The Spy Wore Spurs

She could have cheerfully strangled the man. “Whatever happens on my land concerns me.”

“The concerns of private citizens are secondary in this case.”

Words easily said. And easily abused.

And what if he didn’t follow through? If he found that there was no connection, after all, he’d probably drop the search in a second. She could all too easily see the kids and the husband becoming yet other victims the system failed.

She leaned forward in her seat. “I can help you. I’ve been living in Bryan for the past few years, but I know this area. I know the people around here.”

He pinned her with a hard look, suddenly appearing stronger than he had a minute ago. “Not only won’t you involve yourself in this, you won’t talk about it, either. To anyone. You never saw me. I was never here. Is that clear?”

The strength of his voice surprised her, gave her a glimpse of what he might be like when he wasn’t waylaid by massive blood loss. Tough and stubborn. She gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to upend the egg plate over his head.

But he distracted her with, “I don’t suppose you have a spare pair of men’s pants.”

She was tempted to leave him in the pink-purple afghan her grandmother had crocheted, just to spite him. But she didn’t want to risk the afghan slipping as he got up. So she shot him a glare and stomped up to Tommy’s bedroom, grabbed the rattiest, most ridiculous-looking farmer’s overalls out of the closet and brought them down. The man needed something loose. Tommy’s jeans would have never fit over his bandages.

He lifted an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything, just took the denim and shuffled into the laundry room that opened off the kitchen. She tried not to stare when he came out. The overalls ended above his ankles, since Tommy had been shorter. His dirty-blond hair stuck up in every direction, his face pale.

And the bastard still managed to look sexy. It was the lips, she decided, and turned from him as the sound of arriving vehicles filtered in from the outside. She strode to the door and yanked it open to glare at the men, presumably Ryder’s buddies who’d come to take him and Esperanza away.

She lost her breath for a second.

Oh, sweet heaven. For real?

The men who strategically exited the dark SUVs—all combat ready—wore the same black commando gear Ryder had had on when she’d found him. They were all built, moving with grace, radiating strength. They were so hot, all five of them, that they could have had their own pinup calendar.

If it weren’t for the all too real we-mean-business look in their eyes and their authentic arsenal of weapons, she would have thought that they were hot stuff actors hired to play a commando team in some top budget movie.

They looked her over, some with suspicion, some with appreciation, and honest to goodness made her feel flustered. No small feat, considering that during her military career she’d been surrounded by thousands of horny men.

“Ma’am,” said the tall, Viking-looking one with the reddish-blond hair. “We’re here for a friend of ours.”

He didn’t introduce himself, nor did he refer to Ryder by name. She itched to know just what kind of an op they were running.

“In there.” She jerked her head, hating the way the morning was turning out. She might have been able to stand up against Ryder in regards to Esperanza, but no way could she stand up against the six of them.

Game over.

She watched as they tried hard not to laugh at Ryder’s appearance in the overalls. But there was a lot of smirking going on as they helped him to the door.

He stopped in the threshold. “I appreciate the help, Grace.”

She didn’t say you’re welcome, just stood there with her arms crossed.

“I had a gun,” he said then.

Fine. She stepped to the hall table and pulled open the top drawer, then handed him his gun belt.

He left with a nod, followed by one of his buddies—built like a tank—who was escorting Esperanza. Half of the man’s left eyebrow was missing, giving him a fierce appearance. Esperanza looked about ready to faint.

The rest of the men inspected Grace’s living room as if they were undecided whether to leave or pull out a search warrant.

Twinky padded in from the direction of the kitchen; the Viking gave her a careful look.

Grace rolled her eyes. “What? You want to frisk the cat?”

The man’s startling blue eyes cut to her and he coughed. His face remained impassive, but he might have been trying to cover up a laugh. The others strode out and he walked after them.

She followed after Esperanza and gave the crying woman a hug. “Lo siento,” she whispered into her ear. I’m sorry. “I will do whatever I can to help. I’m going to look for your family, okay?”

