Relentless Protector. Colleen Thompson

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      The army brass had hated losing a warrior in his prime, and his fellow Rangers couldn’t understand why a trained sniper, a hawkeyed marksman who could take down a camouflaged enemy a half mile distant, would “bail” on them. Why he would allow a single incident, viewed through his scope, to instantly, irrevocably make him lose his taste for the kind of clean kills that supported his team’s mission.

      Better he should move his accounts rather than leaving his money at the military credit union, where he would continue running into his former comrades all too often. Where he would be forced to face their disappointment or, worse yet, their attempts to convince him that in wartime, people died, that he hadn’t been the one to kill them.

      He was sitting in a glassed-in booth, filling out the paperwork to open his new accounts, when he saw the brunette walking past him toward the teller’s counter. After months of self-imposed celibacy, he couldn’t help noticing her, his eyes drawn to the curvy figure that her loose raspberry-and-white scrubs could not hide and the wavy, coffee-rich hair that fell well past her shoulders. His gaze flicked to a pretty face, no older than late twenties, and his heart jerked as he was slammed with recognition, followed instantly by guilt.

      She was one of the widowed military spouses featured in last month’s article in USA This Morning—a woman widowed thirteen months before. Widowed because he’d failed her husband.

      He’d known that Lisa Meador and her son lived in town still, had made a note of where she worked and found out where their house was, when he was still thinking of going to her and explaining his role in her husband’s death. Of begging her forgiveness for that one death, one of many. Somehow, though, his C.O., Drew Woodsen, had gotten wind of it and ordered him to steer clear. Cole would have gone anyway, if Woodsen hadn’t made him understand that his appearance would only amount to a selfish—and totally unnecessary—bid for absolution that would end up causing Lisa and her son even more pain.

      Cole meant to drag his gaze away before she caught him looking, but there was something in her glazed, wide-eyed stare that brought him to his feet. Something he’d seen frozen on the features of the female terrorist in the moments before she’d self-detonated in the center of that crowded market.

      Could Devin Meador’s widow be so undone by his death, or facing such financial hardship, that she would actually...

      “Is something wrong, Mr. Sawyer?” asked the bank’s customer service manager, a stout, middle-aged woman with a sprayed blond helmet of a bob. Following his gaze, she smiled on seeing Lisa. “Oh, she is a pretty thing. A friend of yours?”

      “Not yet,” he said with a wink he wasn’t feeling. “Would it be all right with you if I drop these papers back here first thing in the morning?”

      Misreading his distraction, the manager laughed. “Anything for love. You have a pleasant evening.”

      Cole stepped from her office, feeling for the concealed handgun hidden in his waistband just in case. Licensed to carry in the state of Texas, he had come armed only to safeguard the cashier’s check he’d meant to deposit, a check representing the bulk of his life’s savings.

      Never in his wildest imaginings had he figured on the possibility that he might have to stop a bank job, a holdup by a woman radiating the sort of desperation that got people hurt—or killed.

      He hoped his instincts were off, that his own guilt had him imagining things, and the look he’d seen on her face signaled something far more mundane. Maybe she’d been laid off or was behind with a car payment, not planning to resort to a federal crime. As she reached inside an oversize straw handbag at the teller’s station, he willed her to come up with a paycheck, or maybe a withdrawal slip or her ID.

      He gazed across the bank lobby, but he found no help there. Only a big-bellied, older security guard looking at his watch. Checking to see it was just ten minutes before he could lock the doors and get home to enjoy his evening. Mentally, the man had already clocked out.

      And why wouldn’t he, with no other customers in the lobby but the fortyish business type filling out his deposit ticket at an island counter and the pretty raspberry-and-white scrubs woman who pulled out a piece of paper and passed it to the teller before shoving her hand back into the bag...?

      Where she was holding something, Cole was certain. Something that—damn it all—had to be a gun.

      Though he couldn’t see the weapon, he knew it from the way the petite, red-haired teller stiffened and took on the same pale green color as the maternity blouse that covered the late-term swell of her midsection. Cole edged a few steps closer, his hand on his own gun.

      His heart was thumping, adrenaline priming every nerve and muscle, readying him for a fight he didn’t want—the fight to keep everyone inside this bank alive, including his fellow soldier’s widow. No matter how justified the circumstances, he knew that any discharge of his weapon would trigger an investigation, which could easily result in his missing the start date for his training class. And heaven only knew when there might be another.

      But no matter what it cost him, it wasn’t in Cole Sawyer to walk away from trouble, not the sort of trouble that could get a pregnant teller or a distressed widow killed. Swearing he wouldn’t fire unless he absolutely had to, he took another cautious step.

      “Don’t scream, don’t even think of triggering an alarm, and you’ll be fine, I swear it,” Lisa whispered, the tension in her own voice like the sizzling of a fuse.

      A fuse quickly burning toward a deadly detonation. Cole saw it all too clearly, as the teller’s green eyes widened even farther. She was about to lose it, about to give way to a fit of shrieking guaranteed to spell disaster....

      A disaster he had the chance to stop. A second chance...

      He took another step, trying to gain an angle that wouldn’t put the pregnant woman in his line of fire.

      He was interrupted by a sharp cry of alarm, not from the teller but from the friendly service manager who’d helped him. “Oh, no!” Her terror echoed off the glass and marble of the room. “He’s got a gun!”

      She was pointing at him, he realized, as Lisa whirled in his direction, her weapon rising from her purse.

      Cole acted on instinct, diving to one side to avoid fire from both the robber and the security guard, and getting off a single shot of his own, a shot meant to disable and not kill. Because in spite of all his training and several hard lessons underscoring the damage a wounded combatant could still inflict, an older instinct guided his hand. An instinct prompted by the desperation in the brunette’s beautiful brown eyes....

      And the trickle of bright red blood already dripping from her hairline before he squeezed the trigger.

      Chapter Two

      “No!” Lisa shouted without thinking.

      At the crack of gunfire, she dropped the unloaded weapon Evie had forced on her and bolted toward the door, her mind consumed with getting to Tyler, who was sitting bravely with his dog and stuffed toy inside the car with a pair of stone-souled criminals.

      “You screw this up, it won’t go well for him,” the self-styled Evie LeStrange had warned her. Lisa had done exactly as they’d ordered, complying to the letter, yet everything was self-destructing all around her.

      The СКАЧАТЬ