The Heart's Command

by Rachel Lee

  But the sound that reached her was his voice.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  She immediately looked at him. "What for?"

  "I'm lousy company. I'm acting like a jerk."

  "I was out of line."

  "No." His eyes burned into her. "You're trying to be friendly. I'm trying to stop you. I'm being rude."

  "Why don't you want me to be friendly?" She almost held her breath, awaiting his answer. She wasn't exactly used to being rejected by men, but it happened sometimes.

  He surprised her. "Because I'm still feeling raw. That's why I don't want to visit my family yet. That's why I'm being a jerk I feel raw."

  "I understand." And she did, although more with her emotions than with her head.

  "I'm...afraid," he added, as if every word were painful to speak, "that I might...let go."

  Then she did understand, fully and completely. During and after The Incident, she had often felt she was barely hanging on to her self-control by her bloody fingertips. Trying not to freak out, when freaking out was the only emotional response left in her. She could only imagine that his burden was even greater than hers, and that much harder to hang on to his control.

  "Maybe you need to let go," she said quietly.

  "Nobody needs to hear this crap. Nobody."

  "Maybe not. But maybe you need to spill it."

  "It wouldn't do a damn bit of good," he said stonily. "Not a damn bit of good. Anyway, I was doing just fine."

  Just fine when? she wondered. Before he'd come home? Before he'd had to face the world away from the battlefield? Before he'd had to remember that once it had been possible to sleep soundly, to eat well, to live a day without being constantly aware you were one split second from death?

  Turning, she wagged her hand at the waitress. The girl came over immediately. "Two whiskeys," Bethany told her. "And a club sandwich for me, please."

  Joe's expression might have been amused if he hadn't looked so empty. "You're the designated driver."

  "I can walk home if necessary."

  "I refuse to be a cliché."

  "One drink isn't a cliché. And damn it, will you start eating that sandwich?"

  "Yes, Gunny." He took a large bite and chewed mechanically. The whiskeys appeared before them. Joe ignored his, for the moment at least. Bethany didn't really want hers, but she lifted the shot glass and tossed it down. It burned all the way, reminding her of a more foolish age when she'd gotten drunk once. Just once. That's all it had taken to cure her of the desire. Her stomach wanted to rebel, but she quelled it with a pretzel.

  "Okay," she said, when Joe was working on the second quarter of his sandwich, his mouth safely full of food, "you obviously need to talk to somebody. And you don't want it to be your family. So it can be me. Or it can be a shrink. But you have to talk."

  He shook his head and swallowed. "It won't do a damn bit of good. I'm going back."

  Something in her stilled, growing quiet and cold. "Why?"

  "My unit's over there."

  Dumb question, she thought. Of course his unit was over there. Of course he was going back. Why had she even asked? "You still need to dump before you go back to it. You have to dump it or you're going to snap."

  "Who made you an authority?"

  She bristled. "I realize I never did what you're doing, but I have had a little experience, if you remember?"

  He didn't say anything, but reached instead for the whiskey. He sipped it, surprising her. Finally he asked, "Where did you dump?"

  "All over the shoulder of a psychiatrist. He listened, I talked, and it didn't go into my service jacket because I hunted up a civilian guy and paid for it myself."

  A faint curve lifted one corner of Joe's hard mouth. "Smart."

  "I'm not stupid. And dumping it was better than kicking the dog, you know?"

  "I know." Again that distant look came to his eyes. Then he sighed, took another sip of whiskey and swallowed another mouthful of sandwich. "There was a girl," he said after a moment. "A woman, actually. A United Nations aid worker who was there to supervise the distribution of food. The ruling government arrested her for wearing a cross, but she managed to get away. I met her when she was hiding with the insurgents."

  Bethany nodded encouragingly.

  "She was something else, Bethany," he said after a few minutes. "A bundle of fire and determination. Mother Theresa in jeans and a cammie jacket."

