At Close Range

“You already have teachers, then?”

“Only one, Melanie Jorgensen, and she’s not here yet. She’s arriving in the fall.” She released a slight smile, as if remembering Melanie Jorgensen and liking the memory. “In the meantime, we’ve all been pitching in for various subjects.” She made a face as if the classes weren’t going well. “Right now, we’re on home-school status because it’s too far to ship the children into Carlsbad schools and because the children we have now are all somewhat behind in their schooling.”

“So this would be a temporary arrangement?”

He realized his question was inept when she gave him a blank stare. “Temporary? No. Oh, you mean about the home schooling. Again, no.”

He loved the way she couched every answer in formal terms, as if he might misconstrue the slightest nuance of what she said. It was one of her trademarks on the radio, the bit they advertised before her golden voice came on. When Corrie Stratton says it’s true, it’s a fact.

The woman with the golden voice and truth in her words tilted her head at him. “Eventually we’d like our own status as an official school. But that’s a far piece down the road, as they say around here. With the home-school status, however, and with certified teachers, we can still get these kids well grounded in what they need to know to get good college placements.”

Her feet crept to the chair seat again. He was sure she was unaware of the fact that one of her arms wrapped around her knees, drawing them to her chest. He was also sure she was utterly unaware how attractive she was.

“That’s the object, then?” he asked.

She frowned and looked a question at him.

“What you would want from a teacher?”

“I see,” she said as carefully as she had before. “I’m not exactly sure what Leeza or Jeannie would say in answer to that. From my perspective, I think what we want is someone who will be surrogate parent, teacher, friend and mentor with a bit of a kindly uncle thrown in.”

“A teacher of many hats,” he said, and leaned back in the chair, relaxed for the first time since he’d driven onto the ranch.

She smiled at him—a bit wistfully, he thought. “It’s a dream, I know. But…”

“One that’s already working.” Abruptly, it wasn’t just the job he wanted, but to reassure her that the ranch-cum-children’s-home dream was already coming true.

“Yes,” she said, and gave him the most genuine smile she’d managed with him so far—except when she’d expressed her wish for a miracle.

He felt that smile like a fever coming on, making him feel hot and restless.

“So far it’s working.” She cleared her throat as if remembering she was conducting an interview. “Are you currently teaching somewhere, Mr. Dorsey?”

“Mack,” he said.

“Okay. Sorry. Mack, are you teaching anywhere right now?”

“Nothing to apologize for and, no, at the moment I’m not teaching, so I’d be available immediately,” he said.

She gave him a funny look before making another scratch in her notepad. “And when was the last time you were in the classroom, Mr. Dorsey?”

“Mack,” he corrected. He realized then that she didn’t know who he was, that she didn’t realize that he was the so-called hero of the Enchanted Hills incident. Teacher heroically sacrifices himself to rescue ten students burning in blazing inferno. And what else was an inferno but blazing and what was a sacrifice when he had lived and five children had died?

For a moment, as so often happened, the cries of the children, both rescued and lost, echoed in his ears and his nose stung from the acrid scent of burning schoolrooms.

Corrie Stratton, the woman with the golden voice and the coffee-liqueur eyes didn’t blink. Lady journalist extraordinaire, this tiny scrap of a woman didn’t seem to have a clue as to his identity.

He gave a faint and, he hoped, easy smile. “I’ve been out for two years.”

She looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. He must have made some kind of gesture. He found it somewhat ironic that he’d come to Milagro in part to escape the newshounds, the incessant prying into his life, and was now being interviewed by one of the nation’s leading investigative journalists and she didn’t have a clue about him. Because of that news interest, he had assumed Corrie’s partner, Leeza, had known who he was and hadn’t asked him to discuss his reasons for being out of the classroom for such a long time when he went through the initial phone interview with Leeza and the secondary meeting with Jeannie. He found himself stymied and irrationally resenting having to reveal the truth about his scars and talk about the many things he couldn’t explain away—the pain, the losses. Her gaze traveled from his hands to the scars on his face. “An accident?” she asked.

Could one call a deliberately executed firebomb that killed five children and a cafeteria worker an accident? In a cosmic fashion, perhaps that would be true.

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He was grateful when she didn’t pursue that line of questioning.

She cleared her throat again. “You do realize that you’d have to be living here on Milagro?”

