Her Perfect Mate (2 page)

late.

She sighed. “Dammit, Dave. Why didn’t you just listen to me?”

She gently closed Dave’s eyes, then got to her feet to check on the Russian. He was dead, too, shot once

in the head.

Ivy’s gaze went to Dave again and against her will, she found herself reliving the last few moments of

her partner’s life. Could she have done something to prevent his death?

She shook her head. Now wasn’t the time—and this definitely wasn’t the place—to have this

conversation with herself. Even in a blown out shithole like this one, someone was bound to come

snooping around to see what all the shooting had been about. In her experience, people who snooped

around shootouts were not the kind of people she wanted to deal with.

She walked over to the second man she’d shot and ripped open the briefcase still clutched in his hand.

Grabbing the manila folder inside, she shoved it in her coat pocket, then took out her iPhone and snapped

pictures of all three gunmen as well as Dave and the Russian. She wanted to have something to back up her

story if there was an investigation.

When she was done, she retrieved her 9mm, then grabbed Dave’s NVGs. She didn’t intend to leave

anything behind that might identify them. That included Dave. Bending down, she slid her arms under his

body, then lifted.

“Come on, Dave. Let’s get you home.”

Dave was more than twice her weight and she grunted with the effort as she hooked one of his arms

over her shoulder and dragged him to the car. It was slow going, but she didn’t care. Crappy partner or not,

she wasn’t going to leave him behind.

Chapter 1

Two Months Later

The Mountains of Afghanistan—Nuristan Province

Landon Donovan checked his watch. It was so dark tonight he wouldn’t have been able to see his hand

in front of his face if he wasn’t wearing NVGs, but there was just enough glow for him to make out the

time. 0200 hours.

He and five members of his 5th Special Forces A-team had moved to the final observation point in the

hills above their target an hour ago. A multifamily house surrounded by a high wall in the middle of a small

village perched on a mountainside—the place didn’t look like much. Few places in this godforsaken

country did. But it was bigger than any of its neighbors and supposedly housed the province’s most

infamous resident, a high-priority Taliban leader and bomb maker known only by his first name—Qari. The

son of a bitch was best known for insurgent training camps that specialized in turning children into suicide

bombers, but he was also a major force behind the growing number of mortar and IED attacks on local

Coalition Forces. He had money and power, not to mention technical knowledge out the ass and a fair

amount of religious influence. Yeah, well, none of those things were going to help him tonight. Providing

everything went as planned.

Landon glanced at his teammates, checking again to make sure each of them was in position. They

probably wouldn’t get a peek at the compound’s occupants until morning, but they’d keep at least one set of

eyes glued to the scopes the entire night, just in case. He and his communications sergeant Diaz were taking

the first watch.

Big Tex-Mex—otherwise known as Sergeant First Class Angelo Rios—slipped down beside Landon. “I

have Marks just behind us on the back side of the ridge. Mickens is about a hundred meters downslope.

We’ll have warning if anyone tries to sneak up on us.”

Angelo was the senior weapons sergeant on the team, and Landon used him as his second-in-command

when they were running split-team ops like they were now. Part Native American, part Mexican, and all

badass, Angelo was as sharp as they came.

“Good,” Landon said. “Get the laser designator set up, just in case we get a chance to use it.”

Angelo nodded and slipped away as silently as a ghost. For a big man, the senior noncommissioned

officer could be damn quiet.

While Angelo and the other weapons sergeant, Tredeau, broke out the portable laser designator and

mounted it on a small tripod, Landon went back to scanning the compound four hundred meters below,

switching from his long-distance night vision scope to the thermal one.

“Holy shit,” Diaz called out softly.

“What do you have?” Landon asked.

He motioned with his hand for Angelo and Tredeau to hurry up. Diaz didn’t use that particular profanity

lightly, so it had to be something big.

“Check out the far left window, Captain,” Diaz said. “The one with the light coming through the

curtains.”

Landon slewed his scope from the large courtyard area he’d been scanning over to the left, focusing on

the house. It took him a moment to find the window Diaz was talking about, but the second he did, he

knew why the commo sergeant was so excited. Sitting there at a table, bigger than shit, was Qari. The man’s

beard was longer than it was in their most recent intel photo of the Taliban leader, but there was absolutely

no doubt this was their guy. Landon and his teammates had studied photos of him from every angle for

days on end, then quizzed each other by picking their target out of situational lineups. Every member of the

team knew Qari’s face better than his mother probably did.

“That’s our man,” Landon confirmed. “Call in air support.”

Diaz turned to follow out his instructions, but then stopped and pressed his hand to his earpiece the way

he always did when he listened to something on the radio. He frowned as he spoke into the mic. “Say again,

all after ‘abort.’”

Landon did a double take. Who the hell would be calling an abort now?

Diaz looked at Landon, a stunned expression on his face. “Captain, we’ve been ordered to break contact

and immediately move back to the extraction point.”

“Did you tell them we have Qari in our sights and were about to call in air support?”

“Yes, sir, but it was the old man himself, and he didn’t give a shit. He wants us at the landing zone

yesterday.”

Landon swore under his breath. The original plan was for his team to head to the landing zone once the

mission was done, unless there was an emergency. There wasn’t an emergency and their mission wasn’t

done, so why the hell would the battalion commander order them to bail? He and his team had been after

Qari ever since they’d come to this country. To be pulled out now, when the big payoff was at hand, was

nuts. Who knew what information they could find in that compound?

