At Close Range. Marilyn Tracy

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