Living on a miracle. Better than the bitter ashes of regret. “That works for me,” he said truthfully. He didn’t add that it would be an escape. A refuge. Just dodging the media would be a miracle in and of itself.

“And that because we’re providing room and board—and a horse, if you want to ride—we’re not offering even close to what could be considered a competitive salary?”

“With the add-ons of the living quarters, food and, of course, a horse, I’m okay with the salary, provided you offer insurance.”

To her credit, she didn’t look at his scars this time, though he could see a noticeable rise in her color. “Of course. That’s a given.” She didn’t look up as she added, “We require a thirty-day probationary period.”

“Accepted.”

Her eyes shot to his. He felt a jolt of something hot and fiery shoot through him. He had to clear his throat before asking, “Are you offering me the job, Ms. Stratton?” Her partners, Jeannie and Leeza, had led him to believe this interview was pro forma only.

For all the nights of listening to her voice in the loneliest hours of the dark, believing her stories, fantasizing about her, he suddenly wanted her to ask him to stay, not because he was qualified, but because she wanted him to. Knowing a fantasy was impossible didn’t make it fade any more swiftly.

“Corrie,” she said, without answering him.

“What?”

“You can call me Corrie.”

It was like being asked to call Dan Rather, Dan, or Barbara Walters, Babs. But whatever he’d thought before coming out here, despite the needs he’d felt when he saw the opening advertised, he wanted this job now. He wanted it more than anything on the face of the earth. “Okay. Corrie, then.”

Her eyes met his and he saw the wary denial in her gaze. Disappointment shafted through him. She would say no. She didn’t want him as a teacher on this ranch of miracles. Then he saw something else in her gaze. Something confused and alluring, a look that had nothing whatsoever to do with teaching.

He rasped, “Are you offering me the job?”

She shook her head, though her eyes implored him to understand something she didn’t voice. He clearly saw her wary rejection. “I…I don’t think I can do anything without the approval of my partners, Mr. Dorsey—”

“Just call me Mack.” Two could play at that game.

“Mack.” He thought she repeated his name as if savoring it. Her eyes flickered and she shook her head. “I don’t think I can—”

A horse’s angry whinny and a child’s scream cut her words off midstream. In the split second of hesitation following the scream, their eyes locked. Hers, he thought, carried a wealth of fear and helplessness, a pleading that he do something. His, he was sure, told her he couldn’t do a thing to help, that people had died because of him before.

But looking into the depths of her coffee eyes, he felt powerless to resist her. Without a word, he shoved away from the table and was through the doors and across the veranda.

From the time of the scream to his leap from the steps, no more than three seconds could have passed.

A flashy pinto, with a small kid of nine or ten looking like a rag-doll saddle decoration, bucked and lurched toward the hacienda steps, whinnying shrilly and trying his best to rid himself of the child-burr on his back. The boy, all eyes and scrawny legs, screamed bloody murder and held on to the saddle horn for dear life.

Without thinking about it, Mack jumped from the bottom of the steps, directly into the heaving horse’s path. The beast shuddered and whinnied anew but skidded to a halt.

Mack heard a swift shriek from behind him. He heard other yells and ignored them. All his attention was focused only on the horse and the small boy perched above him.

The little boy, who had somehow held on during the wild ride, lost his control at the abrupt stop and pitched forward. He somersaulted down the horse’s neck to land at Mack’s feet.

Mack hooked a leg around the boy and flipped him behind him, not worrying how the boy would fare against the dirt, but terrified that the shivering horse would decide to rear and bring its sharp hooves down onto the child.

Though he knew less than nothing about horses, he instinctively reached for the fallen reins of the horse’s bridle and, talking to the horse the whole time, managed to secure them. The horse turned a white, rolled eye in his direction and, trembling, stamped the ground and huffed several times before seeming to realize he was all right.

When he could find his voice, Mack asked gruffly, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

Corrie stood frozen on the veranda steps, both hands holding a scream inside. Fractured images of alternate timelines flashed through her mind, other presents and myriad futures: Mack Dorsey sitting calmly at the dining table, handing over references while Juan Carlos flew across the air to thud on the ground with a final groan of pain. Mack and Corrie laughing over something and Juan Carlos trampled by Dancer’s hooves. A funeral, a pregnant Jeannie crying in her husband’s arms, a headstone with Juan Carlos’s birthdate etched and the death date today. Juan Carlos riding Dancer and Mack Dorsey deciding not to come to Rancho Milagro that fine early spring afternoon.

