Big Sky, Loyal Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  With them in the lead, her daughter let loose her own reins and shouted a “Yee-haw!” like a cowboy in a movie—completely forgetting to kick the horse. But with the barn so close, her mount didn’t need more coaxing than that. In moments they were all at a canter, or at least a fast trot.

  A dozen horses thundered down the road, the Larson’s cattle fields to the left and the wide pastureland of Henderson’s Ranch to the right, with only a lone longhorn cow grazing where it wasn’t supposed to be. He waved to Lucy, who they couldn’t seem to keep out of anywhere. The cow watched him briefly as she chewed, then ducked her wide head back into the unharvested field of Henderson hay.

  He galloped to the head of the group to make sure they didn’t miss the turn up the ranch’s driveway. So he was the first to see the spectacle as they pounded triumphantly into the main yard.

  Four women played at the grassy volleyball court that had been set up near one of the corrals. Chelsea’s bright red hair waved like a flag as she raced to return a ball. Emily took the pass and leapt high at the net to fire it across. The older blonde wasn’t looking so old as she dove and saved the spike. Despite the dive, she made a near perfect setup at the net.

  Except there wasn’t anyone to take advantage of it.

  Then, rushing up from the back court, a vision sprinted ahead. Five great strides across the grass with her incredibly long legs moved Lauren from the back line to the net. She leapt into the air until it appeared she was floating there and looking down from above onto all the others.

  He nearly choked as he simultaneously tried to gasp with relief that she was still here and also hold his breath pending her play.

  She swung an arm down in a spike so hard that he could hear it over the sound of the hooves pounding into the yard behind him.

  The ball didn’t cross the net. Instead it blazed a trail as if it were a comet descending from orbit. It pounded down between Emily and Chelsea before they could even blink and he was surprised it didn’t just keep going and plow its way to China.

  Lauren turned to slap a high five with the blonde as Chelsea and Emily groaned in frustration. That’s when Patrick finally registered that Lauren wasn’t wearing a shirt. Bare feet, camo pants, and a black sports bra. She might be all leg, except she was tall enough that she was all torso as well. He couldn’t look away.

  Minotaur, however, knew his post-ride duties and turned to follow the last horse in the group over to the corral where Doug was waiting to help everyone dismount. Patrick kept straining to watch as Lauren moved to the service line at the back of the court, catching the ball with a complete surety that only happened on ESPN.

  Just before she served, she glanced for a moment in his direction.

  Then she tossed the ball high in the air, jumped up, and pummeled it into the net.

  “That’s one,” Emily called out.

  Lauren caught the ball as Claudia tossed it back to her. She wasn’t sure what had gone wrong with the first serve. Sometimes you missed. That’s just how it went. But for her, a miss was an inch outside the back line, or a bright tick on the top of the net as it went over. Emily and Chelsea had learned to respect her serves.

  Instead she had nearly pounded it into the back of Claudia’s head.

  “Maybe you should come over to our side, Claudia,” Chelsea heckled. “You’d be safer over here. C’mon, Lauren. Another net serve! Let’s go!” No matter what she might say, Chelsea crouched in preparation.

  Lauren twisted the ball until the air hole was in her palm and the manufacturer’s label was right side up and facing her. She’d done that the same way since her very first serve back in junior high. Knowing it was wrong, she thought about her prior serve rather than her present one. Had she under-lofted the ball? Or jumped so high that she’d over-topped it? The volleyball court had always been one of the few places that she could take on Delta operators woman-to-man. That and tracking with her dog—with Jupiter.

  Then she’d watched Patrick turned nearly backward in the saddle as his horse ambled away without any control from him.

  She tossed the ball, then jumped.

  Even as she hammered down on it again, she knew what she’d done wrong. Too high, and turning just enough to see if Patrick was still watching, she slammed her serve square into Claudia’s backside.

  “Hey!” Claudia stumbled forward and had to grab the net to regain her balance. “Ow! That hurt!”

