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By the time he was dressed, Cisco wasn’t the only one sweating. She felt like she had just roped a steer singlehandedly in the dark.
“Do you want to tell me again how you managed to drive all the way here from Salt Lake City?” she asked as he took an unsteady step toward the door.
“Wasn’t that hard. Took I-15 to Idaho Falls and then turned right.”
She glared at him, even as she leaned in closer to support most of his weight. “I’m glad you find this amusing. I don’t. What if you had passed out? You could have driven off the road and killed both you and that darling little girl.”
He made a face she assumed was supposed to look repentant. “Sorry, Easton. Shouldn’t have come home. Not your problem.”
He had made it her problem. As she contemplated the logistics of loading him to the rental car—better than her pickup, so she could put the carseat in the back, she had realized—she thought about how simple her life had seemed this morning when all she had to worry about were falling beef prices, rising feed costs, taking her cow-calf pairs up in the mountains, the creek near one of the haysheds that was about to overflow its banks and the capricious eastern Idaho weather.
Chapter Three
“A bar fight? That’s really what you’re going with here, Cisco?” Maggiee Dalton pulled the thermometer away and shook her head at the numbers there.
He could only imagine. He was on fire, burning up from the inside out. Another half hour of this and all that would be left of him on the exam room table at the Pine Gulch Medical Clinic would be a little pile of charred ashes.
He couldn’t remember when he had ever felt so lousy.
Okay, maybe a few times came to mind if he jostled his recall. There had been that gunshot wound in Honduras when a stupid, spooked sixteen-year-old sentry had forgotten the password to the rebel camp he’d been infiltrating at the time and had mistaken Cisco for a hostile combatant. Okay he had been a hostile combatant, true enough, but the kid had no way of knowing that when he fired on him with—unfortunately for Cisco—better aim than his normal efforts.
And there was the time he had enjoyed a few delightful hours of torture from a particularly zealous arms dealer/terrorism financier in Panama after Cisco’s cover had been blown, before his support team could stage a rescue.
This was right up there among his least enjoyable moments. He was so damn tired, he just wanted to tell Maggiee to go away so he could curl up on the floor and sleep for a couple of weeks.
He couldn’t seem to shake this woozy, out-of-body feeling, the weird sense of disconnect.
“Yeah,” he grunted, after a too-long pause while he tried to collect his disjointed thoughts, for what they were worth. “Little dump outside Barranquilla. Drunk thought I was making eyes at his señorita.”
“Were you?”
He might have been, if there indeed had been a bar and a drunk with a knife instead of a brutal mid-level drug dealer with more vicious machismo than brains.
“Don’t remember,” he lied. “I’m sure she couldn’t have been as pretty as you.”
Maggiee rolled her eyes and yanked the blood pressure cuff tight enough that he winced.
Despite her current overzealous efforts to check his vital stats, he liked Maggiee. Always had. She’d been a couple years older than him, but he had known her a little from school, back when she had been plain Magdalena Cruz. Pine Gulch was a small town after all, and her family’s ranch had been on the same bus route as theirs.
He had been sorry to hear what happened to her in Afghanistan, especially when she had only been trying to provide medical care. Funny thing about that. He had been going through a rough patch of his own and had been on the brink of walking away from his complicated web of lies when Jo had told him Maggiee had been grievously injured in a terrorist explosion while she’d been deployed.
The news had shot new determination through him like pure-grade heroin gushing through his veins and he’d stuck it out a little longer.
Seemed a lifetime ago. She seemed to be getting around pretty well on a prosthetic leg, he was happy to see.
Or he would have been happy if he could manage to think through the pain and the slick nausea curling through his gut.
“You can try to sell that story of a bar fight if you want, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy it,” she said.
“You’re a hard-hearted woman, Magdalena.”
“True enough. Just ask Jake.” She smiled a little. “And where does the baby come in?”
How did he answer that? Guilt twisted even more viciously than the damn knife wound. His fault. Soqui was dead because of him, that sweet little girl an orphan because he hadn’t been able to protect her mama.