And maybe Esperanza understood, because she slipped a folded-up piece of paper into Grace’s hands, careful so nobody would see the furtive maneuver, her red-rimmed eyes hanging on Grace’s face, begging. She looked as miserable as a person could be, but followed the men without resisting. Then she disappeared in the back of one of the vehicles, no longer visible behind the tinted window.

“I do appreciate what you did for me,” Ryder said again as he got into the passenger seat of the same vehicle.

Grace turned her back on him, marched inside the house, then slammed the door behind her.

Only then did she open the piece of paper.

Two little kids smiled at her from the photograph, a boy and a girl, their eyes laughing into the camera. Their parents stood behind them, a world of love in their eyes as they looked at their children. She turned the photo over. Paco, Esperanza, Miguel y Rosita.

Miguel was maybe two inches taller than his twin, his arms protectively around his little sister.

She had a picture in that same pose with Tommy, although the age difference had been bigger between them.

She glanced at the brass urn on the mantel and her heart constricted.

What if Ryder didn’t fulfill his promise?

Children, even American children, fell through the cracks every single day. What if nobody went to look for Rosita and Miguel?

She squared her shoulders. Somebody would, she decided.

Chapter Three

Ryder took notes at the SDDU’s new satellite site as Esperanza Molinero repeated her story. Raymund, better known as Ray, Armstrong, sat with them. The two of them were senior team members, based on length of service in the SDDU. The rest of the men busied themselves elsewhere so as not to overwhelm her and make her feel threatened.

“Did the guide bring a whole group or you alone?” he asked in Spanish.

“I sold my wedding ring so he would bring me. I came alone. I sold my bicycle and our furniture. Even the kitchen table Paco made me as a wedding gift. Where will my Paco eat when he comes home?”

Ray exchanged a look with Ryder that said he didn’t expect that issue to come up. Something Ryder had considered, as well. The man should have called his wife by now, got word back to her. If he hadn’t, he was possibly dead, or in some other bad trouble.

“Was your husband a drug mule? Did anyone give him any suspicious packages to take to the U.S. with him?” Ray asked, sliding lower in his chair, trying to look as small and nonthreatening as he could, a challenge for a big chunk of Viking like him. The blood of his marauding ancestors ran thick in his veins, there was no mistaking it. Mostly, it was an advantage, but not today. Esperanza eyed him warily.

Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “My Paco was a good man. An honest man.”

“The kids were given backpacks of school supplies from the so-called company representative,” Ryder put in, repeating what she’d told him at the ranch.

Ray asked Esperanza about that; she insisted that the bags contained nothing but notebooks and pencils. She looked confused, probably not understanding why they were asking her about the bags instead of her kids.

“Of course, she wouldn’t have checked the padding,” Ray said in English.

Ryder nodded. Exactly.

“You’re sure about his name?” He wanted to get back to the human trafficking. The same man who brought her over might be the guide for the terrorists, in the not-too-distant future.

“Dave,” the woman said then struggled with the next word. “Snebl.”

“Where did you cross?”

“I couldn’t see in the dark. We walked for a long time together. When he saw the storm, he said he was leaving. I gave him everything I had, all the rest of my money, my bag. But he turned around. He told me to keep walking.”

She was lucky he didn’t hurt her. Robbing people who came across the border was a common racket. If their guide didn’t do it, then one of the groups who made a living from robbing illegal immigrants did. The men and women usually brought their most valuable possessions with them to start a new life. The hits could be lucrative, and the victims couldn’t turn to the police, so the robbers nearly always got away with it.

Ryder shifted in his seat. His job was to defend his country and if he saw anyone breaking the law, do something about it. Either you broke the law or you didn’t. He preferred to look at things in black-and-white. He hated shades of gray.

He was a soldier. He got a command, he carried it out. There was no evaluation of the mission, no second-guessing his superior officer. That was how the army, where he’d started out, worked, as did his current team the SDDU, Special Designation Defense Unit, a top secret commando team.

But nothing seemed clear-cut here. The land along the border was its own universe. Some of the people he’d met were clearly criminals, others victims, some both at the same time. Motivations were complicated.

