The Final Mission Read online

  “Depends. I’m not the only one who thinks this way about managing a horse. On the other hand, there are those who believe in quirts, crops, spurs, yanking the reins and just generally turning it into sheer misery for the animal.”

  “But you want them to trust you.”

  “If they don’t trust me, how can I trust them? Besides, most of what I want them to do is pretty natural for them. It’s just a matter of encouraging them to do it at the right time.”

  She nodded, looking thoughtful, and he let her be as they crossed the yard toward the barn. He’d have liked to know what she was thinking about, but didn’t feel he knew her well enough to ask.

  Ted met them just as they reached the barn. “You let me take care of Jazz, boss. It’s lunchtime and the lady looks like she might need a bite.”

  Courtney surprised them both by laughing. “You sound like my doctor.”

  Dom glanced at Ted, wondering what was going on here. Ted knew that Dom liked to take care of horses who were being a bit difficult, another way of establishing trust. Once he’d gotten a horse that all-important point, it was okay to let someone else do the currying from time to time…hell, it was necessary with so many head. But with a horse like Jazz, Dom seldom turned over the responsibility until the horse had fully settled down.

  Still, he said nothing, merely handed the lead rein to Ted and turned toward the house. He had an idea his foreman was up to something, but damned if he could read the other man’s mind.

  “So,” he said to Courtney, “your doc is telling you to eat?”

  “He’s not very happy with me right now. I’ve always been a bit underweight, but now they’re riding my case about it.”

  “Too much worry?”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t quite meet his eyes, but he filled in the blanks anyway: guilt was eating her alive. He smothered a sigh, knowing there was no way possible to convince her she wasn’t responsible for Mary’s death. The shooter, whoever he was, took full responsibility for that.

  “You know,” he said as they reached the house, “Mary was doing what she felt was right.”

  “I know she was.” Her voice was tight, tense.

  He held open the door for her and said nothing more as they dumped their boots and hung their jackets on pegs. Inside, he hunted in the refrigerator and came up with some leftovers from the mac and cheese he’d made the boys two nights ago. “This okay?” he asked, showing her.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t sound so dubious. It’s not from the box. I make my own from scratch.”

  Her cheeks pinkened faintly. “Really? I hate the box stuff.”

  “So do I. Learning to make my own was a matter of self-defense because the twins love it.”

  He popped the bowl in the microwave, then started a fresh pot of coffee. In a relatively short time they sat across from one another at the table, steaming bowls of mac and cheese and fresh cups of coffee in front of them.

  “This is delicious,” she remarked after she tasted the first bite.

  “I use good cheddar to start with. And the sauce is easy to make.”

  “Well worth any effort. I didn’t know this could taste so good.”

  “I take it you don’t cook much.”

  She shook her head. “I just can’t get up the interest. Not just for myself. My days are long, and it’s a lot easier to pop into some place for a little sushi, or a salad.”

  “I love a good salad,” he remarked, “but if that’s mostly what you’re eating… Are you a health-food nut?”

  “I guess I am in some ways. I like my vegetables fresh, I don’t usually eat things like bacon, I prefer fish over meat…”

  He shook his head. “All you’ll get here is down-home cooking.”

  “Well, you work hard. Until lately, I always spent too much time in a chair.”

  “Maybe so.”

  He ate another few mouthfuls, then put his fork down and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Courtney.”

  “Yes?” She looked up.

  “I’ve been round and round about this, and maybe you need to hear some of it so you can feel easier in your heart.”

  “Me?” Her eyes widened.

  “Yes, you.” He hesitated, knowing he was about to rewalk painful territory, but feeling pushed somehow to share these things with her. Mary’s death had left a lot of holes in his life, in the boys’ lives, in the lives of her friends. And this was one of her friends.

  “I married Mary knowing she was in the Guard. She was proud of what she did and I would never have asked her to quit. It was a weekend a month and it seemed to revitalize her in some way. Especially after we married and she worked less at the hospital. She needed it. Then the wars started. I could see the handwriting on the wall. I think she could, too. She’d signed on for another six-year commitment. No way out, but I know, I absolutely know, that even if she could have resigned, she would have refused to even consider it. Those troops were her troops. And when they got called to active duty, nothing on earth would have stopped her from going with them.”

  Courtney nodded, compressing her lips as if she were holding back powerful feelings.

  “She knew it would be a hardship for me and the boys. But she couldn’t resist her calling, Courtney. Her sense of duty. She saw this as her mission. And if I had even tried to argue against her leaving the boys, I know I’d have heard about all the other families making similar sacrifices. And she would have been right.” He sighed. “Believe me, I found this a whole lot harder to accept after she died, and I sometimes still get a bit angry. But in the end I kept coming back to the same place.”

  Courtney nodded stiffly.

  “She felt her medical skills were needed more there than here. I’m sure they were. And I’m as sure as I’m sitting here right now that if I had found a way to prevent her from going, if I had even tried, I would have broken our relationship. I might have even broken something in her.”

  He waited, noting that Courtney’s eyes looked wet, but she said nothing. He plunged on, ignoring the tightness in his own chest.

