by Cindy Dees
HOT SOLDIER COWBOY
CINDY DEES
CONTENTS
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Get Hot Soldier Down
Cindy’s VIP Squadron
Plea to Reader
More Books by Cindy Dees
About the Author
Copyright
SUMMARY
Susan Monroe never, ever, wants to see her big brother's best friend again. Small problem: a killer from her past has found her, and only the Blackjacks--including Special Forces operative, Mac Conlon--can save her. When Mac shows up at Susan's ranch to take over protection duty, he secretly hopes to make amends for leaving her the way he did ten years ago. But Susan has grown up, and she's having nothing to do with forgiving him. As a dangerous assassin pursues them across the wilds of west Texas, Mac and Susan must walk a fine line between life and death, hate and love.
PRAISE FOR CINDY DEES
Lovers of Dees’ high-stakes, fast-paced action will find exponentially increasing tension in each scene and pulse-pounding adventure that will keep readers enthralled.
ROMANTIC TIMES BOOK REVIEWS
Ten stars is not enough for Dees’ books!
HARRIET KLAUSNER, AMAZON TOP REVIEWER
Wow! You have to read Cindy Dees! I laughed. I cried. I laughed some more. Left me breathless. Can’t put her books down!
ROMANCE READER REVIEW
CHAPTER ONE
Susan Monroe looked through the bulletproof window in front of her at the brightly lit concrete bunker on the other side. Empty. She announced crisply into her headset. “Test range is clear.”
A few more items and the checklist was complete. Her team was ready for a live fire test of the first production-model RITA rifle. She exhaled a long, slow breath, but it didn’t relieve her jitters. Her job, and a lot of other people’s jobs, rode on the next hour’s worth of work.
Today, the rifle known as RITA, after its Roving Instant Target Acquisition system, would face its most critical test. A professional sniper would put Fasco’s prototype production model through its paces.
Personally, she hated guns. And this one was far too Robo-Cop for her comfort. Once pointed at a human target, it would lock on and fire at it until the target fell down or blew up. Literally.
If the sniper gave his approval, her company would spend the next couple of years turning out dozens of the computerized weapons at a tidy profit. But if the sniper decided it didn’t perform up to Uncle Sam’s specifications, Fasco risked losing the contract. There would be massive red ink and layoffs at best, and at worst Fasco would go out of business altogether. No pressure there.
The range supervisor’s voice sounded in her ear. “Send them in, Dr. Monroe.”
She picked up the telephone on her desk and pushed the button for the vestibule just outside the firing range. Fasco’s CEO picked up the call.
“We’re ready to begin,” she told her boss much more calmly than she felt.
A red light went on above the door in the firing range’s far wall. The thick steel portal swung open. Several men stepped into the room. She recognized them as senior Fasco executives. All sucking up hard to the sniper, no doubt. Not that she blamed them.
And then she caught sight of the shooter. He was tall. A bit paunchy. Light-brown hair. Prominent cheekbones in an otherwise smooth, round face. Kinda creepy looking. So bland her gaze just seemed to slide off him. He looked too soft to be holding the sixty-pound RITA rifle and, in fact, he rested it on its butt quickly after he stepped into the room.
She announced over the loudspeaker into the bunker, “We’re ready whenever you are, Mr. Ford.”
The shooter glanced up at her window and nodded.
And the world stood still.
Ohmigod. Those eyes!
She would never forget them as long as she lived. Glittering gold on blue over the barrel of his rifle. Just before he shot her in the knee and blew it to smithereens. She’d fallen out of her seat from the tearing force of the impact, which was the only reason his second shot just grazed her neck and didn’t kill her.
Except this face wasn’t right. Not angular or narrow enough for the man who’d shot her. And the hair wasn’t black. This man’s skin was too pale, not the nut brown of Ramon Ruala, the assassin who’d nearly killed her.
But those eyes…
How many men could possibly have the same strange eye coloring, a ring of gold overlaid on icy, sky blue. The color was striking, fire and ice clashing in discord. Surely no two men could have exactly that same flat, deadly expression of penetrating malevolence that chilled her blood. It had to be the same guy.
But no way was it was the same guy.
She watched in frozen horror as the man hefted the rifle. Another glance up at her. She pushed her safety glasses higher on her nose as if they would protect her identity from the killer in the room below.
Dear God, let him not yank that rifle around and point it at her. The bullet-resistant glass before her was no match for the lethal power of the rifle in his hands. Her knees shook and her gut turned to water. The same visceral terror of that night ten years ago roared through her. Every nerve in her body screamed for her to run, right this second.
But somehow she managed to stay planted in her chair. She’d lost her mind. This was insane. Anybody could look at this poor man and see he wasn’t the one who shot her a decade ago. This was some post-traumatic stress reaction that the guy’s weird eye color had triggered. A flashback. Get a grip, girlfriend.
She stared at her computer monitor until it came back into focus and then broadcast into the bunker, “Let’s start out with a few simple prone shots at a still target so you can get a feel for the weapon.”
