Mack set the children to patrolling the fences, checking the gates and inspecting the barns. He stood in the circle of grass, a man standing alone, watching the boisterous group of children run at the gates, the fences and the various outbuildings. As if aware he was being watched, he turned and met Corrie’s gaze.
He lifted a scarred hand. It wasn’t much of a lover’s gesture, but it seemed to lodge directly in her heart.
She dragged one hand free from her cheek and held it out.
He smiled at her.
That was all he did. He just smiled. And her bones turned to liquid. It was like the sun coming out after a month’s lengthy gloom.
“Interesting game,” she called, though it was the least important thing she wanted to say to him.
He walked toward her, his catlike walk slow and deliberate, and every step making her insides quiver. Walking away from her toward the barn, he’d seemed wary, on the alert. Toward her, he looked dangerous, as if he were about to pounce.
“One you play all the time,” he said.
“Me? What are you talking about?”
He looked up at her from the steps to the veranda. “You. You don’t miss a single thing. It’s in your nature.”
She shrugged. “That’s just training,” she said.
“Exactly,” he said. He mounted the steps.
Her heart was pounding so loudly, she couldn’t have heard him if he’d spoken. In the distance, the kids were running from fence post to corral gate, checking each strand of wire, making a potentially deadly business a game.
“They’re too young,” she said faintly.
“They’re having fun,” he countered.
“There’s no danger here,” she said. “This is Rancho Milagro.”
“A pretty name doesn’t change reality. Danger exists, Corrie.”
Her heart seemed to flutter at his use of her name. But she said, “It doesn’t have to be here.”
“It doesn’t have to exist anywhere, but the truth is that it does. Life is cruel, it’s not fair, and it’s especially rough on the innocent.”
“I don’t want them frightened. Teaching them to see things in a dark light can make them afraid.” She’d been afraid all her life. Every waking moment. And she’d chosen a profession where all she saw was more darkness.
Mack gave a wave at the children. “Look at them, they’re having a ball. And they’re paying attention to every little detail. How does that frighten them?”
She couldn’t think. “It frightens me,” she said.
He lifted a hand to her hair.
She jumped, but her eyes shifted to his. As always, she couldn’t read his expression.
He asked, “Remember when you were a kid and the bell would suddenly go off signaling a fire drill?”
She nodded, unconsciously leaning into the warmth of his hand.
“Remember how teachers would have us line up quietly and make an orderly exit to the hall, then march single file to whatever door we were supposed to use?”
Corrie nodded again.
“But there was never a fire, was there?”
“No.”
“No. And no one was panicked, no one was screaming, and no one was thinking for themselves, worried about their friends, remembering the way out if something happened to their teacher. No one even looked behind them, right? Because we weren’t supposed to look, weren’t supposed to worry, weren’t supposed to even think. Right?”
Corrie nodded because it was all she could do. In his words, in his question, she could see glimpses of what had happened to Mack. Skin grafts because of burns, a fire, children screaming, utter pandemonium, a fallen teacher. Himself? She knew this, knew what had happened to him. She hadn’t covered the story herself, no, she’d been out of the country, but she knew…something. But what was it exactly?
“What if, in addition to the fire drills, the system had added a few extras, like watching out for the people in front of you, beside you and in back of you? What if the kids had to keep their eyes peeled for the source of the danger? What if they were allowed to do a little thinking for themselves?”
Corrie only understood one thing clearly: however Mack Dorsey came by his scars, they were earned not just at a physically painful level, but at the expense of a huge chunk of his very soul.
Her breath burned in her lungs.
His hands grasped her shoulders, as if he might shake the truth of his statements into her, but he only caressed her arms and looked deeply into her eyes. “Quietly exiting a burning building doesn’t cut it.”
“But—”
“No buts,” he interrupted. “Everyone should be running for the exits. They should hit the doors with all the force they can, slam through them, and with their arms around their buddies. They should fly through those doors and drop and roll. I mean really drop and really roll. Fire drills shouldn’t be an exercise in who has the quietest classroom, but in pure, hard survival.”
“You were burned in a school fire,” Corrie said. She wished she hadn’t spoken the moment the words came out of her mouth, but she couldn’t retract them. Not physically, anyway.
“Yes,” he said. The answer was short, the emotion behind it, immense.
“I haven’t asked where or how you came by your scars,” she said.
Whatever fury had driven him just seconds before, drained out of him as he gazed at her. “You haven’t. You’re incredible.”
“I’m not a reporter anymore, Mack. I’m not out for a story.”
“I know that. I don’t know what you are, exactly, but I know that.”
Tears unexpectedly welled in Corrie’s eyes. “I don’t know what you are either, Mack. I just know I care.”
He tensed, ran a hand through his hair as if frustrated, but the look on his face spelled nothing but sorrow. “God, Corrie, I know that. And I care, too. Can’t you see that? Can’t you tell that it’s driving me crazy?”
“Tell me about the fire,” she said, not daring to touch him.
