SPY IN THE SADDLE

by Dana Marton

“She’s Mitch Mendoza’s sister,” Ryder said.

  A moment of confused silence passed as the men looked at each other, processing the unexpected information.

  Jamie spoke first. “The one he’s been looking for?” His sister was married to Mendoza, so this was family business for him. “I thought her name was Cindy.”

  “Got changed at one point along the way. You can ask her all about it when she gets here.”

  Mo clapped Jamie on the back. “Hey, that makes her your sister-in-law, doesn’t it?”

  A stunned smile spread on Jamie’s face as he nodded. “Kind of. Yeah.”

  Ryder headed to the back for coffee. “Mitch found her just recently. Different name and everything, but it’s definitely his sister. They had the DNA test done to confirm it.”

  Shep rubbed his temple where a headache pulsed to life suddenly.

  Mitch Mendoza, another member of the SDDU, Special Designation Defense Unit, the large team that Shep’s smaller group belonged to, came from a family destroyed by drugs. He’d been a teenager when his father had sold his little sister for coke. Mitch had been looking for her ever since.

  And now he’d found her at last.

  Except that through some bizarre turn of events, Mitch’s Cindy Mendoza was Shep’s Lilly Tanner. Shep swallowed. And she was coming here.

  He tried to remember if he had any aspirin in his desk drawer. “They’ll have to send someone else.”

  Jamie lifted an eyebrow, a warning look forming on his face. “She’s my family,” he said, in case somehow Shep didn’t get that.

  He did. Shoot me now.

  “She can’t be my Lilly Tanner. There must be a hundred Lilly Tanners out there.” He stubbornly clung to denial.

  “She’s yours.” Jamie extinguished that hope with ruthless efficiency. “I ran a background check on her when I got the name. Right age. Came from the juvie system. Right city.”

  Shep pushed to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” Mo wanted to know.

  “Taking a break.” He needed an hour at the gym.

  He needed a little time to clear his mind so he could focus fully on his work. His thoughts were all over the place, and he had plenty to get done today.

  No distractions. He had to erase the picture that filled his mind: the seventeen-year-old bundle of holy terror that had made him quit the juvenile justice system. Sort of. Okay, fine, they fired him because of her.

  But even as he moved toward the fridge to grab a bottle of water to go, another car pulled up outside. A throaty engine rumbled, sounding nothing like the team’s SUVs. A car door slammed.

  He had a hollow feeling in his stomach.

  The urge to run hit him, but he stood immobilized as he listened to heels clicking on the floor in the main office area. On reflex, he cataloged the weapons within range: his gun at his hip, his backup firearm in the ankle holster, the knife in his pocket.

  Then the door swung open and a pair of familiar devil-black eyes, fringed with thick lashes, scanned the break room before they zeroed in on him.

  Oh, holy hell. She was definitely his Lilly Tanner.

  Yet she was nothing like the girl he remembered.

  Her full lips stretched into a smile that made Ray stare openmouthed. Shep considered throwing the water bottle at the idiot to snap him out of it. Then he realized that the rest of them were just as bad, staring at her, more than a little dazed. Great.

  “Good morning, gentlemen.” Her voice was a sexy purr, enough to make a man sit up and pay attention, nothing like the disdainful teenage tone Shep still heard sometimes in his nightmares.

  She had stretched up and filled out, and somehow managed to look like a Playboy Playmate even in a straight-cut charcoal FBI suit. She wore her wild, dark curls pulled back into a no-nonsense bun, her five-inch heels a somber black, yet everything about her somehow spelled sex, which made Shep feel all wrong and uncomfortable.

  She’d been his charge once. He was pretty sure he shouldn’t be standing there thinking how she was the hottest thing he’d ever seen.

  Good thing he knew too much about her to fall for the new look. Hell, he even knew where her tattoos were—

  He caught himself and tried to backpedal out of that thought. Too late. A strange heat flooded him.

  She strode straight to him on endless legs, her hips swaying in a mesmerizing way. “Hey, Shep. Long time no see.”

  Enough roundness was happening in that skirt to make a man’s palms itch. And her breasts, too, had come into their own since he’d last seen her. Definitely. His brain was short-circuiting, unable to reconcile his old image of her with the new.

  “Are you going to introduce me to your friends?” she asked when she stood close enough for him to catch the light scent of her perfume, her head at a slight tilt, an amused look in her eyes.

  He had a hard time recalling his friends.

  “Ray Armstrong.” Ray came around the table and took her hand, held it longer than necessary.

  Keith deftly pushed Ray out of the way. “Keith Gunn.”

  She shook his hand, too, then Mo’s and Ryder’s as they came up to introduce themselves. Then she turned to Jamie. “You must be Jamie Cassidy, then.”

  Jamie stood with a bigger smile than Shep ever remembered seeing on him, and walked over to her, then enveloped her in a hug that made Ray and Keith look decidedly unhappy.

  “We’re family,” he said when he pulled back. “I’m glad they found you. Now maybe Mitch will learn to relax a little.” He grinned. “What are the chances?”

