“One for you and one for me?” Hatch asked.
The tyke nodded.
CHAPTER SIX
A year later (almost)
“SO, CLAY, WHO DO WE have here?” The feed store owner winked and peered over the register. Hatch smoothed a hand over Ryder’s hair. They’d been in the store a dozen times or more since Angela’s son had come to live with him.
He’d be surprised if there was anyone left in town who didn’t recognize this little carrottop.
“It’s me, Mr. Grainger.”
“No.” Grainger continued to put on a show. “Ryder, is that really you? You must have grown two inches overnight.”
“Today’s my birthday. I’m this many.” He held up four fingers.
“How many is that?” Hatch quizzed him.
“Four.”
“Well, happy fourth birthday. I believe Mrs. Grainger said something about that.” Mr. Grainger reached behind the counter and pulled out a wrapped present. “She wanted me to give this to you.”
Ryder grabbed for the gift eagerly. Then looked to see if that was okay with Hatch. Ruffling the boy’s head, he nodded. “What do you say?”
“Thank you, Mr. Grainger. You can come to my party if you want. And Mrs. Grainger if she wants. I don’t have any more invitations because they were just for kids. But you can still come.”
Once you got him talking he kept going and going.
“You’re very welcome, young man. I’m afraid I can’t make it to your party because I have to watch the store. But Cory and his grandma will be there.”
Ryder scrunched his face in an effort to connect the dots between his preschool friend, Cory Grainger, and Cory’s grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Grainger, who ran the feed store. He was just becoming aware of the tangle of familial relationships.
Realizing Mrs. Grainger was both Mr. Grainger’s wife and Cory’s grandma was a big leap for him. A few months ago they’d implied Aunt Maddie was an honorary title. And here she was his very real great-aunt by marriage.
Grainger lifted the lid off the Dum Dum jar. “Can I offer your boy a sucker, Clay?”
Your boy. Hatch didn’t know if he was just becoming more attuned to it because Ryder seemed to be searching for his connection to the world, but people referred to the boy as his more often than not these days, too. Ryder wasn’t just Angela’s son.
He was Hatch’s stepson.
The first time someone verbalized that connections Hatch had had a hard time wrapping his brain around it. He hadn’t thought of his responsibility to Ryder in quite those terms. Today he didn’t even bat his good eye, but simply smiled and nodded.
“We’re here about the ad in the paper,” he said.
“Out back.” Grainger led the way through the store, a mysterious and magical place with an array of odd merchandise. They passed through the birdseed aisle with its birdbaths and birdhouses, and a motion detector device As Seen on TV “that kept squirrels away from gardens and feeders.”
Hatch used to love coming here as a kid.
Grainger didn’t just sell feed for pets and livestock. Grainger’s Feed & Pet Supply served as a centralized location for anyone wanting to offload baby animals. The backyard was like a petting zoo.
Ryder ran toward the chicken wire pen where the whelps were tearing through the sides of a battered cardboard box in their eagerness to get out and explore. “Puppies!”
From the look of it, neither puppies nor the boy would be contained for very long. The six energetic pups competed for Ryder’s attention with their yelping.
“What do you think?”
After offering to hold the wrapped present, Hatch unlatched the gate and unleashed the kid on the hounds. Or more accurately, blue heelers, a breed that got their color from a white coat with black hairs that gave the dog a bluish hue. The puppies all looked like little blue-gray rats with black ears. A couple had a black spot or two and one was completely gray.
“Would you like a puppy for your birthday?”
Ryder dropped to his knees amid the fray. “Hatch, this is the bestest fourth birthday present ever. All my life I’ve wanted a puppy.”
Hatch got a good chuckle out of that one. He leaned over the fence and watched him roll around in the straw-filled pen.
Angela had planned ahead, leaving wrapped birthday and holiday presents for her son. Hatch had kept them hidden in the trunk of the Caddy.
He hadn’t really thought about getting the kid something until a couple of weeks ago, when Maddie started making a fuss about party planning. She was back at the ranch right now, decorating, while he and the boy had driven into town for haircuts and anything else he could think of to keep them out of his aunt’s way for the next couple hours.
Until he’d read the ad in the paper at the barbershop, his big plan for the day had been a drive to Walmart in Green River and let the boy pick out his own present. This was definitely a better plan.
Stew came running out the back after Alex, barely able to keep up with his stepson. Hatch let the boy inside the pen and Stew stopped to catch his breath before sidling up next to them.
“When the hell did you get so out of shape?” Hatch muttered. While Stew hadn’t been a Navy SEAL, he’d been in the Navy and had to maintain a weight standard and physical fitness requirements.
“You have to ask?”
Stew had put on a good thirty pounds with his wife’s pregnancy. But Mia had lost her weight after the birth of their daughter, Sophia, and Stew hadn’t.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’ve put on a few pounds,” his friend added.
It was true. But only the twenty or so pounds Hatch had lost while in the desert heat. And afterward in the hospital. He raised his T-shirt a couple inches to show he still had abs of steel.
“I hate you,” Stew said.
“Are you coming to my party?” Ryder was asking Alex.
