Lost and Found Groom

by McLinn, Patricia

She slid her hand down his chest, instructing her nerves to remember–always remember–these textures, these planes and hollows, this sensation. “Later later’s even better.”

  He caught her hand as it ventured lower. His chuckle was raspy. “That package only had three condoms in it, and we’ve used them all. Next time–” He dropped a kiss on her nose. “–don’t sell us short. In the meantime, it’s time to tell you–”

  Unfamiliar panic swept over her. “It can wait.”

  “I’m staying in Wyoming–in Far Hills.”

  “What? But your job . . .”

  “I quit.”

  “Quit,” she repeated, trying to make sense of this. She’d had this thought out, she knew how to react, what to expect. Now he’d dropped a bomb into her order. She sat up, holding the covers to her chin. “Why? When?”

  He frowned, but answered readily enough. “Why is because of what you said about how could I be a good father to Matthew if I wasn’t going to be around.”

  “But I didn’t mean–”

  “For me to quit,” he filled in impatiently. “I know. You meant for me to give up and leave. But I don’t give up that easily, Kendra. Not on things that count. Like Matthew. You were right, though. I couldn’t be a father to Matthew, not the kind I want to be, with that job. So I quit. I went back because I owed my boss a face-to-face.”

  “You went back–you quit when you went East? But that was weeks ago. My God, we’ve talked about your job! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to tell you at the same time that I had a new job–at least that’s what I told myself.” His voice turned grim. “I wonder if something told me I’d get this kind of response.”

  “I don’t know what kind of response you expect when you tell me you’ve quit your job on a whim–”

  “It wasn’t a whim. And I also told you I’m staying in Far Hills. So I might have hoped for a response along the lines of your being glad it won’t have to be the last time for this.”

  Her gaze followed the sweep of his hand to indicate the rumpled covers, and their nakedness. Then she met his eyes.

  His face stiffened.

  “I see. This was meant to be the last time. Sorry to disappoint you, Kendra.” He climbed out of bed, yanking on his jeans. “I’m staying. I got word on my new job before I called. I wanted to surprise you. Guess I did.”

  An insidious thread of hope wove into her confusion.

  “What kind of new job?”

  “Search and rescue. I’ll be training volunteers and coordinating the regional efforts, ground and air.”

  The thread snapped.

  “It’s just the same. Rescuing people.”

  “Once in a while maybe.”

  “Like Taumaturgio.”

  “It’s nothing like that. And it’s nothing like my old job flying for the government. I would have been gone more than I was around with that job. This will mean some emergency calls, sure, but it’ll be mostly milk runs. Routine. Scanning for a few lost campers.”

  “Flying.”

  “That’s what I do.”

  “It’s what my father did, too.”

  A whisper of words came into her mind.

  You’ll come back, won’t you . . .?

  Yes, I’ll come back.

  When had she heard those words? Who–?

  Daniel reached for her. “Kendra.”

  “No.” She scooted to the far side of the bed so he couldn’t touch her. She didn’t want his sympathy. “I told you, I don’t want Matthew to have to go through having his father take off one day and never return.”

  “You can’t guarantee that won’t happen, Kendra, no matter what you do. You said my job with the government was the barrier to putting my name on his birth certificate, Kendra. The job’s gone. So’s your excuse. I’m not going anywhere.”

  *

  “Sheriff Johnson? This is Kendra Jenner at the Banner.”

  “Hey, there Kendra. How’re you doing? This seems to be my week for talking to folks from Far Hills Ranch. Had a call from Marti a few days ago. She’s a sharp one, your aunt.”

  “Yes, she is. Sheriff, I heard you might have found someone to fill that post you mentioned–regional trainer and coordinator for search and rescue volunteers.”

  He whistled. “You hear things fast. Thought I’d get Lucy to do a news release all neat and official before I heard from you.”

  “You’re that far along in the process?”

  “Don’t want to let this one get away. Not often we’d get someone with these kinds of skills. Damned impressive.”

  “Hmm.” She stretched the note of speculation before asking, “So you’ve checked his credentials? Verified his resume?”

  A faint creak reached her over the phone line, as if the sheriff had shifted in his old-fashioned wooden desk chair.

  “Can’t say we’ve done that yet. ’Course we’re not as formal as some places. We can go with our gut reaction, and my gut says this fella’s the real McCoy.”

  “Of course, Sheriff Johnson. Although, with this person training volunteers, I’m sure your department would want to be certain you weren’t dealing with anyone who had something to hide.”

  “S’pose not.”

  “So, should I tell my editor we’re likely to have that news release in time for tomorrow’s deadline, Sheriff?”

  “Better hold off, Kendra. Let me do some checking.”

  “Of course, Sheriff.”

  Kendra hung up, trying to ignore the roiling in her stomach. She’d had no choice. For Matthew’s sake. For hers. Maybe even for Daniel’s. Now she had to do something much, much harder.

  *

  “Daniel?”

  He turned from the map-strewn desk set into the window alcove with no attempt to hide his surprise.

