by Vicki Tharp
“Then what am I?”
“The best thing that ever happened to me.” He said the words without hesitation or reservation. He reached out and pulled her into his arms. She didn’t fight him as he enveloped her in his embrace and tucked her under his chin. “I love you, Jen. Whatever doubts you may have in this world, never doubt that.”
She mumbled something, but her voice was weak and muffled against his chest.
“What?” he asked.
“Then why did you leave me? If you loved me, why didn’t you take me with you?”
“I wanted to. I did, off and on for a bit. Maybe you were too young to remember. The guys watched you between my runs. Then you were old enough for school, and we were living out of horse trailers and hotels, a new city every week with no place to call home. The circuit was no place for a kid to grow up.”
“I didn’t need a house. I needed you.”
“I can see that now.” He paused and when he spoke again, his voice was soft and thick. “I did the best I knew how to do right by you. I’m human. I’m not saying what I did was always right, but I did them with your best interest at heart.”
Becca cleared her throat and she brushed her hand across the tops of her cheeks. She stepped up next to Jenna and said to Hank. “Leave it be. She’s more mature than we were at her age. She’s trying to be smart, trying to be responsible. You can’t fault her for that.”
“I guess not, but she’s my daughter. She wasn’t even supposed to notice guys until she was thirty.”
Jenna didn’t have to say Dad in that exasperated way teens do so well; her eye roll said it well enough.
“My opinion may not mean anything to you, Jenna,” Becca said, “but I’m proud of you.”
Jenna’s eyes blew wide as if she didn’t quite know how to accept that bit of information. She returned her attention to her father. “We done here?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I guess so.”
When Jenna turned to go, Quinn scrambled after her, taking a wide berth around Hank. By the drop of Hank’s shoulders and the slight hang of his head, Hank was too tapped out to bother with Quinn anymore.
Instead, Hank flopped down on one of the logs and buried his face in his hands. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“You’re good with her,” Becca admitted, maybe a tad surprised.
“I could’ve used a little backup.”
“I’m nothing to her, Hank. Hardly more than a stranger. Besides, she’s right.”
“Yeah, maybe so.”
Becca gathered her blanket and backed toward the house. “I’m going to head on up. I’d appreciate it if you’d sign the papers from my lawyer tonight. I have an early flight out in the morning.”
“You just got here,” Hank said. “You’re not even going to stay a few days? Get to know your daughter a little? Spend a little time with your parents? I don’t get you, Bec.”
“No. You never really did,” she said, not in a mean way, but in a normal way, and maybe that hurt him a little bit more because she was stating a frigid fact. “This isn’t my world, Hank. I never wanted any of this and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I don’t think I’m a bad person. I just don’t think I’m the right person for this family.”
“Your parents love you. They miss you.”
“Yeah…I know.”
She turned and headed back to the house, leaving me alone with Hank. Heat still radiated from the fire, but the flames had died to a flicker, the embers glowing hot, the old beams burned thin and black and charred. A gust of cool air blew the balled-up paper bag Jenna’s pills had been in into the fire. A burst of flames shot up before rapidly consuming the fuel and turning it to ash. Pinpoint red embers swirled up in the smoke and blinked out.
I turned toward him and straddled the log. I picked and pried off pieces of bark. He didn’t move. His elbows were resting across his thighs, his eyes fixed on the ground, still, except for the pulse pounding at his temple.
“I—” I cleared my throat. “I owe you an apology.”
He pursed his lips and blinked a few times as the words sunk in. Finally, he said, “No. You don’t.”
“I agreed to go with Jenna under the condition she told you as soon as we got home. We got home later than we expected. And then this morning…”
He groaned. “Yeah, this morning…” He didn’t bother finishing his sentence. He didn’t have to.
“This isn’t an excuse, but if she were my daughter, I’d have wanted someone to be there with her for that if she didn’t think she could come to me.”
“Yeah. I get it. I do. She’s…”
“She’s your little girl.”
He nodded. “Only she’s not. She’s grown into this amazing young woman and…” He cleared his throat, but that couldn’t keep his voice from cracking. “I missed it.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. I wanted to put my arm around him and hug him to me, but there was this emotional chasm rent between us this morning. Instead, I laid a hand on his thigh and gave it a light squeeze. He glanced down at my hand. When I went to take it away, he caught it with his and held it in place. I could feel the divot in his muscle beneath my hand. His eyes weren’t sad. They were haunted. The ghosts of his decisions hovered there, or maybe it was just the way the embers and scattered flames danced in his eyes.
“If I’d—”
“No,” I said, louder than I meant to, the way you would when your child reaches for a hot pan. A voice you obeyed. “You can’t ‘what if’ it. You can’t change what you did or how you did it so nothing good can come by gnawing on those old bones.”
He contemplated my words for several minutes. “You ever considered taking your own advice.”
“Sometimes,” I admitted slowly and with reluctance. “Not so easy to do.”
“Come here,” he said as he lightly tugged on my hand. The point of my knee was already touching his thigh so I couldn’t be any closer unless I was on his lap.
Is that what he wanted? Was it what I wanted?
