by me. I’ve had enough.” The other man pulled off his boots, tossed them beneath the mesquite tree and headed down the slope after Ben.
Two down. One more to go.
“You too,” Kit snapped at Emmett. “Don’t forget your shoes.”
Color surged into the man’s heavy cheeks. After some angry fumbling, he freed his battered sneakers and threw them hard through the air.
Kit was surprised to see Baby jump up and catch them in her teeth.
“One day you won’t be so lucky. Those dogs of yours might not be around.”
Kit kept her expression cold. “Get going, and remember what I said. Next time I’ll shoot first and consider the legalities later.”
Dust drifted over the hillside. Kit didn’t move until all three men had made their way past a row of cottonwood trees far down the hill, where an old pickup was hidden. After they shot out of sight, her knees began to shake, her stomach twisting in knots.
There was no reason to feel sick. Emmett and his friends were gone. She was safe now.
Saying it didn’t help.
She leaned forward against the mesquite tree and threw up. When the spasms stopped, she set her revolver carefully on the ground and sat down on the wall above the well where mesquite leaves shivered in the wind like whispered promises.
But Kit didn’t believe in promises anymore. Every promise that ever mattered to her had been broken. Even her brother had left, tossing all the responsibilities of the ranch onto her shoulders.
She took a deep breath, sagging against the old tree. Her father had planted it the same day he married her mother. Together they had watered it, staked it and tended it. Now the thick, gnarled trunk was twisted into three knots, towering over the well like a rich, dark rope beneath a canopy of green.
Small leaves blew free, raining down on Kit’s face. She sank to the ground. How much longer before Emmett and his friends came back?
How much more could she take?
The three dogs pushed closer, licking her face with small whimpers as if offering exuberant comfort while their tails churned up little circles of dust beside the well.
She frowned, wondering where Diesel was. The most curious of the lot, he was probably back in the courtyard, tracking a squirrel or some other small animal.
But before she could go look, she leaned forward, throwing up all over again.
Some days definitely sucked.
HE WATCHED HER because it was his job to watch her. His orders had come down from the very top: no involvement, no explanations, no contact of any sort. Surveillance and covert protection, nothing else.
But that was before Wolfe had seen Kit ambushed by three men right in her front yard. He’d watched, held back from intervening only by Ryker’s explicit orders. But all that was about to change.
He punched a code into his secure cell phone, all the time studying Kit’s house. “Ryker, it’s Houston. Yes, I’m in place. But I’m requesting permission to break cover.”
“Permission denied. Cruz is almost certainly headed your way, and I don’t want anything to scare him off.”
Wolfe watched clouds shadow the nearby ridge. “Sir, she was attacked a few minutes ago. Three men.” His voice was cold and hard.
“Did they hurt her or threaten the dogs?”
“Negative. She managed to frighten the men off. The dogs helped.”
Ryker’s breath checked. “In that case, there’s nothing to worry about. Do your job and stay under the radar.”
The line went dead.
Wolfe gripped the phone, then shoved it back into his pocket. Orders unchanged. He couldn’t reveal his presence, and the situation was spiking his bullshit meter big time. There were things that Ryker hadn’t briefed him about, foremost among them the fact that Cruz’s death in Alaska had been faked. Everyone had seen how Cruz experienced mood changes during his last months on active service. There’d even been mental and physical side effects brought about by the program medications, but nothing that had been obvious, and Ryker had never briefed the Foxfire team about potential problems. All he had said in response to Wolfe’s questions was that Cruz had become unstable. And that he had been taken into protective custody for the good of the program—and the country.
Wolfe was certain there was more to the story, but no one could pry anything out of Ryker until he was ready to talk. He had also ignored Wolfe’s questions about why Cruz would be interested in Kit and her service dogs. That silence added to Wolfe’s uneasiness.
He had to keep Kit and her special dogs safe, without breaking cover to do it. He shook his head, remembering the shy girl with pigtails who had blushed and stammered whenever he was in the room. Now she could scare off three garden-variety thugs without any help but her half-grown Labradors and a well worn revolver.
Times change.
Kit was grown up now, a woman with killer legs and a mouth that called for long, slow exploration. Not that she would remember him after all this time. To say that Wolfe had changed would be an understatement. But she was still his best friend’s baby sister, off-limits for a man who could never put down roots.
It had been years since he’d been back, years since he’d stood on Lost Mesa. Her family’s ranch was as rugged and majestic as ever, offering forty-mile views of sage, mesquite and piñon in every direction. Coyotes still called from the high ridges, reminding him of long, lazy summer afternoons.
Ancient history.
Cutting off bittersweet memories, he scanned the hill, hidden behind a line of sage in full bloom. As coyote song echoed from a nearby wash, Kit vanished and returned with a pair of binoculars. Silhouetted in the sunlight, strong and tall, she sought the loping pack.
Wolfe remembered the summer when she was twelve and he was a know-it-all high school kid on fire to save the world. Things had been black and white then, good versus evil. But the world didn’t get saved and life had taught him that softness was a trap, trust only a crutch. He’d learned how to live without either.
Watching Kit focus her binoculars, he could sense her fierce determination to protect her ranch, and the dogs lined up beside her seemed almost an extension of that drive. He wondered if so much unspoken communication between dogs and trainer was normal. He also wondered if they had sensed his presence yet. It was only a matter of time before they did.
As the coyotes howled and snarled their way across a neighboring slope, she followed their progress through her binoculars.
She would never see him unless he allowed it. Thanks to his skills she could stand a foot away, yet swear she was alone. He’d implanted focused images on missions in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, distorting the theta patterns of his targets until all they felt was a temporary dizziness. But in that moment of extreme suggestibility, Wolfe could shape and recreate reality—or what appeared to be reality.
He smiled grimly. Once he’d made a trigger-happy potentate
