by Cara Colter
Because just before that shield had come down in his eyes, Grace was sure she had caught a glimpse of someone who had lost their way, someone who relied totally on himself, someone lonely beyond what she had ever known that word to mean.
“There was a complication,” she admitted slowly. “That’s why I agreed to have her provide ponies for the party.”
“The thing about a woman like Serenity?”
She hated the way he said that, as if he knew way too much about women in general and women like
Serenity in particular.
“What kind of woman is Serenity?” Grace demanded sweetly, though the kind of woman Serenity was was terribly obvious, even to Grace. Serenity was one of those women who had lived hard and lived wild, and it was all catching up with her.
The line around Rory’s lip tightened as he decided what to say. “She’s the kind who used to own the party,” he said. “And then the party owned her.”
Grace suspected that he had sugarcoated what he really wanted to say, but what he had said was harsh enough, and it was said with such a lack of sympathy that the moment of unwanted—and weakening sympathy she had felt for him—evaporated.
Thank God.
“And what about women like Serenity?” she said, yanking her strap up one more time.
“There’s always a complication.”
Then he strode over to the horse trailer, and Gracie could not help but notice he was all soldier now, totally focused, totally take-charge and totally no-nonsense.
It felt like a terrible weakness on her part that she was somewhat relieved both by the fact his armor was back up and by the fact he was taking charge.
So she had to say, “I can handle this.”
He snorted, glanced meaningfully at the pony in the wading pool, trampling what was left of the soggy Happy Birthday banner, and said, “Sure you can,
Gracie.”
* * *
I hurt your feelings. Really, Gracie Day couldn’t have picked a more annoying thing to say to him.
Feelings? Weren’t those the pesky things that he’d managed to outrun his whole life? Starting with a less than stellar childhood—no ponies at birthday parties, for sure—and ending up in a profession where to feel anything too long or too intensely would have meant he couldn’t do his job.
No, Rory Adams was a man ideally suited for soldiering. His early life had prepared him for hardship. The little bit of idealism that he had managed to escape his childhood with had soon departed, too.
So, Rory Adams had hated the look in Gracie’s eyes, just now, doe-soft, as if she could see right through him.
To some secret longing.
To have what she and Graham had had. Their house the one on the block that everyone flocked to, and not just because there were always freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, either. There was something there. That house was full of laughter. And love. Parents who actually made rules and had dinner on the table at a certain time.
Rory remembered calling Graham once about a party. And Graham saying, “Nah, I’m going fishing with my dad.”
A family that enjoyed being together. That had been a novelty in Rory Adam’s world.
Is that what he’d wanted when he’d called her? Had it been about him and not about her—or his obligation to Graham—at all?
No, he reminded himself. He’d been relieved by her rejection.
Rory shrugged off the thoughts, annoyed with himself. He was not accustomed to questioning himself or his motives. Except for the event that haunted his dreams, he moved through life with the supreme confidence of the warrior he was. The qualities that had made him an exceptional warrior also made him good at business.
So it flustered him beyond reason that a single glance from her had shaken something deep, deep within him.
He drew in a long breath, steadying himself, clearing away distractions, focusing on what needed to be done.
Poking out from underneath the horse trailer, near the back bumper, was one very tiny, suede, purple cowboy boot, with a fake spur attached.
He nudged at the boot with his shoe and then a little harder when there was no response. The boot moved away.
Sighing, he bent down and tugged. And this time he met some real resistance.
He felt under the trailer, found the other boot and pulled. Out came long, naked legs, and then short denim shorts, frayed at the cuffs, and then a bare belly, and then a sequined pop top with fringes. And then the face of an angel—if it weren’t for the circles of black mascara under her eyes—and blond curls topped with a pink cowboy hat.
He studied her for a moment. Despite her prettiness, she was aging badly. He and Graham had partied—hard—with her and her rodeo crowd. They’d been a rowdy, rough bunch. It had been a brief interlude—a few crazy days before their unit had mustered out the very first time.
That made it eight years ago, about the same amount of time since he had seen Gracie in her braces.
But whereas Grace had come into herself, Serenity
had deteriorated badly. She must have been in her twenties at that first encounter, which meant she was way too old now to be wearing short shorts and a pink cowboy hat. She was on the scary side of skinny, her hair had been bleached once too often, and she was definitely drunk.
Well, that part was the same.
“Leave me alone,” the black-eyed angel mumbled, swinging at air.
“Yes, leave her alone,” Gracie said. “Really, there’s nothing here I can’t handle.”
He ignored them both.
“Look, Rory, you just don’t understand the delicate nuances of this situation.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, but he was pretty sure he got the “delicate nuances” just fine. Serenity had probably come across the obituary for Graham somewhere, and zeroed in on the grieving sister.
It made him mad, but one thing that the military had been really good at was training him to channel aggression, control it, unleash it only as a last resort.
