FRIEND, LOVER, PROTECTOR

by Sharon Mignerey

  "That doesn't tell me why you're interested in it."

  Perceptive. She stared at the ribbon of road ahead of them, caught in the memory that had been the genesis of her interest. "One of my best friends was killed by lightning." She flexed her fingers away from the steering wheel and waited for the platitudes that were inevitable but never comforted.

  Instead he simply said, "And you want a better way of predicting it."

  "Yes." Appreciating his simple response, she added, "We know a lot about the conditions that produce lightning, but predicting with any accuracy—that's still coming." The long ago images of the paramedics working over her friend surfaced. "It was during our sophomore year of college, and we were participating in a track meet. We'd had to stop for a while when a thunderstorm rolled over and the field was cleared. The storm was probably a good ten miles away when they let us back on the field." She waved at the sky. "The sky was clear, like now. And this flash of lightning came out of nowhere. I was standing not even five feet away from Sandy."

  She took a breath. "That was ten years ago, and I wanted to know why. Not only why her and not me, but why had the lightning struck at all? We know way more now about predicting lightning than we did then, but it's still not enough. In fact, you may wish that I was after tornadoes. Compared to lightning, they're rare—very rare."

  His chuckle was wry. "Is now a good time to confess that I hate thunderstorms?"

  "Then you really are hoping for a boring day."

  "We could both use one." He motioned toward the copse of trees a couple of miles ahead that broke through the expanse of the plain and marked a small town. "If there's a café open, I'll buy you breakfast."

  "I won't turn that down." When he had rapped on her door at four-thirty, dawn had still been a distant promise, and she had not even wanted the coffee that he offered her.

  The Silver Spoon, the only café on Main Street, was open. Since Jack hadn't seen a car following them since they crossed over to the east side of I-25, he figured this morning they had been able to escape the thugs. Tomorrow would require a different strategy, especially as Dahlia had a class to teach. When they got out of the car, he caught her searching the road behind them.

  "It's fine," he assured her. "So far we're alone." He didn't add that he had also carefully checked her vehicle for any tracking devices, though he was pretty sure the thugs weren't smart enough to have planted any. Except for one—the guy with pale eyes. For the life of him, Jack couldn't figure out the connection between that guy and the other three.

  They went inside, found a booth where Jack could watch the street, and placed their order. Dahlia was good company, and he imagined her with her crew of students, talking with them in the same casual fashion as she did with him.

  She was the youngest of three, and her father was a salmon fisherman. In turn Jack shared that he'd spent most of the past three years overseas. She told him that she liked to hike and went as often as she could to Rocky Mountain National Park. He found himself telling her that his grandfather had been a cabinet maker, and his best memories were of being with him in his shop. She kept lulls in the conversation at a minimum with the right mix of questions and nonchalant observations that developed camaraderie without getting too personal.

  Except, he wasn't one of her students. Despite his self-imposed stricture that she was off-limits, he wanted to know all those personal things about her that women usually offered up by now. It didn't help that every time his gaze strayed below her chin, he thought about those shorty pajamas and the way her nipples had tightened when she'd caught him looking at her.

  To distract himself from that train of thought, he said, "Tell me why some storms have a lot of lightning and others don't."

  She grinned. "Do you want the answer I'd give to my students or the simple answer?"

  "I'm not ready for any six-syllable words. Start with simple."

  She pulled a pencil out of her pack and drew a quick sketch on the napkin. "It all has to do with electrons. If you remember your basic stuff about atoms, you know that the center of an atom has a positive charge, and electrons—those guys circling around the center—are negatively charged. Inside a storm, the turbulence causes some atoms in a cloud to lose their electrons and others to gain electrons. In that process the top of the thunderstorm becomes positively charged."

  "And then opposites attract," he commented. "Same idea as what makes your hair stand on end after you take off a ski cap."

