Big Sky, Loyal Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  Patrick spit into the worn porcelain sink and studied his reflection in the small medicine cabinet mirror.

  So…was he the hero? She’d kissed him as if he was. Like she really meant it. Meant it? Shoot! Lauren had kissed him in a way that no previous lover had ever prepared him for. Unleashed, intense, no hesitancy at all. It was an all-out kiss of hot passion that still had him tingling from head to toe. Figure out how to capture that on film and it would be a sellout.

  “I’m guessing by how late it isn’t,” Stan didn’t look up from his book, “that the sultry Clara turned you down.”

  “Didn’t even go there.”

  “Seriously?” Stan looked up from his book for the first time, narrowing his eyes as if Patrick had somehow changed. “You really do have that Army dame on the brain, don’t you?”

  “That Army dame was a Delta Force soldier.”

  “They’re called operators,” he tossed aside his book and released the straps of his prosthetic arm.

  Patrick filed that away for later use. “Worked with dogs, like you. Maybe that explains the way Rip reacted to her.”

  “Maybe… No dog ever reacted to me that way.”

  “Well, if you took a shower once in a while.”

  Stan stopped working on his arm for a moment to give Patrick the finger. Then he got the arm off and slid it under the edge of the bunk. He unrolled the protective sock off the odd stump that Patrick had never quite grown used to, so he looked away. It seemed politer to do so.

  “Said she was a handler. Until she lost her dog.” Patrick decided his grass-stained jeans were past redemption and chucked them in the laundry pile. However, the shirt was clean since the volleyball game and smelled slightly of Lauren. He tossed it over a chair for tomorrow.

  Patrick turned for his bunk and froze.

  Stan stared at him—the color leached out of his face.

  “What?”

  “She lost her dog?” Stan’s voice was rough.

  “It’s not like she misplaced it somewhere.” Stan didn’t get to be angry at her. It sounded like she had enough on her plate. “Said it was killed.”

  Stan, Mr. Unflappable SEAL, actually flinched.

  “What?”

  “You see this?” Stan waved his stump at him. “Really look at it.”

  Patrick did. Stan’s arm had been cut off mid-biceps. The flesh folded strangely at the end of the stump. Stan’s big shoulder muscles tapered to nothing at the end of his stump right where his other biceps bulged. He looked at his own arm and tried to imagine what it would be like if three-quarters of it was gone, and couldn’t. It was too much a part of him.

  “This is nothing—Nothing!—compared with losing a dog. I’m so stupid! Don’t know why I didn’t see it. Thought she was weak when she fainted. But turning around to see Rip sitting at her feet… Man! I really should have seen it. No wonder Colonel Gibson is hovering over her so much.”

  Stan’s face was a study of pain and fury that made Patrick both wish for a camera and be glad he didn’t have one. It was such a pure emotion, but it was also far too personal to try to use.

  He aimed his stump right at Patrick’s face, making him take a step back. “You don’t treat her right, cowboy, and I hear about it—you’re burnt toast. We clear on that?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Sure,” Stan scoffed. He flicked off the light. “Get some sleep and do your best not to be your usual self around her.”

  Patrick found his way into the upper bunk in the dark.

  Stan didn’t have to worry about not treating her right. She’d already walked away from him and left him standing in the dark.

  But Stan was wrong about Lauren being fragile. She’d said she was a mess, but that, too, was part of the leading lady’s role. A mess, but already so magnificently strong that the audience could only hold its breath, awaiting the moment when she’d discover that inner truth.

  And Lauren hadn’t exactly turned him down. There was still a chance. A chance that would be vastly improved if she came out with the hunting party.

  And the hero settles in, excited by the possibilities of what tomorrow will bring.

  But the possibility of what? Normally he’d be shrugging off his disappointment that some female ranch guest hadn’t been as willing as she’d first seemed. He knew he was good-looking enough that once things started, they rarely stopped, but it happened.

