Hot Velocity

Operation Day Care

Highly skilled combat veteran and former rodeo star Rex Trainor likes to be in the thick of the action. So when he’s loaned out to Homeland Security, he plans to bide his time until he can get back to the real war. He doesn’t, however, plan on Sierra Daniels, a local day-care giver whose pretty smile hides a stubborn streak more daunting than Wyoming’s Beartooth Mountains. When tragedy nearly strikes the kids in Sierra’s care, Rex vows to expose the culprit. Rex hasn’t failed on a mission yet, and protecting the desirable Miss Daniels is no exception!

Ballistic Cowboys

Sierra backed away. “I have to ask you not to do that again.”

He nodded. “Agreed. It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to get involved with me. I won’t be around for long and, despite our little charade, I’m not very good boyfriend material.”

Sierra hadn’t expected him to agree with her so quickly. Disappointment filled her chest. Pushing back her shoulders, she lifted her chin. Why should she care? He’d only confirmed her desire to avoid anything sticky growing between them. Still…

He turned and walked toward the door.

Before he crossed the threshold, she asked, “Why?”

He stopped and half turned toward her. “Why what?”

“Why do you make bad boyfriend material?” She shouldn’t be interested in his answer, but she was and she waited for his response.

He shook his head, a hint of a smile tilting his lips. “Trust me. I’m no good for you, or any other woman.” With that, he walked out of the room and shut the door.

Hot Velocity

Elle James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ELLE JAMES, a New York Times bestselling author, started writing when her sister challenged her to write a romance novel. She has managed a full-time job and raised three wonderful children, and she and her husband even tried ranching exotic birds (ostriches, emus and rheas). Ask her, and she’ll tell you what it’s like to go toe-to-toe with an angry three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bird! Elle loves to hear from fans at [e-mail] or www.ellejames.com.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Rex “T-Rex” Trainor—US marine on loan to the Department of Homeland Security for Task Force Safe Haven.

Sierra Daniels—Mother’s Day Out Day Care worker who loves children and being independent.

“Hawkeye” Trace Walsh—US Army Airborne Ranger and expert sniper, on loan to the Department of Homeland Security for Task Force Safe Haven.

Kevin Garner—Agent with the Department of Homeland Security in charge of Task Force Safe Haven.

Jon “Ghost” Caspar—US Navy SEAL on loan to Department of Homeland Security for Task Force Safe Haven.

Max “Caveman” Decker—US Army Delta Force soldier on loan to the Department of Homeland Security for Task Force Safe Haven.

Clay Ellis—Sierra Daniels’s ex-husband who hasn’t accepted that they are divorced.

Grady Morris—Political candidate in the race for senator of Wyoming.

Bryson Rausch—Formerly the wealthiest resident of Grizzly Pass, who lost everything in the stock market.

Leo Fratiani—Land agent set on securing some land for an oil pipeline project.

Brenda Larson—Sierra Daniels’s friend and coworker.

This book is dedicated to my grandmother who, at the

age of 97, is still fighting to stay in this world. After a

broken back, she powered her way through physical

therapy to make it back home from rehab for

Thanksgiving. She’s a fighter and I hope to have as

much gumption as she does when I’m 97!

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Cast of Characters

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

“Whatcha got?” Captain Rex “T-Rex” Trainor leaned toward the man sitting beside him in the helicopter, preparing to deploy into the small Afghan village on the edge of nowhere.

Gunnery Sergeant Lance Gallagher, Gunny to the unit, grinned, splitting his scarred, rugged face in two, and held up a small, shiny piece of paper with a black-and-white picture on it. “Number four is a boy!” he shouted over the roar of the rotors spinning overhead.

T-Rex nodded. “Congratulations!”

“Three girls and a boy.” Gunny shook his head, his lips curling into a happy smile. “Poor kid will be outnumbered by women.” He looked up, catching T-Rex’s gaze, his smile fading. “That’s why I’m giving up the good life of a career soldier to retire. I plan on being there to make sure Junior gets a shot at playing football, baseball and whatever the hell sport he wants.”

T-Rex didn’t blame the man. “Someone needs to be there to make sure he has that chance.”

“Darn right.” Gunny waved the thin piece of paper at T-Rex. “I want to teach him to throw his first ball, build a fort, take him hunting and, most of all...teach him how to treat a woman right.” He winked.

What every boy needed—a father who cared enough to show him the ropes. T-Rex’s dad had taught him everything he knew about horses, ranching and riding broncos in the rodeo. He’d taught him how to suck it up when he was thrown and to get back up on that horse, even when he was injured. Too many kids nowadays didn’t have that parental influence, whether it be a mother or father, to push them to be all they could be and more.

“LZ coming up!” the pilot shouted. He lowered the craft onto the rocky ground and held steady while the team exited from both sides of the Black Hawk.

