Her Wild Hero

The marine right beside them got hit and went down hard. Declan grimaced as their effort to escape the ambush started to slow. He needed to be able to shoot back, and he couldn’t do that with Kendra in his arms. He set her down and pulled his weapon off his back.

But instead of cowering behind him like he expected her to do, Kendra surprised him by scrambling over to the body of the downed marine and pulling the man’s M4 out of his lifeless hands. As Declan watched, she dropped the magazine, checked to see how many rounds were left in it, then expertly reloaded the weapon and eyeballed the ejection port to make sure a round was chambered. Then she took it a step further and searched the man’s body for extra magazines and ammo.

Where the hell had she learned how to do all that?

“Don’t shoot unless you have a target right in front of you,” he told her. “The way our people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, you have a better chance of hitting one of ours than one of theirs.”

She nodded and kept herself positioned right on his shoulder as they started moving forward again.

Tate caught up to them, dragging less than a dozen stragglers with him. Damn. Their guys were going down fast.

“I was able to get a call to the base camp on the satellite phone,” Tate yelled. “They’re not too happy about it, but they’ve agreed to pull two Seahawks off interdiction duty to evac us out of here. They’re coming into that landing zone we cleared a few hours back. We just have to stay alive long enough to get there.”

Someone fired a weapon beside Declan and he jerked his head around to see Kendra aiming her M4 at a man just barely visible in the branches of a tree twenty feet away. Declan lifted his weapon in that direction, but the camouflaged sniper was already falling to the ground.

Well, shit.

With Tate leading the way, they started moving toward their goal, picking up stragglers and wounded as they went.

***

It had taken them the better part of the day to traverse the rough terrain between the site of the ambush and the landing zone. On the trip out, they’d covered at least two swampy areas, a practically vertical ridgeline, and about three miles of thick jungles in that time. It had been exhausting even when they’d been moving slowly. Now they had to do it again faster, all the while being hounded every step of the way by a group of men intent on killing them.

Kendra had saved her ammo as long as she could, but their attackers were relentless and wouldn’t let them have a foot of real estate without extracting a price in blood. She’d just killed men. This wasn’t like being out in Washington State, where she’d been facing monsters. These had been men. But she’d had no choice. It was what she had to do if they were going to get out of this alive.

As good as she was at protecting herself, she would have been dead three times over if it wasn’t for Declan, Tate, Gavin, and Brent. She’d known they were good—she’d evaluated their training and read their after-action reports for years. But she hadn’t known just how truly skilled they really were.

To say that they worked like a well-oiled machine was an understatement. It was more like their minds were linked as one. They never spoke, never even gestured. But they covered each other’s backs—and those of the people depending on them—like nothing she’d ever imagined. And yet even as good as they were, they couldn’t protect every single person with them. Not when their attackers seemed willing to die to get to them.

They were still about half a mile from the landing zone when the ambushers suddenly broke off the attack.

“What the hell are they doing?” one of the marines gasped out. He was half carrying, half dragging a lance corporal who was already bleeding through the pressure dressings wrapped around the wound in his right thigh. “They had us on the ropes. Why the hell would they stop now?”

“I don’t know, but we’re almost there,” Tate called. “Just hold this pace for ten more minutes and we’ll make it.”

“Tate, someone’s coming,” Declan said urgently from beside Kendra. He hadn’t moved from that position the entire time. And while she’d taken down a few of their attackers, he’d taken down a whole lot more.

“Are they coming back?” Tate asked. “Which direction?”

“Not them. Someone else, moving fast—too fast.”

Declan turned in a circle, while the marines and cops eyed him in confusion. Kendra was already getting a queasy sensation in her stomach when the bear shifter’s attention locked in one direction.

“There,” he said. “They’re coming at us like a shot.”

Tate and the others aimed their weapons in that direction. Seconds later, the underbrush exploded in movement. Three men came through, moving so fast they were almost a blur. Gunfire erupted, but even with all the shooting, they didn’t go down right away.

Crap.