Guarding the Soldier's Secret (14 page)

A crush of men, too close...too close. The heat and smell of their bodies. The distant sounds of traffic...a car horn beeping. The smell of dust.

She shook off the memory, telling herself it was ridiculous. Laila was safe here. Nobody had taken her. She was here somewhere. Of course she was.

She climbed down from the corral fence and hurried through the barn, calling her daughter’s name as she went. Anger and fear fought a war within her, the tide flowing from one to the other and back again in an instant.

Laila, where are you? You are in so much trouble...

Where could she be?

I’m going to kill her for going off without telling me!

She wouldn’t do that! Something’s happened to her—it’s the only explanation.

She met Abby outside the barn.

“Couldn’t find her anywhere around the house,” the other woman said, breathing hard. “I called. Maybe she went to see the horses? Or to the creek?”

“Laila’s terrified of horses.” Yancy pressed one hand to her forehead, fighting panic. “She wouldn’t go into the pasture for anything, not even to get to the creek.”

“Could she have gone back to the villa?”

“I suppose she might have. You don’t think she went with Sage?”

Abby shook her head. “He wouldn’t take her without telling us. Wait—maybe he left a message on my phone...” She fished it out of her pocket, glanced at it and made a face. “Damn. I keep forgetting there’s no service here. Out at the end of the lane it’s better.”

She began walking down the lane and Yancy matched her stride for stride.

Where is she? She can’t just vanish. Not here. Not here. We’re safe here. Hunt said so.

Oh, God, where is she?

“No message,” Abby said, sounding out of breath herself. She shaded her eyes with one hand and turned in a circle, clearly at a loss.

What do I do now? I don’t dare fall apart.

Yancy felt a touch on her arm and struggled to bring Abby’s face into focus. She found the other woman’s eyes soft with compassion and concern.

“Listen—why don’t you go back to the villa and see if she’s there. I’ll go make another circle through the barns and sheds. There’s probably a million places she could be. Okay?”

Dumb with fear, Yancy could only nod.

She watched Abby run away from her, blond braid bouncing between her shoulder blades. Then she turned blindly to the smooth road that wound between copses of poplars and evergreens and beds of roses to her grandfather’s villa. She walked with her head up and fists clenched tightly at her sides, barely aware of her surroundings, consumed by the terror that only parents could know. Realizing that until Laila she’d never really known fear.

How can that be, when I’ve stood on countless battlegrounds under fire from air and ground, reported from the midst of crowds bent on violence and mayhem, ridden various beasts along trails where one misstep meant a horrifying plunge to almost certain death? How could all that have left me cool and calm, while one missing eight-year-old child reduces me to mindless terror?

And the worst of it was she was alone in this. Utterly alone. She didn’t remember much about losing her parents, but she did know she’d never felt alone. There had been her sister, Miranda, and her grandparents—her mother’s parents, anyway. But now, as a single parent, she was on her own.

I shouldn’t be, dammit!

In that instant, for an instant, she hated Hunt. Hated him for abandoning his child, for leaving his little girl in the care of someone ill equipped to take on the responsibility of a child.

Hated him for coming back from the dead only to vanish again.

Be honest—you hate him for leaving
you
.

Oh, yes, she did hate him for that. Not just for three years ago, but for this morning and all the other times he’d left her. Left her aching, sometimes with her heart still thumping and his sweat still drying on her skin.

Was it possible, she wondered, to hate someone and long for him at the same time?

Hunt, I need you, damn you!

And she had to face the fact that she was always going to need him, and he was never going to be there for her. Ever.

* * *

Laila wasn’t at the villa. Yancy hadn’t really believed she would be. Wrapped in her parent nightmare, now she was convinced her child was gone. Somehow or other, irrational and impossible as it seemed, someone had managed to swoop in and snatch Laila, leaving no trace.

She couldn’t shake that memory of the crowd of bearded, turbaned men pushing in around her and Laila, the feeling of imminent danger, the suffocating surge of panic.
The Taliban?
Could they really reach so far? Was Hunt wrong and it was Laila they wanted after all? Or...did they want
her
, as Hunt believed, and merely meant to use her child as a way to get to her?

Either possibility was unthinkable.

Leaving the housekeeper, Josie, on the telephone spreading the word and rallying help, Yancy wandered out to the front of the villa. From the wide front steps she could see, straight ahead, the wide circular drive, the lane and the trees, the meadow beyond and the mountainside beyond that. To the left, the canyon dropped away to the valley floor, enveloped now in a summer heat haze. As she stood gazing at it all and seeing nothing, a sound penetrated her fear-dulled mind. A rhythmic sound. The clip-clop of a horse’s hooves.

She shaded her eyes and stared across the drive to where the lane disappeared behind the trees. She saw nothing, but the clip-clops continued. And then, like a mirage slowly taking on substance, a horse and rider emerged from the trees into the deep shade. They came slowly on, stepping finally into bright sunlight. And Yancy could see now that it was not one rider, but two. One was an old man with shoulder-length white hair and a white beard. He wore a Western-style hat and sat straight in the saddle, the reins held in one hand. But it was the other rider, seated in front of the old man, that held Yancy’s tear-shimmered gaze.

