Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3)

by Sandra Marton

  He was sure of it.

  * * *

  It had taken a little luck and a lot of backtracking to find Tanner’s ranch.

  The GPS wasn’t the problem. Neither was the paper map. It was the terrain that was the problem, dirt roads heading off in a dozen different directions, roads without names or with names that had nothing to do with the annoying voice of the GPS.

  Alessandra had listened to it say Recalculating enough times to make her start to talk back to it, and not politely.

  Finally, when she figured she had to be getting close, she stopped at a gas station, marched inside and asked the guy behind the counter if he knew where she could find the Flying Eagle ranch. He scratched his grizzled jaw, hitched up his sagging pants…

  She felt as if she’d wandered onto a movie set.

  “You’re almost there,” he said, and he stepped outside with her, pointed a gnarled finger north, then west, then north again, told her to look for a low butte, a thicket of quaking aspens, a small pond and right after that, a right-hand turnoff into the woods.

  “Go three, four miles, you’re there.”

  Alessandra prided herself on speaking fluent, almost completely accent-free American English, but quaking aspens and buttes were not in her vocabulary. This was, she decided, not the time to feel foolish about asking for explanations.

  The old man sighed. A butte was a flat-topped hill. Quaking aspens were tall, straight, white-barked trees whose leaves seemed to dance in the slightest breeze.

  Alessandra thanked him, let him pump some gas into the SUV, and got back behind the wheel.

  Half an hour and two wrong turns later, she saw a wooden sign that bore the name Flying Eagle Ranch. It stood beside a narrow, unpaved road that led into a stand of enormous pines.

  She put the SUV in neutral, told her heart not to race, and turned onto the road.

  It arrowed through the pines for what seemed a long time, but eventually she saw it.

  A house.

  Several outbuildings.

  A corral.

  Flying Eagle Ranch.

  Chay had given Travis a description and he’d passed it on to her. A small house, Chay had said, built of logs. A wide porch. Outbuildings at a short distance behind the house. And there’d probably be an old black Silverado truck parked out front.

  Everything matched the description, but there wasn’t a truck in sight.

  Was it in one of the outbuildings? Or wasn’t it here?

  She stepped from the SUV, reached back inside for the light denim jacket she’d carried on the plane. It was cool here; a breeze blew lightly through the trees.

  Alessandra slipped on the jacket.

  How still things were.

  Even the rainforest, where they’d been miles from civilization, had not been quiet. Monkeys had screamed from the trees. So had bright-plumaged birds. Small creatures had scuttled through the bushes.

  Here, the silence was complete.

  She drew herself up. She was procrastinating, an excellent English word, and she had not come all this distance to procrastinate.

  “No more dawdling, Alessandra,” she said aloud. “Just march up to the porch, knock on that door, and tell Tanner what happened. What really happened.”

  Except…except, what if she told him all about the general’s lies, his interference, and Tanner said he was glad she’d told him the truth, but it didn’t change anything, that what they’d had together had only been temporary, that he’d just been doing his job…

  Alessandra took a deep breath.

  She had come here for the truth and if any of that turned out to be the truth, it would be better to know it than to spend the rest of her life mourning a memory.

  She walked to the porch. Went up the steps. Reached for the brass door knocker and banged it against the door.

  Nothing happened.

  She banged it again.

  Still nothing.

  Now what?

  She wrapped her hand around the doorknob. Gave it a slow turn…

  The door swung open.

  She was staring into a living room. Polished oak floor. Log walls. A big stone fireplace with logs neatly stacked on the hearth. There was a rug in front of the fireplace, something bright and, based on her knowledge of fabric and design, probably hand-loomed. The furniture was simple and handsome. A rocker. A big club chair.

  A coffee table held a stack of magazines. She walked closer. The magazines had names like Appaloosa and Profitable Horse Ranching.

  There was a couch, too, drawn up before the fireplace. It was long and deep. It looked like a place a big man would sit to relax after a hard day’s work.

