She went into the large kitchen through a swinging door. “It’s your valley now, too, Dev.”
Sally Fremont greeted him. She was busy at the granite counter. The blue-eyed woman dried her hands, turned and shook his hand, smiling up at him. Her black and gray hair was up in a topknot, and she was dressed in a pair of simple blue slacks with a white blouse. She had an assistant, Judy, helping her with today’s menu. She was thrilled to have the wine and thanked him.
Catching his hand, Andy said, “Come on, let’s go out to the main living room.”
He was caught off-guard by the warm greetings when he entered the massive room with its floor-to-ceiling river-rock fireplace. There were three long, dark brown leather couches placed in a U-shape toward it, so that everyone had a place to sit and could make eye contact with one another. In the center was a black, red, gray and white hand-woven Navajo rug, and a large cedar coffee table with glass, so the beautiful rug could be seen through it.
“Luke,” Andy called, gesturing for him to come over to where they stood at the opening of the couches, “come and meet my boss, Dev Mitchell.”
Dev saw Luke, who had short brown hair, dark blue eyes, and a six-foot frame unwind, a grin on his oval face. None of the adopted children looked anything like the others. He put his hand forward. “Nice to meet you, Luke.”
“Same here,” he said, gripping Dev’s hand and shaking it. “Andy told me all about you.”
Rolling his eyes, he said, “Oh, no . . .”
The room burst into laughter.
Andy gave Dev a playful punch in the upper arm. “It was all good, Dev!”
Luke released his hand and gestured to the couch. “We’ve saved you a place. Come and sit down?”
Quietly in awe of this multicultural family, the obvious love in everyone’s eyes for one another, made him feel good. The Whitcombs had men and women of all colors working on their ranch. That, to him, was a good sign. It didn’t matter the color of a person’s skin or their religion or gender. He’d been around Maud and Steve enough now to realize they were looking at a person’s heart, his or her actions; not what they said, but what they did. He did the same thing, feeling at home with this group.
Luke grabbed Andy’s hand as they approached the couch. “Sis, you can sit between us. A rose between two thorns,” he jested, guiding her over so she could sit down.
“Only for you, Luke,” she threatened.
“Oh, I forgot, you’re the combat pilot in the family,” he teased her mercilessly, giving her a quick, hard hug and kissing the top of her head.
Dev sat next to her, liking the fire in her eyes as her brother teased her. Everyone was chuckling and trading glances.
“We’re glad to have you back with us,” Maud said. “Would you like some coffee or tea?”
“No, thanks, Maud. I had a mocha latte before driving out here.” He saw several large plates of appetizers spread across the gold-and-red cedar coffee table. “Besides, Andy just took me to the kitchen and said Sally was making prime rib.” He touched his stomach. “I want to save room for that.”
Pleased, Maud asked, “You like prime rib?”
“Corned beef is my first fav, but prime rib is my second.”
“Good thing you said that.” Steve chuckled. “Maud’s favorite meal is prime rib.”
“I think he’s psychic, Mom,” Andy spoke up.
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“Dev brought a really nice burgundy wine with him. That’s your favorite red wine.”
“Wow,” Maud said, giving Dev an awed look, “you really are psychic.”
Steve, who sat next to his wife, turned and whispered loudly, “And he likes prime rib. Think we’ll keep him?”
Dev noticed the sparkle in Maud’s eyes. And then he noticed Andy was blushing fiercely, her cheeks a bright red.
Luke gave Dev a look of appraisal. “My Wonder Woman–sister thinks you’re a real hero, and we all agree with her. She’s told us the story of how you met and how you led Andy out of harm’s way in Afghanistan.”
Holding up his hand, Dev demurred, “Andy had just as much say as I did in that five-day run to escape the Taliban.”
“Yeah,” Luke said slyly, “but you were the Boy Scout.”
“Well,” Dev said, giving her a tender glance and then devoting his attention to Luke, “she’s being too humble. It took both of us to get out of that situation. We each brought certain skills and knowledge, not to mention intuition. We were a team and we worked off each other’s strengths, not our weaknesses.”
