As the young man clutched at his throat, Sam threw his full body weight against him, slamming him into the wall. The blow had the opposite of the effect that Sam wanted, and it seemed to refocus the kid. The young man threw a lightning fast elbow, crushing Sam's nose and making him see stars, which gave him enough time to pull his piece: a silencer-fitted .45 Browning semi-automatic. He drew it on Sam, but just before he fired Sam managed to grab the young killer's wrist and twist his arm around, and the bullet that was originally intended for Sam blasted through the killer's eye.
Sam let the killer's body flop to the hallway floor and took a second to catch his breath. He had no idea who he had pissed off to warrant a hit man being sent after him. All he knew was that whoever sent the first one was more than likely to send a second one, and then a third one. And whoever could afford this kind of hired muscle most likely wouldn't stop until Sam and everyone he loved in Mount Lemon was dead. They weren't safe, and they needed to get to someplace safe and fast.
Sam rushed into the bedroom and shook Diana awake as he began to get dressed. She sleepily stared up at him, the ghost of a smile crossing her lips, but then suddenly her eyes went wide with horror.
"Sam—!"
"Diana, you've gotta get up and get dressed."
“Sam!" She yelled. "Are you bleeding?”
He wiped at his face and his hand came away bloody. No, it wasn't his blood, it was blowback from what was left of the killer's head.
"I'm fine, Diana. I'm fine, but you need to get dressed now."
They both quickly pulled on their clothing in silence and Sam led Diana from the bedroom, attempting to shield her from seeing the body slumped on the floor, but there really was no way she could avoid seeing it. She was surprisingly calm, and only let out the tiniest gasp as they stepped over the lifeless mass.
He ushered her out to his truck, keeping a sharp eye out just in case there was someone watching them. As he turned over the truck’s engine and pulled away from Diana's small house his mind was racing, trying to think of somewhere he could take them where he knew they would be safe and he could figure out his next move. Unsurprisingly, the one place he thought of as truly safe was home, back on the ranch.
Chapter 5: Henry, Apache Junction, Arizona
The dream always starts out the same.
Me and my spotter Chuck are moving across a high desert ridge across a rough, crumbling trail. Our destination is a small brush-covered plateau. We both know that we shouldn’t be moving during the day, but orders are orders. We’ve been told our target is on the move and we need to be in place. Mind you, we haven’t been told what or who our target is. That key piece of information is on a need-to-know basis, and at the moment neither me or Chuck need to know jack and shit. We just need to be in place and ready for our next set of orders.
The sun is beating down on us hard. It’s easily 115º out and we’re both turning into puddles. I’m used to the heat—I grew up under this kind of sun, in this kind of territory. But Chuck, Chuck’s from Portland, Oregon, born and breed, and even though we’ve been in-country for a month, his body has never gotten used to it. In the dream, he’s bitching up a storm. He’s going off about the heat, about Command, about the assignment, about how much he hates bananas. Some of it is garbled altogether or his voice sounds like the adults in the old Peanuts cartoons, an off-kilter horn noise. But he’s making me smile, he’s making me laugh. Chuck’s my best friend; we’ve been hanging since basic. The only people I’m closer to are my brothers, except he’s a hell of a lot funnier than Scott and Paul.
The more we walk, the farther and farther away the plateau seems, but neither of us notices because we’re laughing like hyenas at something, and that’s when the wind kicks up. That’s when the sound of rotor blades fill my ears. I’m looking around, trying to find where the noise is coming from. I keep thinking, maybe they’ve decided to call the mission off. Maybe they decided to send a bird to take us back home. Chuck doesn’t seem to notice the sound; his mouth’s still moving a mile a minute. Finally, I spot the bird. It ain’t one of the big Black Hawks we’ve got in-country. The thing coming towards us is old, like the helicopter that TC on Magnum PI flew. Except this one has got a couple of M-134 machine guns mounted on it, and they’re spitting fire.
I’m stunned at first. I never saw the Taliban in a chopper before, and seeing it’s almost comical. In fact, I start laughing a bit, at least until the bullets start tearing Chuck to bits. His body is dancing and jerking around like he’s a marionette, his arms and hands flopping around as blood blooms and blisters his body, and then all of a sudden, he just drops, a heap of bones, and then the guns train on me and begin to fire. They rain down in slow motion and just as the first one tears into my chest—
I’m awake, my hand covering the puckered scar in the middle of my chest, and I feel my heart hammering against my hand. The sheets are tangled around me, soaking wet and clinging to me. I glance over at the digital alarm clock on my nightstand and see that it is once again 2:39 in the morning, the same time this same exact dream has rocked me out of bed since I’ve been home. The one upside of spending nearly two years in rehab relearning how to walk—hell, relearning how to do everything—is that at least in rehab, they pumped me full of enough drugs that I would sleep through the entire night without dreams. I sure as shit miss that dope, because at least then I got more than four hours of sleep a night.