He thought of Grace Cordero—the definition of complicated. A smart man would leave that attractive bundle of trouble well alone. Like he was going to do. To get a good head start, he put Grace from his mind and focused on the woman in front of him.

“Please,” she begged them. “Help me.”

He did feel sorry for Esperanza. She didn’t cross the border with criminal intent, she didn’t want to stay and live off taxpayer’s money. She was looking for her husband and children because the authorities had failed her.

Yet, what she’d done was illegal.

He had no choice but to take her to border patrol and send her back home. No choice at all, even if a sharp-eyed beauty called Grace Cordero would hate him for it.

She didn’t believe in the system.

He did. He’d sworn to defend it.

“Doesn’t make any sense, if you ask me,” Ray said in English. “The Cordero ranch isn’t a known smuggling corridor. The terrain is too rough. There are easier points for crossing.”

Yet the man who’d shot him had been out there. Ryder smoothed his black cargo pants over the bandages on his thigh. He’d been to the emergency room and back, the wound had been disinfected again, his stitches inspected and pronounced exemplary.

He’d been forced to lie down while they’d dripped a full bag of IV fluids into him, and had plenty of time to think. Maybe the spot had been chosen specifically because the smugglers thought nobody would be looking there.

He listened as Ray asked Esperanza some of the same questions she’d already answered, wording them differently this time to see if he could trip her. But she stayed consistent. Nothing indicated that she was lying.

They had alerted border patrol to her presence, but not to the shooting. Their operation was top secret, dealing with a terror threat. His small team had come to the area on the pretense that they were surveying border traffic for a new proposal for increased funding for CBP, Customs and Border Protection.

They were more than a match for their enemies, the special team consisting of trained and experienced commandos who did this for a living. As much as they respected the work CBP did, several recent busts had proven that not all the border agents could be trusted. Some were on the take from the traffickers.

And this was one mission where Ryder’s team couldn’t take any chances.

“I was cold because I had to swim,” Esperanza was saying.

“Rio Grande.” Ray looked at Ryder. “Can’t believe she made it. The current can be a killer in places. Add the darkness and that storm.” He shook his head.

“I was scared that the water would rise to the ceiling and I would drown,” she said, not having understood the two men’s exchange in English.

Ceiling? Then it all made sense suddenly.

“Tunnel,” Ray and he said at the same time. Now at least they knew what they had to be looking for when they were out there scouring the land day after day. All that water from the rain had been running down and filling a tunnel.

“Do you remember anything about where you came out? In brush? Trees? Open fields?”

“In a ditch. I couldn’t see much in the dark and the rain.”

And no matter how hard they pressed her after that, she couldn’t give them any further information. So Ryder escorted the woman to the crossing point, talked to the guards and walked her across. They had her contact information, the village she lived in and the phone number of her priest, since her house didn’t have a phone line.

“Don’t come back,” he told her. “It’s not safe. Your children need a mother. You stay here, and I’ll go and look for them, all right?” he said in Spanish, and handed her enough money to get her to her village.

Tears streamed down her face. “Paco loves me. He wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t take my babies. He would die for me. I would die for him.”

“I believe you.” He spoke the truth. He believed in that kind of love between a man and a woman, even if he’d never experienced it himself. His parents had that.

He left her and walked back across to his car, feeling somehow guilty and inadequate, even if he was doing the right thing.

A text message with photo pinged onto his phone as he started the engine—a blue-eyed newborn with a pink ribbon in her hair. A birth announcement from Mitch Mendoza. Ryder grinned, happy for his friend, but he also felt a sense of longing. He wanted what Mitch had—his true mate, the one that could make him happy.

He wanted a partner like Mitch had found, someone who would fight by his side and go with him on missions, someone to have his back during the day and fill his arms at night. Mitch had been over-the-moon happy since he’d met Megan. The couple was assigned to the SDDU’s Texas office, but were on leave at the moment for the birth of their baby.

They had something Ryder had never had before. And he couldn’t help but want a taste of it.

