The Enemy's Daughter

by Linda Turner

  He didn’t have to tell them twice. Leaping into action, their faces grim with determination, they turned as a unit and raced after Simon.

  “Lise? Are you okay? Here, honey, let me see.” Dropping to his knees beside her in the dark, his face pale with concern, Russell saw the blood spreading through her blouse and swore fiercely. “The son of a bitch! Tuck, help me,” he called sharply as he applied pressure to the wound. “We’ve got to get her back to the house!”

  Her shoulder on fire, tears stinging her eyes, Lise caught weakly at his hand. “Go after Simon. Don’t let him get away.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” he said fiercely. “Don’t ask that of me.”

  “But Simon’s getting away. He’ll head for the plane. Call Belinda. You have to stop him.”

  His face carved with worry, Russell reached for his wallet and jerked out his phone card, uncaring that the others were watching. If they didn’t know by now that he wasn’t one of them, it was time they found out.

  “Where the hell are you?” he growled when Belinda finally came on the line. “Lise has been shot, and Simon got away. He’s bound to be headed for his plane. Do what you have to to stop him.”

  “The fire threw backup off course,” she explained. “They’ll be right there.”

  “See that they are,” he growled, and hung up, all his attention once again focused on Lise.

  Fanned by the high winds, the fire had intensified and was now raging out of control, racing across the bush. Russell never spared it a glance. Still lying on the ground where she had fallen, Lise was pale as a ghost in the light cast by the fire. Worried sick, he kept his hand tight against her shoulder. And with every beat of her heart, her blood leaked between his fingers.

  Unseen in the night, a squadron of helicopters approached the ranch like a swarm of locusts, using the cover of darkness to conceal their position from enemy eyes. Simon, however, heard their rotors beating at the smoky air and knew who had sent them long before he saw them. SPEAR. Sanctimonious bastards, he thought grimly. So they thought they could catch him, did they? Better men than they had tried and died regretting it. This time would be no different.

  Uncaring that he’d nearly ridden his horse into the ground, he whipped it with the reins and raced for the house just as the first chopper came into view. By the light of the fire, it looked like a black demon in the night sky. His heart hammering against his ribs, he knew he could be seen from the air—the compound was lit up like a Christmas tree—but he had the advantage. He was still out of range of their firepower, and he knew the place like the back of his hand. His enemies didn’t.

  Ruthlessly demanding his spent mount give its all for him, he rode it into the ground and didn’t care that the horse was half dead from exhaustion by the time they reached the barn. It had served its purpose. Not sparing the poor animal a second thought, he jumped from the saddle and ran to the main power switch, which was located on the outside wall of the barn. With one downward thrust, he cast the entire compound—house, barn and landing field—into darkness.

  Triumphant, he laughed, but it was a short-lived victory. The total darkness he’d hoped for was ruined by the fire raging a half mile from the house. Running the length and breadth of the horizon, it set the night sky aglow. From where he stood in the shadow of the barn, he could clearly see where his plane sat on the landing strip. Even though he was dressed in black, he would be just as visible the second he came within thirty feet of the jet.

  “Damn!”

  Furious, there was nothing he could do but run for it. And he didn’t have a hell of a lot of time to waste. If he gave the choppers time to land, they’d surround his plane and cut off his escape. Swearing, he took off at a dead run, weaving in and out between the barn and outbuildings like a dark shadow running from the hounds of hell.

  When the first bullet whizzed past him, he felt the heat of it graze his cheek. Ducking, he cursed and zigzagged across the runway while a hail of bullets rained down from the sky.

  A lesser man might have surrendered rather than chance getting shot, but he’d avoided capture too many times in the past to worry about a little gunfire. He threw himself up the gangplank just as the first chopper landed and armed SPEAR operatives spilled from it.

  “Steady,” he told himself as he ran to the cockpit and prepared to take off. “There’s no reason to panic. You’ve got them right where you want them.”