  Bethany's heart almost stopped. Somehow she thought that if this was about a lost love, she was going to hurt in ways she didn't want to hurt ever again.

  But once again he surprised her. "She was like a sister to me. To all of us. Tough but kind. There isn't much kindness out there. Life's too hard. But she managed to be kind through it all, even when she was starving and cold and whupped. And then she got killed. We were supposed to be protecting her while we carried out our mission and got her to safety, but she got killed."

  He shook his head and looked down. Bethany wanted to touch him, to offer comfort, but she didn't dare.

  "Anyway," he said, "I got wounded, too. Nothing major. But I escorted her body back to her family in Amsterdam, then came home."

  "That must have been rough."

  His silence was his answer. He was drifting away again, but this time she didn't have to call him back. He came back all on his own. "Sorry," he said. "My body is here, but the rest of me is having trouble catching up."

  "It's okay. It can be jarring to make such a big, sudden change."

  His expression suddenly spoke volumes to her, as if he was relieved to know he wasn't just crazy, that what he was experiencing was normal. Nobody, Bethany thought, ever prepared them for these kinds of transitions. And given the he-man mentality of the Corps, it was hardly likely that anyone was going to complain about a readjustment problem.

  But she remembered her own readjustment problem, even though she had had weeks at sea to shift mental gears from the death and mayhem that had struck her ship m the Middle East to the normalcy of life at home. How much worse it must be for Joe, who had spent months at war, only to find himself home in a matter of a couple of days.

  "The mind," she said carefully, "needs time to absorb things."

  "Yeah." He didn't offer any more, and she didn't press him All she could do was let him know she was willing to listen if he decided to talk.

  But talking was evidently not what he wanted to do now. He took another sip of his whiskey, then another bite of his sandwich. Hers arrived, and while she really didn't feel hungry, she knew she had to eat to balance the whiskey she'd just drank.

  And why had she done that, anyway? To loosen him up? Because she hated the stuff herself, hated the fuzzy way it made her brain feel. So many people talked about getting "a buzz " as if it was a fun thing. If it was, she evidently lacked the equipment to enjoy it.

  For a while they ate quietly When he finished his sandwich, Joe ordered another one. It hardly surprised her; he was a big man, and right now he looked a bit gaunt. After his seconds arrived, he started talking.

  "I grew up on a ranch," he said. "In the foothills west of here. We were always on the edge of losing everything from the time I can remember. My sister had to take a job as a cop to keep the place."

  "That's your sister? Sara Ironheart?"

  "Yeah." He looked at her. "You know her?"

  "I've met her. She's the only woman deputy here, and once we met at a church social and got to talking about what it was like to be women in men's outfits."

  A smile lifted his face. "Yeah. It's not easy. When she first went for the job, the sheriff was okay with it, but some of the guys gave her a really hard time. Funny thing was, Sara was still there when the rest of them were gone."

  "Well, she's still there. Part-time now, working as a crime scene investigator with that Dalton guy." Suddenly Bethany blushed. "But you know that."

  "That's okay. She's got two little ones she wants to spend time with, and since she and Gideon married, he's turned the r
anch around enough that she says she only keeps her finger in so she has something to talk about besides kids."

  Bethany laughed. "Well, I can testify to the fact that she has a lot to talk about. I wish I saw more of her."

  "Yeah. She's a good egg. For a sister."

  Beth caught the teasing note in his voice and realized that Joe Yates was an even more attractive man when he wasn't looking haunted.

  "Anyway," he continued, "Gideon turned the place around by boarding and training horses. He's got a spooky way with them. My granddad calls him a horse whisperer. Gideon says all he does is listen to the horse. Whatever it is, it's like magic. So he trains show horses and cow ponies. Quite a combination." He shook his head. "I swear he could get a wild mustang to stand on its hind legs and whistle Dixie."

  "I'd like to see that sometime."

  "What, the whistling Dixie?"

  She laughed again. "No, the training part."