  “So when you feel guilty for asking her to put her ear to the ground with those Iraqi women, I know exactly how she responded. And if you’d warned her a million times that she might get hurt, she would have done it anyway. Neither of you could possibly know what was going to happen. No way did you ask her to do this thinking she’d die. No way. But even if she had suspected she might, she still would have done it. Because that was Mary.”

  A tear hovered on Courtney’s eyelashes, but didn’t fall. Dom felt his own eyes burn, but the pain was no longer what it had been two years ago. It had transmuted somehow: still strong, still hard, but it was now something quieter in a way he couldn’t quite explain. As if he and grief had settled their fight and become friends of a sort.

  “You’re right,” Courtney said finally. “Even if she had known the eventual outcome, she would have done it.”

  “Of course she would have. That woman was born to take care of people. To help in any way she could, to fight for those who needed a champion. Sometimes it hurts to admit, but some of the very things I loved most about her were the things that took her away from us.”

  “You’ve made peace,” she remarked, her voice a little thick.

  “Yes, I suppose I have, mostly.” He hesitated. “Courtney, you need to make peace, too. You can’t be sure she was murdered, no matter how it looks. What will you do if you find out there isn’t a bad guy?”

  “I don’t have enough to put together a case against anyone in particular yet, but I got an email yesterday that removed any doubt that someone on our side was involved.”

  He stiffened. Anger started a slow creep along his nerve endings. “What did it say?”

  “It said they were watching me, that they knew what I was up to.”

  He swore and jumped to his feet. “And you brought their attention here?”

  She jumped up, too. “They don’t know where I am. There’s no way the
y could know.”

  “That’s not what I hear about the government.”

  “You’re talking to the government. There’s no way they could follow me. It would cost too damn much and nobody would authorize it. God, Dom, I even removed the battery from my cell phone when I left Georgia. No one followed me. Give me some credit. I know all the ways people can cover their tracks, and all the ways they can be found. I’m smart enough not to leave a trail. If they want to get to me in some way, they’ll do it when I go back.”

  “Maybe.” He sighed, letting go of his anger. “Maybe,” he said again. “Could you find out who sent the email?”

  “No. They used an anonymous server in Finland. No way I can crack it, least of all from here. But what they did do was confirm my suspicions. Somebody’s up to no good, and they can’t be allowed to get away with it.”

  Looking at her, he could see her near-desperation to settle this. He recognized it because for a long time he’d lived with the same feeling. How do you pick up and carry on when the one you loved was killed? How did you deal with surviving?

  It struck him then that survivor guilt was probably part of what was driving her. If she admitted to a sneaking, snaky feeling that she should have been killed in Mary’s place, it wouldn’t have surprised him.

  That thought crumbled some of his resistance to what she was doing. Not all of it, but some of it. He at least had found some kind of resolution within himself. This woman was living with questions that she had to answer somehow.

  “Courtney,” he said quietly.

  She lifted her head again and he saw the sparkle of tears on her lashes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll pack and go. I’m sure they don’t know where I am, but I can’t take the risk. It was wrong of me to come.”

  “Seems like you didn’t really have a choice.” His voice was almost gruff, and those tears of hers, even not fully shed, were tearing at him. He felt such sympathy for her and he knew only one response.

  He reached out and hugged her. After the barest instant of hesitation, she let herself lean into his embrace, let him stroke her back almost awkwardly.

  “Don’t feel guilty,” he murmured. “Do you really think any of us has control over these things, over who lives and who dies? If you’re right, these guys got Mary. Given a chance, they’d have probably gotten you, too. If there’s one thing I’ve learned to live with, it’s that it’s all luck of the draw.”

  He felt her head tip, so he pulled back just a hair so they could look at each other’s faces.

  “Luck of the draw?” she repeated. “Some luck.”

  “Surely you’ve seen enough by now to know that’s all it is. I know it’s hard to live with. We all like to control things as much as we can. But when you come down to it, we really don’t control anything at all.”

  “Maybe.” She blinked and one tear ran down her face.

  He lifted a finger to wipe it away. Her blue eyes darkened at the touch and he felt his own body leap in response. Heat exploded in him as if someone had ignited gunpowder.

  God, he wanted her. And he didn’t want to want her.

  She must have read something in his face, because all of a sudden she pulled back, away, out of his arms.

  Feeling a burst of self-disgust, he dropped back into his chair. What was happening to him? Couldn’t he restrain his randy impulses? Had it been so long that he’d forgotten how?

  “Maybe,” she said, “I should just go upstairs.”

  He knew what she meant, and more than anything he didn’t want her to feel she needed to run from him. It had just been a moment, after all.

  “If you like,” he said, making his tone indifferent. “Or we can talk some more and you can eat more than a sparrow.”

  She hesitated, then slowly sank back on the chair. Her tears were gone, and she regarded him as if he had just grown two heads. And maybe he had.

  He cleared his throat. “What made you decide to join NCIS?”

  “What made you decide to become a rancher?” she countered.