  He hurriedly started the engine of the small jet and taxied down the runway, away from his pursuers. Long seconds later, his wheels left the tarmac as he took off. The helicopters gave chase, but there was no way they could keep up with the power of his jet. Laughing, he left the station far behind and soared into the sky. Once again, he’d evaded SPEAR.

  She was dying.

  Russell could practically feel Lise’s life force slipping through his fingers, and it struck terror in his heart. He couldn’t lose her! Not now that he’d finally found a woman who meant everything to him. Didn’t she know he’d been waiting his entire life for her? He had to tell her!

  His hand still pressed to the gaping wound in her shoulder, he bent over her and said hoarsely, “Lise? Don’t you die on me, sweetheart. You hear me?”

  “I’m okay,” she whispered faintly.

  “You damn well better be,” he growled. “I love you, and I’m not losing you, dammit!”

  Tuck ran up with Preston while Chuck held Simon’s thugs at gunpoint. “How is she?”

  “Fading fast,” Russell answered, worried out of his mind. “We’ve got to get her back to the house. Take off your shirt. This has to be bandaged before we try to move her.”

  Lightning quick, the older man peeled off his shirt and tore it into strips, one of which he hurriedly folded into a thick bandage. “Ready?” he asked Lise. “We’re going to have to tie this down tight. It’s going to hurt.”

  “Do it,” she said, bracing herself. “I can take it.”

  She was a strong woman, but not even she could withstand hard pressure on a gaping gunshot wound. The minute Tuck pressed the bandage into place, she screamed, stiffening against the white-hot pain that ripped through her shoulder. In the end, however, she couldn’t fight it. Without a sound, she wilted, unconscious.

  “Dammit to hell, Tuck, she’s passed out! You hurt her.”

  “No,” he retorted, “her father hurt her. I’m just trying to keep her from bleeding to death. Mount up. I’ll hand her to you.”

  Terrified for her, Russell grabbed Thunder’s reins and vaulted into the saddle. He’d barely settled into the stirrups before the older man was handing Lise to him. Limp as a dishrag, she collapsed against him without a sound. Scared to death, Russell didn’t wait to see more. Spurring his horse, he bolted for the house.

  Russell never remembered much about that ride. Tuck stayed behind to help Chuck escort Simon’s mercenaries to the house, so Russell was alone with Lise as he galloped across the bush in the night. A half a mile away, he saw the lights of the compound flare on and didn’t have time to wonder if Simon had gotten away. Right now, the only thing that mattered was Lise. He wouldn’t lose her. His face grim with determination, he headed straight for the house. It was the longest ride of his life.

  The compound was crawling with agents when he finally galloped into the light, but Russell only saw one man. “Jeff!” Russell shouted hoarsely. “Thank God! Lise has been shot. You’ve got to help her.”

  In a split second, three pairs of hands were there to take her from his arms. Jeff Kirby, a tall, good-looking man who, at twenty-four, still showed the lankiness of youth in his face and body, was a medical student currently getting field training for his planned medevac specialty. Young in age but old in the ways of the world, he took one look at the bloody bandage strapped to Lise’s shoulder and immediately took charge. “Let’s get her inside—there’s a downstairs bedroom. Somebody get my bag. Easy!” he barked when the men accidentally jostled Lise’s shoulder and she moaned. “She’s in enough pain a
lready. Be careful.”

  Suitably chastised, the men carried Lise inside and deposited her on the bed. After washing his hands in the nearby bathroom, Jeff stepped into the bedroom and scowled. “Where’s my bag?”

  “Here,” Tish Buckner said from behind him in the hallway. “I had to get it from the chopper.” Tish was the senior agent in charge of the search of the compound. Her eyes met his for a long moment as she held his medical bag out to him, then she glanced past his shoulder to Russell, who was hovering close by Lise, refusing to leave her side. Nodding grimly at him, Tish said, “It’s good to see you again, Russell. From what I’ve heard, you’ve done a good job here.”

  “Not good enough,” he retorted bitterly. “I couldn’t protect Lise when she needed me, and I don’t know what the hell happened to Simon.”

