We stood there, looking across the kitchen island at one another. Tears brimmed her eyes, threatening to spill over.

“Just start from the beginning,” I said as gently as I could.

She nodded and took a sip off her gin and tonic. Ashley took a deep breath. Then she began, taking me through the whole thing. I stopped, asked for clarification at certain points as she told me the whole story, from the falling out with her father after he'd married his new wife, how they hadn't spoken since. All the way to her credit cards being cut off, her father being completely unreachable and maybe on the run for some reason, and his assistant Barbara lying to her over the phone about what was going on.

“And now,” she said, tears from her red-rimmed eyes drying on her cheeks, “I have like just a few hundred dollars to my name, all my credit cards are shut off, and someone broke in here. That check I gave your boss? That's not going to clear. I just know it won't.”

“You’re right,” I mumbled as I leaned forward and braced myself on my elbows. “A drink does sound good after all that.”

She cracked a little bit of a smile, and pushed her gin and tonic forward across the granite countertop with one finger.

I took it, downed the last half, and slid it back to her, saying, “Anything else?”

She started shaking her head, but stopped. “One other thing. I want to apologize for not telling you what I suspected was going on.”

I waved it off. “That was just a suspicion, maybe a false lead. While what you just found out ain’t exactly concrete, it’s closer to actual information. Now, all that, though, it’s behind us. Sun is at our back, it’s a new day, and we’re headed west. Right?

She nodded. “Right.”

I slapped my hands down flat on the counter. “Your father is out of touch, his assistant is gone from the office, your cards are cut, you ain’t got a way to get into the alarm system, and there’s someone looking for something in this place.”

“Can we do something like hack the alarm system?”

I shrugged. “Probably. But would it tell us anything new?”

Ashley frowned.

“At a glance, I’m gonna say no,” I said, answering my own question. “What I do need to do, though, is talk to my boss about all this. Peter needs to know what’s going on so he can make a better decision about the whole thing.”

“What do you think he’ll say?”

I took a moment to think about it. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I didn’t want to give her false hope either. My pack leader could be unpredictable at times, disappearing and dropping off the face of the earth for days at a time. But he’d always seemed to come through in the clutch.

“I think,” I carefully began, “Peter’s as frosty as his last name, but he’s a good man. One of the best men I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen him pull an investigation like this because someone couldn’t pay or because it suddenly got too dangerous for us. We’re all big boys and we can handle ourselves just fine.”

She reached across the table and placed her hand on top of mine. Her skin was warm, her palms soft. “Thank you, Frank.”

Without giving it a second thought, I clutched her hand in return, gave a little squeeze, and rubbed my thumb across the back as I looked into her eyes. “It’s gonna be okay, Ashley. Things are scary, but I’ll make sure you make it out of this okay, or I’ll go down myself trying. Hear me?”

I guess I nudged her over the edge, because a single fat tear trickled down her cheek.

“So, you take another second to collect yourself,” I continued, “and I’m gonna step out back on the deck and call Peter right now. Got it?”

She nodded.

I squeezed her hand again. Something about holding her hand like that just seemed…right, the way her skin felt beneath mine, the way her eyes looked as she gazed right back at me and smiled a little despite the situation, her eyes slightly dilated. “Thank you,” she said again, this time her words nearly a whisper.

It was like a flip switched in my head, or somewhere else, and I realized how much she’d changed. She didn’t seem like the spoiled little rich bitch I’d met this morning. She seemed like any other human out there, taken from their comfort zone, dropped into the deep end of the pool and told to sink or swim. I reluctantly released her hand and left her in the kitchen.

I headed out onto the back patio, sniffed the air, and licked my lips as the fresh mountain air hit them.

My heart was still galloping from just touching her hand. What the fuck had just happened in there?

I had no damn clue.

But, like any good soldier, I put my head down and focused on the foxhole I was in. All your emotions getting in the way, all the confusion—none of that matters. All that matters is the mission, the purpose. And, right now, the mission I'd been given was to make sure Ashley was safe, not figuring out what was going down with her father. Far as I was concerned, right then, I'd been hired by her and no one else. And keeping her safe was priority number one.

