Mount Blue
Haven
“If you don’t stop right this minute, I’m going to throw you over my shoulder and tie you down to the bed,” Catherine’s husband Mac growled.
When Tom “Mac” McEnroe growled most people cringed. His speaking voice was naturally low and very deep. When he growled it was the same timbre of a bear in a cave. Match that with a huge, muscled body and an ugly, scarred face, and most people would be terrified.
Catherine McEnroe wasn’t terrified. Not at all. She knew the good man inside the terrifying exterior and she knew, above all, that he loved her.
“Why Mac,” she smiled and simpered, dramatically fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I had no idea your tastes ran that way.”
He made an exasperated noise deep in his throat and she laughed.
They were in Haven’s infirmary. There was a massive rescue mission under way and new refugees were arriving hourly. None of them were infected. Everyone who arrived was placed separately in secure rooms, in quarantine, subjected to thermal scanning for half an hour and spot tests of pupils and body temperature. Infection showed up quickly. As soon as they passed the test, they were admitted into their community.
Before the outbreak, Haven had been an outlaw community. Mac, Nick, and Jon had been members of a super-elite group of warriors known as Ghost Ops. But they had been betrayed, accused of treason, and had disappeared. Mac had known of an abandoned mine inside a mountain, and from there they built their high-tech headquarters, Haven. By some mysterious process, Haven had attracted a community of geniuses and good people, most of them on the run from something.
Catherine herself had found her way here, to the home of her heart, by bearing a message from Mac’s commanding officer, Lucius Ward. The three men had thought Ward had betrayed them, but Lucius had been betrayed himself, together with three young soldiers of Ghost Ops. The four of them had been hideously tortured and experimented on by Arka.
Their nemesis.
The company was no more, but it had unleashed this terrible virus before dying, like a scorpion’s tail delivering one last fatal sting.
“You are not going to joke your way out of this, Catherine,” Mac said in his laying-down-the-law voice. To most everyone he came across, that voice was the voice of God. Catherine obeyed him too. When she wanted to. The other times . . .
She swept a hand at the infirmary. It was organized chaos. New arrivals were coming in hourly. Though there were no infected, there were plenty of people who’d been injured in the evacuation. Lacerations, broken bones, concussions were the order of the day.
They both sidestepped as a volunteer nurse rolled in a patient on a gurney, a young woman with a severely bruised face and a broken arm. Soon the infirmary would be full and they would have to start stacking them in the corridors.
Catherine looked up at Mac. “There’s so much to be done,” she said softly.
He closed his eyes and pinched his nose.
Catherine touched him, laying her hand on his muscled forearm. She had a gift. It had been a curse most of her life, but here in Haven she came into it fully and accepted it fully as a gift. She was an empath, and a powerful one. Each day refined her gift. She could feel people’s emotions at a touch. And if she was close to the person, she could almost read thoughts. And in Mac’s case, since she loved him, she could read his thoughts. He was an open book to her.
And she could read clearly, as if in a book, how much he loved her and how worried he was for her. How worried he was for the baby in her belly.
Mac had no family at all. Being without human ties had actually been a condition for joining Ghost Ops—a deniable team of elite warriors, completely off the books. They had to have no ties whatsoever, no family, no friends, no loved ones.
At the time, that had been fine with them. Mac had never loved a woman. Had sex, yes. A lot—though he’d told her he hadn’t had sex since the group’s betrayal the year before. He thought they had been betrayed by a man he idolized and it had been nearly a mortal blow.
She had changed all of that. She came to him with proof that he hadn’t been betrayed by his commanding officer, Lucius Ward, and it turned out she came with living proof that he could love.
The moment she and Mac had met—even though he had suspected her of being a mole, sent in to find him and his teammates—the relationship had exploded. And now they were married and expecting a child, and it unnerved Mac completely. He hadn’t had a place in his head and his heart for love, had barely coped with the idea of falling in love with her, and now there was a new life coming, to love and to care for and—this still blew Mac’s mind—that new life would be his blood relative. His only blood relative in the world.
