by Becca Van
There was still sporadic gunfire coming from behind the stables, but he wasn’t unduly worried about it. He knew his leaders and friends would deal with them as quickly as possible. Gauging distance and wind speed, Ward stood up and, within a heartbeat, shot one of the bastards right between the eyes. After ducking back down behind the barrels, he waited once more.
Keeping his eyes on the spot where the other gunman was hiding, he found what he was looking for. Just off to the right of his hideout was a metal frame which was used to store the empty barrels ready to be picked up. Narrowing his eyes, he stared at that small piece of thick metal and planned his shot. He exhaled, held his breath, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The gunman fell to the side of his cover. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything.
Ward took off toward the house with Stedman right behind him. As he got to the back steps, two gunshots sounded simultaneously from inside the house. Heedless of any danger to themselves, they crashed through the door and searched. There was a man dead on the floor, blood seeping out from his head onto the floor. He looked familiar, but at the moment he was too worried about Alicia to concentrate. Ward’s knees nearly buckled at the sight of Bronsin wounded and unconscious on the floor, Janie holding a blood-soaked cloth to his side, but he made himself continue on until he sighted Alicia.
She was on the floor with her eyes open. Though she looked stunned, she was still breathing.
“Alicia!” Ward went to his knees and gathered her into his arms. “Are you all right, honey?”
Alicia smiled up at him and then burst into tears. He carefully pulled her onto his lap and ran his hands all over her body. She flinched when he touched her right shoulder, and he turned her carefully to see. A dark spot was forming on the material of her shirt as it soaked up blood.
“Stedman, she’s been hit,” Ward yelled and ripped open her shirt at the seams with shaking hands. “It’s okay, honey. You’ll be fine. It’s just a graze. We’ll get you to a doctor and he’ll patch you up.”
“Bronsin,” Alicia sobbed. “He’s hurt. We have to get him to a hospital.”
Alicia pushed against Ward, trying to get away from him. He didn’t want her to hurt herself, so he let her go. She rose on wobbly legs and staggered, but when he reached out to help her, she pushed his hand away. She looked at the body on the floor and her face paled even more, but then she began to walk toward Bronsin.
“Alicia, a medevac chopper is on the way.” Ward spoke in a calm, steady voice, even though inside he was shaking. “Bronsin will be fine, honey. He’ll be home before you know it.”
“All clear.” Coulter entered the hole in the side of the house, followed by Trace and Corbin.
“Shit, he worked for us,” Corbin cussed, looking at the dead man on the floor. “He is the one we’ve been talking to on the phone from the head office who’s been stonewalling us. Johnson. Why the hell did he set us up?”
Ward wanted to know the answer to that question, too, but he was more concerned about Alicia at the moment.
“Oh, thank God,” Brooke gasped, rising from the floor and walking toward her men.
“Bronsin!” Alicia cried as she stumbled her way across the room.
Ward was scared for Alicia. She was in deep shock and didn’t even seem to realize she was injured. Even though her injury wasn’t life threatening and in fact was only a graze, she didn’t seem to be thinking logically. He followed her, his heart wrenching when she went to her knees beside his brother and sobbed against his chest.
“Alicia,” Bronsin whispered and stroked her hair. “Darlin’, don’t cry.”
“Bronsin?” Alicia questioned in a croaky voice.
“I’m right here, darlin’.”
“Oh GGod,” she sobbed. “II ththought you were ddead.”
“It’ll take a lot more than a bullet in the side to take me out.”
“YYou must bbe in so much ppain.”
“I’m fine, darlin’, but you’re not. You need to let Ward or Stedman look you over.”
“I’m ffine.”
“Alicia, please let them take care of you. I will feel a lot better if I know you’re okay.”
“I don’t want to leave yyou.”
“You don’t have to leave Bronsin, honey.” Ward squatted down next to her. “Just let me have a look at your shoulder and clean it up.”
“OOkay.”