  This felt different. He wanted…

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  A chance to play with Lauren’s fantastic body? The way they’d been pressed together, there was no question about the visuals not matching reality—he’d never held any woman who felt like that.

  He wanted…

  More.

  Real deep there, Mr. Gallagher.

  That didn’t tell him what he wanted more of. He…liked her. Her fierceness on the volleyball court and in his arms. Her quiet, observer silence at other times. Her honesty and integrity in not wanting to use him, no matter how willing he’d been to let her.

  She was a fascinating character with richness and depth. She had secrets and internal conflicts that showed only briefly above the surface of her Delta cool. Her beauty hadn’t gone to her head; she acted as if it wasn’t a magnet for every eye in the vicinity.

  He wanted…Lauren Foster. Not just any woman. He wanted her. And not just for some fun.

  Well, that was new as well.

  Now that the hero has plotted his course…

  If only he had a clue what was going on with the heroine.

  “You’re up late,” Lauren said softly so as not to wake the baby asleep in Emily’s arms.

  “Uh,” Emily barely managed a response. She sat in one of the deep leather wingback chairs wearing a bright yellow terrycloth bathrobe with her slippered feet propped up on an ottoman. Her own head was back as if exhausted, but her arms were rocking the baby. She looked so unlike the powerful woman Lauren had met on her first arrival that she half wondered if Emily had a twin.

  “Like your slippers.”

  “Mark’s idea of a creative Christmas present,” Emily blinked at her blearily. The slippers were shaped and colored like the ugliest trout imaginable, with big smiles and googly eyes.

  “Not surprised. You should have seen him when I was the only one able to catch any fish.” Lauren settled into the chair close beside Emily. The baby had Mark’s dark hair and built-in tan coloring overlaid on Emily’s fine features. “She’s cute.” Unlike most babies in Lauren’s limited experience, this one actually was.

  “Cute. Let me tell you about cute. I was fast asleep and then Belle started fussing. I didn’t want her waking Tessa, my four-year-old, so I brought her out here. Cute? Never have two kids together. You might skip having even one.”

  “Then why are you looking at her like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you couldn’t love her more if you tried?”

  Emily grimaced but it did nothing to change her expression. “Maybe I do. But at the moment I’d rather be asleep. I think one of my arms already is.”

  “I could hold her for a while.” And where had that come from? Lauren had never held a baby in her life.

  “Would you? I really need a moment to not be Mom.”

  And before Lauren could so much as blink, she had an armful of blanket-wrapped child. Once she got over the initial nerves, she could only look down at it in surprise. “She’s so small.”

  “Won’t last,” Emily stood and shook out her arm. “Motherhood changes you in so many ways. Good ways, but it never stops. Tea?”

  “Sure.” Lauren leaned close over the baby. A whiff of talcum powder and… “Alert! Alert!”

  “What?”

  “Belay the tea. We have a DEFCON 2 nasal alert going on over here.”

  Emily groaned. “I’ll be right back.” True to her word, she was back with a big carryall before the vapors emanating off the child had quite melted Lauren’s face off.

  “How
can you sleep through that?” she asked the child.

  “Wrong question,” Emily set out a plastic sheet on the ottoman. “The real question is how she does it so constantly. Tessa went through less than half the diapers. If I’d known what a blessing that was, I might have appreciated it more at the time…though I doubt it.”

  Despite her complaints, it was under two minutes flat that the rebundled baby—who’d barely roused for the procedure—lay once more in Lauren’s arms, smelling mostly of talcum powder this time as Emily bagged the poop explosion.

  “Thankfully it wasn’t a bad one.”

  “That wasn’t a bad one? Sign me up for no kids. Definitely.”

  “You’ll change your tune once you find the right man,” Emily returned to making the tea and had it done before Lauren had quite adapted to the tiny child in her arms. “It’s some sort of a curse—a foul magic that radiates from him that makes an otherwise rational woman want to bear his child.” She slouched back in her chair cradling her mug of steaming chamomile tea like a lifeline. But she had a soft smile as she looked down at her child asleep in Lauren’s arms.

