Guardian Cowboy

by Carla Cassidy

  With each day that had passed, Sawyer’s love for Janis had only grown stronger. That was why he wasn’t nervous now.

  At the moment all he was feeling was a touch of impatience as he waited for Janis to emerge from the bedroom.

  He was ready to start their married life together right now. He was eager to put the ring on her finger and say the vows that would make their bond legal in the eyes of the law. Although in the eyes of his heart, they were already bonded heart and soul.

  As the bedroom door opened, Sawyer turned around and his heart leaped into his throat. She stood there, a brown-eyed angel in a short white dress, the bouquet of pink roses in her arms.

  And within minutes she would be his wife.

  As she started to walk toward him, he was humbled by how much he loved her and how much he knew she loved him. Tears misted his eyes as she handed her bouquet off to Edna and then faced him with eyes that shone brightly.

  Later, Sawyer wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about vows because the minute he reached for her hands he was lost in a haze of happiness.

  The haze didn’t lift until they were in his truck and headed back to their house. “Are you sorry we didn’t plan some sort of reception?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” she replied. “I’m looking forward to a reception just for the two of us that includes eating as much of our wedding cake as we want and then hopping into our new four-poster bed.”

  Their wedding cake was in a box at her feet, a crème brûlée cake from the café.

  “Are you sorry?” she asked. “Are you sure you aren’t sorry that we didn’t have a reception and included all the Holiday Ranch cowboys?”

  He shot her a quick smile. “Why would I want to spend time with a bunch of rowdy cowboys when I can spend time with you all alone?”

  He pulled up into the driveway. “Sit tight,” he said after he’d parked. “I’ll come around to get you.”

  He got out of the truck and hurried around to the passenger side. He opened her door and as soon as she stepped out of the truck, he swept her up in his arms.

  Her laughter shot straight into his heart. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held tight as he carried her across their threshold.

  A half hour later they had changed into comfy, casual clothing and were sitting at the kitchen table with the cake in front of them.

  “You know we’re being complete pigs,” he said as he used his fork to take another mouthful of the cake. They hadn’t even bothered with dishes, but instead were eating the cake right off the cardboard it had come in from the café.

  “We’re allowed to be pigs on our wedding day.” She grinned. “‘Our wedding day.’ Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

  “You’ve made me a very happy man, Janis.”

  “And you’ve made me happier than I ever dreamed possible.” She set her fork down and her expression grew more serious. “I’ve been doing a lot of good work with Ellie.”

  “I’m glad. I was so proud of you for seeking some help.” When she didn’t pick her fork up again, he set his down. “Why do you look so serious? Is anything wrong?”

  “Not at all. For the first time in my life, I feel like everything is wonderfully right. I’ve just been thinking about what a good mother you had and what a good father I had.”

  He gazed at her curiously, wondering where she was going with the conversation. “That’s true,” he replied.

  “So, between the two of us, we should have all the knowledge we need to be really great parents.”

  He stared at her intently. Her eyes were that beautiful caramel color he’d come to recognize as her inner peace and contentment. “What are you saying?”

  “I want to have your babies, Sawyer.”

  His breath caught in the back of his throat. “Is this some kind of a wedding day whim?”

  “No, it’s a wedding day vow, a promise to you.” Her eyes glittered. “You’re going to have that family, Sawyer. We’re going to have that family together. We’re going to have ginger-haired children who will know how very much they are loved every day of their life.”

  He stared at her, this incredible woman he’d fallen in love with, the strong woman who had been through so much and yet had come out on the other side. “Oh, woman, do you have any idea what you do to me?”

  She grinned at him. “Why don’t we go upstairs and you can show me.”

  He jumped out of his chair so quickly he upended it. She giggled as he grabbed her up into his arms. Her giggles disappeared as he took her mouth with his in a kiss that spoke of his fiery desire and his love.

  In return her lips tasted of crème brûlée and passion and love. She was his forever woman and they were going to live in her dream house...a house that was now his dream because she was in it. And they were going to laugh together and love and have babies and live happily ever after.

  * * * * *

  Don’t forget previous titles in the

  COWBOYS OF HOLIDAY RANCH series:

  SHELTERED BY THE COWBOY

  KILLER COWBOY

  OPERATION COWBOY DADDY

  COWBOY AT ARMS

  COWBOY UNDER FIRE

  COWBOY OF INTEREST

  A REAL COWBOY

  Keep reading for an excerpt from HER MISSION WITH A SEAL by Cindy Dees.

