Battle for the Soldier's Heart

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.”

He wanted to ask her where the damned miracle had been for her brother. But he found, to his dismay, he was not quite hard-hearted enough to be the one to snuff out that light in her eyes.

And the light in her eyes was doing the strangest thing to him. He knew the arrival of the cowboys was no miracle, not of the garden variety or any other. It was the Bridey variety miracle, pure and simple.

But something was happening nonetheless. Unless he was mistaken, Gracie’s light was piercing the darkness in him, bringing brightness to a place that had not seen it for a long, long time.

He did not allow himself to marvel at it. He thrust the feeling of warmth away. His darkness could put out her light in a millisecond.

And he’d better remember that when he was thinking about how beautiful Graham’s kid sister had become.

CHAPTER THREE

GRACE watched with absolute delight as the angels who had arrived dressed as cowboys rounded up the ponies. How could Rory not believe in miracles?

In less than an hour the whole disaster was not just repaired, it was practically erased.

It also took less than an hour to become very evident to her that Rory Adams might not know a thing about ponies, but leadership came as naturally to him as breathing.

“How about if you just sit this one out?” Rory had suggested with a meaningful look at her damaged footwear.

She could have resented how he took over from her, but frankly she was sick to death of ponies, and though it was probably a crime in the career woman’s manual, she reluctantly admitted it was somewhat of a relief to have someone take over. But not out loud.

Rory set up an impromptu command center, and she found, in her softened frame of mind, with him unaware of her scrutiny, it was nice to watch him.

Rory Adams was a force unto himself, pure masculine energy practically sizzled in the air around him. He came up with a plan, quickly, delegated, and then he pitched in. He was afraid of nothing: not ponies racing straight at him, not being dragged on the other end of a rope by a tiny pony that was much stronger than seemed possible.

From a purely feminine point of view, watching Rory was enough to make her mouth go dry. He was agile, energetic and strong. It seemed every muscle he possessed was being tested to its rather magnificent limits. Every now and then his shout of command—or laughter—would ring out across the field.

When a pony charged in her direction, he threw himself at it, glancing off its shoulder, but managing to change its direction.

And then he rolled easily to his feet—as if he had not just risked life and limb to save her—and kept moving.

It occurred to her that he protected in the same way he led. It came to him as naturally as breathing.

And it felt like the most terrible of weaknesses that it made her insides turn to jelly.

Within an hour the last of the ponies was loaded into the ramshackle trailer. The poop was scooped. The birthday banner was fished out of the pool. Serenity was installed in the backseat of her crew-cab truck, and Tucker, looking at home for the first time since she had met him, was sandwiched in between two large cowboys on the front seat.

“Clayton and Sam will drive their truck to wherever they want to go,” Slim said, addressing Rory. “I’ll follow in my truck.”

There was something in the way he was addressing Rory, with a respectful kind of deference, that gave her pause. A suspicion whispered to life inside her, and Grace could feel the pink cloud she had been floating on since the timely arrival of the cowboys evaporating beneath her.

“Anything else you need done, Mr. Adams?”

Mr. Adams? Grace tried to think whether there had been an exchange of names in the flurry of activity that had begun since those cowboys first rolled up. Certainly, she had not given her name.

She felt as if she was on red alert now, watching Rory even more intently than she had been when he was commanding the field. Maybe she didn’t know him that well, and maybe many years had gone by since she had seen him, but he simply was not the kind of man who would introduce himself as Mr. Adams.

It was the kind of thing Harold might have done: trying to one-up himself over simple, working men, but Rory would never do that.

She told herself it was impossible to know that given the shortness and circumstances of their reacquaintance, but it didn’t matter. Her heart said it knew.

Still, instead of feeling a soft spot for him, she reminded herself something was up, there was more going on here than met the eye.

Rory, catching her sudden intense focus on him, clapped the cowboy on the shoulder and moved off into the distance, where she couldn’t hear what they said.

But she was pretty sure that was a wallet coming out of Rory’s back pocket!

By the time he came back, any admiration she had felt about his camaraderie with the working man was gone. So was her pink cloud.

In fact, Grace felt as if she had landed back on earth with a rather painful thump. She should have never let her barriers down by admiring him, not even discreetly! Now she had to build them back up. Why was that always harder than taking them down?

The trucks pulled out of the park, the horse trailer swaying along behind them, with great clinking and clanking and whinnying of ponies.

And then there was silence. And Rory standing beside her, surveying the park and looking way too pleased with himself.

“That wasn’t a miracle, was it?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. Eight ponies successfully captured in—” he glanced at his watch “—under eight minutes per pony. Might qualify. Did I mention I’m no expert on miracles?”

He was looking at her, his expression boyishly charming, though there was something in his eyes that was guarded.

“I meant the arrival of Slim and the gang.”

He was very silent. And now he looked away from her, off into the distance. He wouldn’t look at her.

“It wasn’t even the garden-variety kind, was it?”

Silence.

“Why didn’t you say something instead of letting me prattle on?” Instead of letting me believe.

“Aw, Gracie,” he said, finally looking back at her, “you’re too old to believe in stuff like that, anyway.”

She blinked. “I’m old?”

“Not old as in decrepit.” His look was intense, and then he said softly, “Not at all.”

Grace recognized how easy it would to be charmed by him. And she recognized he was a man who had been charming his way past the ruffled feathers of the female species since he’d been old enough to blink that dark tangle of lashes over those sinfully green eyes.

And that after he’d been the one to ruffle the feathers!

“I just meant the last time I saw you, you were a little girl. You probably still believed in Santa Claus.”

“I was fourteen! I certainly did not believe in Santa Claus.” Though she had been hopelessly in love with the man who stood before her, imagining endless scenarios where he finally saw her. And that was probably exactly the kind of magical thinking he thought she was too old for now.

And he was right.

Somehow the hurt of being invisible to him all those years ago, and this moment of his debunking her desire to believe in miracles were fusing together, and she could feel her temper rising.

“What did you have to do with those men arriving?” she demanded.

“I saw you were having trouble. I made a phone call.”

“What kind of man can make a phone call and have a truckload of cowboys delivered?”

“You needn’t say it as if it were a truckload of bootleg liquor during prohibition and you were leading the group of biddies waving a sign saying liquor is of the devil.”

“Old and prim,” she said dangerously.

“You do have a little pinched look around your mouth that reminds me of a schoolteacher who has found a frog in her drawers.”

She sputtered with outrage.

“Hey. Desk drawers!”

“Stop it! You’re trying to distract me.”

“Is it working?” he said silkily.

Yes. “No!”

“Because I have another way to take that pinched look off your lips. Not to mention distract you.”

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