Mac had no idea how to cope with all these feelings and the only thing that made sense to him was to make sure nothing harmed her or their child. He was a warrior, a protector, and that he knew how to do. And the way to do that, apparently, was to make sure that she did nothing more strenuous than sit on the couch and read a book. Maybe listen to a little music.
While the world burned around them.
Catherine loved Mac, and, more to the point, she understood him. Bone deep. So she cut him some slack even though he exasperated her enormously at times, like right now.
Refugees were streaming in hourly, their resources were strained to the limits, every hand with medical training was absolutely essential. If they ever hoped to survive this plague, everyone had to pitch in.
But fighting him would only get his back up. It was only the fact that Catherine understood deeply, bone deep, Mac’s fear of losing her, which kept her from kicking him in the backside.
“Mac,” she said softly, taking one of his big hands in both of her own. Under his skin she could feel the emotions skittering, something that would surprise people who thought of him as an emotionless hulk of a man, cold as ice. Her Mac wasn’t cold, just controlled. She knew, too—and this was brand-new to her—that her touch soothed him, as if she were cool water poured over a burning wound. That had been his description of what happened when she touched him while he was upset. “My darling, we’re fighting not just for our lives here, but we’re fighting so that something remains when this—this thing burns itself out. We’re bringing a child into the world, and I want there to be a world for her, or him, to grow up in. And you know that—”
“Make a hole!” Larry Vetter, one of their engineers, rushed by with a bleeding man on a gurney. Catherine and Mac pressed themselves against the wall. Larry caught Mac’s eye as he rushed past. “Bakersfield’s gone, Mac. No one left. Just got word.”
Bakersfield gone.
Just like that. A city of over four hundred thousand, all dead. Or worse. Infected.
Catherine’s eyes followed the gurney. Beyond the door were over a hundred patients, tested to make sure they were uninfected, but still wounded and bleeding. She needed to help the way she needed to breathe.
“Let me go, Mac.” She turned and met his dark eyes. “If we all work together, maybe we can ensure there are enough people to start again. I don’t want to think about what the world could become. I don’t want our child to grow up in the Dark Ages.”
She was still holding his hand and she could feel the emotions in him, strong and pure. He was so easy for her to read. Love. Pride. Fear.
Love won.
“Okay,” he grated. He stepped away. “Go save the world, Catherine.”
She smiled sadly at him. “Just our corner of it, my love.”
She tugged at the front of his shirt and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. When their lips broke apart, she hooked a hand around the back of his neck and put her lips to his ear. “Thank you, darling. You are definitely getting lucky as soon as I can take a breather.”
San Francisco
Beach Street
If they could tune out the sounds of violent mayhem from outside, it could almost have been a . . . a date. A romantic one, at that. Sophie had pulled her curtains and lit candles. No real way of telling if the infected had a tropism toward light, but better safe than sorry.
And it did create an atmosphere.
If it weren’t the end of the world, it would be pretty cool. Jon Ryan sitting next to her at her table—he refused to let her set his place across from her. He wanted to sit right by her. As dates went, he was a ten, an impossibly handsome and attractive man. The candlelight just loved him. He was so attractive it was almost overkill. Strong, sharp features limned in the glow of the candles, which picked out the gold highlights in his long hair. Much, much more handsome than Brad Pitt had been, back in the day.
For all his looks, he didn’t have an actor’s softness. No, this guy was all tough male. Hard muscles that didn’t look like they’d been built in a gym. They looked like they’d been won in battle. Hands not actor-soft but hard and callused and nicked. Hands that were used.
Hands that knew what they were doing.
Heat flashed through her body at the memory of him touching her as they made love. Hard and callused, yes, but his hands had also been expert and tender. She’d felt clearly the calluses on his fingertips as they circled her where she had been so slick and tender . . .
Sophie’s face was probably beet red by now.