  "Sure." He kind of shrugged the idea away, but didn't exactly say no. "Anyway, you look at the place now and you can't tell what it was like when I was a kid. We were barely holding it together. Sara had to rent out most of the good pasture to a neighbor for his cattle, and my grandfather had this thing about rescuing mustangs, which meant they had to be fed through the cold months, and Sara worked her butt off. I got a job when I turned sixteen, and started helping out."

  Bethany nodded encouragement.

  "I thought we were poor. We didn't have much. But you know what? I never went without a meal. I might have worn clothes from Goodwill when things got tight, but I never went hungry or cold."

  He sighed. "Then I saw the people in...over there. God, I've never seen such poverty. Or at least such widespread poverty. These folks have nothing at all. Nothing. Not a roof, not a bit of land, just the clothes on their backs and maybe a pot for holding water, or cooking, if they managed to find something to eat. It made me think how lucky I was. And now I'm sitting here eating two sandwiches." He started to push the plate away.

  "Don't waste it," she said gently. "Throwing that away won't help them. So what did you do? Give them your rations?"

  "As much as we could. But the winter..." He shook his head. "I don't know what's worse, the starvation or the war."

  "The U.N. is trying to help. And the Red Cross."

  "It isn't enough. It's hard to get food to people in outlying areas because there aren't any roads. There are air drops of food, but it's still not enough. God, they need everything. Blankets. Firewood. Shelter. Clothes. Shoes. Food."

  "And your friend was trying to help with that."

  "Kara? Yeah. It blows my mind that the pigs arrested her."

  "Well," said Bethany, feeling almost hesitant, "it's easier to keep people down when they're too hungry to move."

  "Actually, it just makes them more desperate. Desperate enough to do something. But the rulers didn't want any food getting to anyone except through them. They wanted it to look like they were the ones who were providing it. Bastards."

  Bethany waited a minute or so, to see if he would continue. When he didn't, she said, "You need to eat. Get your strength back up."

  Then he asked the most painful question she'd ever heard: "Why?"

  Chapter 4

  Well, she didn't have an answer for that one, Bethany thought after she drove Joe back to his motel. It was clear he didn't want to go back over there, but it was equally clear he felt guilty as hell about being here.

  But she didn't know what she could do to make him feel any better about any of it. There were no magic wands for this one.

  On impulse, she turned her car west, and headed out to where she thought the Ironheart Ranch was. She'd never been out that way, but from a few things that Sara and others had mentioned in passing, she thought she knew which county road to take.

  The night was already cool, but as she climbed higher into the foothills, it grew even chillier. Here and there she thought she caught sight of patches of snow, sheltered from melting in the daytime sun by the shadows of rocks and trees.

  It was awfully late to be paying a call, and more than once she considered turning around, but she pressed forward anyway. She wasn't a marine for nothing.

  Then, just as she was beginning to conclude that she'd gone too far and was probably on the wrong road, her headlights picked out a sign: Horse Training and Boarding.

  It wasn't much of a sign—although it was fresh and neat—designed not to catch the attention of mere pas-sersby, but to point the way to those who were already looking for the place. Apparently this business relied on word of mouth.

  She turned off onto a ranch road that showed signs of a recent grading to wipe out the effects of the winter. Barbed-wire fence lined both sides of it, not the freshly painted white wood of fancier horse ranches. Already she had the feeling this was a no-nonsense place.

  When she pulled into the wide gravel circle between house and barn, she was relieved to see lights on in the downstairs windows of the two-story house, and even a light from the barn. Somebody was still awake. At least she wouldn't scare folks out of their wits by rousing them.

  She put the car in Park and turned off the engine. Just before she slammed her car door shut, the side door of the house opened, and a large man was silhouetted against golden light.

  "You lost?" he called.

  "I hope not. I'm looking for Sara Ironheart."

  "You've come to the right place. Come on in."