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  Her Mission with a SEAL

  by Cindy Dees

  Chapter 1

  Nissa Beck had done some crazy things in her life, but sailing into the teeth of a rapidly intensifying hurricane in a tiny dinghy—in the dark—with a trio of Navy SEALs was right up there on the stupid scale. They’d actually strapped her into the boat so she wouldn’t get tossed out as their craft went nearly vertical climbing the wave faces towering overhead and then plunged nearly vertically down the waves crashing into black troughs of icy seawater.

  Throat-paralyzing terror was the only reason she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse already. The horror of being out here at the mercy of the wildly tossing ocean was indescribable. As was the sheer size of the waves. They were small mountains. Literally. Except for the ones that periodically collapsed on top of them, burying them in frigid seawater for endless seconds until they popped back up to the surface and could breathe again. In short, it was a living nightmare.

  She’d swallowed more seawater than she could fathom and thrown most of it back up along with the last meal she’d consumed three hours ago. A lifetime away in a safe place. On land. Not in the path of Hurricane Jessamine. />
  But her target had fled the United States and was out here somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico making his getaway on a container ship call the Anna Belle. The ship wasn’t one of the super giants, just a relatively small cargo ship. The manifest said she sailed with a crew of twenty, was loaded with wheat below decks and carried 120 containers stacked above decks.

  What the manifest didn’t say was that she also carried a passenger. A man named Markus Petrov. One of the most elusive spies ever to operate on American soil. A colleague of Nissa’s, an American spy named Max Kuznetsov whose mother had been killed by Petrov, had spent nearly a decade tracking the guy and had spent most of the past three years undercover in Petrov’s criminal organization learning his true identity.

  It was a brilliant setup, actually. Petrov ran a Russian crime gang and used its proceeds to finance his extracurricular espionage activities. In the meantime, he hid behind the Russian mafia, who fiercely protected his identity.

  Max and a team of Navy SEALs had destroyed most of Petrov’s criminal organization last week in a spectacular shoot-out deep in the bayous of south Louisiana. But Petrov had disappeared.

  Unfortunately, Max also needed to go to ground, along with his fiancée, a psychic who had helped him identify Markus Petrov at long last. Until Petrov was apprehended, the two of them were in extreme danger and had been whisked into federal protective custody. This left no subject matter experts on Petrov except Nissa to help with the manhunt.

  She’d been tracking Max’s progress in the Petrov case for years and was the CIA’s second most knowledgeable analyst when it came to the Russian spy. Which was why she was out here tonight doing her darnedest to drown. The SEALs needed someone who could make a positive ID on Petrov when they captured him on the Anna Belle.

  The cargo ship had gone silent the moment it crossed into international waters, and the only reason they knew where it was now was compliments of a hurricane hunter aircraft that’d made a visual sighting of the ship on its last pass through Hurricane Jessamine that afternoon.

  Were it not for that chance sighting, nobody would have any idea where Petrov and the ship he’d fled on had disappeared to.

  The ship’s manifest said it was bound for the Dominican Republic with food and humanitarian supplies. Perhaps that part was true, at any rate.

  One of the SEALs had a radio headset plastered to his ears. He shouted a course correction back to the muscular man wrestling the tiller, the team leader, Commander Cole Perriman.

  He was easily six foot three and built like a god. The high-tech wet suit currently clinging to his torso was an exercise in truth in advertising. Every beautiful, perfect muscle was clearly outlined for her viewing pleasure. Thank you, God.

  At the moment his hood was pushed back, and his short dark hair was plastered to his skull. Still, his face was handsome and rugged. She knew from earlier that his eyes were pale, icy blue and practically glowed against his darkly tanned skin.

  The members of his team called him Frosty. Although the nickname initially made her think of cheerful snowmen, after two minutes in his presence, she understood the moniker. The guy’s nerves were made of pure ice.

  Their pitifully small craft topped a massive swell, and she thought she caught sight of a black shape looming ahead. But then the rain squall around them intensified, and they slid down the back side of the swell into a black trough bordered by massive walls of water on all sides. Lord, the ocean was big. She felt tiny and insignificant in the face of these gigantic waves. She was not a particularly religious person, but a prayer entered her head now to whatever deity might hear her plea to please save them all from this insanity.

  The only good part about being down in the troughs was they got a momentary break from the screaming winds trying to tear their faces off. The rain, blowing at a hundred miles per hour or more, felt like a power washer trying to scrub the flesh off her bones.