  At least he could manage a smile. “I never wanted to be anything else. Dad sent me away to college so I could experience other stuff, but I just wanted to get back here. Those four years seemed like an eternity. Now you.”

  “I grew up wanting to get into law enforcement. My dad was a cop. He died in the line of duty, and they never found his killer.”

  “What happened?”

  “An all-too-common story. Nighttime traffic stop on a deserted road. Back then they didn’t have dashboard cameras, and nobody ever saw who he pulled over. He radioed in a license plate number, but it turned out to belong to a car stolen in another state, a car they never located. They found Dad over an hour later, after he failed to make radio contact again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. I wanted to be a cop before that, but after that I wanted to be something more. An investigator.”

  He nodded, understanding. “And that’s why you’re so fired up to get justice for Mary.”

  “Maybe.” She looked down at her plate, picked up her fork and pushed cheesy macaroni around in a random pattern. “Yes, probably so. I can’t even find words to tell you how much justice means to me.”

  “You want to see them in prison?”

  “It’s not that. I want answers. It’s so hard for a family not to know, not to see someone at least accused. To not know that someone cares enough to try to get the perp. I can live with it when I build a case but the accused gets acquitted. It happens, it’s awful, but it happens. And when it happens, it probably means I was wrong, or I didn’t do enough. It burns in my gut, but at least I know we tried. What I can’t stand is not trying. Throwing up your hands and saying, ‘We’ll never know.’ I can’t stomach that.”

  Dom turned that around in his head, thinking it over. “So if you finish here, and find nothing, will you be able to let it rest?”

  “Once I’ve turned over every single stone and shovelful of manure, yes. But only then. For now I don’t know enough. But I sure as hell know we haven’t done anywhere near enough to get this guy or these guys. That’s intolerable.”

  He nodded. “I can respect that.”

  Her gaze leaped to his. “So you don’t hate me for this?”

  “The thought never crossed my mind.”

  “But you were angry.”

  “Of course I was angry. I’d put it all to bed mostly, then all of a sudden somebody was standing there telling me we were going to rake it all up again. That maybe I didn’t even know the truth about what happened. Of course I got mad. I didn’t want to walk through that valley again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head. “The thing is, it’s doing me some good.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m realizing that while I get a little mad about it, about stirring it up again, I’m not falling into the pit this time. I’m actually mostly on an even keel. That would make Mary happy, I think.”

  “I’m sure it would. She was generous to her soul.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded, and was surprised to feel himself smiling at the memory. “She made me promise that if anything happened to her, I’d get on with life. And I’ve been feeling a bit guilty lately because I’ve basically been living frozen in time. Keeping too busy to think, looking after the boys and the ranch, but little else. I’m sure if she’d been around, she’d have given me hell about it.”

  “I can almost hear her doing that.”

  “So maybe,” he said quietly, “we’ll both find a little rest with this over the next few days.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed. “I know that’s what I came here for.”

  Chapter 5

  Dom found Courtney easy to teach. She seemed to have an intuitive understanding of what he was trying to accomplish with his horses, and she followed directions perfectly. He kept a lead rein on the horse as they practiced in the arena, but she didn’t really need it.

  She got the part about dropping
the bit to one side, rather than pulling on the reins after just three tries. She learned how to lean in the saddle to let the horse know what she wanted in surprisingly short order.

  “You’re one of the best trainees I’ve ever had,” he told her as she reached a nice trot, relaxed in the saddle and smiled.

  “Well,” she said on a laugh, “I know how I’d want to be treated.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell,” he agreed. “A light hand, a gentle touch. That’s all they need.”

  He asked her to stop, and was pleased with the way she shifted her weight and pushed into the stirrups. The horse, Marti, who’d liked her so much at their first meeting, obeyed immediately. Of course, he’d chosen Marti for this exercise because she was gentle and obliging by nature. She had been the first mount for his boys as well, and had tolerated their youthful mistakes almost as if they were her own colts.

  “I’m going to take the lead off now,” he said. “You’ll be on your own.”

  “Really?” She looked both excited and a little frightened, but as soon as he unsnapped the lead she leaned forward in the saddle, patted Marti’s neck, and said, “Let’s see what we can do, you lovely lady.”

  Marti tossed her head and snorted in a way that for her always meant she was pleased. Well, of course she was pleased. Her rider was proving adept, and Marti had never really liked the lead. She tolerated it, almost as if she understood its necessity at times, but it was obvious from her posture and her eyes that she vastly preferred to be guided by her rider.

  That spark was there now, a horse’s way of smiling, as Marti’s step took on a bit of a prance, hooves lifting just a little higher.

  “Now just pay attention to Marti,” he advised her. “She’ll take care of you if you mess up. She’s very smart.”

  “Oh, I can tell she’s smart already.”

  He now saw the spark in Courtney, too, a lightening in her face that made her lovely. He felt a pang for love lost, and a pang that he was apparently emerging from the frigid wasteland of grief enough to notice another woman. It would be easy to feel guilty about that.

  But as his pastor had said to him once, “Mary wouldn’t want you to commit suttee.”