Turquoise Guardian

Her Warrior Protector

Carter Bear Den is a proud Apache of the Turquoise Canyon Reservation. The former US Marine is a member of the Turquoise Guardians working to protect his people and their land. When he discovers a grisly mass shooting at the Lilac Copper Mine, Carter’s one thought is to find Amber Kitcheyan.

After breaking her engagement to Carter and relinquishing her membership with the reservation, Amber found work at the mine. Now she is the sole survivor of the shooting—at best a witness, at worst a suspect. But Carter swears to protect the only woman he has ever loved, even if it means losing everything else.

Apache Protectors: Tribal Thunder

She wished they could go back in time, back to those two kids who had fallen in love, and try again.

Tell her younger self to be wise and give Carter another chance. But it was too late now because she could never ask him to leave their tribe and she was too ashamed to stay.

Despite her reservations, her heart hammered in giddy excitement and her skin flushed.

Focus. You’re in real trouble and this man doesn’t want a woman who walked away from her family.

Carter had loved her. But he loved his people and his place among them more. He was not leaving and she was not staying. There was no future for them. Only more pain.

“Thank you for saving us back there,” she said.

“I didn’t get us out. I’d have been cuffed to the handgrip in a smoldering wreck if not for you.”

He’d been the reason they had a chance to get out of that SUV and they both knew it.

Turquoise Guardian

Jenna Kernan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JENNA KERNAN has penned over two dozen novels and has received two RITA® Award nominations. Jenna is every bit as adventurous as her heroines. Her hobbies include recreational gold prospecting, scuba diving and gem hunting. Jenna grew up in the Catskills and currently lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State with her husband. Follow Jenna on Twitter, @jennakernan, on Facebook or at www.jennakernan.com.

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For Ann Leslie Tuttle with many thanks for sharing her expertise, invaluable critical eye and friendship for more than a decade.

And for Jim, always.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Extract

Copyright

Prologue

The idea of murdering seven innocent people should have sickened Ovidio Natal Sanchez. Instead he felt a grim anticipation. These people were responsible for causing that festering wound on the earth. He only wished he had been given free rein to kill as many as possible. But he was a loyal member of BEAR, and he would carry out his mission, with pleasure. He sat in a nondescript van before the loading dock of the Lilac Copper Mine, holding an automatic weapon with the safety switched off.

His driver’s phone chimed, signaling a text.

“They’re all in,” he said.

“Give them twenty minutes to get to their desks,” said Ovidio.

His driver cast him a look.

“I don’t want to miss one who went for coffee.”

His driver’s sigh was audible, but he said no more, granting Ovidio a few more seconds to savor the moment.

His organization had supplied everything he needed: maps, head shots of each target, transportation and the automatic weapon he would use to kill every living soul in the procurement office of the Lilac Copper Mine. He didn’t know why. He didn’t care why. He just knew when and how.

Today. By his hand.

The twenty minutes ticked by.

A smile curled his lips. The next hole that went in the earth would be for their caskets.

“I’m signaling our man,” said his driver and began texting.

The van was parked at the receiving bays.

Ovidio had worked protection for his boss for years. Even had to kill a few people. But nothing like this. He licked the salt from his upper lip.

In life, he believed, people mostly got what they deserved. Today was the exception. These people deserved worse. If it were up to him, he’d tie the owners of this monstrous mile-deep pit with their own blasting cord and toss them in with the next load of explosives. But his leader said they had bigger fish to fry. This time they’d make a statement that would not be buried on page six. One that the whole world would feel, and know that the earth mattered. That people couldn’t keep assaulting the earth with impunity and that...

“You ready?” asked his driver.

The loading door was opening. He needed to focus.

“There he is,” said his driver and looked expectantly at Ovidio. “Hurry up.”

He wondered if his driver would really be here when he came out or would just leave him. But leaving him was dangerous. He might tell what he knew. He never would, of course. He believed too deeply in their cause. Still, they might kill him. Shoot him the instant he came out that door. He didn’t care. At least his death would matter and they’d never forget him here in this miserable mining town.