  “Maybe I’ll just swear off men.” The right man? What man would make her want to go through all of the pain and trouble? Though Belle did look sweeter than a Peanut Butter and Banana Cream from Doughnut Plant in the Hotel Chelsea. It was easy to imagine a child with Patrick’s softly curling hair and easy smile.

  And it was easy to imagine that she’d completely lost it and belonged in a psych ward—Section 8 and all.

  “Doesn’t work, does it?” Emily was smiling at her over her tea mug.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Pretending to ourselves that we aren’t thinking about them.”

  “I—” Lauren shut her mouth. Being Delta, she’d learned to keep her mouth shut when she didn’t have anything to say. But she should be able to come up with some good defense, argument, or at least a decent denial.

  “I spent months trying not to think about Mark. First he was my commanding officer, but years before that he saved my life. Fished me out of a jungle nightmare in the wrong part of Thailand. He’s the reason I applied to the Night Stalkers—gunning to be beside him. Never figured on a man that amazing noticing me, but at least I’d get to serve with him.”

  “What happened when he did notice you?”

  “I honestly don’t remember. I remember his kiss because it was impossible to forget that. Men are not supposed to have that kind of power over my body—but he did. He claims that I slammed him headfirst into a dining table on an aircraft carrier, then climbed in as passenger on an F/A-18F Super Hornet, but all I remember is that kiss. Came out of nowhere and almost knocked me out. One moment he was raging at me and the next we were in full lip-lock.”

  “Well, that wasn’t quite my reaction…” All she’d done was melt against Patrick while her body begged him to ravage her past all reason.

  “Thought so,” Emily was nodding as if she’d just won a bet with herself.

  “What?”

  “You don’t strike me as a woman big on fooling herself, Lauren.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “But I’m—” not… Except she was. She was thinking about when was her next chance to test herself with Patrick. A chance to find that inner part of her that had indeed gone soft and mushy as he held her. She blew out a hard breath that briefly unsettled Belle, who gurgled, then turned her face into Lauren’s chest and went back to sleep. What would it be like to have her own child do that?

  Her own child?

  She quickly shuffled the baby back into her mother’s arms. “What are you trying to do to me, Emily?”

  “Nothing intentional,” she said softly. Emily rose, offered a nod and a yawn, then shuffled from the room in her trout slippers without another word.

  Lauren trusted her words, but she wasn’t so sure about trusting Emily’s silence.

  Chapter 5

  “Where’s Claudia?” Lauren missed her at the breakfast table. Mark was gone as well. Only Emily and Michael remained. No kid. They sat alone, yet in silence. It didn’t feel awkward. It also wasn’t filled with questions like Emily’s silence last night. It was simply…silence—silence with coffee mugs. Neither of them talking and neither one uncomfortable with that.

  Lauren had risen with the sun, but the ranch hands had already eaten and cleared out. No sign of Patrick, but she wasn’t going to satisfy Emily’s knowing look by asking about his whereabouts.

  “Claudia was called back in. Mark’s flying her to Great Falls airport right now.”

  Lauren vaguely remembered the sounds of a departing helicopter as she’d woken. The little JetRanger was so quiet compared to a Black Hawk that it definitely wasn’t what had dragged her from sleep.

  No, it was the rather lurid dream. A lurid dream that had prompted a long cold shower and made her miss the others at breakfast. It didn’t include Patrick’s face… But it might have included the feel of him and she most definitely was not comfortable with that.

  “But you weren’t called?” she asked Michael as Nathan delivered one of his breakfast platters and a steaming mug. The caffeine slammed her hard—hard enough to pretend the dream hadn’t been quite the serious breach of internal security that it had felt like in the first place.

  Michael shook his head. “I was ordered to take a leave of absence.”

  Emily’s mug, which had been raised high to empty the dregs, fell to the table and shattered against her heavy stoneware plate. She goggled at Michael but couldn’t seem to speak. Which meant that it was news of an unprecedented scale.

