Mirisa’s bright giggles weren’t helping him shed the comic-relief sidekick role one little bit.
“What the heck?” Lauren had only ducked into her room long enough for a combat shower and a change of clothes. In the four minutes she’d been gone, the breakfast table had changed from packed solid with joking field hands to empty. And Mark and Michael were nowhere to be seen.
“How do you like your eggs?” Nathan was the only one left in the kitchen.
“Couldn’t care.”
“I’m a chef. You’ve got to do better than that, First Sergeant.”
“Don’t call me that!” It came out with a snap he didn’t deserve. She grimaced an apology. “I’m on the outside. Retired. My name is Lauren Foster. That’s who I am now.”
“Sorry. I heard Colonel Gibson refer to you as First Sergeant. The way he said it, I’m guessing that’s good.”
“For a female dog handler, I suppose so.” Actually it was good and hard won. “But—”
“Oh, you’re like Stan.”
“No,” she wasn’t. Not anymore. “Yes,” because it was what she had been. “I—” she didn’t know what to say. “Scrambled is fine.”
“Scrambled it is,” Nathan turned to the stove.
“Where are those two idiots?” She was going to get to the bottom of their plans if she had to take them all the way down herself—or maybe she’d enlist Emily and Claudia and do some serious damage.
Nathan laughed easily.
She supposed that Emily was right, Henderson’s Ranch had learned to be tolerant of ex-military personnel and their moods.
“They decided to go into town for breakfast and some errands.”
“When will they be back?” How soon could she throttle them? One or both. She was past caring.
“Hard to say. They drove and it’s over thirty miles to Choteau, which is the nearest place. More like eighty each way if they run in to Great Falls.” Nathan served her up a plate…no, a platter thick with toast, bacon, hash browns, and scrambled eggs. “Hope this is okay, the guys wiped out all the sausage I had made up.”
“You make your own sausage?”
“Sure.”
“For sausages I usually hit a sausage, pepper, and onion cart in Central Park or over at Riposo on 72nd.” She took a piece of bacon with her fingers and crunched down on it. Just fine with her.
“I prefer Faicco down on Bleeker, but I was always a downtown sort of guy.”
Lauren leaned back against the counter and ate one-handed, occasionally pausing for some coffee.
“You’re a southpaw.”
She waved her fork at him left-handed. He waved back with a chef’s knife in his own left, then they traded the silent smile that left-handers always had for each other.
She’d shoveled down half the plate before she caught herself. If she ate fast, then there was nothing waiting for what to do next. And it was food worth tasting. Even Nathan’s scrambled eggs were worth slowing down for.
So, to give her mouth something to do other than eat, she started asking questions about New York—she’d barely been back in fifteen years and would soon be living there. She’d never heard of either of his restaurants, but she’d wager that her brother had. His crowd was into the whole foodie thing, even if they couldn’t afford the upper tiers of it. She’d have to ask. No rush. She hadn’t even told him yet that she was out. Just showing up was more her style and he’d always been fine with that—which made him a perfect brother, even if they weren’t overly close. He was…comfortable. More than either of their parents had ever been, so she wasn’t going to Florida. Comfortable was about all she could handle at the moment.
Kind of like standing here chatting with Nathan was comfortable. He was pleasant, an easy man to talk to.
“So where’s this amazing woman I can see that you’re dying to tell me about?”
She couldn’t have gotten a much bigger reaction with a Taser.
He’ been puttering around the kitchen, fussing over a marinade for a tub of chicken and answering her with just as little brain as she’d been using to chat with him about New York.
Suddenly she had his full attention.
“Julie’s out on a trail ride. I try not to worry. She takes the advanced riders out into the Flathead Wilderness, right up into the heart of the Rockies. She’s taken me there, but only the easier places. She’s the best rider the ranch has—I sometimes think she was born on a horse. Or maybe she’s part horse. I’ve asked her but she thinks I’m just being silly. You know, she placed third in barrel racing at the Calgary Stampede. She’s thinking about getting back into it next year. Anyway,” he waved his hands long enough to catch a breath before plunging back in. “We schedule really high-end riders together, into every other week over the summer. This is the last one. The risk of a heavy snowfall becomes too much any later in the season, especially up in the Wilderness. It’s already not good. Storms blow out of there with so little warning.”