“I like him, Andy. He’s a team player.”
“Yes,” Sky spoke up, “and the military has trained us for that: helping one another.”
All heads nodded somberly, agreeing.
“Did Andy tell you anything about me?” Luke wanted to know, placing his arm around her shoulders, giving her a quick hug.
“No,” Dev said. He saw Luke was far more outgoing than Gabe. And Andy obviously had a very loving relationship with her younger brother.
Sky snickered. “Luke isn’t one to hold back. He’s the true extrovert of our family.”
“He’s a Gemini,” Maud said, her smile growing. “Anyone who meets Luke has a new friend in him.”
“Actually,” Luke said, giving Dev an amused look, “my family is being very kind because you’re here. I was adopted by them when I was two years old. I don’t have any memories until about three.” He pointed at Andy. “I remember Andy being stressed and asking our mother why I always talked so much.”
The whole family burst into laughter.
“Gabe and Sky were the quiet ones,” Andy said.
“What were you?” Dev wondered, teasing her.
“She was the oldest one of the kids,” Gabe told him, “the queen bee in the house.”
“I helped the other three get around when they were young,” Andy admitted good-naturedly. “Mom and Dad relied on me to round up the herd and get them where they needed to go.”
“Head wrangler?” Dev asked, watching the grins broaden, heads bobbing in unison.
“Yep,” Steve chimed in, “and because I was out of country so much, Maud did rely on Andy’s help a great deal. Later on, we hired a nanny so that Andy didn’t have to take on that much responsibility at such a young age.”
Gabe gave Andy an evil look. “By then, it was too late. Andy was the boss. The poor nanny, Mrs. Jones, always asked for her help with the three of us.”
“Partly true,” Andy agreed. “She was a sweet older woman, and we four were truly a handful.”
“You see,” Gabe said to Dev, “our parents believed in allowing us to unfold without trying to brand us into what they wanted us to be. As a consequence, we were four highly independent children very early on. We ran circles around poor Mrs. Jones. Looking back on that time, we were wild children to contend with.”
“But to give Mrs. Jones credit,” Andy said, “she agreed with our parents that we should be given a lot of independence.”
“That didn’t mean,” Sky said, “we were unsupervised; we were. Mrs. Jones happened to have the same philosophy about children, so she acted like a benign dictator, stepping in only when we might hurt ourselves.”
“Or stopping us from doing really stupid things like swinging on a rope in the barn, pretending we were Tarzan and Jane in the jungle,” Luke chortled.
Slapping her thigh, Sky laughed and said, “The poor woman went white as a sheet when Andy leaped off the second floor of the barn hay mow window, hanging on to that rope and swinging to the other side of it where the hay was kept.”
Dev’s brows rose and he stared at Andy. “Really? You did that?”
“I sure did,” Andy said. “Mrs. Jones came out after the other three had already done it. I was the one who got caught.”
“Yes,” Gabe said, pleased. “Andy took the heat on that for all of us. Mrs. Jones let my mother, who was in her office, know what we were doing.”
Andy grumped, “Yeah,
and I was the one who had to go to her room and think about what could have happened.”
Gabe sat up, buttonholing Dev’s gaze. “Our parents didn’t believe in hitting or spanking us. We had time-outs to go think about the choices we’d made.”
“Yeah,” Luke hooted, “and you were in your room about as much as Andy was. They were the two risk-takers.”
“Oh,” Andy said archly, “and you’re a Hotshot, Luke. Like you aren’t a risk-taker, too? And so is Sky. We’re all in the same category. We’re always testing life.”
“Still curious, aren’t we?” Gabe said, giving her an affectionate glance. “That’s not going to change. Ever.”
“Yeah. Mrs. Jones caught me playing with a lighter when I was eight years old. Luckily, it was outside and not in the barn or the house. That got me an audience with my parents immediately.”
Andy gave a wry laugh. “Yes, and you had hours to think about what you did.”
“It worked, kind of,” Luke admitted. “Our dad suggested I read up on fires, firefighting and things like that.”
“As I recall,” Andy said, “Dad bought you about four books on firefighting.”