She heard him ask, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

Juan Carlos sat up, perfectly all right, using Mack Dorsey’s jeans as a pulley. “Y-yeah, I think. Yeah, I’m okay.”

Somehow, Corrie managed to get down the steps despite her watery legs and reached Juan Carlos about the same time the groundskeeper and sometimes groom, Jorge, came limping around the corner of the hacienda, gasping and cursing in little bursts of winded Spanish.

Even as she patted the boy down, trying unsuccessfully to pry him from his grip on Mack Dorsey’s legs, Corrie felt like laughing at Jorge’s bedraggled curses. Juan Carlos, according to Jorge, would fall down a rabbit hole and be twitched to death by bunny whiskers. Juan Carlos, before the day was over, would have his face torn off by magpies and sewn on backward by prairie dogs. Juan Carlos, if he didn’t learn to listen to Jorge, would have to learn the entire alphabet in both Spanish and English backward and forward.

“Niño,” Jorge panted, seeing the boy alive and tremulously smiling up at Mack Dorsey, “next time you want to kill old Jorge, just get a gun, okay?” He bent over, a hand on his chest, another on one knee.

“El hombre stopped the horse for me,” Juan Carlos said, but didn’t let go of Mack’s jeans. Corrie knew how he felt. Her own legs gave way about then and she sat down in the dirt, one hand on Juan Carlos’s shoulder and the other on the toe of Mack Dorsey’s tennis shoe.

“His name is Mr. Mack Dorsey,” Corrie said faintly. “And you better say a very good thank-you.”

Juan Carlos looked up. “Thank you, señor. But you made me fall off the horse.”

Corrie gave a ragged chuckle that was all too close to a sob. “Not quite good enough, Juan Carlos. Try again.”

“Thank you for getting in the way of my horse, Señor Mack.”

“J-Juan Carlos!” Jorge sputtered. “You get up right now and say you’re sorry.” After some effort, the older man stood upright and took the reins from Mack’s hands. “I’ll take the horse now, señor. Thank God you were here.”

The two men clasped hands and Mack withstood a hard backslap from Jorge before leaning over to shake Juan Carlos’s upstretched hand.

“Take it easy, kid,” Mack said.

“You, too, Señor Mack.”

Corrie looked up to find Mack’s eyes on her, a crooked smile on his lips. He held out a scarred hand.

She put hers in his, felt the smooth skin enveloping hers, let him pull her up, smelled the dust the horse had kicked up, and smelled her own fear and the heady, all-male scent of Mack Dorsey.

She nodded at him. He nodded back.

She smiled and he didn’t.

She drew a deep, tremulous breath. “The sooner you can bring your things, the better,” she said.

Then he smiled.

Chapter 2

If Mack was surprised that everyone shared evening meals together at Rancho Milagro, the others seemed to find it perfectly normal. Within seconds of his entering the hacienda for a second time that day, he was subjected to a rapid-fire introduction to the rest of the household.

He nodded at the awesomely tall and gorgeous Leeza Nelson, whom he’d spoken to on the phone when he first applied for the job. Leeza was only on the ranch for a short time, Corrie had told him earlier; she had to go back to Washington, D.C., to run her company. He also nodded to Jeannie, another of the partners, and Chance Salazar, her U.S. Marshal husband, and raised a hand to their two kids, Dulce and José. He was reintroduced to Juan Carlos—much improved by soap and water—the ranch hands, Clovis, Jorge and Pablo, and four other children ranging in age from six to eleven whom he didn’t have names for yet.

Places were set at the enormous table in the dining room. Only a couple of the chairs were without mats, plates and silverware. Three large pitchers of iced tea with lemons and ice bobbing to the surface served as centerpieces and the cloth napkins adorning each plate all held a different shape.

The housekeeper, Rita—a tiny stick of a woman in her forties—plopped the last dish down on an enormous sideboard before taking a place at the table herself and heaving a huge sigh. “Señors, señoras, and niños…dinner is ready.”

