Big Sky, Loyal Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  Patrick looked down. He was still sitting in the stream, so there was no way to deny it.

  Chapter 9

  “That’s when we heard the hooves of Emily’s, Mack’s, and Michael’s horses pounding back toward us.” Lauren was enjoying herself far too much, but Patrick didn’t know how to stop the story. So he decided it was the better part of valor, or at least avoiding total humiliation, to join in the telling.

  Everyone was around the big Doug fir table in the back kitchen. They’d just finished wolfing down one of Nathan’s monster Tex-Mex, build-your-own-taco meals. For the ranch operation, it was one of those quiet turnover nights. The last of the guests had left this afternoon and the ranch had taken no reservations this weekend because of the upcoming wedding. Only Mack had remained, but he was practically family. That and the storm currently lashing rain against the big darkened windows made a flight home out of the question.

  Julie, a younger, smaller version of Emily with white-blonde hair, sat so close to Nathan that she was practically in his lap. Somehow his big brother had won the heart of the unobtainable cowgirl from next door. She now rode as an expert guide for Henderson’s Ranch and also ran a small construction company specializing in ranch maintenance.

  To add to the merry confusion, Mark Sr. and Ama were back from their cruise. Mark Henderson, Sr. had always been called Mac, without the k, but was old friends with Mack Bryson with the k. The two of them sat side by side playing it up for all they were worth. Mac this and Mack that.

  “Now that’s where the real unfairness started,” Patrick cut in before Lauren could completely bury him in the story. “When it was over—and before you others could cover the half mile back to us—she yanks on her clothes faster than greased lightning.”

  “Combat training,” Lauren crowed and even the taciturn Stan laughed.

  “This,” Patrick waved his hand helplessly at her. “This warrior princess looks at me all demure as I’m climbing out of the stream. As if she hadn’t been standing naked with a rifle while taking down a grizzly mere moments before. Minotaur—”

  “Minnie,” Chelsea chimed in with a toast of her long-neck Budweiser.

  “You need better taste in beer, Chels,” but he kept moving so she didn’t have time to sidetrack him. “Minotaur had run off with all of my dry clothes. My wet clothes from the first time Lauren dumped me in the stream…”

  He offered a scowl and she returned a cheeky grin.

  “…had turned into ice cubes. I’d rather still be sitting naked in that stream than wearing them.”

  “Well, you make a very fine sight not wearing them,” Lauren clinked her Coors on Chelsea’s Bud. She needed a beer education as well. Patrick toasted his Dos Equis toward Mark, who appeared to actually be drinking his this time. Mark looked back at him as if he’d lost his mind, which was no surprise to anyone.

  “His brother’s a fine sight too,” Julie was only looking at her fiancé, and Nathan was definitely blushing. It was still weird picturing his big brother getting married, or even making love. He was a big brother, not someone who would… It was like picturing his parents making love. Patrick did his best to shake it off and return everyone’s attention to the story.

  “And there’s seven hundred pounds of very dead grizzly lying on top of the only blanket in the neighborhood.” Not even a corner scrap had been exposed for him to cover himself with.

  “Then, just before Emily and all crested the bank…” Lauren grinned at him.

  “She picked up my cowboy hat.”

  “It had somehow gone astray in, uh, earlier events.”

  She actually blushed a little when the others laughed. Another new discovery about Lauren Foster—that she even could blush.

  “Truly exceptional earlier events,” Patrick tried to prod more of a reaction. Instead it earned him a different kind of smile.

  “Truly exceptional,” she agreed softly. Her smile was the kind that a woman reserved for one special man. To have Lauren Foster look at him that way was the best feeling of his life. Well, almost as good as the moment he wasn’t killed by a charging grizzly.

  “Guess what she did?” Their three companions knew, of course, but no one else around the table did.

  “What?” Mark asked.