  She stood a little stiffly, as if not entirely sure of the hearty welcome. But she said, “From what I’ve seen of him, very little.”

  Jamie grinned, then shot a watch yourself look at Shep, who wished he knew where the button was to project him into an alternate universe.

  Ryder and Mo looked rather protective of her, too. They both had tremendous respect for Mitch Mendoza. Both would have laid down their lives for him. Or his little sister, from the looks of it. Ray and Keith, all googly-eyed, were obviously in lust with her and didn’t care who knew it.

  Shep swallowed in disgust. Less than five minutes had passed since she’d walked through the door. The disciplined, battle-hardened team of six of the best commandos in the country stood in shambles.

  That was Lilly Tanner.

  He drew a slow breath, careful not to inhale too much of her perfume that wreaked havoc with his senses. He was a well-trained undercover operative. He could and would figure out how to stay away from her.

  He stepped back, ready to leave the insanity behind, but her voice stopped him.

  “While we’re all together here, I do have some information to share.” She paused, as if to make sure she had everyone’s attention but of course she did and then some. “We have confirmed intelligence that on October first, terrorists and their chemical weapons will be smuggled across this section of the border.”

  “We know that,” Shep told her.

  She went on. “This team is not large enough to monitor a hundred miles.”

  Ryder nodded. “But a larger force would be noticed. Then the transfer would just be delayed or moved to another location.” They’d been through this many times in the past weeks.

  She held up a slim hand. “A small undercover team catching the terrorists would have been the best option,” she agreed. “However, orders have been given for the National Guard to seal the area in question. They’ll be arriving on the thirtieth. If you can’t show results by then, we do need to be ready with plan B.”

  Ryder’s face darkened. “It’s been decided and approved?”

  She nodded. “This morning.”

  “How long will they stay?”

  “An indeterminate period.”

  “B
ut an incomplete and temporary deployment?”

  “Yes.”

  Shep watched her. “The terrorists will just wait them out. Or find another spot.” Ryder had just said that, but it seemed she hadn’t heard him.

  She pulled her shoulders even straighter. “There’s no guaranteed perfect solution.”

  Her not meddling in his team’s business would have been perfect, Shep thought as Ryder asked, “And if we can pin down the exact transfer location within the next couple of days? In time to set up an ambush.”

  “Capture is preferable to deterrence. If you obtain an exact location, your team will be allowed to go ahead as planned with the apprehension on the first.”

  The phone rang out in the office area. Shep, already near the door, went to answer it, needing some space.

  Jamie and Mo followed him. They were heading out to the border for their shift, so they went to their desks for their backup weapons and started loading up.

  They had the date, but the tangos could change their minds. And catching even a regular smuggler could always turn into gold, if the guy could lead them to the Coyote.

  As Shep picked up the phone, the others came out of the break room, too. He turned his back to them to focus on the call.

  “Hey, I got those prints for you,” Doug at the lab said on the other end. “They belong to one Jimmy Fishburn. Petty criminal.” He rattled off the address.

  Shep entered it into his cell phone GPS before turning back to the others.

  Jamie and Mo were already gone. Ryder was heading into his office with Lilly. He glanced back from the doorway. “Anything important?”

  “We got an ID on the fingerprints.”

  They’d been supposed to catch the Coyote when he came up to the U.S. for a medical procedure two days earlier. Instead, they’d chased and shot a stand-in. The driver had escaped, but they’d gotten his car and prints.

  They’d never even laid eyes on the Coyote. The crime boss was pretty good at the game he played. Too bad. Because if they had him, he could give them the exact location for the terrorists’ trip across the river. He’d know. He’d set up the transfer.

  “You need someone to go with you?” Ryder asked.

  Shep shook his head. He wanted to be alone to regain his composure a little, and so he could swear loudly and at length on the way. “According to the lab, he’s a small-time crook. I can handle it.”

  But Lilly flashed him a dazzling smile. “I can meet with Ryder later. I’ll go with you. We can catch up on the way.”

  Just what he’d been hoping for. Not really.

  If he’d learned one thing in the past couple of years, it was that you always played to your strengths. You figured out what your strengths were, built on them, made them even better and used them. You didn’t go into your weak territory. Your weak territory was where bad things happened.

  Women were his weak territory. Especially Lilly.

  He opened his mouth to protest, then caught another look of warning from Jamie. She was his sister-in-law. Okay, that added another layer of trickiness to all this.

  It wasn’t as if he couldn’t handle her. He could.

  So he forced his lips into something he hoped might resemble a cool, unaffected smile. “Can’t wait.”

  * * *

  LILLY SAT IN the passenger seat of Shep’s super-rigged SUV and tried to suck in her stomach while doing her best not to stare at him. Not that the arid Texas countryside provided much distraction. Low brush and yellow grass covered the land they drove over, a handful of farmhouses dotting the landscape here and there.

  The cool, confident FBI agent thing back in the office had been a complete sham. Truth was, he made her nervous. Very. Not that he needed to know that.

  “This Jimmy is our strongest lead?” She glanced at Shep from the corner of her eye.

  Life was so incredibly unfair.

