by Dana Marton
Ryder thought that over. “We’re hunting criminals here. Terrorists. If someone figures out who we are, if they come after us, everyone connected to us could be in danger. Which is why I’m keeping my relationship with Grace under wraps as much as possible.”
And Grace, after several tours overseas as an Army medic, could defend herself. Molly, on the other hand...
Mo rolled his shoulders. He hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t want Molly and her son in danger.”
Ryder’s face grew somber. “Then don’t put her in any.”
Easier said than done. “She’s fine at my place. I secured it when I moved in. Reinforced the door with Kevlar. Nobody comes through that door unless they’re let in. But while Logan is at school, she’ll be at the ranch, taking care of her garden and her animals. I want some sort of protection for her.”
“She’ll get it. We’ll make sure someone is out there with her while she’s working. Her ranch is connected to our investigation. I can justify expanding some manpower there.”
“I appreciate that.”
Ryder shook his head. “Grace is worried about her, too.”
They talked for another minute or two, then went about their business. Ryder needed to plan the schedules for the following week. Mo headed over to the county jail. After that, he’d take Molly and Logan out so she could do her evening chores at the ranch, then take them back to the hotel. Then he would return to the ranch to lie in wait, should any bad guys stop by during the night.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he told Jamie and Shep, who were working on their computers.
“Another stakeout?” Jamie asked.
“Ready for more electroshock therapy so soon?” Shep ribbed him. “Hoping it’ll curl your hair?”
“Very funny. Want to see how you’d like a couple of hundred volts between your ribs?” he offered.
The friendly taunting didn’t really bother him. Not when Ryder had as good as given his approval. Molly would get team protection, too. And she was living at his place. He knew a grin was spreading across his face but didn’t care.
He walked through the office then outside into the heat. He pushed Molly out of his mind and organized his thoughts around what he needed to do next. He needed to get the truck driver talking. They needed the name of Dylan Rogers’s partner. They needed the man to give up the Coyote’s true identity. They needed the exact location of the planned border breach, and they needed the day.
The drive to the jail was long and hot, the visit a complete bust. The truck driver had hanged himself in his cell just minutes before Mo had gotten there. He called in the news to the office.
They’d had nothing but bad luck on this mission so far. Too much bad luck. The enemy always seemed one step ahead. His instincts prickled. There was something here they weren’t seeing. Maybe Sheriff Shane was involved. It sure seemed as if the bad guys were getting some help from somewhere. Except, Ryder had looked into Sheriff Shane, and the man had come up squeaky clean. He thought about that as he headed off to the hotel to pick up Molly and Logan.
He wanted to greet her with a kiss, but couldn’t in front of her son. How they handled that would have to be her decision.
“Did you find everything okay?” he asked as they were headed down in the elevator.
“Yes, thank you. And I want you to know that we will pay you back for everything.”
There was a coolness to her tone that he hadn’t heard since the first time he’d met her, when he’d been interrogating her. He winced at the memory.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Yes, it is.”
The elevator stopped and Logan darted out. Mo tried to take her hand, but she pulled away.
Okay. What was that about?
He didn’t get the chance to ask on the ride out to her place. And they didn’t have much privacy while taking care of the evening chores, either, with Logan always within hearing distance.
He gave up trying, and while she did the milking, a chore that proved him a complete klutz and no help whatsoever, he took Logan to the backyard for some extra self-defense training.
“Hey, Mo, watch this!” Logan executed a pretty good punch to his solar plexus.
“Not that hard, remember? You want to show them that you can defend yourself. The goal is to prevent a real fight, so nobody gets hurt.”
“What if somebody punches me hard?”
“You fight back just enough to make them stop. You won’t respond blindly. You gain control of the situation.”
The kid nodded solemnly.
“You can train with me as hard as you like. But only with me, okay?” Now that the kid would be cooped up in the apartment all day instead of running around the ranch, he needed a little extra exercise.
“So what do you do when someone tries to grab you from the front?” Mo stepped forward and reached out.
Logan deflected.
“What if they grab you by the foot?”
They kept on training. And he thought of his talk with Ryder, how being connected to them could put Molly and Logan in more danger. He would make sure that didn’t happen. But being prepared was the key.
“What if they have a weapon?”
Logan’s eyes went round. “I’m in elementary school.”
“Right. I meant like a stick or something.” He showed the kid a twist kick, just the right place to hit the wrist to send a weapon flying.
And then he turned and caught Molly watching.
“You shouldn’t take up so much of Mo’s time,” she told her son. And then to Mo, “I’m done. We’re ready to leave.”
Logan talked about some of the games he’d been playing on the console, all the way home. Molly barely said anything. She looked almost relieved when Mo left them at the hotel. The only thing she told him was to make sure he ate something from her fridge and didn’t go hungry.
Why did women have to be like that? Did they know how much they confused men? Did they do it on purpose?
