At Close Range (5 page)

F
rom her suite in the main hacienda, Corrie could see the light on in the teacher's bunkhouse and knew Mack Dorsey was awake as well. He'd looked tired, even exhausted when he'd hurried from the veranda, but somehow she wasn't surprised to see his silhouette pacing behind the curtains in the wee hours of the morning.

She was sorry he was out there alone. After a terrible incident the year before when a truly evil man kidnapped Dulce and José in an attempt to force Jeannie to turn the ranch over to him, Jeannie and Chance had decided the ranch hands' sleeping quarters should be much closer to the main hacienda and a new wing had been added. The former staff bunkhouse had been converted to a large, communal-style teachers' living quarters. But Mack was the only one there now.

Part of her wanted to go offer him some comfort,
see if he was in pain, or simply see if he needed some little item he might have forgotten. The other part, the rational side, told her that whatever made him restless was none of her business and she'd be well advised to let him alone.

She turned back to her notebook.
He walks alone, late at night. Ghosts trail behind him, calling his name.

She groaned—the same could be said of her. Too many ghosts, too many harsh words, too many people claiming her past.

She tossed her pen aside before turning off her own light, as if shutting him out—both physically and mentally.

The narrow aperture of her curtains let Mack Dorsey's lit window shine like a full moon with tidal-wave intent. His shadowy form became a sharp focal point. She held her breath, watching him walk back and forth across the curtained lens.

Feeling like a voyeur, Corrie yanked her curtains closed and turned over on her bed so she wouldn't be able to even imagine she could see his pacing figure. After a few minutes, she swore and sat up in bed. She dragged open the curtains, her eyes automatically seeking the false moon of Mack's window. Though his silhouette was no longer visible, the light remained on.

Corrie checked the clock on the nightstand. Half past three in the morning.

She sat for several minutes, waiting for the light across the drive to turn off, and when it didn't, she sighed and swung her legs out of bed. She dragged on the pair of sweatpants she'd worn earlier that day and
shoved her bare feet into a pair of boots Dulce had given her, not caring that they were two sizes too big.

She snatched up a bottle of aspirin from her bathroom cabinet, a book from the bulging bookcase on the wall and, not questioning why, a pen and empty notebook from atop her desk. She shoved all these items into the pockets of the elegant duster Leeza gave her two months ago and opened the exterior door to the veranda.

She shuffled across the broad expanse of driveway to the guest quarters and hunched in her duster as if snow lay on the ground, shivering in the cold desert air.

She marched up the stairs of the teachers' quarters, but, as she raised her fist to the front door, her need to help Mack Dorsey dissolved and so did her resolve. She back stepped, feeling like a fool, hoping he hadn't heard her determined scuffles across his narrow porch.

He was a grown man, for heaven's sake; not one of the wounded children that needed tending as if he were a little bird with a broken wing. His cold eyes could lance evil at eighty yards; he wouldn't need a painkiller for the bruises inflicted by some drunken uncle or father. He wouldn't need a book—and a soft voice—to lull him to sleep, or a pen to write his experiences down. He would know how to survive until morning.

One of the porch steps creaked beneath her too-large boots as she turned to go. As if the stray sounds were an alarm system, the bunkhouse door flew open and made an enormous clang as the heavy metal hinges collided with the brackets against the side of
the house. Light spilled from the teachers' quarters, incandescence escaping into the night.

Mack Dorsey stood silhouetted in the light, naked to the waist, barefoot, and standing as if he anticipated a grizzly to rush him. His knees were bent, his bare feet spread apart, as if he anticipated a need to move quickly. He held his hands out from his sides as though she might attack him.

“It's me,” she said. And when his eyes strafed the brightly lit driveway at the main house and jerked back to where she stood, she realized how foolish she sounded. “Corrie. Corrie Stratton.”

He muttered a curse before slowly straightening.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to—I was just…”

“It's okay,” he growled. The light behind him blocked her from reading his face.

“New place,” he said gruffly

That he was in a new place didn't account for the hours of pacing. “I saw your light on. I thought perhaps you needed something?”

He turned his head toward the main house, eyes zeroing in on the only light visible, then, back to her. “You were up at this hour?”

“Drink of water,” she lied.

“Me, too,” he lied right back at her.