Mack expected the kids to launch from the table and attack the sideboard, but no one moved. Finally, Jeannie held out her hands on either side, clasping her husband’s in one and her daughter Dulce’s in the other. “Grace,” she said. “Juan Carlos? I believe it’s your turn.”

Mack couldn’t remember the last time he’d been a party to saying grace before dinner—some long-ago Thanksgiving when he was just a little squirt, he suspected—and felt awkward taking the little girl’s hand seated next to him and Corrie’s on the other. Corrie’s was dry and warm; the little girl’s scrubbed and slightly damp. While Corrie’s fingers pulsed and trembled beneath his, the little girl’s fingers squeezed his hand, as if offering reassurance, or—in his opinion, far worse—trust.

He bowed his head with the others when Jeannie signaled Juan Carlos to perform the blessing.

The boy cleared his throat and sang out a version of grace he’d obviously been practicing. “Thanks for the tacos, thanks for the beans, and thank you, God, for my blue jeans!”

Mack wasn’t the only one who chuckled. And to his combined surprise and relief, no one reprimanded the boy. The little girl, whose hand had rested so trustingly in his, removed it to cover her giggles.

Jeannie’s husband, Chance, gave a sharp bark of laughter, followed by deep chortles. Leeza muttered something and, shaking her head, hid a grin that threatened to soften her somewhat forbidding features. Jeannie tsked but smiled fondly at the kid whose gift for rhyme might not meet a holier person’s standards.

But Corrie’s reaction was the best, he thought. She bit her lower lip while giving the boy a slow, deliberate wink, as if they’d cooked up the crazy blessing together. And when the boy gave her a cocky thumbs-up, Mack realized that they had. No wonder miracles happened around this place.

When she glanced at him, and recognized by his answering look that he’d caught her coaching, she flushed a little, shrugged, and by tilting her head at Juan Carlos, let him understand that she didn’t want him to say anything. Mack remembered her conspiratorial smile earlier that afternoon. Before the bucking horse episode, prior to her offering him the job, when she’d asked him why he wanted to be at Rancho Milagro, and, at his answer of wanting to be a part of the miracles, she had hunched forward, guileless, conspiratorial, and said “Me, too.”

The little girl next to him leaned against him, still giggling, sharing her laughter in her shaking shoulders. He resisted the urge to place his arm around her. Corrie’s wish of teacher-cum-kindly-uncle might be her dream, but in the real world of lawsuits and traumas, a simple touch could so easily be misconstrued. Still, the little girl pressed against his arm and rested her forehead on his forearm. He couldn’t help but chuckle at her helpless laughter. And for a fleeting moment, wondered how long it had been since he’d laughed.

“Okay, tonight, even though we have a newcomer, kids get to go first,” Jeannie said. “And Juan Carlos? Keep your fingers away from the alarm.”

Seven chairs, including the one next to his, scraped across broad, burnt-sienna-colored Saltillo tile and seven giggling children raced to the sideboard.

“Chance? Would you pour the wine? Thanks, honey. So, Mack, what do you think so far?” Jeannie asked him over the children’s clamor and clanking of serving utensils.

Mack accepted the glass of wine from an openly smiling Chance, and nodded at the kids. “I’m intrigued,” he said.

“Good,” Jeannie said, and put her hand over her own empty wineglass and grinned up at her husband. “Can’t, remember?”

Chance kissed her and lowered a hand to caress her neck. “Worth it?” he asked.

“Every minute,” she said, taking his hand to kiss it.

Mack felt riveted by the overt love in their eyes. He’d read one of the tabloid accounts of the undercover marshal and the ranch owner falling in love, the first of the long string of Milagro’s so-called miracles.

“Jeannie’s pregnant and not letting a single second of the pampering get away,” Leeza explained in a dry voice. He’d have suspected a snipe hiding in her words if he hadn’t seen her eyes, which were, he thought, starkly and unknowingly wistful.

Mack resisted the urge to look over his shoulder for a disaster lurking in the shadows of the large dining room. Kids laughing and jostling in line, adults relaxed and easy, mixed cultures and backgrounds, beautiful scents rising from the food spread on a lavish sideboard; it all seemed too good to be true.

Instead, he nodded, as if Leeza had asked him a question. He gave a rusty smile at the glowing-faced and obviously happy Jeannie. She smiled back at him and raised a protective hand to her scarcely showing belly. “I’m sure it all seems pretty strange to you right now,” she said.