  An afghan was neatly folded over the back.

  Okay.

  What should she do? Go back outside, get into the SUV and wait for Tanner to show up? Get into the SUV and drive back thirty or forty miles to where she’d seen a small café and an equally small motel?

  Or sit down on the couch right here, pick up one of those magazines and wait.

  “Wait,” she said, because if she didn’t, she might just lose the courage that had brought her here.

  So she picked up a magazine at random. Curled into the corner of the couch. Yawned. And, after a while, yawned again.

  Her eyes felt heavy. It was difficult keeping them open. Another yawn. She reached for the afghan, drew it over herself. Put her head back, just for a minute. Closed her eyes, just for a minute…

  Sleep swallowed her up.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Tanner rode down through the trees behind the house.

  There were a few things to do before he could leave.

  He had to arrange to board his horse. The guy he’d bought him from would probably be okay with that. And he had to close up the house. It was still early fall, but you never knew what the weather might bring in these parts. He’d want to shutter the windows, make sure the place was capable of standing up to a storm.

  When he reached the rear yard, he dismounted. Patted the horse on its flank. Picked up the trailing reins and led the horse to the big barn behind the house.

  “Good boy,” he said softly, and reminded himself that the animal needed a name. He’d been calling it Horse, but it deserved better than that.

  Once inside the barn, the horse headed straight for its stall. Smart horse. He’d learned where he belonged very quickly.

  It had taken Tanner a lot longer to know that he belonged wherever Alessandra was and that she, by God, belonged with him.

  He’d been foolish to buy into anything else.

  Or maybe he hadn’t, but she’d have to look him in the eye and tell him she didn’t love him this time, because he wasn’t settling for letters that didn’t really say anything at all.

  He unsaddled the horse. Hung the gear away. Brushed the horse down. Got him some oats. Turned on the hose and added fresh water to the trough.

  Then he patted the horse again, headed out of the barn, walked briskly to the back door of the house, stepped into the kitchen, went through into the living room…

  And saw Alessandra, curled up and asleep on his couch.

  His head swam.

  He hadn’t eaten in days. He’d stopped at a stream and downed endless gulps of water, but maybe the fast had gotten to him because this couldn’t be real, this couldn’t be the woman he loved.

  He went slowly towards her.

  His heartbeat rocketed.

  It was Alessandra. A different Alessandra.

  She had cut her hair.

  A halo of golden curls surrounded her face.

  Her lovely face.

  Tanner swallowed hard. He squatted down beside the couch. Stretched out his hand to touch her, but his hand shook.

  Should he wake her? Should he sit right here and wait until she opened her eyes?

  And then he stopped thinking, murmured her name, touched his hand to her hair, her cheek, her shoulder, and her eyes flew open.

  “Tanner,” she whispered. />
  He smiled. “Sweetheart,” he said, and whatever he’d intended to tell her when he saw her, whatever she’d intended to tell him, was forgotten as she laughed and wept and went straight into his hard, strong, welcoming arms.

  EPILOGUE

  They were married at El Sueño on a bright day in late November.

  The family gathered at the ranch the week before.

  “I want everyone to get to know you,” Alessandra told her groom.

  “Sounds great,” he said.

  What he said to Chay was, “Five brothers? Four sisters? Their husbands and wives and kids? I’ll be lucky if I come through it alive.”

  Tanner not only came through it alive, he came through it with a new family.

  Weeks before, when he and Alessandra were still in San Escobal, he’d figured the Wildes were high profile.

  He’d nailed that for sure.

  They were high profile.

  They were also amazingly nice, interesting people.

  Caleb was an attorney, but he had once led a very different life as an operative in a top- secret government outfit called The Agency. So had Jaimie’s husband, Zach, who also owned a rather specialized security outfit. Tanner had known both men by reputation and it was great to know them now as family. Matteo, who was also a lawyer like Caleb, had been drawn into Zach’s world some months ago. Now, he was a legal eagle in partnership with Zach.

