The Spy Wore Spurs Page 7

  He set the cup in front of Ryder with a hard click on the counter.

  “No need for you to worry about that. My team and I will make sure she’s okay,” Ryder said cheerfully, looking oh so innocent, but obviously egging the man on.

  “I’ll be fine,” she told them both. “I have Gramps’s rifle.”

  “And I brought her a good lock for the door,” Ryder put in.

  Dylan looked between them. He seemed to be struggling with something for a few seconds, but then he finished his coffee and headed for the door with undisguised reluctance. “I’d better get on the road if I’m going to make that appointment. If you need anything, Grace, just call me.”

  She walked him out. “Thanks for stopping in and checking on me, but I’m fine here. Really.”

  He watched her without saying a word.

  “Ryder is a friend. I knew him in the army.” Best to stick with that story.

  He waited another moment, then hugged her before he strode away.

  When she walked back to the kitchen, Ryder had a map spread on the counter, with her land, smack-dab in the middle, outlined in black marker.

  He drew his index finger along the line that indicated the border, erratically drawn by the Rio Grande. Then he tapped his finger on the southernmost corner of her land. “Rough terrain.”

  “There are a few old dirt roads that might be still passable.” She pointed them out.

  Since they were looking at the map together, they were standing close enough for his scent to invade her senses. His body had this energy field that drew her. The closer she got, the stronger the draw became. Her skin tingled, honest to God, which was so wrong.

  Her body was developing some sort of a crush on him. Luckily, her mind was strong enough to reject the whole nonsense. She wasn’t having any of it. She stepped back.

  “Is Dylan renting the whole ranch?” He looked up from the map and held her gaze.

  She nodded. “But he only uses the area around the ravine for the team building camps. They want a sense of isolation. So please don’t go barging into their camp. I don’t want you to mess up Dylan’s business.”

  He flashed her a curious look. “There was nobody out there when I checked the place last week.”

  “Maybe they came after you checked. Or you looked in the wrong area. It’s a big ranch. There are a lot of rocky parts other than the ravine.”

  He folded the map and tucked it away, his gaze fast on her face. “So what kept you up last night?”

  She flinched and looked away. The dark circles under her eyes were probably hard to miss. “Every little noise wakes me up. I keep thinking… You were shot on my ranch. Do you think Paco was killed here?”

  The possibility had occurred to her at one point, and she had a hard time letting go of it.

  “Nothing points to that. He came through the border with a visa, legally. I was shot by smugglers. If there’s a connection, so far I’m not seeing it.”

  She nodded.

  “But just because I don’t think Paco was shot on your land, it doesn’t mean I think you’re safe. I was shot here.”

  Right. She couldn’t argue with that.

  “Either you go to a hotel, or I’ll be staying here with you.”

  She didn’t do well with ultimatums. “Or how about we play that I’m boss on my own ranch, and I decide what happens?” she snapped. Her nerves might have been a little jumpy these days, but that didn’t mean that either Dylan or Ryder had to babysit her.

  She could defend herself if worse came to worst. She’d shot men before; she could shoot another. Except, she really didn’t want to have to. She found reentering civilian life difficult enough already. She wanted peace and normalcy.

  Trouble was coming. She felt it in her bones. The idea of walking away from it was tempting, and not just to the nearest hotel, but all the way back to her apartment in Bryan. Yet Ryder’s top priority was to find the smugglers and stop the trafficking across the border. He could get distracted from finding Miguel and Rosita. They needed to be someone’s first priority.

  Kenny was looking for them, but he had a whole police department to run, and they weren’t even sure if the kids had disappeared in Pebble Creek. The father’s body had been dumped there, but he hadn’t been killed where they’d found him.

  Those kids needed an advocate, someone to push for them, someone to make sure they weren’t forgotten, didn’t simply become a statistic. She looked at Ryder and silently swore that with or without him, she was going to find Rosita and Miguel.

  “I’m staying here. Nobody is staying with me. End of story,” she told him.

  * * *

  THEY WENT TO PEBBLE CREEK first, then Hullett—where Ryder and Grace had spent hours talking to business owners in vain. They all insisted that they’d never seen Paco Molinero. They also all denied hiring illegals or knowing anything about smuggling in the area. Even Grace’s connections didn’t help. As Ryder drove her back home, he was humming with frustration.

  He’d been in a bad mood to start with. Ever since he’d bumped into that Dylan guy at her house this morning, in fact. He’d run the man through the system after Grace had given him Dylan’s name and number. Everyone who spent time on her land was a suspect.

  The corporate team-building training could have been a cover. Except it wasn’t. Everything checked out. Every sign pointed toward Dylan Rogers being a legitimate businessman, well loved by people in town who still remembered his high school glory days.

  And a close friend of Grace from the looks of it. For some reason, the thought made his jaw muscles tighten.

  “So what’s next for you?” she wanted to know.

  “Drive around, see if I can find some tracks. Maybe I’ll stumble on the crossing point by accident. About the only chance we have of finding it in an area this large.” The fact that they couldn’t call on local law to help slowed them at every step.

