Power: Special Tactical Units Division (In Wilde Country Book 3) (21 page)

Travis’s smile faded. “Confronting our four-star rat of a father.”

“Yes. Except, on second thought, I don’t think I ever want to see him again.” Her hands fisted. “He played God. He always did. He treated us all as if—as if we were pieces on a chessboard.”

Travis looped his arm around Alessandra’s shoulders and began walking her along the patio, towards the rear door of the mansion.

“Let me make a couple of calls. I bet I can locate your lieutenant in just a couple of hours.”

Her lieutenant. Alessandra felt her heart swell.

“You go upstairs and pack.” Travis paused. “And leave dealing with the general to me. Okay?”

They’d reached the door. Alessandra turned towards her brother, rose on her toes and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“I’m proud to be a Wilde,” she said softly.

Travis felt a burn in his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said gruffly, as he embraced Alessandra. “And we’re proud you are.” He stood back. “Now, go on. Dump whatever you’ll need in a suitcase. With any luck at all, I’ll have you at the airport well before dawn.”

* * *

He was right.

Things moved fast when you were a Wilde.

Travis gathered the brothers together in one of the guest wing suites. Told them what had happened. There was a lot of ugly language, a lot of one brother holding the other brother back, and then they all calmed down and got to work.

Travis phoned Chay.

It took a while to track him down, but once he did, Chay gave him the information he needed. Travis had gone home. He told him the name of the town in the Dakotas where he and Tanner had grown up and the name of the ranch Tanner’s old man had owned.

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to reach him,” Chay had added. “I’ve tried calling a couple of times, but he’s not answering.”

The brothers checked with their pilots.

Luca’s pilot and plane were the closest. They were, in fact, at the Dallas airport, ready to go because he and his wife, Cheyenne, had intended to fly out in the morning.

“You’re flying out tonight instead,” Luca told the pilot. “With my sister on board. You’re taking her to the airport at Sioux Falls, South Dakota.”

Matteo arranged for a rental car for Alessandra, but only after what initially looked like an endless battle over her insistence on making the trip alone and his insistence that he would not permit it.

The word
permit
proved to be a mistake.

Angry words. Angry looks. Until Jacob stepped between brother and sister and said, albeit reluctantly, that it was Alessandra’s choice to go alone and they would all have to honor it.

Hugs. Kisses. Tears. And promises she would phone and keep them posted throughout her journey.

Caleb programmed the route she’d drive after landing in Sioux Falls into his iPhone.

She promised she’d be fine. And, yes, she’d keep in touch once the plane touched down.

And she told them she loved them all.

The Wilde sisters got wind of Something Happening and crowded into the suite just as things were all coming together.

Travis promised to tell them the entire story. Right then, there was only time to say it involved the lieutenant who’d rescued Alessandra.

Throughout it all, nobody told the general anything.

They didn’t have to. He was too busy playing the genial host to have noticed his children were among the missing.

Finally, Travis drove Alessandra to the airport.

In fact, they all did.

Brothers. Sisters. It was a multivehicle procession. And they all waited on the tarmac until Luca’s plane was a pinpoint of light against the black Texas sky.

Then, they turned to each other.

It was time to go back to El Sueño and tell the man who’d sired them that nothing had changed.

He was the same no-good SOB he’d always been, and he was not welcome in their lives.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The flight was
short.

“Two hours and a few minutes,” Luca had said. “You can sleep through it.”

That sounded like a fine idea.

Alessandra was exhausted. The past few weeks had taken their toll. Tonight’s awful revelations had added to it.

Sleep, even a couple of hours worth, seemed an excellent plan.

Luca’s plane was luxurious. Leather reclining chairs. Cold drinks. Hot coffee. Sandwiches and chocolates. A pleasant attendant who had met Alessandra many times before.

Still, she couldn’t relax.

Questions whirled through her head.

How badly had Tanner been injured? How was he dealing with not being a STUD anymore? Would he want to see her? According to Chay Olivieri, he did, but maybe he’d only wanted to make sure she’d returned home safe.

That had been his job, after all. Getting her home safe.

Mostly, though, she kept wondering what she’d say to him.

I sent you a note, but my father made sure it never reached you.

My father told me you’d never tried to contact me.

Easy stuff.

But what about the difficult stuff? Would she be able to keep from flinging herself at him and telling him she loved him?

She’d offered him her heart the last couple of days they’d been together and he’d rejected it. No, she’d never come right out and said she loved him, but every touch, every kiss had surely told him how she felt.

And the brutal thing he’d said to her at the end...

She’d already figured out that it might have been deliberate, to get her on the helicopter and out of harm’s way, but what if she was wrong? What if he’d spoken the awful truth? What if she hadn’t meant to him what he’d meant to her?

What he would always mean to her.

After endlessly going over every possible scenario, she fell into restless sleep, but she woke abruptly less than an hour later.

She looked out the window.

It was dawn. And they were flying over what seemed like a sea of dark green interspersed with occasional dots of blue.

“That’s South Dakota,” the attendant said, leaning over to peer through the window with her. The woman smiled. “We don’t usually take this approach to the airport. You’re getting an extra-special tour. We had to detour a bit to avoid some weather.”