  "Static electricity. In simple terms it's the same thing that forms lightning." She added some additional marks on her napkin depicting clouds and trees. "The negatively charged electrons are attractive to other positives—other clouds and the ground. Most of the time lightning travels vertically. But sometimes, it travels horizontally for miles."

  "Clear-air lightning like the strike that killed your friend," he said. "Is that what you're trying to find out?"

  She nodded. "Yes. And it's a bit like Edison's process of making a lightbulb. So far I have a number of hypotheses that did not work."

  Their breakfast arrived, and after taking a couple of bites, Dahlia caught his glance. "Good food, but I have the feeling your cooking would be better."

  "Maybe," he agreed.

  "How did you get interested in cooking?"

  The dimple appeared as he answered, "Self-preservation, pure and simple." He took a sip of his coffee. "In Ranger school you have about ten minutes to eat. Usually you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're dog tired, and you have to stuff enough calories down to make it until the next meal. In those days I had a huge appetite, and going out to eat usually did zero toward filling me up. So I learned to cook."

  "Not to mention a good way to get girls," she said.

  "Most ladies appreciate a good meal."

  "And there are lots." She said it as though it was a fact, not a question.

  "Not as many as you might think," he returned. In actual fact there had been darned few. Being on constant training and on missions when he wasn't training didn't leave much time to develop a relationship, even if he had been inclined. Getting involved for more than the occasional one-night stand would have violated his cardinal rules about permanency and being able to walk away when he wanted to.

  She looked him up and down, frank appreciation in her gaze. "You expect me to believe that?"

  He returned the look. "Just as much as you expect me to believe there's no guy in your life."

  Her expression became taut. "That would be me, all right. The woman with men lined up around the block."

  Her summation was exactly what he was tempted to believe—what her boss had accused her of. "You could have them if you wanted."

  She met his gaze. "I'd rather meet just one guy who sees beyond the obvious."

  Asking him to ignore how she was built would be like asking for the moon, but he said, "I know you're a smart woman, Dr. Jensen."

  "But would you if you didn't know about the Ph.D.?"

  His answer was what he hoped was the truth. "I'd like to think so." Striving for a deliberate change in topic, he asked, "What's your favorite food?"

  "Lefse," she replied, the expression on her face telling him it was true.

  "Now that's a new one. What is it?"

  "Like a tortilla or crepe, but made in a special griddle. They're the best right after my mom makes them—slathered with butter and sugar and eaten with a huge glass of milk."

  As they finished eating their breakfast, her animosity dissolved as she told him about the Norwegian heritage from her father's side of the family and the way her mother had embraced the traditions, down to learning to make the traditional foods and teaching herself rosemaling, a form of folk-art painting.

  Dahlia might have professed the day to be potentially boring, yet he found her company anything but. Though her body was never far from conscious thought, he found that he liked being with her—she was easy to be around, easy to talk with, easy to like.

  After breakfast he p
aid the check, they got back in the van and again headed east. When they came out of the café, the sky was littered with puffy clouds. Eventually they reached the top of a rise, and Dahlia turned the van onto a dirt road, explaining that one of the lightning sensors hooked to a national network was ahead.

  Fifty feet or so from the road, she parked the car and got out.

  "Look," she said pointing to the northwest. "See where the sky changes color? That's the front, and it's coming in just as predicted." She checked a reading on one of her monitors hooked to a computer in the back of the van, then grinned at him. "With this high a dew point, we could have a good day of storms."

  She lived for this, he realized. She made notes about the things she was seeing on the monitors attached to the computers in the back of her van, explaining how the Doppler helped track the most severe turbulence and showed him the high-speed cameras that she used.

  He liked watching her—beyond the physical, he admitted to himself—liked how much she became absorbed in what she did. Despite his assertion that he liked other things about her, as well, he found himself thinking about having her stretched out beneath him and being the object of her highly focused attention. Reminding himself of all the reasons that that was a bad idea, he looked away. The building thunderstorms were not half as interesting as the woman studying them.