He drove back to the ranch and pulled up the driveway. He missed the dogs running to greet him. He got out of the car and walked around, checked the buildings to make sure nobody had come by while he’d been gone.
Nelly gave him her evil look as he walked through the barn.
“Don’t think I’m going to go close enough for a kick. I’ve taken enough abuse already in this barn.” He could swear the cow grinned at him.
Mo looked in on the horses next. Paulie, the half-blind gelding, turned his good eye toward him and gave him a mournful expression.
“You’re not fooling me, buddy. I know you’re just milking this for everything it’s worth.” But he had an apple for the horse, and for Sid and Gypsy, too, and one for Kenny Davis’s Charlie.
He closed everything up behind him, then walked up to the house, went in with the key Molly had given him. Didn’t look as if anyone had been in there or tried to get in.
He opened the fridge for some tea. The leftover lasagna on the top shelf looked like heaven. Later.
He drank then went back outside. A couple of things about last night bothered him. The Taser for one. Not standard smuggler ammo. The people who smuggled contraband across the border were usually armed with more serious weapons and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot anyone, even each other, right in the face at the slightest sign of trouble.
So what was up with the Taser here?
He hoped the bastards would come back. Of course, now they knew that Molly wasn’t entirely defenseless and alone out here, they would be more careful. Not that they hadn’t been careful last night.
They’d come after the lights in the house were turned off. After Mo’s pickup had disappeared from the driveway.
Which meant they probably kept an eye on the place. Probably drove by a few time
s first, checked things out.
He sat in the deepest shadows of the porch, the scent of her yellow roses all around him, and watched the cars on the road. Traffic was sparse this time of the night. None of the cars that passed the house slowed. From where he was sitting, he had no way of telling whether any of the drivers were checking out her place.
He got his SUV out of the garage and drove to the end of the road then set up a one-man roadblock. Ten minutes passed before the first pickup rolled along. Mo stuck a CBP badge on his shirt, flagged the car down with his flashlight and asked for license and registration.
“Anything wrong?” the seventysomething man asked, pushing back his cowboy hat, his face leathered with old age. He squinted from the flashlight as Mo scanned the cab.
“Standard vehicle check. We’ve had some extra activity in the past week. More illegal shipments than we normally see.” Mo handed the papers back, making sure to remember the name. In the morning, he would run everyone through the system back at the office, see if anything popped up.
“Good luck,” the man said and drove away.
Mo checked the next car and the next. A pickup had two rifles on the gun rack in the back, but just regular hunting rifles. Almost everyone had at least one of those around here. No Tasers in sight and no serious firearms, either, nothing that would be used by professional smugglers.
Midnight passed by the time the first car rolled by that seemed out of place—a fancy SUV, close to the hundred-grand price tag. Mexican license plates. An Asian guy sat behind the wheel. He almost didn’t stop, but at the last moment seemed to decide not to drive around Mo. A very lucky decision on his part, since Mo wasn’t in the best of moods by that point.
He was tired and getting hungry. And frustrated because his mind kept returning to Molly and he had no idea why she was giving him the cold shoulder. And doubly frustrated because he was getting nothing out of the roadblock, dammit, nothing that looked suspicious or seemed like any kind of a lead.
“License and registration,” he said as he stepped up to the driver’s side window.
“I left my wallet at hotel.” The man frowned. “What is this? I’m in a hurry. I have business meetings in morning.”
Mo looked him over dispassionately, not the least impressed by the fancy car, fancy suit and tone of superiority. He panned the inside of the car with his flashlight. “You have no ID?”
“I’m Yo Tee. You call mayor about me. He tell you who I am.”
Mo glanced at his watch—almost one in the morning. “I don’t think we’ll be calling the mayor. Why don’t you get out of the car, sir.”
“I have no time. I am important person. Everyone know who I am.” He reached for the shift to put the car in Drive.
Mo reached inside and clamped his wrist. “I wouldn’t try that.”
He opened the door and pulled the guy out, pushed him against the vehicle and patted him down as he protested and yelled about racial profiling.
He wasn’t carrying a weapon, but Mo did notice a pretty fancy semiautomatic in a holster behind the passenger seat, which he’d missed earlier because it was blocked by the door frame. Since the weapon was now in plain sight, it was fair game.
“I own factory in Mexico. You make big mistake.” The man swore at him first in Chinese and then in Spanish as Mo cuffed him and put him in the back of his SUV.
Then he called Jamie. “I got someone here. Armed, without papers. Money to burn from the looks of it.”
The region was pretty hard hit by the economic downturn. Not many people ran around in cars like his. Some of the ones who did made their fortunes in illegal smuggling.
“He claims to be some big-time businessman.”
“Legal or illegal?”
“Exactly. I wouldn’t mind having prints run through the system, if you could come get him.”
“On my way.”
While he waited for Jamie, he pulled over another couple of cars. He hit pay dirt when he shone his flashlight into a beaten-up green pickup.