  He was used to fighting foreign enemies, was used to treachery and all sorts of depravity, of having his guard up at all times. That he still had to be on guard, here in the U.S., bugged him. His mission would have been a hundred times easier if he didn’t have to worry about crooked border agents or crooked cops.

  Sure, ninety-nine percent of them were fine, the best of the best, but because of the one percent who had mixed loyalties, he couldn’t trust any of them. He didn’t understand that—people messing with their own country. The country too many of his good friends had died protecting.

  “I’ll go with you,” she offered.

  He hesitated—not because he didn’t trust her. He was good at reading people, and she was as straight an arrow as there ever was. But he wasn’t entirely crazy about the idea of her getting more involved. He didn’t want harm to come to her. Sentimental nonsense for a soldier. One of his team’s goals was to develop local assets. She was one. Nothing about this was personal.

  Yet he found himself thinking about her in the night, worrying about her. Part of him wanted to pack her up and ship her out. Another part of him wanted to tell her more about the operation and ask her opinion. She was pretty sharp. She was a local. She might come up with an insight that had escaped his team.

  “So you pretty much know every inch of this land?”

  “Grew up on it. We used to ride all over, hunt, camp, herd cattle on the northeast pastures where the soil is decent enough to support grass.”

  He looked over the inhospitable terrain they were crossing at the moment, nothing but clumps of scraggly weeds, patches of dry brush here and there, and some mesquite. The landscape did hold some stark beauty, even if it was alien to him—prickly and unwelcoming.

  “All right. If you have nothing else to do. Okay.” He drove her home, and she checked on the kittens, then on the horses.

  The one called Cookie seemed to be doing better. She walked the mare for twenty minutes or so, Ryder beside her, asking her about growing up on the borderlands. She was easy to talk to. When she had a mind to cooperate. Funny
, too. He almost envied her childhood by the end, growing up around animals, on all this open land. Sounded very different from his childhood in a town house in Seattle.

  “The best way to find out what’s going on out there is on horseback,” she said as she tied Cookie back in her stall. “You miss too much in a truck, no matter how slow you’re going. Do you ride?”

  “A little.” He’d had to learn on an op, and in a hurry.

  “Too bad Cookie isn’t up to riding yet.” She looked at the horse wistfully.

  “How about the other one?”

  She patted the massive black mare that stood tall and proud next to her. “Maureen is a dream.”

  “We could ride double.”

  She looked him over. Hesitated.

  “Or I could go alone.”

  “We’ll ride double,” she said immediately, and he bit back a smile. “If Maureen is okay with it. We’ll have to see. I do have a bigger saddle around here somewhere.”

  She found it after a brief search and began saddling up the horse. He helped by handing her whatever she needed next.

  “I think Esperanza came over in a tunnel.” His instincts said he could trust her with that piece of information. The line of work he was in frequently required life-and-death decisions to be made in an instant, on nothing but instinct. He’d learned to trust his. “Any idea where the entrance to something like that might be on your land?”

  “A tunnel under the river?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  She shot him a look of denial, but then gave the question some thought before she responded. “If there’s something like that, it would be close to the border. They wouldn’t want to dig more than necessary.”

  He’d looked, along with his team, but they hadn’t found anything. “The tunnel’s entrance would be covered up, most likely.” But someone who knew the land intimately might be able to pick out what looked out of place. And being on horseback would probably help, too. She was right about that.

  When she was done with the horse, he led the animal out of the barn and boosted her up. For once, she didn’t protest the help.

  “Get up behind me,” she said, scooting forward as far as she could, holding the reins.

  Because, of course, she was driving.

  He bit back another grin. An animal hoarder with control issues. Sounded like a mess, but she wasn’t. She got done everything that needed to get done and then some. Never backed down when it came to saving anything, either, be it animals or people.

  She kept her left foot out of the stirrup, so he could use it for leverage. She gave him a hand. Then he was up behind her, her lean body between his thighs. The heat that shot through him caught him off guard. And that was before he put his arm around her to hang on to the saddle horn in front of her.

  She put both feet in the stirrups and clicked her tongue, started Maureen in an easy walk, just a small circle. “She seems to be handling it well. Some horses buck when they’re ridden double.” After another minute, she directed the horse toward the fields.

  “I don’t want to push her too hard. There’s a place I’m thinking of. We’ll ride out there, then back. I don’t want to ride her too long with all this weight.”

  “Are you disparaging my figure?”

  She gave a snort.

  He could find nothing wrong with her figure, certainly. Which he’d known before, but the fact was brought to his attention anew, now that his body was practically wrapped around hers.

  She followed a dirt road for a while, then turned onto what looked like an animal trail.

  “Deer and wild hogs,” she said.

  And he was glad he had his weapon tucked behind his back.

  They rode quietly for a couple of miles. When he spotted some tire tracks in the dust, he pointed them out to her.

  “Probably from the team-building training.”

  Soon the ground turned rocky, washed out by flash floods over the last few decades from the looks of it. His SUV definitely couldn’t have made it through here. “Where are we going?”

  “To the border near the ravine,” she told him. “It’s a shortcut. The path someone on foot might use to cut through the acres as fast as possible toward reaching Hullett.”