He’d been thinking about a wife lately. Kids.

A call interrupted that warm little fantasy.

“Shep and Mo are heading back,” Ray said. “I’m about to leave for the Cordero ranch to look for the tunnel with the others. Jamie says last night’s rain washed away all the tracks. I don’t see how we can find the damned thing unless we stumble on it by accident. The report on Grace Cordero came in after you left, by the way. Squeaky clean. She has a hell of a service record. She did two tours of duty in Iraq. Are you coming out here?”

“I’m heading into Hullett to talk with the sheriff. Want to see if he has any information on Paco Molinero and those kids.”

“They came through with visas. I don’t think Paco could give us much on the human trafficking.”

A good point, but Ryder wanted Grace Cordero packed up and gone, and the quickest way to achieve that was to close the Molinero case as expediently as possible by finding Esperanza’s family for her.

Then Grace would go back to where she’d come from and his team would have free rein over her ranch. He didn’t like the idea of her out there alone, with criminal activity going on around her. She’d be unsafe and underfoot, a double negative.

He reached the next intersection and took the turn toward her ranch on impulse. But he found the driveway empty when he reached the house. His knock on the door went unanswered.

She’d better not be out there riding around the fields. He would have to warn her about that when he caught up with her. She needed to stay off the land until they figured out what was going on and found the damned tunnel.

He considered looking for her, but then he glanced at his watch and got back into his car. If he wanted to catch the sheriff at the office, he had to get going.

An hour later, he caught the man at his desk.

“So you’re not with CBP?” Sheriff Denholtz ran his thumb over his considerable mustache. His large belly fairly stretched his uniform. His cowboy hat sat on the desk in front of him. He was in his mid-thirties, pretty young to make sheriff. But he acted as if he’d had the job for decades.

“I’m affiliated with CBP.” Ryder gave his cover. Since his team had no idea who they could trust around here, the rule of thumb was to trust no one. “I’m working on a special project.”

“I thought the U.S. Customs and Borders Special Response Team handled those.”

“You’re right about that.” People liked to hear that they were right. When you were trying to build rapport, it didn’t hurt to say it. “This is different,” he added. “My team is here to survey the border situation and make recommendations for policy makers.”

“Strangers coming in, telling our local boys how to do their business.” Denholtz pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started chewing on it.

“I just need to have a list of Mexican nationals that ran into any kind of trouble here over the past two months.”

The man drew his spine straight. “We don’t have a smuggling problem in Hullett. I run a tight ship.”

“No doubt, Sheriff. Still, if I could get that list.”

The man sucked on the toothpick. “I’ll tell one of my boys to get right on it. I’ll have it faxed to CBP when it’s ready.”

“If you could fax it straight to me, it would be very helpful.” He scribbled the office’s fax number on the back of his fake card and slid it across the desk.

From the look the sheriff was giving him, he wouldn’t hold his breath.

He resisted the urge to take a tougher tone. He needed to gain the local law’s cooperation. If he pushed too hard, the sheriff might wonder if he had a special agenda, and his special agenda was top secret.

A deputy stuck his head in the door. “Gracie Cordero is here to see you, Sheriff.”

Surprise flashed across the man’s face, then a smile spread his mustache. He spit the toothpick into the garbage can and pushed to his feet.

Ryder gritted his teeth as the man passed by him without a word of apology for the interruption.

“Gracie, sweetheart. Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes?” The words filtered through the door the sheriff had left open behind him.

“Good to see you, Shane. How is Mattie?”

“She’s fine. Kids are so big you wouldn’t recognize them. I heard about Tommy. I’m awful sorry about that. He was a real stand-up guy, your brother.”

“He was.” Grace’s voice turned somber.

Ryder couldn’t see her from where he was sitting, but he would recognize her voice anywhere. She had a melodious tone, not silky and seductive, yet still somehow sexy and feminine, except when she got herself all worked up and her voice turned hard and clipped.

“You back for good, then? Mattie would love that.”

“For a week or two, at least. I’ll stop in to see her and the kids.”