Since I know that there ain’t a chance in hell I’m getting back to sleep tonight, I flip on the lamp knowing that the light won’t wake Inez up, open my detective novel, and read until it’s time to go and deal with the first troubles of the day.
***
When I told the old man that I was enlisting, he squinted at me like I’d grown a second head.
“What the hell kind of dumb shit reason did you do that for?” he asked, and then went right back to bailing hay.
The old man had been drafted during Vietnam, and being young, dumb, and full of cum, he’d rejected Grandpa’s offer to pay his way out of it.
“Worst fuckin’ mistake of my life,” he’d tell us over and over while me and my brothers were growing up. “I should’ve let your Granddad just have his way.”
He ended up being in the jungle for two years before he took some landmine shrapnel in the chest. The funny thing is, the injury that got him out of the jungle was almost identical to the one that got me shipped home, too. Of course, my legs and arms were shot to shit on top of that. But the chest wound and my punctured lung were what almost killed me. All the other holes were what made me have to relearn everything.
After coming home to the ranch, I completely understood why the old man hated his time in the military, and the government in general. The damnable thing is that the citizens of the United States aren't the ones who forget the people who fought for them and their "freedom" (by the way, the U.S hasn't fought for anyone's freedom since World War II. The half-dozen some odd conflicts since then have all been rich men's wars, particularly the last three), it's the government. The minute one of the wounded steps off the transport and sets foot (or wheels, or metal appendages) on the ground, the Feds turn their backs and run. They forget all the promises they made to you when they were trying to get you to sign on the dotted line. You become a ghost; a living, breathing ghost.
I was lucky when I came back. I still had my limbs. Outside of the nightmares, my head was intact. The nightmares were easy to deal with. I could handle a little lost sleep, even if it lasted for the rest of my life. I knew they wouldn't truly effect who I was as a person. I knew they wouldn't cause me to lose my job (not that I needed one), or a spouse (Inez knew about my time in the Army, and the first time I startled her awake with the dreams it scared her bit, but ever since then, she knew to just keep her distance until I calmed myself down. She's not even disturbed by them anymore and hardly ever wakes up), or more important things like my sanity. But there are buddies of mine who came back missing arms and legs; with broken backs a
nd minds, and their lives are a constant battle.
Not only do they have to try and adapt to the world again, but also they have to fight their former employers every single inch of the way in order to get what they need to become productive private citizens—things that were promised to them and then weren't delivered. Compared to most of these men and women, I've got it easy. I might be living with the ghost of my best friend waking me up at 2:30 in the morning every night, but at least I'm not itching at a ghost limb, or living on the street because paying for my treatments and medicine has drained me dry. I count my blessings every day because of this, and vow to do whatever I can for those who can't help themselves.
Chapter 6: Henry, Apache Junction, AZ
I'll be the first to admit that I've never understood what women get out of planning weddings. I mean, I get it, what woman doesn't want to be treated like a princess at least once in her life? But I never in a million years thought Inez would be the type of woman who would be into that type of thing. I figured when I asked her to marry me a few months back that all she would want to do was go down to the courthouse, buy a marriage license, and go and stand in front of the judge. And I'm sure that would've been exactly her reaction if I hadn't opened my big dumb mouth and told her she could do whatever she wanted for the wedding. Yeah, no one's ever accused me of being a genius.
But, you know, all the planning and preparation makes her happy, and that's all I really care about. I'll admit, though, that I can't say I've been exactly all that happy with it. It's not that I hate it or anything, but it's just not in my nature to care about things like decorations, menus, and whatnot. But I've been participating—which mainly consists of me nodding and smiling whenever Inez and the wedding coordinator stick something under my nose—because I know that it's important to Inez. There are certain things that drive me a little battier than others, though. Like looking at napkin and tablecloth colors for nearly three hours, now that will drive any man to drink. And it’s also exactly what we did today.
Not that it made me want to go and down a bottle of Jack afterward, but it did make me go and jump on my horse and go riding for a couple of hours. I mounted up my favorite mare and rode her hard under the dusty gray winter sky until the both of us were sweating bullets and panting. My brain was a complete blank as I stared down at the long dirt road that leads from the Ironwood Highway to the ranch. I mostly had my eye on a pack of javelinas rooting around in the brush, gnawing on juniper and hoping to stick their snouts in a nest of termites, when all of a sudden I saw a cloud of yellow dust coming up the road. As far as I knew, none of the boys from the bunkhouse had headed into town today, so whoever was coming up the road so fast probably wasn't someone I wanted around. I kicked my mare and headed back to the house at top speed so I could meet whoever was speeding up my road before they hit the main drive.
I made it to the house just as the Border Patrol truck pulled up in front of the house, and I was greeted by a face I hadn't seen since Inez's troubles over a year ago, my older brother Sam, and his face was covered in blood.
***
There are certain things you swear to yourself you'll never do again when you become an ex-soldier. Most of the time they're promises that you know you'll be able to easily keep. Me, when I came back from Iraq, I promised myself two things: I would never take another human life, and I would never pick up my sniper rifle again. I broke my first promise when I had to deal with the coyotes who were chasing after Inez. After that, the killing stopped because Sam knew the crackers who were after her and he laid down the law.
