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“So you did, Scott,” she said agreeably. She smiled and didn’t continue. He didn’t appreciate it.
“Let’s go outside—now,” he said. He reached to take her arm, and she jerked back. Will moved, putting himself between her and Scott, close enough to keep Scott at bay and still leave room for him to back down—if he had enough sense.
“Do you want to go with him?” Will asked her.
“No,” Arley said, hating that she couldn’t keep her voice steady.
“That’s good enough for me,” Will said. “For them, too,” he added, nodding toward the nearby group of paratroopers, who were already on the alert and looking in their direction.
Will and Scott stared at each other.
“Excuse me,” Arley said abruptly. “It was interesting talking to you, Specialist,” she said to Will. Then she did what she did best—walked off and left the mess she had created.
“Arley! What do you want from me?” Scott called after her, as if she were the unreasonable one.
Nothing, she thought. And that in itself was a revelation. She didn’t want, didn’t need, anything from him anymore.
She kept walking, dodging the dancers, knowing Scott was likely following her. He didn’t give up easily. The real question was, what did he want?
She could see Uncle Patrick working hard behind the crowded bar, and she headed in that direction.
“Ah! Reinforcements!” he said when he saw her. “Find yourself an apron, darlin’. I need another pair of hands.”
Arley slipped behind the bar. Her knees were shaking as she found an apron and managed to wrap it around herself, taking her place next to her uncle, rushing to fill mug after mug with beer.
“Steady now,” Uncle Patrick said quietly. “Scottie is safe with the aunts and he-who-shall-not-be-named has taken himself out the door.”
When she finally got the nerve to look up, she didn’t see Scott anywhere. She didn’t see Will Baron, either.
She bowed her head again and filled another mug. So much for getting out and having a good time.
“What was that all about?”
Will glanced at Specialist Bernie Copus and considered his options. He could answer the question now and get it over with, or he could answer it any one of the thousands of times Copus would ask for the rest of their natural lives.
“I thought you were going to clean that young man’s clock for him,” Copus said. He grinned, showing the gap between his front teeth, a feature women found irresistible.
Or so he said.
“I don’t know what it was about,” Will said, hoping the truth would bring an end to the interrogation. All he had understood of the situation was that Arley Meehan had been afraid.
“Listen to your old Uncle Bernie, now. I have to admit the former Mrs. McGowan is a good-looking woman—a good-looking woman. But, you’re not wanting to go there, son, believe me. You’re not wanting to get between the McGowan heir and something he prizes. No sirree.”
“Copus, I’m not—”
“No, now, I am serious, William. I know how this thing works.”
“And how is that?”
“You are in the military. He is in the money. His family owns the whole damn world. What do you own?”
“Not much,” Will said.
“Well, there you go. Need I say more?”
“I hope not.”
Copus grinned, showing his gap again. “I’m just trying to help you out, son.”
“Yeah, and how much is that going to cost me?” Will asked, because Specialist Copus was nothing if not mercenary.
“Not one cent—this time. I can see how tempting that little flower is, but I’m telling you, this thing has got trouble written all over it. I am a man of vast experience and I know.”
“Copus, I told you. It’s not—” Will stopped. “I don’t even know her.”
“Okay, okay. You just think of me as that television robot—the one that looks like an old-time wringer washing machine—and I’m going, ‘Danger, Will Baron!’”
Copus waved his arms for emphasis, knocking somebody’s beer to the floor in the process. Will grinned and walked away, leaving Copus to do what he did so well, apologize profusely in the hopes of not getting pitched across the premises.
The music stopped abruptly as the band made room on the small stage for the bride and groom to say farewell and get on with married life. Will joined in the toasts, laughing at the heavy-handed newlywed commentaries served up by a number of the paratrooper guests. He was determined to enjoy the rest of the evening. Even without Copus’s dubious advice, Will knew better than to get involved in whatever was going on between the bride’s sister and her ex-husband. He deliberately stood so he could see Arley out of the corner of his eye, however. She stayed behind the bar, participating in one toast after another, just as he did, laughing in all the right places and, as far as he could tell, completely unaffected by the incident earlier.
Except that he didn’t think that was the case.
The bride and groom were leaving—or trying to. Clearly, it was the custom for everyone at the postnuptial party to escort them to their car. The band members struck up another song, playing as they walked, a reprise of something they’d done earlier.
Will stood back to let them pass, losing track of Arley in the surge of people heading toward the door.
He was one of the last to reach the outside, and he had to force himself into the mugginess of the summer night. He had grown up in the desert and he was used to hot temperatures, but he would never adjust to the oppressive heat and humidity so rampant in this part of the country. He always felt as if he were walking into a living being.
The band played as enthusiastically as ever, but outside the music dissipated into the night air.
