Code Name: Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

thoughts back to his mission.
    Thanks to his training, he was adept at burying his emotions and forgetting them. The sight of a woman’s uneven hair wasn’t going to make him backslide.
    In Wolfe’s line of work, feelings got a man killed faster than bullets.
    He kept that thought in mind as he followed Kit back to the ranch, careful to stay out of sight.
    Â 
    K IT WATCHED SHADOWS pool across the empty courtyard, feeling unbearably tired.
    She was still shaken by her encounter with the cougar. Shivering, she stared at the ridge above the ranch and realized how lucky she was to be alive. She wanted to believe that her quick response with voice and motion cues had scared the predator away, but she couldn’t. The animal had looked wounded. Perhaps something else had frightened it and sent it running away into the brush.
    Too keyed up to sleep, she paced the living room, unable to forget the cougar’s shrill cry. Silent and smart, the animal could be outside the wall right now, searching for a tree branch with access into the nearby courtyard.
    Enough.
    Disgusted, Kit grabbed her old sweater from the arm of the couch and strode down the hall. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well tackle the pile of bills that had accumulated over the last week. Food, equipment and medical care for the dogs were just the beginning, yet she refused to stint on materials or food for her animals, even if it meant that she wore threadbare jeans and sneakers with holes in the bottoms.
    The ranch was a steady drain on the small legacy that had come to Kit at her parents’ death. With forty acres of high desert stretching between two mountain ranges, the land was unsuited for ranching, and the cost of adding modern irrigation would have been prohibitive. Thanks to Kit’s growing reputation training service dogs, her bank account had finally crept out of the red, but it might be five years before she could actually take a vacation.
    Five years….
    Frowning, she sank into the old chair behind her wooden desk. It was the same place where her mother had handled the ranch’s account books and budgets. The pitted wood was cool beneath her fingers, smooth from years of use. Closing her eyes, she could imagine her mother lining up pens and stacking bills in neat piles as she calculated new ways to stretch a dollar.
    Kit did the stretching now.
    A local dog food company was pestering her to endorse a new product. The money would help her buy new tires for her Jeep and install an alarm system at the ranch.
    As she reached for her checkbook, she saw the red message button flashing on her telephone and quickly scanned the calls. She would be devastated to miss a call from her brother, who was impossible to reach and always phoned at unpredictable times. If she’d missed Trace today, it might be months before she heard from him again.
    Triggering her replay button, she fumed through two mortgage offers. The third message was from her oldest friend.
    â€œKit, it’s Miki. I just got back from a new project in Santa Fe. You are not going to believe the assignment I landed this time. Let’s go drink double shots of tequila while I tell you about it, okay? I need some advice. Stop spoiling those gorgeous canines and give me a call.”
    Kit smiled, wondering what kind of bizarre situation her old friend had gotten into now. A year ago it was making a tour documentary for a punk band that performed with defanged rattlesnakes, and her most recent job had been shooting trailers for indie horror movies. Whatever her new assignment, it was bound to be strange. Miki attracted bizarre like honey attracted flies.
    The next message was the crisp, professional voice of Kit’s vet, calling to make an appointment for a vaccination titer, a procedure required to check the immunization status of the four puppies. Liz Merrigold had been the O’Halloran family vet for nearly a decade, as well as the local contact for