Guarding the Soldier's Secret (15 page)

Well, hell, when it came to the ranch, Sage was the boss and did a damn fine job of it. Good thing, too, since it would all be his, one day. Probably not too far off, either. Not even Sam Malone could figure on living forever.

From the Memoirs of Sierra Sam Malone:

I remember that day like it was yesterday, though it was one I’d give my fortune to forget.

We’d gone out riding that morning, Kate and I, in the mountains of West Virginia near to where I was born. I’d taken a place there after the twins were born so Kate could be close to the grandbabies across the way in Virginia. My own kinfolk were all long dead and gone by then, and California had been my home for so long I didn’t have any particular feeling left for the place, or it for me. But Janey’s folks were in Virginia, not too far from Washington, where John Michael worked, and that was where the little girls stayed when their parents were off on another one of their missions to save the world.

I wasn’t against them doing that, you understand, but I’d been around long enough to know it was a losing battle they were fighting.

I guess they had it in their blood, those two, though John’s had come from his mother’s side, for sure, not mine. They’d found one another whilst they were down there somewhere in South America, working in that thing Kennedy started—the Peace Corps, I guess they call it. Janey was from a family of do-gooders a lot like Kate’s except for being better off moneywise, and the two of them matched up as well as any two people could. It didn’t seem like they’d ever find time to settle down and raise some kids, the way they were always off in some godforsaken part of the world trying to save somebody else’s, but then here came the twins. Kate was in grandma heaven.

For a while, then, it looked like John Michael and Janey were through with gallivanting all over the globe and were going to be content with working in DC and raising those two little girls.

Then came that famine over in Ethiopia, and, well, they just had to go. Wasn’t anything anybody could do to change their minds. They left the twins with Janey’s folks there in Virginia, and off they went.

We came riding up to the stables that day, like always, and from a ways off I could see Gladys and Willard, the couple that looked after the place for me, standing outside waiting for us. I got a bad feeling in my gut, but I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look at Kate in case I’d see my own fears looking back at me.

Closer we got, I could see Willard holding his hat in both hands, and Gladys had her hands wrapped up in her apron and tears running down her face.

Beside me, Kate started to whimper even before Willard got the words out of his mouth. “Mr. Malone, sir, I’m sorry. The plane...”

Kate whispered, “No. No. No...”

Gladys covered her face with her apron.

“It went down, sir. They’re gone. They’re both gone.”

Kate slid off her horse and crumpled on the ground like a broken doll. I sat in the saddle like I was made of stone. Willard, he went over to Kate and tried to help her up. She turned her face up to me, and I still see her face in my memory, clear as I saw it then. I knew what she needed from me, but I couldn’t give it to her. God help me. I turned my horse around and headed back up into the West Virginia hills.

I don’t recall much about the next few days. I know when I came down from the hills, Kate had gone to Janey’s folks to be with the little girls. Me, I ordered up my airplane and had my pilot fly me home to California, home to these mountains that gave me their name.

Chapter 11

“Y
ou favor her, you know,” the old man said.

Yancy threw him a questioning look over one shoulder. She was sitting on a rock beside the little creek, watching Laila try to catch pollywogs in her hands while the horses drank and nibbled on the grass that grew green along the creek banks. Sam hadn’t dismounted; Yancy thought it was probably because he’d need some help getting off the horse and back on again.

“Your grandma, I mean.” His eyes weren’t on her, but focused somewhere on the rocky hillside beyond the creek.

“Really?” She got up, brushing at the seat of her pants, and climbed the gentle slope to where he sat on his pinto horse, leaning on the saddle horn. “I don’t remember her very well, but I wouldn’t have thought so, from the pictures I’ve seen.”

He made a gesture, brushing that aside. “Not your looks, exactly—guess I’d have to say you’ve got your mama’s features and coloring. Something about you, though. Brings her to mind—my Katie. She was tall like you, and leggy—had the look of a Thoroughbred. She was a classy dame, your grandma.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she smiled. He laughed, a sound like a rusty gate hinge.

“Your nature, now—that adventurin’ streak—you got that from me. Kate, she was a homebody. But me... I had that yearn to wander, you know. Always did. And I handed it down to you through your daddy—well, and your mama, she had it, too, I guess. They were two of a kind. So you got it in your blood, girl. Both sides. No use denying it. Yep...” He heaved a sigh.

Yancy closed her mouth, which she’d opened in bemusement, both at his words and the fact that he’d strung so many of them together at one time. But the sadness in his face stopped the questions she might have asked, and after a moment, he added, “She blamed me, you know—your grandma—for what happened to your folks. Them goin’ off like that...the plane crash that killed ’em.”

“Oh, she couldn’t—” She was shaking her head, poised to argue, but his gaze came back to her, no longer unfocused but fierce as a hawk’s.

“Yes, she could, and she was right. And I blamed me, too. It was me passed that adventurin’ spirit to our boy, and that’s a fact. That’s who he was. Can’t change who you are.” He waved a hand to where Laila squatted at the water’s edge. “Her daddy—seems like he’s got it in his blood, too.”