Alessandra nodded. The land below seemed vast and beautiful. Tanner was someplace down there.

Tanner…

“Breakfast?” the attendant asked.

“No. No, thank you. Just coffee, please.”

She went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, washed her face, tried to tame her short curls with her hands. When she came out, her coffee was waiting. She drank it quickly and then she sat back and told herself to be calm.

Whatever was going to happen, whatever Tanner would say on seeing her, would happen soon.

The car waiting for her was a four-wheel-drive SUV. The kid who delivered it planeside wished her a sleepy good morning even as the sun rose higher in the early morning sky.

He tossed her the keys.

Alessandra reached into her carryall, took out the iPhone Caleb had given her, and bells went off.

The carryall was full of smartphones.

She did a quick count. Every member of the Wilde clan seemed to have tucked a phone inside it.

It made her laugh. It was the first time she’d laughed in what felt like forever.

Because Caleb’s phone was the one in her hand, it was the one she answered. Yes, she was fine. Yes, the weather was clear. Yes, the SUV had been waiting for her. Yes, she would keep in touch.

The questions kept coming. There was only one way to stop them. She hated telling the small lie, but if she kept talking, she’d never do what she’d come here to do, and finding Tanner was all that mattered.

“Caleb? Caleb, you’re breaking up…”

One by one, she shut off all the phones, even Caleb’s. The SUV had its own GPS and she decided to rely on it and on the old-fashioned paper map she’d found in the console.

Alessandra put the SUV in gear and drove off.

* * *

The Flying Eagle ranch, Tanner’s father’s ranch, had consisted of fifty acres of woods and prairie dotted with a couple of small lakes and streams.

Tanner hadn’t thought much about the place when he was growing up except to know that he wanted to get out and leave it behind.

Over the years, his feelings had changed.

He’d realized it hadn’t been the ranch he’d wanted to escape. It had been his life.

The land was rugged and beautiful. After he joined the SEALs and after he became a STUD, he’d returned to it whenever he could.

Spending time on the land, in the rugged forests and peaceful prairie, had become a kind of spiritual renewal.

And he’d made the ranch his.

He’d put sweat equity into the house and outbuildings, and brought them back from the disasters they’d been under his father’s stewardship. Then he’d started adding acreage. For as long as he could remember, an unbroken stretch of several hundred acres to the north had been for sale.

Gradually, he’d bought it up.

He’d figured that by the time he’d return to it for good, he’d have what could be a working ranch.

He ‘d even known what he’d do with it. Breed and raise Appaloosas. As a kid, he’d worked odd jobs for an old guy who raised them and he’d discovered that he not only liked horses, he was good with them.

All that had been tucked away for the future.

What he hadn’t expected was that the future would suddenly turn into now.

He had been home, if that’s what this was, for almost two weeks. The first few days, he’d kept busy. Laid in groceries. Bought a horse. Not an Appaloosa—the old guy who’d kept them was long gone, but he found a good Quarter Horse and he was pleased with it. He’d put hours into tuning up the old Silverado he’d bought a couple of years back, and he chopped wood for the big living room fireplace in advance of what would soon be winter.

That hadn’t been easy.

He still limped. He still ached. But using a chain saw and swinging an ax made him feel as if he had a useful place in the world, and helped wipe away the memory of the time he’d spent trapped in a hospital bed.

The problem was that nothing would wipe away the memory of the time he’d spent with Alessandra.

He did his damnedest to put it all in perspective.

A handful of days with a beautiful woman. The ever-present element of danger. Add in great sex and any man might kid himself into thinking it meant more than it really had.

That was what he told himself over and over, but it didn’t take away the sleepless nights or speed the passage of what felt like endless time, and maybe that would have been okay except there were moments he felt the walls closing in, which he knew was the way his mother had felt, along with the need for some kind of temporary oblivion, which he knew was what had led his father to booze.

Three days ago, with the whisper of fall in the air, he’d rolled out of bed, saddled his horse and ridden into the hills, never stopping until he’d reached the highest point of elevation on his land. It was a particularly beautiful spot, a grassy knoll surrounded by tall stands of ponderosa pine and Black Hills spruce, with a seemingly limitless endless view of prairie below.

A shadow had fallen over him. He’d looked up to see a golden eagle circling low on a current of wind. The magnificent bird had seemed almost motionless. Then it had flapped its wings and flown off, leaving behind a long tail feather that drifted slowly to earth.

Tanner had caught the feather in his hand.

He hadn’t touched an eagle feather in decades. Not since the Sun Dance. Eagles and their feathers were sacred to the dance.

He’d looked at the feather. Touched it with his fingertips.

And suddenly he’d known what he had to do.

He’d unsaddled the horse. The animal would do fine. There was plenty of grass to graze and a stream running with cold, sweet water a few hundred yards away.

Then he’d collected small rocks and stones, arranged them in a circle. He’d stripped off his clothes, left them in a neat pile, tucked the feather into his hair and stepped into the circle. Sitting down cross-legged hadn’t been easy. It had hurt, but he’d known it was vital to let himself experience the pain.