  “Yes!” Chelsea’s cheer turned into some sort of a dance as she tromped about, thumbs tucked in her armpits, and her elbows flapping like a chicken’s wings.

  Claudia was now retrieving the ball as she rubbed her backside.

  Emily simply watched Lauren through the cage of the net.

  “What?” Lauren mouthed.

  Major Emily Beale was back. Her face remained utterly passive as she offered the smallest nod toward the departing cowboy and his mouse-dress-colored horse.

  When Lauren shook her head, no freaking way, Emily offered another of those fleeting half smiles.

  Chelsea’s serve hit her square in the chest. Without thinking, Lauren caught it.

  Chelsea added ecstatic clucking to her victory chicken-dance as Lauren tossed the ball back to her.

  “Did you see that?” Patrick whispered to Doug as the ranch manager helped him shoo the riders and their horses around the ring one final time. Freed of saddles, curried down, they were walking off the last of the run—both rider and horse.

  He could have had them walk the last half mile to the ranch for the cooldown, but that would ruin the triumphant return. And after two days in the saddle, it was good for the tourists as well.

  “Made it impossible to get decent work out of anybody around here for the last hour,” Doug grumbled. But he had a dreamy look that said the other ranch hands hadn’t been the only ones watching the game. As long as none of them were thinking about Lauren, maybe it was okay—though he envied them the hour.

  “You know,” Doug leaned close, “that Lauren is the only single gal of the four.”

  Which meant that every single male hand on the ranch had been thinking about her rather than the other three. Doug, on the other hand, was like some campy Hugh Grant lead every time someone so much as mentioned his wife Chelsea.

  “Heard how you carried her up to the house,” Doug continued after they’d gotten the horses back in their stalls and sent off the riders for well-deserved showers and a reminder to not be late for a fried chicken lunch in the big dining room.

  “Might have.” They wandered back out to the corral and leaned on the fence, which offered them a good view of the game.

  “Doesn’t exactly look like the frail, fainting type.”

  She didn’t.

  Emily and Lauren were facing off, clearly outclassing the other two players. They were well matched. Lauren had an inch or two of height and more reach, but Emily was so fast that she could make up for most of it. Emily was down to a sports bra as well and their bodies glistened in the sun like some ridiculous ’60s beach movie.

  Mark’s big, baby-blue pickup rolled up the drive and eased to a halt near the court. Three years and he’d never found out why it was baby blue—Mark just snarled anytime Patrick asked. He could see Mark and the old guy looking at each other, then they both climbed out, shed their shirts, and strode over to join the play.

  “Think maybe we should go even up the odds?” Patrick asked, but Doug was already on the move.

  Patrick didn’t need a horse to kick him to tell him it was a chance to actually be in the volleyball scene from Top Gun. “Am I Maverick or the Iceman?”

  Doug laughed as he pulled off his shirt and kicked away his cowboy boots.

  “Remember Merlin?”

  “The goof played by Tim Robbins?”

  “Bingo,” Doug slapped him on the shoulder and sent him over to Lauren’s team before stepping to the other side and sweeping Chelsea into a steamy kiss.

  Patrick stumbled to a stop close in front of Lauren. “U
h…hi.” Great opening line, dude. Oh, no, maybe he was Anthony Michael Hall in Sweet Sixteen, trying to be friends with the outrageously cute Molly Ringwald and never succeeding.

  “Can you even play volleyball?” Lauren scoffed.

  “Just you watch.” He’d played plenty on the sand at Long Beach Park as a kid.

  An hour later Patrick stood in the shower and wondered if he’d ever move again. The game had raged back and forth. No score kept, each serve and volley a triumph of its own. Each change of service a major victory.

  He’d given everything he had. And if that meant grinding his chest into bare grass in a diving save, then he’d done it. The stains felt as if they reached all of the way down to the soles of his feet…from the inside. Of course, his feet were also stained on the outside.