She worked with people who had special psychic gifts. She’d worked with empaths, who could read a person’s emotions with a touch. Thank God Jon didn’t give any signs of being gifted in that way because she would just sink to the floor and die.
“Here.” She gently pushed the platter with her zucchini omelet over to him, afraid that if she held it out, he’d see that her hands were trembling. “Have some more.”
He’d already eaten half of her eight-egg omelet. His manners were impeccable, but clearly he’d been hungry.
“Don’t have to ask me twice.” He smiled at her and cut himself another wedge.
Oh God. It was the first real smile she’d seen from him and . . . he had a dimple. It appeared, unexpectedly, in his right cheek. A dimple. Oh, this was too much. She took in a deep breath and slid the wooden cheeseboard over to him as well.
“These are all great,” he said as he cut himself a slice of goat cheese.
“Yes, well, it’s San Francisco,” she said before she could think her words through. “Was San Francisco,” she corrected. Who knew when the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market would open again. If it could ever open again. To open, it would need the rebuilding of a subculture of farmers and cheese makers and vintners. She gave a crooked smile. “Maybe rat brains cooked over a trash fire will figure large in our future.”
Jon put his hand over hers and squeezed gently. His big hand was so warm, so comforting. She looked down at her hand under his. She had a scientist’s hands. Soft and pale, with only the strength necessary to pipette liquids into vials and pound the keyboard. His hand looked as if it could haul a tank.
“There won’t be any rat brains in Haven. Put that image out of your mind. We’re completely self-sufficient in energy and water and food. The refugees will put some strain on us but we have enormous reserves. Mac, Nick, and I are used to military planning and—well, we planned for a siege right from the start.”
Oh no. Her breath blocked in her chest. Her hand slid from his and her back hit the chairback with a thud. “You knew this was coming?” she whispered. The words would barely come out between numb lips. “You knew and you didn’t stop it?”
He grabbed her hand back. “No, God no. We didn’t plan for this. For a massive outbreak of a deadly virus, no.”
Her lungs expanded on a loud gasp. For a second there she thought—No. Arka had engineered the virus, not some people on a mountaintop in Northern California.
She had to wait a minute to be able to speak, though. “Okay,” she said when she could keep her voice even. “Explain why you have a community that plans for sieges.”
He didn’t answer right away. He simply looked at her, his bright blue eyes burning into hers. He didn’t try to hide his scrutiny, didn’t try to pretty it up. He just stared so intensely, it felt as if he were walking around inside her head, picking at her thoughts. Turning them over. What was he waiting for?
Finally, he spoke. “Okay.” He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. The touch was casual, a friendly gesture, no more. But she shivered.
He noticed. Those bright ice blue eyes noticed everything.
“Two years ago I would have been shot by the U.S. government for telling you this, but I think, all things considered, that soon there might not be a U.S. military to shoot me anymore, so it’s a moot point.”
“If you told me, you’d have to kill me?” she teased. A thousand movies had used that line.
He wasn’t smiling. “Exactly.” The way he said it sobered her. “If I had talked to you about us two years ago and someone in my chain of command found out, you’d have been tracked down and disappeared. No one would ever have heard from you again. Least of all me.”
This happened in the real world. She knew that. Her smile was gone. “Your chain of command is probably gone,” she said softly.
His jaws clenched. “It’s definitely gone,” he answered. “Mac, Nick, and I belonged to a deniable military unit. Deniable means that if we were ever caught, Uncle Sam would deny our very existence. We were Ghosts. We were off the books, our pasts wiped out, our military records erased. All photographs tracked down and destroyed. We didn’t exist. We deployed on missions where the U.S. government could not be seen as intervening. Posse comitatus didn’t apply to us, since technically we didn’t exist. Do you know what that is?”
Sophie nodded. “Sure. It’s the law that stops the military from acting on American soil.”
He gave a sharp nod. “Exactly. But technically we weren’t military. We weren’t anything. So when the military got word that a lab in Cambridge was very close to perfecting a weaponized version of Yersinia pestis, they called us.”
