“I think Jake was right about tying you on, but I think he should have started with your ankle rather than your foot,” Charlie said. “Let me give it a shot.”
A moment later with the string newly wrapped, she said, “Okay, Hank, get on with it. Show me what you can do.”
“I haven’t been on a horse in over a year, since I got hit.”
“Excuses, excuses.” She held her breath and crossed her fingers. He must not fall again. She had to show Jake that his idea was a good one.
She walked close beside Hank, not quite touching Aries, not quite touching Hank’s thigh. Until he moved Aries away from her. A moment later the pair were executing a slow trot across the arena. Most cowboys knew how to post a trot. Hank certainly did. He might not be good with driving reins, but he was a natural horseman.
“Don’t you dare canter!” she called to him.
“Aw, teach,” he said as he trotted up to her. His body slid in the saddle when he stopped, but the tether on his stirrup gave him the purchase to right himself.
This was the third of her students to show her that happy smile. She couldn’t exactly chalk Mary Anne’s up to the horses. She was Sarah’s success. But Jake and Hank had smiled because of the horses. Only three to go—four, if she included Sarah. But Sarah might never be attracted to horseflesh.
Hank was dripping sweat, but his face glowed.
“Walk Aries out a couple of minutes, then we’ll get you down from there.”
“Do I have to?”
She grinned. “Don’t whine. You now have two assignments. Learn to drive and relearn how to ride.”
“Deal.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
AFTER A NEARLY silent dinner with the colonel and Sarah, Sarah departed for the computer supposedly to play video games, and the colonel went to his study to work on an article.
Charlie, with a fluttering heart that she didn’t appreciate, covered herself with mosquito repellant and sat in the swing in the darkness on the patio. She could see lights in both Sean’s and Jake’s bedrooms and wondered if Hank were upstairs with them. The television was on in the common room, and she could hear Mickey talking to Mary Anne.
Apparently the mosquito repellant repelled Jake, too. She swung and waited for him, feeling more and more foolish. She remembered all those times she’d sweated bullets waiting for some man to call her—usually Steve. She was no longer a teenager. The heck with Jake.
She noticed that the light was still on in her father’s study, so she tapped on the French door, stepped in and regretted her impulse at once.
“Charlie, what a nice surprise. Come in, sit down. Would you like a soda?”
She considered running through the room, out the hall door and up to her bedroom. He always knew when she had a problem. But that would be childish. Couldn’t hurt just to talk. She sank onto the big wing chair beside his desk—the one that had spent twenty years in his office, the one his patients sat in to pour their guts out to him.
“No thanks. I hate to admit this. You were right. I’m in over my head.”
The colonel swung his feet off his desk and sat forward. “Horses not cooperating?”
“People not cooperating. The horses are fine.” She ran her hands through her hair. “Hank is grumpy because he’d rather ride saddle broncs than drive and knows he can’t, so he takes it out on Mickey. Mickey says Hank thinks he’s too good to help Mickey because he’s an officer and Mickey isn’t. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sean is so busy looking after everybody else he’s not keeping up with his own work. Mary Anne is scared of horses and brandishing her scars like a weapon. Then there’s Jake...”
“Ah, yes. Jake.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“His situation is complicated.”
“He’s complicated,” she said. “I need to know what happened to him in Afghanistan. If you can’t show me the files, tell me. Call it professional courtesy. If that won’t work, make it one father to one daughter. Whatever, but for pity’s sake, please explain what made him the way he is.”
He leaned back, sucked in a deep breath and regarded her steadily. “No one knows the details but Jake, and I am not certain how much he remembers.”
She started to stand. “So you won’t tell me. I should have known.”
“Whoa, Charlie. Sit down. I will tell you what I can, and if you ever tell anyone I did, I’ll swear you’re lying. How’s that for one father to one daughter?”
She nodded. “I won’t tell a soul, cross my heart.”
He grinned. “That’s what you used to say when we kept things from your mother. Okay. His refusal to make decisions is not that unusual a reaction to the kind of trauma he experienced.”
“PTSD?”
“Not precisely. He has a deep-seated case of survivor guilt. He was already set up for something of the sort from his childhood. He’s never said what. Since he is not actually brain damaged, that refusal to talk about it is a choice in and of itself. He believes that every decision he makes is catastrophic to people he cares about. Solution, don’t choose.”
“I got that part.”
“Since no human being can guarantee that any choice is correct, no matter how insignificant, his only solution is total avoidance.”
“But he makes small choices all the time.”
The colonel nodded. “Ah, you caught that. Smart girl. Part of that is that he is actually getting better. Partly, he doesn’t realize or admit he’s deciding. If, however, he were forced to make a major decision to save something or someone he cared about, I believe he’d make it. I believe his training as a leader would override his fear of choosing wrong.”
“And if it was wrong?”
The colonel shrugged. “He might shut down completely.”
