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“El hombre stopped the horse for me,” Juan Carlos said, but didn’t let go of Mack’s jeans. Corrie knew how he felt. Her own legs gave way about then and she sat down in the dirt, one hand on Juan Carlos’s shoulder and the other on the toe of Mack Dorsey’s tennis shoe.
“His name is Mr. Mack Dorsey,” Corrie said faintly. “And you better say a very good thank-you.”
Juan Carlos looked up. “Thank you, señor. But you made me fall off the horse.”
Corrie gave a ragged chuckle that was all too close to a sob. “Not quite good enough, Juan Carlos. Try again.”
“Thank you for getting in the way of my horse, Señor Mack.”
“J-Juan Carlos!” Jorge sputtered. “You get up right now and say you’re sorry.” After some effort, the older man stood upright and took the reins from Mack’s hands. “I’ll take the horse now, señor. Thank God you were here.”
The two men clasped hands and Mack withstood a hard backslap from Jorge before leaning over to shake Juan Carlos’s upstretched hand.
“Take it easy, kid,” Mack said.
“You, too, Señor Mack.”
Corrie looked up to find Mack’s eyes on her, a crooked smile on his lips. He held out a scarred hand.
She put hers in his, felt the smooth skin enveloping hers, let him pull her up, smelled the dust the horse had kicked up, and smelled her own fear and the heady, all-male scent of Mack Dorsey.
She nodded at him. He nodded back.
She smiled and he didn’t.
She drew a deep, tremulous breath. “The sooner you can bring your things, the better,” she said.
Then he smiled.
Chapter 2
If Mack was surprised that everyone shared evening meals together at Rancho Milagro, the others seemed to find it perfectly normal. Within seconds of his entering the hacienda for a second time that day, he was subjected to a rapid-fire introduction to the rest of the household.
He nodded at the awesomely tall and gorgeous Leeza Nelson, whom he’d spoken to on the phone when he first applied for the job. Leeza was only on the ranch for a short time, Corrie had told him earlier; she had to go back to Washington, D.C., to run her company. He also nodded to Jeannie, another of the partners, and Chance Salazar, her U.S. Marshal husband, and raised a hand to their two kids, Dulce and José. He was reintroduced to Juan Carlos—much improved by soap and water—the ranch hands, Clovis, Jorge and Pablo, and four other children ranging in age from six to eleven whom he didn’t have names for yet.
Places were set at the enormous table in the dining room. Only a couple of the chairs were without mats, plates and silverware. Three large pitchers of iced tea with lemons and ice bobbing to the surface served as centerpieces and the cloth napkins adorning each plate all held a different shape.
The housekeeper, Rita—a tiny stick of a woman in her forties—plopped the last dish down on an enormous sideboard before taking a place at the table herself and heaving a huge sigh. “Señors, señoras, and niños…dinner is ready.”
Mack expected the kids to launch from the table and attack the sideboard, but no one moved. Finally, Jeannie held out her hands on either side, clasping her husband’s in one and her daughter Dulce’s in the other. “Grace,” she said. “Juan Carlos? I believe it’s your turn.”
Mack couldn’t remember the last time he’d been a party to saying grace before dinner—some long-ago Thanksgiving when he was just a little squirt, he suspected—and felt awkward taking the little girl’s hand seated next to him and Corrie’s on the other. Corrie’s was dry and warm; the little girl’s scrubbed and slightly damp. While Corrie’s fingers pulsed and trembled beneath his, the little girl’s fingers squeezed his hand, as if offering reassurance, or—in his opinion, far worse—trust.
He bowed his head with the others when Jeannie signaled Juan Carlos to perform the blessing.
The boy cleared his throat and sang out a version of grace he’d obviously been practicing. “Thanks for the tacos, thanks for the beans, and thank you, God, for my blue jeans!”
Mack wasn’t the only one who chuckled. And to his combined surprise and relief, no one reprimanded the boy. The little girl, whose hand had rested so trustingly in his, removed it to cover her giggles.
Jeannie’s husband, Chance, gave a sharp bark of laughter, followed by deep chortles. Leeza muttered something and, shaking her head, hid a grin that threatened to soften her somewhat forbidding features. Jeannie tsked but smiled fondly at the kid whose gift for rhyme might not meet a holier person’s standards.