She gasped. A weaponized version of Yersinia was one of the worst things she could think of. Almost as bad as what was happening outside her windows. “The plague! A genetically modified version of the bacillus that can spread quickly—maybe airborne—it would be a disaster!”
“Oh yeah.” His face tightened. “Believe me when I say that the seven of us—the founders, the plankholders of Ghost Ops—were highly motivated to retrieve the material and shut the research down. We had a very short chain of command. Our team leader, Captain Lucius Ward reported to General Clancy Flynn, who reported to the President. So when we got our orders from Lucius, we were ready to go in fifteen.”
“Who were the other three?”
“Three of the best teammates you can imagine. Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist.”
Something about the way he said their names . . . “Did they die in the mission?”
Something dangerous flashed in his icy blue eyes. “No. It might have been better if they had. They ended up on the wrong end of a scalpel. They spent a year under the knife.”
Sophie blinked.
“It was a trap, Sophie.” His voice had been calm up until then. Now the heat of rage shaded through it. “It was an Arka Pharmaceuticals lab and General Flynn and Dr. Charles Lee wanted to get rid of Lucius and get rid of us. Nobody was weaponizing bubonic plague. They were actually perfecting a cancer vaccine. We were sent into battle under a lie. We were ambushed in a firefight and an explosion took out the lab. Only three of us survived, or so we thought. We thought Pelton, Romero, and Lundquist died and Lucius escaped. We thought he’d betrayed us for money.” His jaws clenched and he looked away for a moment, visibly trying to control himself. “The thought that the captain would betray us for money—well, it nearly brought us to our knees. Mac particularly. He was recruited by the captain, trained by the captain to head up the Ghost Ops team. Mac would have gladly given his life for the captain. All of us would have. And here we were—betrayed, under arrest, on our way to a secret court-martial.”
He looked away again, jaws clenched. The memories brought him pain, distress. Sorrow came off him in almost visible waves, though his face betrayed nothing. It didn’t have to, she could see the pain.
Sophie didn’t know what to do, so she did the only thing she could—she touched him. Since childhood she’d had two different types of touches. Normal touch, human skin to human skin. It could be a hug, walking arm in arm, accidental touches. But over and above that, she could also Touch. It was an entirely different thing altogether and she still didn’t understand it, even after a lifetime of it.
She’d become part of the Arka research project not just to understand the science of paranormal phenomena, but to understand herself.
To understand how she could heal.
Not all the time and not always fully, because it was erratic, but when she threw a switch on inside herself, something that had no explanation in normal science happened. She was a scientist and she’d always gotten straight As in everything, including English. So she should have been able to explain to herself what happened when she threw that switch, but she couldn’t. She could barely describe it.
But Sophie let it happen, this gift she barely understood.
She warmed up in a flash, heat crackling through her in a palpable wave. The heat was entirely subjective, though, because she’d taken her own temperature during a healing session and it never went above 98.6. The heat didn’t feel like a fever. Fevers were a reaction to a pathology. This didn’t feel like pathology, it felt . . . right. As if she were throwing a circuit of nature, and power flowed from her to the sick person.
Her first conscious use of her Touch had been at the age of twelve with Fritzi, the dumb and the beautiful. He’d been run over by a car on the street outside their house. The house had had a fence around it, but later they’d discovered that Fritzi had dug his way out. She and her parents had been having breakfast on a Saturday morning when they’d heard a loud thump and then anguished wailing.
Rushing out onto the street, they’d seen Fritzi lying on his side, whining, trying to lick his red hindquarters. Sophie’s father had gathered Fritzi in his arms while Sophie clung to her father, crying as he carried the wounded animal to their porch.
While her father took out his cell to call the vet, Sophie threw her arms around Fritzi, burying her face in his soft golden fur that smelled of shampoo and dog and . . . something happened. She felt waves of heat that didn’t burn. She was barely aware of the fact that Fritzi’s whines had stopped and that he’d started licking her arms instead of his hindquarters. All she knew was that she loved this beautiful dog who’d been a puppy during her own puppyhood.
