Big Sky, Loyal Heart

Chapter 1-2

A tough-looking guy, maybe old enough to be her father, came out the other side. No problem. Patrick had plenty of practice cutting pretty young things out of the herd. He knew his slightly shaggy dark hair and bright blue eyes had power over female ranch guests seeking adventure. Cowboy strong—plus boots and hat—didn’t hurt either.

Just as she turned to face him, Minotaur took a sudden step sideways in the wrong direction.

There was a weightless, Wile E. Coyote moment before Patrick plummeted down to land face-first in the puddle made of last night’s brief rain and his pride. At least the morning sun had warmed it.

If the sleek woman laughed before she turned away, she hid it well.

Minotaur nuzzled at him in surprise.

“Some help you are.”

Minotaur puffed out a big, hay-flavored horse breath that knocked Patrick’s Stetson into the puddle for good measure before moving off to crop some grass.

“Little early for a swim,” Stan commented as he came out of the garage through a nearby door. He shifted some paperwork he’d been carrying between the parallel hooks of his missing left hand to his good right one, then offered his hooks for Patrick to grab.

“I was getting hot.” Patrick supposed the stainless steel hooks would be easier to clean than Stan’s other, flesh hand. Since the woman’s back was still turned, Patrick gratefully accepted the help.

“I saw,” Stan glanced over toward the helicopter. “Nice first impression.”

“Thanks. I try.” And usually it worked out just fine. He knew how to play his tall height and good looks to win, especially now that he was cowboy strong from three years of hard labor on the ranch.

“I was talking about her first impression. You should keep trying,” Stan chuckled, then snapped the fingers of his good hand. One of his dogs, who’d been busy marking a fence post, trotted over…and kept right on going. “Rip. Heel!”

They stood side by side, Patrick in the mud puddle and Stan on dry land, but Stan wore a look of total surprise on his face as if he was the one at sea.

“Rip!” Stan called out again.

But the dog kept going; nose first, he was on some scent. He trotted up close behind the tall brunette, then sat abruptly.

“I thought he only did that for explosives?” Patrick always enjoyed watching the former Navy SEAL dog handler training up a pack of hopeful military war dogs.

“Uh-huh,” was all the response Stan managed.

“Don’t the dogs usually look back at you after they sit? Doggie pride or some such thing you once said?”

“Every time. They want their toys as a reward for making the find.”

“He’s not turning,” and Patrick didn’t blame him. The view from behind was as nice as from the front on this tourist despite the battered leather jacket masking certain details. The war dog training was a separate part of the ranch operation from the dude ranch’s guests and rarely mixed.

Stan started walking over to see what was up with his dog. Patrick hesitated only long enough to flip Minotaur’s reins around a fence rail near a deep patch of grass and retrieve his hat from the puddle before following along. No way was he going to be cut out here.

Mark, climbing out of the pilot’s seat, saw him first and burst out laughing.

Okay, definitely not his best first impression.

The brunette very studiously didn’t turn, keeping her fists in her jacket pockets. The old guy looked over at him, then looked away as if he was of no consequence. A light blonde came around from the other side. She was absolutely majestic—just how a woman should mature.

Patrick liked his women young and frisky, though he’d outgrown coeds a number of years back, at least mostly, but the older blonde was well worth a second look. Up close, there was also more to the old guy than at first appearances—all wiry and hard muscle. His look clearly said, Do not meet me in a dark alley. Like Tom Berenger in Platoon. The guy must have seen some serious s**t, but that would be in his younger days. Now he had some salt in his longish dark-brown hair. The light-blonde stepped up close to him, close enough to be a couple. Her smile at Patrick was amused and, perhaps, a little sympathetic for some weird reason.

Then the younger brunette with the long legs turned, the slightest hint of smile on her lips more cutting than a laugh at his expense. For the briefest moment, her unexpectedly light brown eyes regarded him—rich as the amber of red clover honey.

Then she glanced down at the patiently waiting Rip.

She screamed and dropped like she was about to be run over by a cattle stampede.

In a moment of shocked silence, everyone, including Rip, just looked down at her curled up on the dirt.

Then the old guy spoke softly, “Oh, s**t!”

“I don’t know what happened.” Lauren was a little surprised to find herself sitting with a cup of hot tea cradled in her hands, hanging onto it for dear life despite the warm morning. She sniffed at it carefully. Peppermint with honey—she could deal with that.

She hadn’t been aware of much since seeing Jupiter impossibly reincarnated and sitting at her feet. She’d never fainted in her entire life. But all she remembered after seeing him were like brief snapshots. Being carried, tight against a well-muscled chest. Bright blue eyes crinkled in worry. The door into the big log-cabin style house. Inside had been all space and light. Modern furniture mixed with rustic decor. Then a dining room that could seat forty at a single long table and through to a kitchen big enough to feed them.

Now she was in an armchair at one side of the kitchen. There was a big stone fireplace, unlit, and a ring of comfortable leather chairs and sofas. It felt safe, but could she trust that? It had also felt safe to step from the helicopter onto good old American soil for the first time in far too long. Fort Bragg soil didn’t really count, but she’d thought Montana would be safe.

So not.

She looked around carefully. Listened.

No dog.

Working up some nerve, she checked around her feet and the other side of the chair. Still no. Should she be relieved that she was merely hallucinating? Or was that worse?

Surreptitiously, she rubbed her fingers over her belt. Yes, it was still Jupiter’s leash. Around her waist rather than attached to some hallucination turned far too real.

