Page 54 of Vaquero
Yeah, that. Easier said than done. He wasn’t the weak link here. “I had a stroke, remember? I’m not—”
That waggling finger cut her short again. “Believe,” he told her sternly. “Believe what you are doing is right and good. Believe you are strong and just. That you are the right hand of God. That he will always send His archangels in your time of greatest need. Then, you will prevail.”
“Is that what you do? You pray for… angels?” She never would’ve guessed a hard warrior like him believed in such things.
“Always. He knows where I am, and what I’m doing, even now. I may not be His perfect Son, but he is still my perfect Father.”
Whoa. A shiver raced through Meg’s entire body at the ease with which Julio had just declared his astoundingly Christian beliefs. She should’ve known. He’d uttered‘Madre Dios’often enough. “So you think you’re what? A crusader? A white knight? An apostle?”
Julio shook his head even as he looped another loaded holster to the broken branch at his side. Man, these trees were alive with weaponry. “I’m just a messenger,” he replied, his voice as emotionless as ever.
She had to ask. “What happened to you to make you so—”
“Cold?”
“No. Not cold.” The last thing this man could ever be was cold. “Remote. You look at me with fire in your sexy brown eyes, but then you shut it down, and all you offer me is—”
“Shhhhh. They’re back.”
Oh, damn. Meg swallowed hard. Julio was right. Armed, dangerous men dressed in cammies were filtering through the trees as silent as vipers near the trailhead. The majority of them appeared to be waiting on the chubby guy wearing an olive-green beret and sitting in a Jeep in the deep shadows.
“Who’s the guy in that Jeep?” Meg whispered as she stood, anchored herself into her harness, and shouldered her first launcher. After strapping the other end of her harness onto an overhead branch, she’d lined the bags of weaponry at her feet. She was as ready as she could ever be.
“Not sure,” Julio replied just as quietly. He was on his feet and his LAW was ready to fire as well. “Hotrod?”
“Never seen him before,” Hotrod muttered. “Asshat’s packing two Desert Eagle 50s, though.”
That he was. The Israel Military Industries’ Desert Eagle 50, known for its gas-operated reload mechanism, weighed in at a solid four and a half poundswithout ammo. Which made it one of the heaviest handguns on the market. Load that baby up with fifty caliber ammunition, and you’d better have a pair of big, strong hands and a bigger set of balls if you intended to use it.
The kinetic energy in its recoil alone was like taking a full-on body slam from the rear hooves of a pissed-off mule. A guy could literally knock himself out if he didn’t handle this monstrous handgun with extreme care. Meg knew a couple operators who packed one, mostly for the shock and awe effect the handgun created in military circles. It definitely had a cult following.
“I’ll take Asshat,” Hotrod said. “You guys handle both flanks. Ready?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll take right,” Meg replied evenly. “My right, not Asshat’s right.”
“Understood,” Julio muttered, the LAW already balanced on his shoulder, his eye to the reticule. “I’ll take Asshat’s right, my left.”
With that perfectly clear, Meg took careful aim at the group of soldiers holding at Asshat’s left, waiting on Hotrod’s command. The moment he said, “Go,” she pressed her launcher’s trigger bar and sent a rocket straight into the army at Asshat’s left.
Like hers, Julio’s and Hotrod’s rockets were both direct hits. Hotrod’s blew Asshat and his ride away in a fireball that belched out sideways and engulfed the men standing closest to him. Julio’s rocket did its fair share of damage, as did Meg’s. Those three initial shots had pretty much decimated the core of Asshat’s ranks.
Discarding the spent launcher as quickly as she could, Meg followed the first rocket with another. Then another. Furiously, she reloaded and fired until the rim above the trail was nothing but a smoking field of ash, twisted carnage, and burning debris.
Shaking like a leaf, she reached for another rocket, only to realize she’d used all six. She blinked at Julio. “You got any rockets left? I’m out.”
He shook his head. “We’ve used all we had. Breathe, Meg. You did good, but if you don’t breathe, you’re going to faint and fall out of the tree.”
“I am not,” she argued, but yeah. Wow. Holy shit. H-h-hot damn. The adrenaline spike surging through her compromised system was worse than any she’d experienced before, maybe because of her stroke. She was dizzy, but she’d never admit it. Not until she had to.
Oh, damn. Maybe she had to. Dizzying exhaustion had crept up on her, dropping her chin to her chest, making it harder to catch her breath. A wave of tiny black dots swarmed her peripheral vision, and… Shit. She was going to faint. In front of Julio and Hotrod. Not good, not good, not good. Not now, damn it!
Sucking in quick, hard breaths and fighting to stay upright, she dropped her backside to the branch and straddled it like a horse, wishing it had a long mane to tangle her between her quivering thighs. A rope would work. Julio’s callused hands. An—y—thing.
Fighting a rolling wave of nausea that came out of nowhere, she swallowed hard and focused on the rough, rugged texture of the branch to keep from losing her cookies. Stinging sweat trickled over her brows and filtered into her eyes. In less than seconds, she’d morphed from Wonder Woman with an attitude into timid shaking-in-her boots Chicken Little, afraid the sky was falling. It didn’t get any more embarrassing than this.
Because she didn’t dare take her eyes off the tree trunk for fear she’d pass out, she didn’t see Julio move in behind her until he’d reached one arm around her and pressed her back firmly to his front.
“D-don’t touch me,” she murmured, bile creeping up her throat at the unexpected shift in perspective. Man, she’d never seen trees dance like the forest was now. Bobbing. Back and forth. Up close, then weaving forward and—