Ovidio checked his weapon and slipped from the van. His body tingled as he mounted the five cement stairs that took him from the bright sunlight to the shadows of the loading bay, the sensation reminding him of sexual arousal. Oh, yeah. He was getting off on it because he knew he was on surveillance now. And what would they do with only their rent-a-cops and crappy wire fences for protection?

How long until they spotted him? In the hall? After the first shots?

His conspirator stood holding the door and, as he passed through, relayed a message.

“Ibsen called in sick.”

“Address?”

The man passed him a sheet of paper. Now Ovidio had to get out of here alive to get Ibsen.

Somehow Ovidio thought after he told his commander at BEAR about the discovery made by the new purchasing clerk, Ibsen would know what was coming. Unfortunately it was too late to abort. Besides there was no way of knowing who in the office the clerk had spoken to about her discovery.

Ovidio stalked into the corridor. Today he would write his convictions in blood.

Ovidio continued toward his goal, inhaling the scent of machine oil coming from the automatic rifle heavy in his hands. He thought of the memorials and the anniversaries of the legacy he was about to leave behind. But this wasn’t his legacy. The removal of men who violated the earth—that was his legacy.

Chapter One

“I’ll be back soon.” Amber Kitcheyan stowed the last of the receiving slips she needed signed by her boss in her satchel as she spoke to their receptionist. Then she headed out from the receiving department in the Lilac Copper Mine’s administration building where she was a receiving clerk.

Their squat building sat at ground level perched over the thousand-foot cavity, which was the active open-pit copper mine. Below them, a constant stream of enormous mining dump trucks wove up the precarious roads, hauling ore to the stamp mills in Cherub. The pit covered two-hundred acres and the tailing piles covered even more ground. To Amber, it looked like a crater left by some absent meteor.

Amber always left by the loading dock as it was closer to the parking area. She stopped in the restroom for just a moment. Too much coffee, she thought as she left the stall. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror as she washed her hands, checking that her long black hair was all tucked neatly up in a tight coil. She wore nothing in particular that marked her Apache lineage because her face structure and skin tone did that adequately. The human resources had been happy to tick the box indicating they had hired a minority. She didn’t care. A job was a job and this one paid better than the last.

But she missed her tribe and her sisters. And wished...no, she wasn’t going there. Not today.

Amber tugged at the ill-fitting blazer she’d purchased used with the white blouse she wore twice a week. She slung the stylish satchel on her shoulder and headed out into the hall.

On the loading dock she paused to slip her sunglasses out of her bag and swept a hand over her hair. February in Lilac was a good twenty degrees warmer than the Turquoise Canyon Apache Indian Reservation where she had grown up. She longed for a cool breeze off the river but now wasn’t the time to be feeling homesick. She stopped to find her keys. Amber didn’t like to bother her boss, Mr. Ibsen, at home, especially when he was sick. But as a clerk she couldn’t sign for a delivery this big. So she’d just slip out there, get his signature on the receiving slips and be back before the truck was unloaded.

She had called from the office and got his voice mail and followed up with an email. It worried her that he had not replied to either and that, on the day after she mentioned the problem she’d spotted on the receipts to her boss, he was absent. And he knew they expected another delivery truck today.

She could have them signed by Joseph Minden in finance, but the one time her boss had been absent for a delivery, she’d done just that and her boss had lost it. She’d never seen veins stick out of a man’s neck like that before.

Minden was their CPO, Chief Procurement Officer, and Mr. Ibsen’s supervisor. Later in the day, Mr. Ibsen had explained to her about chain of command and threatened to fire her if she did something like that again.

Then yesterday he had also shouted at her to get back to work. Amber was on shaky ground here, and she needed this job, what with the seemingly endless debt she was trying to pay down.

She couldn’t afford to screw this up.

She’d only been here a month and was still getting used to the copper mine’s policies. But she would not make that mistake twice because she needed this job for at least the next six months. Then the loan would be finished, and she could go home, if she wanted. The pit of her stomach knotted at the thought as mixed emotions flooded in.

“Not now,” she whispered to herself and strode across the loading dock. The Arizona sky glowed a crystal blue, and the sun warmed the concrete pad beneath her feet. The temperature would rise rapidly, she knew, and then drop with the sun.