  Soon they settled in for a wait—patience was the key, she told him—and they fell silent when there seemed little more to say about the storm or the equipment. Jack opted for watching the empty landscape in front of them. They were on a rise, high enough that he could see roads in the distance, especially those approaching their location. On the downside, they could be seen from a long way away. Since Dahlia had parked her van close to the tiny equipment shack, he hoped that the van wouldn't be too noticeable to anyone at a distance.

  "How did you end up in the Army?" she asked sometime later from her perch on a large rock a dozen feet away from the van.

  "The usual way. I enlisted." His gaze roamed over the landscape and fastened on a car a couple of miles away that was moving away from them.

  "Ah," she said, a teasing note in her voice. "Deliberately obtuse. If you're going to avoid anything too personal, we're going to be stuck with religion, politics and weather. And I never discuss the first two."

  He grinned. "I never discuss the last two, so where does that leave us?"

  "With a long, boring day, just as you predicted." She held his glance a few moments, and her voice became more serious. "This isn't the usual situation for me. You're not a student, so using this time to teach—what's the point, unless you're really interested in storms."

  "Like I said before, not my most favorite thing."

  "And personally I'm too old for truth-or-dare."

  He laughed and let his gaze wander down her body. "I don't know. That could be pretty interesting." As always, her jeans and T-shirt were on the baggy side. He would dare a lot to see what was underneath.

  "Don't even go there," she warned.

  "As you were saying…"

  "If you ask something too personal, I'll tell you about something else that's easier. I won't press for more. You do the same."

  He nodded. "I can live with that. It doesn't quite fit into the maxims, but it's close enough."

  "What maxims?"

  He met her gaze. "For starters, keep your mouth shut."

  "Ah, an Army thing."

  "A Ranger thing," he corrected. "Just like the two I told you yesterday about being a thinker and being self-disciplined."

  "Okay, have you ever been married?"

  His gaze snapped to hers, and she grinned. "Since you know I was, an eon ago, and since you kissed me—" she shrugged "—I'd like to know."

  "Yes, I was married once. It didn't last a year." Never mind he'd promised himself that when he married it would be for better or worse and, most of all, forever. "Satisfied?"

  Dahlia shook her head and gave him a small smile. "It will do for now, though." She scanned the sky, then said, "I think the storms are going to develop early today."

  So far it looked like a great spring day to him. Lots of sunshine, lots of big fluffy clouds.

  "Cumulous," he said, pointing.

  She laughed. "You'll love this, but that's actually cumulus congestus."

  "Sounds contagious," he returned.

  "In a way it is. When the sky is this filled with clouds, moisture, and the day is this warm—"

  "Don't forget your dew point."

  "That, too. We'll have good storms by midafternoon." The conversation lulled as she checked readings again and made notations on the laptop while Jack watched the surrounding landscape through the binoculars.

  "Why did you join the Army?" she asked sometime later. Above them the sky was more gray than blue, an indication that another hour or more had passed. "You were in college then, right?" When he nodded, she added, "Why not the reserves or something?"

  Just thinking about the day he enlisted made his stomach tighten. He had never talked about that day, had no one to tell except his grandpa who had died a couple of months earlier.

  Striving for a flip tone, he said, "Since another man was moving into my apartment with my wife and my kid—correction, his kid—it seemed like a good idea. Enlisting. Uncle Sam wants you."

  The memories swamped him, and he didn't dare look at Dahlia.

  He had just left the hospital on what had begun as the happiest day of his life. His wife, his brand-new baby girl … only some guy named Kenneth Townsend had shown up, claiming them both. And, Erin … she had cried and hugged the guy when he came through the door. She told Jack that she had never wanted to hurt him and explained how she hadn't really believed that Ken would ever be back.