“Oh. Of course. So you don't need anything?” At best her question sounded lame, at worst it sounded like a come-on. She blushed.

Luckily, he didn't seem to read meaning into her words. “You and your partners have thought of everything. Except for clothes, I wouldn't have had to bring a thing.”

And he wasn't wearing many of those, she thought. “Jeannie gets all the credit,” she said, and hoped he didn't hear the breathlessness in her voice.

“She deserves it,” he said.

She shivered against the cold. Despite his lack of clothing, he seemed impervious to the deep chill and she wondered if his many wounds, the scars she could only faintly discern in the dimness, blocked the sensation of cold.

“Well…thanks for thinking of me,” he said. His hand ran the length of his torso, a wholly unconscious gesture, but one that robbed her mouth of moisture.

“What?” she asked.

“Thanks for thinking of me.” There was a bitter note in his voice.

She'd thought of little else since she opened the front doors to find him standing there for an interview. But at his words, she felt like a three-year-old being dismissed by a social worker.

“Okay. Sure. As long as everything's okay,” she said, her voice faltering. “I'll—I'll just go back now.” She turned, embarrassed she'd come out there, disturbed at the fact that she had, and that she'd done so armed with a handful of items more suited to welcoming an adolescent than an adult who had obviously survived more than his share of hardship. And then to stare at him like a love-starved teenager. She might be love-starved, but she wasn't a kid anymore.

However much she might be acting like one.

I'm Corrie Stratton, and if I survived my childhood, I can survive this.

 

Mack felt like a heel. All she'd done was come to check on him. She'd seen his light on at three-thirty
in the morning his first night on the ranch, and had come out into the cold out of simple kindness and concern for him. And he'd greeted her as if she were a terrorist, was curt to the point of rudeness, then capped it off by lying to her and making her feel like she'd intruded.

“Wait. Please…?”

She stopped but didn't turn around. “Yes?” Given her voice, even that single questioning syllable sounded like a chord straight from paradise.

“Do you have any aspirin?”

She slowly revolved back to face him and dug into her pocket. She withdrew a paperback, a notebook, a pen and, finally, a bottle of aspirin. She handed him the plastic bottle.

“Thanks,” he said, working at the childproof cap. He had to fight himself not to ask about the other items she started to shove back into seemingly rapacious pockets. But he knew instinctively that she'd brought them for him for some reason.

“Here, let me,” she said, bridging the gap between them as she stuffed the last of her things back into her pocket. She held out her hand for the bottle and he gave it up without a struggle, careful not to touch her. He was too aware of her standing so close to him in the night, too aware of his own near nudity, his terrible scars she didn't so much as look at, and the way the merest hint of a breeze on the cold night air seemed to tease his newly formed skin.

She flipped the aspirin bottle open and held it out at an angle, apparently prepared to shake them into his hand. Her hands trembled so much that only three as
pirin fell onto his hand and a few more disappeared onto the ground. He closed his palm around her shaking fingers.

“Did I scare you when I threw the door open?”

“Yes…and no,” she said, with simple honesty and not a single hint of accusation.

He couldn't resist lifting his free hand to cover the tiny one he had trapped. “I'm sorry,” he said.

She gave a half grimace. “Nothing to be sorry about,” she said. “It's no big deal.”

He felt her hand fluttering in his, a small wild bird. He lifted his fingers and hers took wing. As she'd done when he'd arrived at the ranch, she curled her hand in to her chest.

“Thanks,” he said, though he wasn't sure what he was thanking her for.

“You're welcome,” she said, but that liquid silk voice of hers seemed to be thanking him instead.

For a moment, an invitation to come inside his new home curled around his tongue. But it tasted too perfect, too sweet. And he was no longer a man who believed that good things were possible. They were only to be desired. But just for a moment he wondered if her skin would feel as smooth as her voice, if her hair would smell as sweet as the expression on her face.

“I hope the aspirin helps,” she said, and with a little wave, she turned away from him again, but this time without the look of hurt rejection or the blaze of painful color staining her cheeks.

He let her go, but stood outside until she was back at the main house and inside. He waited until he saw
her light go out, and continued to wait until all he could see was his own breath freezing in the air.

He dry-swallowed the aspirin left in his palm and went inside the bunkhouse. His new skin tingled, both from the cold and from thinking about Corrie. He thought about how her hand had felt in his when he shook it earlier in the day, and how it shook in his during the dinnertime prayer. How it quivered beneath his fingers just now.

