Relentless Protector

by Colleen Thompson

  The woman went on to recommend the rib eye, adding with a wink, “I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like rare Texas meat.”

  Looking horrified, Lisa ordered a vegetable plate, while Cole, who never turned down a good steak if he could help it, went with the waitress’s suggestion.

  As it turned out, neither of them had much appetite for the food. Especially not once Cole started going over the details of a mission that could so easily go fatally wrong.

  Putting down his fork with more than half his meal uneaten, he reached across the table to touch the back of her hand. “There’s still time to change your mind, Lisa. Time to call in help if—”

  She took his hand and squeezed it, her beautiful brown eyes locked with his. “I have help, Cole. I have you.”

  The faith in her expression—the gratitude, of all things—sent fresh guilt crashing through him. He’d been lying by omission, allowing her to think he was some sort of damned hero. Allowing himself to think about her not only as Devin Meador’s desperate widow, but as a woman. A woman he hated himself for caring about, for—hell, why not admit it?—wanting more with every passing hour.

  “Back at your house this morning,” he managed, a band of pressure tightening around his skull, “you asked why I would come back. Why I’d want to do this.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care why, Cole. I only thank God that you did.”

  “Don’t thank God,” he said. “Thank your husband.”

  Eyes widening, she pulled her hand into her lap. “What? Did you know Devin? Why didn’t you say—”

  “I didn’t know him,” he admitted, “but I—I was there, Lisa. Thirteen months ago, in Lashkar Gah.”

  She stared at his face, studying him as if she’d never seen him before. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I was part of the team that responded to a report of a woman who might be rigged with explosives.”

  Her face went white as paper. “You mean you...you tried to stop her.”

  “We encountered trouble on the way in,” he said. “An ambush, like the whole thing might’ve been some kind of setup. But I should’ve stopped her anyway. Should’ve got my shot off in time.”

  She skewered him with a stricken look. “Could you have saved him?”

  He closed his eyes, reliving that split-second hesitation and the fiery concussion that had followed. Remembering the physical and mental agony. “Yes. I could have saved him. Could have saved them all. And I will carry that knowledge—and that guilt—with me forever.”

  He forced himself to look at her, to face the judgment in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Lisa. Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, after I’d found out everything I could about Devin and your family.” He shook his head, regret roaring through him. “Sorry I didn’t defy orders by going to see you months ago, the way I wanted, to explain what really happened. But most of all, I regret that I let everyone down that day in that marketplace.”

  She sat there for several minutes, her eyes misted with emotion. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and shaky. “It’s why you left the army, isn’t it? It’s what you meant when you said you were a failed Ranger.”

  “It is,” he admitted. “Lisa, I just wanted you to know, I’m no hero. I’m only a man, a man who’ll do my very best to get you and Tyler safely home.”

  Her gaze snapped to his and held it, her eyes blazing, despite the moisture gleaming in them. “This time, your very best had better be enough, Cole Sawyer, because I can’t lose my son, too. I won’t. Do you understand me?”

  “You won’t lose him,” he said, a promise that he had no business making. “I swear it on my honor. I swear it on my life.”

  “You’d better be right,” she said. “Because if you fail Tyler the way you failed my husband, I swear I’ll kill you myself.”

  Nodding stiffly, he signaled for the waitress, who hustled over with an offer of to-go boxes and a check that he insisted on paying. Once they left the restaurant, they both lapsed into silence, both of them wrung out from the conversation, along with the knowledge of what they were heading into.

  “Just for the sake of argument,” he said, changing the subject to the practical, “who else might hold a grudge against you? Who might want to hurt you by taking Tyler?”

  She speared him with a hard look before releasing a breath and shaking her head. “I’ve been over it and over it with the investigators, and with my father, too. But there’s absolutely no one else I can come up with but Sabra. No one I can think of who’d have any reason—”

  “Remember, whoever this woman is, she isn’t reasonable, so whatever you come up with may not seem like anything. It could be someone you once beat out for a job or a previous girlfriend of your husband’s. Or maybe it goes as far back as a girl who accused you of flirting with her crush in junior high, or stealing her spot on the cheerleading squad.”

  “Honestly, there’s nothing like that I can think of, not a single enemy. Well, not unless you count the woman who schedules patients at work, but Beatrice is just mad at life in general, not me in particular.”

  “You’re certain, Lisa? Think hard.”

  “I have, and I swear to you. I can’t think of anyone who’s this cruel and warped but Sabra.”

  “But Evie can’t be Sabra,” Cole insisted. “Not when she was killed by that truck. Your father said it looked like her. And it was her backpack.”

  “You asked my dad about her?” she asked accusingly.

  “I make no apologies for that. I needed to know everything. Including information that might have been kept from a child at the time.”

  She nodded, realizing he could be right. “Was there anything I didn’t tell you? Any possibility that backpack could have been stolen, or passed off to another girl?”

  “Your dad’s convinced it was really Sabra.”

  “So they weren’t just telling me that so I’d stop having nightmares?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Shaking her head, she insisted, “I think she set it up. Gave her things to a girl she met on the run. A girl who looked like her.”

