by Rachel Lee
Yet it was hard not to feel guilty when you still had a life and someone you loved did not. Hard to feel an awakening from the winter of grief.
He knew what Mary would have wanted for him. That knowing didn’t make it one damn bit easier.
After her riding lesson, Courtney got her first lessons in grooming. She enjoyed running the brush over Marti, and loved the way Marti appeared to enjoy the attention. In a matter of a few hours, she began to understand why Dom loved this life so much. It would be easy, she thought, to fall in love with the rhythm of the days, the work, the horses. Her muscles, accustomed to workouts in gyms and jogging, actually liked this different kind of exercise and, without question, it was much more emotionally satisfying.
Afterward, she took the hot bath Dom recommended, luxuriating in the relaxing hot water until it started to become tepid. She cleaned the tub, checked to make sure she had left everything as spotless as she had found it, then dressed and headed downstairs again.
The file box still awaited her. The tapes she had not yet been able to make herself listen to. The envelopes full of photos from Iraq that she had barely opened.
And the sight of them reminded her of yesterday’s email.
Her heart accelerated a little, and once again she went over all the measures she’d taken to cover her real destination and her real purpose in this “vacation.” Could somebody have really found out where she was?
Of course. So the question became was she putting Dom and his boys at risk? Very unlikely. Clearly if he’d known anything, Dom would have raised a ruckus long ago. So she didn’t have to worry that she was putting them at risk. Conviction filled her. Yes, they would be safe. If anyone was a risk, it was her, and she was fairly good at taking care of herself.
Besides, even if someone found she was here, why would they care? She had been Mary’s friend, and it wasn’t out of line for her to visit Mary’s family.
Unease wouldn’t quite leave her, though. Getting an email like that would make anyone uneasy. All that mattered anyway, was that she was certain Dom and his boys were at no risk at all. For herself…well, sometimes she just didn’t care.
It was hard to care quite so much about living when you sometimes felt that you should have been the one killed.
God, she felt more reluctance to go into that box than she would have ever believed possible. Her instincts had driven her to come here in defiance of her orders, but never had she imagined just how painful it would become to have to see those photos and listen to Mary’s voice again.
She gave herself a mental shake, trying to shed the personal feelings and focus herself intellectually. She was an investigator. This was just another investigation. Regardless of her history with Mary, it was essential she put her feelings on hold.
With another cup of coffee, she headed back into the office and opened the box. She couldn’t afford to let her heart break. Not now.
Nor did it help that the more time she spent with Dom, the more attractive she found him. As she sat and lifted the box lid to reveal the stack of emails, tapes and photos, she caught herself whispering, “I’m sorry, Mary. I hope you don’t mind.”
But even as she whispered the words, she knew it wasn’t Mary who would mind; it was herself.
Shaking her head, she dived into the box, facing the pain because someone had to make every attempt to find Mary’s killer. To find those men who had terrorized the Iraqi women. All of them deserved justice, and she was the last stop on that train.
A few hours later, she rubbed her eyes and then stretched, looking up from her work. Nothing so far had seemed unusual or out-of-the-way. Most of Mary’s snapshots seemed to be of her coworkers and the town where she had run her ad hoc clinic for local women. No pictures of her patients, of course. But photos of them wouldn’t have helped anyway.
And she still hadn’t gotten to the audiotapes, or the CDs. Mary evidently hadn’t missed sending something nearly every single day.
Picking up her mug, she went to the kitchen where she could hear Dom talking to the boys, who had come home from school just a little while ago. They were at the table with their homework and snacks and Dom was sitting with them.
“Coffee’s fresh,” he said when he saw her.
“Thanks, I need it.”
Kyle piped up, “You’re coming camping with us. That’s awesome.”
She had to smile. “Awesome indeed,” she agreed. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“I can hardly wait,” Todd announced. “I want to go now.”
“Nope,” Dom said firmly. “You haven’t finished your homework, we still need to pack and then it’ll be too late to go today.”
Todd scowled. “I hate homework.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Ride!”
Kyle looked at his brother. “I like homework.”
“Do not.”
“Do, too!”
“Okay,” Dom said quietly, and the argument ended right there. The boys exchanged scowls, but returned to their books and papers.
Dom gave Courtney a crooked look of amusement. She flashed him a smile and continued her trip to the coffeepot.
“Anything?” he asked her.
She shook her head.
“I didn’t think so.” Then he returned his attention to his sons.
She paused after she rinsed her mug and gazed at the three dark heads at the table. Something about the grouping tightened her throat. Loneliness, she supposed. Oh, she had plenty of friends, but this was a different kind of togetherness, the kind she hadn’t known since her mother had died a few years ago. Family.
She had always assumed in a vague way that someday she’d have a family of her own. It had always been out there somewhere on her horizon, an inchoate vision of that family and future. But now she was just past thirty, and that vision was beginning to dim. As she stood there, she realized she had begun to plan a solitary future, as if something inside her told her that family was never meant to be hers, or that the opportunity had somehow passed her by.
