Military Man. Marie Ferrarella

exhumed.”

      Lucy asked, “Then how…?”

      Emmett’s green eyes shifted in her direction. It was as if he was speaking only to her. “You can take a sample of my DNA.”

      Collin watched first surprise, then suspicion pass over the medical student’s almost-perfect face. She was probably thinking that they were here for some ulterior purpose.

      He couldn’t blame her, he supposed. In her place, his mind would have probably worked the same way. But this was a time when the line about truth being stranger than fiction applied.

      Lucy’s eyes widened. “You’re related to the escapee?” She tried to see a family resemblance, but could detect none. But then, she’d only seen one newspaper photograph of Jason Jamison.

      The man barely nodded his head. “He’s my brother.”

      Lucy’s mouth nearly dropped open. She would have never guessed the two men were brothers. Talk about night and day, she thought.

      Accustomed to fending for herself for a long time now, she momentarily forgot that Daniels was even in the room and that it was his place to ask the questions. “Could I see your badge again?”

      Collin laughed as Emmett dug into his pocket once again. “Relax, we’re not here to taint any evidence. All we want to do is find Jason and bring him in.”

      Putting her hand on the wallet, she looked carefully at the ID the agent provided before releasing it again. When she did, she turned toward the other man, letting her curiosity get the better of her.

      “If he’s the fugitive’s brother, how do you figure into all this? You his sister?” She never cracked a smile.

      Collin’s eyes shifted toward where Daniels was standing. “She’s got a flip mouth.”

      The doctor only laughed, his large belly shaking beneath his lab coat like a tremor building in momentum to become a major quake.

      “Tell me something I don’t already know.” But there was nothing but fondness in his eyes as he looked at the young woman. “Lucky for her she’s top notch at what she does.” And then his expression sobered just a touch as the M.E. looked intently at Lucy. “You never heard me say that.”

      Her face was the soul of innocence as she asked, “Say what?”

      “See?” Daniels looked at Collin. “What did I tell you? Top notch.”

      That, Collin thought, was exactly the term he would use to describe her, too.

      Four

      “Open wide, please. This won’t hurt a bit,” Lucy promised the man she now knew as Emmett Jamison. Her voice was quiet, as if she were trying to steady the nerves of a reluctant patient.

      When he did as he was asked, she took the long stick and carefully swabbed the inside of his left cheek.

      “I wasn’t worried about the pain,” Emmett told her crisply as she placed the swab in a small air-tight plastic container and sealed it.

      Without realizing it, she glanced toward the other man who had stood silently by as she’d taken the necessary sample to run the test.

      He read her glance and obviously took it as a solicitation for some kind of comment from him. “Sorry, he left his manners in his other coat.”

      His words invoked a smile from her. “But you brought yours,” she said, labeling the plastic container with a black laundry marker.

      “Never leave home with them.”

      Collin saw that his words caused Emmett’s brow to furrow slightly. Emmett had always believed in the direct route, which wasn’t necessarily always the polite one. The time his cousin had spent confined within the New Mexico shack that had become his hermitage had stripped him of what little social graces he’d possessed to begin with. Emmett’s manner with strangers had become positively brusque and Collin had a feeling that brusque wasn’t going to get them very far in this venture, especially since they weren’t supposed to be walking along the trail to begin with.

      “How long will the actual test to compare the two DNAs take?” Collin asked.

      “If they rush it,” Lucy told him, “less than a week.”

      It wasn’t the answer he wanted, obviously, as he suppressed a belabored sigh. “That long?”

      Emmett frowned, too. “Doesn’t seem right in this day and age.”

      Taking an empty folder, Lucy made a notation on a sheet and deposited it inside the folder. “Some things don’t change. No matter what progress does, it still takes nine months to have a baby.”

      The second the words were out of her mouth, she stopped. Lucy had no idea where that had come from. Babies were the furthest thing from her mind. Especially since she didn’t intend to marry for a long time and she wasn’t about to be intimate with a man until after there was a ring on her finger. A wedding ring.

      As far as she could calculate, a baby wasn’t going to be in her future for another nine or ten years, if then. It would probably take her that long to settle on a husband.

      Right now there was no one special in her life, which was a good thing because her life was hectic enough without adding emotional conflict to it. The kind of conflict that went on when a man assumed that a relationship would just naturally progress to the next plateau. A plateau she was not about to climb to until after she was married.

      She’d seen firsthand the kind of consequences that resulted when people allowed passion to govern them. She didn’t need that kind of turmoil.

      Lucy wondered suddenly what Military Man would have said if he knew he was in the presence of that rarest of creatures, a twenty-six-year-old virgin. Probably take it as a challenge, she mused.

      It would be one challenge he wasn’t going to win. She was very, very determined to remain in her present state until the right man came along and said the right words: “I do.”

      Since the field she was presently studying dealt exclusively with death, not birth, she had no idea where the analogy that had slipped from her lips had even come from.

      What was more, she had no idea why it embarrassed her. But embarrassed she was, because she could feel the color beginning to creep up her neck, onto her cheeks again, its path heralded by a warmth that preceded it, marking the way.

      Unlike her normal, take-charge self, Lucy suddenly felt hot from head to foot.

      Like an amnesiac slowly becoming aware of her surroundings, she looked down at the plastic container and the cotton swab that was lodged within. Her hand tightened around it.

      “Um, let me get this to the lab. The crime scene investigators already have the scrapings we took from under his fingernails.” She wanted to get out of the area as quickly as possible, until the flush she felt in her cheeks had subsided and her color was back to normal. The way Military Man was looking at her, she knew he would notice. Unless he was utterly color blind.

      Somehow she didn’t think that was the case. She could see his lips curving into a smile as he looked at her. She began to move past him.

      “You’ll let us know the minute you get the results?” he pressed.

      Bent on escape, Lucy began to nod her head, then suddenly stopped. She looked at Collin. “How am I supposed to get in touch with you?”

      Collin grabbed a piece of paper from a desk and jotted his number on it. As he handed it to her, her fingers brushed up against his.

      He knew it was crazy, but he could have sworn he felt something just then. Something electrical passing through him.

      He dropped his hand to his side, nodding at the paper. “That’s my cell phone number.”

      She glanced at the number before pocketing the white paper,