The Final Mission Page 12

“It was a hunter,” she agreed tensely.

  “Then the smart thing to do is make breakfast while he finds some other place to look for deer.”

  As her adrenaline subsided, Courtney took a seat. “He may not have even been shooting at me.”

  “Probably not,” Dom agreed. “Sound echoes off these hills.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “Did someone shoot at Courtney, Dad?” Todd spoke, but both boys’ eyes had grown huge.

  Courtney looked at the frightened boys, and her heart and gut both twisted. “No, of course not.” She couldn’t bear the thought of what might have occurred to them, after what had happened to their mother.

  “Of course not,” Dom said firmly. “It was some hunter. He might not even have been aiming this way.”

  “They’re not supposed to hunt here,” Kyle said.

  “No, they’re not. But some people don’t pay attention to signs and fences. Now let’s get breakfast started.”

  Courtney was watching the boys closely, and felt relief when they seemed to relax. She’d better not run across that hunter, because if she did he was going to get an earful for the fright he had given these boys. One hell of an earful.

  But later, while the boys were eating at the table, Dom drew her back outside under the pretext of drinking their coffee on the porch.

  “Are you sure that no one is after you?” he asked.

  It was a fair question after her reaction this morning. No matter how she sorted it in her head, she thought it more likely that if someone wanted to get her, they would wait until she returned to Georgia. Especially since absolutely no one could know where she was right now.

  “I’m sure. At least for now. I told you, my response came from my training. If someone wanted to get me, they’d have to be foolhardy to try it here. And it would cause them unnecessary trouble when they could get me far easier on the streets at home.”

  After a moment he nodded. “It was a hunter. Had to be. It’s not like you’re alone up here.”

  “That’s right. If someone was hunting me, it’d just make it unnecessarily messy and noisy if you and the boys were around.” She sighed, trying to let go of a creeping uneasiness. “Frankly, Dom, I don’t think these guys are quite that stupid. If they want me dead, it’ll happen at a place and a time that will look like something else entirely. Like with Mary.” It almost killed her to speak those last three words.

  Dom winced, just a bit, then said, “Like a hunting accident?”

  “Not when I’m not alone.”

  After a few seconds of thought, he nodded. “Okay. I’m inclined to agree with you.”

  “Besides, there are plenty of ways they can stop me without killing me. They’ve succeeded for two years now. Like you said, I have no idea where that shot came from, or even if it was aimed anywhere near me.”

  He appeared to accept that. “You’d better eat something before we head back.”

  But she noticed he stood on the porch by himself for a while, scanning the hills around them. Then he seemed to shake free of his thoughts, and when he came back inside he seemed settled in his own mind.

  Dom tied the packhorse’s lead rein to the back of Courtney’s saddle. “You ride in the middle of the herd.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it. Stay in the middle. We’ll keep things moving all around you.”

  That’s when she realized he wasn’t completely certain that had been a random shot. That he was worried about a repetition. And it wasn’t the twins he was worried about.

  Her stomach burned a bit. “You’re overreacting,” she told him. “No one knows where I am.”

  “Maybe not. But let’s not test it, okay?”

  Something in his face, maybe anger, maybe worry, made her shut up and do as told.

  Surprising, to Courtney at least, was the way the horses headed home. Even after a summer in the high pasture where they had been able to roam free, they seemed eager to go down the mountain. Maybe because they had learned it would be warmer below and they would get more attention.

  Of course, what did she know about what a horse would think?

  But there were surprisingly few problems. The dogs kept the herd together, along with Dom and the boys, who rode around the edges of the gathering. Everybody except her seemed familiar with the drill.

  She realized the thing that amazed her most was the way it all went off like clockwork: man, boys, dogs, horses, all cooperating.

  The trail home was a lot broader and smoother than the climb they had made yesterday. When a stream cut in alongside them, Dom let the herd and their mounts pause to drink as they chose, then with a few commands started the whole band moving again with the aid of the dogs.

  Courtney could see the dogs were the most important of his helpers, but in no way did he make the boys feel as if they mattered less, even though it was clear even to her untutored eyes that they were still learning. In fact, their horses may have been in more charge of what they were doing than the boys.

  Hadn’t one of them said just last night that Marti would tell her what to do?

  And Marti seemed to understand without any instruction at all that her role in this was to simply walk along in the midst of all the bustle and movement. She never tried to join in the activity of the boys and Dom.

  Which was good, because a few times, the way the boys’ and Dom’s horses wheeled sharply to corral laggers or wanderers, she was sure she would have been unseated if Marti had tried that.

  The herd picked up pace as the ranch came in view. Marti tried to keep up and Courtney found her sudden trot a bit uncomfortable as she lifted and fell in the saddle. Following Dom’s directions, she pressed into the stirrups and forward. Marti slowed immediately, but tossed her head as if she didn’t like it.

  “Sorry, girl,” Courtney said. “I’m still not good at this.”