Luke gave his father a proud look. “He did. And the rest was history. I knew right then, Dev, that I wanted to be a Hotshot.”
“He did,” Steve agreed. “And he was a junior volunteer fireman at the Wind River Fire Department at ten years of age.”
“It honed his love of firefighting,” Maud told Dev.
“And I wouldn’t have found out if Mrs. Jones hadn’t caught me with that lighter,” Luke said, giving them a Cheshire cat smile.
“Maybe,” Steve cautioned. “But we channeled your interest in fire into something positive.”
“Instead of burning the house down around our ears,” Gabe deadpanned.
“I wouldn’t have done that!” Luke protested.
“Mrs. Jones, on that particular day,” Andy said archly, “sure thought you were going to burn everything down.”
“As I recall,” Sky put in, snickering, “it was July and you went around building little piles of straw outdoors and had them all in a row about two hundred feet long down by one of the corrals. You had them all lit when she discovered them, and you at work.”
“Lucky on that day there wasn’t a lot of wind,” Gabe said, barely able to squelch his grin.
“And,” Andy said in defense of Luke, “he did build those teepees out of sticks and straw in the dirt, not in the grass or inside a building. You have to give him some credit for doing that.”
“You sound like you were the mad scientist of the group,” Dev teased.
“You think the fire experiment was over the top? We’re lucky he didn’t blow the house up,” Gabe offered. “He wanted a science set he saw on TV and our parents bought it for him. The one experiment he wanted to replicate was the explosion.”
“Even then,” Luke defended himself proudly, “I liked explosions.” He turned to Dev. “When you’re out on a wildfire, you’ll get all kinds of trees or groves exploding, so that fulfilled some of my need to take risks.”
“Mom took your chemistry set away from you,” Sky reminded him. “She was afraid you’d blow up the house.”
The room rocked with laughter. Dev could see Luke preening over all the attention, even if it was at his expense. He took it in good-natured stride. A lot of men had too much pride and arrogance to laugh at themselves, but Luke wasn’t one of them. He gave everyone a bashful smile as the family remembered his growing-up antics.
“Now,” Sky ragged on Dev, “aren’t you sorry you came to dinner with all of us here at one time?”
His lips twitched. “I was an only child. This is new to me, but I really am enjoying it.”
The family traded proud looks with one another, bathed in the glow of Dev’s sincere words.
“Are you married?” Luke asked him.
He hesitated. “I was, but my wife died of a sudden heart attack in our second year of college.”
Quiet settled over the jocular group. An uncomfortable silence.
Dev saw Andy’s eyes widen, and then he saw sadness come to her expression. This wasn’t the way he wanted to tell her about his past. “Sorry,” he offered everyone. “I probably should have been a politician and changed the topic.”
Andy reached out, putting her hand on his thigh. “I like you just the way you are, Dev: honest. Politicians lie for a living. I hate that. You can never trust them or what they say.” Her gaze grew intense. “But I trust you.”
“Hey, dude,” Luke muttered, looking chastened, “this was my fault, not yours.”
“Yeah,” Gabe intoned darkly, “your Gemini mouth gets ahead of your brain sometimes.”
“Guilty,” Luke offered quietly. “I’m sorry to hear that about your wife.”
“It’s okay. Over the years, I’ve worked through the shock and loss. Life goes on,” Dev quietly offered Luke. “You just do the best you can.”
“Luke is a love-’em-and-leave-’em type,” Gabe said, giving his brother a serious look.
“That’s true,” Luke said. “I just haven’t settled down, is all. I’m only twenty-eight.”
“None of us have settled down,” Sky muttered darkly. “I think it’s because we were all abandoned, left to die.”
The room grew quiet again.
Dev struggled to say something healing for all of them because he could see the truth of Sky’s embittered words slam into the other siblings. “Being an only child, but never abandoned, I couldn’t know how it felt. It had to be tough and heartbreaking for all of you when you realized it later on.”
“It’s like,” Gabe said, “losing the person you loved.”
“Only you can make that statement,” Dev said. “I was never abandoned, nor would I ever do that to someone else.”
