At Close Range (12 page)

“Tell me about the fire,” she said, not daring to touch him.

He turned back to her with the swiftness of a pouncing predator grabbing both her arms, scaring her a little. “There's nothing to tell, Corrie. I'm alive and they're dead. Okay? That's all there is to it. No heroics, just burned children and grieving parents.”

She must have made some sound, for his gaze seemed to focus in on her—instead of whatever anger drove him—and he lowered his eyes to his hands on her upper arms. He emitted a low groan and released
her, almost shoving her away before turning around to leave her.

“Mack,” she called, unconsciously raising her hands to the spots where he had gripped her so fiercely.

He didn't stop.

“Mack, wait!”

If anything, he strode faster.

“Mack, I don't care what happened!”

At that, he slowed, stopped, then turned around.

“You should care, Corrie. Everyone on this planet should care. We train our children to be quiescent. We train them to follow the rules, obey the teacher, and above all else, to believe that they will be rescued. We don't tell them that if they don't think for themselves, fight and claw their way out of a bad situation, that they could die, they could just die. And we don't tell them that if they do, someone like me, someone who tried to save them, is going to feel guilty and scarred for the rest of his damned life. So scarred he can't even reach out to the most wonderful woman he's ever even imagined. So care, Corrie, but don't cry, because there's nothing here to cry about.”

And with that, Mack turned and walked slowly, almost regally to the teacher's quarters. And every step he took seemed to echo in her soul.

 

Watching the pacing figure hidden behind the thin curtains over a lit window across a graveled drive, Corrie remembered Mack's answer to Jeannie's question the first night he'd sat around the Milagro table. In essence, he'd said he liked the prehistoric period because survival mattered.

Survival. Warmth, food, a mate. Leeza had teased him about being macho. He'd said something about matriarchal tribes, but the need being the same. Warmth, food, a mate.
Safety. That's all that matters,
he'd said that first night. That's what he believed with every fiber of his being.

A knock at her door made her nearly leap from her chair.

“Señora?”

“Rita,” she said. Then on a sharper note, “Is anything wrong?”

The bedroom door opened. “Not to worry,” Rita said, stepping inside Corrie's suite. “I hope you don't mind. I saw your light, no?”

“Nothing's wrong?”

“Oh, no. But you see, I'm here with the children, yes? And you watch Señor Mack's window, yes? So, why don't you want to go out there?”

“No. God, no. Let him be.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why let him be? He needs something,
niñita.
And I think you know what that something is.”

“I can't leave the children,” Corrie said.

“Sure you can,
niña.
I'm here. Pablo's here.”

Corrie couldn't hide the blush that rose to her cheeks at the suggestion. But she shook her head.

“He means something to you, that man,” Rita said.

Corrie looked at the window across the drive. Mack's shadow crossed it. “Something,” she said.

“Something very important, I think,” Rita said.

“He wants to train the children. Like miniature commandos,” Corrie said.

Rita sighed. “And there is something wrong in that?”

“They're just kids.”

“They were only children where he came from.”

Corrie turned to stare at Rita. “You know about his past?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me.”

Rita looked surprised. “I thought you knew. The newspapers and television called it the Enchanted Hills firebombing incident….”

Corrie didn't need any more than that single reference. Everything fell into place. Hero teacher rescues ten children. Five perish in firebomb set by disgruntled former employee. Of course she knew the incident, she just hadn't connected the dots. Ghosts, plural. Burns. The fire-drill analogy. The terrible, terrible scars. Five perished. The sleeplessness.

Rita had continued talking, and concluded with, “…so he's a true hero. And I think you should listen to his ideas. In the old days, when I was a girl, my father kept us all safe. He seemed hard by today's rules, maybe, I don't know. But I know that there are some things we have forgotten that we knew back in those days. Some of the simpler things to keep our families safe, to make our friends and neighbors as important as our own. Nothing so wrong with that.”

“No, nothing wrong with that,” Corrie repeated.

“So, you go out there to him. He needs you.”