He stood up.
Sophie had fallen back, so weak she couldn’t stand up, though Fritzi could.
They took Fritzi to the vet and a surprised Dr. Felsom told her parents that the X-rays showed bone fractures that had recently healed.
Sophie healed Nana Henderson’s arthritis, her mother’s breast cancer, and her father’s broken femur. She’d healed an aneurysm in an old family friend, Emma Price. Aunt Emma’s aneurysm had disappeared after a session with Sophie, and it was only her father’s influence that had stopped Aunt Emma’s cardiologist from publishing the incredible results—the clear aneurysm on the angiogram on September 12, no aneurysm on the angiogram on September 20.
No one told the cardiologist that Sophie had spent an afternoon with Aunt Emma on the seventeenth. And no one told him that Sophie spent the next week in bed, too weak to get up.
From that moment on, she was forbidden to help anyone.
Sophie had never tried to heal the spirit, but she felt that Jon had an ailment as deathly as an aneurysm. A bone-deep sorrow that in any other human would have been crippling.
The sorrow was profound and deep and old. Not linked to the suffering outside the window. That was like rain falling on an already flooded plain.
So she Touched him, and was nearly staggered by the waves of pain and sorrow.
“Go on,” she urged. “Tell me.”
Jon shook his head, frowning. He looked at her, opened his mouth and shut it. Something was happening to him, something he couldn’t explain. She was absorbing his pain, trying to withstand the onslaught.
“Mac knew of an abandoned mine inside Mount Blue.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “That’s the place Catherine mentioned.”
He had hesitated just a second before saying the name of the location, just as no last names had been exchanged when she was talking with Elle and Catherine Young.
Jon’s head was still in the Old World. In this New World, all secrets were gone. How could there be state secrets when the state had disappeared? He hadn’t understood this yet, but he would.
“Right away, we had people who just . . . come to us.” He raised his eyebrows, rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “The damnedest thing,” he muttered. “It’s like we became this—this magnet. For people on the run, for misfits, for people with gifts that got them into trouble. One of the first was an engineer who’d worked for a criminal construction company that got a lot of people killed and framed him for it. He just . . . showed up one evening.”
His eyes slid to hers.
“You have to understand something. Mac, Nick, and I are experts in security. We’re the best. The very first thing we did was surround our hideout with remote sensors so thick a fly couldn’t fart without our knowing about it. And Eric—he just waltzed right in. No one should have been able to do that, but by God he did. So we knew he was either going to be a dangerous enemy or a strong ally. Turns out he’s a strong ally. He built us a beautiful place that somehow just attracted people, the right kind of people.” His beautiful mouth kicked up in a half smile. “Do you know who our cook is?”
Sophie shook her head. “But I’m not up on trendy chefs, so I might not recognize the name.”
“Oh, you’ll recognize this one, all right. Stella Cummings.”
Sophie’s mouth fell open. “Stella Cummings? The Stella Cummings? The—”
“Actress, yeah.” Jon looked as if he were enjoying her astonishment.
“Wasn’t she—”
“Slashed by a stalker, yeah.” Jon’s face turned grim again. “Took her two years and ten surgeries to get over it, and she was badly scarred. She just left Hollywood behind. Got a job slinging hash up north because she’d always loved to cook. I was with her in the diner in a small town when there was an announcement on the news that her stalker had escaped from prison. She’d barely put her life back together. Working as a cook at the diner grounded her, she said. We’d struck up a sort of friendship. We never exchanged names, though I knew who she was. She looks like Stella Cummings, only chopped up and put back together again. She was shaking so hard she could barely breathe. I told her I could take her to a place where she would be safe and she came, and now we can’t do without her.”
“So all these refugees streaming into . . . your headquarters are—”
“Eating like kings. Speaking of which”—he lifted a forkful of her zucchini omelet—“Fabulous.”