But Corrie’s reaction was the best, he thought. She bit her lower lip while giving the boy a slow, deliberate wink, as if they’d cooked up the crazy blessing together. And when the boy gave her a cocky thumbs-up, Mack realized that they had. No wonder miracles happened around this place.
When she glanced at him, and recognized by his answering look that he’d caught her coaching, she flushed a little, shrugged, and by tilting her head at Juan Carlos, let him understand that she didn’t want him to say anything. Mack remembered her conspiratorial smile earlier that afternoon. Before the bucking horse episode, prior to her offering him the job, when she’d asked him why he wanted to be at Rancho Milagro, and, at his answer of wanting to be a part of the miracles, she had hunched forward, guileless, conspiratorial, and said “Me, too.”
The little girl next to him leaned against him, still giggling, sharing her laughter in her shaking shoulders. He resisted the urge to place his arm around her. Corrie’s wish of teacher-cum-kindly-uncle might be her dream, but in the real world of lawsuits and traumas, a simple touch could so easily be misconstrued. Still, the little girl pressed against his arm and rested her forehead on his forearm. He couldn’t help but chuckle at her helpless laughter. And for a fleeting moment, wondered how long it had been since he’d laughed.
“Okay, tonight, even though we have a newcomer, kids get to go first,” Jeannie said. “And Juan Carlos? Keep your fingers away from the alarm.”
Seven chairs, including the one next to his, scraped across broad, burnt-sienna-colored Saltillo tile and seven giggling children raced to the sideboard.
“Chance? Would you pour the wine? Thanks, honey. So, Mack, what do you think so far?” Jeannie asked him over the children’s clamor and clanking of serving utensils.
Mack accepted the glass of wine from an openly smiling Chance, and nodded at the kids. “I’m intrigued,” he said.
“Good,” Jeannie said, and put her hand over her own empty wineglass and grinned up at her husband. “Can’t, remember?”
Chance kissed her and lowered a hand to caress her neck. “Worth it?” he asked.
“Every minute,” she said, taking his hand to kiss it.
Mack felt riveted by the overt love in their eyes. He’d read one of the tabloid accounts of the undercover marshal and the ranch owner falling in love, the first of the long string of Milagro’s so-called miracles.
“Jeannie’s pregnant and not letting a single second of the pampering get away,” Leeza explained in a dry voice. He’d have suspected a snipe hiding in her words if he hadn’t seen her eyes, which were, he thought, starkly and unknowingly wistful.
Mack resisted the urge to look over his shoulder for a disaster lurking in the shadows of the large dining room. Kids laughing and jostling in line, adults relaxed and easy, mixed cultures and backgrounds, beautiful scents rising from the food spread on a lavish sideboard; it all seemed too good to be true.
Instead, he nodded, as if Leeza had asked him a question. He gave a rusty smile at the glowing-faced and obviously happy Jeannie. She smiled back at him and raised a protective hand to her scarcely showing belly. “I’m sure it all seems pretty strange to you right now,” she said.
He hoped the kids returning to the table, scraping chairs and trading friendly insults in a mixture of Spanish and English, precluded the need for an answer from him, for if he’d had to give one, it would have been in the negative. It didn’t seem strange; it seemed completely alien. It was too perfect. And anything too wonderful, too perfect was sure to have a downside.
“Señor Mack?” Pablo rose and waved his hand at the sideboard. “You first, yes?”
Mack was in awe at the array of foods prepared for the Rancho Milagro crowd. Far from mere tacos and beans, the fare included an enormous roast beef tenderloin, a salad with seemingly every known vegetable and some cheeses he didn’t recognize, home-baked bread with sun-dried tomatoes, a large bowl of herb-and-butter pasta, and a host of soft or crispy finger foods that would normally be served as hors d’oeuvres.
As he helped himself to a healthy portion of the dishes, knowing from the quantity that he needn’t stint whatsoever, he listened to the easy conversation behind him.
“What’s this, Corrie?” one of the kids asked.
“Fried grasshopper,” she answered promptly. “With enough tempura batter, it tastes just like lobster.”
“Eew!” chirped one of the boys. “Not really?”