Which was ridiculous. Thirty-year-old women were hardly over-the-hill these days. Unfortunately, reason and emotion could be miles apart, and right now emotion told her she’d never know the moments Dom enjoyed at this instant with his sons.
She smothered a sigh, told herself not to sink into a pit of ridiculous self-pity, and refilled her mug.
“Going back to work?” Dom asked as she turned away from the pot.
“I was. Do I need to be doing something else?”
“Not yet. Later I’ll need to pack the clothes you want to bring, but for now the only people who need to do something are two boys who are dawdling.”
“We’re not,” came two voices in unison.
Dom glanced at them.
Pack her stuff? Courtney paused, then gave a laugh.
“What?” Dom asked.
“Of course I can’t carry my clothes in a suitcase on horseback. Duh.”
That sent the boys off into peals of laughter, and the corners of Dom’s mouth twitched as his eyes twinkled. “The horses hate suitcases.”
“I can’t imagine why,” she said drily.
“Because they bang around!” Todd supplied.
“I think,” Dom said, “that Ms. Courtney already figured that out.”
“Oh.”
Dom looked at Courtney, indicating his sons with a jerk of his head. “Too young yet for sarcasm.”
“What’s that?” Kyle demanded.
“Trust me, you’ll figure it out in the next few years. In fact, I’m sure you’ll be full of it.”
Courtney laughed again. “I seem to remember becoming full of it around ten.”
“Sounds about right to me.”
She wanted to linger with them, but decided she was probably impeding the homework, so she gave them a smile and returned to the office. And returned to the godawful job of pawing through the bones of a love she wished she could find.
Just as she was fina
lly getting to the bottom of the stack of photos, with darkness creeping in and the smells of dinner cooking, she came across a photograph that made her pause.
There was nothing about it specifically. Or maybe there was. She turned on another light, and peered at the image, trying to figure out what bothered her.
It was a photo taken in the Iraqi town. Courtney even recognized it as being taken from the door of the clinic Mary had established, looking across the street at a small shop. Women in long, dark dresses, many with their faces covered as well as their hair, were walking by. Some of the shops wares were on creaky folding tables out front, and one woman had paused to look. A couple of soldiers were in the photo, too.
One had his back to the camera and seemed to be involved in a conversation with a smiling Iraqi man. The other faced toward the camera, and she thought she recognized him. Well, she recognized a lot of soldiers who were stationed in that part of Iraq, mainly because her job required her to be there so often.
But this one…something niggled at her. She glanced at the date on the photo and saw that it was just a few days before Mary had been killed.
She looked at the soldier’s face again, and wished it were larger.
She jumped up from the desk, driven by an instinct from years of this kind of work. It might be wrong, but something told her she needed a closer look at that soldier’s face.
“Dom?” She burst into the kitchen and found him standing at the stove, stirring a pot. The boys had vanished somewhere.
“Yeah?” He looked over his shoulder.
“Do you have a magnifying glass? A scanner?”
“I have both.” He glanced at the photo she held. “Did you find something?”
“I don’t know. But something in this photo caught my attention. I need a better look at it.”
“Just a second.”
He turned down the heat beneath the pot, stirred it a couple of more times, then turned to her.
“That smells good,” she said.
“Beef stew. Hearty and filling. Probably not up your alley.”
She flushed faintly. “Actually, it smells like it’s right up my alley.”
A nearly silent laugh escaped him. “Okay, let’s go magnify this photo.”
In the office he pulled out a good-size rectangular magnifying glass and turned on some more lights. He waited patiently while she pored over the photo.
Something in that guy’s expression seriously disturbed her, but the magnifying glass wasn’t enough. She looked up. “Scanner?”
“Right here.” He touched a button on his computer and it sprang out of hibernation quickly. Then he took the photo from her and placed it on a flatbed scanner. Bending over, he pressed the button on the scanner, then typed something into his computer.
“Okay,” he said, “It’ll come up as a file on the desktop labeled Iraq-one. You probably know what to do from there. I have to get back to dinner before I scorch it.”
Since he had turned the heat down on the stew, she suspected it was more of a matter of not wanting to see the photo enlarged, or discover what it was she didn’t like.
“Thank you,” she said as he left the room. Then she took his chair at his desk and waited for the scan to finish.
When it was done, she opened the file and worked on cutting that man’s face out of the photo and enlarging it in stages. Some of the resolution was lost, of course, but as she fiddled with size and other settings, at last his expression leaped out at her. And what had bothered her became obvious.
He was staring right at Mary. And the look on his face was enough to make her shiver. Even so, she had seen that expression on the face of other soldiers who’d been through a lot of combat. What disturbed her even more was the sense that she should know that guy.
She hesitated only a few moments before she set his face as a separate file. Then she emailed it to one of her best friends in the service, Lena Mattock.