  “I take it that doesn’t happen to you much?” Lauren asked, enjoying her own serene calm in the face of Emily’s shock.

  “Last time was the week before I was engaged to Claudia.”

  “Sounds more like a vacation than enforced leave. Though it’s a story I’d pay to hear.” Not that there was any chance of Michael spilling a single detail. Claudia she might have been able to get some juicy tidbits from, but not Colonel Michael Gibson.

  “What? You mean tell you what happened after I proposed?” And Michael’s expression actually softened at whatever that memory might be.

  “I’m guessing that included great times in a remote location. I meant you proposing, because I’m sure that you did it without saying anything.”

  “We’ve both always had a preference for remote locations,” Michael’s infinitesimal smile said that he too was enjoying the banter and Emily’s complete discomfiture. And his shrug about a silent proposal was eloquent. Maybe for the first time in his career, Michael was on inactive status until someone else said he was back in.

  “Are you hurt?”

  He just shook his head. No wonder Emily had been so shocked. Now she was starting to feel it herself. What was going on that the Delta commander had taken Michael, his Number One field operator, off the front line?

  Emily finally managed to gather the broken chunks of her mug, dump them on her empty plate, and shove the whole thing aside. “Does Claudia know?”

  “This morning. Before she left.” Michael shrugged.

  “Did you also tell her—”

  “Yes,” Michael’s growl told her to keep her mouth shut, which had Emily looking back and forth between the two of them. Lauren was down with that, so kept her thoughts about gruff men telling their wives that they loved them to herself.

  “So you filled her in and then shuffled her off to keep Emily and me from questioning her?”

  “I think my wife is made of sterner stuff than you think.”

  Lauren glanced over at Emily. Their shared look said that, between them, they could have gotten around Claudia’s defenses.

  But there was no chance of getting around Michael’s.

  Emily opened her mouth to try anyway when a gurgling sound came out of her phone. She was on her feet and gone before the sound rose to a questioning cry. Baby monitor app.

  Michael looked
down at his empty mug, then over at Lauren’s plate. Once again, she’d eaten Nathan’s food without really tasting it. It was a soldier’s habit—and she’d make sure that it was one of the first she broke.

  He rose, and Lauren knew by his look that she was supposed to follow.

  As Patrick waved at the Mooney M20E Chaparral circling down to land, he was sorry to have missed Lauren at breakfast. The single-engine airplane circled once more before lining up to land on the roadway. The dirt and gravel road was broad enough to be a landing strip for small planes. It ran between the fences that separated Larson and Henderson pastures and led to both of the ranches’ driveways. A bright orange windsock fluttered slightly in the gentle morning breeze.

  It was shortly after sunrise and it was a fine day. Mack Bryson, the pilot, knew the routine and had radioed ahead so that Patrick would be waiting to drop a section of the fence line. Touchdown kicked puffs of dirt off the three wheels, then the plane slowed abruptly. In moments, the pilot had taxied through the gap in the fence into the lower field with a throbbing roar of the three-bladed propeller, then shut it down in the tall grass.

  Mack had taken him up in it last year and Patrick had decided that having a horse as his primary mode of transportation was just fine. The Chaparral was the fastest production single-engine airplane of its day and still moved fast enough to give him the willies.

  “Hi, Mack,” Patrick called out once the engine went silent and the pilot’s door swung open.

  “Howdy, youngster,” Mack’s reply was cheery and his handshake enthusiastic if not the strongest. Of course the guy was old and even thinner than a young Jimmy Stewart, though with none of his height. He looked about as heavy as a feather, but Patrick had learned over the last couple years not to underestimate him when he was on the trail of an elk.

  “Growing shorter, Old Man.” Mack didn’t even reach Patrick’s shoulder and was probably older than his grandfather, though he’d never asked. The word wizened didn’t fit someone so impossibly cheery.

  “Still on the right side of the ground, youngster,” he was wholly unflappable.