I called Peter on my cell and he picked up on the second ring. I could hear car noises in the background as he spoke, the rush of air as he raced down the highway. “Frank, talk to me.”

“Oh, boss man, we are in a spicy jalapeño dill of a pickle here.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.” I ran him through all the new information. The hardware store, Barbara being out of pocket. The lot of it.

“You’re right,” he agreed. “This is certainly less than ideal.”

“Got a plan yet?”

“Notice any tattoos on your Russian? Identifying markings?”

“Not that I saw. But he was dressed to be as inconspicuous as possible.”

He grunted in acknowledgement. “Alright, first thing is to stick by her side. Mission parameters may have changed. Too much in motion at the moment, but we were hired to investigate a break-in, and now she needs protection in case something spills over and affects her.”

“My thoughts exactly, boss.”

“Glad we’re on the same page. I’ll get back to you on our next move. Want you to sit tight in the meantime, though, and don’t make any extra moves. This is a protection detail now. Got it?”

“Got it. Going to send in the cavalry?”

“Going to do a couple things. I’ll get Lacy to find out about the alarm system first. Second, I’m sending Jake and Richard both after the Russian. Gonna take two to tail him, especially in this small of a town, if your suspicions are true. Put out some feelers to my contacts, see if they know of anything. With Matt out of town already, that spreads us pretty thin.”

I nodded, my eyes tracking up and over the back piece of the property. The wind was blowing in from the northwest still, from the direction we figured the Russian had tracked in on. “So I’m on my own for now?”

“Sorry, soldier, but that’s what it sounds like. Don’t worry, though, we’re going to keep our eyes on this guy of yours. He makes a move, we’ll know what he’s doing before he does.”

“Sounds good. I’m out.”

“Good luck.”

We hung up and I stuffed my phone away. I glanced back into the house and smiled when I saw that Ashley had gone back to her broom. Apparently the alcohol hadn’t taken her mind off her problems as well as she thought it would. I knew it wouldn’t, but telling somebody they’re wrong isn’t a way to get someone to listen to you. Sometimes they needed to find that kind of thing out for themselves.

I went over and rapped on a window lightly until I got her attention. I jerked a thumb back over my shoulder towards the woods and she nodded. Turning on my heels, I headed back into the woods to walk the perimeter again. I wasn’t worried about her down here, though. Anyone coming up the front would have to have a password for the gate, and I’d be able to hear, smell, or see anyone coming up the back.

Besides, it was broad daylight.

I headed back up into the woods, following mine and Jake’s tracks up to where we’d spotted the empty bottle of Stolichnikov. I looked around when I got there. With nothing new and nothing else jumping out at me even with my fresh eyes back on the scene, I turned and headed down the track Jake had followed before, the one I hadn’t had a chance to check out because I was out running errands with Ashley.

As I walked, my thoughts drifted to her. To those eyes of hers, the cool blue of them. Normally, I liked women with a little bit of country to them, someone who really liked the land. Ones that could at least two-step. Which was funny, because I mostly listened to classic rock. Definitely not spoiled little rich chicks like her.

Maybe it had been the way she’d decided to clean the cabin herself. Or how she hadn’t curled up in a ball the second things didn’t go her way, even if she had been swaddled in thousand dollar bills all her life.

I almost didn’t recognize the new smell as it came, borne on the winds from the estate’s border, to my hypersensitive nose. I stopped in my tracks and sniffed the air again.

Cumin? What the hell? And was that…mescal?

I tilted my head subconsciously and turned my ear in the direction of that side of the property.

I heard a car door shutting. Then another car door shutting.

I dropped into a crouch, my hand snapping to attention and coming to rest on the pommel of my sidearm. Two car doors and the new smell meant it wasn’t the Russian, unless he’d brought his brother he’d mentioned along for the ride. And they’d stopped for Mexican on the way. Staying low, I crept forward through the underbrush, the low-hanging needles from the trees scraping back through the air as I moved between the trunks like a ghost.

