Enemy Mine

“Emotionally charged…riveting and deeply touching.”

—on
Firstborn

“Edge-of-the-seat romantic suspense…. Readers will be enthralled from first page to the last.”

—on
Valkyrie

“A truly remarkable love story of two courageous people.”

—on
Morgan’s Marriage

“When it comes to action and romance, nobody does it better than McKenna.”

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Destiny’s Woman

“McKenna weaves together enticing players, heart-stopping action and sparks aplenty to create a savory romantic concoction.”

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Man with a Mission

“Full-bodied characters that shine amid a powerful backdrop of emotional change, desire and love.”

—on
A Man Alone

“Talented Lindsay McKenna delivers excitement and romance in equal measure.”

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Protecting His Own

“Another Lindsay McKenna romantic treasure.”

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Woman of Innocence

“A terrific story.”

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An Honorable Woman

“Balanced characters, electrifying attraction, a smattering of military jargon and bracing danger. Readers can count this one a winner.”

—on
Her Healing Touch

To: Stacie Albee and her grade school class.
A wonderful teacher, a great reader and an inspiration
to her children. Thank you for being who you are.

K
ATHY
T
RAYHERN KNEW
she was going to die. The only thing left to wonder was when and how. She knew
who
was going to kill her: Carlos Garcia. Hands tightening on the wheel of her red Toyota MR2 sports car, the wind tugging at her loose blond hair, Kathy took in a deep, ragged breath.

She was driving through the majestic Rocky Mountains, familiar friends to her, as she’d grown up here. At least she’d spent from age eight onward in the Montana Rockies. Before that…At the memory, her mouth pursed in pain—a raw pain that never healed. Before that she’d lived in Washington, D.C. Her father, Morgan Trayhern, had thought he and his family were safe from retaliation by the drug lords of South America because of the power he brokered in the capital. He’d made a near-fatal error in that assumption. Kathy had watched her family—both her parents, the twins, Pete and Kelly, and her older brother Jason—begin a death spiral of slow deterioration after they’d been kidnapped by her father’s enemies.

Kathy touched her dark aviator glasses, a nervous habit whenever she thought about that terrifying time.
The treacherous act had been engineered by Guillermo Garcia, Carlos’s father…. She lost herself in the memories, no longer smelling the fresh pine scent along the two-lane asphalt highway that wound through the forested mountains. Nor did she notice the fluffy white clouds accumulating—rain clouds that soon would shed water upon the thirsty land. No, her heart, her soul were focused on the obsessive rage she felt, a desire for revenge that gnawed at her gut. She couldn’t forget the kidnapping.

Tunneling her fingers through her wind-tossed mane, Kathy followed the twisting curves of the road. The June sun was high overhead. It was noon, and she should have been hungry, but her carefully planned mission of reprisal had robbed her of an appetite. Whether her parents guessed it or not, she was coming home to say goodbye to them. Because what she had decided to do—get even with the Garcia drug family, would kill her.

Grimly, Kathy stared unseeing at the road before her. There was no regret in her; after all, she’d lived twenty-seven years—long enough to witness the ongoing effects the kidnapping had had on her parents and Jason. After they were rescued, they lived in hell, struggling every day to overcome the terrible, tragic wounds of their trauma.

Who could
ever
forget a rape? Her mother, Laura Trayhern, certainly couldn’t. And Kathy’s father, who was larger than life in her eyes, had been drugged and tortured. He’d nearly died at the hands of his captors, who had beaten him three times a day with their fists, chains and boots. No one could get over such abuse.

With the atrocities he’d committed on her parents and Jason, Guillermo Garcia had stolen Kathy’s loving family from her. For they’d changed, all of them. From the kidnapping day onward, Kathy had lost the happy parents she’d adored.

Over the years, guilt had eaten at her because she’d been spared as a child, she’d known something was terribly wrong with her family, but was too young to understand what or why. In her teens, she’d grasped the truth and wondered why the kidnappers hadn’t taken her, too. Why had she been left behind? Kathy knew drug lords in South America felt sons were important, especially the firstborn. Women counted for nothing, except to be mothers of a man’s children. Maybe that was why they’d left her behind and taken Jason, instead.

Her thoughts lingered on her brother, firstborn son of her generation of the proud Trayhern dynasty, with its two-hundred-year tradition of military service to the nation. Jason had been kidnapped by another drug family, in Maui, Hawaii, and kept a captive there. They’d tried to win him over with candy but when he’d balked and fought back, they’d beaten six-year-old Jason, taunted him endlessly, slapped him and made a cowering dog out of him. Kathy remembered her extroverted, assertive older brother. After his rescue, he’d come home a different person, a stranger to her. He’d become so withdrawn, so unresponsive that Kathy felt she’d lost her brother, too.