  Whether she liked it or not, though, Marti slowed to a smooth walk and Courtney felt secure again. She leaned forward a bit to pat the mare’s neck in approval. Up ahead she could see Ted opening a gate to a large corral across from the pasture where the rest of the herd waited, clearly watching. So these horses weren’t going to the same pasture. Why?

  There was no time to ask right then. Dom let out a couple of whistles, and the dogs, who had mostly been trotting along behind the horses, spread out and began to steer them toward the open gate. The boys took their cue from the dogs, adding their presence to ease the moving herd from a cluster to more of a line. One or two at a time, the horses entered the corral.

  By the time Courtney caught up, all the horses were safely penned. The morning, which had been full of the drum of hoofbeats, the whistles of man and boys, and the barks of dogs, had grown quiet except for the snorting of the penned horses and the occasional sound of them pawing at the ground.

  Dom trotted over to her and pulled his mount up beside her. He looked happy. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine. Actually, I’m amazed at how well that went.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled. “You expected a stampede?”

  “I just never dreamed it could go so easily.”

  “The important thing is to never let it get out of control. And my older mares know the pattern anyway. Forage was getting lean up there. They know it’s time to come down here where there’ll be more food.”

  “Why did you pen them separately?”

  “Need to check for disease and deworm them before I put them in with the rest.”

  He reached out and laid his hand over one of hers. “Ready to head for the barn?”

  She was indeed. Riding was an unaccustomed activity, and while she’d been only slightly sore after yesterday’s ride, she had a feeling it was going to be worse today as the unusual use of muscles compounded.

  Dom reached over and took her lead rein. “Just relax. Marti knows the drill. I’ll keep her from taking off like a bat out of hell.”

  “Would she do that?”

  “She l
ikes the barn a lot after she works for a couple of days.” He winked. “All that TLC plus some oats? Who could resist?”

  “Certainly not me,” Courtney said with a laugh. She tossed her head, loving the way the dry air and sunshine felt. “I could get addicted to this. I had a whole lot of fun.”

  She felt a little stiff when they dismounted in the barn. The guys tethered the horses in grooming stalls. Ted and Dom did all the unsaddling but then Courtney got her first lessons in grooming.

  Marti clearly loved being curried. Her flanks rippled under the brush even as she stood stock-still for the attention. Occasionally she lowered her head to munch some oats or straw, or drink from the large pail.

  “You’re doing great,” Dom said, entering the stall with her. “Marti loves you.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Take a look at her. She couldn’t be more relaxed. I think you just got yourself a horse.”

  Courtney laughed, not taking it seriously. How could she have a horse when she was leaving soon? But the idea touched her anyway. She gave Marti a couple of additional pats and continued brushing while Dom checked her hooves. Then he took another brush and worked on Marti’s tail.

  “Thanks,” Courtney said. “I’m not sure I’m ready to stand behind her.”

  “You’ll notice I’m standing a bit to the side here. Marti may trust us, but she’s also got instincts. No point in stirring them up.”

  “You think a lot about what the horses like and don’t like.”

  “Sure I do. They matter, too.”

  “I haven’t had the opportunity to think much about things like that.”

  “Never had a pet?”

  “Not since I was very little. A cat.”

  “That’s too bad. Animals have a lot to teach us.”

  “Probably a lot of it nicer than people.”

  “And maybe you’ve got a skewed view of people, given your job.”

  She paused, holding stock-still, anger rising in her. “What do you know about my job?”

  “Sorry.” He looked up from combing Marti’s tail. “I didn’t mean that to sound judgmental. Just that I figure you must see a lot of the worst side of people.”

  “I see a lot of the good side, too.”

  “I believe you.”

  Almost muscle by muscle, she released her irritation and relaxed. “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m feeling so defensive.”

  “It’s okay. I was making assumptions I had no right to make.”

  “Maybe your assumptions are correct,” she said after a moment. “I came out here looking for something bad, and instead I found something good. Yesterday and today…well, they’ve been idyllic for me.”

  “We’re not always idyllic. I’ve got this theory, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you work hard with your body, your mind finds more peace.”

  She resumed brushing Marti with slow strokes as she pondered that. “You may be right. Before I went to the CRFO, I had to spend a lot of time working the kinks out every night.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I had to jog long distances or work out at a gym. I needed to unwind. Today I feel like I’m unwound just fine.”

  He chuckled quietly. “We’re lucky here. We don’t have a lot, but we have what we need, and plenty of work to fill a day. I’m even hoping the sale will go well enough next month that I can hire another hand. Ted’s been with us forever, but in better times we used to have someone to help him out. These days, ranches around here are sharing hands.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I put out a call that I need a certain number of guys for a particular kind of work. My neighbors send over their hands. Kind of like a labor pool. Sometimes Ted goes to help out on other ranches.”

  “I take it the heyday of the cowboy is over?”

  “Not totally. But it never paid well to begin with. Used to be you’d hire a guy for less than three hundred a month, give him grub, a place to sleep and a horse to ride. He had to provide his own saddle. People won’t work that way anymore, and I don’t blame them.”

  “You’re killing my fantasies.”