The shooter nodded and lay down on a padded rubber mat to her left. Methodically, he set up a tripod stand, attached the barrel to the stand and lay down at a slight angle away from the weapon. He shifted to align himself with the weapon at exactly the right angle for every muscle in his body to relax when he fired.
His eye went down to the sight and his right hand came up along the trigger housing. His middle three fingers were folded down with only his thumb and pinkie finger extended. He rocked the two fingers back and forth rapidly against the side of the gun as he acquired the target downrange.
Lights exploded inside her head, sending shooting pain through her skull. She remembered like it was yesterday the way the sniper who’d shot her had done the exact same thing with his right hand mere seconds before he shot her.
Bang!
She about leaped out of her chair as the RITA rifle fired in the enclosed concrete bunker below. Even through heavy layers of glass, the sound was painfully loud. There! He did that thing with his fingers again! He rocked his pinkie and thumb against the side of the rifle as he set up the next shot.
“Martin, come take a look at this,” she said to the other computer scientist in the control room.
The former Marine Recon soldier loomed over her a second later. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Watch this guy’s right hand when he sets up a shot.”
She and Martin watched intently. The sniper did the finger-rocking thing again. “There. That!” she murmured tersely. “Is there any technical reason for a shooter to do something like that?”
“
Nah. Nervous tic.”
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she inquired.
Martin frowned. “It’s kinda weird, actually. You don’t want to jar the rifle once you’ve acquired your target. The whole idea is to go perfectly still a couple seconds before you take the shot. A shooter tapping his weapon like that could jeopardize the shot if he weren’t careful. Of course this dude’s pegging the middle of the ten circle every time.”
“Next sequence,” a low, gravelly voice growled in her ear.
She jumped and looked down at the government sniper. He was staring up at her impatiently through the window.
“Uh, of course. Let’s start by adding wind into the calculations. We’ll program a steady-state wind first, followed by random gusts,” she replied. She hit the command sequence on her keyboard to start the wind machine in the shooting range, and sat back while it ran.
The voice wasn’t right. The man who’d ordered her death had a higher-pitched voice than that. Of course, vocal cords could be altered surgically and the sound of a voice changed. For that matter, an entire face could be changed surgically.
But those cursed eyes…
She couldn’t take a chance. If it was the same guy and she didn’t tell anyone of her suspicions, no telling how many people could get hurt or killed at his hands. But if it wasn’t the same man—well then, she only risked pissing this guy off enough to flunk the RITA rifle and shut down her company. Lovely.
She agonized through the rain and smoke simulations, and still hadn’t decided what to do when she set up the last and most difficult firing sequence. Moving targets. The RITA rifle’s crowning glory was a computer brain that, once locked onto a target, tracked its movements and compensated for changes in firing conditions independent of any human inputs. The sniper started picking off moving targets like candy.
What were the odds of Ruala showing up like this where she worked? Surely it was pure chance. A violent criminal, whom she could put in jail permanently with her testimony? Who’d supposedly searched for her for years after their last encounter with the intent to silence her for good?
She simply didn’t believe in coincidences this huge.
How on earth had he ended up working for the federal government?
If he recognized her today, he would no doubt report her to his boss. Word on the street had it that Ruala’s longtime boss, crime lord Eduardo Ferrare, had personally ordered her killed. Fortunately, Ferrare’s nemesis, the Blackjacks—a highly classified, irregular special forces team, had whisked her away to a new life before Ruala or Ferrare could catch up with her.
The Blackjacks. The very name sent a lingering shiver of excitement and agony through her.
She’d been working on a surveillance mission with the six-man squad when she lost her heart and nearly lost her life all those years ago. Surely her brother, Tex, a Blackjack himself, would have told her if Ruala had picked up her trail again. Obviously, the team didn’t know. No way would they have allowed the sniper to get this close to her.
The sniper’s raspy voice caught her attention. “Give me randomly moving targets.”
She typed in the command sequence, her throat too tight to speak a response aloud. She had to call the Blackjacks. But the idea of inviting him back into her life positively set her teeth on edge. Mac Conlon. The one man she’d sworn to never, ever, not in a million years, lay eyes on again.
He was the Blackjacks’s ordinance and demolitions expert. An integral part of the team, and part of the package if the Blackjacks came back into her life. Lord, she didn’t want to make the call. But she had no choice.
She lurched as “Mr. Ford” abruptly jumped to his feet. He moved as lightly as a cat. She had to get out of here before he got another good look at her!
She snatched up her cane. She didn’t always need it to walk, but spasms of remembered pain were shooting through her knee right now, and the limb could collapse at any moment. Impatiently, she punched a code on the number pad beside the door to get out of the lab. The steel panel slid open. She stumbled forward and it shut behind her, locking her in a tiny, stainless-steel vestibule. A quick pass of her ID card through a magnetic card reader opened the outer door. Relieved to be out of that claustrophobic box, she moved out into the hallway.
