The Final Mission Page 5

  She’d probably hate him if she ever figured out he was thinking of her that way. But there it was.

  “Camping?” she repeated uncertainly. “But, um…”

  “You’re not going to finish going through Mary’s stuff tomorrow. We both know it. And I assume, since you’re here, that you’re on some kind of vacation. Because they sure wouldn’t have let you come otherwise from what you said.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So take some vacation. The weather is supposed to warm up, I need to go into the upper pasture to gather about twenty head that are still there. The boys have a great time. We ride up on Saturday morning, gather the herd and bring them back down on Sunday.”

  “I…don’t know.”

  “Think about it. I’m getting some coffee. You want fresh?”

  “Please.”

  Just a gentle movement of the bit, he reminded himself. Just a hint to let the horse know something was needed. No woman who had gotten into her car and driven out here in defiance of her orders could be weak. No, she had to be a strong woman. But right now she was looking weak, and that was because she was floundering as she tried to find a way to deal with a burr under her saddle.

  That would change, he thought. If nothing else, her visit here would convince her it was a dead end. And maybe some mountain sunshine and fresh air would clear her emotions a bit.

  Because, as he’d learned these past two years, sometimes you just had to live with the way things were, like them or not.

  Chapter 4

  Friday morning dawned misty as the warm front moved in, bringing the possibility of light rain.

  Courtney rolled onto her side and stared out the window, struck by the lack of curtains. But why would anyone need curtains here? Beyond that window lay nothing but mountains and trees. The bunkhouse, barns and main pastures were on the other side of the house and behind it. In her world, though, no window was ever left uncovered because it was too easy for people to look in from nearby buildings, or even from the ground.

  A different world indeed.

  From below she could hear the sounds of Dom and the boys at breakfast, and she could even smell some of the aromas that had wafted under her closed door, but not even coffee could make her move.

  Emotionally, she felt trampled. Last night she had determined that she would finish up today somehow and leave. This morning she doubted she would be able to do much of anything. It was as if a load of grief she had been carrying around, carefully compartmentalized for two years, had finally hammered her. Reading through Mary’s letters to her sons had left her feeling positively battered.

  Worse, it seemed to have awakened memories of things she had seen over there. Nightmares of war, of mutilated bodies, had plagued her all night. She’d awakened at least three times with the sounds of screams in her ears. But her exposure had been relatively small. Someone like Mary, someone who saw it almost every day, would surely have worse nightmares, worse memories. Worse everything.

  I’m lucky, she told herself firmly. Lucky her job had taken her into hell so rarely. Other people had been there for years.

  But the thought of opening those doors of memory any wider almost sickened her.

  So what was she going to do? Give up her pursuit of justice? Let the desert ghosts lie in their hiding places? Because for her Mary wasn’t the only ghost. So were the women of that village who had never received justice. So was the person who had murdered Mary to protect himself and his buddies. Some of those ghosts she felt unable to leave alone.

  Except that today it all seemed like too much. Way too much. Her plan of poring over letters, photos and tapes had been anticipated from a professional angle. It was the kind of thing she did all the time in her job.

  But this was no job. This was personal. And it hurt.

  Apparently not even two years had buried the anguish completely, and she could only imagine what it was like for Dom, surrounded by all his memories of his wife, taking care of two boys who looked quite a bit like her.

  Of course, maybe that had helped him deal faster than her own burying of it had. Maybe he was further down the road than she.

  Sighing, she at last rose, tended to her needs and went downstairs. Dom wasn’t there and she imagined he had taken the boys to the bus. Through one of the windows she could see Ted walking out into the pastures. He appeared to be carrying some tack with him.

  Breakfast still waited on the table, and the coffee was still hot and fresh. Her place had been set, as if her arrival was anticipated. Somehow that made her feel a little more welcome.

  She poured some coffee and then took some pancakes and link sausages from a platter and warmed them in the microwave. Blueberry syrup topped her menu. Not that she felt much like eating. Not after the nightmares, not after that damn email yesterday that was probably as toothless as an old hag, designed to frighten her, but unable to do anything else.

  She forced herself to take a bite of pancake. No, that email was meaningless. It had probably arrived simply because she had gone out of reach of oversight. And someone was worried.

  Wouldn’t they be horrified to realize that all they had done was confirm her suspicions that something was seriously wrong with the way the investigation had been quashed? For a moment, she almost smiled, and the taste of the pancakes became wonderful.

  Yeah. They’d confirmed her suspicions. Now she would get to the bottom of this or die trying.

  She tried to imagine Mary sitting at this table. All her memories of Mary involved the base, the hospital and a couple places where it was safe for an American to stop for coffee. Even in a pacified zone that wasn’t always a sure thing.

  She ran her fingertips over the aging oilcloth, and figured from the pattern that it must have been Mary’s choice. She had loved cheerful things.

