A Gentleman and a Soldier

by Cindy Dees

  “How do you plan to keep me alive until I can testify against this guy?”

  Susan caught Mac’s gaze and held it, whether he liked it or not. The last time she’d asked Mac a Big Question, he’d dodged it.

  Her life rested again on his answer to her question. Did she dare trust him to be square with her this time?

  Mac answered quietly. “We plan to guard you around the clock, not only until you testify, but until Ruala’s captured, brought to trial and locked up for good.”

  His sapphire gaze bored into hers. Challenging her to believe him. But something else lurked in his intense expression. A promise—to keep her safe this time. An appeal—to give him another chance, to let him make up for Ruala outmaneuvering and outgunning him and nearly killing her last time. A plea—to trust him.

  Could she do that? She’d trusted him once with her heart and he’d destroyed it. Could she trust Mac Conlon with her life this time around? She sighed in resignation. What choice did she have?

  Dear Reader,

  The weather’s hot, and so are all six of this month’s Silhouette Intimate Moments books. We have a real focus on miniseries this time around, starting with the last in Ruth Langan’s DEVIL’S COVE quartet, Retribution. Mix a hero looking to heal his battered soul, a heroine who gives him a reason to smile again and a whole lot of danger, and you’ve got a recipe for irresistible reading.

  Linda Turner’s back—after way too long—with the first of her new miniseries, TURNING POINTS. A beautiful photographer who caught the wrong person in her lens has no choice but to ask the cops—make that one particular cop—for help, and now both her life and her heart are in danger of being lost. FAMILY SECRETS: THE NEXT GENERATION continues with Marie Ferrarella’s Immovable Objects, featuring a heroine who walks the line between legal, illegal—and love. Dangerous Deception from Kylie Brant continues THE TREMAINE TRADITION of mixing suspense and romance—not to mention sensuality—in doses no reader will want to resist. And don’t miss our standalone titles, either. Cindy Dees introduces you to A Gentleman and A Soldier in a military reunion romance that will have your heart pounding and your fingers turning the pages as fast as they can. Finally, welcome Mary Buckham, whose debut novel, The Makeover Mission, takes a plain Jane and turns her into a princess—literally. Problem is, this princess is in danger, and now so is Jane.

  Enjoy them all—and come back next month for the best in romantic excitement, only from Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Yours,

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Executive Editor

  A Gentleman and a Soldier

  CINDY DEES

  Books by Cindy Dees

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Behind Enemy Lines #1176

  Line of Fire #1253

  A Gentleman and a Soldier #1307

  CINDY DEES

  started flying airplanes, sitting in her dad’s lap, when she was three, and she was the only kid in the neighborhood who got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. After college, she fulfilled a lifelong dream and became a U.S. Air Force pilot. She flew everything from supersonic jets to C-5’s, the world’s largest cargo airplane. During her career, she got shot at, met her husband, flew in the Gulf War and amassed a lifetime supply of war stories. After she left flying to have a family, she was lucky enough to fulfill another lifelong dream—writing a book. Little did she imagine that it would win the RWA Golden Heart Contest and sell to Silhouette! She’s thrilled to be able to share her dream with you. She’d love to hear what you think of her books. Write to her at www.cindydees.com or P.O. Box 210, Azle, TX 76098.

  My warmest thanks to Lance Corporal Bryan Brady, 1st Combat Engineer Battalion, 1st Marine Division, United States Marine Corps, for his extensive and scary expertise in how to blow up absolutely anything. I rest easier knowing brave men and women like you keep watch over our country.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 1

  S onofa—

  Mac Conlon slammed the wedding invitation down on his kitchen table in disgust. Another one of his bachelor buddies biting the dust. What in the hell had happened to Charlie Squad’s long-standing death-before-marriage pact?

  First Colonel Folly, and now Tex. What were they thinking? It wasn’t like there was anything only a diamond ring could get from a woman. The proper amount of charm, properly applied, always yielded the same results. And without the life sentence to follow.

  The invitation’s fancy engraving leered up at him. “Captain Tex Monroe and Congresswoman Kimberly Stanton request the honor of your presence when they join in wedded matrimony…”

  He swore under his breath. And caught sight of the liquor cabinet in the corner. Aww, what the hell. It wasn’t every day a guy had to miss his best friend’s wedding on account of a woman. He fished out a dusty bottle of whiskey and flopped in his leather recliner in front of the TV. The hell of it was that he actually wanted to go to the damn wedding.

  But Susan would be there. Memories of her auburn hair, porcelain skin and laughing hazel eyes swirled around him. He could see them as if it was only yesterday that she’d gazed up at him while he’d lain with her in a room filled with candles. Her eyes were dark with passion that night. But after he’d dropped his bomb on her, he’d seen those eyes snap in outrage. Then fill with tears. Always those damned tears. His gut twisted.

  No way would Tex’s only sister miss her baby brother’s wedding. And no way could he face the only woman he’d ever loved. Not after…

  Damn. He chugged a fiery slug of forgetfulness straight from the whiskey bottle. He aimed the remote at the TV and flipped through the channels until he found a John Wayne flick. The Duke and Jack Daniel’s would have to do for companionship tonight, since he made it a policy never to get stinking drunk alone. And he was about to tie on a big one.

