In Zach's Arms (Once a Marine, Always a Marine Book 1) Read online

  “Copy that. See you in four hours.”

  The dirt road was pitted and bouncy, throwing them both around in the front seat, but his companion never made a noise. Ten minutes later, he pulled into the mouth of the ravine he’d scouted out the night before. It was wide enough to hide the truck and close enough to hoof it across the border in the dark. There were too many patrols, on both sides, to make it safe to cross while it was light out.

  He parked the truck and turned to the woman lying on her side on the bench seat. He helped her to a sitting position and then ripped off the burlap hood draped over her head.

  Jesse grinned into her shocked face.

  “Jesus, Lily. Who’d you piss off this time?”

  ***

  Liliana Richardson glared into the face of her rescuer. A man she hadn’t seen since she was seventeen years old and practically left at the altar. Okay, that was dramatic, but senior prom was almost as important in a girl’s life.

  Especially in Texas.

  The duct tape over her mouth was the only thing preventing her from having an emotional outburst of epic proportions.

  “Promise you won’t bite me if I take that tape off?”

  A snort was the only noise she could manage. Jesse’s killer smile appeared as he reached up and ripped the tape off so fast that she gasped.

  “Holy mother-frick, did you leave any skin?”

  He had the nerve to glance at the tape. “Well, let’s just say you won’t have to have your upper lip waxed for a while. And my, my, my, such language.”

  “I don’t have my lip waxed, thank-you-very-much. I didn’t cuss and can you please untie me? I lost feeling in my arms several hours ago.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The blood rushed back into her hands causing that painful pins-and-needles sensation as she rubbed her battered wrists. Her ankles were in much the same condition and being thrown over Jesse’s broad shoulders hadn’t been kind on her ribs.

  But none of that mattered as she threw herself at Jesse and tried to squeeze the stuffing right out of him. Whatever feelings she might or might not have for him, he’d saved her life today.

  “Thank God you found me. How did you find me? And please tell me that you shot at least three of them. In very painful places.” She pulled back a fraction, nose wrinkled. “And what is that stench?”

  The laugh rumbled up and vibrated from his body into her as he hugged her back as strong as she’d gripped him. “Good to see that not even being held hostage could depress you.”

  Lily pulled back and grinned. “Hey, I’m absolutely thrilled to not be dead. Or raped. Or raped and dead.”

  “I am too,” he said as he took off the smelly poncho and hat.

  Lily took that moment to look around. More to bring some balance and distance from Jesse, who was even better looking than the last time she’d seen him, especially with his white T-shirt sweat-plastered to every muscle he had. They were in some kind of small canyon and even in the shade the heat was sweltering.

  “Is there a platoon of Marines coming to get us?”

  He shook his head. “You got kidnapped on Mexican soil, sugar. That means you get two retired Marines that like some occasional adventure and hazard pay.”

  “When did you get out?” She really looked at him. His normally wavy blond hair was a little longer than regulation and the stubble on his face showed he hadn’t shaved in several days.

  “I’ve been out a couple of years now. Decided working for myself was better than being shipped all over Hell’s half acre for Uncle Sam.”

  Lily nodded. She’d been pretty nomadic herself for the last couple of years, and she missed the stability of having a home. “How did you find me?”

  His grin faded and the sparkle in his eyes dimmed. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “There’s quite a lot that I haven’t exactly enjoyed in the last twenty-four hours, so I can’t imagine anything you have to say would be worse.”

  “Someone I know was hired to kidnap you, retrieve information you have, and terminate you after.”

  Lily swallowed hard. “Okay, that was worse than I imagined.”

  She could see on Jesse’s face that she was in deep doo-doo with someone, but who that person was, she had no idea. She was exhausted, still running on adrenaline and felt like she had a year’s worth of grime caked on her body, so her brain wasn’t running as efficiently as it normally would.

  “What kind of friend would take a job like that?”

  Jesse shrugged. “Not all the guys I served with adjusted to civilian life. They take jobs of all kinds, all over the world, but word gets around when a weird one hits the wires. Most of the guys do bodyguard work. When your name came up I decided you needed a little help.”

  “Thank God you did.”

  She was about to ask more when Jesse jerked his head around and squinted through the back window. “Hang on, Lil, this is about to get interesting.”

  Dust rose in the distance, headed in their direction. The cloud of brown was large and moving fast. “It’s already been interesting in the most horrible way, so bring it on.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said absently, still turned and watching the road.

  Lily shivered at the endearment, but chose to think it slipped out due to the danger, not because he used to call her that when they were younger.

  “Brace yourself, this is going to be a wild and bumpy ride.” He started up the truck and put it in reverse, but they didn’t move.

  Lily looked for a seat belt of any kind but there wasn’t one, so she braced her hands on the dash and stretched her legs out. “You always did know how to show a lady a good time.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, but last time it was you who stole the car.”

  “Borrowed.” She huffed. “And you were the one that showed me how to hot-wire the thing.”

  “I showed you how to hot-wire my car, not Andy Newton’s brand new Camaro.”

  She snorted. Her mother would cringe in dismay at the noise, but Jesse just laughed in that way he had that made Lily feel like nothing she could ever do would shock or embarrass him. It was why they’d become friends in school.

  “Andy Newton was a turd.”

  “He was Prom King, the star quarterback, and every other cliché that I can think of and he loved that stupid car.”