  And she probably wouldn’t be very happy to see Courtney sitting here feeling as if lead weighted her down. That just wasn’t Mary. She probably wouldn’t be happy, either, that Courtney had gotten Dom all stirred up again.

  Crap! She put her head in her hands as powerful, painful feelings grabbed her. Maybe she should have just let this lie and lived with her sense of outraged justice.

  But as soon as she had the thought, she knew she couldn’t rest until she was absolutely certain that she had done everything possible. Everything.

  She heard Dom come into the mud room, and didn’t even bother to look up. She didn’t want to know, in a moment of reaction he couldn’t conceal fast enough, how little he wanted her here.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she admitted frankly. “But it doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t, compared to his problems.

  “Of course it matters.”

  She listened to him pour coffee for himself, then heard a chair scrape as he sat at the table. “What’s going on?”

  She shook her head, still resting in her hands. “It’s hard reading those emails and letters.”

  “I know.”

  Yeah, she was sure he did. And it seemed petty of her to even mention it. “How are you managing?”

  He shrugged a shoulder, seeming to indicate he wasn’t going to talk about it. But then he said, “With time I feel it less often. I still feel it, it still hurts like hell, but it happens less often. I guess you can get used to anything, given time.”

  “I guess so.” She gave herself an inward shake and looked up at last, finding his strong face looking calm, even resigned. And then she caught a flicker of something else in his gaze, something hot. It was gone almost instantly, but she knew that look, had seen it often enough to know what it meant: he found her sexually attractive.

  But as quickly as the heat showed, it was followed by a flash of puzzlement, as if he didn’t understand what he’d just felt.

  Guilt. It was thick on the air, she realized. They both felt guilty, though perhaps for different reasons. She felt it because it was partly her fault Mary had died. He probably felt that an instant of attraction somehow betray
ed her. And frankly, Courtney wondered the same thing, because as she had caught that flicker of sexual yearning in his gaze, she had felt herself respond all the way to her center.

  Desire, evidently, had its own calendar and its own causes, and simple thoughts of propriety, ugly things like guilt, couldn’t entirely squash it.

  Life went on whether you wanted it to or not. That was the hardest part. Just when you felt everything should freeze in time and space, that the whole world should halt because you had lost someone you loved, life intruded, reminding you that you had to go on.

  “Have you decided whether you’ll go camping with us tomorrow?” he asked.

  “I…” The hesitation, so strong earlier, the decision she thought she had made…all of a sudden they were gone. “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted. “Good. You’ll enjoy it. There’s a cabin up there, not much, but I’ve kept it up because the boys love to go up there in the summers when we look after the horses. You won’t exactly be roughing it.”

  “It would be fun either way. I think—” she hesitated, then blurted it “—I think I need some fun.”

  “I think you do, too. I think we all do.” His smile widened slightly. “How devoted are you to spending another day in my office?”

  She thought about all those photos she still needed to review, all the tapes and CDs. “There’s a lot I need to look at still.”

  “Well, if it gets to be too much, come over to the arena. Ted and I are going to be working with some cutting horses today.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  “Just don’t forget your boots. We try to keep things clean outside the pastures, but we don’t always get there fast enough.”

  That elicited a little chuckle from her, a tension breaker. His smile grew more relaxed.

  “It’s hard for you right now,” he said.

  “For me?”

  “Yes, for you. I’ve been living with the memories on a daily basis for two years. You’ve probably gone long periods where you didn’t even have time to think about it. This has all just freshened it for you.”

  “But not for you?”

  “A bit.” He sighed. “A bit. I was angry at first, but you know that.”

  “But not now?”

  “Folks have to do what they need to do. You need to do this. Won’t change much of anything for me.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true and she knew it. He might be telling himself that, but how could it not change things for him to know his wife might have been a deliberate target rather than just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  She had certainly seen his anger when she first arrived, but since then she had been impressed by his steady composure, as if he had discovered a rock on which to stand, and while he might tip a bit from time to time, he recovered his balance.

  She needed to do the same thing. It was a skill she had learned on other distressing cases, a way of reminding herself that the only water that wasn’t over the dam was her investigation. That no matter how upsetting the crime, all she could do was seek justice.

  Those cases, though, hadn’t been personal. And this one might really be tipping her over the edge. She had come all this way, in defiance of orders, without sufficient thought of what she might inflict on this family. Was that a stable way to act? Was it normal to be unable to let go of her thirst for justice after two years?

  Heaven knew she’d had to let go of it before, when people she had been certain were guilty had been acquitted. Not often, but it had happened. She’d learned to live with that. Was this so very different?

  But she knew in her heart that it was. This was different because the investigation had been stymied, because a charge had never been laid, and a trial had never been held. All those things that she considered essential to the functioning of proper justice had been short-circuited.

  And maybe that was what bothered her as much as anything. The process had been interrupted, and that wasn’t right. It just plain wasn’t right.