Although it was night, nothing stood in the way of the stars and the moon shining down on the rugged landscape.

They were deposited on the other side of a hill from their target village. In less than thirty minutes they climbed to the top of the ridge and half ran, half slid down the other side into the back wall of the hamlet.

This was supposed to be a routine sweep to ensure the small group of Taliban thugs they’d chased off hadn’t returned. The intelligence guys had some concerns since the location was so close to the hills and caves the terrorists fled to when driven out of their strongholds.

T-Rex motioned for his team to spread out along the wall. When he gave the signal, they were to scale the wall and drop to the other side. When everyone was in position, he spoke softly into his mic. “Let’s do this.”

In two-man teams, they helped each other over the wall, landing softly on the other side. T-Rex led the way through the buildings, checking inside each one. The locals knew the drill, they’d been invaded so many times. They remained silent and gathered their sleeping children close.

What a life. These people never knew who was coming through the door next, or if the intruders would kill them all or let them live to see another day.

As T-Rex neared the other end of the village, doors stood open to huts that were empty of people and belongings.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. “Something’s not right here,” he said softly into his mic. He knelt in the shadow of a building and strained to see any movement in the street ahead or from the rooftops. Nothing moved. No shadows stirred or separated from the buildings, and no one loomed overhead from the tops of the homes.

In his gut, T-Rex knew they were walking into a trap. “Back out the way we came,” he whispered.

“I’ve got your back,” Gunny said.

“Get the others out of here. I smell a trap.”

“Not going without you, sir,” Gunny insisted.

“That’s an order,” T-Rex said, his tone firm, despite the whisper. “Move out.” He glanced over his shoulder to the gunnery sergeant’s position a building behind him, and on the opposite side of the road, the other members waited for the signal, hugging the shadows. At that moment, a shadow appeared on the roof directly over Gunny’s head.

“Heads up! Tango over you, G,” T-Rex warned, setting his sights on the man, waiting for the telltale shape of a weapon to appear. His finger on the trigger, T-Rex counted his breaths.

One...two...

The man yanked something in his hand.

“Not good!” T-Rex pulled the trigger, hitting the man in the chest. He collapsed forward, the object in his hand slipping from his grip, falling to the ground. “Grenade!” T-Rex shouted.

Gunny threw himself away from the small oval object rolling across the dirt. But not soon enough.

T-Rex lurched to his feet, too far away from his gunnery sergeant to be of any use. “No!”

The world erupted.

T-Rex was flung backward, landing hard on his back, the breath knocked from his lungs. Stunned, he lay for a second, staring up at the stars overhead, shining like so many diamonds in the sky until the dust and debris from the blast obliterated the night. Then he remembered how to breathe and sucked in a huge lungful of dust. The popping sound of gunfire came from above and all around.

T-Rex rolled toward the shadows of a building and bunched his legs beneath him. Bullets rained down around him, kicking up puffs of dirt near his feet.

Raising his weapon to his shoulder, T-Rex scanned the rooftops through the cloud of dust.

A man stood above him, aiming an AK47 in his direction.

His ears still ringing, T-Rex pinned the man in his sights and fired. One shot. The man fell to the ground, his weapon clattering on the rocky street.

T-Rex quickly scanned neighboring rooftops and the road ahead. Nothing moved there, but the world was pure chaos behind him.

He spun and ran toward the others, his heart hammering in his chest, his head still spinning from the detonation of the concussion grenade.

His men were pinned to the sides of the building, by a single fighter wielding a machine gun from his position near to where his comrade had been standing when T-Rex had taken him out.

T-Rex knelt, aimed, but his vision blurred. He blinked, gaining a clearer shot. His finger tightened on the trigger. He fired one round, and the fighter fell, dropping the machine gun to the street below.

Farther ahead, three of his men were exchanging gunfire with two fighters hiding out between the buildings. How the hell had they missed them?

Their training kicked in and they leap-frogged, providing each other cover as they worked their way to the fighters and knocked them out, one by one.

T-Rex hurried to where Gunny lay in the rubble of the building damaged by the grenade.

The man lay so still, T-Rex’s gut knotted. He bent to feel for a pulse. At first, he could feel nothing. He held his breath and shifted his finger. That was when he felt the reassuring vibration of a heartbeat. Quickly scanning the man’s arms and legs, he noted the tears in his clothing where shrapnel had penetrated. None of the wounds was bleeding profusely. If Gunny had sustained an arterial wound, T-Rex was prepared to apply a tourniquet. But he hadn’t.

Chief Petty Officer Miles Kieslowski ran up to him. “Sir, we got incoming enemy reinforcements. We have to get out of here while we can.” He stared down at the man covered in dust. “Damn.” He glanced up into T-Rex’s gaze. “Is he...”

“Alive. But I don’t know the extent of his injuries.”

