Vigilance could avoid many a disaster. Sometime in the last two years, that had become Mack’s talisman-like phrase. He might not feel comfortable with relaxed dinner conversation, and may have a case of the might-have-beens for Corrie Stratton, but he was right at home letting his eyes comb the shadows, his hands check the fences, and his ears strain for a misplaced footfall.
Corrie hid the disappointment she felt as Mack left the table early for the third night in a row. She’d caught the look of longing on his face as he listened to the children swapping the day’s adventures and the unreadable look he’d turned on her. The first she wholly understood. As one raised without a family, she regarded mealtimes at Rancho Milagro as among the most precious of all moments. But she didn’t understand his reserve around them all, herself in particular. It was as if she’d personally done something to make him feel unwelcome.
She felt herself flush when she turned back from watching his evening departure to find Jeannie looking at her with speculation. “We’re too rowdy for him,” her friend said.
“We’re too rowdy for anyone but some old rodeo hands and three crazy women from back east,” her friend’s husband, Chance, said. He dropped a hand over his wife’s.
Pablo leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’ll tell you this much, the man’s a natural teacher. I never saw Juan Carlos pay so much attention to anything anybody has to say. Ten minutes more this morning and the boy would have believed Mack if he’d told him the moon was made of goat cheese.”
Clovis, one of the ranch hands, agreed with Pablo’s assessment and added, “I’ll tell you something else, the man’s obviously been through the wringer, like with all those burn scars, but he’s strong. He was showing some of the kids how to do calisthenics and resistance stuff—what do they call that? He used a word—”
“Anaerobics,” Leeza supplied.
“That’s it. Anyway, the guy’s as solid as a rock. And he had all the kids jumping up and down and in pretty good rhythm, too. And doing judo stuff.”
Corrie remembered the stance he’d taken when she’d disturbed him a few nights before. All muscles, wary fight-ready position, and skin impervious to the night air. He’d suffered skin grafts for burns?
“I like him,” Rita said. “He brought all the children to the kitchen yesterday. He had them all making dog biscuits for the puppies.”
“Dog biscuits?” Leeza asked, laughing. “We hire a teacher and get a doggie chef?”
“Sí, señora,” Rita said. “And making the children double the recipe by using mathematics. And then half the recipe. And they had to measure everything out using the cups and spoons. Then they had to sell them to one another. The big cookies were two dollars, the medium ones only one, and the tiny ones—”
“I made the little ones,” Analissa called out from the next room, leaving no doubt of a child’s capacity for eavesdropping.
“Sí, you did,” Rita agreed mildly. “The little ones were fifty centavos. And he made them do all the adding and subtracting themselves. I never had a teacher who used real life as lessons.”
“Good idea,” Leeza said, flushing a little. As the financial wizard of the partnership, Leeza had struggled with the mathematics lessons for the children, and, thus far, to zero avail. Tony had complained he couldn’t even see the little boxes she wanted them to write in, and Juan Carlos had done his crossword-puzzle style. Analissa drew in Leeza’s account books. Jenny had just cried.
“What do you think of him, Corrie?” Jeannie asked.
Corrie hoped no one could see the blush that seemed to stay in her cheeks these days. “I think he’ll work out fine,” she said. She felt as if she was betraying him somehow by talking about him behind his back. She almost had to laugh at the notion. She’d made a career out of talking about others, sharing others’ thoughts, dreams and foibles, and publicly at that. Why would talking about one Mack Dorsey make her feel uncomfortable?
“Well, I like him,” Chance said, pushing to his feet. “And so does José. And that kid can read people better than any shrink.”
They all chuckled and, following Chance’s example, started clearing the table. After leaving the kitchen, Corrie stopped Leeza. “Remember the first night Mack was here? You looked as if you recognized him, or remembered something about him. What was it?”
Leeza gave her a blank stare anyone on earth but Corrie and Jeannie would have taken for complete unawareness. However, Corrie had known Leeza since college. The three orphans had forged a sisterhood that transcended blood.
“Tell me,” Corrie said.
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” Leeza said. She gave an exaggerated yawn and looked at her wristwatch. “It’s late and I’ve a couple of calls left to make or the known financial world will collapse in its tracks.”
“Leeza—”
Corrie was surprised when Leeza cupped her face in her cool hands; the woman seldom showed any sign of affection. “Rest easy, newshound, the man’s been checked out and then some. Chance just stopped me from being a dimwit about Mack’s burns. Good night.” And she dropped a kiss on Corrie’s forehead and sauntered away toward her office.
Corrie raised a hand to her forehead, as if Leeza’s offhand good-night kiss were imprinted there. It might as well be. She’d known the woman fifteen years and had never once felt its like. They’d hugged upon rare occasion; they’d linked arms at Jeannie’s first family’s funeral. They’d cried on each other’s shoulder from rare time to time. But never a kiss.
It was the simple kiss that let Corrie know her friend knew something about Mack Dorsey. She could easily drive into town and hop on the Internet and search for herself, and if that proved fruitless, she had countless sources from which to draw to find out everything about Mack Dorsey’s life. But facts and data weren’t what made her slip on her duster to head outside to look for him. She wanted to know what he was feeling.