  “Instead of tossing it to me so that I could be at least a little decent…”

  “I put it on,” Lauren took the end of the story anyway, earning her another big round of laughter. “Your head is too big. I had to wear it practically on the back of my head so that I could see.”

  “Sure, so that you could see Emily laughing her head off at my expense.”

  “Michael and Mack were laughing too.”

  “Perfect.” Patrick considered crawling under the dinner table to hide. “I’ll buy you one in your size the next time we’re in town.”

  “You know,” Mark’s deep voice of command drew everyone’s attention, but he was staring at Lauren. “They say that a cowboy only ever lets one woman wear his hat.”

  Patrick opened his mouth to save her, but was too slow.

  “What woman is that?”

  Mark offered what Patrick had always thought of as his evil super-villain grin. Then he rested his left hand on the big wooden table and began tapping one finger. His ring finger. His wedding band made a solid, rapping sound against the hard wood.

  “That’s pure bulls—” Lauren tried to scoff in a throat suddenly gone dry.

  Only one woman ever wore a cowboy’s hat?

  The men around the table were looking at her differently. As if they suddenly knew something about her that she didn’t. As if…

  “No way!” She looked to Chelsea for help, but she was looking at her husband Doug with a soft and dreamy expression. “Emily?” Lauren turned to her last resort…

  No refuge there either.

  “You all need to stop thinking things like that. I’m not…” But she wasn’t quite sure what she wasn’t. She certainly didn’t want to say that she wasn’t falling for Patrick, because she was and hadn’t yet figured out how to stop her downward slide.

  Unable to help herself, she slowly turned to face Patrick. If he was looking at her with puppy dog hope, she was gonna have to flatten him.

  She’d never really known fear in the heat of combat before. In the heart of the fight—in those few crucial seconds of mayhem—a soldier was too busy staying alive to be afraid. Before and after was when fear had its chance to grab hold.

  Lauren had felt raw terror down to the core of her soul when she realized that Patrick had no way to get clear of the bear’s path. Never in her life had she taken a shot as important as that first one. She’d been able to see the bear die with the first round, but had pumped in two more because somehow that would drive back the massive beast just one more crucial inch to save Patrick.

  The thought, the fear of losing Patrick so soon after she’d found him was all out of proportion to how she thought she felt about him.

  Patrick offered neither smugness nor hope. Instead he offered her a friendly shrug of commiseration that indicated the saying was real and she was going to get teased for it. It was a friendly look. As if he was the only one on her side in this whole crazy situation.

  Talk moved on to other topics, but somehow Lauren had lost her voice.

  She sat a long time listening to the merry banter around the table. It washed over her, around her, but didn’t touch her.

  The hand resting lightly on her shoulder jolted her with surprise.

  Patrick stood beside her. With the tiniest nod of his head, he indicated he was leaving and invited her to join him.

  There was nothing to hide from anyone at the table. Nothing but the fact that she had fallen for a Long Island cowboy and fallen hard.

  Emily was right. She wasn’t big on fooling herself, so why should she try to fool others? Waste of energy, and to a Special Ops soldier, energy conservation was a key tool.

  Lauren offered Patrick a nod of her own, then rose to her fe
et. It earned them nods and winks and teases, but they were kindly meant—more of a welcome than anything else. Certainly no hint of a hard-core military tease seeking to break down a “mere woman.”

  Patrick offered her a rain slick and led her out into the storm.

  Her room was close by the kitchen, which would never do.

  Patrick bunked with Stan, which definitely wasn’t a solution either.

  He took her hand and led her up the road toward the guest cabins.

  “There’s one cabin in particular I’ve always liked. I’ve been imagining you there since the first day.”

  She didn’t know why she was surprised when he led her to the last cabin in the row—the small cabin tucked by itself in the trees.

  Of course that’s where Patrick would take her.

  Patrick tried to understand what was happening as he lay in bed and looked at the woman sleeping in his arms. Firelight washed across her, adding hints of red to her light brown hair.