  She would be more inclined to whimper in fear were it not for how unconcerned these guys seemed about the storm. They were self-possessed and untalkative, exuding a certain cool self-confidence.

  “There’s the Anna Belle!” the one called Bass shouted as they topped another huge, heaving swell.

  “Where are its lights?” she shouted back.

  Commander Perriman answered from behind her, “Good question. They may have lost power. If they’ve taken on enough water, they could have flooded their engines and backup electric generators.”

  “That sounds bad” Nissa ventured to reply.

  The SEAL called Ashe responded, managing to infuse his voice with dry irony, even while shouting over the storm, “It would suck to be them in a storm like this without power.”

  The big twin motors on their rigid inflatable boat powered them up a half dozen more mountain-steep swells before they finally drew close to the darkened container ship. It was actually the scariest moment of the journey so far when a swell tilted the Anna Belle way over on its side toward them, a huge pile of containers looming overhead, threatening to topple the ship and kill them all.

  “Suit up!” Perriman ordered the team. All the hoods came up. Nissa already had hers up, and it held in place the earbuds and throat microphones the team would use to communicate once they boarded the Anna Belle. She covered her eyes with the night-vision goggles that had been stowed around her neck. The three men beside her leaped into lime-green relief against the heaving black sea.

  “Ship’s listing pretty bad,” Perriman commented over their discrete radio frequency.

  “Fifteen to eighteen degrees to the port side,” Ashe replied. He sounded like an expert sailor. “She’s looking top-heavy, too. With those containers stacked high like that, they act as a wall to catch the wind. Hurricane could blow the ship over if they get crossways of a big enough gust.”

  Okay, that sounded really bad.

  “Let’s get on and off her as fast as we can,” Perriman ordered. “I don’t like the looks of her seaworthiness.”

  Great. The ship they were about to board was on the verge of capsizing and sinking. Just how every girl wanted to spend her Saturday night.

  They tied off their craft to a cleat low on the hull of the Anna Belle, and then Bass, using welded rungs on the hull, climbed the side of the ship like a freaking monkey. He lowered a rope ladder from the deck down to them.

  “Up you go, Nissa,” Cole ordered. He clipped a rope that Bass threw down onto the body harness they’d made her wear and which they’d used to lash her into their boat.

  She looked up at the rope ladder swinging around over her head and gulped. He must have seen her hesitation because he moved up behind her and leaned forward to shout in her ear, off microphone, “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Right. As if that was reassuring. At least she knew to grab the rope ladder from the side and not to try to go up it facing the rungs head-on. With one rope of the ladder against her cheek, she turned her feet pigeon-toed to climb the ladder.

  It was okay for the first ten feet or so. But then the ship got sideways of a swell, and it tilted toward her sickeningly. The rope swung out into space. She wasn’t even over the SEALs’ boat anymore. Black water yawned below her. I’m going to die. Frozen in terror, she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the ladder for dear life.

  The ship tilted back the other way, and the ladder swung back toward the ship, slamming her into the cold steel hull. She lost her grip on the wet ladder and swung out to the side on the safety rope, smashing into the ship’s hull hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She screamed, but the sound was ripped away from her by a huge gust of wind and rain that hit her with the force of a fire hose.

  “Grab the ladder!” someone shouted.

  She opened her eyes and swung sickeningly out in space as the ship rolled again, black water reaching up to her and the listing ship looming above, as if it was about to come down on her head and drag her to
the bottom of the sea.

  Panic paralyzed her so completely that she couldn’t even form thoughts, let alone take action. She bumped along the hull of the ship as it tilted away from her, and by some miracle, she banged into something hard and rough. The rope ladder. She grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.

  A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the figure’s head was at her waist.

  “Keep going!” It was Cole.

  Not. A. Chance.

  No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.

  He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.

  “One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.

  He patiently talked her through the rest of the climb, one hand and one foot at a time. Bass kept tension on her safety rope from above, helping her make the climb, and Cole steadied her with his big body and strong arms, protecting her from the worst of the storm.

  It took a lifetime, but eventually Bass hauled her onto the deck beside him. She lay on her belly and although there was nothing left in her stomach, she dry heaved anyway, so terrified she didn’t think she was ever going to be the same again.

  Of course, Ashe jogged up the ladder as if it was a walk in the damned park. The party all aboard, they knelt together in the shadow of a pile of containers, shadows among the shadows in their black sea-land suits and black facial camo grease. Of course, she looked the same, her blond hair tucked under her neoprene hood, her skin blackened like theirs.

  “Any sign of movement out here?” Perriman asked.