  The four of them—Tanner, Zach, Matteo and Caleb—settled into the study one evening with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, talked tradecraft, and ended up exchanging stories that made them laugh in a way only men who’d endured the things they had endured would find funny.

  Luca was a builder. An architect. When Tanner mentioned he had a house he was thinking of expanding, Luca’s eyes lit.

  “Tell me about this house,” he said, and hours later, he and Tanner were still huddling over sketches and plans.

  Travis, the financial guru, ended up sputtering over something he read about interest rates in the Financial Times one morning at breakfast. He looked up, found them all rolling their eyes.

  Everybody but Tanner.

  “If you have a minute,” Tanner said, after the others had all wandered off, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.” Travis’s expression was blank. “Hey,” Tanner said quickly, “forget that. I’m sure you don’t want to talk numbers when you’re on vacation—”

  Travis grinned and put his arm around Tanner’s shoulders. “I always want to talk numbers, dude, but the rowdy bunch here is tired of listening to me. What would you like to know?”

  And then there was Jake, who had left the air force not because he’d wanted to, but because he’d lost an eye on a mission and you couldn’t fly with only one eye. He had returned home wounded in spirit as well as in body. He and Tanner had gotten into a quiet conversation that had gone on for a couple of hours when actor Nick Gentry, Lissa’s husband, knocked at the partly closed door and asked if their pity party was open to newcomers.

  Tanner looked up, eyes gone cold, only to hear Jake burst into laughter.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Jake said, “old Nicholas here has a leg so bad it would probably make yours look good.”

  Tanner scowled. Now that he thought about it, maybe he’d noticed Nick favoring one leg over the other, especially at the end of the day.

  Nick grinned, put his foot up on the edge of a chair and reached for his cuff.

  “Bet you ten bucks my scar’s nastier than yours.”

  There was a brief hesitation. Then Tanner grinned back at him bent down and grabbed the cuff of his jeans.

  “You’re on.”

  Several bottles of beer later, they were still laughing and debating which of them had the sorriest story to tell.

  “Men,” Lissa said, when she heard the howls drifting out of the library.

  But her smile was filled with love, as were the answering smiles of Jaimie and Lissa and Alessandra.

  It had taken Tanner all of five minutes for him to love all the Wildes.

  Bianca…Bianca was a little different.

  Beautiful. Well, all the sisters were beautiful. Smart. Again, nothing unusual for a Wilde woman.

  It was her cynicism that set her aside. That, and the way she watched over Alessandra as fiercely as a tigress with its cub.

  “She adores you,” she told Tanner one evening when they ended up on the porch alone.

  Instinct told him this was not the time for a clever answer.

  “She does,” he said quietly. “And I adore her.”

  Bianca nodded. “You’d better. Because if you ever do anything to break her heart, you’re a dead man, Akecheta.”

  Tanner looked at her. “I’ll cherish her to my last breath,” he said. “And that’s a promise.”

  Bianca nodded again. Then she rose on her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I believe you,” she said, and he knew he had passed some kind of test.

  And, of course, he fell hard for El Sueño. Long talks with Jake revealed some interesting practices his soon-to-be brother in law had put into play. The Flying Eagle Ranch would be a much smaller operation, but Tanner could do in South Dakota a lot of what Jake had done in Texas.

  By Friday, the week he’d worried about had become a week he’d never forget.

  “So,” Alessandra asked as she lay in his arms late that night, “what do you think about the Wildes?”

  Tanner rose up on his elbow and looked down at the sweet face of his lover.

  “I think I’m a lucky man,” he said softly, “to have the chance to become part of it all.”

  She smiled. “You’re already part of it. They’re all crazy about you.”

  He grinned, caught one of her curls and let it wind around his finger.

  “Even Bianca?”

  “Especially Bianca. We’ve always taken care of each other, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Tanner bent his head and brushed his mouth over Alessandra’s. “Kind of like Chay and me.”