“Yeah, we got you a present. I can’t tell you what it is, though” Alex held out an action figure. “But I got one, too. Only yours is different.”
“Alex!” Stew scolded. “You weren’t supposed to tell.”
“Hatch is getting me a puppy for my birthday.” Ryder held on to two promising prospects, one a medium blue with black ears and a mask, with a patch just above his tailbone. The other also had black ears, and three big patches on his back.
“Dad, I want a puppy!” Alex turned to Stew in appeal. “Ryder gets one, so can I have one, too?”
“No,” Stew said, “we just came here to look. Your mom would kill me.” He turned back to Hatch. “Are you crazy? Have you even asked Ryder’s mother?”
The boys had moved farther into the pen to chase down the pack. Although it looked more as if the pack was chasing them.
Hatch kept his voice low to keep little ears from overhearing. “Shouldn’t I have done that?”
It wouldn’t be his first blunder in child rearing. Angela wasn’t always accessible when he had a question. Phone calls were reserved for true emergencies and there was no guarantee he’d even get ahold of her. The internet was their most reliable means of communication.
Though there could be lag time between their Q & A sessions. There were a hundred reasons for it, not all of them bad, but he found himself worrying when he didn’t hear back from her right away. Whenever he couldn’t reach her, however, he relied on Mia and sometimes Stew for guidance.
“Yeah,” his pal said, beginning to sound like the voice of reason. “A puppy is a twelve- to fifteen- year commitment. You don’t just bring one home on a whim.”
Hatch and Angela had scheduled a Skype session for after the party.
“I guess I should put the boy off until I speak with her.” He glanced over at Ryder. Down to one puppy. It looked as if he’d made his decision....
The pup with the black patch above his tailbone.
The boys were running in circles, squealing and inciting the pups to chase them.
“So which one are you going to get?” Stew asked.<
br />
“The one in the lead.” The blue bundle of energy was nipping at, but not biting, Ryder’s heels. He was also trying to keep the other pups in check. The alpha. “I’ve been needing a good herd dog. Picked up another two dozen head at auction the other day.”
“Mia’s been wanting a house with a yard,” Stew said. “We get a yard, there’s no excuse not to have a dog. Which one do you think I should get?”
“That pudgy little guy running at the back of the pack.”
Stew took Hatch’s good-natured ribbing in stride. “We could start running together in the morning. Maybe I’d lose some of this excess baggage.”
“You could start with the ten miles out to my place every day. That ought to do it.”
“Might not be that far.” Will shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “I’m thinking about buying the old Anderson place. If it’s all right with you?”
Hatch was quiet for a moment. Fifteen years ago the Anderson property had been Henry land. One of ten 650 acre plots. Nine of which had been sold off. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Anderson was desperate to sell and Hatch had been holding out hope of getting it back until just now.
A pipe dream. He didn’t have the kind of money it would take to piece Henry land back together. Not all of which was even available. Some of the land had been developed, and only four of the nine plots were on the market.
Anderson’s land being the only one abutting his.
He looked Stew in the eye. “Of course it’s all right with me.”
And it was.
“Mia deserves better than a double-wide behind the shop, with my mother in the next room.” Stew shuddered. “And right now the baby’s in our room. The only other option is having Sophia and Alex share. That works for now, but it won’t five years from now.”
Hatch gave himself a mental kick in the pants for having teased Stew about his weight. His friend carried even more weight on his shoulders. Hatch had gone all through school and joined the Navy with the Stewart boys, Will and his cousin, Big Al—Alex.
Big Al and Hatch had gone on to become Navy SEALs. Will never made it past the first qualifying round of physical fitness tests. After his first hitch in the Navy he’d decided military life wasn’t for him, and he’d returned to the family business.
Meanwhile, Big Al, star quarterback, married his high school sweetheart and breezed through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs training. He’d been sitting to Hatch’s left when the rocket propelled grenade ripped through their transport.
Shrapnel had taken out Hatch’s eye, killed two of their team members and injured three others, including Calhoun, who’d lost his leg and two brothers.
Hatch admired Calhoun for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the gunny was one tough son of a gun.
Alex Stewart had escaped without a scratch—not that Hatch begrudged him that. Except he was never the same again.
Survivor’s guilt? Post-traumatic stress disorder?
Hatch didn’t know what had made Alex Stewart take his own life. Only that he’d left his wife, Mia, devastated. Will Stewart, the most stand-up guy Hatch knew, had stepped in to pick up the pieces.
When his cousin’s widow wouldn’t eat, he’d fed her. When she couldn’t sleep, he’d sat up with her all night. And when she couldn’t get herself out of bed in the morning to care for her son, Will took care of Alex. When Mia had discovered she was pregnant with her dead husband’s baby, and lost the child shortly after, Will had been there to cry with her.
A year after his cousin’s death, Will convinced Mia to marry him. But somewhere along the way he’d convinced himself he wasn’t good enough for his cousin’s widow—the girl he’d had a crush on since high school. That she’d married him only because he was a convenient substitute.