“Let’s get him out of here.” Kieslowski started to lift Gunny. “Kenner is on the radio, calling in for pickup.”

“No. I’ve got him,” T-Rex said. “You cover me.” He handed his rifle to Kieslowski. With his hands free, he pulled Gunny to a sitting position and then draped the man’s body over his shoulder. Straightening, he felt the strain on his back and legs. But nothing would stop him from bringing his man out. Never, in all of his skirmishes, had he left a man behind. He wouldn’t start now.

With his burden, T-Rex hurried toward the designated extraction site. As he emerged from the village into the open, he spotted several trucks in the distance, stirring up dust as they barreled toward them. In the light from the moon, T-Rex could tell the men loaded in the backs of those trucks all carried weapons.

The thundering roar of helicopter rotors sounded nearby as the aircraft rose up over the hill behind the village and landed a couple of hundred yards from where T-Rex had stopped to catch his breath. The other marines from his team knelt behind him, firing at the village, as more enemy fighters came out of hiding.

T-Rex had one goal: to get his men to the waiting chopper and out of there before they were outnumbered. As he reached the helicopter, he gave over Gunny’s care to the medic on board and turned toward his team.

Several of them ran toward him, while the others returned fire, backing up as they did. When they were out of range of rifle fire, they ran toward the aircraft and leaped in.

T-Rex stood beside the vehicle, helping his men board. When the last man was in, T-Rex climbed in, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!”

As he settled into his seat, he noted the trucks had stopped short of the village. Several men climbed out carrying long narrow tubes. “They’ve got RPGs!” he yelled.

The helicopter couldn’t move fast enough for T-Rex. It lifted off the ground with its heavy load of souls on board and swung back toward the hill.

They had just made it to the ridge when an explosion went off so close, it made the chopper shudder.

Instinctively, T-Rex ducked.

They made it over the ridge and dropped out of the line of sight of the truck and the RPG-bearing fighters.

The rest of the trip back to their post seemed like they were moving in slow motion. The medics worked furiously over Gunny and the other men who’d sustained injuries.

“Is he going to make it?” T-Rex leaned over his gunnery sergeant, thoughts on that sonogram photo of the man’s fourth child. The boy he’d always dreamed of having. For the first time in a long time, T-Rex closed his eyes and prayed.

Chapter Two

“Time to line up,” Sierra Daniels called out to the toddlers on the playground outside the Grizzly Pass Community Center. Some of the little ones headed her way. Others ignored her completely and continued to play with their favorite outside toys or apparatus.

Sierra couldn’t be angry with them. They were children with the attention spans of gnats, and so adorable she loved each one of them like she would her own. If she had any kids of her own. She sighed, pushing back against that empty feeling that always washed over her when she thought about how much she’d wanted to hold her own baby in her arms.

With a shrug, she called out again, forcing her voice to sound a little sterner. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to line up for a game.” Though they were all under six years old, they seemed to have a keen sense of who they could push around and who they couldn’t. Sierra was 100 percent a pushover when it came to children.

Once all the boys and girls stood in front of her, Sierra instructed, “Let’s play follow the leader. Hands on the shoulders of the one in front of you, like this.” She placed the hands of one of the little girls on the shoulders of another. When each child had his or her hands on the one in front, Sierra led the little girl who was first in line around the play yard, weaving back and forth, creating a giggling, laughing snake of toddlers.

The community center had once been a US Army National Guard Armory. Eventually, the Montana National Guard moved its meeting location to a larger town and turned the building over to Grizzly Pass. It was now used as a community center for local events and the Mother’s Day Out day care program. There were also several offices in the building rented out to local businesses.

Sierra had been ecstatic to land a job as a caregiver to the small children who were too young to go to public school. Jobs were hard to come by in the small community, and she’d needed one when she’d filed for divorce.

She and the other caregiver, Brenda Larson, worked together to corral the little ones and see that they were happy, fed and learned something while they were at the center.

Brenda was inside with the babies and infants. The two women traded off between the babies and the more mobile toddlers.

Sierra led the children around the yard one more time and had angled toward the door to the armory when a truck pulled up and the driver honked the horn.

Her fists clenched and she tried not to glare at the man stepping down from the vehicle. The children picked up on her moods more than she’d ever realized. If she was sad or angry, tiny Eloisa would pucker up and cry her little eyes out. It broke Sierra’s heart to see the tiny girl with the bright red curls shed a single tear, much less a storm of them. She refused to give in to the temptation to yell and throw rocks at the man walking her way.

She pasted a fake smile on her face and waited until he was within twenty feet of her before she said in a patient but firm voice, similar to the one she used with her class, “Please, stop where you are.” Her smile hurt her cheeks, but she refused to release it.

Clay Ellis crossed his arms over his chest. “Get your things. You’re comin’ home.”

