Protected by a Hero

by Susan Stoker, Cristin Harber, Cora Seton, Lynn Raye Harris, Kaylea Cross, Katie Reus, Tessa Layne

  “What the fuck, man?” Bob went after him, but with a swift series of moves, Brian put him on the ground in a way that left Cass breathless, then stifling a cheer. She recognized that kind of strength and skill from when she used to visit her father on the military bases where he served. Brian knew what he was doing.

  Bob had no idea what he was up against.

  She refused to admit to herself what a turn on it was to see Brian in action—defending her honor. No one had ever done that before. Bob deserved whatever he got for coming back here to push his luck with her again.

  “The lady’s not interested. Go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under.” Brian pulled Bob up by the front of his shirt and gave him a shove. “Go on.”

  “You can’t treat me like that.” Bob backed away. “Whoever the fuck you are.”

  “Get going.”

  “This isn’t over. And Cass, don’t put me off too much longer. You mark my word; you’ll want a man like me around the place before too long.” He was gone before Cass could answer him, scooping up his hat and climbing back into his truck.

  Brian stood next to her, watching as Bob drove off. “Was that joker really your overseer? Your father mentioned the name,” he added when she turned a questioning look on him.

  “Bob Finchley. In the flesh,” Cass said tiredly. “I kicked him out. Didn’t like him.” She wouldn’t tell Brian anything about the embezzled cash. Or about the fact she’d dated him. Considered marrying him, even. Brian would turn right around and tell the General, and then where would she be?

  “I can see why.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Well, how goes it?” Connor asked, his face filling Brian’s laptop screen. The other men’s faces were visible along the bottom of the screen. Jack had called for this video chat. All the men Brian had left behind in Tampa were curious about the state of the mission.

  “So far so good. I’m in the house. The General’s daughters are tolerating my presence. For the moment, anyway.” He didn’t want to think about what they were saying out there in the pagoda at the center of Sadie’s herb garden. All five of the women had hustled away as soon as he and Cass reached the back door.

  “Stay away from us,” Cass had said again before they hurried off. He figured he’d give them their privacy. This time.

  “That’s progress.” Logan laced his fingers behind his head. “What about Cass? She someone you want to marry?”

  Leave it to Logan to focus on the female angle. “It’s a funny thing,” Brian said. “On the surface, anyway, I’m not sure I could have picked better. I definitely could have picked worse. The ranch is spectacular, by the way.”

  Something like yearning rippled through the men’s expressions, and once again Brian wondered if the General had known exactly what he was doing when he picked them for the bogus task force. They were all country boys—all men who wanted a ranch someday.

  But had he picked them from a larger pool of expendable fuck-ups? Or had he honed in on them and waited for them to make mistakes? Brian filed the problem away for consideration.

  “What about the boyfriends?” Jack asked.

  “The General was right; Cass kicked Bob Finchley out,” he told them, “but he’s still sniffing around. I’ll keep an eye out for the others.”

  “Good luck with that.” Connor nodded at him.

  “Tell us more about the ranch.” Logan leaned forward.

  “It’s everything you might have hoped for—and more.” Brian described what he’d seen so far.

  “Worth marrying a stranger for?” Jack asked.

  “Maybe. The right stranger. Look, these women—they’re all a handful in their own way, but they’re also smart, attractive… interesting. I don’t know if it’s enough, but…”

  Their faces all told the same story. Curiosity. Skepticism.

  Hope.

  “The military’s made it clear it doesn’t want me anymore,” Jack summed up for the rest of them. “I’m not good for much else. Maybe I can make a go of ranching.”

  The others nodded. So they were coming around to the whole idea, Brian mused.

  “Has the General told you anything more about when he’ll send you here?” he asked.

  “Not a word,” Logan answered. “He keeps throwing more manuals our way. He says it all depends on you. If you screw things up, the whole mission gets scrapped.”