She knew, if no one else had noticed, that every night Mack had been there, he hadn’t gone directly to the teachers’ quarters after leaving dinner.
She’d watched him through the French doors or from her bedroom. Each night, he walked to the front gates and checked the locks. He melted into the shadows out by the barn. Sometimes she’d seen him strolling along the fences beyond the corral, his hands running the straight lines of wire, testing the barbs occasionally, or pulling at a strand to make sure it was taut. Another time she’d glimpsed a shadow out beside the well house and suspected he was inspecting the locks on that door as well.
His weren’t the casual perambulations of a man working off a heavy meal, nor did he seem particularly fond of stargazing. The nightly roaming had all the earmarks of a man afraid of something. Or acting as guardian.
The teachers’ quarters were still dark, so she made for the barn. She didn’t see him in the broad, open area, nor could she find him within the stalls. The tack room was empty of all but the smell of leather and molasses oats. The riding ring, a recent addition to Milagro, stretched behind the barn, flanking the empty cattle pens. Mack wasn’t there, either.
As she turned to go back through the barn, someone grabbed her and roughly dragged her outside into the lambent moonlight.
She barely issued a squeak of surprise and, when she saw who had hold of her, offered no resistance as he propelled her away from the barn and into the soft starlight. She stood quiescent in his grasp, searching his shadowed face. Only her rapid heartbeat betrayed her reaction to him, and that he couldn’t have perceived.
She didn’t know why she’d followed him outside, nor could she begin to explain, even to herself, why she’d felt no shock when he’d manhandled her to the riding ring behind the barn. But when he growled a curse before lowering his lips to hers, she found she’d sought him in the dark for precisely that reason.
He tasted of the honey he’d poured on the sopaipilla he’d had for dessert and she fancied she could draw it from his tongue like nectar. His lips were both gentle and rough, more
as if he warred with himself than with her. His breathing was steady at first, then ragged as he pulled her even closer.
When he slid a cold hand onto the curve of her neck, she couldn’t withhold a moan. Her knees threatened to buckle in a purely primal reaction. She clung to his coat as if to a life preserver, feeling she was going down.
Instead of withdrawing, he plundered, his tongue thrusting into her, demanding, taking. One of his hands tangled in her hair, spilling it free of her loose twist, while the other ran surely down her arm only to plunge into the warmth beneath her duster. His hand against her thin blouse felt as cold as ice, and made her gasp as it slid around her back to pull her even closer to him.
As though the forceful side of him had won whatever battle he’d waged earlier, he ground her against him, letting her know with absolute certainty how strongly she affected him.
Corrie’s experience with men had been limited to a few relationships with colleagues in the news business, men who lived for the next story, the next big assignment, and the camera lens or the microphone. As they did in work, they only skimmed the surface of relationships. Their approach to life was that too much information killed a good story; skill, charm and knowing when to wrap things up were all that really mattered. They applied the same reasoning to personal relationships.
Mack’s passion was the complete antithesis of casual. His breathing was ragged, his body tense and hard. His hands shook with the need that raged through him. And it sparked something in Corrie that she’d never encountered before, an ache that came from her very soul.
A little voice deep inside her seemed to cry out in relief—“Ah, at last”—and with such desire and sincerity she literally throbbed from it.
He could have lowered her to the ground beneath them and she wouldn’t have raised a protest. He could have led her to his room and she would have gone willingly.
Instead, he yanked his head back, as if snapping awake. He held on to her shoulders, keeping her at arm’s length, confusing her, making her want to push back into him.
“You scared me,” he said.
If she were Leeza, she might make some quip, like “boo,” and step right back into his embrace. If she were Jeannie, she might try verbally analyzing the reason she’d scared him and why that fear translated into a kiss of such passion that she was still gasping for breath.
As it was, she was only Corrie and didn’t know how to ask for more. She never had. So she stood there, an earthquake survivor in the midst of violent aftershocks.
Mack waited for Corrie to say something, anything that would douse the fire that raged inside him. Instead, she gazed at him with unblinking dark eyes, unreadable in their vulnerability. She could have been outraged, though God knew she’d responded. She could have been hurt, though he could see no pain in her eyes. She might even have laughed it off, but he could detect no sign of humor.
She looked like a doe caught in the headlights of a speeding car, neither fearful nor alarmed, but rather simply and acutely aware of a certain something about to happen.
He couldn’t, in all honesty, apologize. He didn’t feel the least sorry for the kiss. In some wholly id-driven portion of his mind, he realized he’d been waiting for this hero’s reward for two long years. Through the long, lonely nights of recovery, listening to her voice over the radio, she’d spoken to the best part of him. That the worst part had wanted to drag her to the ground and tear her clothing free of her glorious body couldn’t pull the apology from a mouth that still could taste her.
He slowly drew her to him again. She came without the slightest resistance. Her body molded to his. Her hands slid around his waist and held him close. Her breath played on his collarbone.
“Ah,” she said, as if finding something she’d lost sometime.