  He hadn’t changed any in the past decade. Okay, maybe a little. His shoulders seemed even wider, his gaze more somber. He had a new edge to him, as if he’d been to hell and back. But he could still make her heart skip a beat just by breathing.

  No, she caught herself. There’d be none of that this time around. She was a grown-up, a self-possessed, independent woman. Or she would act like one, at the very least.

  “Yes.” He responded to her question. “If it pans out, Jimmy could be a direct lead to the Coyote.”

  She tugged on her suit top, wishing she knew how to hide the pounds she’d put on since their last meeting—thank you, office work. Being a cop had been bad like that, but working for the FBI was worse. A week’s worth of fieldwork could easily be followed by a month of debriefings, reports and other documentation, with her going cross-eyed in front of a computer.

  His stomach was as flat as the blacktop they drove over, and probably as hard. Not that she’d looked. Much. She lifted her gaze to his face.

  “Hot down here,” she said, then winced at how inane she sounded.

  She had tagged along to catch up, maybe even apologize for her past sins, but suddenly she couldn’t remember a thing she’d meant to say. Shep still had a knack for overwhelming her.

  He kept his attention on the road. “How long have you been with the FBI?” he asked in that rich, masculine voice of his that had been the center of her teenage obsession with the man.

  “Five years. Police force before that.”

  He turned to her at last, his eyebrows sliding up his forehead. “You were a cop?”

  “For a while. After I got my act together. My juvenile record was expunged.”

  He grunted, sounding a lot less impressed than she’d hoped he would be. As she tried to think of what to say next, he turned off the county road and down a winding lane, which led to a trailer park.

  A hundred or so trailers of various sizes sat in disorderly rows, all in faded pastel colors. No people. Nobody would want to sit outside in this heat. Broken-down cars and rusty grills clogged the narrow spaces between trailers, garbage and tumbleweeds blowing in the breeze.

  He drove to the back row, checked the address, then backed his SUV into the gravel driveway next to a derelict shed that sat between two homes.

  “This one.” He nodded toward a pale blue single-wide directly across from them that had its siding peeling in places. A tan recliner with the stuffing hanging out sat by the front steps.

  When Shep got out, so did she. She caught movement at last—nothing sinister. Behind the shed, in a half-broken blue kiddie pool, a little boy was giving a graying old dog a bath. The dog didn’t look impressed, but still stood obediently and let the kid dump water all over him.

  The kid paid them no attention. He should be safe where he was. They weren’t expecting trouble, but even if they found some, the little boy was out of sight and out of the way.

  Shep looked at her. “What do you think?”

  She scanned the blue trailer, mapped all the possible venues of approach in her head. “Anybody going up the steps could be easily picked off by someone in one of the windows.” That would be the most vulnerable part of the exercise. “Do you need backup?”

  “I can handle it.” He checked his weapon with practiced movements, as if he’d done this a million times before. He probably had. “You keep an eye on the kid. Make sure he stays where he is.”

  She watched the trailer’s windows. If anyone moved behind the closed blinds, she couldn’t see them. “Any guess who the big boss is? Any clues to the real identity of the Coyote?”

  Shep shrugged. “Our best leads have an unfortunate tendency to die before they can be questioned.”

  Which was one of the reasons why she had come.

  While the six-man team was made up of the best commando soldiers the country had to offer, they’d been trained to fight, and fight they did. The body cou
nt was going up. She’d been sent to tone that down a little.

  They weren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan. Running an op inside the U.S. was a more delicate business. Border security was a touchy issue. International relations were at stake. They needed to catch the terrorists without starting a war.

  Well, they weren’t going to lose any leads on her watch. She glanced at the boy still busy splashing in the water, then something else drew her attention. A souped-up Mustang roared down the street.

  The dog barked, then jumped out of the pool to chase the car. And the little boy chased after. “Jack! Come back!”

  Something about the car set off Lilly’s instincts, but there was no time to react, no time to stop what was happening.

  Brakes squealing, the car slowed in front of Jimmy’s trailer, and the next second the trailer’s windows exploded in a hail of bullets.

  “Get down!” Shep shouted over the gunfire and dived after the kid.

  She’d never seen a superspy lunge like that, straight through the air, covering an unlikely distance in a split second as she took cover behind the SUV. She was on the wrong side to help, but at the right angle to get a look at the license plate, at least.

  Shep went down, protecting the boy, rolling back into the cover of the shed with him as the dog ran off. The Mustang was pulling away already.

  Her heart raced as she jumped up. “Shep!”

  Was he hit?

  Chapter Two

  She couldn’t see him. “Shep!”

  Then he popped back into sight and shot at the Mustang, blew out a window as the car picked up speed, roaring away.

  Lilly rushed forward and aimed at one of the back tires, barely seeing anything from the dust cloud the car was kicking up. She missed.

  “You stay right here,” she heard Shep call out, probably to the kid, then he was next to her.

  “Call in the plate. Call the office.” He rushed forward, up the shot-up trailer’s steps. “Law enforcement,” he called out when he reached the top. “Don’t shoot. Are you okay in there, Jimmy?” He kicked in the already damaged door and disappeared inside.