Close beside her sat the colonel’s wife, Captain Claudia Casperson, and another woman Lauren didn’t know who might have been Claudia’s twin sister—at least in some ways.

“Who are you?” It came out rude, but her nerves weren’t steady enough to fix anything.

“Emily. Mark’s my husband. Old friend of Michael as well.”

Michael? Oh. First name basis with Colonel Michael Gibson. He didn’t strike Lauren as a man who made many first-name friends.

“Do you feel up to talking about it?”

She shook her head, but Delta wasn’t about avoiding hard truths. A deep breath to gear up didn’t help at all. Lauren finally gave in and asked the question that was scaring her the most.

“Was there really a dog?” Though she didn’t know which answer she’d prefer.

Claudia nodded.

“A nearly pure black Belgian Malinois?”

This time Emily nodded. The two tall blondes shared straight, long hair cut neatly at their shoulders and piercing blue eyes. But after the first impression, they looked less and less alike. Claudia had a softer, Nordic face, but her soldier strength showed in powerful shoulders. Emily was pure Anglo-Saxon melting pot and look lean and fierce enough to take down a Russian T-14 Armata main battle tank—barehanded. Lauren liked that in a woman.

“Okay, that makes me feel a little better.” Not Jupiter reincarnated.

“Why did Rip surprise you so much?”

Rip, not Jupiter. She sipped her tea. That, too, seemed real. “How about a different topic?”

“Well, you certainly scared the daylights out of Patrick,” Emily looked amused.

“Hooks or klutz?”

“Hooks belong to former Navy SEAL Stan Corman. He was also an MWD handler, now a trainer.”

“TMI.” Way too much information. Lauren didn’t want to know anything about any military war dog handler. That was the last person she wanted to talk to or about. Jupiter was too recent. His eyes—

No dogs.

No. God. Damn…

And there lay the yawning hole once again. She sighed, then clawed her way back out. Again. At least she was getting good at that.

“So Patrick is the klutz,” she confirmed.

“He’s actually a surprisingly good horseman, considering his background, but—”

“He fell off a stationary horse into the only mud puddle in the county.”

“He did,” Claudia confirmed and sipped her own tea. “Guess it’s hard to blame him.”

“Why?” Lauren could think of no one else at fault than the man himself.

Claudia and Emily shared a look that Lauren couldn’t interpret, then both turned back to her.

“What?”

Emily rose to her feet, crossed the kitchen to rinse her mug at the sink and toss it into the washer. The room was high and airy, filled with light from the big windows. Hardwood flooring, vast counters, and all the equipment necessary to feed a ranchful of guests. Close by the back door, a kitchen table of thick slab fir had a dozen chairs clustered around it. There was a hint of a recently finished breakfast on the air, but the room was immaculate.

“Your room is over there, just off the kitchen,” Emily pointed in the other direction where a small hallway passed between two monstrous silver-faced refrigerators. “That way you won’t have to deal with the ranch guests if you don’t want to. Stan, the guy with the hooks for a left hand, brought in your duffle.”

“Not the klutz?”

“Nope,” Emily confirmed. “Now I have to go find out why Michael showed up here unannounced since Claudia won’t tell me.”

“I would if I knew, Emily. He’s not even talking to me on this one.”

“Likely story. You’re the only person he’s ever talked to.” Emily left by the back door.

Lauren turned back to face Claudia. “Surely it wasn’t Colonel Gibson who carried me in?” She couldn’t imagine the humiliation of having him carry her in here. It was so bad to have collapsed in front of him that maybe she should just catch a night horse to New York right now so that she didn’t have to face him ever again. Easy to get lost and hide in the Big Apple—from anyone other than Colonel Gibson. He could track anyone anywhere. There’d been missions with him where she’d wondered why she and Jupiter were along at all. Fieldcraft wasn’t something he knew; it was something embedded in his DNA at birth, then honed like the finest knife.

“No, Michael didn’t carry you,” Claudia confirmed. “Nor Major Mark Henderson.”

Major? Major Mark Henderson? The ranch pilot had been a full major before retiring? That would have been almost as embarrassing as being carried by the colonel.

“Hold it.”

Claudia simply smiled at her before rising to rinse her own mug.

“The Major Mark Henderson?” Lauren twisted around to look at Claudia.

She nodded without turning and racked her mug.

“That means that was…” Lauren turned to face the chair. Finding it empty, she swung to look at the back door where Emily had exited. If the pilot had been Major Mark Henderson, then “Emily” was the legendary Major Emily Beale. The two best pilots that the Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR had ever put at the controls of a Special Operations Forces helicopter. Both were retired, but they were the standard measure of everyone who followed in their flightpath—the standard no one ever matched.

It knocked the wind right out of her.

First name basis with Colonel Michael Gibson and his wife? Of course Major Beale would be. There were few better warriors in any military. Had she herself called Major Beale “Emily?” That would have been presumptuous and incredibly embarrassing, but she didn’t think so—she’d only been horridly rude in her first greeting. Strike One, Foster.

“She couldn’t be the—” But Lauren was alone in the kitchen. Claudia had gone as well.

She went to the sink herself and looked out the big picture window as she finished her own tea. To one side there were definitely horses. To the other was a hillside peppered with guest cabins tucked invitingly into pines and aspen. Some had people sitting on the porch, other folks were on the move toward whatever event was next.

The farthest cabin, the tiny one she’d picked out as the best from a tactical standpoint, peeked out between the trees. It looked nicely cozy. And out in the distance, towering mountains shot up out of the Plains with a suddenness so abrupt that it was like waking up in the midst of a freefall parachute jump.