  “Uh-huh.” Alessandra cupped her hand around the nape of his neck. “He’ll be here early tomorrow, right? I know he’s flying in from overseas.”

  “Yes.” Tanner kissed her throat, nuzzled the comforter down to expose her breasts.” But right now, I don’t feel like talking about Chay. Or Bianca.”

  Alessandra gave a little gasp as his lips closed around her nipple.

  “No?”

  “No,” he said, and then he moved above her, kissed her again and a heartbeat later, he was deep inside her and she was whispering his name and coming apart in his arms.

  * * *

  Their wedding day dawned bright and cloudless. It was the kind of perfect late fall day that only north Texas can produce.

  At least, that was what the Texas Wildes all said.

  The Sicily Wildes agreed the day was spectacular, but they insisted it was no more spectacular than a fall day in Sicily.

  They argued back and forth with laughter and love, and then, all at once, it was time for the ceremony.

  Luca, Matteo, Jake, Caleb and Travis gave the bride away. If the judge who performed the ceremony found that unusual, he didn’t say so.

  Bianca, Emily, Jaimie and Lissa were the bride’s maids of honor. That was unusual, too, but this, after all, was an unusual family.

  Chay was the groom’s best man.

  “Chayton,” it turned out, was his full name.

  Bianca had made the discovery. It seemed she’d done a bit of research on the Lakota language and learned that Chayton meant hawk.

  “You checked him out?” Alessandra asked.

  “It’s what I do,” Bianca replied, her tone a little testy. “I’m a researcher, remember?”

  “You’re interested in him,” Alessandra said with delight.

  “Are you pazza? I had enough dealings with Chayton Olivieri when you were in San Escobal to last a lifetime. He is arrogant and opinionated, and he always, always wants to be in charge. Why would any sane woma
n be interested in a man like that?”

  Maybe because arrogant, opinionated, take-charge guys were also incredibly sexy, Alessandra thought, but she decided to keep her opinion to herself.

  The ceremonial vows, written by the bride and groom, made all the women weepy and the men did a lot of throat-clearing. After, there was music and dancing, vintage champagne and amazing food. Then, just before sundown, Alessandra and Tanner changed out of their wedding finery and into jeans, cotton T-shirts and soft leather boots. They were driving to South Dakota to go wilderness camping as long as the weather held out, which everybody thought was nuts, considering all they’d gone through in San Escobal. But being alone together under a star-filled sky was what they both wanted.

  “What?” Chay had asked innocently. “You guys don’t want to go to the Caribbean?”

  Everyone had laughed.

  Everyone except General John Hamilton Wilde, who wasn’t there. He had not been invited to attend his daughter’s wedding.

  What he had done to her, to the man she loved, defied forgiveness. They wanted nothing more to do with him, and all the Wildes asked Jake and Travis to figure out what the ranch was worth. The number was staggering, but they all agreed to put in what they could. Travis would arrange for a loan for the balance…

  But that turned out to be unnecessary.

  The day before the wedding, a legal document arrived by courier. It was from the general, and it ceded ownership of El Sueño to his children.

  After the wedding dinner, the guests cheered and showered the bride and groom with rose petals as they ran down the steps of the mansion to Tanner’s Silverado. He lifted her by the waist and settled her into the passenger seat, then went around the truck and climbed in behind the wheel. He reached for the gearshift, looked at Alessandra, changed his mind and kissed her instead.

  Everyone applauded, but only she knew how it felt to hear him say “You are mine forever, wastelakapi,” and she wound her arms around his neck and returned his kisses with all the love in her heart.

  At last, the Silverado drove off.

  The Wildes and their guests went back inside the mansion.

  Chay and Bianca stayed right where they were.

  “Well,” Chay said, “what’s that old saying? All’s well that ends well.”

  “It isn’t a saying.” Bianca tossed her head, sending a tumble of dark gold curls down her back. “It’s a line from a play by—”