She glanced at the deep navy van illegally parked before the receiving bay, then back at the sign that indicated parking there was prohibited. The driver had shaggy blond hair poking out from beneath his ball cap like straw. She cast him a disapproving look, and he leaned forward over the wheel to glare right back.

Amber descended the steps in a rapid gait, making a beeline for her vehicle, which was small, ugly, used and paid for. She didn’t do leases. She paid cash or did without.

As she drove out of the lot, Amber glanced back at the van still illegally parked, and then turned onto the road that would lead her through the high chain-link fencing and off the copper mine’s property.

* * *

CARTER BEAR DEN’S first sign of trouble at the mine came in the form of a yelp from the security guard seated at the lobby reception desk. The guard’s eyes were glued to the monitor on his desk, showing a series of images from various security cameras. Carter leaned in to see what had made the man blanch.

Carter had a message to deliver. He didn’t like it, but he was duty bound to see that Amber Kitcheyan received the letter. It had been given to him by Kenshaw Little Falcon, the head of the Turquoise Guardians, his medicine society and a tribal shaman.

Now, standing beside the security desk and the uniformed boy they had hired to check in visitors, Carter looked at the monitor that showed a masked gunman making steady progress along an empty corridor, and he stopped thinking and wondering. This time he saw the face of danger before it was too late.

Amber was in this building.

The security officer stood now, one hand on his pistol grip and the other reaching for the phone seeming uncertain as to which to use.

Carter had no such trouble. As a former US Marine with three tours of duty, he knew what he needed to do. Protect Amber.

The digital feed displayed a view of an office where the masked gunman proceeded past a fallen woman toward the cubbies tucked directly behind the receptionist’s station.

“Where is that?”

“Purchasing,” rasped the guard.

From the security guard’s radio came a call to lock down. On the other monitors people scurried about, fleeing the halls for the closest cover.

Carter retrieved his Tribal ID from the high counter and tucked it in his open wallet as the shooting started, the burring sound of an automatic rifle blast unmistakable and close.

For just an instant, Carter was back there in Iraq with his brother and Ray and Dylan and Hatch. The next instant he was drenched with sweat and running.

Suddenly delivering his message came second to keeping Amber alive. Had Little Falcon known what was about to transpire?

The stabbing fear over Amber’s safety took him by surprise. He’d been so sure he was over her. So why was he running into gunfire?

Although he now moved forward with the stealth of his ancestry bolstered by the training of the US Marines, the stillness in the corridor was unnerving. It had the eerie quiet of a deadly game of hide-and-seek. Everyone was hiding except for him and the killer.

From down the corridor he heard a bang, like the sound of a heavy door slamming shut. He ran toward the sound, the light tread of his cowboy boots a whisper on the carpeted hallway.

He saw the blood trail as soon as he rounded the corner. It led from an office that read Purchasing upon the door. The gunman’s boot prints were there in blood leaving the scene, dark stains on the industrial carpeting.

Amber’s office, he realized. For an instant he was too terrified of what he might find to go inside. Was it the same as Iraq? Was it already too late?

He held his breath and stepped across the threshold. The calm sending his flesh crawling. He moved from one body to the next, checking for signs of life and the face that still visited his dreams.

Everyone in the outer office was dead. He moved to the two private offices. The man in the first was gone, shot cleanly through the forehead. In the next office he was greeted by the sight of dark legs, sprawled at an unnatural angle. One moved.

Carter was at her side in an instant, sweeping away the dark hair that covered her face. She was breathing, but she was not Amber. Her eyes fluttered open and flashed to his.

“Rest. Help is coming,” he said, feeling his gut twist in sympathy.

He could tell by her sadness and the tears in her eyes that she saw death coming.

“Amber?” he whispered.

“She left. When the shooter spotted her empty cubicle, he said he would find her.”

His heart gave a leap and hammered now, hitting his ribs so hard and fast it hurt.

“Where is she?”

“Left. Harvey Ibsen’s home. Paperwork. Oh, it hurts. My kids. Tell them I’m sorry. That I love them.” Her eyes fluttered shut.

