Deadly Desire. Katherine Garbera

It was the same bold strokes he always used.” She was tired of talking about this. It wasn’t helping. Somehow being here in the jungle made the threat all the more real. Right now she felt out of control. Only the glances she kept taking at the monitor on her GPS unit made her feel more in charge.

      Less a victim of this Yura disease that might spread throughout the entire Amazon basin region. A disease that the government and Raul Veracruz both denied existed. She didn’t understand that. Raul had always been a top-notch virologist. She couldn’t believe he’d have missed something this lethal.

      “When we stop tonight I’m going to have my assistant send me some further information on Lassa. Did you definitely rule that out?” Mac asked after several minutes.

      “Yes. Why are you questioning me?” she asked. Did he doubt her research?

      “I don’t want to give an untried treatment to people,” he said at last.

      “Why not? The disease is fatal. A treatment gives them a good chance to stay healthy.” She’d bet that his doubt had something to do with his Southeast Asia experience. She wanted to know more about it. Had he put glory in front of human lives?

      “Experience.”

      There was an expression in his eyes that she’d seen once or twice on a virologist fresh from a hot zone. There was nothing like fighting a disease in its environment and coming home barely the winner. “Does this have something to do with—”

      “I said experience. Leave it at that.”

      She stepped away from him. He was surly now, as if it was okay for him to probe into her life but not vice versa. He wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “I don’t understand you,” she said.

      He closed the gap between the two of them. There was something challenging in the way he crowded her. Man-woman challenging, and it made Jane take a step back. She wasn’t used to dealing with men who got in her face. She was kind of an ice queen at work and in the field she was all business. Damn. This trip was making her crazy already.

      “That makes two of us,” he said.

      When he pulled his arm away she realized the sleeve had blood on it. She searched his face in the waning light, finding a cut at his hairline. “Are you injured?”

      “It’s nothing. Just a flesh wound,” he said, moving out of her reach when she tried to check it out.

      “We’re in the jungle. A flesh wound—”

      “I know it could mean death. I put some antiseptic on it.”

      “Let me see it,” she said. He stood still. She had to step very close so that each breath he exhaled brushed her face. He smelled of sweat and mint. She hadn’t been this close to a man in a long time. In fact, Raul had been the last man.

      It had taken her a long time to get over him. Not because she’d been mooning or anything like that. But because she’d felt, of all the men she’d dated, Raul was the one she could have gone the distance with. They’d both shared so much. Work and career, similar outlooks on life and of course white-hot passion.

      Mac stared at her and she realized she was just looking at him. Carefully she probed around the cut with her fingers. He didn’t flinch, and she saw that the wound had started to close.

      She went up on tiptoe for a better look.

      “Going to kiss it and make it better?” he asked. His lips brushed the side of her cheek when he spoke.

      Shivers spread down her body from the warmth of his breath against her skin. Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t trust him or maybe it was just some sort of animal magnetism that he possessed. But whatever it was, he made her very aware of needs she’d ignored for too long now.

      He was trying to rattle her. She knew it and he knew it. But Jane had been holding her own against hard-ass men her entire life. And it took a lot more than intimidation to scare her.

      Jane put her shoulders back and stood a little taller. It helped that she’d spent a lifetime getting to know herself so well, because she had utter confidence in her ability to do what she’d come to the Amazon basin to do. Her nature wouldn’t let her accept failure.

      “Maybe it’s worse than you think and I’ll have to put you out of your misery.”