Necessary Secrets. Barbara Phinney
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the military divulging its secrets, and she doubted that Jon had come all this way to merely find closure. He knew more. Or he suspected more.
He’d said something about not knowing the truth. During the debrief, her CO had told her the military still had to finish their investigation. Considering what she knew, yes, of course, she was expected to keep silent. And for once Sylvie had been in full agreement. She had no desire to discuss what had really happened, especially with Jon Cahill and his obvious deep-seated bitterness.
She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry about your father. My mother died about ten years ago.”
“So you live with your dad on your ranch?”
“Now that I’ve taken over the place, yes. Sort of. I did when I came home on leave, of course.” She sighed at her foolish stumble of words. “I guess I do now. But he and Andrea go south in the winter. A few years ago he remarried. My stepmother…she’s great and all, but…”
“But what?”
Sylvie shrugged. “I don’t know her very well. She’s a lot younger than Dad and loves the great outdoors. They take university students on primitive expeditions all summer long. They’ve been gone for the past two weeks.”
“I see.”
Great. She sounded like a jealous daughter, but she wasn’t. Andrea kept Dad active and alive. She was good for him and had even convinced her father to sign the ranch over to Sylvie, something Sylvie had secretly hoped would happen.
“So you haven’t told your father about your pregnancy yet. And you don’t know how to, either, right?”
“Reading my face again?”
“Among other things.” He turned to her when they stopped at Trail’s only traffic light, and as they lingered at the intersection, his gaze drifted up from her knees, pausing at her hips a moment, before completing the inspection with a journey to her face. “How long will your father be gone?”
“Most of the summer. On and off. And I’m not worried about what he’ll say. Dad is, well, mildly supportive of everything I do. Andrea might want to help a bit too much, but at least she’s never had a baby, so I won’t get too much anecdotal advice.”
He kept staring at her face, as if gauging whether or not she was telling him the truth. Then, as if he’d just remembered he was driving, he noticed the green light and eased the sports car into the intersection.
“What about your mother? Tell me about her,” she asked. He blinked once before answering.
“She died a few years ago.”
Yes, of course. Now she remembered. Rick had told her that lung cancer from too many cigarettes had killed his mother.
“You don’t smoke, I hope,” Jon said, as if reading her thoughts yet again.
“No.”
“Good.”
The traffic lessened as they put the town behind them and brought the foothills closer. Sylvie forced herself to relax, but the effort was in vain. The man beside her radiated the tension of a coiled spring. One sudden shift of the unknown force that held him together, and that spring would fly out like a destructive missile.
Ridiculous idea. He was a grieving man, not a loose cannon. Besides, she could handle loose cannons if she had to. She’d taken leadership courses. She knew—and had practiced—all the styles of leadership. She’d been good at soldiering.
Leaders were made, not born, the military touted, and she’d always believed that. But this man? He would have aced any of those courses. Leadership seemed as sculpted to him as the smooth, tanned skin he wore.
“Turn right here,” she told him, glad she could occupy them both with her directions. Because as soon as they reached her ranch, she’d offer her thanks, her condolences and then ask him to leave.
Jon turned the car when Sylvie pointed to a sign at the start of a long driveway. “Mountainview Ranch Campgrounds,” he read out loud. He didn’t understand. “A campground? I thought you said this was a ranch?”
“It was. And still is. When ranching bottomed out a few years ago, my father cut way back on the number of cattle and decided to diversify. A campground was one of the ideas he came up with. You know, campers wanting to experience ranch life the easy way, with motor homes and wagon rides?”
Jon peered out the side window to his left, noticing the small barn and corral that filled the center of the circular driveway. “And he’s raising exotic animals, too?”
Sylvie let out a short laugh. “Andrea’s contribution was a small petting zoo for the kids. She had to justify bringing a pot-bellied pig into their marriage. Since then, we’ve acquired a mule deer, two llamas and six foul-tempered Canada Geese who never want to fly south in the fall. But the kids love them.”
Jon touched the brakes when he spied a small group of children, who, ignoring the sign not to feed the animals, chucked handfuls of grass over the fence to the llamas.
“You can’t work this ranch alone. You’ve just retired, and now you’re expecting,” he stated the obvious.
“I have some hands. Lawrence is my biggest help, and I had three others, though one quit in the spring. They’re all expected to work both the campground and the ranch.”
“Big ranch?” In one easy sweep, he assessed the house where his nephew or niece would call home. Not a bad location. What kid wouldn’t love a ranch-cum-campground with zoo animals and wide-open spaces? He and Rick had spent their childhood in a postage-stamp-size home in middle-class Toronto.
“Not like it used to be. Only forty-two breeding cows on less than 100 acres, twenty of which are now used for camping.”
“Not much to graze on.”
“No, it isn’t. We grow some silage, but thankfully, because we’re small, we’re entitled to lease a certain portion of federal land. It works out well for us, the government land being el-shaped and connected to our land by a good trail. I used to ride out there all the time.”
“A lot of work?”
She shrugged, trying to make it appear everything was fine. She failed. And he knew it. It was a hell of a lot more work than she was making it out to be. “We manage okay. Most of the work’s in the late fall, anyway.”
Jon drove up to the main house, following Sylvie’s directions, his eyes focusing on the sprawling bungalow. The house was set apart from the campground office, which sat over to his right. He eased to a stop just as Sylvie threw open her door.
“Thanks for the ride. I feel better already.”
He snapped his attention back to her, scrambling out of the car before she could bolt into the house. “How are you going to get your car back?”
She stopped at his front bumper. “I’ll send the men in later. It’s no big deal. We make trips into town all the time.” After a pause she added, “Like I said, thanks for the lift.”
“That’s it?” Jeez, she couldn’t just expect to cut him loose. “Just thanks?” He clenched his jaw to check his rising temper. “I came here to find out what happened the night Rick died. No one will tell me. Even the death certificate didn’t say one damn thing. Just ‘death as a result of an accident.’ No one’s at liberty to say. I even had to wait to bury him, and I’ll be damned if I’m waiting any longer to find out how he died.”
Her face impassive, Sylvie stared at him while he vented his fury. He took another seething breath and added, “Put yourself in my shoes. After all of that, I find out my brother’s warrant officer is carrying his baby, and you want me to walk away with just a ‘thanks for the lift’?”
He tightened his fingers into painful fists, trying to force his body to stop shaking. When it refused, he stalked up close to Sylvie. Only when she