That wasn’t how Hatch saw it. Mia was the happiest he’d ever seen her. “It’ll be nice to have you as a neighbor.”
“You know I’m not a rancher, Hatch,” Will said. “I just want the property for the house and the yard. A little hunting. And the damn dog I’m going to get an ass-chewing over.” He glanced at the light blue runt his son held, and sighed. “If you ever want to expand, we could work something out regarding the land. You could buy it back or lease it.”
“I appreciate it.” Saying more than that would be like admitting he was ready to return to his own roots.
“WHAT DO YOU GALS DO for the Marines?” the guy across from Angela asked as they rumbled along in the back of the supply truck. “Aside from drive trucks?”
“You mean like this one you commandeered from us?” Maria Romano said in her tough New Jersey accent.
“We’re mechanics.” Angela never had gotten around to taking one of those powder puff car maintenance classes. Instead, she’d chosen automotive maintenance as her military occupational specialty. Mechanics often did double duty as drivers along supply routes, for the very practical reason that if a truck broke down there was someone on hand to fix it.
Provided they had everything they needed. Or could compromise enough to get the truck running again.
These guys weren’t the enemy, but they didn’t look like any of the Marines she knew. They had long hair. Overgrown beads. Wore a uniform of sorts. And looked as if they could move in and out of villages without attracting too much attention.
These men reminded her of Hatch when they’d first met.
The guy next to her wasn’t talking, but he kept brushing his thigh against hers. Angela shifted in her seat and he bumped her again. It wasn’t as if she’d never been in this situation before.
Bored men. Isolated duty.
Yeah, a few of them were bound to get out of hand.
“Son of a—” He let loose a howl. “What’d you do that for?”
“Sorry.” She shifted the butt end of her M-16 from his boot. “Did I put my weapon down on your foot?”
He was tough. He could take it.
Intentional or not, she couldn’t take any more of his cozying up to her. All she wanted was to get back to base in time to talk with her son on his birthday.
A guy sitting in the corner chuckled. “Better watch yourself, Shade. That’s Hatch’s wife you’re messing with.”
The hairs at the back of her neck stood on end. How did he know that?
They guy on her right straightened and put some space between them. And when she looked around, even the men who hadn’t been bothering her were sitting up straighter.
The one in the corner moved out of the shadows, and she saw he was about her age. She’d never met him, but he seemed familiar.
Angela didn’t know if these men were acting out of fear or respect. But whatever it was, she liked it. “Are you guys Navy SEALs?”
They hadn’t volunteered any information when they’d stopped the supply caravan in the middle of nowhere. And turned the truck around after a brief chat with the officer in charge.
They were clearly men on a mission to return to base ASAP.
So the rest of the caravan had gone on, while she and Romano, the truck’s duty drivers, had been ordered to stay with the vehicle and ride in back. Whoever was driving now was with these guys.
The guy across from her, the one who seemed to be in charge—at least back here—confirmed it with a nod. “I didn’t know Hatch was married.” He said it as if he didn’t quite believe it. And why would he? It’s not as if they’d sent out wedding invitations.
She touched the horseshoe nail with her thumb. “How do you know Hatch?” she asked the young guy in the corner.
Should she have said “my husband” to drive home the point?
“Only by reputation,” he said. “But some of these guys served with him. I’m sure he’d want to know if his old unit was disrespecting you. In any way,” he added, for Shade’s benefit.
They arrived back at camp a short while later.
Angela hopped down from the truck.
Maybe this had worked out better than she’d
anticipated, since she was back long before her scheduled Skype time. Romano went to find their sergeant, to see if he’d even listen to their explanation, and to find out what he wanted them to do next.
There were troops in outposts counting on these supplies. But there was also safety in numbers, and Angela couldn’t imagine the sergeant wanting them to set out on their own. But who knew when the next scheduled delivery was for that sector? They might need an armed escort.
She accepted the keys from the driver, who hurried off after the man who appeared to be their officer in charge. The rest of them seemed in no hurry to go anywhere. The young guy from the corner tailed her to the driver’s door.
“So would you like to see a movie sometime, Angela Adams?” he asked.
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Maybe.” His smile seemed sincere.
“As you pointed out—” she opened the door to climb in “—I’m married.”
‘I thought that was only a technicality.”
She whipped around. “Who are you?”
She knew the Special Ops community was small and tight. But this guy’s knowledge into her personal life was almost creepy.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”
She studied his handsome face. She’d seen that firm jaw and those green eyes before, but knew she’d never met him. His buzzed hair, sandy in color with blond highlights, could mean he was right out of boot camp, or that he just had a different haircut then the rest.
He carried the bag of a field medic, so if she had to guess, she’d say he was a corpsman. Did she know any hospital corpsman? Although that meant he was Navy, he might serve with Navy or Marine Corps units. “I give up,” she said.
“We were recruited out of the same office back in Colorado. I went Navy. You went Marine. We ran into each other a couple times coming and going while I was on delayed entry. Keith Calhoun,” he said, introducing himself. “My brother Bruce was your recruiter.”
Huh, she didn’t remember him at all. Probably because of everything she’d had on her mind back then. But now it all made sense.
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