After the pause that followed her question, several of the kids laughed, and so did the little boy. “It doesn’t taste like a grasshopper. It tastes good!”
“See?” Corrie said, her sultry voice all the more alluring when filled with teasing laughter. “It’s all in the batter.”
“And this?” another kid piped up. “What’s this?”
“That’s the snake that was bothering me by the back gate. Deep-fried rattlesnacks, I call ’em.”
Beside him Pablo chuckled. “That Corrie, she’s like a kid herself.”
Mack turned his head to look at her.
No employer facade masked her face now. Pablo was right; she almost looked a child herself as she pressed against the table, her eyes sparkling, her face flushed, and a soft, inviting smile curving her generous lips. “And those little ones that look like fried spiders? Well, there you go. I decided we needed to wage war. So instead of nuking the little critters, we’re frying them.”
“Yuck,” one of the boys said.
“That’s what they’re called. Yuckums.”
Juan Carlos laughed and popped one of the spidery confections in his mouth. “Mmm,” he said after crunching noisily, swallowing elaborately. “They’re delicioso.”
Mack found himself mesmerized by Corrie’s face. She looked so at home, laughing with the children, not an aunt or a mother, a mere child herself, lost in the teasing moment, full of merry delight and wonder. So different from the woman who had greeted him at the door, the one who had been unable to remain standing as she ran to the little boy thrust behind his legs, and certainly not the famous newswoman the world knew so well. Here, she was one of the kids, her sultry, well-known PBS voice a beacon and her smile a lighthouse of warmth.
Something inside him twisted and pulled. If he’d met her only a few years before, he thought he’d probably have moved heaven and earth itself to spend some time with her.
Mack’s dinner partner, the little girl with the hapless giggles and the trusting grip, studied Juan Carlos’s antics with now-solemn eyes. “It’s squash,” she announced to the table at large. “I helped. It’s just squash from the pantry place, not spiders. We graded it. It gets an A-plus. Corrie wouldn’t make us eat spiders.”
“Señor?” Pablo asked.
Mack realized he’d been staring at Corrie, holding up the line for dinner. He jerked his attention back to the sideboard, muttered a quick apology and took one of the rattlesnacks and a couple of the yuckums to add to his plate before moving back to his chair.
When he sat down, the little girl with the big black eyes and missing teeth scooted a bit closer and whispered loudly, “They really are squashes. Don’t worry. It’s nothing scary.” She patted his hand and, in doing so, ripped something loose in his long-closed heart.
Corrie, who had almost convinced herself that it was just another rollicking evening at Rancho Milagro, had nevertheless been all too aware of every single move that Mack Dorsey made. She’d heard his throaty chuckle at Juan Carlos’s cheeky prayer, witnessed his surprise when no one took exception to it and saw the precise moment little Analissa had gotten under his skin forever.
She’d felt him jolt when Analissa patted the scars on his long, beautiful hands and told him not to worry; the squash confections weren’t scary. Everything in him seemed to stiffen, as if electrified. And she’d heard him take a hitching breath, as if what he was about to say he swallowed instead.
The children fell as silent as only kids could be while eating with total concentration. The adults talked about various ranch details, feeding the cattle, the shopping trip that day, adding a new corral for the horses in the spring, speculation on adding an official schoolhouse. It should have been just another normal evening, everything casual, simple, but it seemed thrown into chaos with the addition of Mack Dorsey, who contributed nothing to the adult conversation and seemed ill at ease with the children’s chomping noises.
Pushing her own plate aside, Corrie glanced at Jeannie, so at home in her special element of creating a home for disparate souls, and saw her friend’s gaze resting on Mack. To Corrie’s certain knowledge, Jeannie had never judged anyone, and Mack Dorsey appeared no different. Jeannie’s eyes conveyed nothing but warmth, welcome and a sincere level of curiosity.
Next to her, however, Leeza stared at Mack as if he’d suddenly sprouted horns. Her eyes widened and a look of recognition flooded her face. She straightened and stretched out her hand to Jeannie, who, although not breaking her easy smile, looped slender fingers over her friend’s wrist.
