Mashchenko had trained his weapon on them. “Maybe one of your security men can shoot me, if they are good enough, but I will pop a shot off first.” He lifted his head to shout, “Does everyone hear that? I have a weapon strong enough to pierce through the General and kill the lovely senator—that is, if I don’t hit her anyway.”
Hank held tight, but it didn’t matter, damn it, because the bastard already had a gun pointed toward Ginger’s head and the sharpshooters weren’t an option any longer.
“Why, Mashchenko?” Ginger’s voice didn’t even shake as she tried to shrug her way free of Hank, but he wasn’t budging. “Why are you doing this?”
“You have brought that nativity back out in the open.” The older man moved closer, the lethal weapon all the closer. “The crèche would be back where it originally belonged. I tried to simply steal the crèche back, but Senator Landis never let it out of her sight. As time drew near, I’ve had to resort to desperate measures. Now that it is out there, where people in this part of the world can examine it, I will be ruined.”
Back where it belonged. But the precious art collection in the chapel had been destroyed by a fluke fire.
Or not.
Ginger gasped. “You burned down this chapel during a storm—after looting the place to sell the invaluable treasures on the black market.”
“You’re a smart woman,” Mashchenko replied. “I was only sixteen but I had dreams and a plan.”
Hank couldn’t help but fill in the blanks. Talking would buy time, and damn it, if the guy managed to squeeze off a shot…“The money financed your rise in government.”
“Enough talk.” He waved his weapon, obviously relying on firepower to overcome what he lacked in strength due to age. “There’s no reason why we all can’t end this day happy. If I kill you, I’m a marked man for life. I just want out now. I can hide. Come quietly until I can get to my connections.”
Fat chance.
Hank decided that age didn’t have a thing to do with any of it. He’d never felt more honed than at the moment as years of experience blended with training and a deep-rooted need to protect the woman he loved.
As if sensing his intent, Ginger gripped his clothes tighter; with those snipers out of commission, he couldn’t afford to hesitate.
The second he saw that Mashchenko’s weapon wavered and was only pointed at him, Hank leapt, not far at all. The weapon discharged. Ginger screamed. Hank couldn’t afford to hesitate. He forced himself to focus on the mission.
Take down Mashchenko.
Save Ginger.
Muscles bunched, Hank landed on the older male—a man who obviously worked out. Still, Hank gripped the bastard’s gun hand in a relentless grip, banging it against the rocky remains of the floor again and again. Praying the villainous thief wouldn’t get another shot off.
The thought of losing Ginger was inconceivable.
Even the notion caused a fresh pulse of adrenaline to surge through him, managing to mask most of the pain in his hand as he battered the villain’s arm against the ground. He slammed Mashchenko’s wrist against a sharp stone one last time.
The weapon skittered away along the cobblestones.
Hank’s fist followed as quickly across the man’s jaw, knocking him out a second before the secret service descended, Ginger’s sons leading the pack to rush them. A swarm of activity buzzed all around them, but his focus was only on one woman.
Where it belonged.
He pivoted to find Ginger already launching toward him—his feisty Carolina angel—blessedly safe and unharmed. He opened his arms to have her fall against his chest where he now knew she belonged.
For a lifetime.
Three hours later—which felt like a lifetime, so much had happened—Ginger stood with Hank under one of the tents erected for the dedication ceremony. After the shooting, it had been changed into a questioning center for the police to collect data, but most of the crowd and media had cleared away now.
A paramedic was just finishing splinting Hank’s two broken fingers from when he’d grappled with Mashchenko to pound the gun from the villain’s hand. Her pugnacious general insisted he would go to the hospital in the morning. Tonight, give him some tape and a Tylenol. He just wanted to be with his family—the Renshaws and the Landises.
She couldn’t stop the warm spread of joy over his words, even if they had been spoken with a grumpy-bear growl.
She hoped the secret service would let their children come over sometime soon. At least no one had been seriously injured. The sharpshooter had been hit in the shoulder and was reported to be doing well in surgery.
The stray bullet from Mashchenko’s gun, as he and Hank struggled, had struck one of the aircrew—who’d been with them from the start of this trip—in the arm. A superficial wound, thank God.
The injured sergeant was already being lauded by the press as the hero of the day as he’d helped carry an elderly woman to safety during the fracas.