He patted his leg and said, “It’s okay.”
My brain didn’t quite know what “it’s okay” meant but apparently my heart did because I stood and then resettled myself on his lap, one leg on either side of him without conscious deliberation. He wrapped his arms around my lower back and I linked my arms around his neck and he buried his face in the crook of my shoulder and breathed in deeply as if a whiff of me could fill the empty well within him. It wasn’t sexual, just a deep need to hold and be held.
Sweat and smoke and a hint of the diesel he’d used to start the fire tinged his skin. The fire popped, and wood shifted and settled, collapsing on itself. My arms were chilled, but my back was warm from the fire and my front was warm from Hank.
He inhaled through his nose. “I can still smell us. On your skin.”
His words sent an arc of electricity to my core and the heat started to build. I’d been in such a rush to get out the door this morning that I was already dressed and out the door before I had realized I hadn’t taken a shower. So all day, as I was doing my level best to forget about Hank, I’d catch whiffs of him, of me, of us.
Talk about hell.
I was still sore from making love to him and was constantly reminded of that fact if I moved a certain way and that hadn’t made my day any easier either.
My forearms rested on his shoulders, and my fingers tangled and toyed with the hair on the back of his head and he said, “If you had asked me if I was married, I would have told you the truth. I—”
This was my fault? My back stiffened and I must not have schooled my expression well, because his hands went to my hips and he gently held me in place and said, “Wait…that didn’t come out right. Hear me out?”
My eyes narrowed as I studied his face. I could see the worry in the tightness of his features. The hope, i
n the widening of his eyes. I nodded once and his grip on my hips barely loosened like a lion’s jaws on the neck of a gazelle. Enough to get a breath, but not enough to get away.
“What I meant to say is that I never deliberately tried to mislead you. I get what you said about integrity and trust and the meaning of vows, of promises. But Army, Becca decimated those vows a long time ago. Are we still married? Legally, yes. I was faithful to her long after she’d abandoned us. Long after I knew she was never coming back.”
“Why didn’t you file for divorce?” He hadn’t shaved today and the whiskers on his jaw were getting thick and they made a scratching sound when I rubbed my thumb across them.
“First couple years, I figured she’d come back. Which I know was stupid because it wasn’t like we had any kind of relationship anymore, but we had Jenna and I was concerned about custody. Yeah, she’d left, but I was on the circuit, so was I that much better of a parent than she was? I was afraid to rock the boat. And I don’t know, but it seemed like by filing it was putting an end to whatever fragile family we had. Then later, it didn’t seem like it mattered. I dated, but never seriously. The women didn’t seem to care and I’m ashamed to admit that many of them wouldn’t have cared if Becca were in the other room. A few would have invited her to join in.”
I digested that, accepting the humor as he’d intended. “And now?”
“I was an idiot.” His smile was quick and rueful. “I’ll never quit wishing Jenna could have had the mother she deserved and I’ll never understand why Becca didn’t want any part of it. But I’m happy Becca’s here, because for the first time in a very long time I have a reason to care that I’m still married. A reason to do something about it.”
I wasn’t about to let him off too easy. “What reason is that?”
“I want you.”
“You already had me.”
“Yeah. Now it matters that I’m still married because I want you again.” He palmed the side of my face and led me in for a kiss. He brushed his lips against mine, tasting my resolve. “You matter. We matter. I’ve waited a lifetime for you.”
My heart did this weird twisty-twirly thing that knotted my cardiac vessels and made my head swim and my chest hurt. It had been a long time since I mattered to someone else. An even longer time since I’d cared.
Chapter 15
On the way back to the cabin, I’d checked in on my horse-with-no-name and filled her hay bag and given her clean water. She seemed content with that. Now, I was fresh out of the shower and making the top bunk—I’d given Boomer the lower one—with the extra bedding Lottie had dropped off earlier.
He’d already brought his stuff inside, which amounted to a tiny duffel of clothes and a large duffel of tactical gear. Oh, and his extra leg, with a human molded foot on one end. Boomer had opened the windows to air out the place and we both pretended the fresh air was for reasons other than to rid the cabin of the underlying heavy tones of musk and sex.
I climbed down as Boomer dropped his tactical bag on the table and started yanking out gear. He nodded a chin toward Hank’s side of the room where the sheets and quilt cascaded off Hank’s bed like a fabric waterfall and pooled into a riot of color on the floor. “I can find somewhere else to bunk if you want.”
I knew he was giving me shit. “Nah, you can stay.” I stepped up next to him, leaned in, and whispered, “I won’t scream too loud, but I can’t promise the same from Hank.”
That won me a chuckle and a lazy smile. He assessed me, not in the way a man does when he’s interested in a woman, but more in the way he does when he analyzes an old muscle car he’d restored. He knows how it runs, but more importantly, how it tics. “So you’re good?”
I started loading rounds into the empty magazines. It was mindless, repetitive work. I contemplated his question for a bit. This was Boomer. This was someone who understood. This was someone I didn’t want to placate with an empty “I’m fine,” so I answered with a truthful, “Closer than I’ve been in a long time.”
He accepted that with a nod and a grunt.