He turned back to her with the swiftness of a pouncing predator grabbing both her arms, scaring her a little. “There’s nothing to tell, Corrie. I’m alive and they’re dead. Okay? That’s all there is to it. No heroics, just burned children and grieving parents.”
She must have made some sound, for his gaze seemed to focus in on her—instead of whatever anger drove him—and he lowered his eyes to his hands on her upper arms. He emitted a low groan and released her, almost shoving her away before turning around to leave her.
“Mack,” she called, unconsciously raising her hands to the spots where he had gripped her so fiercely.
He didn’t stop.
“Mack, wait!”
If anything, he strode faster.
“Mack, I don’t care what happened!”
At that, he slowed, stopped, then turned around.
“You should care, Corrie. Everyone on this planet should care. We train our children to be quiescent. We train them to follow the rules, obey the teacher, and above all else, to believe that they will be rescued. We don’t tell them that if they don’t think for themselves, fight and claw their way out of a bad situation, that they could die, they could just die. And we don’t tell them that if they do, someone like me, someone who tried to save them, is going to feel guilty and scarred for the rest of his damned life. So scarred he can’t even reach out to the most wonderful woman he’s ever even imagined. So care, Corrie, but don’t cry, because there’s nothing here to cry about.”
And with that, Mack turned and walked slowly, almost regally to the teacher’s quarters. And every step he took seemed to echo in her soul.
Watching the pacing figure hidden behind the thin curtains over a lit window across a graveled drive, Corrie remembered Mack’s answer to Jeannie’s question the first night he’d sat around the Milagro table. In essence, he’d said he liked the prehistoric period because survival mattered.
Survival. Warmth, food, a mate. Leeza had teased him about being macho. He
’d said something about matriarchal tribes, but the need being the same. Warmth, food, a mate. Safety. That’s all that matters, he’d said that first night. That’s what he believed with every fiber of his being.
A knock at her door made her nearly leap from her chair.
“Señora?”
“Rita,” she said. Then on a sharper note, “Is anything wrong?”
The bedroom door opened. “Not to worry,” Rita said, stepping inside Corrie’s suite. “I hope you don’t mind. I saw your light, no?”
“Nothing’s wrong?”
“Oh, no. But you see, I’m here with the children, yes? And you watch Señor Mack’s window, yes? So, why don’t you want to go out there?”
“No. God, no. Let him be.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why let him be? He needs something, niñita. And I think you know what that something is.”
“I can’t leave the children,” Corrie said.
“Sure you can, niña. I’m here. Pablo’s here.”
Corrie couldn’t hide the blush that rose to her cheeks at the suggestion. But she shook her head.
“He means something to you, that man,” Rita said.
Corrie looked at the window across the drive. Mack’s shadow crossed it. “Something,” she said.
“Something very important, I think,” Rita said.
“He wants to train the children. Like miniature commandos,” Corrie said.
Rita sighed. “And there is something wrong in that?”
“They’re just kids.”
“They were only children where he came from.”
Corrie turned to stare at Rita. “You know about his past?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me.”
Rita looked surprised. “I thought you knew. The newspapers and television called it the Enchanted Hills firebombing incident….”
Corrie didn’t need any more than that single reference. Everything fell into place. Hero teacher rescues ten children. Five perish in firebomb set by disgruntled former employee. Of course she knew the incident, she just hadn’t connected the dots. Ghosts, plural. Burns. The fire-drill analogy. The terrible, terrible scars. Five perished. The sleeplessness.
Rita had continued talking, and concluded with, “…so he’s a true hero. And I think you should listen to his ideas. In the old days, when I was a girl, my father kept us all safe. He seemed hard by today’s rules, maybe, I don’t know. But I know that there are some things we have forgotten that we knew back in those days. Some of the simpler things to keep our families safe, to make our friends and neighbors as important as our own. Nothing so wrong with that.”
“No, nothing wrong with that,” Corrie repeated.
“So, you go out there to him. He needs you.”
“I don’t know what to say to him,” Corrie said, but she wanted to go.
Rita held up her hands as if giving up on her. “So don’t talk. Have a little courage, niña. Life doesn’t come in pretty paper packages. It comes with scars, and pain, and sometimes it’s out in a little house just across a driveway.”
Chapter 11
Mack realized he’d been waiting for Corrie the moment he heard her footfall on the bunkhouse steps. He opened the door before her knock and didn’t say anything.
“Mack?” she asked, as if he’d changed his personality since morning, had transformed into someone else. Maybe he had.
“Come in,” he said, holding out a hand to her.
She stared at his outstretched palm for a moment, and her eyelids flickered when her fingers lightly slipped into his clasp. When she didn’t come forward, he studied her more closely and saw immediately that she knew, that either she’d remembered or someone had told her about his past.
Her hand didn’t flutter in his, as he’d half expected. It rested quiescently, perhaps trustingly, no attempt at escape.
“I’ve known Jeannie and Leeza since college,” she said, her liquid brown eyes meeting his with a strange urgency. “But I’ve never told them this. Never even hinted at it.”