The driver handed over his papers with his left hand, then turned his swarthy face from the light, his right hand in his lap.
His driver’s license said Garcia Cruz. Same name as the guy killed with the knife that had slashed Molly’s tires. Then again, there had to be probably a hundred Garcia Cruzes in the state. It was a common name. Still...
“Hands on the steering wheel where I can see them.” Mo didn’t want him to try to go for a weapon.
The guy put his hands up, trying to cover one with the other.
What was he trying to hide?
Mo went for his gun. “Step out of the vehicle, sir.”
And then, as the man did, Mo saw the bandages.
“What happened to your hand?”
The man shrugged, looking at his feet. He wore scuffed work boots, dirty jeans and a sweaty muscle shirt. “Fingers got cut in the reaper.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
A man who just happened to be missing three fingers. What were the chances? They’d need a DNA test to match him up to the fingers found on the border, but Mo was pretty sure they’d found their guy. That put him in a much better mood.
By the time Jamie got there, he was damn near smiling. Progress was a beautiful thing.
Jamie took in Garcia and Yo Tee, who was still yelling for his cell phone and his lawyer. Mo stayed the whole night, stopped every car that went through. They were mostly locals, but he did catch two illegal border crossers, teens, with nearly forty pounds of weed. Looked like an amateur operation, small-time fish swimming way below the notice of the big-time smugglers.
Jamie came for the entrepreneurial teens, too. Everyone who was taken in would get printed, questioned, then turned over to Customs and Border Protection when Mo’s team was done with them.
Keith called him at seven, just as he’d headed inside Molly’s house to get some coffee and breakfast. He was pretty much starving by that point. Molly’s lasagna tasted even better than it looked. Not being the type to cut corners, she packed all the wholesome goodness into it that she could.
The house seemed empty without her. The ranch missed her. Oh, hell, he missed her. He had to figure out why she was mad at him.
“Just got back,” Keith was saying. “Got nothing. Everyone’s sitting tight. Want me to go out to the ranch and stay with the Rogers woman while she does her thing? I can do that before I turn in.”
“I’m out here already. Thanks.” He needed to go back to his place for a shower and a clean set of clothes. Might as well bring Molly back with him.
He finished his breakfast, locked up, then drove into Hullett.
He ran into her in the lobby.
“Where’s Logan?”
“I just put him on the school bus.” Her smile was strained. “It’s a different bus for him. Different driver. Different students. That’s a big deal for kids.”
“Was he nervous?”
She looked away. “I was. He thought it was great to be picked up at a fancy hotel. And he couldn’t wait to tell the other kids about your gaming setup.”
They went up in the elevator together. She smelled like his shampoo. He wanted to pull her closer, but she definitely kept her distance.
“Long night?” she asked as they got off on the top floor. “Any trouble?”
“I don’t mind trouble.”
She stared at him as if he was crazy.
“Looking for trouble is my job, kind of.”
She nodded. “I’ll be out at the ranch for a while. You can have your place to yourself to get some rest.”
“I’ll just shower and change,” he said. “I’ll take you back and stick around while you finish up.”
For a second she looked as if she would protest, but then she simpl
y nodded and thanked him.
By the time he’d showered—trying hard not to think that she had been in his shower already this morning, naked—she had breakfast ready for him in the kitchen. And he found he was hungry again. Hey, how often did he have someone cook for him?
Might as well take advantage of it while he could. He pretty much inhaled the bacon and eggs, slowed down for the pancakes that were covered in something red and gooey and tasted like heaven.
“What’s that?”
She looked up from the counter, where she was writing something in a notebook. “Prickly pear jelly. I make a few dozen jars every year. I brought some over. Logan likes it.”
He licked his lips. “I appreciate this. Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time.” Then he added, “The lasagna was great, too.” He could definitely get used to eating like that on a regular basis.
He went around her to rinse his plate and put it in the dishwasher, turned around just as she turned back to reach for something. He knocked her off balance and wrapped her in his arms so she wouldn’t be knocked against the counter. “Sorry.”
Their gazes locked.
Under the scent of the soap, he could smell her soft skin.
He’d wanted her from the moment he’d first seen her, and had spent half of last night thinking about her.
He wanted to taste her lips so badly he thought he’d go cross-eyed from desire. He needed to romance her. That was what women wanted, wasn’t it? He knew he should say something, compliment her on her hair or her clothes or whatever.
“Listen, I—” But then he just pressed his lips against hers.
This time, the wave of blinding need didn’t catch him by surprise as it had at their first kiss. This time he knew what to expect, and yet the sensation still nearly knocked him off his feet.
They had some instant chemistry that made him want to pick her up and carry her off to his bed like a caveman. As bad as he was around women, even he knew that wasn’t acceptable. Women needed courting. And sweet words. Romance, he thought again. The very word struck fear into the heart of most every man. God help him.
So he kept on kissing her before she could start missing any of that.