“I don't know what to say to him,” Corrie said, but she wanted to go.

Rita held up her hands as if giving up on her. “So
don't talk. Have a little courage,
niña.
Life doesn't come in pretty paper packages. It comes with scars, and pain, and sometimes it's out in a little house just across a driveway.”

M
ack realized he'd been waiting for Corrie the moment he heard her footfall on the bunkhouse steps. He opened the door before her knock and didn't say anything.

“Mack?” she asked, as if he'd changed his personality since morning, had transformed into someone else. Maybe he had.

“Come in,” he said, holding out a hand to her.

She stared at his outstretched palm for a moment, and her eyelids flickered when her fingers lightly slipped into his clasp. When she didn't come forward, he studied her more closely and saw immediately that she
knew,
that either she'd remembered or someone had told her about his past.

Her hand didn't flutter in his, as he'd half expected. It rested quiescently, perhaps trustingly, no attempt at escape.

“I've known Jeannie and Leeza since college,” she said, her liquid brown eyes meeting his with a strange urgency. “But I've never told them this. Never even hinted at it.”

He stilled himself, an unfamiliar combination of triumph and fear coursing through him. Triumph that she was sharing a secret with him, fear because such a sharing implied deep trust.

“When I was five, I got up in the middle of the night. The living room was filled with a cloud. A big pretty white cloud right inside our house. Usually the floor was cold, but that night, it was so warm that I lay down on it, watching the cloud floating over me. I heard a banging. Then I heard my mother screaming for my father and my father yelling.”

He never wanted to stop someone more than he did right then. He would have given anything on earth to have Corrie simply break off her story.

“I'm not sure I realized right then what the cloud was, but I was scared and knew something was terribly wrong. Then I saw the flames beneath my parents' door. They looked like some kind of strange animal, jumping up from the crack under the door, leaping for the doorknob. I heard my mother call my name.”

“Ah, God, Corrie, stop…”

“I was too scared to answer her. I couldn't move. I stayed where I was on that warm floor. My mother was screaming. My father, too. Screaming for me. And I couldn't move. Because I was too scared to move, my parents died.”

Tears filled her eyes but she made no effort to wipe them away. Some fierce message seemed to shimmer
in them, a meaning she desperately wanted him to understand.

“Corrie, you were a baby. Analissa's age. You couldn't be expected to rescue your parents.”

“No? You couldn't be expected to run back into a burning building and sacrifice yourself for a group of children.”

“I was an adult. Anyone would have done the same.”

“No. No one else did anything remotely similar. I remember the accounts well.” She gave a little moue. “Now, anyway. Maybe some part of me knew from the first minute I saw you. I tend to avoid stories about fires. Go figure. The point is, not one of the other so-called adults went back into that inferno. Not even the firemen went in. Just you.” She lifted a hand to his face, not tracing his scars, but erasing them somehow with her touch.

“It's not at all the same, Corrie.”

“Yes, it is. Because you're haunted by those you couldn't save, every bit as much as I am.”

He wanted to argue with her, to deny it with every bit of bone and sinew in his body, but he couldn't because she was right and she knew it.
When Corrie Stratton says it's true, it's a fact.

“I didn't come out here to make you feel bad or force you to think about that terrible afternoon. I came because it was time to let my secret be free, but only because I thought it might help you be free of your ghosts.”

A slow river of tears coursed down her cheeks. “Because you're right, I was just a little kid and couldn't have saved my parents. And because you're
wrong, you couldn't have done more to save those children.” Her breath hitched and she caught her lower lip on a sob. She closed her eyes, but it didn't stem the silent tears.

When she opened them again, they were awash with sparkling tears. It killed him.

“And…and I came out here because you're right. The children do need training. If I had had any coaching, even enough to know the difference between clouds in the sky and smoke in the living room, then my mother wouldn't have died worrying about me, terrified that I was trapped, too.”

