LITMIR.BIZ

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were still there, but after nearly a week they were almost healed. Guess you deserved this after all.

      He didn’t hold it against her. Sure, he’d been trying to rescue her, but she couldn’t have known it at the time. She’d fought him like a wildcat, and he respected her for it. Although they looked nothing alike, Keira somehow reminded him of his feisty best friend growing up. Mandy would have done exactly the same thing under the circumstances, he thought with a mixture of admiration and amusement.

      Without realizing it, his hand went to the scar on his left shoulder. Beneath his shirt he could feel the raised edges of the healed bullet wound where Mandy had shot him six years ago because she’d thought he was about to kill the man she loved. Mandy hadn’t known the truth then any more than Keira had the other night.

      Keira. He’d blown his assignment to hell and gone for her, but he couldn’t have done anything differently. Not and still call himself a man. He couldn’t have left an innocent woman there in that isolated shack in the mountains west of Denver with the incipient terrorist gang members he was meeting with in his undercover persona as an illegal arms dealer. They would have raped her at the very least, and probably would have killed her afterward—they wouldn’t want to leave a witness behind.

      He remembered his first sight of her last Friday night when the three men had half dragged, half carried her into the shack where he’d been negotiating with two other gang members. She’d been fighting her captors every step of the way, refusing to surrender to them despite the terror any woman would have felt in that situation, struggling against ravaging hands and lewd suggestions, unwilling to give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry or beg for mercy she had to have known was nonexistent.

      His desperate plan had been born in an instant. He’d had leverage because they wanted something from him—Stinger man-portable surface-to-air missiles, Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and magazines, and other sundry weapons of destruction. And he’d used that leverage to claim “first rights” to Keira, using the coarse language they’d expected in that situation. Then he’d triumphantly claimed his “prize” and dragged her into the other room, and...

      Well, that part was in his report, anyway.

      He threw the papers on his desk, momentarily disgusted, and swiveled around to stare at the picture on his wall—a large, blown-up reproduction of his rustic cabin and the surrounding woods in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. He wondered why he’d ever left it and the relatively easy job as sheriff back then.

      He sighed. He knew why he’d left. Just as he knew why he’d taken this job. But sometimes it didn’t seem worth it.

      He’d been unofficially reprimanded for compromising his assignment—no way would they have dared to make it an official reprimand under the circumstances, special rule seven notwithstanding—although what his immediate supervisor and his partner thought he could have done other than what he had done was a mystery to him.

      He’d managed to electronically send the “abort mission” signal to his partner, waiting with a backup team a mile away, without Keira seeing him. He hadn’t wanted her to know she’d interrupted a covert operation, hadn’t wanted her to have any suspicions of what he was or why he was there. But he’d had a lot of explaining to do later that night about why the op had to be aborted.

      He was just thankful he’d been at the right place at the right time. Thankful they’d both escaped and he’d seen her safely back to her car and on the road home. Thankful he hadn’t had to kill anyone in the process—the red tape on that would have included a mandatory desk assignment while the incident was thoroughly investigated. Not that he had any doubts he would have been cleared. But it would have been a time-consuming hassle, and he hated being chained to a desk.

      Besides, he’d only ever taken one life, and he wasn’t in any hurry to repeat that experience unless he had no other option. Now if only he could get the feel of Keira’s taut, unyielding body beneath his out of his mind...

      The phone on his desk shrilled. He swiveled around and picked it up automatically. “Walker,” he said crisply. He relaxed back in his chair. “Hey, Callahan,” he said, “I was just thinking about you.” He listened to the voice on the other end of the line for a second, then added, “Well, not you, exactly. I was thinking about the time your wife shot me.”

      “No more than you deserved,” Ryan Callahan responded promptly. “At least from her perspective.”

      “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cody replied. “Tell that to the marines.”

      That was something he and Callahan had in common—they’d both served in the U.S. Marine Corps, but at different times, since Callahan was quite a bit older. Cody thought for a second. If he was thirty-seven, that meant Callahan had to be forty-five now, close to forty-six. We’re none of us getting any younger.

      They’d also both worked the same undercover operation six years ago, bringing down the New World Militia together when Cody had been the sheriff of Black Rock, Wyoming, a position Callahan now held.

      They had something else in common, too—they’d both been in love with Mandy Edwards. Mandy Edwards Callahan, Cody corrected himself with a wry smile. He wasn’t in love with Mandy anymore. Well, not much, anyway. There would always be a small corner of his heart devoted to her, but once Callahan had come back into her life, Cody had known there was no chance for him. He’d left Black Rock and had joined the Drug Enforcement Administration after he recovered from the gunshot that had almost killed him.

      But his work in the DEA hadn’t satisfied him somehow. He’d been restless and had needed something more, so he’d been ripe for change when he’d been approached by Nick D’Arcy to join a newly created ultrasecret agency not quite two years later. His new job was more demanding, both mentally and physically, and more rewarding, too. And it had allowed him to forget about losing Mandy to Ryan Callahan.

      “So what’s up?” he asked.

      There was just the slightest hesitation on the other end. “Something we both thought was dead and buried is raising its ugly head again.”

      “What?” Cody sat up straight in his chair and gripped the phone a little tighter. He knew instantly what Callahan was referring to. “The New World Militia?”

      “Got it in one.”

      “Don’t B.S. me,” he said roughly, doing a rapid mental review of the facts as he knew them. “Pennington’s dead,” he said, referring to David Pennington, the founder of the New World Militia. Silently he added, We both killed him, though it wasn’t something he wanted to brag about or mention over the phone. “And the militia’s other high-ranking officers are all serving long prison terms. How—”

      Callahan cut him off. “Don’t ask me how I know, not over an unsecured phone line.” He let that sink in before adding, “Just trust me on this, okay?”

      Cody thought about it for all of half a minute. Callahan had once trusted him with his life six years ago, even though he’d known how Cody felt about Mandy, had known other things, too. Despite that, Callahan had saved Cody’s life after Mandy shot him—wasting precious seconds to apply a makeshift pressure bandage to the wound, even though both men had known Mandy was out there somewhere, in danger from Pennington. If he hadn’t done that, Cody wouldn’t be alive today.

      “Okay,” Cody said, but he knew that one word was enough—Callahan got the message. “We need to talk.”

      “Not over the phone.”

      “Where, then?”

      “Can you come to Black Rock? I’d come to Denver, but...”

      He didn’t have to finish. Cody knew Callahan would never leave Mandy and their three children, not if danger threatened them. And if the New World Militia really had been resurrected, Callahan, and anyone close to him, could be in grave danger.

      You, too, he thought for a second, before brushing it aside as immaterial. He’d been undercover himself

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