I broke my second promise tonight because of the people who my brother led to my home.
If these men had been strictly chasing Sam, there’s a better chance than not I would’ve told him to go fuck himself, that he’d made his own bed and now he needed to lie in it. But these men, they weren’t after Henry—they were after his girlfriend.
“She’s in the witness protection program, and they finally tracked her down.”
Obviously, my big brother hadn’t been aware until very recently, perhaps only a few minutes ago, that she was in WITSEC. His voice was so full of heartbreak and bitterness that I almost wanted to pull him into my arms and give him a hug, which is something I’ve never done with Sam. But instead of a hug, I locked him, his girlfriend, and Inez in my safe room and I dug out my Armalite AR-50 and my night vision goggles.
Then I waited up on the hillside above the house until those cocky sons of bitches began creeping towards the house from the brush, and watched as each and every single one of their heads turned into pink mist.
Chapter 7: Sam, Apache Junction, Arizona—Two Months Later
Sam supposed he should be happy. After all, his little brother was getting married to the love of his life today. Over the last two months, Sam had realized how special that was, and how damn lucky his brother and Inez were to have found one another. Yeah, he should have been happy, but he wasn’t, because today was also the day he would be losing the love of his life.
After today, Angela would be gone forever and they’d never see one another again. If he was the type of man who cried, there’s a better chance than not he would be curled in a ball in some dark corner weeping his eyes out. But he wasn’t that kind of man. He hadn’t even cried when his old man was killed, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to shed a tear over Angela. At least he knew she would be safe and out of harm’s way, at least for a little while.
He did feel lucky that they had had the last two months together. After they were finally able to get ahold of her handler’s boss—her handler, Agent Kelly, had been captured and tortured by the Russians, which is how they were able to track her down—the Feds decided it was probably a lot safer for her to be with Sam and Henry on the ranch. True enough, they lived on edge the entire time, but after the number Henry did on the dozen mobsters he put down with his rifle, they figured she’d be just as safe with them as anywhere else. Plus, the FBI was keeping a tighter eye on her than ever.
In those two months, Sam and Angela had really gotten to know each other. Not the happy facades they’d presented to one another over the last six months, but their real selves, warts and all. She let him get to know the money launderer and mistress, and he let her get to know the smuggler, the wheeler and dealer, the crooked cop, and neither one of them seemed to mind the other’s past mistakes. Because they were, after all, mistakes. For a time, he played with the idea of going into WITSEC with her, but he knew that he could never pretend to be someone else; he was who he was, and there was no changing that.
He felt a light touch on his arm and he turned and faced the woman who would soon be gone from his life. She gave him a small, sad smile, her eyes shinny with recent tears.
“They’re ready,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.
He gently kissed her, mentally saying his goodbyes, and then they went to their seats.
Epilogue: Henry
I don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous in my whole life. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve experienced more than my fair share of nerves over the years, but this is practically unbearable. As I stand in front of the alter with my older brother at my side, I feel myself starting to pass out. But Sam steadies me, pats me on the back, and gives me a smile.
Just as I feel like I’m going to pass out again, the wedding march begins, and I see Inez for the first time in her wedding dress. And at that moment, I know that everything is right in the world, and I’m the luckiest SOB walking the planet.
Married to the Cowboy
Prologue
"I swear to God, Billy, you take one step closer I'm gonna cut her throat from ear-to-ear!"
Sometimes, the things you love the most come back to haunt you. In my case, they come back to kill something you love even more.
"Jenna ... Jenna, you don't want to do this."
"YOU'RE MAKING ME DO THIS!"
There was a time in my life where I would've done anything for Jenna McClean. I would've r
obbed a bank, I would've run over a stray dog, I would've killed another man with my bare hands if she wanted me to. And there were a couple of times where I did things to make her happy that I've regretted my entire life doing. Not killing or robbing, just hurtin' people so she could show off to her friends how she had me wrapped around her little finger.
But that was a lifetime ago.
In the here and now, I wish she'd never been apart of my life. Because in the here and now, she's got a twelve-inch, razor sharp hunting knife pressed to the throat of the love of my life, and I'm pretty sure if Jenna doesn't get what she wants, she's going to take her away from me.
Chapter 1
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't want to spend my life being a rancher. Don't get me wrong,, it ain't such a bad way to live and it's how my family has lived for generations. But I think that was also what made me want to rebel against it, because it was expected of me. When I was a kid, I didn't understand why the family still ran the ranch. I mean, our family had made millions off of gold and copper claims in Arizona over the years that we could've lived anyway we wanted to. We could've been living in a twenty-million dollar mansion out in Scottsdale spending our days getting loaded by the pool and traveling the world whenever the urge struck us. But, instead, we woke up before dawn every day to feed the steers and milk the heifers. It didn't make a damn bit of sense to me.
Arranged Marriage To The Rogue (Victorian Romance) Page 59