“Lovely. So if I push him and he messes up, he could wind up sitting in a corner sucking this thumb?”
He shook his head. “More likely he’d regress to square one and wear mismatched socks again.”
“So it’s up to me to make him choose right? How do I do that?”
“The same way you let Sarah choose the clothes she wears to school. Make certain the choices are innocuous, and that either decision is acceptable.”
She flopped back in her chair and brushed her hair off her forehead. “Something awful must have happened on deployment. What?”
“Here’s what I know and what I surmise. I told you he was G-2, intelligence. Whatever the movies say, that generally entails sitting in an office reading reports and looking at maps. He was stationed in what was supposed to be a pacified zone. Then his hotshot new commanding officer met some village headman at a conference on rebuilding infrastructure and promised him medical supplies. Standard operating procedure. One step above handing out chocolate bars to the children. Jake wanted to delay the mission to gather better intelligence. The hotshot was certain Jake was just dragging his feet, so he ordered Jake and his team to take a couple of trucks out to the village to deliver the supplies and do some PR.”
“Jake was right,” Charlie said quietly.
The colonel nodded. “An hour after he and his team drove out of the compound, fresh intelligence supporting Jake came across the colonel’s desk. To his credit, the CO sent a couple of armored personnel carriers after them.”
“They were too late.”
“Jake’s group was ambushed. One truck was blown up. Jake was hit in the leg, but wrestled a wounded man into the remaining truck and drove it out of the village. They met the APC down the hill and eventually were air-evacced out.”
“The other man survived, too?”
The colonel shook his head. “Died on the flight to Germany. Jake was the only survivor.”
“What happened to the officer who gave the original order?”
“What would have happened to Jake if he had disobeyed the order?”
“He’d probably have been court-martialed and another officer would have led the team on the mission.”
“The same thing would have happened whatever Jake did.”
“That’s about it.”
Charlie leaned forward, braced her elbows on her knees and dangled her hands. “If it’s a long line of screwups, where did it start?”
“I have no idea. Suffice it to say he’s much improved since he’s been here.”
“Okay, that’s Jake. What about the others?”
“I’ll reschedule my appointments at the hospital for the next week and observe the group. I may not like to drive, but I’m perfectly capable of teaching Mickey and Mary Anne. I take it they are your problem drivers.”
She went to the hall door and stopped with her hand on the knob. “You’re not giving me even one I told you so?”
“Not one.”
“Thanks.”
After she left his office, the colonel returned his feet to his desk and tented his fingers in front of his face. He’d been too caught up in his own grief at Abigail’s death to notice when Charlie went off the rails with Steve. He’d had no idea how bad the marriage was, because Charlie hid it from him.
She was much too interested in Jake. He liked Jake, but Charlie needed a man with a healthy mind. A man she could rely on. One day that might be Jake. Not yet.
* * *
ON THE PATIO Charlie took a cold soda and went back to the glider. She needed to “process” what her father had told her about Jake. As she finished the soda, she heard the merest rustle in the leaves and the man in question slipped out of the darkness. She patted the seat beside her, but he shook his head.
“We have a problem,” he said.
“You and me?” She had enough problems. “People or horses?”
“Neither. Two cats. At least when I left it was two cats. I suspect it’s more by now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come with me.” He took her arm none too gently, half dragging her through the common room and up the stairs into his bedroom. “Keep quiet.”
She laughed. “If this is your idea of seduction, Jake, you’re bungling it.”
“What?” He looked confused, then grinned at her and pointed. “At the moment, my bed is otherwise occupied. Look.”
How could she have talked about seduction? Her whole body went hot with embarrassment as she dropped her eyes to his bed. “Oh! That was a very nice candlewick bedspread,” Charlie whispered. “It’ll never come clean again.”
“You could boil it,” Jake said. “That’s what my mother did.” He sank onto his heels beside the bed. “Three and a half already, and she doesn’t look much thinner.” He motioned Charlie over. “She’s too preoccupied to realize we’re here.”
Mama Cat had pulled and scratched herself a nest in the center of Jake’s bed, then settled down to deliver her litter. As they watched, the fourth and fifth kittens popped out. Mama cleaned up after them, then shoved all five close to her belly for their first milk. They didn’t crawl so much as swim until their tiny paws found purchase on the mother cat’s stomach, then a nipple. Finally they latched on and began the instinctive rhythmic pushing that was a kitten version of milking a cow.
Charlie sank onto the floor beside Jake. “I’ve never watched a cat have kittens.”
“I have. Frequently.” He stroked the space between Mama’s ears with his index finger.
His caress was so gentle. Charlie longed to feel his long fingers against her skin. She took a deep breath. That would never do. Keep it practical, Charlie. “How on earth did she get in here?”
“I cracked open my window to smell the roses.”
“She’s purring,” Charlie said.