He should never have let Soqui in on the operation. After John’s murder, she had begged him to let her bring down El Cuchillo. He should have just sent her to safety, maybe here in the States with John’s family. Instead, he had used her fierce need to avenge her husband to help his own cover.
And now she was dead.
El Cuchillo’s thugs might have fired the shot that killed her, but Cisco might as well have been the one holding the AK-47.
“Mother was a friend of mine,” he finally muttered to Maggiee.
“Was?”
“She … died last week. But all the paperwork’s in order, I swear. She gave me custody before she died.”
He didn’t want to close his eyes. He could still see that grimy warehouse, bodies everywhere—including Cuchillo’s—Soqui bleeding out on the concrete.
She had known. He didn’t know how, but somehow she had sensed they were walking into an ambush. Maybe she had known it would end like that from the moment she begged him to be part of the operation, months ago.
“I have papers,” she had rasped out, her voice already thready and weak as her life ebbed away. Her hand was icy cold in his and each word seemed to choke her throat.
“Hidden under the … sink. Custody papers. Take my sweet Belle to Johnny’s family. Where she’ll be … safe. Swear to me, Francisco.”
Her voice seemed to echo in his aching head, heavy on the reverb.
How could he refuse? He owed her this much at least. He had failed to protect Soqui, but he would do whatever it took to take care of her little girl.
“All legal, Maggiee,” he said now. Technically, anyway.
Yeah, he had been forced to move both heaven and hell with a couple different embassies to speed up the process and had pissed off about a dozen agencies, but nobody could find any legal loopholes. He was Isabella’s legal guardian until he signed custody over to her family. Whenever that happened, the sooner the better.
“She has an aunt. Boise. She’s coming to take her in a few days.”
Maggiee probed around the six-inch gash just below his rib cage. Though her movements were gentle, he was desperately afraid he was going to pass out.
Big, bad super spy. That was him.
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to clean things up a little before Jake comes in to take a look.”
“S’okay,” he lied.
“Why didn’t you have this looked at in Colombia?”
Because he was too busy getting Belle out of the country before Cuchillo’s psycho baby brother discovered her existence—and before all the people he bribed or threatened changed their minds about letting him leave with her.
“Then I would have missed your tender, loving care, Mag.”
She shook her head, even though she was smiling.
That was him. Always good for a laugh.
“What happens after Jake patches you up? You go back for more bar fights in some seedy cantina somewhere? Maybe next time with someone who has better aim?”
Damned if he knew. He was so tightly tangled in the web of lies he had spun that he didn’t have the first idea how to break free.
El Cuchillo hadn’t killed him, but Cisco was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before someone else would. He didn’t have a death wish. Far from it. But after the last ten years of deep undercover work against narcoterrorism, pragmatism was unavoidable.
He figured he was lucky he’d made it this long.
Maggiee tilted her head to study him. Too damn smart, that Maggiee Cruz Dalton.
“Hear you’ve got a couple cute kids.”
As a distraction ploy, it was pretty transparent but under the circumstances, it was the best he could manage.
“We do. One of each. A girl, Sofia, and a boy, Charlie. They keep us hopping.”
“Sounds good.” Would she mind if he checked out for a while? he wondered. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open.
“Maybe you ought to think about sticking around for a while while you recover from your bar fight. Easton is alone too much in that big old ranch house since Jo died.”
He didn’t need her laying that sort of guilt on him. He managed to pile on enough of his own, thanks.
“She’s not alone all the time. Mimi and Brant spend time with her when they come back, now that Brant’s stateside,” he answered. “So does Quinn and his family.”
He was the proverbial prodigal foster kid. The one Jo and Guff had always worried about the most. He regretted that, though before Jo died, he had finally told her the truth about his life and what he was doing. He knew a few hours’ conversation couldn’t make up for years of worry, but it was the best he could do.
“Family is everything,” Maggiee answered. “I’ve learned the last few years that we have to grab every moment with them.”
He thought of his strange family. Jo and Guff had taken a group of lost, troubled kids without much hope. Juvenile delinquents, orphans, abuse victims. Yet somehow they had managed to form a family.