  “He gave us the slip in the smoke,” Jeff told him flatly as he quickly moved to the opposite side of the bed to inspect Lise’s wound.

  “He turned off the compound lights, and by the time we spotted him, he was already halfway to his jet and out of range,” Tish added in disgust. “Once he took off, the choppers couldn’t keep up.”

  Lise moaned, shifting under Jeff’s hands as he inspected the wound. As pale as the bedsheets, she groggily opened her eyes and stiffened at the sight of a stranger bending over her. Alarmed, her eyes flew from him to the small, pretty woman standing at the foot of the bed. They were both dressed all in black and looked too much like the hired thugs her father had brought to the station with him. “Who…?”

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” Russell said quickly, taking her hand. “This is Jeff Kirby and Tish Buckner. They’re with SPEAR. Jeff’s a medical student—he’s going to take care of you. How do you feel?”

  “Like I got hit in the shoulder with a flamethrower,” she said faintly, wincing. “My father shot me, didn’t he?”

  Nodding, he said, “I knew he was a bastard, but I never thought he’d hurt you, Lise. Not like that. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. How could you be expected to know that when I didn’t know it myself? I’m his daughter, for God’s sake! He left me to die.” Suddenly remembering the fire, she blanched. “Oh, God, the fire! We’ve got to do something.”

  “It’s already being taken care of,” Tish assured her. “Your neighbors volunteered their water trucks, and now that the wind has died some, the fire’s not spreading so quickly. It’s under control.”

  “So just relax and let somebody else worry about the station,” Jeff added. “Right now, we want to get you patched up and back on your feet. And that’s going to be easier than I first thought. The bullet appears to have exited cleanly, and I don’t see any bone fragments. Let me give you something for the pain, then I’ll clean the wound and bandage it for you.”

  Her entire shoulder throbbed, but Lise didn’t realize how badly it was hurting until Jeff gave her a shot. Within minutes, the pain eased to a dull, bearable throb. Relieved, Lise could have cried. “Thank you!”

  “Jeff’ll fix you right up,” Tish said confidently. “He’s an excellent doctor.”

  She smiled at Jeff, and something passed between them, something intimate and private that Lise doubted Tish was even aware was reflected in her expressive brown eyes. But Lise saw it and blinked in surprise. Jeff might have the eyes of an old soul, but he couldn’t have been older than his middle twenties. Tish, on the other hand, had to be at least ten years his senior, in spite of the fact that she looked no more than thirty. With her olive complexion and glossy, dark brown hair, she was very attractive, but there was a maturity about her that only came with age.

  And it showed when she realized Lise was watching the two of them together. With the blink of an eye, she hid whatever was between her and Jeff and became all business again. “I know this has to be difficult for you, Lise. Unfortunately, I can’t make things any easier for you. Your father was able to escape, so it’s my job to make sure he hasn’t hidden anything here. I had to order my men to tear the place apart.”

  Even as she spoke, Lise could hear the groan of wood as floorboards were pried up and furniture dismantled as SPEAR agents went to work searching for every possible hiding place. Lise couldn’t blame them. After the way her father had betrayed her, she’d have been right in there with them, looking for whatever she could find to incriminate him, if she hadn’t been shot. “Do what you have to do,” she said huskily.

  Relieved, Tish said, “Thanks. If you can think of someplace in particular he might have hidden his records, we’d appreciate it.”

  Lise would love to have helped her, but there was little she could tell her. “Sorry,” she said with a grimace, “but he really didn’t spend a lot of time here. Other than his study, the only place I can think of is the cabin he built for my mother when they first married.”

  “Russell mentioned that he’d already searched it, but we had to go through it again and take it apart. The team I sent to go through it should be back shortly.”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth when they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching the airstrip. “That’ll be them now,” Tish said. “Excuse me.”

  Hurrying out to meet with her men, she left Lise in Jeff and Russell’s care, only to return moments later with a disgusted look on her face. “It looks like we struck out at the cabin and here at the house.”