  Somehow, the violence of the storm lashing the cabin had the opposite effect on their lovemaking. It had been slow, sweet, lasting for hours in front of the fire he’d lit.

  And why had he never realized the wonder of simply holding a woman close after loving and talking about nothing of importance? They’d identified three different concerts that they’d both attended as teens. He’d only attended a few Yankees’ games, but she was such a fan that they’d probably been there for some of the same games. Sitting in roughly the same section. It was hard to believe that he might have seen Lauren and somehow not known.

  Her education in movies was woefully lame, which was something he’d definitely have to start fixing at the first opportunity. He had a mental list going in his head: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Star Wars… How could she not have seen Star Wars, at least the original? And all of the New York films: Moonstruck, Ghostbusters, Crossing Delancey. Not even When Harry Met Sally, though she had eaten at Katz’s deli, of course. His attempts to explain the “fake climax” scene—one of the funniest in film history—had her looking at him strangely. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried telling it so soon after he had just survived a particularly spectacular real one that she’d said was very, very mutual.

  Despite being New York familiar, she was also strange, even exotic. But she was also impossibly alive, warm, and when she lay in his arms, it was if it was the place she’d always belonged.

  He now understood something of where she was from. But that wasn’t what was scaring the daylights out of him.

  “Where are you going, Lauren Foster?” he whispered it into the night, lit only by the soft glow of quietly crackling embers.

  “I’m the last one to know,” her voice was as soft as she’d been still.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “This feels far too good to miss a minute of it in sleep.”

  He snugged his arm tighter around her waist.

  It wasn’t long before they were again finding ways to make each other feel even better.

  But Patrick didn’t forget his question and it nagged at him on and off all the next day. Though not that much as they didn’t leave the cabin except for a brief foray to gather up an impressive picnic basket filled with Nathan’s leftovers.

  Chapter 10

  The knocking on the cabin door jolted Lauren straight from sleep to wide awake. Soldiers, even ex-ones, couldn’t afford the risk of slow transition times.

  Patrick, on the other hand, lay half across her like a dead weight.

  She slithered out and grabbed the first clothing that came to hand before crossing the cozy living room. They’d made extended use of the couch, some of the rug close beside the now darkened fireplace, and generally created an amazing number of good memories here. She wanted to stop and appreciate the cabin. It’s interior had completely delivered on the promise of the exterior. Comfortable, homey, perfect if you didn’t have a lot of belongings—the entire contents of her duffle wouldn’t fill a single closet. A couple of bedrooms across the back, a luxurious tub, and a great room with a view that was Montana wide and Big Sky tall.

  Through the big front window, she could see Emily stepping down off the porch.

  She opened the door and called softly, “Morning.”

  Emily turned, then smiled radiantly.

  “What?”

  Emily scanned her eyes down Lauren to indicate what was amusing her. Lauren looked down as well.

  “Oh.” She was wearing Patrick’s flannel shirt, and nothing else. With one button open, it had slid off one of her shoulders and the tails danced high on her thighs. “Yes, you found both of us.” And she could feel that she was now sharing Emily’s smile. It didn’t feel strange on her face. It felt…right.

  “I was wondering where you two had gone to ground.”

  Lauren pointed down at the two sets of muddy boot prints, definitely in his and her sizes, that had tracked across the porch and through the door to where their boots rested on the rubber mat.

  Emily shook her head. “I always miss the ground clues. I spent my career in the air. I couldn’t have tracked those caribou in a year, never mind an afternoon. Get dressed. And roust Patrick. He’s best man today and his brother is already melting down.”

  “Best man?”

  “Nathan and Julie are getting married today. Big wedding?” Emily was chiding her memory. It had been a major topic at dinner last night…two nights ago.

  Lauren could only look at her wide-eyed. She had just spent a day and two nights in a love nest with Patrick. She’d never done anything like that before in her life but the time had slipped away so easily.