“Anything I can help you with, sweetheart?”

Ryder rolled his eyes. Quite a bit different reception from the one he’d gotten.

“I’m looking for a guy by the name of Paco Molinero. He might have come to town with his two small kids, Miguel and Rosita.”

“You hired someone for the ranch?”

“I know his wife in a roundabout way. He’s gone missing.”

“She ought to report that. I can send a deputy out to her house.”

“She’s on the other side of the border.”

A moment of pause came. “You can file a missing person report, I suppose. You got the details?”

“Most of them. I also have a picture.”

Ryder’s ears perked up at that.

“Joey,” the sheriff called out. “I want you to run this man through the system right now. Let’s see if we get a hit.”

“Yessir.”

“How about a cup of coffee while we wait?” the sheriff offered next. “There might even be a couple of cookies left.”

“Mattie’s?” she asked in a kid’s Christmas-morning voice.

Ryder stood and strode out, but all he could see was their disappearing backs as they walked down the hallway, chitchatting like two old friends. He decided to avoid the indignity of chasing after them.

She laughed and put her hand on the sheriff’s shoulder as he said something amusing. Which annoyed Ryder more than it should have.

He wanted to go after them and demand the information he needed, but he had a feeling the sheriff would resist anyone who challenged his authority here, in his own little kingdom. So he strode out of the station, calling Shep, one of his teammates back at the office, for an update.

The news was less than encouraging. They couldn’t find the tunnel.

“Any luck in Hullett?” Shep wanted to know.

“I’ll get what I came for.”

“Locals proving too difficult for you?”

“The usual small-town stuff.”

“Maybe you’ll find yourself a nice small-town girl.”

Telling the guys that he was looking to settle down had clearly been a mistake. “Maybe you’ll step on a rattler.”

Shep laughed. “Come on now. What was her name again? Vivien?”

“Victoria.” He bit out the single word. On a long night patrol with Shep, he’d unfortunately shared his vision of what he was looking for: tough, athletic, ready to go, a partner in fight as well as in the bedroom. Tough enough to survive his kind of life, but soft enough to be the mother of his children, basically.

He might have shared that he was partial to blondes with long hair, the longer the better. And since they’d been talking about her, it was easier to give her some sort of name, for convenience’s sake. Not that he meant she had to be named Victoria, of course, which would be idiotic. But since then, even to himself, he’d begun to refer to this dream woman as Vicky.

GRACE TUCKED HER SHORT, dark bob behind her ears as she ran down the front stairs of the police station. She frowned at the man leaning against her pickup. His color was better than the day before. He was better dressed, too. This time, Ryder McKay wore a dark gray suit with a dark blue shirt and dress shoes instead of the combat boots.

His hair had a little wave to it so it managed to look tussled even short-cut. He wasn’t the best looking man on his team, although he was plenty hot, but he had the kind of energy, a presence that drew her as the others hadn’t. All the more annoying since she hated him for taking Esperanza away.

He was the last person she wanted to see today.

He limped toward her. Looked as if he’d been waiting for her and his presence here wasn’t just an unhappy accident. Great.

“You should be resting that leg.”

“Let’s sit in your truck for a second.”

As he looked her over, she suddenly wished that she’d bothered to slap on some makeup that morning, or that the jeans she wore didn’t have a hole above her left knee. “What happened to Esperanza?”

“She’s on her way back home. Why don’t we see if we can come to some agreement about how to help her?” His desert-honey gaze held hers.

Awareness zinged up her spine. She went around him and yanked the driver’s-side door open.

“You should keep that locked.”

“You should mind your own business.” She wasn’t used to having to lock anything around here.

He got in next to her, taking up way too much space. “These are different times.”

So maybe they were. Smugglers. People getting shot. People disappearing. Things like that didn’t normally happen in Hullett. Even if she no longer lived around here, she hated the idea of the place changing for the worse. Dylan’s sister, Molly, was usually the one who hated change and wanted everything to stay the same, but for once, Grace agreed with that sentiment wholeheartedly.