So he satisfied himself with giving Gracie a sour look that let her know he was not impressed with how she had handled this so far.
And he was rewarded with a look that had nothing doe-soft about it.
“There’s nothing here I can’t handle,” she said, again.
“Given that this woman is bad, bad news and her ponies are devouring Mason’s most prime real estate, you might want to consider the possibility you are in over your head.”
Her mouth worked, but she didn’t say anything. He could tell that Gracie had suspected Serenity was exactly what he said. Bad news.
And she had suspected that she was in over her head.
But there was something else, too, something glittering at the back of her eyes that gave him pause.
For some reason she wanted Serenity here.
What did Serenity have to offer that Grace had rejected from him?
Sheesh. His damn feelings were hurt. That was a stunner. A weakness about himself that he could have lived quite happily not knowing he had!
“Hey,” he reached down and took Serenity’s shoulder. “Wake up, get your ponies and clear out.”
The attack came from the side. At first, confused, Rory thought it was Grace who had hurled herself at him, nearly pushed him over.
He stumbled a step sideways, straightened and felt a warrior’s embarrassment at not even having seen the attacker coming, at having been caught off guard.
It made it worse, not better, that his attacker was pint-size.
The attacker aimed a hard kick with cowboy-boot-clad feet at Rory’s shin. Still slightly off guard, Rory shot out his arm and held the child at arm’s length. The kick missed but, undeterred, the kid tried again.
A boy. Rory had not been around children much, so he didn’t know ho
w old. Seven? Eight? Maybe nine?
Despite his size, the boy had the slouch and confidence of a professional wrangler. And he was dressed like one, too. His jeans had holes in both knees, his denim shirt had been washed white. A stained cowboy hat was pulled low over his brow. It was more than obvious this child had not been at the upscale birthday party that had just ended.
“Don’t you ever touch my mama,” he said, glaring up at Rory, not the least intimidated by the fact his opponent was taller than him by a good three feet and outweighed him by about a hundred and fifty pounds.
He was the kind of kid—spunky, undernourished, defiant—that you could care about.
If you hadn’t successfully killed the part of yourself that cared about such things. Rory had seen lots of kids like this: chocolate-brown eyes, white, white smiles, spunk, and he’d learned quickly you couldn’t allow yourself to care. The world was too full of tragedy. It could overwhelm you if you let it.
Rory let go of the boy, backed away, hands held up in surrender. “Hey, I was just trying to rouse her so she could catch her ponies.”
“I’ll look after the ponies,” the boy said fiercely.
“It’s okay, Tucker,” Gracie said, and put a hand on the boy’s narrow shoulders. “Nobody’s going to hurt your mother.”
The boy flinched out from her touch and glared out at her from under the battered rim of his straw cowboy hat with such naked dislike that Rory saw Gracie suck in her breath.
Rory looked at the boy more closely.
And then Rory looked at Gracie’s face.
She was clearly struggling to hide everything from him, and she was just as clearly a person who had never learned to keep her distance from caring. Her tenderness toward that boy was bald in her face. And so was the hope.
But she hid nothing at all.
Rory Adams was a man who had lived by his instincts, by his ability to distance himself from emotion. He had survived because of his ability to be observant, to see what others might overlook.
Rory looked back and forth between the boy and Grace, and he saw immediately what the complication was.
He studied the boy—Tucker—hard.
“How old are you?”
Grace gasped, seeing how quickly he had seen the possibility.
The boy did not look like Graham. But he certainly looked like Grace had looked just a few years older than this: freckle-faced and auburn hair.
A million kids looked like that.
For a moment, Rory thought the boy wasn’t going to answer him at all.
From Serenity, a moan, and then, “Come on, Tuck, tell the man how old you are.”
“I’m seven,” he said, reluctance and belligerence mixed in equal parts.
So, there it was. A little quick math and the complication became a little more complicated, a little more loaded with possibility. And Grace was clinging to that possibility like a sailor to a raft in shark-infested waters.
Serenity crawled back under the truck.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, grimly, to Grace. He pointed at the boy. “And you need to go catch those ponies.”
“You’re not the boss over me,” Tucker said.
The flash in his eyes and the tilt of his chin were identical to those of the woman beside him.
And the defiance was likable, if you were open to that kind of thing. Which, Rory reminded himself, he wasn’t.
“You’re the one who said you’d look after the ponies,” Rory reminded him. Tucker left, making it clear with one black backward glance it was his choice to go.
When he was gone, Rory turned his full attention to Gracie, whose expression clearly said he was not the boss over her, either.
“Did Serenity tell you that kid was Graham’s?”
“Don’t call him that kid! His name is Tucker.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling how forced his patience was, “did she tell you Tucker was Graham’s?”
“No.” That very recognizable tilt of chin.
“Did she insinuate it?”