Stedman walked over to Alicia and sat down on the floor next to her. He picked her up and pulled her into his lap but stayed at his brother’s side. Ward draped a blanket around her shoulders and over her body.
“How are you feeling, baby?”
“Ffine.”
“Look at me, Alicia!” Stedman commanded. “Shit. You’re in shock, baby. We need to get you to a doctor.”
“No! II don’t ddeserve help.”
Ward felt so helpless. Alicia was visibly shaking, and other than trying to calm her and keep her warm, he didn’t know what else to do.
Brooke walked over to them and nudged Ward aside. Kneeling down on the floor, she took one of Alicia’s hands in her own.
“Alicia, you have to stop torturing yourself.” Brooke spoke earnestly. “If it hadn’t been for you, we could all be dead. Is that what you would want, if you could go back? Now that you know what was going to happen, would you have let that fucker kill you and then kill Martha, May, Janie, and Bronsin as well as me and my baby?”
“No!” Alicia wailed in reply, tears streaming from her eyes.
“He needed killing, Alicia. If it hadn’t been you, I would have tried next, and if I hadn’t killed him, then it would have been up to everyone else to try. No matter how you look at it, that man was a dead man walking. You got to him before he could kill us all. He only has himself to blame. We weren’t the ones trying to hurt anyone. He was.”
“I can’t…Oh God. I’m so sorry. I killed him,” Alicia howled.
Ward went down to his knees and rubbed Alicia’s back, trying to help calm her. He was so proud of her for protecting their brother and the other women but also worried over her reaction to taking a life. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight. She buried her face against Stedman’s chest and bawled her heart out. Bronsin reached out and took one of her hands in his, offering her comfort.
Finally, after she had exhausted herself and fallen asleep in Stedman’s arms, Ward cleaned and covered her wound and then held her until the medevac arrived. Not wanting to let her go, he climbed into the chopper with her and Bronsin and prayed she wouldn’t let the fact she had taken a life kill her inside.
* * * *
The truck bounced over a pothole, and Bronsin grunted. “Sorry, bro,” Ward said.
“Don’t slow down on my account.” The drive from the hospital had already seemed to take forever. The closer they got to the stud, the more eager Bronsin was to finally be coming home.
Ward slipped him a look from the driver’s seat. “You shouldn’t even be sitting up.”
“Don’t baby me. I’m fine.” Two nights were more than enough in the hospital for him, so he had discharged himself against the doctor’s orders. Bronsin considered himself damn lucky to even be alive, and he wanted to enjoy it, not lie in a hospital bed.
The bullet which had hit him had nicked the side of the timber window frame as well as gone through glass before it entered his body. If the bullet had gone any deeper, he would have ended up with a punctured lung. The surgery had been tricky enough since the bullet had been lodged against an artery.
“Ready to see Alicia, huh?” Ward said.
“More than ready.”
“She’s been chomping at the bit to go back and see you. Doesn’t seem to care that she was injured, herself. The two of you are a lot alike.”
Bronsin grinned. Alicia had visited him after surgery, and she had put up quite a fight when Ward and Stedman tried to drag her back home. “That’s my girl.”
“Sted been keeping you updated?”
“About some
things, yeah.” His brother’s tone had sobered, and Bronsin guessed he was referring to the aftermath of the attack. “He said the Healys are out again on Jones’s trail.”
Stedman had told him how yesterday they’d gotten an alert on a Dr. Jones practicing medicine in a clinic in Montana. The people in charge of the organ smuggling had started using “Smith” again, too.
The Healys had taken off at once, but this time they had a different plan. Coulter had kept them out of sight on recent ops, so now they could infiltrate the group and take them down from the inside.
Bronsin was glad it was them, not him, who had to go rub elbows with organ smugglers, but Stedman had told him that the Healys were ready to roll. Bronsin wondered if they weren’t feeling a little envious of the rest of the team. Their teammates had all found the one woman meant for them, the love of their lives. Bronsin didn’t blame them one little bit for their jealousy, and he understood why perhaps they’d rather immerse themselves in work than dwell on their loneliness.