“Thanks. So you guys set this place up. People came and found refuge with you. Did I get that right?”
“You did. And since the people who came don’t want to be found, we keep it hidden. And we’d prepared for the worst case scenario—a siege. We’ve been working nonstop on our community, and it is almost completely self-sufficient in water, food, and energy. Now Catherine and Elle are setting up a clinic. Refugees are pouring in, but we have the space and huge food reserves, so we’re going to be okay. Haven will survive this storm. We just have to make sure as many people survive as possible.”
A howl came from outside. It sounded like an animal cry, but wasn’t. Sophie shivered. There might be one safe space left, but it was far away and too late for this city she loved.
Now it was Jon’s turn to comfort her. He put down his fork and leaned toward her, arms open. Sophie burrowed there, arms sliding around that broad back, hands pressed flat against the thick muscles of his back
“It’ll be okay,” he said softly and kissed her hair.
Yes. Maybe. Sophie’s gift was great, but she wasn’t going to be able to save the world. All she could hope for was to make it back to this safe community, snugged inside a mountain, and help produce as much vaccine as possible. If they made it. Another howl came from outside, and another. Sounds of animals snarling, fighting.
Only they weren’t animals.
They were people.
She buried her head against Jon’s shoulder. His arms tightened around her.
“Take me to bed, Jon,” she whispered against his shoulder, eyes closed tight.
He stood so quickly his chair tipped over to the floor. He picked her up and carried her away—away from the terrible noises.
Mount Blue
Haven
His cane slammed to the floor, crossing right in front of two of the most beautiful female legs on planet Earth. The woman’s eyes looked at the cane running obliquely in front of her, following it up to his hand, then going all the way up to his face.
She met his eyes and flinched. It was Stella Cummings’s usual reaction to someone looking her right in the face. He was pleased to note that the reaction was less severe than it had been in the beginning, when she tried to hide, instinctively. Now she didn’t avert her face much, just her eyes.
Lucius Ward reached out to hold her chin between thumb and forefinger and turned her face gently so she was looking him square in the eyes.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said and bent to kiss her. Her luscious lips—with that little indent on the pillowy lower lip that millions of men had dreamed of and lusted after in her previous life—were soft against his. He could feel the scar that slashed across her mouth as a little raised ridge. He didn’t care. He was covered in scars himself.
They were right in the communal kitchen’s entrance. People were streaming by them like water around a boulder. Keeping one hand firmly on his cane—no point falling on his ass just because this woman took his breath away—he hooked his other around her slender neck and deepened the kiss.
Stella gave up trying to maintain discretion and kissed him back. Man, it was heaven. She opened her mouth, her tongue licking his—and right there, in their communal kitchen, right in front of just about the entire Haven population, Lucius’s body woke up.
It was a miracle that perhaps only this one woman in all the world could have engineered.
Before being taken prisoner by Arka Pharmaceuticals and subjected to harsh surgical tortures for a year, Lucius wouldn’t have needed a world-class beauty like Stella Cummings to get a hard-on. His dick had taken care of itself, and him, ever since he’d been twelve.
But after his rescue from the research lab-torture chamber where he and the rest of the Ghost Ops team had been held, standing upright had been almost beyond him. He’d pushed himself daily since the rescue, falling exhausted into bed each night. At first, simply standing with the help of a cane for more than five minutes at a time had been beyond him. But damned if he’d be a cripple, even though those sadistic bastards at Arka had done their best to reduce him to the level of an animal. Dr. Charles Lee, the head of Arka, the man who’d orchestrated the brutal experiments in his frenzy to find the formula for supersoldiers, had been about to discard him as human waste when Mac’s wife, Catherine, led his former teammates to him.
He’d been in a coma when he arrived here at Haven, as near to death as you could be. But here he’d found his old team, he’d found superb medical care, solidarity, and . . . love. He’d found love, here in this outlaw community.