“Yeah, the Khyber Pass in the Hindu Kush has fast weather changes like that.” That earned her a blank look. Right. Her past was now irrelevant. Civvie-world was looking harder and harder with each passing moment. She’d been fine camping out with Mark and Colonel Gibson. But each time she dealt with a civilian, the conversations kept having these dead moments when things like foreign places came up that weren’t in France or Italy—or, heaven help her, Canada.
“Uh-huh,” Nathan made an agreement sound, but too little too late. “Stan nearly got himself killed up at the waterfall above a fishing cabin out there in a freak spring snowstorm. He says he’d be dead if it wasn’t for Bertram saving his life.”
“Who’s Bertram?” Then her throat went dry as a brownout dust storm.
“That’s—”
“One of his dogs,” she managed to choke out.
Nathan nodded, then returned to the subject of his bride-to-be and high country rides as if Lauren hadn’t just stepped on the worst kind of land mine.
It wasn’t some IED—improvised explosive device—that went off when you stepped on them that were the worst.
Nor the engineered Bouncing Betties—designed to pop up to waist-high after you stepped off them, then release a lateral explosion to cut down a whole squad.
Her demolitions trainer had called the worst ones HSE mines—Hollywood Special Effect—because they didn’t really exist out in the battlespace. Step on them, and there’s a loud click. “Everyone” knows that stepping off them is what blows them up. So some unlucky sod just stands on and on, with nothing his buddies can do to save him.
“Strictly Hollywood,” her trainer had sounded disgusted and moved on.
But here she stood, in the warm, sunny kitchen of Henderson’s Ranch, with her foot firmly down on an HSE mine and wondered just how soon it was going to kill her.
Did she dare lift her foot?
Don’t think.
Did she dare breathe?
Did she dare even blink?
A dog trainer saved by his dog. A man who said his life had been saved by a dog… Then she thought about Stan and his hooks—he’d clearly been through worse than she had. Which meant that if he said Bertram saved his life, the Malinois had.
She didn’t want to think about dogs. Especially not trained dogs. Was this why Colonel Gibson had dragged her across the country? To be “cured” about dogs?
Lauren handed her half-finished plate to Nathan and walked out of the kitchen while he was still in mid-sentence about something. She’d apologize later. If she survived.
Out of the back door, she tried to breathe but couldn’t find any air.
She leaned back against the lumpy log siding, gasping like the fish she’d yanked out of the stream last night. The sun was still on the far side of the house, the air here on the west side was cool, damp, cloying. It stuck in her throat until she feared she would choke.
Was this PTSD?
No!
She’d met the wrecks that had once been soldiers. She wasn’
t one of those. No ruined shell of a soldier plagued by nightmares until they couldn’t function. She’d walked out of the Army standing tall, not carried into some VA psych ward strapped on a stretcher. No negative psych eval on her DD 214, despite shredding the re-up offer on the personnel officer’s desk—she’d still count that as a healthy choice.
Covering her face with her hands, she screamed into her own palms in frustration.
“It doesn’t help, does it?”
This time Lauren yelped as she spun to face Emily. She was leaning one shoulder against the lodge’s wall about ten feet away.
“How…”
“Nathan called. He said you just blanked out in mid-sentence.”
“I’m fine!” At least she would be if no one was watching her.
Emily just nodded. “The screaming doesn’t help though, does it?”
“Tenacious shrew,” Lauren tried to keep the mumble to herself, but it didn’t work. Strike Two, Foster.
“That’s what Mark keeps telling me, though he uses kinder words.”
Lauren considered apologizing, but didn’t feel like it.