  “Sorry. I know some ranches that bring in vaqueros, cowboys, from Mexico for seasonal work, but I don’t need to do that, and I’d feel like I was taking advantage of them anyway.”

  “But if they want the work…”

  “They do.” He gave the horse’s tail another swipe, then dropped it. “But I’d still feel like I was taking advantage. I’d rather pay the guys who live around here a decent wage for the days they work for me.”

  “And others feel the same way.”

  “Obviously. That’s how we formed the pool. Now maybe if I was running big cattle herds I’d need to do something different. But I’m more about quality than quantity, so the question isn’t one I need to argue with myself about.”

  “So you breed champions?”

  He smiled at her over Marti’s back. “It’s enough to know I don’t have a whole lot of competition in some areas.”

  Evening settled over the ranch early, but the horses had had their first worming and seemed happy enough to meander around the corral and enjoy the treats of some high-quality feed in between nibbles on the grass.

  Dom lingered outside longer than necessary, mainly because he was hiding. The boys were capable of putting out tonight’s meal, an assortment of cold cuts and condiments, and were pretty proud of their ability to take charge of making a meal, simple though it was.

  But Courtney was in there. And as he’d watched her growing appreciation for the ranch and the kind of work he did, his attraction to her troubled him even more.

  This, he reminded himself, was a vacation for her. A change of pace. Not a way of life she’d want to adopt on a permanent basis. Just the thought of her trying to transition from a fast-paced lifestyle to this bucolic one was enough to make him backpedal fast.

  Mary hadn’t been able to do it, and Mary had grown up on a ranch. She’d needed more excitement and variety, more of a social life, a sense of greater importance than raising horses could give her.

  That had been okay then. This was now. He knew all the costs now, that came with bringing someone into your life who couldn’t fully live your life. There had been gulfs and gaps that they’d never been able to bridge simply because one or the other couldn’t fully understand. You could live with that.

  It was the other stuff, like being alone for long periods, that had been harder to endure. And finally there had been wrenching, tearing, sundering grief.

  He’d have to be an idiot to even think about signing on for something like that again.

  So while he watched Courtney’s face shine with pleasure in each new thing, and watched her start to slip into the ranch’s life, he knew it wouldn’t last.

  So he didn’t want to go back in there. He didn’t want to feel that pull, that unreasoning pull, toward her. He didn’t want to have to remind himself that when he’d first seen her he’d thought her too thin, too tense. Because as the tension vanished, and her face started to shine with the relaxed outdoor life, he didn’t notice that thinness anymore. He didn’t notice that her face had sharper lines than he liked.

  What he noticed was a blossoming rose, and that was dangerous.

  He also didn’t want to think that she might be at risk over this obsession of hers. She thought she might get in trouble on her job. She ought to know that wasn’t the only threat she faced. If someone had killed Mary over what had happened in Iraq, how could she possibly think it was less likely that they’d react the same way if they found out what she was doing? She of all people ought to know what humans were capable of.

  And she’d emailed that picture to a friend. Someone had already tried to warn her off, and now they might have the means of finding her through that email. Maybe. He knew damn all about how such things worked, and maybe he’d seen too many movies.

  But while he didn’t think he and the boys were at
risk, she might well be.

  He stiffened a bit as he leaned on the corral fencing. He’d been downplaying the danger, and so had she. It was something neither of them really wanted to look at, but he wasn’t the type to stick his head in a hole in the sand. And he couldn’t imagine why she was doing so. It wasn’t as if people didn’t get murdered all the time.

  What if that shot this morning hadn’t just been some hunter? He turned it around in his mind, remembering the sick feeling he’d had when he burst out of the cabin and saw Courtney on the ground. She’d reacted the right way, but his heart had damn near stopped when he saw her laid out flat.

  No, it had to have been a hunter. Surely someone who wanted to kill her wouldn’t have given up after a single shot? Of course, a second shot would have made it clear it wasn’t just some deer hunter, and these mountains would have been swarming with law enforcement pretty quickly. He knew how fast Gage could gather a posse from around here. And then of course there was the problem of witnesses. She was right about that. There were better ways to make something look like an accident than shooting at a woman in the company of others who hadn’t been a hundred yards from a horse pen.

  Hell.

  Turning sharply, he marched back into the house. He found the table deserted, the food left out for him. He could hear the boys upstairs and it sounded like they were getting their stuff together for school in the morning. Cripes, he probably needed to do a load of laundry.

  He called up the stairs. “Kyle? Todd?”

  Two heads appeared, looking down from the landing. “Yeah?”

  “Do you have clean clothes for tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” Kyle answered.

  “Me, too,” Todd agreed.

  “Nice clothes? Not something that should be in a rag bin?”

  “Clean shirts and jeans.”

  “Underwear?”

  “Check,” answered Kyle. He’d heard that on some program or other, and it popped up from time to time.

  “Do I need to do laundry tomorrow?”

  “Probably,” Todd said. “I think this is my last pair of jeans.”

  “Okay. Make sure everything comes down the laundry chute tonight. And I mean everything.”