Someone entered the office.

“Security!”

“In here,” Carter called.

A moment later a man in a gray uniform shirt and black pants appeared in the doorway. His gun drawn.

Carter lifted his hands. “Unarmed.”

The man aimed his weapon. Carter didn’t have time to get shot.

“EMTs on the way?” he asked.

The man nodded, his face ashen.

“Come put pressure on this.”

He did, tucking away his weapon and kneeling beside Carter before placing a large hand on the folded fabric over the woman’s abdomen.

“You know a guy called Harvey Ibsen?” Carter asked.

“Yeah. He works here.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know. In town, I guess. Who are you?”

“Friend of Amber Kitcheyan.” Friend? Once he had planned to make her his wife.

“Yeah?”

Carter was already on his feet. He pointed at the woman. “She wants her kids to know she’s sorry to leave them and that she loves them.”

The security officer blanched. Carter stepped away.

“Hey, you can’t leave.”

Carter ignored him. If the shooter was after Amber, he had to go. Now.

“She also said that the shooter was looking for Amber. Send police to Ibsen’s home. I think he’s heading there.”

The man’s eyes widened and he lifted his radio.

“Call Amber’s cell. Warn her,” said Carter.

“She doesn’t own a mobile. Or at least that’s what she told me.” The security officer’s eyes slid away.

Carter groaned. Of course she didn’t. That would have made the necessity of him delivering this message superfluous. He headed out, following the ghastly bloody footprints. His phone supplied an address for a Harvey Ibsen, and his maps program gave him the route.

Ibsen didn’t live in Lilac. According to Carter’s search engine, he lived in Epitaph, the tourist town fifteen miles north of here. The name, once a joke for the number of murders committed during the mining town’s heyday, now seemed a grim omen.

Carter swung up behind the wheel of his F-150 pickup. Amber’s boss was out the very day this happened. A coincidence that was just too perfect in timing. Luck. Fate. Or something else?

He didn’t know, but he had a sour taste in his mouth.

Chapter Two

Carter headed out, turning away from the town of Lilac, named not for the color of the rock, but the name of the man who decided to crush the poor-quality copper ore in a stamp mill and make the low-grade ore profitable.

En route to Epitaph, he phoned his twin brother, Jack, a detective with the tribal police back home on Turquoise Canyon Reservation, and filled him in.

“We have no jurisdiction outside of the tribe,” said Jack. “You’re practically in Mexico.”

Actually he was thirty miles from there and heading north.

“See what you can find out. Tell them that Amber is a member of our tribe.”

“She left the tribe, Carter.”

“They don’t know that.” Carter reined himself in. He wouldn’t lose his temper or shout at his brother.

There was a pause.

“Ibsen lives in a small housing development in Epitaph. You need the address?”

“Got it.”

“Okay. I’ll call border patrol. They might have a checkpoint set up along that stretch. What is the shooter driving?”

“Don’t know.”

“Do you want me to call the others?”

He meant the members of Tribal Thunder, the warriors of the Turquoise Guardian medicine society. The ones charged with protecting their ancestral land and people from all enemies.

“Call Little Falcon.”

“I’ll call Tommy, as well. He’s down there somewhere. Maybe he can help,” said Jack.

Tommy was their brother. At twenty-six he had scored a spot on the elite all–Native American trackers under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as the Shadow Wolves, and had been down there on and off for two years. Carter supposed not all the Bear Dens could be Hot Shots. A Hot Shot was a member of an elite team of firefighters flown into battle forest fires, and the Turquoise Canyon Hot Shot team was one of the most respected and sought after in the nation, a reputation they had earned with hard, dangerous work. He and the other members of his former US Marine outfit all missed the buzz of adrenaline, and so had joined the most dangerous job they could find as a substitute.

“Great. Gotta go.”

“Be careful,” said Jack.

Carter hung up and slipped the phone into his front pocket. Amber still didn’t have a cellular phone. She hadn’t owned one the last time he’d seen her either.

“Please, don’t let that be the last time,” he whispered and pressed the accelerator.