Emily pushed off the wall and strolled out of the lodge’s shadow. The sun caught her light hair and lit it like a beacon. “The problem is that the scream doesn’t tell you if you’re still sane or not.”
Lauren cursed, carefully to herself this time, then hurried over to fall in beside Emily. There was a heat to the sun, despite the coolness of the early September air. Maybe that contrast was what made it taste like fall.
“Doesn’t even let off the steam behind it.”
“Then what does help?” Which of course implied that there was a problem. But there wasn’t…but there was. Maybe it was just jet lag. Or being in Montana. Or…
“You’ll hate the answer.”
“That’s okay. I already hate the question.”
Emily offered one of her ghostly smiles. “Patience.”
“You baiting me with that lame-o answer?”
“Nope,” Emily guided them around the main lodge, then crossed the broad sunlit patch of the main yard. All roads met here: the one up from the ranch entrance, branches off to outbuildings, barns, and even up to cabins. A dozen cars, a pair of horse trailers, and a tractor were parked in various places. A classic chuck wagon, complete with wooden wheels and a hooped red-and-white checked canopy was backed into an open garage bay.
Lauren hadn’t had a chance to explore anything yet—not that she wanted to. She wanted to curl up on her brother’s couch, watch bad cable, and…go quietly insane in private.
“Patience isn’t something I’m real good at.”
“Delta? Dog handler? Those didn’t teach you patience?”
“I may have been accused of being as hyper as my Malinois.”
“Restless or hyper?” Emily led her into the biggest of the barns.
“Wow! This is different,” Lauren stumbled to a halt. She’d never been in a big horse barn before. Or a cow barn, for that matter. It was like a kennel on steroids. But instead of a long line of chain-link gates blocking concrete cells each with a dog bed, a chew toy, and a hyper-driven war dog, it was all wood and shadows. The sun’s heat had been chopped off behind them, but rather than being cold, there was a warmth—a warmth that smelled distinctly horsey, but was welcoming nonetheless. The wide central aisle was lined with wooden stalls that looked as old as the hills. The wood was dark and weathered, scuffed with years of hard use. But not beaten and battered. Instead it felt better cared for than a new-built military kennel.
Many of the stalls were open—horses out on rides or grazing in the pasture. But every now and then, the half-height door was closed and a horse would peek out at the two women who had suddenly entered their world.
At the center of the long barn was the only break in the aisle of stalls. Offices to the right. To the left, a large space filled with saddles and bridles. The sign above it said “Tack Room.”
A steep flight of stairs led up to another room with large windows that she couldn’t see in. She scanned the length of the barn. No skylight. One her way in, she’d spotted a skylight at roughly this location. Near the three rooftop satellite antennas.
She shifted enough to see the door. Biometric-coded lock. She’d bet the windows were one-way glass as well or she’d be able to see the brightness of the skylight. A small sign said, “Tac Room.” Without the k.
She looked back down to see Emily watching her closely.
Lauren stuffed her fists in her pockets and shrugged, Ain’t seen nothing. Except a military-grade installation in the middle of a Montana horse barn where it made absolutely no sense. She’d seen similar installations in war zones, usually CIA command-and-control rooms.
She glared her knowledge at Emily: I can see you clearly, woman, no matter how blind and dumb everyone else around you is.
Emily kept her thoughts to herself as she stepped up to a stall close by the stairs.
A horse the color of mahogany stretched out particularly far.
“Hello Chesapeake,” Emily moved in to rub the horse’s nose, which made it sigh happily.
“You ride horses, too. Any show ribbons?” Because there was nothing Major Emily Beale didn’t do well.
“No, that’s Julie—Nathan’s intended. Has a whole wall of them. But riding is part of living on a ranch. Chesapeake and I had our first ride together the day before my wedding. Went well, didn’t it, pal?” She addressed the last to the horse. The horse made a happy sound, with extended neck and awfully big teeth exposed.
“Is that a laugh or is he about to eat you?”