“It’s late,” he said raggedly, pulling back from her.
“Yes,” she agreed, letting him go, with her hands if not her eyes.
“I’ll walk you back to the house.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not leaving you out here.”
Something flickered in her gaze and her lips parted slightly, as if she were reviewing things to say, comebacks that might leave him lying on his face in the middle of a child’s riding ring. But all she said was “Halfway, then.”
He reached for her arm to take her elbow, but she stepped forward first, dodging him. He moved back to have her walk through the barn door ahead of him. Her hair, silky soft folds of it, spilled down the back of her duster, as dark as the coat itself, and he caught the light, lemony scent of it. His hands tingled in memory of how tresses of it had fallen across his fingers, ribbons of satin he’d bunched in his fist.
“What are you looking for at night?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“When you come out and walk along the fences, what are you looking for?”
He couldn’t see her face in the darkness of the barn, but he suspected she would be wearing her radio-interviewer face. “Just walking off dinner,” he said.
“Checking the main gate locks? Making sure the well-house door is barred?”
He hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious or that anyone had noticed. Even though she couldn’t see him, he shrugged. “I don’t want the kids getting into mischief.”
“Ah. That makes sense,” she said, but her tone let him know she didn’t believe that to be the only reason he patrolled at night.
They cleared the barn. The main house seemed ablaze in lights across the broad dirt drive. One of the four lab-cross pups barked once and subsided immediately as if recognizing them in the dark.
“It’s amazing to think that only a year ago there was nothing here but a few broken-down buildings and some owls and field mice,” Corrie said, looking at the ranch house. “Now it’s more home than anywhere I’ve ever lived.”
Mack thought her statement sad but didn’t say so.
She turned to him and held out a hand. She waited until he took it in his. “Halfway,” she said.
“Corrie…”
Her eyes, which had been leveled somewhere around his chin, lifted swiftly to his. “That’s the first time you’ve used my name since that first afternoon you came here. Why do you have such a hard time saying it?” she asked. “You use everyone else’s on a daily basis. But not mine. Why is that?”
He could hear no accusation in her tone, only a puzzled question. He thought of her deer-in-the-headlights awareness and answered truthfully, “Because I don’t want to kiss them.”
Her eyes widened and for the first time that night he caught a hint of total surprise, as if he’d said the last thing on earth she’d expected.
“Good night, Corrie,” he said.
“Okay,” she answered abstractedly.
He turned away from her and started toward his quarters. A few paces from his front steps, he looked back at her. She was still standing where he’d left her, her gaze locked on her outstretched hands, her forehead furrowed in a considering frown, her lips parted and smiling faintly.
Chapter 6
Corrie tried revising some of her lyrics until the early hours of the morning, but the light in the bunkhouse held more allure than the awkward rhymes and rough rhythms. She didn’t don her coat and fill her pockets a second time. She merely watched the muscled silhouette walk the floor, remembered the feel of his lips on hers, and sadly wondered what kept him from his bed, driving him from sleep.
And wondered if he knew that when he’d kissed her, he’d driven all hope of sleep from her.
Corrie studied him the next morning and again later that afternoon and could see no signs of insomnia on his chiseled features. His eyes were shadowed but not by lack of sleep, just by whatever demons haunted him. Unlike her, his hands were steady and sure and his gait even and deliberate.
“Pablo was right about him.” Jeannie came to the corral fence and leaned against it beside Corrie.
“Right about what?”
“The kids. The way they
take to Mack. Look at them. They’re like filings to a magnet, a few at a time, until suddenly they’re all there, leaning and tugging on him.”
“Yet he holds them at arm’s length.”
“Do you think so?”
“Look at him. It’s as if he’s somewhere else. His thoughts, anyway.”
“They don’t seem to mind,” Jeannie said.
“They trust him,” Corrie said slowly, and with no small amount of admiration. It was rare that a group of orphaned or abandoned children would so readily take to a stranger, especially one who was their teacher.
“So do I,” Jeannie said.
“Why?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t. I just want to know what it is about him that makes you trust him. What do you know about him?”
“Aside from excellent credentials and references, he’s a natural with the kids. A pure natural. And I like the way he takes his job so seriously. He hasn’t even asked whether or not he has weekends off, did you know that?”
Corrie grinned. There were no days off at Rancho Milagro. Jeannie claimed there were no days off from family. There were getaway times, vacations, excursions, but no one punched a clock or logged overtime.
“I keep getting the feeling I should know about him,” Corrie said.
“Like what?”
“Like—something. I don’t know.”
“Well, Ms. Prizewinning Journalist, you could always do some research on him. Or maybe you don’t want to know too much and just don’t want to admit it,” Jeannie said.
“And this bit of oracle-esque speech means what?”
“Ah…the oracle knows all, reveals but a crack in the large picture frame of life.”
“Gag.”
Jeannie laughed and relented. “I think you’re curious about Mack because he appeals to you. And you don’t want to play Corrie the journalist, but Corrie the woman.”
Corrie couldn’t mask the blush, but said, “You can be inexpressibly corny sometimes, Jeannie.”
At Close Range Page 6