The first order of business was to lay her hands on a copy of the video of Mr. Ford to show the Blackjacks. She made her way as fast as her artificial knee would go to the security office near the front of the Fasco building. A huge shape loomed directly in front of her. Her heart slammed into her throat before she recognized the giant as Shane Wilkins, head of Fasco’s security. Apparently on his way out. She lurched and had to plant her cane quickly to regain her balance.
“You okay, Dr. Monroe?” he asked, reaching out to steady her elbow.
“Not really. Got a minute?” she asked with quiet urgency.
He looked sharply at her, then stepped back for her to move fully inside and closed the office door behind them both. “What’s up?” he asked.
She eyed the gray-haired man warily. He knew all about Ramon Ruala. When she applied for work at Fasco soon after the shooting, it had been conceivable that Ruala would come looking for her to finish her off. Wilkins had been alerted to keep an eye out for the guy. But as time had passed, the threat had diminished to nothing more than an unpleasant memory.
She glanced over at the bank of television monitors on the wall. “Did you watch the test firing of the RITA rifle just now?”
He nodded. “Looked like it went great.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about the sniper?” she asked him cautiously.
“Good shooter. But then, a monkey would look good firing the RITA. Hell of a weapon.”
“That’s not what I meant. Did he…remind you of anybody?”
Shane frowned. “The guy in those marshmallow commercials who turns into one as he eats more and more of them?”
She grinned reluctantly. “Did you get a good look at his eyes?”
“Not on the monitor. He would have to look right up at one of the cameras and then I’d have to zoom in to get a good look at them.”
“They’re blue. With a gold ring in the middle.”
The security man frowned. And then comprehension broke across his face. “Like that fella that shot you?”
“Exactly like that fella,” she answered tensely.
She took a deep breath and announced, “I think Mr. Ford is Ramon Ruala.”
“That’s crazy,” Wilkins blurted. “They don’t look anything alike.”
“I’m telling you, they’re the same person.”
Wilkins spun in his chair and typed on his computer. The monitor in front of him flickered, and video of the sniper walking into the building began to play. The security chief deftly followed Ruala’s movements from the moment he entered the plant, jumping from camera to camera. And then footage of Ruala in the bunker came on the screen.
She leaned forward over Wilkins’s shoulder and stabbed the monitor with her finger. “There. Watch what he does with his right hand.”
Wilkins zoomed in the picture, and Ruala’s distinctive finger-rocking came into focus.
“That’s exactly what Ruala did right before he shot me,” she declared.
Wilkins looked up at her. “You realize that if you’re wrong about this, you could cost Fasco its contract for the RITA.”
She nodded solemnly. Wilkins wasn’t jumping out of his seat volunteering to go arrest Ford, and she couldn’t blame him. They were talking about Fasco’s survival, here. Over a hundred people’s jobs. But they were also talking about her life.
Finally she broke the uncomfortable silence between them and said slowly, “I know some government agents who could tell us for sure if Ford is Ruala. I can make the inquiry unofficially. Quietly. But I would need a copy of the video footage you’ve got of Ford to show them.”
“Done,” Wilkins answered in relief. He turned to his keyboard and began to type.
&n
bsp; Two minutes later he handed her a thumb drive. She nodded her thanks to him and pushed to her feet using her cane. Her knee was killing her, but there was no earthly reason why it should be hurting like this.
“You be careful,” Wilkins advised her. “If this guy is who you think he is, he’s a dangerous sonaofa—” He broke off. “Well, you know that already, don’t you?”
She managed to force the corners of her mouth up into a parody of a smile. “Yeah. I got that memo when he shot me.”
Truth be told, she dreaded facing Mac Conlon almost more than Ramon Ruala.
She stepped out of the security office, intent on getting to her car and thinking what in the world she was going to say to Mac if she saw him again. A group of men stepped out of a side hall directly in front of her and she looked up, startled. And stopped cold. Standing no more than five feet from her was the sniper. With several Fasco executives in tow.
His gaze went down to the thumb drive in her hand, then up to the placard beside the door she’d just stepped out of. And then to her face. Something flickered in that blue-gold gaze.
Terror washed over her like an icy bath. All she could do was stand there and stare back at him. Fear congealed in her throat into a sticky lump as Fasco’s CEO stepped forward and gestured to her.
“This is Dr. Monroe, one of our defense systems analysts. She programmed the test firing sequence you went through today and ran it from the control booth.”
The sniper nodded. “Nicely done.” He held out a hand to her.
She stared down at it stupidly. She was supposed to shake hands with a man who’d tried to kill her? Fasco’s CEO cleared his throat beside her. She shifted the thumb drive to her left hand with the cane and shook his hand awkwardly. His palm was hard. Painfully strong. Not at all in keeping with the rest of the man. She ought to say something. Congratulate him on how well he’d handled the RITA rifle. Any inane comment would do. But no matter how hard she tried, words wouldn’t pass that glob of terror lodged in her throat.