“The Healy brothers are pretty well equipped this time,” Ward said. “For one thing, they have the real names of these ‘Jones’ and ‘Smith’ people.”
“Where did that come from?”
“Our dirty handler’s son. You have to feel a little bad for the guy.”
Bronsin sat up. “What? Why?” he asked skeptically.
“His son needs a liver transplant. Johnson heard about the organ-smuggling ring and contacted Smith and Jones. We owe him, strange as that sounds. After we captured their ringleader, they were forced to reorganize, and Smith and Jones took over. This guy did a lot of the searching for us.”
“Did he really think those assholes would give his son a liver?”
“He must have, but they’d just keep using him until he’d outlived his usefulness. Our bosses, however, have helped find a compatible donor for the kid. Dumbass should have just asked for help.”
“I feel sorry for the kid. Even though I understand what motivated Johnson’s desperation, if he’d come forward and asked for help all of this could have been avoided.”
“Yeah, when the kid got wind of what went down he came clean. Apparently he’d overheard his father on the phone one night while Johnson was visiting him in the hospital, thinking he was asleep. He’s hoping to set things right after what his father did.”
“So Johnson fed information to Jones?”
Ward nodded. “He didn’t have access to confidential information, though. Nothing about our location or our abilities. All he knew was that we’d been given orders to investigate the kidnappings in Miles City and that we’d be heading in that direction. He gave the word to Smith and Jones, and they sent goons to slap tracking devices on the truck while Jones led us on a merry chase all over the state.”
“I see,” Bronsin said. “And the supposed kidnapping in Livingston?”
“All a setup. That was purely to split up our teams and attack us separately.”
As Stedman spoke, he had made the final turn onto their property. Bronsin let out a sigh of relief at the sight of the houses and fields beneath the broad North Dakota sky. The view wasn’t exactly as he remembered, since the machine shed was still blackened from the fire. As they pulled in closer, he saw plastic sheeting covering the hole in the side of the main house, too. But workmen were already repairing the damage.
“There’s our girl.” She was waiting on the porch for him. Alicia waved as they pulled closer, and even though she seemed happy to see him, she looked drawn and pale.
“There’s one more thing you should know.”
Bronsin looked over at Ward, on alert at his brother’s tone as well as Alicia’s appearance. “What?”
“Alicia’s been taking it kind of hard about killing Johnson. She hasn’t been herself.” Ward put the truck in park and met Bronsin’s eye. “We’re all worried about her. She’s been very quiet and introverted. I hope that you coming home will help her get back to normal. Maybe now she’ll heal emotionally as well as physically.”
“Only one way to find out.”
As he got out of the truck, she ran to him. He met her between the truck and house and wrapped his arms about her, pulling her close.
“Hey, darlin’,” he said against the top of her head. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“God, I’m so glad you’re home. I have missed you so much,” Alicia sobbed.
“I told you I was tough.”
“Yeah, well that may be, but I don’t ever want to have to go through anything like that again.”
“I know, darlin’, and if I could promise you that you won’t, I would. But until all these evil bastards are found, we’re on call to go.”
“Do you think it will ever end?”
“There will always be evil in the world, but we will fulfill our obligations. Bryden, Linton, and Codi aren’t going to give up until they find the leaders of this ring, and when they do we will go in and help them bring it down.”
“It just feels like there has been nothing but danger and mayhem everywhere lately,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be venting my self-pity party on you. I am so proud of you all. You, your brothers, and the rest of the team have risked your lives time and again to save the innocents of this world. We would have been dead if it weren’t for you all.”
“We were just doing our job, darlin’.” He released her but took her hand in his. “Let’s go inside. I would really love a decent cup of coffee.”
Alicia laughed, her whole face lighting up. “That bad, huh?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “You know that hospital coffee is like tinted water. Are you okay, darlin’?”