  Susan Monroe looked through the bulletproof window in front of her at the brightly lit concrete bunker on the other side. Empty. She announced crisply into her headset. “Test range is clear.”

  The firing range supervisor droned through several more checklist items.

  Her turn again. She glanced down the list of testing parameters on her computer screen. An unbroken column of green. “Monitoring systems nominal,” she announced.

  A few more items and the checklist was complete. Her team was ready for the first live fire test of the RITA rifle. She exhaled a long, slow breath, but it didn’t relieve her jitters. Her job, and a lot of other people’s jobs, rode on the next hour’s worth of work.

  Building the highly classified sniper rifle was Fasco Inc.’s first government contract, and there’d been problems from day one. The company had to learn how to wade through stacks of government reports and forms. Their bid had been tightly budgeted, and they’d had trouble sticking to it. Fasco’s promised production schedule had been a killer, too, and everyone in the company had worked long, hard hours to bring the weapon on line in time.

  And today the rifle known as RITA, after its Roving Instant Target Acquisition system, was going to face its most critical test. In a few minutes a professional sniper would step onto the firing range and put Fasco’s prototype production model through its paces.

  If the sniper gave the go-ahead, her company would spend the next couple of years
turning out dozens of the sophisticated rifles at a tidy profit. But if the sniper decided the weapon didn’t perform up to Uncle Sam’s specifications, Fasco risked losing the contract. There’d be massive red ink and layoffs at best, and at worst Fasco would go out of business altogether. No pressure there.

  The range supervisor’s voice sounded in her ear. “Send them in, Dr. Monroe.”

  She picked up the telephone on her desk and pushed the button that connected her to the armory vestibule just outside the firing range. Fasco’s CEO picked up on the other end.

  “We’re ready to begin,” she told her boss much more calmly than she felt.

  A red light went on above the door in the firing range’s far wall. The thick steel portal swung open. Several men stepped into the room. She recognized them as senior Fasco executives. All sucking up hard to the sniper, no doubt. Not that she blamed them.

  And then she caught sight of the shooter. He was tall. A bit heavy. Light-brown hair. Prominent cheekbones in an otherwise smooth, round face. Kinda creepy looking. So bland her gaze just seemed to slide off him. He looked too soft to be holding the sixty-pound RITA rifle and, in fact, he rested it on its butt quickly after he stepped into the room.

  She announced over the loudspeaker into the bunker, “We’re ready whenever you are, Mr. Ford.”

  The shooter glanced up at her window and nodded.

  And the world stood still.

  Ohmigod. Those eyes!

  She would never forget them as long as she lived. Glittering gold on blue over the barrel of his rifle. Just before he shot her in the knee and blew it to smithereens. She’d fallen out of her seat from the tearing force of the impact, which was the only reason his second shot only grazed her neck and didn’t kill her.

  Except this face wasn’t right. Not angular or narrow enough for the man who’d shot her. And the hair wasn’t black. This man’s skin was too pale, not the nut brown of Ramon Ruala, the assassin who’d nearly killed her.

  But those eyes…

  How many men in the world could possibly have the same strange eye coloring, a ring of gold overlaid on icy, sky blue. The color was striking, fire and ice clashing in discord. And no two men could have exactly that same flat, deadly expression of penetrating malevolence that chilled her blood. It had to be the same guy.

  But there was no way it was the same guy.

  She watched in frozen horror as the man donned a clamshell headset and plastic shooting goggles someone handed him. He waved the Fasco executives out of the bunker. And hefted the rifle. Another glance up at her. She pushed her safety glasses higher on her nose as if they’d protect her identity from the killer in the room below. Dear God, let him not yank that rifle around and point it at her. The bulletproof glass before her was no match for the lethal power of the sniper rifle in his hands. Her knees shook and her gut turned to water. The same visceral terror of that night ten years ago roared through her. Every nerve in her body screamed for her to get up and run out of there right this second.

  But somehow she managed to stay planted in her chair. She’d lost her mind. This was insane. Anybody could look at this poor man and see he wasn’t the one who shot her a decade ago. This was some post-traumatic stress reaction that the guy’s weird eye color had triggered. A flashback. Get a grip, for goodness’ sake.

  She stared at her computer monitor until it came back into focus and then broadcast into the bunker, “Let’s start out with a few simple prone shots at a still target so you can sight in the rifle and get a feel for it.”

  The shooter nodded and lay down on a padded rubber mat to her left. Methodically, he set up a tripod stand, attached the barrel to the stand and lay down at a slight angle away from the weapon. He shifted to align himself with the weapon at exactly the right angle for every muscle in his body to relax when he fired.

  His eye went down to the sight and his right hand came up along the trigger housing. His middle three fingers were folded down with only his thumb and pinkie finger extended. He rocked the two fingers back and forth rapidly against the side of the gun as he acquired the target downrange.

  Lights exploded inside her head, sending shooting pain through her skull. She remembered like it was yesterday the way the sniper who’d shot her had done the exact same thing with his right hand mere seconds before he shot her.