He didn't let her say any more. He dragged her into his arms, crushing her to his chest, breaking off her what-ifs, willing her to let his body absorb her pain, her misplaced guilt. He rocked her in the doorway, cradling her, murmuring her name, and trying so hard not to see that smoke-filled living room and the little girl who cowered on a too warm floor.

He didn't know when his comforting shifted. All he knew was that one minute he was fighting tears of his own, tears for a younger Corrie, for a frightened little girl who had to listen to the screams of her own parents, and the next, her hands were inside his shirt, skimming along his ribs and tracing the contours of his waist.

He didn't have the feeling she was trying to forget anything, but was driven by the same fierce need that seized him, a force beyond reckoning. Hers weren't the caresses of a woman attempting to lose herself in a single moment. Rather, they were the actions of a creature caught in the sheer, rough magic of living.

He dragged her into his living room and kicked the
door shut behind them before crushing her lips beneath his own. A fierce, possessive joy infused him. She was his and claiming him for her own.

She pulled at his shirt and he at hers. She pushed his shirt from his shoulders, dragging it down his arms. He slid her bra straps from her shoulders and unfastened the contraption with a groan.

He had to bite back an oath as she pressed her bare chest against his own naked torso. He'd wanted to absorb her pain with his body; he hadn't anticipated the sharp stab of agony he would experience when he felt her heart beating against his, knowing he would always want her like this, would always ache for her, no matter how wrong it would be for her.

When he'd kissed her that night behind the barn, then again later, lying on her duster, insensate with longing, with need, he'd half convinced himself that she was the reward for two long years of physical agony, the rainbow at the end of a terrible storm. But holding her now, having dried her tears with his own skin, feeling her breath against his collarbone, her heart thundering as if trying to join his, he knew a jagged despair, knowing the future wasn't a certain thing, that even the concept of a future was a huge leap of faith, the kind of faith he'd abandoned.

He longed for words to express what he was thinking, feeling, but couldn't find the very phrases he knew he should be offering her. All he could do was to let her understand some of his thoughts through his touch, and, through hers, his passion.

He dug at her jeans even as she yanked open his fly. He tugged hers down her silky thighs and she
stood over him, her hands on his shoulders, her head flung back, her long hair swaying as if in a tempest.

“You are so incredibly beautiful,” he said, a supplicant at her feet. A warrior kneeling before his lady.

Without rising, he ran his hands back up her legs, memorizing her, kissing her knees, her thighs, and hooking a finger on either side of her lacy panties, pulled them down to reveal her dark thatch of curls. He ran his hand over them, loving the springiness, the silken folds and honeyed moisture he found beneath.

Her fingers tangled in his hair and she gasped his name as his lips found another of her secrets and his tongue plied it free. He could feel her legs trembling and steadied her as he lifted one of them over his shoulder, granting him full access to her.

“Please…” she cried, her hands fisted in his hair, her stunned body aflame with need, with a raging thirst, and nearly inchoate in her desire. “Please…stop,” she finally gasped.

He stopped immediately, holding her swaying form tightly against him. “Are you okay?” he ground out against her firm waist.

“No. Yes, of course, but I don't want to be alone in this.”

He gave a rough chuckle. “I'm definitely with you here.”

She blushed. “Not just with me. In me. Filling me. Please, Mack.”

If she'd asked him to walk over burning coals, he would have.

In a fluid motion, he swung her leg from his shoulder and over his arm. He scooped up the other and surged to his feet. The look in her half-closed eyes
made him feel godlike, powerful, endowed with superhuman strength, though in truth, she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds fully clothed and dripping wet.

“I wanted to provide you a moonlit bed,” he said.

“I'd like that,” she answered demurely, though the look on her face was anything but prim.

He carried her reverently and somewhat arrogantly into his bedroom.

Though she knew the room intimately, having helped Jeannie decorate it, the well-appointed bedroom seemed a foreign place with Mack's possessions in it. A stack of books, an open magazine, a wall covered with notes and rough maps of the Rancho Milagro headquarters, and a queen-size bed with the covers turned back—all seemed to tell the story of the man who held her so securely in his arms.