Alicia looked up at him, and he could see that she had some sadness still lurking in the depths of her eyes
“Yes. I will always regret that I took a man’s life, but I’m glad he can’t hurt anyone ever again.” She wrapped her arm around his waist and squeezed. “I’m so glad you’re back home. I love you.” Bronsin studied her face for a moment longer and could see that sadness had left her face. He wondered if him being in the hospital away from her was one of the reasons why she had been so quiet and melancholy. She lifted his hand and kissed it.
“I love you, too, darlin’.”
Chapter Fifteen
Looking out the window, Alicia watched her three men working with and riding the horses. God, they were so hot. Watching the way their bodies moved with sinuous motion as the powerful animals moved beneath them was every woman’s wet dream. And they were all hers. She still couldn’t get over the fact that they loved her, but since she loved them in return she wasn’t about to question her good fortune.
Alicia was so happy to have Bronsin home. The despondency which had hovered over her the last few days left at his return. Even though she’d had Stedman or Ward with her, and she loved them both fiercely, it hadn’t been the same without Bronsin there as well. She hoped never to have to worry over one of her men ever again. It had been a struggle for her to accept killing a man, but when she felt guilty Brooke’s words to her that horrible day would echo through her head and she knew if she hadn’t shot the bastard that they would all possibly be dead.
Her men slept with her once more in the same bed, but they hadn’t touched her, and she was nearly going out of her mind with desire. Bronsin was nearly healed, and she so wanted to feel their hands and mouths on her body again.
While they were away, she prepared. There was no way she was spending another night without them loving her. She’d planned a nice meal of pot roast and had made an apple pie, and now all that was left was for her to shower and change.
She had just finished zipping up her dress and was slipping on her high heels when the back door slammed. Then she heard footsteps hurrying down the hall toward the bathrooms. Bronsin met her at the door to the bedroom and took her in with a long, slow, heated perusal. He made a whistling sound, and then he was shoved aside by Ward and Stedman as they tried to see what had caught their brother’s atte
ntion.
“Fuck, you are gorgeous, Alicia,” Ward rasped and reached toward her. He stopped and lowered his hands with a chagrinned smile. “Sorry, honey, I would love nothing more than to strip you out of that beautiful dress, but I need to clean up. I would hate to get you all dirty.”
He leaned forward, planted a light, lingering kiss on her lips, and turned on his heel and disappeared into his bedroom.
Stedman didn’t hold back at all. He slanted his mouth over hers, tangling their tongues in an erotic dance until they were both breathless. When he finally lifted his head, she could see the hunger in his eyes. Giving her a last lingering look, he, too, turned toward his bedroom.
“I love you, Alicia,” Bronsin whispered and bent down to kiss her. He swiped his tongue across her lips and then pushed inside. Their mouths mated until she all but melted into a puddle at his feet.
“Hold that thought, darlin’.” He eased through the door toward her adjoining bathroom.
Alicia drew several shaky breaths and tried to get her heartbeat back under control. She returned to the kitchen, and by the time her men were showered and dressed, dinner was ready and waiting for them.
“Do you want some wine, baby?” Stedman held up a bottle and opened it at her nod.
They enjoyed a leisurely meal, her men praising her often as they talked about their day. She listened intently, interested in what was important to them. After clearing the table she got dessert and coffee and was about to carry it to the table, but Ward stopped her by taking the two bowls in her hands away.
“It will be more comfortable in the living room, honey.” He kissed her and then led the way. Alicia was about to get the other dessert bowls, but they, too, were taken from her hands. When she reached for the tray of coffee mugs, Bronsin took over.
“Go sit down and get comfortable, darlin’.”
She sat in the middle of the large sofa with Stedman sitting on her right and Ward to her left. Bronsin sat on the floor next to her legs, and they all ate their apple pie.
“You don’t even know how sexy you are, do you, baby?” Stedman asked, taking her empty bowl and placing it on the table.