  “He was a pompous, rich, spoiled brat and deserved it.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  Okay, that hurt. But Jesse was right. She’d been rich and spoiled and used to getting her own way. Looking down at herself now, covered in days of filth, kidnapped and taken to a border town to be tortured and murdered, she didn’t see that spoiled little rich girl any longer.

  And she hadn’t been that girl for a long time.

  Engines whined as the two vehicles got closer to their hiding place. The dust thickened as they approached the mouth of the canyon. It looked wide enough to move in farther, but since Jesse already had the truck in reverse Lily figured it was a dead end up ahead.

  “Is this where we die?” She hadn’t really thought about it until this moment, but she was more scared now, this close to freedom, than she had been tied up in that roach-infested warehouse.

  “Not today.”

  He was solely focused and she didn’t say anything else, not wishing to distract him from saving both their butts. But his confidence made her feel better.

  “This is it,” he said, almost to himself. “Hang on tight.”

  A car passed too quickly to see what the make was or how many people were inside. One second later, a truck whizzed by, with at least one man standing in the bed hanging on to the roll bars with one hand and holding an automatic weapon in the other.

  Jesse’s foot hit the gas spitting debris and rock up the canyon walls as they flew backward out of the ravine and into the desert. He spun the wheel and they were behind the car and the truck as he slammed the gears into drive and hit the gas again.

  “Why are we
following them?” she yelled over the noise.

  “Got to disable them so they can’t follow us across the border.”

  “How are we supposed to do that?”

  “Slide over and take the wheel.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, just reached up under the dashboard and pulled out the biggest handgun she’d ever seen, which was saying a lot since she’d been raised around guns.

  She slid over fast, thigh to thigh with Jesse and took the wheel with both hands. He leaned out the window just as the driver of the truck realized they were being followed. He hit the brakes and the horn at the same time, signaling the car in front.

  Jesse started shooting, and combined with the noise of the squealing tires, the loud rapport of the gun was going to make them both deaf. He’d eased off the gas and the old truck slowed immediately.

  Jesse continued to fire.

  The man in the bed of the truck had a brown jacket on and a bright red bandana covering the lower portion of his face. He swung the big automatic rifle in their direction as Jesse shot out the two back tires of the truck.

  Already in the middle of a hard turn, losing those tires caused the truck to flip, throwing the man in the bed out before he could fire. The vehicle rolled a couple of times and settled in the sand amidst an enormous enveloping cloud of dust.

  “Keep the wheel steady,” Jesse yelled and hit the gas again.

  Lily held on to the wheel as it bucked and bounced and she wasn’t sure how Jesse managed to hit anything as he fired. The car in front of them U-turned and headed toward them in some sick game of chicken, with the passenger hanging out of the window mirroring Jesse.

  She heard more loud pops right before their windshield cracked and spider-webbed. There was a large hole in the glass where she had been sitting in the passenger side.

  “Keep your head down,” Jesse yelled.

  “I can’t keep my head down and drive, idiot,” she yelled back. She thought she heard him chuckle but she couldn’t be sure. Her ears were ringing from all the gun shots.

  Jesse ejected his empty clip, reached into his back pocket and had a new clip in place faster than any gunslinger in those old westerns could have managed. If she wasn’t terrified of being shot or dying in a head-on collision, she would have told him how impressed she was.

  “Keep straight at them, Lil. Don’t flinch.”

  “We’re so going to die.” But she kept the wheel steady. He’d told her one time that the hardest part of playing chicken was knowing when to flinch.

  “We got this.”

  Then he started firing again, just as bullets were whizzing back at them. The hard ping of the bullets ripping into the truck had her sliding down in the seat until only the top of her head and eyes were visible over the dashboard.

  The radiator of the car took several of Jesse’s shots before there was a loud crack and jets of steam hissed out. He concentrated on their windshield, peppering shots into the glass. The car jerked hard to the right and Lily kept the wheel straight as they roared past.

  “Keep down and slide back over,” Jesse said. She moved quickly as he took control of the wheel and stowed his gun under the dash again. Throwing his right arm around her shoulders, he squeezed tight. “You did great.”

  “Can they still follow us?”

  “Nope. Unless they want to do it on foot.”

  Lily sighed, all the pent-up tension draining out of her body as her hands began to shake and tears she hadn’t realized were there streaked down her face. “I hate crying.”

  “It’s the adrenaline. That’s all. You did better than some of the men in my unit over in Baghdad. A real trooper.” He pulled her closer, plastering her body up against his.

  “That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Nah, remember that time you lost the bet with me and had to streak through the boys’ locker room in nothing but your panties? That was way worse.”

  The memory of her in nothing but her undies and bra running through the locker room, singing “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett at the top of her lungs, made her laugh and hiccup through the tears.

  “True. That was worse than this.” That time she had burst into hysterical laughter once she was safe. Well, until her mother had heard about it. Then she’d been grounded and on house arrest for an entire month.

  “That’s my girl.”

  With Jesse, Lily was free to be herself. And because of Jesse, she was free. And as soon as she could, she was going to have to get away from him. Because she needed to finish what she started. She was on a mission to do the right thing and prove something to herself in the process. And Jesse was more than a complication.

  He was a game changer.

  Purchase Lily’s Outlaw.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Excerpt from Lily's Outlaw