“I don’t live with you, Clay,” Sierra said, her voice singsong in an attempt to fool the children into thinking she was fine and that the angry man wasn’t scaring her, and therefore they shouldn’t be frightened either. She glanced down at the thirteen children gathering closer around her knees.

Eloisa stared from Clay to Sierra, her bottom lip trembling.

Oh, no. Sierra wouldn’t let Clay’s bad temper impact the little ones. “Come on, everyone. It’s time to go inside.”

“Like hell it is.” Clay stepped forward.

Eloisa screamed and flung her arms around Sierra’s legs, burying her face in Sierra’s slacks.

She laid her hand on the bright, soft curls and faced her ex-husband. “Clay, I’ll have to ask you to leave. You’re frightening the children.”

He didn’t leave. Instead, he walked up to her, grabbed her arm and pulled. “Quit playing around with these brats and get home. I’ve put up with enough of your nonsense.”

Sierra dug in her heels, refusing to go anywhere with the jerk. She’d put up with enough of his verbal and physical abuse. “We aren’t married anymore. You have no right to boss me around, now or ever. Let go of me.”

He raised his free hand as if to strike her.

Sierra braced herself, but wouldn’t flinch. There had been a time she’d cowered when he’d raised his hand to her. But not anymore. She’d learned the hard way that she had rights, and she didn’t have to take abuse from any man.

The children clung to her, their eyes wide, scared. Eloisa sobbed loudly into the smooth linen of Sierra’s tan slacks. Once Eloisa started, the other children sensed her distress and joined the squall.

“Shut up!” Clay yelled.

For a moment, all the children stopped crying and then, as if the spigot had been opened full blast, they all screamed and cried like a dozen caterwauling cats in a back-alley fight.

Clay yanked her out of the center of the noise and dragged her toward his truck.

Sierra dug her feet into the dirt and resisted with all of her might. “Let go of me. I’m not going with you.”

“The hell you aren’t,” he said. “You belong to me.”

“I belong to no man.” She clawed at the meaty hand gripping her wrist like a vise. “I have a restraining order against you.”

“No one’s going to honor it. Everyone knows you’re my wife.”

“Ex-wife. What part of divorce don’t you understand?” She couldn’t let him get her into his truck. Sierra couldn’t go back to this man. He was a bully, a cheater and a monster. “Let go of me, or I’ll scream.”

“Scream. Only those brats will hear you.” He snorted. “You expect them to come to your rescue?”

“I don’t need anyone to rescue me.” She stopped leaning back against his hold on her and let him pull her close. When she was in range, she stomped hard on his instep and raised her knee hard against his crotch.

Clay bellowed and bent double, clutching the area she’d injured. But he didn’t release his grip on her wrist.

Sierra’s fingers were growing numb, and the kids behind her were hysterical. She had to do something to stop this madness. But what? Clay was bigger, stronger and meaner than she was. He’d demonstrated that over and over again. She had the scars to prove it.

“Please, Clay, you’re scaring the children. Let me get them into the building. When I’m done, I’ll go with you.”

“Yeah, right.” He grunted and straightened. “You expect me to believe you?”

“I will. Cross my heart.” She held up her hand as if she were swearing in front of a jury, something she’d had to do in order to convince a judge she’d been abused and needed out.

“No way.” He turned and dragged her closer to his truck.

“You can’t leave them standing outside. They might get lost in the woods. They’re just children.”

“Like the kids you wouldn’t give me? Why the hell should I care?”

“I wanted children. I tried,” she said. “You can’t blame our problems on these little ones.”

“They aren’t mine. I don’t give a crap what happens to them.”

When he set his mind on something, there was no stopping the man. He’d refused to listen to reason when they were married. What made Sierra think he would listen now?

Using another one of the techniques she’d learned in her recent self-defense class, she twisted her wrist, jerked her arm downward and broke free of Clay’s hold. Free at last, she spun and ran. She hadn’t gone two feet when a hand clamped on her hair and yanked her backward.

Sierra screamed and stumbled backward. The children screamed, as well. She could see them standing there, terrified and confused. It made her mad enough she could have spit nails, and all the more determined to free herself of the madman she’d once promised to love, honor and cherish.

“Well, it goes both ways. And you didn’t live up to your part of the bargain,” she muttered, twisted and turned, attempting to get away. But short of letting him rip chunks of her hair out of her head, she was caught.

Chapter Three

A persistent ringing grated on T-Rex’s nerves. He didn’t like to look away from the road when he was driving, so he waited until he pulled to a stop sign before glancing at his cell phone.

GALLAGER

The name on the screen made his heart tighten. The man had gotten out of that Afghan village alive, barely. He hadn’t lost his life, but he’d lost so much more. “Hey, Gunny, how’s that baby?”

“Great. I got to hold him today. With a little help.”

T-Rex swallowed hard before saying, “That’s great, man.”