He stilled himself, an unfamiliar combination of triumph and fear coursing through him. Triumph that she was sharing a secret with him, fear because such a sharing implied deep trust.
“When I was five, I got up in the middle of the night. The living room was filled with a cloud. A big pretty white cloud right inside our house. Usually the floor was cold, but that night, it was so warm that I lay down on it, watching the cloud floating over me. I heard a banging. Then I heard my mother screaming for my father and my father yelling.”
He never wanted to stop someone more than he did right then. He would have given anything on earth to have Corrie simply break off her story.
“I’m not sure I realized right then what the cloud was, but I was scared and knew something was terribly wrong. Then I saw the flames beneath my parents’ door. They looked like some kind of strange animal, jumping up from the crack under the door, leaping for the doorknob. I heard my mother call my name.”
“Ah, God, Corrie, stop…”
“I was too scared to answer her. I couldn’t move. I stayed where I was on that warm floor. My mother was screaming. My father, too. Screaming for me. And I couldn’t move. Because I was too scared to move, my parents died.”
Tears filled her eyes but she made no effort to wipe them away. Some fierce message seemed to shimmer in them, a meaning she desperately wanted him to understand.
“Corrie, you were a baby. Analissa’s age. You couldn’t be expected to rescue your parents.”
“No? You couldn’t be expected to run back into a burning building and sacrifice yourself for a group of children.”
“I was an adult. Anyone would have done the same.”
“No. No one else did anything remotely similar. I remember the accounts well.” She gave a little moue. “Now, anyway. Maybe some part of me knew from the first minute I saw you. I tend to avoid stories about fires. Go figure. The point is, not one of the other so-called adults went back into that inferno. Not even the firemen went in. Just you.” She lifted a hand to his face, not tracing his scars, but erasing them somehow with her touch.
“It’s not at all the same, Corrie.”
“Yes, it is. Because you’re haunted by those you couldn’t save, every bit as much as I am.”
He wanted to argue with her, to deny it with every bit of bone and sinew in his body, but he couldn’t because she was right and she knew it. When Corrie Stratton says it’s true, it’s a fact.
“I didn’t come out here to make you feel bad or force you to think about that terrible afternoon. I came because it was time to let my secret be free, but only because I thought it might help you be free of your ghosts.”
A slow river of tears coursed down her cheeks. “Because you’re right, I was just a little kid and couldn’t have saved my parents. And because you’re wrong, you couldn’t have done more to save those children.” Her breath hitched and she caught her lower lip on a sob. She closed her eyes, but it didn’t stem the silent tears.
When she opened them again, they were awash with sparkling tears. It killed him.
“And…and I came out here because you’re right. The children do need training. If I had had any coaching, even enough to know the difference between clouds in the sky and smoke in the living room, then my mother wouldn’t have died worrying about me, terrified that I was trapped, too.”
He didn’t let her say any more. He dragged her into his arms, crushing her to his chest, breaking off her what-ifs, willing her to let his body absorb her pain, her misplaced guilt. He rocked her in the doorway, cradling her, murmuring her name, and trying so hard not to see that smoke-filled living room and the little girl who cowered on a too warm floor.
He didn’t know when his comforting shifted. All he knew was that one minute he was fighting tears of his own, tears for a younger Corrie, for a frightened little girl who had to listen to the screams of her own parents, and the next, h
er hands were inside his shirt, skimming along his ribs and tracing the contours of his waist.
He didn’t have the feeling she was trying to forget anything, but was driven by the same fierce need that seized him, a force beyond reckoning. Hers weren’t the caresses of a woman attempting to lose herself in a single moment. Rather, they were the actions of a creature caught in the sheer, rough magic of living.
He dragged her into his living room and kicked the door shut behind them before crushing her lips beneath his own. A fierce, possessive joy infused him. She was his and claiming him for her own.
She pulled at his shirt and he at hers. She pushed his shirt from his shoulders, dragging it down his arms. He slid her bra straps from her shoulders and unfastened the contraption with a groan.
He had to bite back an oath as she pressed her bare chest against his own naked torso. He’d wanted to absorb her pain with his body; he hadn’t anticipated the sharp stab of agony he would experience when he felt her heart beating against his, knowing he would always want her like this, would always ache for her, no matter how wrong it would be for her.
When he’d kissed her that night behind the barn, then again later, lying on her duster, insensate with longing, with need, he’d half convinced himself that she was the reward for two long years of physical agony, the rainbow at the end of a terrible storm. But holding her now, having dried her tears with his own skin, feeling her breath against his collarbone, her heart thundering as if trying to join his, he knew a jagged despair, knowing the future wasn’t a certain thing, that even the concept of a future was a huge leap of faith, the kind of faith he’d abandoned.
He longed for words to express what he was thinking, feeling, but couldn’t find the very phrases he knew he should be offering her. All he could do was to let her understand some of his thoughts through his touch, and, through hers, his passion.
He dug at her jeans even as she yanked open his fly. He tugged hers down her silky thighs and she stood over him, her hands on his shoulders, her head flung back, her long hair swaying as if in a tempest.
At Close Range Page 13