  “I know,” Emily nodded merrily before continuing back to the big house. “It’s crazy when it happens to you, isn’t it?”

  “When what happens?”

  But Emily was gone back into the thin rain.

  Lauren grabbed a heavy jacket from the peg by the door and sat out on the porch bench. She needed a minute to get oriented to this new reality.

  The air was cool on her legs, but it smelled so fresh that she didn’t want to go back inside. When people said that rain washed the air clean, they hadn’t understood about Montana. The air here wasn’t merely clean, it was new-made. It smelled of rain and rich earth. It smelled of the tall conifers clustered around the side of the cabin and the white-barked aspen with leaves turned wedding-ring gold with the changing season.

  Seasons. New York had them marginally, but the Big Apple insulated its residents from most of them. Afghanistan had two seasons: blazing summer when the fighting was heaviest, and freezing winter when the locals were too poor to purchase ammunition out of Pakistan—which was isolated in the winter by the snow in the Hindu Kush anyway. Somalia and Libya hadn’t even had that, just heat.

  Patrick said that the winters here were brutally cold, with frigid winds roaring down off the Canadian plains. But he also had talked about the beauty of the land coming awake in the spring. She wouldn’t mind seasons. Not at all.

  “Morning.” Patrick leaned in the open doorway. His jeans low across his hips, his chest bare, and a blanket over his shoulders because she was wearing his jacket as well as his shirt. It smelled so like him. That, too, had added to the pleasure of the morning.

  Lauren was getting to know his body, very intimately. Like his friendly personality, it didn’t disappoint. Patrick was so…himself—no matter what movie script was going on in his head. She scooted over so that he could sit beside her.

  He held out one side of the blanket and folded her against him as he sat.

  “Nice legs,” he kissed her on the ear. The blanket wasn’t long enough to reach down. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so many goose bumps in one place in my life.”

  She swung her legs straight out. Could see the scars that Jupiter and Max before him had left on her. And the goose bumps, but she didn’t really feel the cold. She swung them across his thighs and he scooped her up into his lap.

  “Emily came by.”

  “
Oh?” Patrick nuzzled her neck.

  “Your brother is coming apart.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him,” Patrick’s attention shifted lower. Why men were so fascinated by women’s chests was one of the great mysteries. But Patrick had taught her to appreciate that fascination for the first time in her life. So many firsts with him that they wouldn’t all fit in a single post-op debrief report.

  She cradled his head and leaned down to kiss him on the ear. Now it was easy to imagine holding a child there. One who would be seeking life from her, rather than joy. Could it somehow be in her to give both?

  “The wedding is this afternoon.”

  “Uh-huh,” he mumbled against her chest.

  Guessing what was coming next, she managed to move her head back just in time to not have her chin clipped as Patrick jolted upright. “I’m best man!”

  “Emily might have mentioned that.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” he jolted to his feet. She slid off his lap and her bare bottom thumped down on the cold and wet porch.

  “Eww!”

  Okay, she hadn’t been ready for that.

  But he stopped and helped her to her feet, even though he was looking frantic. Still, he took the moment.

  “Patrick,” she rested a hand on his cheek to keep him from rushing off as soon as she was standing once more.

  “Uh-huh,” hurried and clipped, she only had half his attention.

  She leaned in and kissed him.

  That earned her his full attention.

  And hers as well. In the cool Montana morning, rain misting the air, he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly as they kissed.

  She had let Patrick in much further than any man ever before. They had avoided speaking of the future—she still wasn’t ready for that—but they had explored much of her past and he had merely taken it all in stride.

  No. More than that.

  He had done his movie story thing and shown her a different way to shoot the scenes. A better view. They had even talked about Jupiter. Yes, her dog had been murdered, but he had also lived. They had saved hundreds of lives between them, found innumerable explosives, and ferreted out terrorists. Patrick had showed her that her past had honor as well as tragedy and that there were no clean lines, only how they were viewed.