  Normally when circumstances got tight, adrenaline kicked in and sharpened his brain. This time Brian found his mind racing in circles. Cass was attracted to him, he was sure of it. He was certainly attracted to her. Not in a casual fling kind of way, either. He wanted to get to know this woman. He wasn’t used to having any kind of deadline on his pursuit of a relationship, though, and if he was honest, he hadn’t pursued a relationship with any of the women he’d dated in the past few years. He’d convinced himself marriage wasn’t for him.

  So why was it so compelling to picture marrying Cass?

  It shouldn’t be. Or rather, even if it was, he shouldn’t give in to it. It wasn’t fair to her. She deserved a man who wouldn’t fuck things up. Who wouldn’t send her off for groceries alone at ten at night, or gamble away her money and property.

  But he’d never do that to her. He knew it with every fiber of his body. If he was married to a woman like Cass he’d dedicate his life to keeping her safe—to making her world—and her ranch—a paradise.

  “No pressure.” Connor grinned.

  “Yeah, no pressure,” Brian echoed uneasily, surprised by the strength of his convictions. After all, he was sure neither his father nor brother set out intending to destroy their wives. “All right; I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “I don’t understand why we have to wait for Wye,” Lena said.

  “Because I need an impartial observer.” Apart from her mouthful of a name, Wyoming Smith was as open and uncomplicated as any person Cass had ever known, a perfect antidote to her family’s labyrinthine secrets. Cass held one of the white painted posts of the open-air pagoda and watched for her friend. “There she is.” She relaxed a little when Wye’s Volkswagen Beetle trundled around the side of the house down the driveway and parked near the other vehicles by the carriage house. A moment later Wye climbed out and waved. Cass waved back.

  “What’s the emergency?” Wye asked when she reached them. She sat down on the built-in slatted bench next to Sadie, across from Cass. Her curly light brown hair was caught in a sensible ponytail. Like Cass, she was dressed in jean shorts, paired with a pretty blue top and white Keds.

  “Cass is getting married,” Lena said. “To a Navy SEAL.”

  “Am not.”

  “That’s what the stone says,” Jo put in.

  Wye rolled her eyes and Cass wanted to hug her for it. “You ladies and your stone. It’s an inanimate object. It can’t predict the future.”

  “And yet it does,” Alice said. As usual, tendrils of her long hair had escaped her updo, but she looked like she’d just walked out of a boho fashion shoot, and Cass suppressed an almost automatic surge of jealousy. Alice’s otherworldly beauty was an outward manifestation of the link she had with their mother. Amelia had been beautiful, too, and both of them sensed things before they happened. It was uncanny how well Amelia had organized everything before her death. Afterward, they’d found her detailed instructions for how everything in the house worked, the Christmas presents she’d purchased and wrapped in the weeks before the stroke took her, the box of letters she’d left with the lawyer for their father. Cass had forwarded those to the General since he’d never come home after the funeral.

  So many times she’d wondered what they said, and she hated her father for keeping them to himself. Her sisters didn’t know about those letters. Cass had decided it was cruel enough she knew about them. All in order. All dated. The General was still hearing from his wife, but she hadn’t had a word from her mother in eleven years.

  “Back up. Who’s this Navy SEAL? Where did he come from? I thought you
were supposed to marry Bob.” Wye’s last sentence was delivered in a light, teasing tone, and pulled Cass from her melancholy thoughts. Wye knew all about her breakup with Bob—and that the overseer hadn’t seemed to want to take the hint and leave her alone.

  She didn’t know about the money, though. No one but her knew anything about that. Cass couldn’t bear to reveal the way Bob had played her, or how she’d nearly lost her family’s ranch in her ignorance and desire to be loved. It was a secret she would take to her grave if she could.

  “The General sent him to fix the house,” Sadie told her. “He took one look at Cass and decided he wanted her.”

  “Sounds romantic.” Wye grinned at Cass.

  “Sounds ridiculous,” Cass retorted.

  “So you don’t like him. What’s the problem? Oh wait—that’s right. The stone said you have to marry him.”