  But his stains hadn’t begun to match Lauren’s scars. Stan had told him that every military war dog trainer had scars—though he’d lost his worst ones overseas along with his arm. He said there were bites that somehow always found the hole through the protective layers of a bite-training suit, claw scrapes as the animal fought for a purchase on an “attacker,” and being knocked into innumerable unforgiving objects by seventy or eighty pounds of racing military war dog.

  Lauren’s body bore those scars. A slice of four parallel white lines where a rear claw had raked down her thigh. Tooth marks on her upper arm and shoulder. And other injuries that looked as if they’d hurt like mad, but weren’t in any pattern he could imagine a dog making. Two were ominously round, like bullet holes.

  Somehow, the scars had added to, rather than diminished, her perfection. She wasn’t some movie star. She was a powerful, real woman. For the hundredth time, he wondered what had made her faint that morning, but he just couldn’t imagine.

  He cranked the shower another notch hotter, letting it soak into his muscles, but he knew that he’d be sore anyway.

  There was no way that a game of v-ball to match this one had ever been played. By the end, Doug had upgraded him from Merlin to Goose—as if that was such a major improvement. At least he was one of the main characters now and married to Meg Ryan. Except he got killed off deep in the movie despite being in the “best buddy” role. That didn’t bode well.

  No matter how he tried to cast Lauren, he couldn’t find a role that put him in the leading man position beside her. For each time he threw himself into the hard ground, Lauren had already been in the right position to make the perfect tip, save, or spike. It was like watching Doug or Julie ride—they’d been born to horses and it showed.

  She’d been thrown off her game when the men joined in, but she soon settled down and proved that she was truly lethal on the court. No idle chatter for her—Lauren was a hundred percent about the game.

  “What else were you born to do, Lauren Foster?” Patrick asked the shower wall he was leaning against.

  It didn’t answer.

  “Fine. Be that way.”

  He’d figure it out himself. She’d been Delta Force. There were never any women in Delta Force movies. Just macho dudes blowing stuff up. Those flicks were low-brow, fun, and Chuck Norris had ruled. But there were no women.

  Except Lauren.

  He shut off the water and wondered if he had the energy to eat any of the fried chicken at lunch. It was his brother’s recipe, so he probably would. He was half out of the bunkhouse door before he remembered that maybe he should dry off and get dressed first.

  Chapter 4

  It was after dark and Lauren sat out on the unlit porch of the big log house, no wiser than she’d been this morning. And no closer to leaving for New York, which surprised her. The Adirondack chair was big enough for her to slouch in. The wooden slats were more comfortable than she’d expected, but she was looking forward to the queen-sized bed tonight.

  Between the jet lag, sleeping out under the stars, and the volleyball game, she felt pleasantly wrung out—without going for a 10K run. It would be tough to do that in The City. Central Park had a 10K outermost loop, but it was almost impossible to really run it between joggers, walkers, moms with strollers, horses, and all the other noise. Out here she could choose a direction and probably run 50K without bumping up against much of anything.

  No cities, barely towns.

  Montana was a strange place.

  Also no machine gun nests, no Taliban with AK47s, or ragheads who’d rather see her dead than walking tall with her dog on point for a military patrol. No parched desert that would kill for even a single mistake, without the aid of fanatics.

  “It’s different, isn’t it?” Colonel Gibson slid silently into the chair beside her—a shadow against shadow. She hadn’t heard him approach, not that it surprised her. He probably had some mental map of every creak and loose board on the entire porch tucked away in his head somewhere. She considered for a moment. She only had it about half mapped so far—an unconscious habit.

  “More than a little different. Off into bizarre-land.” Afghanistan might be more the latitude of Texas than Montana, but she’d seen plenty of the sky. And after dark there should be even less difference to observe.

  Yet being here on the ranch was like being on a completely different world.

  A hoot of an owl. The heavy flap of wings counterpointed by the high chirp of crickets. The chilly night air was now scented with wood smoke drifting from the cabins. She stuffed her fists deeper into her jacket’s pockets.

  “Why am I here, Colonel?”

  “You’ll figure it out. You never give up, Foster. I’ve seen enough who have, to know. You don’t. So you’ll get there.”