  He had listened in shock. His wife wasn't madly in love with him as he had believed. She'd known she was pregnant before they had sex the first time, seven months earlier. All she had wanted, she insisted, was a good father for her child, a man she could grow to love. She knew how he felt about not having a father, had used his vow that no kid of his would grow up without him. When she had shown up claiming to be pregnant a scant three weeks after they began dating, he hadn't questioned her story. For him, there was only one option—marry her, make the best of things and be the kind of father he had always promised himself that he would be. As for the man Erin loved, the man she wanted to raise her daughter—that wasn't Jack.

  After all these years that was still the kicker—that he'd spent months believing they were in love, and she hadn't been at all.

  "And I thought my marriage was a disaster," Dahlia finally said, as if she had heard everything he had not said.

  He managed a lopsided smile. "I hear they're pretty common."

  "Yes." The reply came out on a sigh as though she, too, was caught up in old painful memories. "I'm so sorry."

  Sympathy was the last thing he wanted. "You should have asked me why I wanted to be a Ranger."

  Her eyes lit as though she understood his reason for the change in topic. "Okay. I'll bite."

  "I decided to become a Ranger because I wanted a challenge that required total focus. I was an athlete—played football—"

  "One of those."

  "Hey, don't be insulting," he returned, realizing he wanted her to see him—beyond the obvious—as well. "I'd studied, had the recommended physical regime down before I applied. Thought I was good enough that Ranger training would be a snap."

  "It wasn't."

  "Not even close."

  "When did you injure your knee?"

  He absently rubbed it. "Four months ago." Four months of healing and therapy and the prognosis that he wouldn't pass his next physical no matter how much PT he did between now and then.

  His roving gaze found a car that he had spotted earlier, far enough away that it looked like a miniature. The vehicle had stopped, and Jack brought the binoculars to his eyes. "Tell me about your niece."

  "After you tell me what you're watching."


  "A car," he answered. "See the windmill down there, three or four miles off at about ten o'clock?"

  A second later she responded. "Yes."

  "There's a car just to the left, kind of sitting in the shade of the cottonwood. It's just been sitting there for about ten minutes." He handed her the binoculars.

  She took them from him and watched a long moment. Her jaw firmed, then she shook her head. "The windmill looks like it fills that little stock pond, so maybe somebody is doing maintenance or something."

  "If I'd seen someone get out of the car, that would make sense." The other piece bothering him clicked into place. "If it was some guy doing maintenance on his farm equipment, he'd be driving a pickup truck, not a car."

  All the tension she'd had yesterday morning was back in her face. He'd been with her from the first moment all this began, so he knew just how frightening this must be.

  As reassurances went, he had too few. "You watch your storms, I watch your back." He waited a beat until she looked at him. "Another maxim, in case you're interested."

  She took a deep breath. "So what do you want to know about little Annmarie?" she asked, returning to his question and handing him back the binoculars.

  "Anything you want to tell me."

  "She'll be five soon, and there's no sweeter child in this world."

  "Spoken like a dutiful aunt."

  Dahlia grinned. "Lily and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for years, and when it didn't happen, Rosie offered to be a surrogate, or at least that's what I'm supposed to believe."

  "Your sisters are close," he stated.

  Dahlia crossed her fingers. "Like that. Me? I'm just the baby sister, and forever the fifth wheel. You're an oldest, aren't you?"

  He shook his head. "An only."

  "And it was just you and your mom, right?"

  He nodded. "Except we're talking about you and Annmarie. And what you're supposed to believe."

  "Something happened to Rosie, and I know she had been to the police because I overheard her and Lily talking once. I thought maybe she was raped or something, but if she was she never told me. Anyway, she had Annmarie, and Lily and John adopted her when she was a day old. Whatever happened with Rosie—it left some pretty big scars. She moved to Alaska right after that, and she hasn't been back to California. Not even when Lily's husband died." A shadow crossed over Dahlia's face. "They were all so wrapped up with the new baby and whatever was going on with Rosie that they never even noticed when I miscarried."