“Silverware’s in that drawer, place mats in the one under it.”
Hank was already pulling glasses and plates out of the cabinets above the sink. He was apparently over his pet for the moment. Maybe it was only the colonel who annoyed him. If he had a problem with authority figures—and many rodeo cowboys did—why did he join the military? And how on earth did he get to be an officer?
By now everyone was helping to set out lunch. Everyone except Jake. He sat with his hands loose in his lap and his face turned toward the window and the pasture beyond. It wasn’t that he was avoiding the job. He simply didn’t seem to be aware it needed doing.
When the food was ready, everybody sat down except Jake, who didn’t look up. Charlie gave a slight shake of her head at Sean, who was about to call him over. “Let me,” she whispered. Jake didn’t react as her shadow fell across him. “Time to eat, Jake. Aren’t you hungry?”
He made no move toward the table.
“Come on, join us,” she said.
As the platters of sandwiches were passed around, he ignored them.
Charlie took a sandwich from each platter, put them on his plate, poured his diet soda into his glass and asked, “Would you like mayo and mustard?”
He didn’t respond.
“Yeah. And pickles and potato chips.” Sean took the plate. “I’ll do it for him.” When Charlie raised her eyebrows, Sean added in a whisper, “He doesn’t eat with people.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He’ll go outside on the patio or up to his room, but he won’t sit at the table with us.”
“But he has to. It’s one of the few hard and fast rules the colonel’s set up for this group.”
Sean added condiments to Jake’s sandwiches and picked up a soda with his prosthetic hand. “Hey, look at that. I didn’t crush the can. I’m actually getting the hang of this thing.”
Charlie decided not to push Jake at this meal. She’d stand back and watch what he did. But he would have dinner with them.
Jake took the plate and drink from Sean, walked out onto the patio, sat in the swing and wolfed down his sandwiches.
Nothing wrong with his appetite. He’d chosen to groom the stallion, although he might not think of it as a choice. Maybe horses were the key to getting him to reconnect with the world.
Charlie would start by cajoling him into making small decisions with the horses. Could other animals help, as well? She’d try him out on the barn cats.
If he could actually touch one without getting himself raked to the bone, he was a true animal whisperer.
But even felines made allowances for damaged human beings. Usually. The big brindle tomcat regarded man as a lesser species created only to provide for his comfort. He wouldn’t cut the president any slack.
Jake brought his empty plate and soda can back into the kitchen but didn’t seem to know what to do with them.
“Put the can in the trash and the plate in the dishwasher,” Sean said.
Charlie added, “We have brownies in the microwave for dessert. Jake, why don’t you get them?”
That apparently counted as a command, because he took them from the microwave and carried them to the table, then looked uncertain where to put them. Charlie took the plate. “Thanks.”
She was passing the brownies to Mary Anne when the door from the stable burst open and Sarah burst in, then came to an abrupt halt. “Oh!” she said. “They’re here already. I didn’t see the van.” She turned to flee.
“Been and gone. Lunch was scheduled for noon,” Charlie said with a glance at the clock on the mantelpiece. It read twelve thirty-five.
“You could have called me. Did you leave me anything to eat?”
“Sarah, we have guests.”
She pivoted toward the table. From her vantage point, Charlie caught the precise moment her daughter spotted Mickey and Hank. “Uh, hi,” she said, but her words, like her eyes, took in no one except the two young men.
“This is my daughter, Sarah,” Charlie said. At fourteen, Sarah was already six feet, a tall colt of a girl. She’d cried for days when one of the boys she liked at school called her the Jolly Pink Giant.
When Charlie heard about that, she wanted to complain to the guidance counselor. Actually, she wanted to drop the boy down the nearest volcano, but Sarah begged her to let it go.
The vets would read Sarah’s toss of her head and peremptory tone as arrogance, but Charlie knew it masked terminal shyness.
She put the last two sandwiches on a plate and handed them to her daughter. “Soda’s in the fridge. What have you been up to all morning?”
Sarah bristled. “I’ve been answering my emails, okay? There’s nothing to do around here.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Nothing to do?” Hank gaped and pointed out the window. “Girl, you got horses!”
“They’re just driving horses,” Sarah said. “You can’t ride ’em or anything.”
Hank laughed, showing every one of his perfect teeth. “If you can drive ’em, you can ride ’em.”
“Mom was the only one who ever hung around the post stables.” Sarah eyed Charlie. “But then there was tons of other stuff to do. Actual humans and the post exchange and a pool and stuff.”
“You’ll make new friends once school starts,” Hank said. “Hey, you must be good at it, right? Army brats are.”
“They’ll hate me.”
“Why would they hate a foxy chick like you?” Hank said.
Charlie cleared her throat and caught Hank’s eye. This was her daughter he was calling a foxy chick. He had the grace to look away.
“Right. As if.” Sarah picked up the sandwiches, added a couple of brownies to the pile, stuck a diet soda under her arm and headed for the door.
“Lay off the computer for the rest of the day,” Charlie said.
“Mom!”
