Natural Evil by Thea Harrison Page A

please?”
    She said, comfortably, “Fuck, no.”
     
     
    He was pissed. He was royally pissed. She could see it in the angle of his shoulders and the way he held his jaw. Well, he was just going to have to deal with it.
    She tried her sat phone without much hope. She wasn’t surprised to find she still didn’t have a signal.
    One or two stars had begun to show although the sky was still mostly overcast, turning the landscape into dull shadows. In the early hours of the morning, any residual heat from the day was long gone. She found the cold air bitter. When they climbed in the car, she put the heater on high. Soon after, he turned it down and began to argue with her.
    She maintained her silence, made the turns when he told her to and kept watch for unwanted company. Finally she told him, mildly enough, “I’m going to smack you upside the head if you don’t stop.”
    When she glanced at him, his eyes glittered and his shadowed face was hard, and that expression was even sexier than his flirting.
    He took a strand of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not going to stop.”
    She refused to hear nuances in that. She said, “You need to quit reacting with your emotions and think of what is optimal.”
    “Optimal,” he spat.
    She reached up to pull his hand away from her hair. “The optimal thing would be for you to drive out and take my sat phone with you. You keep trying the phone until you get a signal. You’re the one with the official status, the contacts and the authority. You’ll get help here on the ground much quicker than I would.”
    Somehow she hadn’t let go of his hand. His long warm hands curled around hers, and she drove one-handed. “And you?” His tone was still short, and he didn’t like what she was saying, but at least he was listening.
    “Worst case scenario,” she said, “we can hope it’s not true, but we have to act as if it is. What if there are people across that passageway in the Other land? The company will have a store of commercial mining explosives on site. What would you do if you thought you were in danger of getting caught, and you wanted to cover your tracks?”
    His grip tightened until she was in danger of losing feeling in her fingers. She could hear his breathing. “What is your solution?” he asked at last.
    She squeezed his hand, because she could hear how difficult it had been for him to ask that question. “We have to trust each other,” she said quietly. “You get me over the fence before you leave, and you let me do something I am really good at. I’ll recon the area, and if everything’s all right, I’ll find a good place to watch and wait. And if somebody tries to do something they shouldn’t, I’ll stop them.”
    The measure of an intelligent man, she thought, is when he allows reason to influence his actions, whether he wants it to or not.
     
     
    They found a place to leave her car where it couldn’t be seen from the road, tucked behind a few yucca trees. Then he changed into his Wyr form. He had a satellite phone as well, but it had been stored at the camp for two cold desert nights, so she brought hers along to be safe. The moon provided some illumination, but the ground was still treacherously uneven, so they jogged at a careful pace for the mile and a half back to his campsite.
    He had set camp discreetly among a tumble of large, broken rock, and both site and Jeep were still undisturbed. She started out feeling cold, stiff and tired. Halfway into the run, her muscles loosened and the warm rush of her blood sharpened her thinking.
    Once he had agreed to a course of action, Luis didn’t waste any time. She walked to keep her muscles warm as he dove into his tent. A few minutes later, he stepped out dressed in jeans, T-shirt, hiking boots and a battered, black leather jacket. He was stuffing something into a pack as he emerged. “Here’s a blanket, an MRE and some bottled water,” he said. “Should help you stay warm and alert.