She sighed as he gently deposited her on the bed. Her breath caught as he bent over her and lightly skimmed her lips with his. It felt like a first kiss, tentative and questing—as different from his intense passion as winter from summer. She found the contrast all the more alluring because it was barely controlled. She responded in kind, scarcely letting her fingers touch the skin on his back, on his shoulders.

He shifted lower, trailing featherlight kisses down her arms, across her breasts, an explorer with all the time in the universe. His teasing tongue discovered secret crevices and his fingers, hidden recesses and valleys.

He gently scooped her breasts into his hands, molding them softly, as if she were made of spun glass. His tongue flicked over a hardened nipple, causing her
to draw in her breath sharply. His hands kneaded with more firmness as his teeth lightly grazed a hard nub. He suckled avidly as she arched beneath him, her fingers digging into his shoulders.

And he abruptly ceased his ministrations only to shift to her other breast, repeating his soft caresses, followed by intimate demand. He dallied and exhorted, he scarcely touched, only to follow the skimming delicacy with sure command. He kissed, nipped and kneaded every inch of her flesh, inciting a riot within her.

Mack moaned when Corrie touched him in return, groaned when her teeth gently grazed his tiny nipples, and swore when her hands reached between his legs, encircling him with her velvet hands.

She called his name as she thrashed in his arms. And he called hers, buried deep within her, losing every particle of himself and finding himself again afterward in the tears in her eyes and her languid smile.

When Corrie fell asleep in his arms, he was certain he'd never felt anything so exquisitely right in his entire life. That piercing sorrow washed over him again. He wasn't vain; the scars on his body wouldn't make her turn away from him eventually. She would someday run from the scars on his soul, the puckered wounds that would haunt him forever.

One day, some day, he would let her down. He would hurt her, or worse, fail to protect her. And on that day, at that moment, he would not be merely broken, he would be lost forever.

He reached for her hand when he heard a soft sigh, and thought it came from Corrie as she slept. Then,
as he recognized her deep, steady breathing, he blamed the wind. Or someone crying far away.

His eyes snapped open and he turned his head. He hadn't been dreaming. Corrie still lay beside him. Her head was turned from his, a naked arm flung above her head, a leg curled outside the comforter. She was the embodiment of abandoned, guilt-free sleep.

He could still hear the faint sighing that had wakened him. Someone crying or murmuring.

He carefully inched from the bed. Corrie didn't move. He dragged his gaze from her and slipped to the window. He lifted a corner of the thin sheers.

Like a movie set, the ranch headquarters were illuminated by a thousand stars and a waxing, heavy moon. Shadows stretched and crept across the drive as the spring breeze teased the newly planted trees into dancing. A light at the back of the main house didn't illuminate the area outside, but looked warm and inviting in the darkness.

And someone was walking along the southern end of the barn.

A woman in black.

The
same
woman in black.

“What is it?” Corrie asked softly from behind him.

He couldn't hide his start. Nor the lust he felt for her upon seeing her naked beside him. Instead of reaching for her, he started dragging on his clothes. “It's the woman,” he said.

Corrie left the bedroom and came back in seconds, already half-dressed. “What woman?”

“The one on the road.”

She stopped in the act of buttoning her blouse. “La Dolorosa?”

“She's no ghost. She's out there by the barn.”

Corrie sat down on the bed as if her legs had given out. “You're not going out there, are you?”

“I've got to.”

“We can call the sheriff. He'll be here in—”

“A half an hour at the earliest. It's thirty miles to Carlsbad.”

“At least call Pablo. And Clovis.”

“And the kids, too? Give me a break. I think I can handle one woman,” he said.

She gave him a look. “You don't have to prove that to me. The jury's already in.”

He couldn't hide his grin.

“I'm coming, too.”

“You're staying here.”

“With my knitting? I don't think so.” She'd moved to the window and was peering out. “I see her,” she whispered. Then in a louder voice said, “Oh, I don't like this. What makes you so sure she's not a ghost? She looks like a ghost, walks like one….”