“Show us around this afternoon,” Mickey said, looking to Charlie to make sure that was okay. She nodded. “You can wheel the crip.” His chair whirred as it backed away from the table.
Sarah’s eyes widened. Apparently she hadn’t realized he was in a wheelchair. She recovered instantly and flashed him a grin of her own, the first real smile Charlie had seen on her face in days. “I’m up for that, just not right now.” She flipped her long, light-brown hair over her shoulder. “I suppose I’ll go read an actual b-o-o-k. Is that all right with you, Mother dear?”
“Sarah—” Charlie began. Without waiting for an answer her daughter went out and shut the door firmly behind her.
“She hated having to move down here,” Charlie explained. “She’s lived on post since she was born. Out here she’s lonely and bored.” There was no reason to tell them that Sarah had lost her father less than a year ago. She might not act as though she was still grieving, but Charlie knew she was and ached for her. She wanted so much to help, but Sarah wasn’t interested. She blamed her mother for her father’s defection and death and didn’t hesitate to tell her.
Nobody said anything. Men. They probably had no idea what to say.
“I haven’t helped much,” Charlie added. Big understatement. Why couldn’t she simply tell Sarah she loved her and keep on telling her until she believed it? Charlie asked herself for the hundredth time. Heaven knew she wanted to, but she didn’t know how.
One thing she’d learned from her father very early—don’t show your heart to anybody, especially the people you love. You do, you get zapped.
“At her age she’d find fault with Paradise,” Sean finally said. “I’ve got two daughters of my own. One’s majoring in engineering in St. Louis and is relatively civilized. The other—not so much.” After lunch, everyone went off to unpack, then reassembled to explore the farm. All except Sean and Jake, who was staring out his window again.
<
br /> “Hey, Jake, how about I show you around?” Charlie said. Sean appeared grateful for the break. “Unless you’re tired and want to unpack.” She watched him weigh his choices and was prepared to choose for him if he couldn’t or wouldn’t. He needed an opportunity to make small decisions and build up to larger ones.
Sean started to speak, but Charlie wiggled her fingers behind her back to stop him.
She caught Jake’s panicked glance at his friend.
“I’ll introduce you to the other horses,” she said. “Come on.”
“Okay.”
She heard Sean release his breath behind her.
She handed Jake a baseball cap off the rack in the corner. “Down here the sun is dangerous to your skin all year round.”
He nodded. “Like Iraq.”
He put on the cap. She plopped her battered khaki safari hat on her head and started out into the stable. As she passed Sean, he touched her arm and winked at her.
CHAPTER THREE
JAKE MUSTN’T THINK she was watching him. All the students had emotional as well as physical problems, but Charlie suspected Jake would be the most difficult to deal with.
She needed to figure out the hot buttons for the others, too. She heard Hank’s boots click on the staircase and realized he also limped, though less than Jake.
Without the front half of his of his right foot, Hank would never be able to balance on a saddle bronc. He’d probably be able to ride bareback, but not on a bucking horse.
He could drive draft horses. No balance required.
And he obviously loved horses. Carriage driving didn’t involve as much adrenaline as rodeo, but there were still moments of terror. Vic Piper, the farrier, said that carriage wrecks were less frequent than riding accidents, but were usually worse, especially when the horse in question was a big old Belgian or shire.
She looked around and realized that Jake was no longer walking beside her.
“Jake?” she called.
“Down here,” he answered.
In the hay-storage room the bales were stacked in stair steps all the way to the roof of the barn some twenty feet above.
Charlie found Jake sitting cross-legged on one of the lower bales. Two feet away stood big Mama Cat, twenty pounds of yellow tabby with orange eyes that could shoot fire. Her tail had swelled to twice normal size, and the tip flicked back and forth an inch in either direction.
Usually by this time she’d disappeared up to the top of one of the rafters or gone for the nearest jugular. Charlie was afraid to move. It was another one of those “child in the gorilla cage” moments.
She held her breath as he reached two fingers toward the big tabby. The world stopped while man and cat stared deep into each other’s eyes.
Jake’s eyes were the color of the Aegean Sea in high summer. She still remembered that blue from the vacation she and her parents took to Crete during one of her father’s tours of duty. She’d felt that if she looked over the side of the little boat, the mermaids would pull her down. She felt the same drowning sensation now as she stared into Jake’s eyes.
Good grief!
She’d sworn off men! Definitely no more soldiers. Celibacy was the order of the day. Men wanted to own you, to make you go where they wanted you to go, be what they wanted you to be. Military men, especially. And you better not make any changes in your life while they were off fighting the bad guys. Steve would have preferred she go into suspended animation while he was away.
She turned before Jake could catch sight of the blood suffusing her face. She suspected if he took her temperature, she’d blow the lid off the mercury.
This would not do. One did not get turned on by a student. And a soldier. And a loner with psychological problems. He could have a wife and sixteen kids for all she knew.
Why not react to Sean? He wasn’t that much older, and his hand couldn’t be called a handicap. Or even Hank, the gorgeous macho guy. But neither of them pushed her hot buttons. Actually, she was kind of surprised she still had hot buttons. She hadn’t felt physically attracted to Steve since before his last tour, and he had definitely not been attracted to her.