  “Jerk.”

  His silence felt as if it was wrapped around a smile. He certainly didn’t contest her accusation.

  “Fine. Why are you here?”

  And the silence shifted and changed. No, it warped. One thing a Delta learned was how to listen. Everything from direction of fire to tracking a sniper by his breathing. She didn’t need the twitch of her dog’s ear to tell her something had shifted in the man beside her.

  “Do you even know why you’re here?”

  Again that long stretch of cricket-filled silence before he answered. “I know why I came.”

  “That’s more than I’ve got. Puts you ahead of the game.”

  She could imagine his shrug even if she couldn’t see it. Why he came, which he wasn’t saying anything about. But not why he was here? What brought a man like the colonel to a ranch in the Montana Front Range?

  He was already married to a Night Stalker captain. Claudia Jean Casperson was almost as impressive as Emily Beale. Despite her quiet manner, she evoked a knee-jerk respect that couldn’t be denied. He had to know that he could trust her, but whatever was clawing at him, he wasn’t telling even her. And he hadn’t told Emily either.

  “Was that what yesterday’s fishing trip was?” She looked over at the shadow beside her. By the faint starlight glimmer, she could see by his profile that he was staring out into the night.

  “What?”

  “Was it you getting away from the ranch to avoid Emily’s and Claudia’s questions? Or were you looking to get off alone to talk with Mark and I got in the way?”

  “You weren’t in the way.”

  “Which means yes to the first question.”

  He grunted. “Sometimes I forget that I’m not the only jerk here.”

  “Proud to be. Is it me you’re looking to talk to?” There was a scary thought. She was a first sergeant (retired) with fifteen years of service. He was a colonel with something like thirty years in.

  His snort of a laugh answered that one.

  “You know, you are going to have to talk to someone at some point if you want an answer. You do know that, right?”

  Again the silence of an unvoiced shrug.

  Who was she going to have to talk to? The colonel wasn’t giving her any clues. It had better not be Stan and his dog, because there was no way that was going to happen.

  She liked Emily well enough—as well as she could lik
e someone so terrifyingly competent. Beautiful woman, two kids, handsome-as-a-dream husband, illustrious military career, retired to a massive horse ranch after four years of flying firefighting helicopters. But Lauren couldn’t imagine actually talking to her about anything important, even if she knew what she was supposed to be talking about. It would be like telling the high school beauty that you didn’t feel pretty—it was a pointless conversation because the HSB would have no point of reference to give advice from.

  Well, she certainly wouldn’t be looking for advice from—

  “Hey, there!” The porch lights blazed on. She threw an arm over her eyes to cut the glare.

  Patrick.

  “Sorry.”

  She risked peeking out and the dark had returned once more, but she still had afterimages of a brightly lit cowboy, complete with hat, blotting out the stars.

  In retrospect she recalled that she’d heard his boot heels coming across the stone foyer inside the house. But she’d felt safe enough to not bother tracking it consciously. That was a dangerous precedent for only being two days out of the service. Unless the precedent had been recognizing Patrick’s walk. Her subconscious was busy thinking other thoughts, safe in knowing it was him.

  He’d looked amazing on the volleyball court. Shirtless, he was even more impressive than merely wearing a wet one. And he had thrown himself into the game with a passion, something so few others besides herself really did. Yet he’d also brought a cheeriness that almost matched Chelsea’s—an innate positivity that made him everybody’s friend. A skill she’d certainly never had.

  “Nathan said he thought you were out here. What are you doing on the porch all alone?”

  All alone? She hadn’t heard Colonel Gibson depart, but his stealthy departure wasn’t any more of a surprise than his silent arrival.

  “Mind if I sit with you?”

  “Free country.”

  She was getting back her night senses and could feel his hesitation.

  “Sure. Sit where you like.”

  He fumbled his way along the porch. Only a quick pulling back of her legs kept him from stumbling over them. He discovered Gibson’s chair with a barked shin and a soft curse that brought the klutz moniker back to mind.