“A laugh. Besides, horses are vegetarians. It wasn’t one of Mark’s better days. He made up for it the next day though.”
“When he married you.”
Emily held up her left hand as proof. The ring’s stone matched the color of her eyes.
“Nice,” she was never sure of what else to say when someone did that. The one time she’d held a ring it had seemed so light and insubstantial—the moment before she’d chucked her dreams into the polluted river.
“Tell me about your—”
“Oh! I knew it!” Lauren should never have followed Emily. It had been part habit—because Major Beale, retired or not, was a superior officer. It had also been because she was desperate. But she wasn’t that desperate.
“—your life,” the major continued as if Lauren hadn’t spoken, “back in New York.”
“Oh. Thought you were going to dig into the mess I am now. Do you have any suggestions on how I can get my foot back out of my mouth?”
“You mean your hoof?” Emily’s slight smile was understanding and washed the last of “The Major” out of Lauren’s vocabulary.
“Not a whole lot to tell. Decent enough parents who were more interested in their careers than their children. A gay older brother. Being so tall and built like a stick, I played a lot of volleyball. Nothing much of interest.” And her ex-fiancé could die along with the rest of her past, she wouldn’t bother mentioning him.
Emily merely nodded and leaned back against the half-height door.
The horse rested its head on her shoulder and they both watched her.
Lauren sat on a nearby hay bale and tried to explain herself—something she rarely even bothered to do to herself.
“I guess I was never what you’d call a deep thinker. That was my brother, always asking me what I thought or felt until I wanted to pound on him. He had the empathy gene even when he was a little brat. Never wanted it myself. Never missed it.”
Claudia, Michael’s wife, and Chelsea, who’d told her about Minotaur’s real name, came out of a nearby room that must be the barn’s working office.
“My Doug is dreamy that way,” the redhead effused, stepping right into the middle of their conversation with her tight jeans and cowboy boots. “He’s always thinking about things like that. Me, I just blunder ahead until I run into something I have to climb over.” She sat on the bale beside Lauren, pressing thei
r shoulders together as if they were already friends. Chelsea hooked a thumb at Claudia. “She told me—”
Oh man!
“—almost nothing at all about you. Why are you dressed that way?”
Lauren looked down. She’d just grabbed the first clothes that came to hand. By ingrained training, she wore Army boots, camo pants, a black t-shirt, and her Glauca knife in the leg sheath. Wearing no sidearm felt weird, but she’d turned that in to the quartermaster before her departure from Pope Field. She’d have to get a personal weapon at the first opportunity.
These clothes defined the person she was. Civvies could never hold a candle to this.
“You say you go over things?” Lauren faced Chelsea going for a subject change.
“Sure! Right over the top!” She smacked her palms together and then shot one upward like plane taking off. Her long hair flounced with the power of the motion. Her face was mid-twenties, innocent, happy, though definitely not simple. “Best way!”
Lauren smiled softly. “Me? I go through them.” She stomped a boot, making Chesapeake jolt back a half step.
“Perfect!” Chelsea wasn’t to be slowed down. “Let’s team up. I go over them. You go through them. Emily outsmarts them. And what do you do?” She aimed the last at Claudia.
“I sic my husband on them.”
Colonel Michael Gibson was a formidable asset indeed.
Lauren didn’t laugh with the others, but she could feel the smile. It didn’t hurt as much this time.
Halfway back to the ranch, Patrick had the sickening thought that maybe Lauren would be gone before he got back. No one had said how long she was staying. She’d only arrived yesterday, but if she left without him seeing her again he’d… He didn’t know what, but he’d definitely do something. As soon as he thought of what it was.
He brought the group out onto the unpaved road a mile down from the ranch. From here, the beginners could risk a canter to get them back to the ranch in style. Rolo, of course, needed no coaxing to run, and Clara was game enough to let him do it—though she kept control of the reins this time.
Big Sky, Loyal Heart Page 6