Leeza ignored the message. “Mack, I’m sorry, aren’t you—”
“Leeza,” Jeannie murmured in warning. Corrie tensed, waiting for Leeza to continue. Much as she, herself, might want to know about Mack, she didn’t want to put him on the spot.
“I finished my plate, señoras. Can I have dessert now?” Juan Carlos interrupted.
“Let’s see that plate,” Jeannie said, and with no more than a cursory glance, gave her opinion that dessert was in order. “But only after everyone helps clear these dishes.”
Seven bodies bobbed up from the table and Leeza’s question faltered in the wake of so much clatter of dishes and silverware.
Corrie hid a smile as little Analissa snatched Mack’s plate away mid-bite with a blithe “You’re done, right Señor Mack?” and a happy grin when he nodded, before she added confidentially, “I’ll be right back. You stay here, ’kay?”
“Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth on one of the cotton napkins and nodding at the intent young face waiting for an answer from him.
“Right here,” Analissa commanded.
“Just for you, I’ll wait right in this very spot. Can I move while you’re gone?” A half smile played around his lips and Corrie could tell Analissa had melted the frost in his eyes.
The little girl nodded solemnly. “But you can’t go away.”
“I won’t,” he said.
“Promise?”
Corrie frowned when he hesitated. What possible harm could it do to promise the little girl he’d be there when she got back? It would only take a matter of minutes while the kids deposited the dishes and brought in Rita’s amazing anise-flavored biscochitos and homemade ice cream.
“Promise?” Analissa demanded. “You have to promise. And cross your heart.”
“If you hurry back, I’ll be here,” he said, and reached his hand out as if he would stroke the little girl’s hair. His hand hung there for a moment, then dropped back to his lap as if the child’s aura had burned him.
Corrie’s breath tangled in her throat, both at the look of withdrawal in Mack’s gaze and at the lack of promise to the little girl. He’d agreed, but it had been a half promise at best, not the whole she’d asked for. Luckily, Analissa didn’t notice. She only beamed brightly, her partially toothy grin brightening the dining room as it always did. Before the child reached the door to the kitchen, she managed to lose most of the silverware on the two plates she smashed together, and chip at least one of those plates against the doorjamb.
Leeza leaned forward again, having retrieved the errant silverware and handing them to Jeannie’s adopted daughter, who was indulgently smiling at Analissa. “Mack, aren’t you the one who—”
Chance’s wineglass toppled into Leeza’s lap and he swore as he stood up, napkin in hand, and mopped up the wine. He apologized to the table at large for being every kind of a clumsy fool, then before a shocked Leeza could even remonstrate, he leaned down to say something in her ear before turning to kiss his wife soundly.
To Corrie’s surprise, Leeza flushed and shot Mack an apologetic look.
Corrie knew Chance wasn’t clumsy; his every move was measured and slow, calm and deliberate. The marshal had spilled his wine on purpose, stopping Leeza’s questioning of Mack.
Why? What didn’t he want brought out at the Rancho Milagro dinner table? What did he know about Mack? How he acquired his terrible scars, what accident befell him?
Why was Chance avoiding her eyes? Why did Mack appear so tense and stiff beside her? And why did her journalistic instincts rise so readily to the surface when she wasn’t working in the field anymore and never, ever wanted to again?
“Mack,” Jeannie asked, commanding attention as she stretched and leaned back into her chair, “what period of history interests you the most?”
“Prehistoric,” he said swiftly.
“Why is that?”
“Because the lines were so clear in those days. Survival was all that mattered. Find a cave, find a mate, make a home, go out and hunt a bear or two for food, clothing and fat for the fire. Simple. Hard, but simple.”
“Sounds rather macho,” Leeza murmured.
Mack waved a hand in a noncommittal gesture but nodded as he took a sip of wine. “Oh, there were plenty of matriarchal tribes then, too, but the bottom line was still the same. Survival.”
“What about happiness?” Corrie asked, twisting her own untouched wineglass around, wondering why his answer might mean something important.
“Happiness?” he asked.
Corrie thought he repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before, didn’t know its meaning.
He turned to look at her, as if he were trying to imprint some unspoken knowledge on her, and answered, “Happiness was a matter of security, safety, ensuring everyone in the cave had shelter, food and water. Safety. That’s all that matters.”