He hoped the kids returning to the table, scraping chairs and trading friendly insults in a mixture of Spanish and English, precluded the need for an answer from him, for if he’d had to give one, it would have been in the negative. It didn’t seem strange; it seemed completely alien. It was too perfect. And anything too wonderful, too perfect was sure to have a downside.

“Señor Mack?” Pablo rose and waved his hand at the sideboard. “You first, yes?”

Mack was in awe at the array of foods prepared for the Rancho Milagro crowd. Far from mere tacos and beans, the fare included an enormous roast beef tenderloin, a salad with seemingly every known vegetable and some cheeses he didn’t recognize, home-baked bread with sun-dried tomatoes, a large bowl of herb-and-butter pasta, and a host of soft or crispy finger foods that would normally be served as hors d’oeuvres.

As he helped himself to a healthy portion of the dishes, knowing from the quantity that he needn’t stint whatsoever, he listened to the easy conversation behind him.

“What’s this, Corrie?” one of the kids asked.

“Fried grasshopper,” she answered promptly. “With enough tempura batter, it tastes just like lobster.”

“Eew!” chirped one of the boys. “Not really?”

After the pause that followed her question, several of the kids laughed, and so did the little boy. “It doesn’t taste like a grasshopper. It tastes good!”

“See?” Corrie said, her sultry voice all the more alluring when filled with teasing laughter. “It’s all in the batter.”

“And this?” another kid piped up. “What’s this?”

“That’s the snake that was bothering me by the back gate. Deep-fried rattlesnacks, I call ’em.”

Beside him Pablo chuckled. “That Corrie, she’s like a kid herself.”

Mack turned his head to look at her.

No employer facade masked her face now. Pablo was right; she almost looked a child herself as she pressed against the table, her eyes sparkling, her face flushed, and a soft, inviting smile curving her generous lips. “And those little ones that look like fried spiders? Well, there you go. I decided we needed to wage war. So instead of nuking the little critters, we’re frying them.”

“Yuck,” one of the boys said.

“That’s what they’re called. Yuckums.”

Juan Carlos laughed and popped one of the spidery confections in his mouth. “Mmm,” he said after crunching noisily, swallowing elaborately. “They’re delicioso.”

Mack found himself mesmerized by Corrie’s face. She looked so at home, laughing with the children, not an aunt or a mother, a mere child herself, lost in the teasing moment, full of merry delight and wonder. So different from the woman who had greeted him at the door, the one who had been unable to remain standing as she ran to the little boy thrust behind his legs, and certainly not the famous newswoman the world knew so well. Here, she was one of the kids, her sultry, well-known PBS voice a beacon and her smile a lighthouse of warmth.

Something inside him twisted and pulled. If he’d met her only a few years before, he thought he’d probably have moved heaven and earth itself to spend some time with her.

Mack’s dinner partner, the little girl with the hapless giggles and the trusting grip, studied Juan Carlos’s antics with now-solemn eyes. “It’s squash,” she announced to the table at large. “I helped. It’s just squash from the pantry place, not spiders. We graded it. It gets an A-plus. Corrie wouldn’t make us eat spiders.”

“Señor?” Pablo asked.

Mack realized he’d been staring at Corrie, holding up the line for dinner. He jerked his attention back to the sideboard, muttered a quick apology and took one of the rattlesnacks and a couple of the yuckums to add to his plate before moving back to his chair.

When he sat down, the little girl with the big black eyes and missing teeth scooted a bit closer and whispered loudly, “They really are squashes. Don’t worry. It’s nothing scary.” She patted his hand and, in doing so, ripped something loose in his long-closed heart.

Corrie, who had almost convinced herself that it was just another rollicking evening at Rancho Milagro, had nevertheless been all too aware of every single move that Mack Dorsey made. She’d heard his throaty chuckle at Juan Carlos’s cheeky prayer, witnessed his surprise when no one took exception to it and saw the precise moment little Analissa had gotten under his skin forever.

She’d felt him jolt when Analissa patted the scars on his long, beautiful hands and told him not to worry; the squash confections weren’t scary. Everything in him seemed to stiffen, as if electrified. And she’d heard him take a hitching breath, as if what he was about to say he swallowed instead.