Andy kept her hand on his, fingers tightening around his. “You proved that when you didn’t leave me at the crash site in Afghanistan. You were there for me in every way possible. You never quit on me, you never said I was too slow or slowing us down.”
“It’s nice to be with all of you,” Dev said quietly, making eye contact with every one of them. “I miss times like this at home with my parents. You were fortunate that Maud and Steve took all of you in. From my standpoint? They chose each of you because they loved you. And I know from having a lot of friends in the military that no family is ever perfect. Many are dysfunctional. Being able to come here and meet all of you has really helped me in ways I didn’t even realize I needed to keep healing up from my own past.”
“I’m sorry I asked you that personal question,” Luke offered, his hands clasped between his knees, watching him for a reaction.
“It was bound to come up sooner or later,” Dev said. “The people at our medevac facility are all ex-military. And you naturally become personal with those people. They aren’t employees. We see one another as a team. And when you’re a team, you open up, you trust and rely on the other people. We all get one another’s stories.”
Sky gave Maud and Steve a loving look. “Just like they saw us as a team. They trusted us long before we trusted them.”
“And we did it with love,” Maud said gently. She glanced at her husband. “And in time, all four of you began to trust us. We made a point of never allowing you to feel abandoned again.”
“That must have been a lot of work,” Gabe murmured.
“It was a 24/7/365 job,” Steve said, “but we knew you were all shattered emotionally from being abandoned. Maud and I wanted to show you that adults could not only love and support you but not drop the ball and leave you without any protection.”
“We wanted all of you to feel safe,” Maud said. “And only time, consistency and being there for each of you was going to make the difference.”
Luke studied the group. “I don’t know about the other three of you, but I’m afraid to get too far into a relationship.” He shrugged and added, “Maybe that’s why I don’t stay long with a woman in
my life.”
Gabe nodded, giving him an understanding nod. “I’ve often thought I chose undercover work because it was an excuse not to become entangled in a serious relationship. In my work, I’m gone weeks or months at a time. No relationship can stand that kind of strain.”
Andy nodded. “I think, maybe, we all have to reach a point where we heal within ourselves. I know that the crash in Afghanistan made me see my life differently. Before that,” and she glanced at Dev, “I dallied around with a guy, but if he started getting too serious, I ran. I was chicken. I didn’t want to get corralled into a serious relationship.”
“And deep down,” Sky offered, “we’re all afraid that anyone we might fall in love with will abandon us, too.” She touched the area between her breasts. “I’ve never said this to anyone, but now is as good a time as ever because I trust all of you. When I analyzed why I run away from a potentially serious relationship, I found fear was the reason.”
“Fear?” Andy asked, frowning.
“Yes, fear that I couldn’t trust that person enough to take that next, serious step and make our relationship deeper and wider.” She opened her hands. “Or maybe I haven’t met the right guy yet. I don’t know . . .”
“I think all of us go through a number of relationships,” Maud told them. “And we’ve been hurt by them. So, we become gun-shy of the next person who comes along. None of the other relationships worked out, so I started thinking there was something wrong with me. There wasn’t, but at the time I met your father, I had pretty much given up on ever finding a man who was compatible with my needs.” She looked at her grown children with affection. “I would say that the right person hasn’t come along yet, and to stay open to the possibility. There are good people out there we can trust over time.”
“When I met you in that soup kitchen,” Steve said, “near Princeton, I fell in love with you that morning. I didn’t know it at first, but within three months, I was sure of it.”
“I hope it happens to me like that,” Sky said. “I’m pretty much given up on the whole idea.”
Gabe and Luke agreed.
Dev glanced at Andy, who had clasped her hands in her lap, her gaze on them. She wasn’t agreeing to it. He knew she was fully capable of speaking up for herself. Was she feeling the same way he was? That he wanted to get to know her better, have the time to fully explore her as a person? His gut said yes. That startled him. But it also fed him hope for a future that included Andy. Only time would tell him those things. It felt as if a silent step had been taken between them, a sensing and a knowing. Was Andy afraid to take the next step, trust him enough to go forward with whatever they had?
Wind River Protector Page 17