As a small girl, she had cried nightly about this loss, sobbing quietly into her pillow so no one could hear her. She didn’t want to waken her parents, who were still
reeling from the shock of their imprisonment. Kathy had understood even at that age that she couldn’t run to her mother or father when she was scared or needed to be held. Not anymore.

Life had spared her from the brutal kidnappers. Yet now, many years later, Kathy was well aware of the message those cretins had wanted to convey to her family. They’d warned Morgan’s supersecret agency, Perseus, to stop trying to halt the drug trade in the Caribbean and South America…or else.

When her father refused to halt his secret missions, the drug lords had gotten even. Guillermo Garcia had planned his retaliation perfectly. Morgan’s arrogant belief that his family was immune to the drug lords’ treachery had been off the mark entirely. What better way to even a score than with a man’s family? In South America, the family unit was everything, and that was where they struck at Morgan. With his family.

A slow, simmering anger stirred in Kathy as she braked gently for a curve around a black granite cliff. Patches of wildflowers clung to pockets of yellow soil on the vertical incline.

The time was
now.
She’d just gotten back from a year-long black ops flying a Seahawk helicopter with insertion teams in South America. She’d worked with the CIA, Navy SEALs and Recon Marines. As a pilot, she’d experienced plenty of action and some near misses on her own life. After seeing firsthand what drug lords did to many families in Colombia, Kathy had a gutful of rage. Witnessing others’ horror had triggered violent feelings from her family’s past, and it fed her need for revenge.

And, as if to seal her quest, the drug dealers had killed the man she loved: Lieutenant Curt Shields, a U.S. Navy SEAL who had gotten into a lethal firefight with a group of them on a jungle-clad hill. She’d met Curt shortly after starting the black ops mission. He had been an incredible man—a good friend, a wonderful lover. Under the shadow of danger, daily, they’d planned out the rest of their lives together. There was no doubt that Curt’s murder played prominently in her obsession to bring down those monsters.

For whatever reason, Kathy couldn’t let her father off the hook, either. The family’s kidnapping was partly his fault. When he was rescued and returned home to Washington to pick up the pieces of their shattered life, Morgan had made amends very quickly. He’d immediately left D.C. for Phillipsburg, Montana, a little fishing and hunting town in the Rockies. He’d brought his family here to this sheltered, secluded place to live and, hopefully, to recover.

At first, Morgan swore he would quit the rescue business he’d created. He’d spent years developing Perseus, with the help of his well-trained mercenaries, mostly ex-military types. Morgan had used Perseus to help people in need around the world. But in less than two years after their move, Kathy had seen him slowly go stir-crazy, with too little to do. All her father knew was the military and assisting others in need. It was in his blood, in his genes. After all, he’d been raised in a military family, and was used to carrying a great deal of responsibility on his broad shoulders.

Finally, her father resurrected Perseus, which this
time was absorbed into the CIA for even deeper cover. Morgan had talked it over with Laura, and she’d agreed he needed to revive his company. He hadn’t consulted Jason or Kathy—much as they would have liked him to. The gesture would have been so healing. But Morgan no longer was as close to his older children as he’d been before the kidnapping, or what Kathy called “BTK.”

Her father had happily dived back into his work, with a heavy layer of camouflage to protect his family from another possible attack. It had worked, thus far. And with fraternal twins being born three years later, Pete and Kelly, the family became one, once more.

Kathy had watched and listened at the doorway of her father’s office as he’d sketched out the details on making Perseus look like a tourist center—with condominiums to rent to fishermen during the summertime and to hunters in the fall. In actuality, the main office was a three-story Victorian house that functioned as just that: a tourist facility. Below ground, however, deep in the earth, was the heart and soul of Perseus. Her father literally went underground in an effort to save his family from danger.

Abruptly, Kathy stopped the flow of memories. Ahead was the dirt road that led to the cedar home where she’d been raised. Her heart beat harder. No stranger to adrenaline, she didn’t allow it to affect her reflexes, her focus or her thinking. Turning right, she directed her little red sports car up the hill, toward the large, two-story house embraced by Douglas firs. The trees had always reminded her of soldiers standing at attention, guarding the family.

The porch was wide and long, built in an L-shape around the front of the house. Thanks to her mother’s green thumb, large pots of red, white and pink geraniums adorned the porch. The bright blooms looked so beautiful to Kathy, and the fierce love she felt for her mother nearly overwhelmed her.