  Sometimes it didn't pay to rash in where fools dared to tread, and this might be one of those times. Joe might hate her forever for not minding her own business. And she liked Joe. She wanted to see him again. But...she'd also seen how he was hurting, and she didn't think avoiding his family was helping him any.

  So she marched forward with squared shoulders until she was standing in the kitchen with the broad-shouldered man whose long black hair was caught in a thong at the nape of his neck, and whose face was stamped with his Native American ancestry. A powerful-looking man who seemed to be at peace with life and unafraid of anything. He, she thought, might be good for Joe. She wondered why she hadn't seen him around town.

  "I'm Gideon Ironheart," he said, offering a hand. "Sara's husband."

  "I'm Bethany Mathison, the Marine Corps recruiter."

  He lifted his eyebrows. "My kids are too young. Don't tell me Sara's taken a wild hair."

  "No." She felt herself smile. "I'm here to see her about her brother." At once Bethany realized what that sounded like, and before surprise could change to horror on Gideon's face, she rushed to say, "He's okay. He's not hurt." No physically, anyway. But she didn't want to say more until Sara was here, or at least until she knew this big man would stay calm when he heard what his brother-in-law was going through.

  "Well," Gideon said, absorbing the news with barely a change in expression, "have a seat at the table. I was just making some coffee. Sara had to go out on a job tonight, but she called a little while ago. She was probably following you right up the county road."

  Bethany accepted his offer, taking a seat at a table that looked as if it had seen generations of wear and absorbed countless conversations, quarrels and good times. She'd never had anything that old in her life, and the age of the piece attracted her. She ran her hand over it, feeling the mars and scars, and the patina of its long life.

  "I'm sorry to come so late," she said as he poured them both mugs of steaming coffee, then sat across from her.

  "It's not all that late," he said reassuringly. "I'm going to be up most of the night, anyway. I have a mare in foal. And obviously Sara's not in bed yet, and won't be for some time. She always comes in wound up from these things."

  "I can imagine. Thanks for being so kind."

  "So you know Joey?"

  "I met him recently."

  "Ah." Gideon's obsidian eyes searched her face, but he didn't question her further. Somewhere this man had learned the gift of patience, and Bethany was beginning to wish she could ask him for a dose of it Everything s
he was doing tonight seemed reckless, and she'd sworn never to be reckless again, not after her last mistake. By the book, that's what she'd sworn to be, and the book said you didn't make impulsive calls on people you didn't know late at night, mixing up in something that was really none of your business.

  But here she was, and so as not to scare this family to death, she had to remain. If she left now, they'd wonder what she was hiding. They'd worry.

  "I hear you're a horse whisperer," she said, to fill a silence she was beginning to find awkward, even though he seemed comfortable with it.

  He smiled. "So it's rumored."

  "You don't think you are?"

  He shrugged. "I just pay attention to the horses. You have to learn their language. Animals aren't verbal, but they say a whole hell of a lot with their bodies and behavior. There's nothing magical about it, despite what people say. Have you ever had a dog?"

  "No, I never had a pet."

  "Too bad. People with dogs and cats learn to read them the same way, if they pay attention. What I do is no different."

  "Except that you're very good at it?"

  He chuckled. "It keeps me in food."

  She felt a great liking for this man, and wondered if Joe might ever have been a little like him, before war had affected him. And yet she got the feeling that Gideon's patience and calm arose not from an easy life, but rather from surviving a hard one. There was something in his face that was etched so deep, something hard and painful, that even his calm gaze and friendly smile couldn't wipe it away entirely. That pain was etched on Joe's face now, too, but Joe's gaze wasn't calm. It was nearly empty, sometimes.

  That frightened her, she realized. She had only just met Joe Yates, yet she was already coming to care about what happened to him. Maybe caring too much, if she judged by her presence here.

  Gideon spoke. "So how did you get to be a recruiter?"

  "Well..." She hesitated and smiled wryly. "You have to be gung-ho, you have to look really good, and then the Corps gods have to pick you out of all the applicants."