  The white-haired man who’d introduced himself as Rufus Trent had told her Daniel was in his room, and to go on up. Her heart beat much harder than the climb up the stairs could explain. Some of it was dread. Some if it was simply seeing Daniel.

  “Kendra.” A frown chased the surprise. “Is everything okay? Matthew–”

  “He’s fine. It’s–we need to talk.”

  “Okay.” He surveyed the room. Besides the desk and chair, there was a double bed with the head pushed against an end wall, a wardrobe, dresser and two bookcases under the slope of the roof.

  He gestured for her to sit on the end of the quilt-covered bed. When she hesitated, he gave her a knowing look, picked up the desk chair, set it squarely facing her and sat. His patient silence gave her the floor.

  “Yesterday . . . Well, it caught me by surprise.”

  “What did, Kendra?”

  “All of it,” she said a little impatiently. “What I was feeling, what happened–no, maybe not what happened.” She’d sworn to herself she would be totally honest. “But certainly the news about that search and rescue job. And I didn’t say some things I need to say. Some things I’ve thought through.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s like what you said when I said the storm drugged me–that drugs were one way to get people to reveal a truth that came out no other way.” She glanced up and he nodded. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have expressed my feelings without that storm. But you do it, too. You use the danger. That’s your drug.”

  “That’s–”

  “Just like a drug, Daniel.” She spoke over him, not letting him deny it. “It brings out the truth for you. Because that’s the only time you feel you’ve earned the right to have survived.”

  He bent forward, his hands dropped between his knees, forearms resting across his thighs. He’d sat this way that first day he’d been in her house. Then he’d been watching Matthew with great intensity. Now his eyes seemed to be trained on his own hands. He didn’t lift his head when he spoke.

  “Remember what you told me your professor said about what you would want to be doing on the last day of your life?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well
, this is it for me, Kendra. Flying and helping people. That’s what I want to do.”

  “It’s more important to you to save strangers–”

  He raised his head, and she couldn’t finish.

  “You’re who I want to spend all my days with–you and Matthew. But this is what I need to do. It’s not a means to an end. It’s who I am. I’m not saying you’re wrong about why that is. I don’t know. And I’m not saying it might not change. Some of it already has. It used to be I only knew about raising hell. Flying changed that. Then Taumaturgio changed me more.”

  He took her hand, opening the clenched fingers and stroking it. “I love you, Kendra.” Her heart jolted at the words. “I think you love me. And part of me is the need to do this.”

  “I know.” A strange feeling washed over her. A mixture of sadness, empathy, perhaps even a little shame. But it did not erode her determination. “That’s why you’ll be leaving here soon.”

  His hands stilled. “What have you done, Kendra?”

  “I asked pointed questions about the new search and rescue trainer’s credentials. They’ll check, and they’ll hit the same deadends my sources did. They’ll wonder what you’re hiding.”

  “So you think you’ve killed my chance at this job.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And my chance of helping people.”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t give up.”

  “I know that.” Her voice trembled. She took in a steadying breath. “But you’ll take your risks somewhere else. Matthew won’t have to watch you. I won’t have to watch you.”

  “I’m not a daredevil, Kendra. My defiance has been of regulations and red-tape, not of the laws of nature. I have a healthy respect for nature, and for the limits of machinery and man. I don’t push myself or my equipment beyond them.”

  “I wish I could believe that. Or that believing would be enough.”

  “Do you fear for Matthew?”

  “Of course I do. But I didn’t have a choice whether to love Matthew or not. With you I have a choice.”

  “Do you, Kendra? I didn’t. I had no choice at all. Not from those first hours during Aretha, when you were so damned determined to be brave. When you feared for someone else’s life and fought so hard to ease his pain. I had no choice at all about loving you.”

  He leaned forward until his knees enclosed hers and took her face between his hands. She gave no resistance as he drew her forward so their mouths met. The kiss was soft and sad. With no warning, it shifted to hard and hungry.

  It ended only when they parted enough to gulp in air.

  “Dammit, I have no choice.” He shifted around to sit beside her on the bed, and put his arms around her. She went into the embrace, resting her cheek against his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Daniel.” Her tears slipped down without check. “I know you wanted this job. I’m sorry I took that away from you.”

  He kissed her hair. “I know you are.”

  “I’d do it again.”

  “I know that, too.”

  She met his eyes, let her fingers trace the scar on his cheek. “The worst of it is, I still want you.”

  His dark eyes held a million colors, each holding a different emotion, but the light in them was what she needed to see.

  “That’s the best of it, Kendra.”

  They made love. Kendra couldn’t explain it, couldn’t rationalize it, but she accepted that in the long, hot kisses, in the slide of his skin against hers, in the building sensations, there was a certainty, a clarity that she had known only in making love with this man. Their joined bodies, like cupped hands, enclosed a space, a moment, where they could love.

  Afterwards, she lay wrapped in the quilt from his bed, listening to him in the bathroom, knowing that beyond them the problems remained. But content for now to allow only what was between them to exist.

  He came back into the room. Naked and so right that her throat and eyes burned just looking at him. At the edge of the bed he stopped and looked down at her, his body changing, reacting.