“How about you?”
“Good. Really good.” His answer came too fast, his voice pitched too high for me to believe him. I cut my eyes at him. I wasn’t buying his bull for a minute. “I mean, Lizzie and I have our ups and downs, sure, but she’s been great.”
I loaded two more magazines to his three. I was out of practice. My thumbs had lost their callouses and they were getting red and sore. Then he dropped a full mag and rubbed the back of his neck and glanced at me kinda sideways as if he couldn’t face telling me the truth head on. “It’s been tough. Lizzie’s trying hard. Too hard. Maybe that’s the problem, or maybe it’s all me. It’s just…” He pursed his lips as if trying to formulate the right words. “It’s exhausting pretending to be the man I was before I deployed.”
I could see it in the shadowed parts of his eyes. How hard he’d tried. How hard he’d fought. Sometimes no matter what you did, it wasn’t enough. I nodded as the full weight of that sunk in. Maybe that was part of the reason I’d stayed on the road so long avoiding friends and family. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them, or that I didn’t want to be with them, but it was difficult to watch them deal with the fact that the person who’d left wasn’t the same one who’d returned.
Like I’d died, but I was still haunting them.
He embraced me in one of those sideways hugs. Then grabbed me in a chokehold and scrubbed the top of my head with his knuckles the way annoying brothers do to tell their little sisters they love them. I elbowed him in the gut. Not hard enough to really hurt, but hard enough to get a satisfying oomph out of him as he released me.
“You’re such a dick, Boom.” Which roughly translated into “Love ya too, bro.” His teeth flashed bright and white behind his beard.
With the windows open, we heard Dale and Hank approaching. I scrambled and tossed Hank’s covers back on the bed. I wasn’t hiding anything Dale didn’t already know, thanks to Becca, but knowing it and seeing evidence of the fact were two different things. I’d turned back around when they walked through the door. Dale first, then Hank. I must have had one of those guilty expressions kids get when their parents catch them watching porn because Hank shot me a quick wink. Thankfully, Dale seemed too preoccupied to notice.
“Have a seat,” Dale said as he plopped down into one of the chairs.
Boomer grabbed the back of the chair next to him and aimed it toward me so I could sit. He stepped over and boosted himself up onto the counter. Hank leaned against the opposite end beside the refrigerator.
Hank was tall, and he’d been right, the counters would probably have to be raised a good three or four inches for the height to be comfortable for sex. Hank caught my eye and waggled his brows up and down. The tips of my ears burned and I fought to keep the smile off my face. He knew exactly what I’d been thinking.
“So what’s the plan?” Boomer asked.
Dale picked up one of the full magazines for Boomer’s M9 Berettas. They were double-stack extended mags, which gave each handgun a capacity of seventeen rounds. Eighteen if you had one in the barrel. “We’ll round the horses up and corral them in the canyon where we’d worked the cattle instead of driving them straight back to the ranch. Which will be best for a couple of reasons. One, if this weather system moves in like the weatherman predicted then the runoff could make it dangerous to get the younger horses across the creek. From the canyon, we can trailer them in groups back to the ranch. At this point, every horse, every penny matters.
“Two, since the canyon is relatively close to the road where the cattle were stolen, if someone wants to rustle the horses, then that location will give them easier access. Maybe lure them to an opportunity they wouldn’t have taken otherwise.”
“What if they don’t bite?” Boomer asked.
“Then we consider ourselves lucky. Don’t get me wrong, I want the bast
ards caught, but if we can get the horses to the ranch without anyone getting hurt, I’ll take it all damn day long. Even if we never find out who did all this to us.”
Boomer narrowed his eyes and assessed Dale, then hopped off the counter and stepped over to the table. He palmed a magazine and thumbed out a round. “All the ammo we loaded is FMJs. Full Metal Jacket. It’s what we use in the military. Our goal, if it comes down to it, is to hurt them, not kill them. If you kill one, you’ve taken one guy out. If you wound one, you have potentially taken two or three out—the wounded man and the ones trying to help him.”
“These rounds are more likely to go through and through,” I added. “Which can also be a disadvantage because you have to be more careful of what’s behind your target. You don’t want anyone hurt with friendly fire.”
Boomer reloaded the round. “The home defense rounds, the hollow points, they spread and fragment, dissipating their energy in the target so they are much less likely to go through. They are more lethal as well. Great for home defense, but not so great if you just need to put someone out of the fight. I have those as well if you would rather go that route.”
“No,” Hank said, “I think these’ll work.”
Dale nodded.
There were so many ways this could go sideways. Not having properly trained professionals was the most concerning. That’s where Boomer and I came in. We’d go in hot and heavy, but if I never fired another round, well, that was more than okay too. “So how are we going to let people know we’re moving the horses without it sounding like a setup?” I asked.
Dale got up and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, not so much because he was thirsty, it seemed, but because he needed something physical to do as he unveiled his plan. “I’ll call Tate tonight. Tell him what we’re doing and where we’re going to be and ask him if he’ll run a few patrols by our place to keep an eye on it while we are gone. Considering the fire, I think it is plausible enough.”