Battle for the Soldier's Heart. Cara Colter
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not the boss over me,” Tucker said.
The flash in his eyes and the tilt of his chin were identical to those of the woman beside him.
And the defiance was likable, if you were open to that kind of thing. Which, Rory reminded himself, he wasn’t.
“You’re the one who said you’d look after the ponies,” Rory reminded him. Tucker left, making it clear with one black backward glance it was his choice to go.
When he was gone, Rory turned his full attention to Gracie, whose expression clearly said he was not the boss over her, either.
“Did Serenity tell you that kid was Graham’s?”
“Don’t call him that kid! His name is Tucker.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling how forced his patience was, “did she tell you Tucker was Graham’s?”
“No.” That very recognizable tilt of chin.
“Did she insinuate it?”
“No. I had them over for dinner the other night. She never said a word about Graham and Tucker. Not one word.”
“You had them over for dinner? At your house?”
The you’re-not-the-boss-over-me expression deepened. Rory had to fight an urge to shake her. All those years of discipline being tried by a hundred-and-ten-pound woman!
“Why wouldn’t I have them over for dinner?”
Because it’s akin to throwing a bucket of fish guts to seagulls. They’ll be back. He said nothing.
“I actually enjoyed it. She’s had a very tough life, but she’s very interesting.”
“You don’t know anything about her!”
Her chin was tilting stubbornly.
“You can’t save the whole world, Gracie.”
“No? Isn’t that what you and Graham were so fired up to do?”
He let that bounce off him, like a fighter who had only been nudged by a blow that could have killed had it landed.
His voice cold, he said, “That’s precisely why I know it can’t be done.”
Instead of having the good sense to see what he was trying to tell her—that he was hard and cold and mean—that soft look was in her eyes again.
It made him wonder if maybe, just maybe, if she couldn’t save the whole world, if she could save one person.
And if that person was him.
The thought stunned him. It had never occurred to him he needed to be saved. From what?
“You want desperately for that boy to be Graham’s,” he said softly.
“Don’t you? Don’t you want some part of Graham to go on?”
He heard the desperation, the pure emotion, and knew he could not rely on her to make any rational decisions.
“Look, the things that made Graham who he was are not exactly purely genetic. Those things are the result of how the two of you were raised.”
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