What would make a woman of the world, an icon like Corrie Stratton, so nervous that she trembled? A possible answer popped into his head, only to be rejected. A woman with Corrie Stratton's background, her voice, her looks, wouldn't be rendered vulnerable around any man, let alone a teacher with more scars than God should allow.

What kept her awake at night, watching him pace the floor some two hundred yards away? What were her ghosts? What was the miracle she sought?

Strangely, once back inside, he felt sleepy. He wasn't exhausted, restless or even weary. He was just sleepy. More strangely still, he fell asleep almost immediately after turning off his light.

But not so strangely, he dreamed of a woman with delicate fingers and an angel's voice, and somehow, in the dream, he knew she carried miracles in her coat pocket and, in the wake of her magic, he started to believe the promises in her eyes.

M
ack avoided Corrie like the proverbial plague for the next few days, which, given the size of Rancho Milagro, should have been easy. And could have been if it weren't for the infernal family meals.

During his convalescence, Mack had lain in a darkened room, listening to the radio, and had fantasized about the woman behind the lovely voice. On the ranch, over family-style meals, seeing her laughing with the children, giggling until tears ran, or solemnly taking in a child's tale of the day's activities, made him acutely uncomfortable, as if he'd rummaged through her dresser drawers without her knowledge.

The woman who'd interviewed heads of state and painted word pictures of the global political climate on the radio, sat barefoot at the dinner table, one arm around a child, the other holding her raised knees, as if needing to be grounded. With every gesture, she
revealed her heart, her longing and her love for her two partners and the hodgepodge collection of children.

And he wanted her. Fiercely, with a sharp hunger that surprised him in its simplicity and raw desire. And because he wanted her, he told himself he needed to stay as far away from her as humanly possible. He'd come to Rancho Milagro looking for peace, seeking a place where he could make a difference, not expecting any more than that.

On his third night at the ranch, little Analissa was regaling them all with a story of Leeza attempting to ride the gentle old mare, Plugster. “And then she screamed like this—ooh!—and her face turned all red like the flowers in the living room and her eyes got really big, like this….”

Mack half listened to the story but really was watching Corrie. She, in her usual bent-knee perch, sat with her head tilted to one side, her long chestnut hair spilling loose from its twisted ponytail and falling across one shoulder. A tender smile played on her lips. Her eyes were dreamy and soft, alight more with love for the child than humor over the story the little girl told.

Mack found himself holding his breath. What would it feel like to have that look turned on him? As if reading his thoughts, she shifted her gaze to his. For a single second that seemed to last an eternity or two, her expression didn't change. Then her eyes focused on his, and her smile faltered.

They might have been alone in the room, the little girl's story mere background music. Something seemed to leap between them, an electrical arc, a seemingly invisible ribbon of connection. He had to
close his eyes to shut her out. No wonder she had been able to pry secrets out of the most hardened political figure. One plunge into the warmth of her rich dark eyes, and a man wanted to reveal every secret he had locked up inside him. At least, this man ached to do just that.

When he opened them, she'd looked away, but wasn't watching little Analissa anymore. She was staring at the wall above the sideboard, her eyes unfocused, not looking at the children's drawings framed there. Color bloomed in her cheeks and her arms were wrapped around her knees. Her long fingers plucked at the loose folds of her trousers and trembled noticeably.

As was becoming his habit, he left the rollicking dinner table earlier than the other adults, needing to get away from all their noisy camaraderie, but most of all to hide from Corrie's too-discerning gaze. He had lesson plans to organize, schedules to prepare. He could do laundry, smear vitamin E oil on his many scars in a vain attempt to make them slowly fade. He could walk the fences, check the locks and pace the back corral.

He could do anything rather than sit next to this beautiful woman who made his body come alive and his heart thunder in his chest.

He'd come to Rancho Milagro looking for a miracle, certainly, but nothing remotely as miraculous as Corrie Stratton.

Before the fire, before the scars, he'd had a vague dream of a happy home. Something unformed, yet present, a wife, children, even barbecues on lazy Sat
urday afternoons with neighbors and relatives bringing potluck dishes.