The property rose in elevation more gradually this direction, but eventually reached a peak of its swell and dipped back down until it met the side road that skirted the piece of land.

A gun racked. A rifle, by the sound of it.

I sucked in a sharp breath and stopped in my tracks. That sounded like high caliber small arms. I had two choices. I could go back right now and try to get Ashley out of the cabin ahead of them. Or I could move forward, find out what was going on, then come back and grab her with more information.

Either way, I couldn’t shift, not in the clothing I was wearing. Tee shirt and sweat pants were best for that kind of thing, definitely not the get-up I had on. I was stuck handling this in my human form.

No, I had a duty to protect her.

But, the best way to protect her was to have all the knowledge I could at my disposal. Intelligence on the battlefield was power. I didn’t like it, but I needed to know the exact number of men I was up against, even if it cost me a huge head start.

I continued to move forward, pausing only for a moment when they cut a hole in the chain link fence with some clippers. I got to the crest of the hill and dropped down flat as I peered down on them.

A black, nondescript Tahoe was parked down at the bottom, all its doors and heavily tinted windows shut tight. Four men in varying outfits, from black tee shirts to pearl snaps, slacks to jeans, were ducking and slipping through the chain link of the fence already, automatic rifles in their hands. AK-47s by the looks of them. The smell of cumin and cilantro, much heavier than before, hit me again.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, crawling backwards, my head reeling from the implications.

It was a hit squad from a cartel. A fucking Mexican cartel. Either that, or the cast of El Mariachi had decided to drop in and pay Ashley a visit for her birthday.

I’d heard they’d been up here at one point, doing grow operations in the more remote parts of the national parks like they did in Oregon and Washington, but I’d thought they’d pretty much left when the state legalized pot.

What the fuck had Martin Maxwell gotten himself wrapped up in, that a drug cartel was after him? Did he lose the wrong person’s investment or something?

I scrambled back through the underbrush. Once I was behind the hill and wasn’t presenting a silhouette, I ran as quickly as I could through the trees, still low, my legs pumping as I avoided the thick, twisting roots with sure feet.

Behind me, one of them said something to another. They’d heard me, and now they were coming up the hill faster. They could only move so fast, though, through the unfamiliar terrain.

Luckily for me, my feet were like a mountain goat’s as I tramped through the trees back down to the patio. At least I had that advantage.

They scrambled after me, swearing in Spanish. One lifted his rifle to take a shot, but the line of trees broke up the sight line enough that he didn’t risk it.

The rear of the cabin came into view. The broken window we still hadn’t repaired or boarded up, the patio, the furniture. And Ashley, drink in hand.

“Frank?” she called as I came out of the trees in a sprint. “What’s going on?”

God, no. She was a sitting duck on the patio, a perfect target for the men coming up behind me. And I knew what those men were capable of. After my experiences in South America, I kept a close eye on the news and other intelligence reports we subscribed to about what was going on south of the border. And it wasn’t pretty. Beheadings, bodies dissolved in acid, rape, torture.

I waved at her frantically, trying to signal for her to get back into the cabin, to run for the Audi out front, but she just gave me a confused look and stayed right where she was standing.

“Ashley!” I yelled, still running at a breakneck pace. “We’ve got company! Get moving!”

She gave me a weird look at first, but then her eyes shifted a little and she caught sight of them moving through the trees behind me, still far enough back in the woods to not have a clear shot.

I hit the trimmed and cultivated grass, and picked up my pace as I bounded onto the deck.

“Frank? What the–”

I slammed into her, scooping her up into my arms like a feather pillow. “No time!” I barked as she screamed in shock, her empty cocktail glass shattering behind us on the deck as I made for the back door in a flash.

As fast as I was, though, I wasn’t fast enough to beat the gunmen. Just as my hand touched the doorknob, they opened fire.