  “It didn’t say I have to,” Cass said, pleating the hem of her shirt with her fingers. “It said I would.”

  “You always were good at taking orders.”

  Cass glared at Wye. “I brought you here for help. If I want this kind of crap I’ll go hang out with Bob.”

  “Ouch. Don’t get mad at me,” Wye told her. “Get mad at the General. He’s the one who sent the SEAL. Which makes no sense, by the way. Why wouldn’t he send a soldier?”

  “Don’t try to figure out why the General does what he does. I stopped trying years ago,” Cass said.

  “Anyway, we’re always angry at the General,” Lena said practically. “Now we need to figure out what to do with Brian.”

  “Why not let him fix the house? You’ve been complaining forever about how it’s falling down around your ears,” Wye pointed out. “If the General sent him, he’ll have given him a budget to work with. That’s less money out of the cattle earnings. Isn’t that a good thing? Seems like cash is a little tight right now.”

  Cass could have kicked her. Sometimes Wye was far too perceptive for her own good. Cass was trying to solve the problem of the missing money without her sisters knowing about it, and so far Brian hadn’t mentioned anything about a budget. It was going to be tricky enough to fool him about the lost money if he expected the repairs to come out of the cattle income. She didn’t need her sisters’ attention drawn to it, too. “We can’t allow that precedent to be set,” she said firmly. “If we accept one SEAL, next he’ll send a whole squadron, or team or… whatever.”

  “Pod,” Lena said helpfully.

  “I think that’s Orcas,” Jo said. “Seals run in herds.”

  “That’s cattle,” Lena said.

  “Seals, too.”

  “Anyway,” Wye went on. “I don’t understand why the General is sending anyone. Why doesn’t he just let you run things your way? You’ve always done fine.”

  Cass didn’t answer her. Her secret fear was that somehow the General had figured out what was going on. But there was no way that could have happened—unless Bob had told the man himself, which she highly doubted.

  “Because he’s so used to ordering people around he can’t stand not to,” Lena told Wye, growing serious. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Brian’s just another kind of overseer, and he won’t be as easy to get rid of as Bob was. Sure, he says he’s here to fix the house, but just you wait. He’ll be handing out orders within the week.”

  “So kick him out,” Wye said. “You all are awesome at that. How many overseers have you run off in your time?”

  No one answered. Outsiders found it funny when they learned about the girls’ attempts to run the ranch themselves when they were younger. But it hadn’t been funny at the time; it had been their way of trying to control their future when their mother’s death blew everything apart. And a way of expressing their rage at their father’s behavior. How could he have not come home—not once—since his wife had died? Especially in those early weeks when they needed him the most? And then to send strangers to run the ranch—to take care of them. It wasn’t to be borne.

  “We’re working on it,” Lena said.

  “We can’t get rid of Brian. Remember what the standing stone said,” Sadie countered.

  “Oh my God! You realize you’re giving it the very power you’re attributing to it!” Wye shook her head at them. “You are some of the most highly intelligent, capable women I know, but you have the biggest blind spots of anyone I’ve ever met. A stone can’t really predict the future.”

  Cass sighed. Wye was a good friend, but they’d only gotten to know each other in the past year or so. There was so much she didn’t understand. “There’s rational, and then there’s seeing things with your own eyes. It’s not right some of the time. It’s right all of the time. You get used to it and after a while you realize there’s no sense fighting fate.”

  Wye frowned. “So Cass has to marry Brian. What else has it said about your futures?”

  Cass accepted her sarcasm. She couldn’t blame Wye for not getting it. “I’ll never leave the ranch,” she said quietly. She’d resigned herself to that back when her mother died, though, and it didn’t bother her anymore. Maybe at one time she’d thought about joining the Army, but she loved Two Willows, and she’d grown to love caring for it the way her mother had before her. She knew in her heart she might travel now and then, but she’d always come back to her home.

  “I’ll never leave the ranch,” Alice echoed from her seat at the far side of the pagoda. She sounded relieved. Alice drew her heightened sensibilities from the land, just as their mother had, and Cass knew she didn’t want to leave it.