“So how homesick are you?” someone said.
Arley stood on the sidewalk near the door.
“Not very,” he said this time. He realized she was starting their conversation over, rewinding it to the point before her ex-husband arrived.
“Really,” he added, and she smiled.
“Maybe you ought to tell your face that.”
“Aren’t you going to go say goodbye to Kate?” he said to divert the conversation to a safer topic.
“I did earlier. Besides, I might catch the bouquet.”
“Wouldn’t want to do that, I guess.”
“No way. So I thought I’d annoy you instead.”
“Any…particular reason?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “You’re so serene. Even when you’re not having a good time.”
He laughed softly, because, at this moment, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Is that a Navajo thing?”
“What?”
“Serenity,” she said pointedly. “Pay attention, Baron.”
“It’s kind of hard to do both—be serene and pay attention,” he said, smiling still.
“Just answer the question.”
“Which one?”
“The serenity one.”
“Yes. It’s a Navajo thing.”
“Must be hard to do—in the military, I mean.”
“Sometimes.”
“Now answer the other question. How homesick are you?”
He drew a quiet breath, aware of the night sounds around them, the kind that didn’t mean home to him. “Well, all the pine trees help—except they’re too tall and the wrong variety.”
“That’s what I thought. Did you leave a girl behind? In Window Rock?”
“Ah…no,” he said.
“A lot of family, though.”
“A lot, yes.”
“How many brothers and sisters?”
“One half brother. One half sister.”
“That’s not a lot.”
“Well, my half sister—Meggie—has children—hers and the rest of the world’s. Stray people are Meggie’s thing. And there’s my stepfather—Lucas Singer—he’s also my uncle by marriage, because he married my father’s sister, Sloan, who got joint custody with the tribe so she could raise me. Lucas has a sister—she’s a lawyer, the kick-butt kind. She’s got children, plus there’s the daughter my stepfather-uncle by marriage didn’t know he had and her husband, Ben. Ben’s a tribal policeman. So is my stepfather-uncle and his sister the lawyer’s husband.”
“Go on,” she said, when he stopped his deliberately convoluted recital to see if her eyes had glazed over. Incredibly, she was listening.
“And then there are the non-blood-related people who have a permanent invitation to attend any and all Baron-Singer social gatherings—the ones who are just passing by and happen to smell dinner cooking, and the ones in and out of jail. Basically, it’s the Navajo reservation version of Mayberry.”
She laughed softly. It pleased him to make her laugh.
“What about your birth mother? Does she come?”
“No. She doesn’t. Meggie would invite her, though, if she got the chance. She’s like that.”
“What about your half brother?”
“Patrick. He’s…” Will stopped. There were no precise adjectives for Patrick. He was and always had been a walking contradiction.
“So when was the last time you were home?” Arley asked.
“Christmas. Are we…going someplace with this?” he asked.
“I like to know things,” she said. “Especially when it comes from somebody who doesn’t like to tell them.”
“Well, that would be me,” he said. “Usually.”
“And this usual…reticence—is that a Navajo thing or a Tar Heel thing?”
“Can’t be a Tar Heel thing,” he said, making her smile again.
“Don’t go by me. Some Tar Heels are reticent,” she assured him. “Do you like being in the army?”
“It’s what I need,” he said cryptically. He had never really articulated to anyone why he’d enlisted—there were a lot of reasons, including a very persuasive army recruiter with a quota to meet. But the most important ones had to do with Will’s obligation to and affection for the people who had rescued him after his father was killed and had given him a good life.
Two women stood watching them from the edge of the crowd surrounding the Meehan-Doyle getaway car. One was strong-looking and tall and unyielding, like a tree that would break rather than bend. The other seemed tentative and anxious, as if she had more concerns than she could handle. Both of them looked just enough like Arley and Kate for him to hazard a guess.
“I think I see two of your relatives,” he said when the women’s intense interest began to exceed his comfort level.
“My sisters,” Arley said. “Gwen and Grace, the micromanagers. Kate is usually their target. Lucky me, I get to be their surrogate concern for the next two weeks.”
“Kate’s only going to be gone three days.”
“It’s going to seem like two weeks,” Arley assured him.
“It’s…good to have relatives who care.”
“You think so?”
“Where I grew up, it is. The worst thing you can do is behave as if you didn’t have anyone who cared enough about you to teach you right from wrong.”
“Now, that’s a Tar Heel thing. It’s called ‘not being raised.’ Don’t ever act like you haven’t been raised, Baron. People would talk. It would reflect badly on your father’s family forever, and, believe me, you don’t want that.”
Arley paused. “Will, thank you,” she said suddenly.
“For…?”
She glanced over to where her sisters were standing, then looked at him.