  When they got to a watering hole, they let the horse drink and rest while they walked around to check for signs that anyone had been here. Grace found an empty plastic bottle in the brush.

  “Could be from anyone,” she said. “Hikers, border patrol, the team Dylan has out this way.”

  He agreed, but checked the GPS on his phone and saved the coordinates. Might be worth staking out for a couple of nights to see if the smugglers came this way. This was exactly the kind of spot they needed to be watching, but would be nearly impossible to find without the help of someone who knew the land.

  They got back on the horse and rode south, taking their time, making sure they weren’t pushing Maureen too hard.

  An hour passed before Grace stopped the horse again, having reached a rocky area. “We’ll walk from here.”

  Nothing but dust and rocks and cacti as far as the eye could see, prickly pear in abundance. They walked through the inhospitable landscape, leading the horse.

  “Watch for snakes,” she told him.

  She didn’t have to. He’d been watching all this time. He’d seen a couple of beauties while he and his team had been familiarizing themselves with the borderlands.

  Soon they came out at the top of a long ravine, a flat area with a road leading to it from the opposite direction. Someone had parked here not long ago; he noted the tire marks. A single vehicle. Boot prints all around.

  She tied the horse to a mesquite brush and pushed forward, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “This way.”

  She might not have trusted him or the government he worked for, but she was willing to help, willing to go the extra mile. In pretty much everything, he noted. For Esperanza and her family. For the animals that she took in.

  He worked with the best of the best, men who were heroes in their own right. He wasn’t easily impressed, but Grace Cordero managed to impress him.

  That appreciation wouldn’t have been a dangerous thing on its own, but coupled with the attraction he felt for her… He definitely needed to keep that in check. She wasn’t the kind of woman he was looking for. He needed to focus on his goals and not get distracted by a woman who had fragility at her core, but at the same time acted consistently heroic.

  Of course, he found that intriguing. Who wouldn’t? The fact that he’d thought about kissing her didn’t mean anything. She was pretty damned sexy. He couldn’t imagine any red-blooded man not wanting her. A thought that suddenly made him uncomfortable.

  Dylan at her house that morning… The Dylan guy was no good for her, obviously. He wouldn’t have a clue what she’d gone through during her deployments. He couldn’t begin to know what she needed. She needed a whole different type of man. Ryder hoped she was smart enough to know that.

  “So Dylan seemed to feel very at home at your ranch,” he said, not without some resentment.

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “None of your business. You’ve invaded my land. Don’t think you’re going to invade my personal life, too.”

  He raised a hand, palm out. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  But of course he did—dream of her. He dreamed of her plenty.

  * * *

  THE RIDE SHOOK HER UP. She liked his masculine body wrapped around hers way too much. And Grace definitely didn’t want to like him that way. Any way. She’d be gone in a couple of days, as soon as they found Esperanza’s children, and then they would never see each other again.

  But, darn it, her body still tingled. What on earth was wrong with her? She didn’t normally respond to strange men as strong as that.

  He followed her as she started down a path nobody could have made out—unless they’d been down it a hundred times as a kid—despite her grandfather’s warnings. Rocks rolled under her
feet, slowing her, unbalancing her every couple of steps. No vegetation to hang on to here, nothing solid. If she grabbed on to a bigger rock, that could roll along, too, and bring her with it.

  “Careful,” she called behind her just as Ryder slipped.

  She had one second to wish he’d worn his combat boots instead of the cowboy boots that hadn’t been made for this terrain. He tried to catch himself, but the rocks gave way and he barreled toward her. He outweighed her by thirty pounds, at least. No way was she going to catch him.

  Yet she had to try, because he was going to go over the edge, and his tumble would be nasty, most likely ending with a lot of broken bones.

  She spread her feet and wedged in her heels, braced her body for absorbing the impact of him plowing into her.

  “Out of the way!” He threw his weight to the side to avoid her, but she stood her ground and leaned into his path to catch him.

  “Grace!”

  For a second, his progress halted and they hung in balance. Then the gravel under her feet gave and she slid back. She went down hard on her knees, heard her jeans rip. He tumbled with her, then caught her somehow, his arms tight around her and holding her in place just as they would have gone over the edge of the precipice.

  They were on the last large rock, she on the bottom and he on top of her. A long, hard drop below them.

  As he looked at her, his eyes were a soft, tawny brown, a contrast to his hard-muscled body. “Are you hurt?”

  Dazed. A long time had passed since she’d last felt the weight of a man on top of her. And Ryder McKay was definitely no ordinary man. Awareness arched between them suddenly. And she found she couldn’t say a word. She simply stared up at him. My, what chiseled lips you have, a stupid little voice said in her head.

  She really shouldn’t be staring at his lips. Yet she didn’t seem to be able to stop. She forced her eyes shut before he could notice.

  She hated the stupid attraction. Wrong man. Terrible timing.

  “I’m going to get off you,” he said. “Don’t move. I don’t want either of us going over the edge.”

  They were in complete agreement on that. The first thing they were in complete agreement over, in fact, since they’d met, it seemed. She opened her eyes just as his lips pulled away.