Jake was holding something between his slim fingers. How long could he maintain his position with his arm extended that way? Would cat or man break first?
Then Mama took a single step, flattened her ears, stuck out her neck and snatched something—a bit of chicken saved from lunch?—from Jake’s fingers. A moment later she was gone in a honey-colored blur.
“That cat is a killer,” she said. “How did you do that?”
“You know she’s pregnant?”
Charlie nodded. “We’ve tried every trick in the book to catch her so we can have her neutered. She’s much smarter than we are. She showed up here a couple of years ago all skin and bones with more battle scars than Galactica. She’s a Tennessee feral cat.”
He unfolded himself from the bale of hay. “Man, is she ever!”
It seemed the most natural thing in the world to offer him her hand to pull him up.
Not so natural to stand closer than she’d intended. She caught her breath and heard his catch, as well. She looked away from those blue eyes, but not before they’d held hers a moment too long for comfort. Aware of her quickened breathing, she turned away and walked down the aisle. She heard him following her, the slight hitch in his step already familiar.
“Tennessee feral cats are an actual breed,” she babbled. “There’s a stuffed one in the local museum. Probably descendants from the cats the Scots traders brought with them in the eighteen hundreds. I’ve no idea whether it’s feasible for a domestic cat to interbreed with a bobcat, but I do know the few remaining representatives of the feral cat breed are all that big, all that beige yellow tabby color and all fierce fighters.”
“Feral cats always regress to that beige tabby color within five generations in the wild.”
“How would you know that?”
He shrugged. “I grew up on a farm where all the barn cats were feral. We never had a problem with field mice or even the pink-eared rats. Everybody worked on my family’s farm, even the snakes.”
“I beg your pardon?” This time she stopped to stare at him.
He grinned at her. “This place is bound to have a couple of resident king snakes to keep the poisonous snakes down.”
“I’d rather not know, thank you.”
“If you meet one, tip your cap, thank him for his good work, and send him on his way.”
“How will I know the difference? What’s more important, how do you?”
“You weren’t born a country girl, were you?”
“No.” She didn’t offer him any further explanation.
“Hey, want company?” Hank, Sean and Mary Anne came down the aisle to join them.
“Where’s Mickey?” Charlie asked.
“Said he was tired,” Hank said. Charlie picked up the faintest trace of a sneer.
“He was,” Mary Anne snapped. “You have any idea how hard it is trying to be upbeat and funny all the time you’re driving a wheelchair?”
Hank held his hands up in front of him, palms out. “I didn’t mean anything. I’m not used to him is all.”
“Get used to this, too, why don’t you?” She yanked off her scarf and glared at them.
Charlie managed not to gasp. The colonel had warned her that Mary Anne needed more reconstructive surgery, more skin grafts on the side of her face and her arms. Most of her scars would eventually be gone or less evident. She had to go through a period of healing both physically and emotionally before her next round of surgeries.
The doctors hadn’t yet reconstructed her right ear. A patch of skin the size of two dollar bills ran red, puckered and hairless down her scalp and along the side of her jaw, disappearing beneath the colla
r of her shirt. “Get used to it, people. I did.” She turned on her heel.
“Hey, Mary Anne,” Hank called after her. “The horses don’t care and neither do we.”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Too hot for those long sleeves anyway. Come on back.” He held out his right hand to her.
When she turned, Charlie could see she was fighting tears but she reached out to Sean with her left hand, hesitated, then held out her right, as well. The scars covered only the pinkie side. Without looking down, Sean took the injured hand gingerly in his latex-covered one.
For a moment, no one breathed, then Hank said, “Come on, girl. Time’s awastin’. I want to get my hands on some horse.”
Charlie’s throat tightened. She caught Jake’s eye, and knew he got it.
We’re all damaged. Maybe together we can heal one another.
CHAPTER FOUR
THEY HEARD MICKEY’S whir before his wheelchair whipped out the door to the common room and down the aisle toward them. “Hey! Yous guys taking a trip without me?”
“You snooze, you lose,” Hank said. He stopped at the first stall. “Would you look at the size of him? That’s not a horse, that’s a hippopotamus.”
“Hippos are short,” Sean said. “That’s more moose size. Y’all got mooses in Wyoming, don’t you?”
Mary Anne pulled away from him and backed across the aisle.
“Hey, did I grab you too tight?” Sean called.
Mary Anne shook her head, her dark eyes the size of eight balls. “I...I didn’t think they’d be so big.”
The gray Percheron gelding poked his head over the top of his stall gate, delighted by the attention. He looked straight at Mary Anne and snorted—a big, wet, huffy snort.
She yelped.
“He’s a real sweetie,” Charlie said, and scratched his nose.
“Don’t you have anything smaller?” Mary Anne asked. “Like maybe a pony?”
“Our newborn foals are bigger than the average pony,” Charlie said.
Mary Anne turned paler.
Taking the Reins Page 3