Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming\A Soldier's Redemption\Danger in the Desert\Strangers When We Meet\Grayson's Surrender\Taking Cover by Rachel Lee & Catherine Mann & Merline Lovelace

Author:Rachel Lee & Catherine Mann & Merline Lovelace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Lara flatly refused to remain at the Double H a second day. Sam tried to convince her otherwise, but she held firm. Grumbling, he brought his pickup around to the front of the house shortly after breakfast. She wedged into the front seat between him and his cousin for the ride into Douglas, where Dodge had arranged another rental.

Lara said goodbye to Sam with the wind swirling dried cottonwood leaves around her legs and the sky an ominous gray. The sun had disappeared behind dark clouds that now piled one on top of another. Dodge lifted his face and scanned the horizon.

To her disgust, Lara felt her stomach kick at the sight of him testing the weight of the air against his tanned, weathered skin. He wore the clothes he’d changed into after the accident yesterday. Jeans, denim shirt, down vest, the well-creased black cowboy hat parodied in so many films of the American West. On him, the clothes looked right.

As right as his military uniform.

Lara didn’t need the reminder of who he was—who she was—but it hit hard anyway. So hard that she nodded grimly when he said they’d better get going.

“Sky’s going to open up,” he warned. “Feels more like rain than snow, but you never know this time of year.”

* * *

The deluge hit only a few miles south of Douglas. Lara couldn’t but be thankful for the diversion. It forced Dodge to keep his attention on the road, leaving her to spend the rest of the trip listening to rain drum against the pickup’s roof and preparing for what she would face when she returned to the base. It would not be pleasant.

She would have to report the accident yesterday to Aleksei Bugarin. She needed to report as well the rasping voice she’d heard—and the agonizing memories it had evoked.

She dreaded having to speak of Yuri and the night of the fire with Bugarin, though. The FSB officer was a pig. There was no other word for him. He gobbled his food like a swine at the slops, swilled vodka until he was blind most nights and had more than once suggested they could make their stay in the United States far more enjoyable by sharing a bed.

Yet Lara had to tell him. She couldn’t jeopardize her mission, couldn’t risk letting the memories of that awful night cloud her judgment. What she did here was too vital to her country’s future. After a decade of slashed budgets, fractured commands and black marketeering of everything from boots to antimissile defense systems, the military was a hollow shell, barely able to provide an adequate shield for the motherland.

That was just one of the reasons Lara believed so passionately in the START treaty. The only way to ensure Russia’s ability to protect itself against the United States—the one nation on earth that had demonstrated its willingness to loose the devastation of atomic weapons—was to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal. If that meant reducing Russia’s arsenal at the same time, so be it.

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