But he'd given up on that sort of dream in the aftermath of a shattered afternoon two years before. He'd come to Rancho Milagro for a chance to teach again, to stop the screams of dying children he couldn't save. He had to cling to that knowledge. Even if Corrie Stratton made him want other things, like dreams lost to him now and definitely better left that way, he had to stay focused on his new life. If he let himself, even for a moment, relax his guard, begin to feel safe again, he might falter when needed most, and, as he knew all too well, people could die as a result.

Even though Rancho Milagro sported a staff of ranch hands, a groundskeeper, a federal marshal and several women and children, Mack had taken to walking the perimeter of the hacienda grounds each night after dinner. Both the solitude and the careful survey served to bring the nights into focus.

For all their concern over the children at Milagro, even the marshal seemed too casual with their safety in Mack's opinion. A madman could hide in the shadows of the great adobe barn and capture the stray child sneaking out to feed a carrot to one of the horses. A carelessly tossed cigarette from one of the ranch hands could ignite the bales of hay and the whole place would become an inferno. An unlocked gate could allow danger to waltz through.

Luckily, as the children were society's lost, there weren't many undesirables who would come after them, though he understood that the infamous El Patron, a man with too much money and delusions of power, had done exactly that only a year before when
he took José and Dulce from the ranch. As evil as that man was, what was to stop him from exacting revenge from prison?

Vigilance could avoid many a disaster. Sometime in the last two years, that had become Mack's talisman-like phrase. He might not feel comfortable with relaxed dinner conversation, and may have a case of the might-have-beens for Corrie Stratton, but he was right at home letting his eyes comb the shadows, his hands check the fences, and his ears strain for a misplaced footfall.

 

Corrie hid the disappointment she felt as Mack left the table early for the third night in a row. She'd caught the look of longing on his face as he listened to the children swapping the day's adventures and the unreadable look he'd turned on her. The first she wholly understood. As one raised without a family, she regarded mealtimes at Rancho Milagro as among the most precious of all moments. But she didn't understand his reserve around them all, herself in particular. It was as if she'd personally done something to make him feel unwelcome.

She felt herself flush when she turned back from watching his evening departure to find Jeannie looking at her with speculation. “We're too rowdy for him,” her friend said.

“We're too rowdy for anyone but some old rodeo hands and three crazy women from back east,” her friend's husband, Chance, said. He dropped a hand over his wife's.

Pablo leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I'll tell you this much, the man's a natural teacher. I never
saw Juan Carlos pay so much attention to anything anybody has to say. Ten minutes more this morning and the boy would have believed Mack if he'd told him the moon was made of goat cheese.”

Clovis, one of the ranch hands, agreed with Pablo's assessment and added, “I'll tell you something else, the man's obviously been through the wringer, like with all those burn scars, but he's strong. He was showing some of the kids how to do calisthenics and resistance stuff—what do they call that? He used a word—”

“Anaerobics,” Leeza supplied.

“That's it. Anyway, the guy's as solid as a rock. And he had all the kids jumping up and down and in pretty good rhythm, too. And doing judo stuff.”

Corrie remembered the stance he'd taken when she'd disturbed him a few nights before. All muscles, wary fight-ready position, and skin impervious to the night air. He'd suffered skin grafts for burns?

“I like him,” Rita said. “He brought all the children to the kitchen yesterday. He had them all making dog biscuits for the puppies.”

“Dog biscuits?” Leeza asked, laughing. “We hire a teacher and get a doggie chef?”

“Sí, señora,”
Rita said. “And making the children double the recipe by using mathematics. And then half the recipe. And they had to measure everything out using the cups and spoons. Then they had to sell them to one another. The big cookies were two dollars, the medium ones only one, and the tiny ones—”

“I made the little ones,” Analissa called out from the next room, leaving no doubt of a child's capacity for eavesdropping.

“
Sí,
you did,” Rita agreed mildly. “The little ones were fifty
centavos.
And he made them do all the adding and subtracting themselves. I never had a teacher who used real life as lessons.”

“Good idea,” Leeza said, flushing a little. As the financial wizard of the partnership, Leeza had struggled with the mathematics lessons for the children, and, thus far, to zero avail. Tony had complained he couldn't even see the little boxes she wanted them to write in, and Juan Carlos had done his crossword-puzzle style. Analissa drew in Leeza's account books. Jenny had just cried.