  Dom was glad to get out to the arena. The atmosphere in the kitchen had grown thick, at least for him. It had been a long time since he’d felt hunger for a woman, but he felt it now. He looked at Courtney and saw a wounded mare, one who maybe didn’t even know how wounded she was. He should focus on that.

  Instead, when he was around her, he found his thoughts trying to ride down different trails. Trails that involved exploring those delicate curves of hers, trying to find out if she was softer than she looked, wanting to bring a hazy happiness to her eyes to replace the haunted look. And every time his mind and body wandered that way, his response was so strong it was like the air became too thick to breathe.

  He hadn’t felt that since he’d been with Mary, and he didn’t want to feel it again. Not now. Not with a woman who was hell-bent on finding out things he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. A woman who’d be leaving in a few days.

  Ted had brought in a couple of the horses they were training for barrel racing. A buyer had been out a few months ago, eyed these two geldings and announced he’d buy them at the sale if they were ready to go and showed well enough.

  The showing “well enough” had been the challenge. Dom trained a lot of horses, and trained them well, but these two promised a higher than ordinary price if they excelled. The buyer wanted to win competitions. It was Dom’s job to ensure that he turned over two horses that could.

  After that everything would depend on the buyer and his riders. But from here they were going to leave as ready winners. Maybe he’d even get to tutor the riders a bit, which would mean more money.

  But even more important to him than the money in teaching the riders would be the secure knowledge that the riders would treat the horses right. Know how to handle them without making them difficult or stubborn.

  Horses were happy to cooperate most of the time. As long as you didn’t override their instincts, or inadvertently teach them they couldn’t do anything right. And each horse had its own quirks to be handled. You could either make it into a fight, which seldom yielded the desired results, or you could make it a cooperative effort. He preferred cooperation.

  These two were beautifully cooperative. He rode them both, alternately, among the barrels, at first slowly, and finally at a full gallop. They had learned to trust him, to cut around those barrels with the amazing agility of quarter horses, and there was only one minor bump on a barrel.

  They were damn near ready for the buyer.

  Following them, he worked with two more, younger horses, getting them used to riding the wall of the arena, cutting figure eights in smaller and smaller spaces, backing up when he leaned in the saddle.

  One of the three-year-olds still didn’t like the whole backing up thing, and occasionally balked. Every time he did, Dom led him away, then brought him back through the same ride, the same backup, making it clear that they would do it until the horse backed up.

  And as always, eventually the youngster cooperated. With time, the repetitions needed had become fewer. It wouldn’t be long before the horse stopped balking at all. He ended the workout on a success and with a lot of pats and praise.

  As always, the smell of horses, sawdust and leather lifted his spirits. The sounds of their snorts, occasional whinnies and the muffled clomp of their hooves on the sawdust…all those things put him in a happy place. All his life the only thing that had ever made him happier had been Mary and the boys.

  He was walking his last horse toward the door of the arena when he suddenly caught sight of Courtney sitting quietly in the back of the bleachers. He paused, surprised, wondering how long she had been there.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. That was interesting to watch.”

  “Interesting to do, too. I’m about to take Jazz here to groom him and cool him a bit before I send him back to pasture. Want to come?”

  “Sure.” She looked almost relieved to be invited to tag along. Apparently she wasn’t feeling too good by herself to
day.

  He could understand. He’d gotten so he avoided looking through Mary’s things. For a while, he’d done it almost obsessively, and then he had realized it only made him ache worse and had put everything away for the boys.

  He waited while she clambered down from the bleachers and came up beside him. Jazz gave her a once-over then bobbed his head and snorted impatiently. He knew that currying awaited him and he was in no mood to stand still.

  “He’s a beautiful horse,” Courtney remarked.

  “He’s got a good streak of stubborn in him, too.”

  She smiled. “He definitely didn’t seem to like backing up.”

  “He has to do that based on trust because he can’t see. We’re working on it.”

  “I noticed you didn’t seem to do much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were almost motionless in the saddle.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s my training method. How I sit, what I do with my knees, whether I make his bit drop a little on one side or another. Controlling a horse isn’t about force.”

  “I see that now.”

  He glanced at her, unhappy to feel once again that hot spur of desire. Damn, he didn’t need this, she wasn’t his type and maybe he’d just been living like a monk for too long. “Consider the size of a horse. Consider your size. Then ask who is going to win any argument.”

  That got a genuine laugh from her, a pretty sound that he liked. There’d been a shortage of laughter around here for too long. Oh, the boys laughed a lot, and he laughed with them, sometimes he even felt the laughter when he made the appropriate sounds. Maybe it was high time he got around to laughing more. For real.

  For the sake of the boys, if nothing else.

  “Maybe,” he suggested, feeling oddly awkward and not knowing why, “I should give you a few riding lessons this afternoon. For tomorrow.”

  “I’d like that,” she said easily enough. “I’ve ridden a few times, but not recently, and I’m sure I don’t know your methods.”