Ricardo lay in the mud where the horse had tossed him and tried to ignore the cold rain slashing down on him. He still held his rifle securely in his hand, not that he had any live ammo for it. If he had to lie here much longer, he might use it as a club on someone—soon.
Just another day in Delta Force, he kept telling himself.
Except he wasn’t in The Unit anymore.
This was all Isobel’s fault. Not the leaving The Unit part, but all the mud and rain part.
Why don’t y’all come up to Montana? And, like naive chumps, they all had. When the great film star Isobel Manella called, everyone came—even her twin brother. Which somehow meant that he’d ended up crawling facedown through the near freezing prairie mud.
One of the stuntmen on her movie had driven the thirty miles from the shooting location, here in the wilds by the steep mountains of the Montana Front Range, to the nearest bar in some hole called Choteau. He’d gotten into a predictable brawl with the locals last night, and was sleeping it off with one arm in a cast and the other handcuffed to a hospital bed. Some Hollywood Joe-boy taking on a bar full of Montana ranchers. Not the brightest dude.
Her director had needed five-ten of lean Latino dude about the same moment the Shadow Force’s plane had landed…and he’d been volunteered.
The fake rain—that the water truck had clearly tapped directly from a glacial stream, maybe straight from a glacier itself—made the quagmire far colder than should be possible on a hot June day. If it didn’t stop pounding him deeper into the frigid mud soon, he was definitely going to have to hurt someone. Not Isobel, of course. Not only was she the movie’s star, but he’d long ago learned (probably while still in the womb) to never try to outsmart his twin.
Her skills as an empath had cut off every nefarious plan a twelve-minute-younger twin brother could come up with before it even hatched—they’d split midnight between them and she’d been lording the extra “day” over him ever since to explain her “natural superiority.”
:You look so cute.: Michelle’s voice bubbled into his brain. And there was his first target.
:Go to hell!: Telepathy had its uses; telling off Michelle Bowman was a good one.
:You wish. You do look seriously cute though, Manella. Great butt. Which is about all that’s showing above the mud.: She sent an emotion tag of :(So laughing.):—because no emotional tone passed over their link, just the words and timing. Over the last year, with her thoughts constantly rattling in whenever they chose, he’d learned to punctuate most of her sentences. She always chose the tease over the straight line, sarcasm over…most anything.
He pushed himself up just enough that he could see her standing close behind the director. Even mixed into the crowd of male and female ranch hands gathered to watch the movie being made on their property, Michelle still stood out. Five-ten of sleek auburn redhead in jeans, a flannel shirt, and blue cowgirl boots—because, of course, she was always dressed perfectly for any occasion. She offered him one of her electric smiles.
He let himself drop back down into the mud. Do not be thinking about that woman.
Michelle scowled at him, but since that was one of her natural states, he couldn’t begin to figure out why.
Besides, telling himself off didn’t help. And the cold mud wasn’t enough of a distraction. To a former Unit operator, this really was nothing. He’d take this any day over an Indonesian mangrove swamp crawling with eight kinds of nasties before you even started counting the critters that weren’t carrying guns.
He began belly-crawling forward per the script.
Someone grabbed his hand, and it took all of his strength to not reflexively take them down hard. He was supposed to be the battle-battered hero wounded in a Wild West ambush after all.
Isobel, wearing the wet look like perfection, helped him to his feet. She slung his muddy arm over her shoulders. At least they hadn’t dressed her in one of those white blouses that went transparent when wet. Izzy certainly had the figure for it and he appreciated that they hadn’t taken the cheap shot. It saved him having to beat the shit out of the director.
“Remember to keep your head down. You look nothing like Javier,” she whispered as he limped out of the mud straight toward the camera.
“Right. I’m much more handsome.” But still, he wasn’t the newest hot-guy movie star and Javier was.
His own shirt, however, was paper-thin, torn in all the right places, and bloody—with more red leaking from the small bladder under his arm and trickling down his chest.
“I’ve got better pecs, too.”
Ricardo could feel Izzy’s half laugh where her arm was clutched around his waist, though of course she didn’t show it.
He used the butt of his lever-action Winchester 1873 rifle like a four-foot-long crutch as instructed. It was a crime to do such a thing to such a great old gun, but this was Hollywood recreating the Old West and he assumed they were too stupid to care.
They dragged forward until he was afraid they were going to walk square into the lens before the director yelled, “Cut.”