Laura Trayhern was the light of the family, whose combined souls had been darkened, tortured, twisted and almost destroyed. Despite being raped and drugged, and nearly beaten to death one night, her mother had rallied and pulled the frayed fabric of their disintegrating family back into place. Kathy stood in awe of her mom’s steel backbone, her ability to overcome what seemed to be insurmountable circumstances. Maybe because Laura had been adopted, she’d acquired a special spiritual strength. It had helped keep their family from completely self-destructing after the kidnapping ordeal….

No one knew Kathy was coming home. That’s the way she wanted it. Her family couldn’t suspect the real reason for her surprise visit. If they did, Morgan would stop her, and Kathy wasn’t about to let that happen. Her father was privy to the most supersecret activities going on inside the U.S. government. If he caught wind of what she’d planned, he’d dismantle it in the blink of an eye.

Morgan was so protective of the women in his family. He was a throwback to another era, Kathy thought, as she turned off the engine and opened her car door. At the same time, he respected women’s strengths and abilities. He always paired up a man and a woman on Perseus missions, teams he sent around the world to
help people in distress. His pledge was to help others out of hell. Morgan had been put there himself, the victim of an underhanded plot deep within the CIA decades ago. He’d sworn, once he cleared his name, that he’d never let it happen to someone else. And so Perseus was born.

The breeze was soft and pine scented. Kathy breathed in deeply, to steady nerves jangled by the flush of adrenaline pumping through her bloodstream. Mounting the stairs slowly, she saw that the main door was open, the screen door in place. As she neared the entrance, she heard the pleasant strains of classical music. Beethoven. Her mother loved the classics, and as a result, Kathy did, too. Instead of rock, she loved Wagner, Bach and the rest of the classical composers.

Kathy opened the screen door and stepped inside. Running her fingers through her blond, slightly curly hair, she looked across the carpeted foyer. Nothing had changed since her last visit, a year ago. She usually spent her thirty-day leaves at home.

A lush, leafy philodendron hung in the golden-toned cedar foyer. Her mother had living greenery in every nook and cranny of the house. Kathy smiled fondly. If Laura Trayhern could drag the forest inside her home and make it grow, she’d do it.

Because it was mid-June, her mother was probably out back, doing her daily weeding in the huge vegetable garden, which was fenced in to keep the deer at bay. For Laura, weeding was like a meditation. Kathy hated weeding, but understood her mom’s love of it.
Better her than me,
she thought with a smile.

She felt a new awareness as she ambled through the spacious, airy house. The place was dazzling, with many windows looking out into the forest, and she absorbed its warmth and beauty deeply into her heart. This was the last time she would walk these rooms and halls. The realization cut like a knife.

Anyone who toured her home would notice how her mother loved light and hated darkness. Funny, so did Kathy. Smiling again, she checked the large kitchen. Nope, no one there, although she did see a pot on the stove. She went over to it and, lifting the lid, inhaled the familiar fragrance of her mom’s tomato-based gazpacho soup. It smelled delicious, the fresh herbs obvious. After settling the lid back on the pot, Kathy went through the back door that led to the yard and the large, rectangular garden.

Yep, there she was. Kathy stood quietly on the steps. Dressed in a light pink blouse and dark red shorts, her mom was weeding the rows of carrots. She wore a worn, floppy straw hat with a wide brim that protected her face, neck and shoulders from the sun. Warmth—soft and haunting—flowed through Kathy.

She hadn’t seen her mother in nearly a year. Laura was now in her middle forties and yet looked so much younger—despite having endured so much. Kathy thought of her being repeatedly raped, and her gut twisted into knots of rage. Laura was short, five foot five compared to her own five foot eleven inches.

Laura had her back turned and, absorbed in her activities, didn’t see her daughter standing there watching her. Kathy recalled her father telling her that when he’d
met Laura on one fateful day at the Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C., at first glance she’d reminded him of a swan—so graceful and beautiful.

Kathy held out her arm and realized that she was not small-boned like her mother, but more like her dad. While Laura had a model’s body, Kathy was more statuesque and curvy. She was glad she shared her mother’s sun-streaked hair, with some strands golden, others wheat colored and still others a dark caramel.

Because she was in the Marine Corps and flew the SH-60 Seahawk helicopter, she was encouraged to have short hair. Instead, she wrapped her shoulder-length locks up in a twist beneath her helmet. Some things she wouldn’t give up—such as her femininity or her long hair. Regulations said to keep it off her collar, and she did that. But that was all.