  Cole had heard of cases where medical examiners had gotten complacent, identifying the body they’d expected to find rather than the one actually lying on the table. Still, he couldn’t believe that Sabra could have found a double, supplied her with her clothes and backpack and then...what, exactly? Shoved her into traffic?

  “It’s way too complicated,” he said. “I can’t picture her getting away with it.”

  “That’s because you’ve never met her. When it came to hurting others, she was incredibly devious.”

  “Incredibly deranged, from the sound of it.”

  Lisa lowered her face to her hands. “If I’d only told my dad what I saw sooner. Now Sabra means to see I get exactly what she thinks I’ve got coming. I know it. But I’d rather face her a thousand times over than let her hurt my son.”

  “And I’d rather square off against a tank than let her, or whoever this Evie really is, hurt you,” he vowed.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE SURE she said Terlingua?” From what little Deputy Jill Keller had seen—and mostly heard—of the bosomy blonde waitress, it would appear that the woman was a hell of a lot better at talking than listening to what anybody had to say.

  But questioning the clerk at the first gas stop she came to had led Jill this far, and she was fresh out of other leads.

  “Yep, it was Terlingua, all right,” said the waitress. “I was fixin’ to ask ’em if they were headin’ out tonight in the dark—I can’t imagine what for. I mean, it’s a danged ghost town, not Las Vegas. But I didn’t ask, ’cause she started actin’ kind of funny right then, just because I said that mountain lions can’t be faulted for pickin’ off the occasional nitwit tourist.”

  “What’s the quickest route?” Jill asked. “I need to catch up with them fast.”

  “You really thinking of leaving this time of night?” The waitress shook her head. �
�I’m tellin’ you, you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face out there, much less—”

  Jill pointed out her badge and snapped, “I’m sure you understand why I can’t give you any details.”

  Minutes later, she was speeding out of Alpine and away from her own life, with all its complications. But no matter how hard she pressed down on the pedal, Jill could not outrun the memory of Trace’s joy on the night she’d accepted his proposal, or his laughter as he’d spun her in his arms after she had told him they were expecting their first child.

  As she hurtled through the star-strewn darkness, she wiped away hot tears, realizing for the first time what her anger, pride and no-holds-barred approach to her career had cost her....

  But utterly unable to imagine a way back.

  She headed past a tower visible only because of its red lights, a last, lonely vestige before the black expanse of desert. A cell tower, she dimly registered, as her long-

  silent phone began to ring.

  * * *

  AS THE SCATTERED lights of Terlingua came into view, Cole pulled off the otherwise-deserted road and killed the headlights. “This is where I get out, Lisa. You won’t see me when you get there, but you can bet I’ll be watching you.”

  He remembered looking down a gun barrel, watching another young woman in another desert town. Watching and hesitating, until it was too late. He would be damned if he would make that same mistake this time.

  Unable to say more, he left the SUV and started walking, the growing lump in his throat a mute testament to the turmoil inside him. But as he’d learned long ago, some things were best left bottled. Now was the time to prepare for action, not sit around and fret over what could go wrong, or imagine how things might have gone had Lisa been anyone but Devin Meador’s widow. So what if she’d touched something inside him, something that he’d thought he would never feel again?

  He heard her footsteps coming fast behind him, crunching on the gravel.

  “Wait,” said Lisa, catching at the sleeve of his jacket. But it was the emotion in her voice that stopped him, a raw echo of the turmoil he’d been struggling to lock inside.

  “Please, Cole,” she added. “I have to tell you how much—how much this means to me. I’m sorry for what I said before. No matter what happened in Afghanistan, you didn’t have to help me. You could have walked away a hundred times.”

  “I tried to tell myself the same thing, but there’s no way I could have—”

  “A lot of men would have. We both know that. So whatever happened thirteen months ago, whatever happens tonight, I want you to know that I think you’re one of the bravest men I’ve ever—”

  He turned and pulled her to him, silencing her with a hard and angry kiss. Because he couldn’t bear to let her finish, to allow her to believe that he was worthy of comparison to a man like her husband, who had made the ultimate sacrifice to serve his country, while he himself hadn’t even had the strength of purpose to shoot a single suicide bomber without a fatal hesitation.

  Instead of getting angry and pulling away to slap him, as he half expected, Lisa kissed him back, pouring every bit of sweetness she had to offer into their connection. It was like fire meeting water, the steam rising to engulf him. Because what he felt from her wasn’t simply gratitude, but a shocking urgency, a passionate need that started a moan low in her throat. A sound that swept aside his anger and had his hands racing along forbidden curves.

  Too fast, and far too greedily, but instead of jerking away, she pressed closer as she slipped warm palms beneath his shirt. Groaning at her touch, he dropped his mouth to the column of her neck, his body already aching for her when she whispered, “I want you. I want you. Need you, Cole. Kissing me, touching me, inside me, before we have to...”

  It was everything he could do not to haul her into the Chevy’s backseat and take her, hot and hard, until she screamed his name. But as desperately as he wanted to give her the release she needed, to take what she had offered, she deserved far better—for far longer—than such a betrayal of the debt of honor he owed her.