  “What about the barns and outbuildings?” Jeff asked. “You know how crafty Simon is. For all we know, he could have a secret basement out there somewhere that no one would think to look for.”

  “I tried searching them before the roundup,” Russell said, “but it was difficult with the other hands always around.”

  “It’s probably a waste of time,” Tish said, “but we can’t leave any stone unturned. I’ll tell the men.”

  She started to turn away when the cell phone clipped to her belt rang. Frowning, she quickly answered it. “Yes?”

  “Simon made it to the Perth airport before he ran out of gas,” a male voice said in her ear. “He caught a flight to New York.”

  “Damn!”

  “Leave the search to the others—they’ll finish up, then return to the States and report to headquarters. We need you to follow Simon now. Take a chopper to Perth. There’s a private jet waiting to take you to New York.”

  Outside, a chopper fired to life, signaling that there was no time to waste. “I’ll leave immediately,” she said, and hung up. Across the room, her eyes met Jeff’s. “Simon’s on his way to New York. I’ve got orders to follow him.”

  Orders were orders. There was nothing left to say. With a nod of goodbye, she turned and walked out.

  When Jeff watched her until she disappeared from view, Russell arched a brow in surprise. Interesting. Was there something going on here that he didn’t know about? Curious, he almost asked, but another look at Jeff’s face and he shut his mouth with a snap. Jeff was hurting, and it was none of Russell’s business why.

  “Now that Lise is going to be okay, I’ll get back to the search,” Jeff said huskily. Digging into his bag, he produced a bottle of antibiotics and another of pain pills. “Keep your arm in a sling, and take the antibiotics for the next ten days. Your shoulder will tell you when to take the pain pills. If you have any problems, have Russell call me. I’ll be here the rest of the night.”

  He could search from then until doomsday, but Lise knew he and the others wouldn’t find anything. Art— Simon, she corrected herself with a grimace—was too smart to hide anything on the station. There were too many people milling about, and he wouldn’t take a chance that someone might stumble across something incriminating when he wasn’t there to protect it.

  Still, it was the SPEAR agents’ job to look, so she said, “Thank you, Jeff. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been here.”

  “We would have flown you to Perth,” Russell told her, “and that could have been damn dicey with the way you were bleeding. Thanks, man,” he added gruffly to Jeff, offering
his hand. “I owe you.”

  “I’m just doing my job,” Jeff replied, returning his handshake. “Sometimes, it works out better than others.”

  He left then to join the search, and suddenly, for the first time in what seemed like hours, Lise and Russell were alone. Their eyes met, then danced away. Her heart thumping crazily, Lise told herself to say something, but all she could think of was that Russell’s mission was complete. He would probably be leaving in the morning with the other agents. Just the thought of that caused a pain in her heart that was a hundred times worse than the one in her shoulder.

  Say something, a voice in her head urged. You can’t just let him walk away. Say something, for God’s sake!

  She should have asked him where he was going from there, if he thought he would ever come back to Australia, but those questions never entered her head. Instead, she asked, “Did you mean it?”

  Another man might have pretended he didn’t know what she was talking about, but Russell met her gaze head-on. “Yes,” he said gruffly. “I love you. I think I fell in love with you the moment I met you. Not,” he added before she could say anything, “that I expect you to feel the same way. All things considered, I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me.”

  Surprised, her heart pounding crazily in her breast, she frowned in confusion. “Why would I hate you?”

  “Because I used you to try to get information about Simon,” he said simply. “I was just doing what I had to, to do my job, but I still flirted with you so you’d trust me and tell me what I needed to know.”

  “Even when we made love?”

  “No!” Horrified that she even had to ask that, he sank down on his knee next to the bed and took her hand. “When we made love, that was for me,” he said huskily. “For us. It had nothing to do with my job. I was falling in love with you and it scared me to death, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

  Tears flooded her eyes at that. “Oh, Russell.” She choked, tightening her fingers in his. “That was just the way I felt, too, and I didn’t know what to do about it. No one had ever made me feel the way you did, and I was afraid you’d break my heart when you left.”