She uttered a laugh, denying the quickening of her heartbeat. “How can you know that? You’ve never—” She stopped, because he was laughing again.

“Oh, I know, missy. I know. And nobody—not you or me or that little girl down there—is ever gonna change him. Best you remember that.” He gave the pinto’s reins a tug, making her dance restlessly. “Time we was headin’ back to the barn. Storm’s coming.” He quieted his horse, then looked down at her and winked. “And I’m an old man, you know. Time for my nap.”

* * *

After the ride, Laila wanted to stay to play with the kittens in the barn, and Abby said she would bring her home in time for lunch. With the rest of the day stretching ahead of her and nothing she could think of to do to fill it, Yancy thought of calling her sister. They hadn’t really talked since Yancy had returned from Afghanistan. However, she’d forgotten there was no cell phone service at either the barn or the adobe, so she fired off a text instead. She was almost back to the villa when she heard the chirp of a voice-mail notification.

Hey, big sister, got your text. Call me.

She thumbed Callback and listened to the rings while she walked. She was thinking it was going to go to voice mail when her sister picked up, sounding out of breath.

“Yancy? Hey.”

A smile came to her automatically, along with a quivering breath. “So, what’s this ‘big sister’ stuff? I’m all of five minutes older than you are.” It was an old routine, comforting as a hug.

“Five minutes, five years—what’s the difference? Older is older. So, how is it, there on the farm?”

“It’s a ranch, not a farm.”

“What’s the difference?”

Yancy laughed. “To tell you the truth, I’m not quite sure.”

“Okay, so what’s he like, our grandpa Sam?”

“That’s kind of hard to put into words. You really should come meet him yourself. You are planning to, aren’t you?” She closed her eyes for a second, hoping Miranda wouldn’t hear the plea in her voice.
I miss you, Randy. I wish you were here.

She shouldn’t have worried—as usual, Miranda was too caught up in her own problems to notice anyone else’s.

“Uh...well, I can’t right now... I have some stuff going on here. Kind of hard to get away. But I will, I promise, as soon as I can.”

Unlike her sister, Yancy was tuned to the nuances of speech and tone, with a talent for hearing what wasn’t being said in addition to what was. She kept her voice casual, the question light. “Yeah? What’s going on?”

“Oh, you know. Just...stuff. Um, the gallery’s keeping me pretty busy right now.”

It didn’t take a twin sister’s intuition or the skills of an experienced interviewer to hear the evasion. Little pulses of alarm began to beat in some far-off region of her consciousness, but she didn’t push it. It was probably nothing; Randy was a bit of a drama queen.

And so fiercely independent she probably wouldn’t tell her “big sister” even if it
was
something.

They chatted about nothing for a few more minutes, and Yancy disconnected feeling even more alone than before the call.

She told herself she should have known better than to expect much from Randy. She and her sister had been able to share and talk about anything when they were kids, especially after the deaths of their parents. It had been just the two of them against the world then. But their lives had taken such different paths, and as adults they’d seemed to have little in common. They seldom talked anymore, and when they did, it seemed as though they had nothing much to say.

Yancy stood in the smooth dirt road, frowning at the phone in her hand. What had she expected? Or hoped for?

Maybe something to drown out the words that were playing over and over in her mind like a song that refused to go away—what did they call it? A brain worm?

You got it in your blood, girl. No use denying it.

Can’t change who you are.

Her daddy, he’s got it in his blood.

Nobody—not you or me or that little girl down there—is ever gonna change him.

Best you remember that.

It was only what she’d been telling herself all along, wasn’t it? She didn’t understand why she should now feel weighed down by those words.

Weighed down.
Yes, that was how she felt. Heavy. Burdened. As though every step took more effort than it should. As if she were slogging through deep sand. Was this, she wondered, what it felt like to be depressed?

As if in support of her mood, the world suddenly darkened and thunder rumbled. She looked up at the sky, surprised to see clouds piling up over the mountains to the north and east. Surprised that rain ever happened here in this semidesert in the summertime. Although she did remember, now, that the entire southwestern part of the country was prone to monsoon rains. And the flash floods that sometimes came with them.

A gust of wind ruffled the grass in the pasture next to the road, carrying with it the smell of thunderstorms and lifting Yancy’s spirits a little in anticipation of what was to come. She’d always loved thunderstorms. They brought back memories of growing up in the Southeast and of sitting on her grandparents’ front porch with Miranda, arms wrapped around her pulled-up knees, watching the raindrops dance on the cement walk. She hurried on, breathing in great gulps of the rain smell, waiting for the plopping sound of the first big raindrops.

To her disappointment, the rain didn’t come, and Josie told her that was the way it usually was.

“My grandfather used to say, ‘All signs of rain fail in a dry time,’” she said with a shrug, then smiled. “But it’s better it doesn’t rain right now. I think Sage has hay down in the field. Rain isn’t good for hay, you know.”

Yancy nodded and went off to her room to shower before lunch, restlessness coiling inside her like a spring being wound and wound, tighter and tighter.