Easton had always been their heart. Even when she was a blond, pigtailed brat who followed the older boys around. Without conscious thought, he pressed a finger to the E on his compass rose tattoo.
“You’re not going to pass out on me, are you?” Maggiee asked.
“You kidding?” he managed a grin, though it took just about all his remaining energy. “And miss a minute of a pretty nurse fussing over me? What kind of idiot do I look like?”
“Like an idiot who found himself on the wrong end of a sharp stick,” a man’s voice interjected. “And who might just find himself even worse off if he doesn’t stop flirting with my wife.”
He looked toward the sound, then winced at the pain in his head from the abrupt movement. Jake Dalton, Pine Gulch’s only doctor, stood in the doorway, giving him a mock glower.
“Hey, Doc. Long time.”
Jake stepped into the room and scrubbed his hands at the sink. “Yeah, I think the last time was when you toilet-papered my pickup truck once when I came home from college.”
He supposed it was a good thing Jake was a dedicated doctor who wouldn’t let Cisco’s assorted past sins keep him from providing quality medical care.
But then, he didn’t know the half of them.
“He belongs in a hospital, doesn’t he?”
Jake’s blue Dalton eyes narrowed and he pursed his lips. “Let’s just say I’m not admitting him at this time,” he answered carefully.
“That’s not an answer.”
“East, you know I can’t say anything more because of privacy laws. It’s the best I can do. I’m sorry.”
She made a face. As much as she liked Jake Dalton personally, she hated all he represented. Doctors, hospitals, that distinctive smell of antiseptic and illness that lingered, no matter how one tried to wash it away.
Loss.
Seemed like every time she had any dealings with the medical community, she ended up losing someone, starting with her parents’ accident when she was a silly, giddy sixteen-year-old who thought she had total control of her universe.
Her father had died instantly that stormy January night when their car had slid head-on into an oncoming semi.
Her mother had survived the accident—barely—and had been airlifted to the hospital in Idaho Falls. Easton’s aunt and uncle had rushed her there to be at her mother’s side, but Janet Springhill had died on the operating table.
Then had come Guff’s heart attack. She had been the one to find him collapsed on the barn floor, clutching his chest. She had performed CPR while waiting for the paramedics to get there and had been able to get a pulse, but he had died on the way to the hospital in Idaho Falls. Easton, following behind the ambulance, had arrived in time for the grim news in the E.R.
Jo had been treated at the same hospital for the cancer that eventually claimed her life eighteen months ago. Whenever Easton had walked through the doors of that place to take her to chemotherapy or for an appointment with her oncologist, her stomach would churn in a conditioned reflex.
In another hospital room in another city hundreds of miles away, she had endured the most painful hours of her life. She couldn’t even think about that time without her breath catching in her throat.
So much pain and loss.
She knew hospitals also brought forth life. She had been there when Mimi’s sweet little Abby came into the world. And she imagined some hospital in South America had contributed to the birth of the little girl who was currently babbling on her lap.
“He insists he won’t go to a hospital. I agreed to follow his recovery here as long as he’s got someone to keep an eye on him.”
She supposed that meant her. “What sort of care will he need at home?”
“He mostly needs someone who can make sure he takes things easy and doesn’t overdo.”
“That’s a great plan in theory,” she muttered. “I have a feeling it won’t be so easy to implement.”
“Do what you can. Rest is the best thing for him to fight the infection and heal. And I need to know immediately if his fever spikes again.”
“Okay.”
Jake gave her a careful look, his handsome features concerned. She had seen that expression before. One of the things she loved about Pine Gulch’s only doctor was his concern not only for his patient, but also for those charged with their care at home.
“I could give the same advice to you,” he said in that calm, reassuring voice of his. “Don’t overdo, East. I’m sure we could find somebody in town willing to come out and help you with the little one there.”
The suggestion made sense. Heaven knew, she had enough to do at the ranch without throwing in the complication of caring for a needy baby and a recalcitrant patient.
On the other hand, Cisco had come to her for help. Right now he needed her, when he had made a point of not needing anyone for the last decade or so. She wasn’t about to surrender that to someone else.