Resisting the urge to get on the radio and argue with the commander, Landon barked orders to get the

gear packed.

They got to the landing zone two hours later to find a Black Hawk waiting for them, rotors turning.

Landon immediately headed for it, only to stop when his executive officer, Major Bennett, stepped off the

bird. Some serious shit had obviously hit the fan for the battalion’s executive officer to be out here.

“Major,” he said.

“Captain.” Bennett surveyed Landon’s teammates with a critical eye before turning back to him. “You’re

the only one who’s going out on the Black Hawk. I’m taking over your team.”

He sure as hell hadn’t expected that. No formalities. No
Hey, great job finding Qari.
Just a harsh,

straightforward
I’m taking over your team.

Landon glanced over his shoulder to see his teammates looking at him in disbelief. He felt as if he’d just

been hit with a ton of bricks. Well, he wasn’t going anywhere without some answers. That might take time,

though, and he didn’t want his guys exposed out there while he got them.

“Set up a perimeter,” he said to Angelo, then turned back to Bennett. “Sir, am I being relieved of

command, and if so, why?”

“No, Captain, you’re not. You came down on orders. That’s why you’re being pulled out.”

Orders? He could have handled a kick in the balls easier. “In the middle of a fucking mission? Sir, we’re

not due to rotate back for another month.”

“Captain, I can’t explain it and I’m not going to try. Battalion received the word barely three hours ago.

The old man personally finalized the transfer orders himself and told me to put you on that bird ASAP.”

Bennett’s mouth tightened. “No matter how I have to do it.”

Landon looked around at his team. They’d followed his order to position themselves around the

helicopter to provide security in case of an attack, but all of their attention was focused on him. They

looked just as bewildered as he was.

He turned back to Bennett. “Sir, be straight with me. Did I screw up somehow?”

Bennett shrugged. “I don’t know. If you did, no one in the battalion knew about it. All I can tell you is

that the order to pull you out came from somewhere mighty fucking high. Above SOCOM. There isn’t even

a report date on your orders. They just say immediately.”

He must be joking. Special Operations Command, known as SOCOM, owned all the Special Forces

troops in the Department of Defense, regardless of service. Who’d be telling them where to send their own

troops, especially in the middle of a deployment?

“At least tell me where I’m going,” Landon said.

Bennett hesitated, and Landon thought he saw what looked like sympathy in the man’s eyes. “The

MDW.”

The Military District of Washington? No fucking way. He must have heard wrong. He was about to ask

Bennett to repeat that, but Angelo abandoned his place on the perimeter and ran up before he could.

“Landon, what the fuck’s going on?”

Angelo was the only troop on his team who got away with calling him by his first name. That was

because he and the NCO went way back, to a time before Landon was an officer, a time when just making it

to the end of their first enlistment without getting their asses shot off was the only goal they had. Back then,

Angelo had earned the right to call him anything he damn well wanted. They weren’t just teammates, or

even best friends. They were brothers.

Major Bennett looked like he was about to shit a brick over the delay, but Landon didn’t give a crap.

“I’m getting shipped off to DC,” he told Angelo.

“DC? Shit.” He blew out a breath. “Is this about what happened to LT?”

Landon hoped not. He sure as hell didn’t want to go there again. But some kind of shit had hit the fan

somewhere for him to be yanked during a deployment. “I don’t know.”

“Captain,” Bennett insisted.

Landon ignored him. Behind him, the Black Hawk’s rotors echoed off the surrounding mountains,

filling the silence. It was dangerous for the chopper to be on the ground this long. The sound of the rotors

was going to attract the wrong kind of attention soon enough, and he didn’t want his team here when that

happened.

He swallowed hard. He’d been with his guys a long time. It felt as if he was deserting them by leaving.

But he couldn’t disobey a direct order.

“Tell the guys to take care of themselves,” he said to Angelo. “You, too.”

Landon didn’t wait for a reply. Instead, he turned and climbed into the Black Hawk. Bennett slammed

the door, then motioned for the pilot to take off.

As he rode back to base camp, Landon tried to convince himself he’d heard wrong, that Bennett hadn’t

said MDW. But Landon knew he’d heard right. He was heading to the Military District of Washington. As in

Washington, DC. As in pushing pencils and making coffee for generals who didn’t seem to have any work

to do. There were some officers who might consider a transfer to the Pentagon—if that’s where he was

going—to be a peach assignment. But for a dirty-boots Special Forces warrior like him, it was the

equivalent of a demotion.

What the hell had he done to earn it?

He could only think of one thing, the same thing Angelo had been referring to—the ambush that had

happened eight weeks earlier. The one where his assistant commander had gotten injured badly enough for

the guy to end up getting his ass shipped back to the States where he wasn’t likely to ever see combat again.

Landon didn’t want to believe he was getting reassigned because of that shitty episode, but it was the

only thing that made sense. He snorted. It was almost ironic. He was going to be reassigned to the DC area

where he’d get to come face to face with the biggest screwup of his life on a daily basis. Looked like karma

was coming back to bite him in the ass.

***

He’d figured he would at least have time to clean up before he left, but they immediately shuffled him onto

another fueled-up Black Hawk and flew him directly to the main airbase in Bagram. Then he’d been the

lone passenger on a C-17 cargo plane full of mail and broken equipment bound for Qatar. A Department of

Defense–contracted commercial carrier had taken him from there to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany with

an immediate transfer to Washington National. In all, he’d been traveling for almost twenty-four hours. Add