“What do you think of him, Corrie?” Jeannie asked.

Corrie hoped no one could see the blush that seemed to stay in her cheeks these days. “I think he'll work out fine,” she said. She felt as if she was betraying him somehow by talking about him behind his back. She almost had to laugh at the notion. She'd made a career out of talking about others, sharing others' thoughts, dreams and foibles, and publicly at that. Why would talking about one Mack Dorsey make her feel uncomfortable?

“Well, I like him,” Chance said, pushing to his feet. “And so does José. And that kid can read people better than any shrink.”

They all chuckled and, following Chance's example, started clearing the table. After leaving the kitchen, Corrie stopped Leeza. “Remember the first night Mack was here? You looked as if you recognized him, or remembered something about him. What was it?”

Leeza gave her a blank stare anyone on earth but
Corrie and Jeannie would have taken for complete unawareness. However, Corrie had known Leeza since college. The three orphans had forged a sisterhood that transcended blood.

“Tell me,” Corrie said.

“I don't have a clue what you're talking about,” Leeza said. She gave an exaggerated yawn and looked at her wristwatch. “It's late and I've a couple of calls left to make or the known financial world will collapse in its tracks.”

“Leeza—”

Corrie was surprised when Leeza cupped her face in her cool hands; the woman seldom showed any sign of affection. “Rest easy, newshound, the man's been checked out and then some. Chance just stopped me from being a dimwit about Mack's burns. Good night.” And she dropped a kiss on Corrie's forehead and sauntered away toward her office.

Corrie raised a hand to her forehead, as if Leeza's offhand good-night kiss were imprinted there. It might as well be. She'd known the woman fifteen years and had never once felt its like. They'd hugged upon rare occasion; they'd linked arms at Jeannie's first family's funeral. They'd cried on each other's shoulder from rare time to time. But never a kiss.

It was the simple kiss that let Corrie know her friend knew something about Mack Dorsey. She could easily drive into town and hop on the Internet and search for herself, and if that proved fruitless, she had countless sources from which to draw to find out everything about Mack Dorsey's life. But facts and data weren't what made her slip on her duster to head outside to
look for him. She wanted to know what he was feeling.

She knew, if no one else had noticed, that every night Mack had been there, he hadn't gone directly to the teachers' quarters after leaving dinner.

She'd watched him through the French doors or from her bedroom. Each night, he walked to the front gates and checked the locks. He melted into the shadows out by the barn. Sometimes she'd seen him strolling along the fences beyond the corral, his hands running the straight lines of wire, testing the barbs occasionally, or pulling at a strand to make sure it was taut. Another time she'd glimpsed a shadow out beside the well house and suspected he was inspecting the locks on that door as well.

His weren't the casual perambulations of a man working off a heavy meal, nor did he seem particularly fond of stargazing. The nightly roaming had all the earmarks of a man afraid of something. Or acting as guardian.

The teachers' quarters were still dark, so she made for the barn. She didn't see him in the broad, open area, nor could she find him within the stalls. The tack room was empty of all but the smell of leather and molasses oats. The riding ring, a recent addition to Milagro, stretched behind the barn, flanking the empty cattle pens. Mack wasn't there, either.

As she turned to go back through the barn, someone grabbed her and roughly dragged her outside into the lambent moonlight.

She barely issued a squeak of surprise and, when she saw who had hold of her, offered no resistance as he propelled her away from the barn and into the soft
starlight. She stood quiescent in his grasp, searching his shadowed face. Only her rapid heartbeat betrayed her reaction to him, and that he couldn't have perceived.

She didn't know why she'd followed him outside, nor could she begin to explain, even to herself, why she'd felt no shock when he'd manhandled her to the riding ring behind the barn. But when he growled a curse before lowering his lips to hers, she found she'd sought him in the dark for precisely that reason.

He tasted of the honey he'd poured on the
sopaipilla
he'd had for dessert and she fancied she could draw it from his tongue like nectar. His lips were both gentle and rough, more as if he warred with himself than with her. His breathing was steady at first, then ragged as he pulled her even closer.

When he slid a cold hand onto the curve of her neck, she couldn't withhold a moan. Her knees threatened to buckle in a purely primal reaction. She clung to his coat as if to a life preserver, feeling she was going down.