  “Do you have to go soon?”

  “I have to pick Matthew up at the co-op at four-thirty, but I need to get something from the market for dinner before that.”

  He glanced at the clock, then grinned. “Tell you what, while you pick up Matthew, I’ll get the fixings for that steak dinner I owe you. That gives us time.”

  His knee on the mattress shifted her toward him. Using the damp cloth he’d brought from the bathroom, he slowly stroked from her throat down the center of her body, pushing away the quilt, until he reached the juncture of her thighs. Leaving his hand there, he settled onto the mattress beside her, each of them on their side, facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes. He tossed the cloth aside, and ran his palm across her buttocks, then down the back of her thigh, drawing her top leg up, over his hip.

  “Daniel . . .”

  “I know.” He twisted around to the nightstand behind him, grabbing another condom, and putting it on without changing their positions, the brushing movements of his hands and body against her vulnerable core producing a nearly unbearable tension.

  Finished, he paused an instant. An eternity. And both threatened her–her resolve, her need, her belief, her desire.

  “This doesn’t change things,” she said because she had to.

  He kissed under her chin, arching her head back, as he entered her, and she climaxed with that long, deep stroke.

  “It doesn’t need to.”

  And then he began again.

  *

  This time, he’d had no idea he was being tracked, not until he came out of the Far Hills Market with a loaded bag of groceries tucked against his side, and heard: “Hello, Daniel.”

  Daniel knew the voice. But it couldn’t be. Here?

  He turned slowly. Robert Delligatti Junior. In his three-piece suit, white shirt, discreet tie, regulation briefcase, thinning hair and thick glasses. As much as his bland appearance blended in in Washington, it stood out against the jeans, boots and cowboy tans of Far Hills. But Robert Delligatti’s mild expression revealed no indication of feeling out of place or uncomfortable.

  “Hello, Robert. This is a surprise.” He let the full measure of his bemusement come through in that understatement. Robert in Far Hills was more than a surprise, it damned near reversed the laws of nature. Then he frowned. “Mother and Father–?”

  “Are in excellent health. I’m here–shall we sit?” Robert took a seat on the bench in front of the Far Hills Market as if he’d done it every day of his life. Daniel followed, still holding the grocery bag. “I’m here on your behalf.”

  “On my behalf?”

  Robert put his briefcase across his knees, twirled the combination lock then flipped up the lid.

  “Yes, I thought you would like a copy of these.”

  He held out crisp official papers folded in thirds.

  “What are they?”

  “They are copies of your work record, which indicates your expertise at search and rescue missions, as well as your experience in a training and supervisory role, and of course an official log of your extensive pilot experience. These should make you an ideal candidate for the search and rescue operation, and should satisfy those who were inquiring about your credentials and were turned away without answers. In future, these records will be available to anyone who should inquire about your suitability for such jobs.”

  “But–”

  “It doesn’t list your true experience. But neither would it mislead a prospective employer. Comparable experience, I would call it,” he finished judiciously.

  Daniel looked at the papers in his hand. “Why, Robert?”

  “I felt an obligation. After your fine work in Santa Estella, and the sacrifice involved, especially the last years of Taumaturgio’s existence, it seemed the least I could do.”

  “What did you have to do with Santa Estella and Taumaturgio?”

  “My office reviews certain reports from th
e various embassies and consulates.”

  “Yeah?” Daniel slid the papers into his shirt pocket. They’d do the trick, all right. Robert did thorough work. “What kind of reports?”

  “The reports my section reviews are those that someone along the line has felt required a particular kind of attention.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as aid to the children of Santa Estella.”

  “The section where you work decided on that?”

  “Ah, well, actually the section I head. I received the promotion because my superiors appreciated my particular brand of creativity. They felt it gives me an ability to find the unorthodox solution to unorthodox situations. As on Santa Estella.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Daniel wasn’t sure which surprised him more–Robert being the one behind the operation, or his being considered unorthodox.

  “So you felt a professional obligation because I was an operative on one of your missions.”

  “I would classify it as a personal obligation.”

  “Why?” he demanded baldly.

  “I became aware that your assignment on Santa Estella had a great impact on you. Your connection with Ms. Jenner, of course, but also your feeling about continuing your association with the–” His eyelid flickered, almost as if he’d winked. “–government.”

  “Why would you . . . Good Lord, you recommended me to be Taumaturgio? You!”

  “Why wouldn’t I? I know some might see our relationship as a bar, but I have confidence in my ability to separate my filial loyalty from my professional assessment.”

  “Filial loyalty,” Daniel repeated, torn between laughing at the typically Robertian phrasing and an odd sensation in his throat.

  “And from a strictly professional standpoint, you were perfect. Your appearance made it feasible for you to blend in with the natives, you had a foundation in the language as well as a remarkable knack for picking up local variants, you could fly through the eye of a needle, as one of your evaluations said, and you could think on your feet. The name Taumaturgio, of course, wasn’t part of the original conception. But I did think it added an appropriate touch when it came to my attention.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. With that settled–” He put the briefcase on the bench and started to rise. “–I will be on my way.”