* * *

AMBER HUMMED A tune about being happy as she rolled along. The fifteen mile drive out to Harvey Ibsen’s was uneventful, and the scenery was lovely, so different than Turquoise Canyon. The roads were well maintained and flat as Kansas. She whizzed past dry yellow grass dotted with silver-green yucca and woolly cholla cacti with spines that looked like fur.

There were no cacti up on Turquoise Canyon. Here the planes stretched out wide-open to the snowcapped Huachuca Mountains to her right and the rockier Dragoon Mountains to her left where Apache warrior, Cochise, once kept a stronghold. The mountain ranges here did not look like those near Black Mountain, but at least the Huachucas got snow.

She missed home, still, after all this time. The Turquoise Canyon Apache Indian Reservation gleaned its name from the exposed vein of blue stone on Turquoise Ridge. Her tribe was a conglomeration of many Tonto Apache people, the losers in the wars against the Anglos, relocated twice until finally reclaiming a small portion of their lands. And the Turquoise Canyon Apache tribe had timber, turquoise and decorative red sandstone. They also had the best Hot Shots in the world. She supposed the warrior spirit lived on in the men of her tribe who now flew all over the West to battle forest fires.

Carter was a Hot Shot. Her smile faded, and her heart ached at the thought of the man she’d once loved.

She caught movement behind her and saw a dark vehicle closing fast. She held her steady pace and frowned as she recognized the van a moment before it swerved to the opposite lane and zoomed past her. It was the same illegally parked van at the loading dock, or so she thought. Her brow wrinkled as the vehicle vanished in the distance. How fast had that van been going to make her look like she was driving backward?

Amber continued on but now with a sense of disquiet that niggled at her. She signaled her turn, though there was no one behind her.

She checked the numbers on the houses she passed. She had been here once on a similar mission, but the houses were very alike; her boss’s home had solar panels, so she studied the roofs as she passed. When she arrived at number nineteen, she slowed before the house. Harvey’s hybrid vehicle was parked in the drive. That’s when she saw the familiar blue van was already on the corner. She slipped the car into Park, instead of electing to turn into Harvey’s ample drive. Something felt wrong, and she leaned forward to stare out the passenger window. Something about that van gave her the creeps.

Amber had to be back soon because the shipment was being unloaded as she sat there dithering. As she turned off the engine, she resisted the urge to start the engine back up again. The last of the air-conditioning dissipated, forcing a decision. She was being ridiculous.

She grabbed her satchel and then the car’s door handle, stepping out into the street. She took a moment to tug down her cream-colored jacket and smooth her dark slacks. Then she closed the door.

She’d just made it up the drive when she heard a male voice speaking from inside the house. The tone was so strained that she did not at first recognize it, but then the strangled timbre became familiar, a version of Harvey Ibsen’s speech that she recognized but had never before heard.

“I told you everything. I reported it, for God’s sake. I told you we had a problem.”

There was a pause and then Ibsen again, whimpering, begging now.

“Oh, but I’m one of you. I’m the one who—”

The sound of a gunshot brought Amber up straight. Her eyes widened, her jaw clamped, and her grip on the shoulder strap of her satchel tightened. Her mind struggled to catch up with her body as her heart rate leaped and a sheen of sweat covered her skin.

The second shot set her in motion. She spun and ran back to the curb. She dropped her satchel in the street beside her car as she crouched.

Her breath now came so fast she choked on the dry air. Heat from the pavement radiated up through the soles of her shoes, and her image reflected off the metal of her door panel before her. She could see herself in the white paint—all wide eyes and cowering form.

She glanced toward the van, perpendicular to her hiding place, and inched back out of sight, dragging her leather bag along the road as she moved away from the house. She ended up behind her rear bumper as she heard the sound of footfalls crunching on the ornamental stone. She peeked up over the trunk.

He held a long black rifle in his hand, and his head was turned toward her car, the one that he likely knew had not been there when he entered Ibsen’s home. He looked directly at her and she at him. They made eye contact for one endless second and then another. His step faltered as he changed direction, raising the rifle stock to his shoulder as he headed for her at a quick march.