He deepened the kiss further, losing himself in her. In this beautiful, scarred, very smart woman who’d captured his heart. He would have sworn he didn’t have one. All he had was loyalty—to his teammates and his country, in that order—but it turned out that, yes, he had a heart and it was hers.
Stella stepped forward, slipping one slender hand over his on the cane, the other around his waist, and the instant her torso touched his it happened. While kissing her, he’d felt a heaviness around his groin, the feeling of blood rushing around looking for a place to pool. He always felt that way around her, aroused in his head though his body was too damaged to respond.
The blood finally found its old pathways and his body woke up and smelled the roses. Or smelled her, Stella Cummings, once considered the most beautiful woman in the world until a slasher took a knife to her. The surgeons had done their best to put her back together again, but Stella’s face looked like a jigsaw puzzle. Lucius couldn’t see that. To him, she was still the most beautiful woman in the world. The most gifted actress of her generation, a woman who had enchanted millions around the world.
The woman who now held his heart in her hands.
His dick, too, apparently.
He felt the instant Stella realized what was pressing against her. Her lips smiled under his. He pulled back, pressed his forehead against hers. “Let’s go lie down for a while, Stella.” His voice came out thick, rough. As if it were the first time he’d spoken in years.
Stella kissed his jaw. Though she was a tall woman, she had to lift herself up to do it.
“I can’t,” she whispered. He could hear the regret in her voice. “And anyway, I don’t know if you should—”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I should either. I don’t even know if I can,” he said honestly. “This is the first time it’s been anything but inert meat between my legs in over a year. Maybe if I used it, I’d keel over dead.” He made a rumbly noise in his chest, which took him a few seconds to realize was a laugh. He’d laughed. He wasn’t a laughing man, never had been. Few things about this fucked-up world amused him. This last year had been pain and helplessness and desolation. And right now they were in a crisis as a plague unlike any other had been unleashed.
But this woman—she infused him with such joy. The world was in danger, but there had to be some joy in it, otherwise why save it?
Lucius had lived with duty as his sole motivator for so long. For most of his life. But duty was a cold and harsh mistress. Right now he had something warm and alive and magical in his arms. This was worth fighting and dying for.
Someone holding a big tin vat of tomatoes bumped them as he sped by. “Sorry,” he called over his shoulder.
Stella straightened with a sigh. “I can’t take time off, Lucius.” She cupped his chin and tried a smile. “Much as I’d like to. Soon there will be almost three thousand of us. We’re already feeding in two shifts; we’re going to have to go to three soon.”
“We can take the time off and we should, my darling. You’ve been working almost twenty-seven hours straight.” He touched his finger to the dark circles under her eyes. “You’re about ready to fall where you stand. General Snyder sent forty men and women to help you. He’s organizing what is essentially a mess hall. The Marines know how to do this. They’ll take their cues from you with regard to recipes and menus, but they don’t need help in creating a mess hall.”
She sighed and bowed her head. He was speaking the truth and she knew it.
“And I have gone over plans with Snyder and my men. We’re bringing in refugees and Eric is overseeing a fast extension to the structure. By tonight there will be a hall large enough for everyone to sleep in, and we’ve set up communal showers. A platoon in ten up-armored Humvees has gone out to a ranching town fifty miles outside Bakersfield. We’re in radio contact and apparently they’re holding their own. The platoon won’t be back before dawn. There’s nothing more I can do, and there’s nothing more you can do right now. I don’t think I can even act on what you felt just now, but by God I’d like to lie down and hold you in my arms. I need you in my arms, Stella.”
She rubbed her face against his neck and he could feel wetness. Stella wouldn’t want anyone to see her crying, so he simply held her for a long moment while men and women hurried past in ordered chaos with supplies.
Finally she lifted her head and those famous eyes—a brilliant turquoise—smiled at him.
“Let’s go lie down,” she said huskily.
“Together,” he said. Right then he made a vow to himself. For whatever time they had left—and it might be only a day—he was going to spend every night at this woman’s side.
She nodded. “Together. Oh yeah.”