“It must hurt to have kittens, but that never keeps them from purring.”
“I did not purr when I had Sarah. I yelled and called Steve every name in every language I knew and some I made up.”
Why on earth should this feral cat, whose dens were so well hidden that no one had an inkling where they were, have chosen the center of Jake’s bed to birth her kittens?
She trusted him. As the stallion trusted him. Everybody seemed to trust Jake but Jake.
“She must know that’s all of them the way she dragged them around to suckle.”
“A competent lioness,” Jake said.
“Knows her job much better than I ever did with Sarah. If the tom smells them, he’ll kill them.”
“I already shut the window. She’s safe for the moment, but if we bother her she’ll find a way to move them out and hide them. She’ll have to stay here.”
“Not on that bedspread. We’ll make her a nest in your bathroom. Can you handle that?”
He looked at her as though he couldn’t believe she had to ask. “Certainly.”
Ha. Another decision. In the next twenty minutes they made a nest, set up litter, food and water, and moved cat and kittens to the corner of Jake’s bathroom.
The others must have heard them running up and down stairs, in and out of Jake’s bedroom. She expected them to open their doors and ask what was happening, but nobody did, not even Sean.
Surely they didn’t think...she and Jake... Were the others being discreet and giving them privacy?
She considered banging on everyone’s door to explain that she and Jake were being midwives, period. Teachers weren’t supposed to fall for students. But then students weren’t supposed to have such gentle hands, blue eyes that seemed to see into her soul....
Bad enough he’d opted out of the sushi party and they had driven alone. Thank heaven the others didn’t know about their patio trysts.
Was it possible to have a tryst when one of the two didn’t realize what it was? To Jake they were pleasant interludes, but Charlie could hardly wait to clean up after dinner before she sat in the patio swing in hopes Jake would join her. When he did, she glowed. When he didn’t, she felt so let down she wanted to cry.
This was bad and getting worse, especially since Jake probably had no idea he was anything to her except another student. She couldn’t tell him. Couldn’t tell anybody the way she felt. She must concentrate on acting as though Jake was no different from the other students. Good luck.
The newly dry kittens were all yellow-and-gray tabbies that scrabbled blindly with their tiny paws and carried their short, triangular tails straight up. Charlie sat on the floor of Jake’s bathroom and watched them.
Her family had never had a cat or dog in quarters. Once Sarah found out about these kittens, the colonel might find himself with five house cats.
Jake pulled himself up on the edge of the bathtub and rubbed his knee.
“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m hungry.”
“This giving birth is hard work. Is there anything downstairs to eat?”
Charlie grinned at him. The man was making decisions left and right. “I’ll make you an omelet. We can raid Vittorio’s larder in the big house.”
“Can you cook, too?”
“I beg your pardon? You think because the colonel has Vittorio, I had a Vittorio of my own? I was a starving army wife. If it got done, I did it.”
“Sorry.”
He followed her downstairs and across to the kitchen in the farmhouse.
She pulled a packet of shredded sharp cheddar cheese and a carton of eggs from the refrigerator, split and slipped a couple of sesame bagels into the toaster.
“As a matter of fact, my getting it done ultimately broke up my marriage, not that Steve
ever would have admitted it.” She pulled out a stick of butter, took a copper-bottomed pan down from the rack over the island and dropped a couple of spoonfuls into it.
“How so?” Jake edged a hip onto one of the bar stools on the far side of the island and watched her.
“When Steve came home the last time, he’d been gone fifteen months. His choice—he extended. That should have set off alarm bells.” She opened the refrigerator again and began hunting through the vegetable cooler. “I know we have some fresh mushrooms in here someplace. Vittorio usually has some portobellos.”
“They’re too big to hide,” Jake said.
“Right. Ah, here they are.” She pulled out a covered container. “Chop up a couple of these, would you? They’re already washed.” She pointed to the knife block. Jake selected the correct knife, took the cutting board she offered and began to slice and dice the fat brown mushrooms.
He was as competent at that as with everything else he did—no wasted movement and no sliced fingers. “What changed?” he asked without slowing down his chopping.
“While he was gone I took a teaching job at the base school that evolved into full time.” She shrugged. “We badly needed the money. Sarah needed a good computer and soccer equipment. I was shuttling her back and forth to practices and play dates with her friends. Half the time we ate on the run at the kitchen table.
“Steve walked into a household that functioned beautifully without him. He’d left an adoring little girl and a housewife who deferred to his every wish. He came home to a busy teacher with her own interests and her own friends. The baby daughter had turned into a smart-mouthed teenager who understood a bunch more about technology than he did. When she refused to go on one of their special fishing trips—I wasn’t asked along—he threatened to drag her out of the house and toss her in the boat. When I explained to him that teenagers don’t want to waste a whole Saturday sitting in a johnboat with a parent, he called me a bad mother and a lousy wife.”
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