Standing under the cooling spray, she gave herself what amounted to both a stern scolding and a pep talk. Depression, she told herself, was not productive.
Of course
she felt restless and even bored—she was totally unaccustomed to inactivity. No—more than inactivity, she hated the feeling of being cut off from everything. Out of the loop. Isolated. She hadn’t been in the field since becoming Laila’s foster and then adoptive parent, but at least in WNN’s Washington bureau she’d had access to all the news, every hour of every day. Here she was limited to the network broadcasts and frustrated by the knowledge that there was so much more going on that the public would never see.

The way she felt, she told herself, had nothing to do with Hunt Grainger and his sudden and seemingly miraculous reappearance in her life. Nothing whatsoever. She would never allow herself to count on him, and she would do her best not to allow Laila to do so, either. She’d been happy with her career and her daughter—and occasional and casual male company, perhaps—and there was no reason for that to change.

With her eyes closed against the stinging shower spray, an image flashed into her mind. It came with the explosive suddenness of summer lightning.

The warm, firm muscle of his neck against her palms...the cool silkiness of his hair tangling in her fingers...his hand cupping the side of her face, his thumb sliding across her moistened lips. His voice...a whisper. “Yankee.”

She had no defense against it. She sucked in a breath at the pain. Furiously, she turned off the water, reached for a towel and scrubbed her head with it as if she could somehow scrub the images from her mind.

* * *

Surprisingly, for the most part she was able to keep the images and thoughts of Hunt at bay. During the daytime, at least. Most of the time. As long as she kept busy and in the company of others. Mornings began early, since Laila was expected to report to Sage’s barn by barely past the crack of dawn. Yancy had no problem with the early call: network newspeople were rarely allowed a leisurely sleep-in, and war correspondents sometimes had a hard time finding time to sleep at all.

After a hurried breakfast with Josie hovering and sometimes sitting down with them to sip her cup of coffee, there was the walk down to the barn. Then there were the horses to groom and saddle while Laila fed her goats and coaxed them into letting her pet them, all this under the watchful eye of Sam Malone. Yancy didn’t know how the old man managed it, but he was always already up on his pinto horse, the one he called Old Paint, before she and Laila arrived. She had to assume it was Sage who brought the horses in from the meadow and got Sam’s horse saddled for him, and probably it was also Sage who helped him mount up.

There wasn’t a lot of talking during the ride, but each day Sam took them farther up the canyon, to where the meadow narrowed down to nothing and the climb into the timber began. Times like that, Hunt and Afghanistan seemed very far away.

After the ride, there was lunch, which usually included Rachel and the baby, as well as J.J. and Josie, and sometimes Abby and Sage, although Sage was often busy in the fields, and when he was absent, Abby seemed to stay away, as well. The dynamics of those relationships—Abby and Sage, Rachel and J.J.—interested her greatly and were welcome distractions from the complexities of her own.

In the afternoons she was kept busy finding activities to keep Laila occupied. The local middle school, Josie had told her, had summer-school classes in various arts and crafts, as well as swimming lessons for all ages, from babies to adults. Laila objected to swimming lessons, insisting she already knew how to swim, but Yancy convinced her she would have fun and maybe meet some new friends. Which she did, of course, and then there were playdates and sleepovers to plan.

Yes, the days were full.

So were the nights. Full of thoughts she couldn’t keep out of her head. Full of images that played in full and living color on the backs of her eyelids. Full of memories that made her body grow hot and her pulses throb, that made her ache in places she wanted to feel nothing at all.

In the daytime she lived on June Canyon Ranch, in the southern Sierra Nevadas of California, USA. In the night, she was back in Afghanistan. With Hunt. She remembered it all, from the first time she’d laid eyes on him, when he’d appeared like a superhero out of the smoke and chaos of battle to rescue her and carry her to safety. To the last time. When he’d come
here
and kissed her by the pool, and she’d known she should push him away but instead had pressed against him, hungry for the taste of him, the softness of his beard on her skin, the roughness of his hands, holding her tightly to feel his own hunger and desire.

God help me. I still want him. How insane is that?

The really crazy thing was that she found herself remembering things she hadn’t even known she’d noticed at the time. Like the dimple in one cheek when he smiled, the dimple that was camouflaged most of the time by beard stubble and, more lately, by the full beard. Like the way his voice became a growl in the darkness, so soft it was almost a purr, and the way it stirred goose bumps when he breathed words against her skin.

Finally one night, restless and frustrated beyond bearing and afraid of disturbing Laila, who was breathing softly and sweetly in the other bed, she got up and put on the beach cover-up she’d worn to meet Hunt at the pool. Then she went silently into the courtyard.

Though the courtyard was lit at intervals along the verandas, the night was dark and humid, with clouds covering the stars. Faint rumbles of thunder came from far away over the Sierras to the north, and flickers of lightning cast the bell tower in intermittent silhouette. She might not have noticed the faint glow in the tower window if her attention hadn’t been drawn there by the lightning. At first she thought the glow was a reflection of the lightning, but how could that be when the lightning was behind the tower? And when the lightning was gone and darkness returned, the glow remained.