She asked for a face-recognition match, and a background on the guy if they identified him. She said nothing about why, and hoped there was nothing left in the in the picture to give away where the photo had been taken, other than somewhere sunny. She checked one last time before sending, to be sure. No, no one should be able to tell where the photo had been taken.
She didn’t doubt Lena would run the face through the software. Lena was the kind of person who would just assume Courtney had some valid reason, and wouldn’t bother to ask why.
And maybe, finally, she’d learn something useful.
Chapter 6
“Were you an only child?” Courtney asked as she watched Dom pack the requisite clothes in large saddlebags.
“Yeah. Mom almost died having me, so Dad wouldn’t hear of letting her try again.”
“Any other family?”
“I have an uncle in New York.” Dom flashed a smile. “The city lights attracted him more than dark starry nights. I see him and his family every now and then, but none of them seems too keen on roughing it out here, and I can’t leave for long to visit them.”
Courtney nodded. “I was an only, too. I don’t really know if that was a choice, or if it just happened that way. My parents never talked about it, one way or the other.”
“I know you said your dad passed, but what about your mom?”
“She lives in Taos now. She moved there for the artistic community.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a potter. Good enough to support herself.”
Dom’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “You must seem almost alien to her.”
Courtney chuckled. “Sometimes I think so. She never wanted me to go into law enforcement and keeps telling me I need to loosen up. Maybe she’s right.”
“We are who we are.” Dom shrugged and folded some more clothing into a saddlebag.
Much truth in that, Courtney thought. “Those saddlebags look like they’ve seen a lot.”
“They’re pretty old all right. Sometimes I have to get them restitched, but the leather never comes close to wearing out as long as I take care of it.”
“How long will the ride be tomorrow?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Worrying about saddle sores?”
“Only a little.”
“It’s a couple of hours, actually, but we can walk some of it to give you and the horses a break. It’s not like we’ll need a lot of time for gathering the herd. The dogs’ll do most of the work getting them into the pen, and then in the morning we’ll move ’em down here.”
“Those dogs are pretty amazing.”
“They are.” He stuffed the last of her clothes into a second saddlebag, then started adding her personal care items, along with a towel and washcloth. “I’m thinking about getting a new one this fall.”
“How come?”
“Bradley is getting up there. He’s almost ten. I think he’s going to start looking for a warm place by the fire soon.”
“Won’t that add a lot to your work, training a dog, too?”
He laughed. “These dogs are born with the instinct to herd. The other dogs do most of the teaching.”
“Really?” That surprised her.
“Really. They’re social critters, and they want to please. A youngster will know instinctively about herding, and the older dogs will show him when and how. And probably nip him gently when he gets too rambunctious. It’s always fun to watch.”
“I’d love to see that.”
“Well, it won’t be for a few weeks yet.”
The implication being that she would be long gone by then. And of course she would. She had a job to get back to, and he probably didn’t want her to hang around any longer than necessary.
What truly surprised her was that she felt an unexpected reluctance to leave. Good heavens, she’d only been here two days and she was already getting attached? Not good.
Dom finished the packing then suggested they have some coffee in the living room. A courteous host, she told herself, not an indicator that he wan
ted to spend more time with her. But the boys had gone to bed a half hour ago and the night was still young, even with the early rising he planned.
So she agreed, because there was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t bear looking through more photos, or listening to those tapes. There had been enough of that today. The only other alternative was taking a chilly walk, but her leg muscles were beginning to notice her riding lesson, if only mildly. Nor did she want to go sit upstairs in the solitude of the guest bedroom.
All good reasons to justify doing what she really wanted to do: be with Dom.
Something about his quiet steadiness drew her, apart from the fact that he was an awfully attractive man. She liked the sense that he had found balance in his life, something she still sought for herself. She was apt to go overboard on things, most especially her work. Like a dog with a bone, once she took on something, she’d gnaw on it until she’d gnawed it to nothing.
Dom, on the other hand, seemed better able to let things take their own course in their own way. But, of course, she didn’t know him all that well yet. She probably never would.
“Something wrong?” he asked as they settled in the living room.
“Not really.” She was hardly going to tell him what she was thinking about. So she covered. “Just feeling kind of wistful, I guess.”
“Eager to get back to…where are you stationed now?”
“Not especially eager to get back, no. I was at Camp Lejeune for over a year. We had a really full investigation load, mainly because we covered two states and an awful lot of sailors and marines and their families. But about eight months ago I got assigned to Georgia, to the Contingency Response Field Office.” She paused. “I guess that’s because of the training I had before I got sent to the Middle East.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, we’re kind of a SWAT team, of sorts. Counterintelligence, counterterrorism, force protection, all the high-risk stuff. We’re a rapid deployment group, ready to go anywhere we’re needed, fast, in support of other NCIS field offices.”
He studied her a moment and said, “Why do I think you’re not very happy about that?”