  Bang!

  She about leaped out of her chair as the RITA rifle fired in the enclosed concrete bunker. Even through heavy layers of glass, the sound was painfully loud. There! He did that thing with his fingers again! He rocked his pinkie and thumb against the side of the rifle as he set up the next shot.

  “Martin, come take a look at this,” she said to the other computer scientist in the control room.

  The former Marine Recon soldier loomed over her a second later. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Watch this guy’s right hand when he sets up a shot.”

  She and Martin watched intently. The sniper did the finger rocking thing again. “There. That!” she murmured tersely. “Is there any technical reason for a shooter to do something like that?”

  “Nah. Nervous tic.”

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” she inquired.

  Martin frowned. “It’s kinda weird, actually. You don’t want to jar the rifle once you’ve acquired your target. The whole idea is to go perfectly still a couple seconds before you take the shot. A shooter tapping his weapon like that could jeopardize the shot if he weren’t careful. Of course this dude’s pegging the middle of the ten circle every time.”

  “Next sequence,” a low, gravelly voice growled in her ear.

  She jumped and looked up at the government sniper. He was staring at her impatiently through the window.

  “Uh, of course. Let’s start by adding wind into the calculations. We’ll program a steady-state wind first, followed by random gusts,” she replied. She hit the command sequence on her keyboard to start the wind machine in the bunker, and sat back while it ran.

  The voice wasn’t right. The man who’d ordered her death had a higher-pitched voice than that. Of course, vocal cords could be altered surgically and the sound of a voice changed. For that matter, an entire face could be changed surgically.

  But those cursed eyes…

  She couldn’t take a chance. If it was the same guy and she didn’t tell anyone of her suspicions, no telling how many people could get hurt or killed at his hands. But if it wasn’t the same man—well then, she only risked pissing this guy off enough to flunk the RITA rifle and shut down her company. Lovely.

  She agonized through the rain and smoke simulations, and still hadn’t decided what to do when she set up the last and most difficult firing sequence. Moving targets. The RITA rifle’s crowning glory was a computer brain that, once locked onto a target, tracked its movements and compensated for changes in firing conditions independent of any human inputs. The sniper started picking off moving targets like candy.

  What were the odds that Ruala’s showing up like this where she worked was chance? A violent criminal, whom she could put in jail permanently with her testimony? Who’d supposedly searched for her for years after their last encounter? Oh, no, he was here looking for her. Word on the street had it that Ruala’s boss, crime lord Eduardo Ferrare, had personally ordered her killed. Fortunately, Ferrare’s nemesis, Charlie Squad—a highly classified Air Force Special Forces team, whisked her away to a new life before Ruala or Ferrare could catch up with her. Charlie Squad. The very name sent a lingering shiver of excitement and agony through her.

  She’d been working on a surveillance mission with the six-man squad when she lost her heart and nearly lost her life all those years ago. Surely her brother, Tex, a Charlie Squad member, would have told her if Ruala had picked up her trail again. Obviously the squad didn’t know. No way would they have allowed the sniper to get this close to her.

  The sniper’s raspy voice caught her attention. “Give me random target movements.”

  She typed i
n the command sequence, her throat too tight to speak a response aloud. She had to call Charlie Squad. But the idea of inviting him back into her life positively set her teeth on edge. Mac Conlon. The one man she’d sworn she’d never, ever, not in a million years, lay eyes on again.

  He was Charlie Squad’s demolitions expert. An integral part of the team and part of the package if Charlie Squad came back into her life. Lord, she didn’t want to make the call. But she had no choice.

  She lurched as “Mr. Ford” abruptly jumped to his feet. He moved as light as a cat. She had to get out of here before he got another good look at her!

  She snatched up her cane. Generally she didn’t need it to walk, but spasms of remembered pain were shooting through her knee right now. She punched a code on the number pad beside the door to get out of the lab. The steel panel slid open. She walked forward and it shut behind her, locking her in a tiny, stainless-steel vestibule. A quick pass of her ID card through a magnetic card reader opened the outer door. Relieved to be out of that claustrophobic box, she moved out into the hallway.

  The first order of business was to lay her hands on a copy of the video of Mr. Ford to show Charlie Squad. She made her way as fast as her artificial knee would go to the security office near the front of the Fasco building. A huge shape loomed directly in front of her. Her heart slammed into her throat before she recognized the giant as Shane Wilkins, head of Fasco’s security. Apparently on his way out. She lurched and had to plant her cane quickly to regain her balance.

  “You okay, Dr. Monroe?” he asked, reaching out to steady her elbow.

  “Not really. Got a minute?” she asked with quiet urgency.

  He looked sharply at her. Then stepped back for her to move fully inside and closed the office door behind them both. “What’s up?” he asked.

  She eyed the gray-haired man warily. He knew all about Ramon Ruala. When she applied for work at Fasco soon after the shooting, it had been conceivable that Ruala would come looking for her to finish her off. Wilkins had been alerted to keep an eye out for the guy. But as time had passed, the threat had diminished to nothing more than an unpleasant memory.