“No. I had them over for dinner the other night. She never said a word about Graham and Tucker. Not one word.”
“You had them over for dinner? At your house?”
The you’re-not-the-boss-over-me expression deepened. Rory had to fight an urge to shake her. All those years of discipline being tried by a hundred-and-ten-pound woman!
“Why wouldn’t I have them over for dinner?”
Because it’s akin to throwing a bucket of fish guts to seagulls. They’ll be back. He said nothing.
“I actually enjoyed it. She’s had a very tough life, but she’s very interesting.”
“You don’t know anything about her!”
Her chin was tilting stubbornly.
“You can’t save the whole world, Gracie.”
“No? Isn’t that what you and Graham were so fired up to do?”
He let that bounce off him, like a fighter who had only been nudged by a blow that could have killed had it landed.
His voice cold, he said, “That’s precisely why I know it can’t be done.”
Instead of having the good sense to see what he was trying to tell her—that he was hard and cold and mean—that soft look was in her eyes again.
It made him wonder if maybe, just maybe, if she couldn’t save the whole world, if she could save one person.
And if that person was him.
The thought stunned him. It had never occurred to him he needed to be saved. From what?
“You want desperately for that boy to be Graham’s,” he said softly.
“Don’t you? Don’t you want some part of Graham to go on?”
He heard the desperation, the pure emotion, and knew he could not rely on her to make any rational decisions.
“Look, the things that made Graham who he was are not exactly purely genetic. Those things are the result of how the two of you were raised.”
He remembered her family. Off to church on
Sunday mornings. Going to their cabin on the lake together. Playing board games on winter nights. Lots of hugs and hair-ruffling. Their parents had given them so much love and affection.
He was trying to tell her that the way that Tucker was being raised he didn’t have a hope of turning out anything like Graham. Even if he was Graham’s, which was a pretty big if.
“It’s easy enough to find out,” he said. “Whether he’s Graham’s or not.”
She said nothing.
“A cotton swab, the inside of his cheek, an envelope, a result.”
“Good grief, how often have you done that?” she said with scorn, but he knew it was to hide the fact it frightened her that it was that easy.
He didn’t say anything. Let her believe what she wanted. Especially if it killed the soft look in her eyes, which it did.
“Don’t you want to know the truth about Tucker?” he asked.
“Yes! But I want Serenity to tell me the truth!”
“You want Serenity to tell you the truth?” he asked, incredulous. Was it possible to be this hopelessly naive?
Grace nodded, stubborn.
“You know how you can tell Serenity is lying?”
“How?”
“Her lips are moving.”
“That’s unnecessarily cynical.”
“There is no such thing as being unnecessarily cynical.”
She glared at him then changed tack. “How well did you and Graham know her?”
“Well enough to know she’ll tell you whatever you want to hear if there’s money involved.”
“You’re hopelessly distrustful.”
“Yeah. And alive. And those two things are not mutually exclusive. Grace, there’s a woman lying under a trailer
, presumably drunk. Her ponies are all over the park. If ever there was a call to cynicism, this is it.”
Suddenly, the defiance left her expression. He wished he’d had time to get ready for what she did next. Grace laid her hand on his wrist.
Everything she was was in that touch. The way she was dressed tried to say one thing about her: that she was a polished and successful businesswoman.
At least before her pony encounter.
But her touch said something entirely different. She probably would have been shocked by how her touch told her truth.
That she was gentle, a little naive, hopeful about life. She was too soft and too gullible. He was not sure how she had managed that. To remain that through life’s tragedies, the death of her brother, the breakup of her engagement.
There was a kind of courage in it that he reluctantly admired even while he felt honor-bound to discourage it.
She looked at him, and there was pleading in her eyes. “I know you’re just trying to protect me. But please, Rory, let me do this my way. Is it so terrible to want a miracle?”
Miracles. He’d never been a man with any kind of faith, and spending all his adult life in war zones had not improved his outlook in that department. He—from a family who had never set foot in a church—had said his share of desperate prayers.
His last one had been Don’t let this man, my friend, die.
He both admired her hope, and wanted to kill it before it got away on her and did some serious damage.
Trying for a gentle note, which was as foreign to him as speaking Chinese, Rory said, “Gracie, come on. No one walks on water.”
At that moment, a pickup truck shot into the parking lot, and pulled up beside the horse trailer. It had a decal on the side for the Mountain Retreat Guest Ranch. A cowboy got out of the driver’s side.
He looked as though he was straight off a movie set. Booted feet, plaid shirt, Stetson, fresh-faced and clean-scrubbed. Three other cowboys spilled out the open doors.
“Slim McKenzie,” the first one said. “I hear you’re having a pony problem.”
Gracie turned and looked at Rory, those amazing eyes dancing with the most beautiful light.
“Maybe no one walks on water,” she said, quietly, “But garden-variety miracles happen all the time.”