He’d sat very still, hearing the wind in the trees, feeling the sun on his naked shoulders. After a while, he’d closed his eyes and laid his hands, palms up, on his thighs.

Morning had given way to afternoon, afternoon to night. Owls hooted. Coyotes howled. The horse whinnied softly and came to stand quietly beside its master, just outside the stone circle.

Morning came again, and afternoon, and night.

On the third morning, just at dawn, Tanner stirred.

He felt—there was no other word to describe it—the presence of something passing high overhead. He looked up. It was not an eagle this time.

It was a plane.

Hungry, thirsty, exhausted, his thoughts were not as precise as they would otherwise have been, but he knew seeing a plane here was unusual.

This wasn’t the normal route to or from the airport.

Years ago, his vision quest had brought him a wolf. Surely planes didn’t qualify as spiritual messages.

Still, something inside him stirred.

He rose to his feet. His leg felt cramped. His balance was a little shaky. But he felt better. Cleansed. Alive.

And angry.

At himself. At the man he’d almost let himself become.

He dressed quickly, whistled for his horse, stroked its neck and muzzle when it trotted to his side. He saddled the animal, mounted it, touched his heels lightly to its flanks and started for home.

What had he been thinking, running away as he had? Because he had run. From the hospital. From the life he’d always known, the man he’d always been…

The woman he would always love.

She hadn’t responded to his phone calls or to his note. So what? There were a dozen reasons that could explain why she hadn’t. How come he hadn’t confronted her? Demanded that she look him in the eye and give him those reasons?

And that letter from the general.

My daughter joins me in offering you our deepest gratitude…

Alessandra had offered him much more than that. Her sense of humor. Her intellect. Her courage. Her body. And, unless he was completely crazy, her love.

How come he hadn’t confronted her about that, too?

Superman, she’d called him, but his behavior since the accident qualified him more as Mighty Mouse.

Tanner tapped his heels harder against the horse’s sides. He leaned over its neck, clucked to it, urged it into a trot, then a canter, then a gallop.

Maybe planes weren’t omens, but they sure as hell were reminders.

A plane had brought him here. Now another would take him to New York. To the woman he loved.

The woman who loved him.

He was sure of it.

* * *

It had taken a little luck and a lot of backtracking to find Tanner’s ranch.

The GPS wasn’t the problem. Neither was the paper map. It was the terrain that was the problem, dirt roads heading off in a dozen different directions, roads without names or with names that had nothing to do with the annoying voice of the GPS.

Alessandra had listened to it say
Recalculating
enough times to make her start to talk back to it, and not politely.

Finally, when she figured she had to be getting close, she stopped at a gas station, marched inside and asked the guy behind the counter if he knew where she could find the Flying Eagle ranch. He scratched his grizzled jaw, hitched up his sagging pants…

She felt as if she’d wandered onto a movie set.

“You’re almost there,” he said, and he stepped outside with her, pointed a gnarled finger north, then west, then north again, told her to look for a low butte, a thicket of quaking aspens, a small pond and right after that, a right-hand turnoff into the woods.

“Go three, four miles, you’re there.”

Alessandra prided herself on speaking fluent, almost completely accent-free American English, but quaking aspens and buttes were not in her vocabulary. This was, she decided, not the time to feel foolish about asking for explanations.

The old man sighed. A butte was a flat-topped hill. Quaking aspens were tall, straight, white-barked trees whose leaves seemed to dance in the slightest breeze.

Alessandra thanked him, let him pump some gas into the SUV, and got back behind the wheel.

Half an hour and two wrong turns later, she saw a wooden sign that bore the name Flying Eagle Ranch. It stood beside a narrow, unpaved road that led into a stand of enormous pines.

She put the SUV in neutral, told her heart not to race, and turned onto the road.

It arrowed through the pines for what seemed a long time, but eventually she saw it.

A house.

Several outbuildings.

A corral.

Flying Eagle Ranch.

Chay had given Travis a description and he’d passed it on to her. A small house, Chay had said, built of logs. A wide porch. Outbuildings at a short distance behind the house. And there’d probably be an old black Silverado truck parked out front.

Everything matched the description, but there wasn’t a truck in sight.

Was it in one of the outbuildings? Or wasn’t it here?

She stepped from the SUV, reached back inside for the light denim jacket she’d carried on the plane. It was cool here; a breeze blew lightly through the trees.

Alessandra slipped on the jacket.

How still things were.

Even the rainforest, where they’d been miles from civilization, had not been quiet. Monkeys had screamed from the trees. So had bright-plumaged birds. Small creatures had scuttled through the bushes.

Here, the silence was complete.

She drew herself up. She was procrastinating, an excellent English word, and she had not come all this distance to procrastinate.

“No more dawdling, Alessandra,” she said aloud. “Just march up to the porch, knock on that door, and tell Tanner what happened. What really happened.”

Except…except, what if she told him all about the general’s lies, his interference, and Tanner said he was glad she’d told him the truth, but it didn’t change anything, that what they’d had together had only been temporary, that he’d just been doing his job…