too short to pull, so he ran both hands over his crew-cut head. “What?” he almost yelled.

  “Well, it’s obvious. I certainly didn’t go into the building with Cal when he was supposedly searching for my tag, but the computer said that I did, which means he must have had the tag with him and flashed it so the sensors would pick it up, thereby destroying any record that he had entered the building alone and discrediting my story of having misplaced my tag. There wasn’t anything Cal didn’t know about computers. He probably figured it out not long after he started work on base, testing it by swinging the tag through the doorway on a string, or something like that. If he’d been caught, he wasn’t doing anything he would be arrested for, just playing with the computers like any hacker