  Besides, he knew full well that she didn’t really mean a single word that she was saying. She was merely acting out, the emotional stress she was under so unbearable that she was willing to do anything—even something he knew she would regret forever—to escape it even for a moment.

  Pulling away from her was one of the toughest things he could remember doing, but he damned well wasn’t going to lose his chance to save her by giving in to his libido. “I want you, too,” he told her honestly, a claim his body’s hardness echoed. “Want you so damned bad I’m aching. But I can’t. We can’t—especially not when I need to concentrate on cutting over to that cemetery and casing the surroundings. To concentrate on getting all three of us out of here alive.”

  “I—I know you’re right,” she said, and even in the velvety desert darkness, he knew she was crying. “But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say I hate you right now for being the voice of reason.”

  He kissed her one last time, softly on the forehead. “Believe me, Lisa, right now I’d forgive you absolutely anything.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lee Ray needed a tweak so bad he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t rest or eat, though hunger gnawed inside him like a starved wolf. But Evie had only kicked him like a damned dog when he’d asked for more, telling him to get his head straight because he had a job to do. A job he’d freaking better get right if he ever hoped to tweak again.

  Standing outside the cabin they had broken into, he shuddered with the biting cold, feeling so twitchy he wanted to pick every square inch of skin bloody, and so furious and frustrated, he needed to pound that bitch’s face in. And not the Hartfield bitch, as Evie kept calling Lisa Meador, but Evie herself.

  The front door creaked, but it wasn’t Evie, as he’d both hoped and dreaded, out to bribe him with a taste or even to scream more threats and insults. Instead, a tiny warm hand slipped inside his cold one. Tyler Meador’s hand, followed by that piping voice.

  “It’s too scary in there with her,” he said.

  “Get back inside anyway,” Lee Ray snapped.

  “After the bad people blew up my daddy, I used to get real mad a lot, too. I wanted to hit something, and sometimes I did. But it only made my hand hurt and got me lots of time-outs.”

  Lee Ray scowled down at him, wanting to tell the brat to shut up. To stop acting as if they were buddies, and that he’d never been and never could be anybody’s daddy.

  “My grandpa gave me this special pillow, and he says when the mad gets too big inside me, I should punch it.”

  “So you punched a pillow,” he echoed hollowly. As though he gave a rat’s ass.

  “I hit it real hard lots of times,” Tyler told him, and for the first time, Lee Ray noticed the smudges on the kid’s face, along with the griminess of the tattered blanket wrapped around him. He had a runny nose, too. Somebody ought to wipe it.

  “I don’t need it so much anymore, though,” Tyler went on, “so when we get home, you can have it.”

  “Me?” The boy wanted to give him something? Something that had been a present from his grandpa? Lee Ray felt a flicker of warmth in the center of his chest, followed by a stone-cold realization. Poor little rug rat actually fell for that stupid camping trip story I told him. And he believes he’s going home.

  The weight of what he was involved in settled in the icy hollow of his belly, a weight so heavy that he sank to his knees with it. Taking a corner of the ratty blanket, he wiped Tyler’s damp nose. But it was only an excuse to lean in close enough to whisper, “Tonight I have to go away for a while,” he started, before catching sight of the fear flashing across Tyler’s face.

  “Don’t go! Please! Don’t leave me with—”

  “Shh,” Lee Ray warned. “We can’t let her hear us or she’ll get mad. We don’t want her mad again, do we?”

  The boy shook his head quickly, his eyes wide as an owl’s, though Lee Ray had so f
ar managed to protect him from the lash of Evie’s fury.

  “Before me ’n’ her take off, we’re going to lock you in the cabin,” Lee Ray said.

  “All by myself?”

  Lee Ray nodded, his thoughts coming into a focus so sharp that they surprised him. “Yeah, except—you know that wooden shutter over by the big bunk?”

  “What’s a shutter?”

  “That wooden cover thing over the window. It’s coming loose on one side, loose enough that a little guy like you could just squeeze out with your blanket.”

  “In the dark?” the kid asked, sounding more afraid than ever. Lee Ray wasn’t surprised, since the boy had pestered for a night-light till Evie threatened to zip him up inside the duffel and dump it in a black cave, filled with slime and bats and bugs.

  “Just think of them stars up there as a million little night-lights. Then you go hide, little dude. You go and hide real good.”

  “Like for hide-and-seek?” Tyler stared up at him as he spoke, his small voice shaking.

  Lee Ray knew the kid was thinking of the canyon’s giant boulders, dangerous ravines and thorny thickets, and especially of Evie’s “bedtime stories” of giant zombies and bloodthirsty werewolves that would get him if he wandered off alone. But the only monster that scared Lee Ray was Evie herself.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Only this game has a real good prize.”

  “What prize?”

  Just maybe you get to live. But since Lee Ray couldn’t say that, he struggled to come up with some other idea. And something came floating into his memory, something he’d heard Lisa tell the kid to calm him down.

  “A medal,” he said. “A medal, like for soldiers.”

  “For real?”

  “Oh, yeah. Really real,” he lied, starting to sweat, because Evie might come out at any moment.

  “My dad got lots of medals before he went to heaven.”