  “I’ll never leave the ranch.” Lena was determined. She’d always felt her destiny was to become Two Willows’s overseer.

  “I’ll never leave the ranch.” Sadie’s answer was thoughtful, and Cass wasn’t sure how her sister felt about that. As their chief gardener, she was the most directly attached to the land they lived on, and in the past Cass would have said she’d be happy to stay that way, but recently her infatuation for Mark had distracted her from her work. If he ever got serious about her, Cass felt Sadie could easily be lured away.

  “I’ll never leave the ranch.” Jo grinned impishly. Cass didn’t even want to know what was going on in her head—or in Sean’s. Sometimes she thought Sean was as determined as Bob to get his hands on their property.

  Wye leaned back on the slatted bench. “And you’re going to accept that? All of you? Whether you want to stay or not?”

  “Two Willows is in our blood, Wye. I know you don’t understand—” Cass began. She wasn’t sure if it was the location of the house, or the curve of the land, or the mountains far in the distance, or the big Montana sky arcing over all of it. Two Willows got under your skin. It got a grip and didn’t let go. The stone had simply spelled out what they all had come to know was true.

  Wye forestalled her with a raised hand. She took a moment to think before she spoke, though. “You know, the crazy thing is, I do understand,” she said. “I don’t know how. I haven’t known any of you long enough to have this kind of intuition about you, but I get it,” she said. “Honestly, I do. The truth is, you all want to stay as badly as the land wants you to—is that it?”

  All of them nodded.

  “So what are you going to do about this SEAL problem you’re having?”

  “We have to find a way to get rid of him.” Cass was firm on that front.

  “But—” Sadie began.

  “But nothing. The stone said I’d marry him, but it didn’t say what would happen if he changed his mind and never asked me.”

  “You know it doesn’t work that way,” Sadie said.

  “It’s going to work that way this time,” Cass told her. “If he never asks, then I can’t marry him.”

  “You want to make him dislike you,” Wye said.

  “Exactly. And I know just how to do it. He’s here to help, right? That’s why the General sent him?”

  Her sisters nodded.

  “We won’t let him. At all. And we’ll document the fact he’d no
t getting any work done, and make sure the General is very clear about all the ways he’s failing his mission. The General will order him back, and that’s that—no more SEAL.”

  “You really think that’s going to work?” Wye asked.

  “It has to.”

  Brian woke early the next morning, but Cass and Lena both beat him downstairs. He came into the kitchen to find Cass cooking a large farm-style breakfast and Lena tinkering with a weed-whacker.

  “You need a workshop,” he told her.

  “Got one. Just busy. Got to fix things when I can,” she answered without looking up.

  Brian made a mental note to pass that information on to the General. He had a feeling Lena had few weaknesses to exploit. Cass was tough, too, in her own way, but she wore her feelings on her sleeve, while Lena kept hers close to her vest. Brian had learned a few things about Cass in his short time here—like how much she cared about her sisters—and her house.

  And that she was superstitious. They all were.

  “How long are you going to stay here?” Cass asked him bluntly when he came to survey his breakfast options.

  “Forever.” He found himself a plate and happily forked a couple of sausages onto it. The hash browns looked terrific, too. This was much better than the food at USSOCOM.

  “I’m serious.” She elbowed him away from the stove. He ducked around the other side and scooped a generous helping of hash browns onto his plate.

  “So am I. Tell me about the house. What needs fixing?” He slipped the spatula from her hand and slid a friend egg onto it. He eased it on top of the rest of his food and handed the spatula back to her.

  “Nothing.” Cass snatched it from his hand.

  “Everything,” Lena said at the same time, still bent over the weed-whacker. “The first-floor shower is a mess.”

  “Don’t forget the busted window upstairs,” Sadie said as she came into the room. She stopped dead when she noticed Brian there. “Whoops.”

  Lena looked up. “Right. Whoops.”

  Uh oh, Brian thought. What were they up to now?