A child. A little girl. A little girl with dark hair.

She drew a trembling breath and held it, clamped it in with a hand across her mouth, while the pinto clip-clopped lazily up to the steps of the villa. It halted, bobbed its head, and a snort gusted from its nostrils. Almost in a trance, Yancy descended the steps.

“Howdy,” the old man said, tipping the brim of his cowboy hat. “I’m your granddaddy Sam Malone. And I’ve got something here I think belongs to you.”

Yancy held up her arms, and Laila, a determined smile pasted on her lips, released what appeared to be a death grip on the saddle horn. Sam Malone steadied the child with one hand while Yancy eased her daughter out of the saddle and lowered her feet to the ground.

“I wasn’t scared, Mom,” Laila whispered during the brief moments she was in Yancy’s arms.

“She’ll be ridin’ with me every mornin’,” Sam informed her. “Right after she gets done feedin’ her goats. We have a deal—right, kid?”

“Right,” said Laila, without much conviction.

“Seven o’clock, down at the old barn.” Sam touched his hat brim and turned the pinto sharply. A few steps on, he halted and looked back, while the horse danced impatiently, hooves clattering on the pavers. “You ride, missy?” he asked Yancy.

“I do,” she managed to reply. She added, “Eastern style, I’m afraid.”

Her grandfather snorted. “Well, you’re welcome to come along, if you want to.” He and the pinto trotted on, unhurried, across the drive, down the lane and disappeared behind the trees.

Yancy’s legs buckled and she sat down abruptly on the steps. A small hand came to pat her shoulder.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Laila. “I wasn’t scared. Sam was holding on to me really tight. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. He’s my great-grandpa, you know.”

* * *

The next morning Yancy was shaken awake at roughly six o’clock by Laila, who was already dressed and hopping with eagerness to eat her breakfast so she could feed her goats and go riding with Sam.

Stifling a groan, Yancy sent her off to the kitchen with her blessing, thus buying herself time for a shower.

Odd, she thought, how different it was, with no work schedules to keep, no phones to answer, no deadlines to meet. She’d spent most of her adult life keeping odd hours, getting up at all hours of the day or night, managing to look and sound presentable in front of a television camera often on little or no sleep and very few amenities. But after yesterday’s upsetting morning, she’d felt as if she were sleepwalking through the rest of the day and then again had tossed and turned all night.

Not that it had been a difficult day. Far from it. She and Laila had driven the rented car around the valley, ending up in the river town of Kernville, where they’d had pizza for lunch and Laila had played on the swings in the riverside park and splashed in the river’s frigid but gentle rapids. They’d wandered through some antiques shops and eaten ice cream sitting outside at a table with an umbrella, and Yancy had promised Laila they would return another day to go tubing on the river.

In the evening, after Laila had fed her goats under the relaxed supervision of Sage, he and Abby had again joined the rest of the family for dinner at the villa. They enjoyed another delicious meal prepared and served by Josie—as usual, she had emphatically refused all offers of help. And then the adults—Yancy, Rachel and J.J., Abby and Sage—had relaxed on the patio with glasses of wine or bottles of beer, talking quietly while Laila swam in the pool and baby Sean napped in J.J.’s lap.

The daytime winds had died and dusk had darkened slowly into peaceful night when Abby and Sage said good-night and went home to their little adobe. Rachel and J.J. went to sit on the edge of the pool, letting Sean kick and wriggle naked in the warm water like a little pink frog. Laila made the baby laugh by coming up in the water close to him and blowing a fountain of water onto his tummy.

When Rachel and J.J., too, said good-night and went indoors, Yancy coaxed Laila out of the pool with reminders of her new morning responsibilities and her early riding date with Sam. In their room, she checked the time on her cell phone and was shocked to discover it was after ten o’clock. She’d forgotten how short the nights were in late June.

After a brief shower and perfunctory teeth-brushing, Laila had fallen asleep almost instantly—and this morning had risen chipper as a bird. Yancy, on the other hand, now felt like a lump of cold oatmeal.

She didn’t understand why she felt so flat. Briefly, she wondered if she might be depressed, although she didn’t really know what that would feel like, never having had any experience with depression. At least, to the best of her recollection. True, her life had taken some unexpected turns, but that had never bothered her before. She’d always found the unexpected to be stimulating, in fact, and had relished the challenges it brought.

Could it—God forbid!—be because of
Hunt
?

And if it was, then what made his sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance any different this time from all his other comings and goings over the years? He was Hunt Grainger, after all. It was just what he
did
.

A voice inside her whispered,
Yes, but this time maybe you expected more
.

A knot formed in her chest and a peppery rush stung her eyes.
Okay, maybe I did. Because of Laila. This time I thought...

Impatient with herself, she brushed away the thought and willed away the physical symptoms of her disappointment. She’d learned, after all, the only thing she could count on with Hunt was that he could not be counted on.

It was who he was. End of story.

* * *

Yancy and Laila walked down to the barn together, though neither said much. Each of them was lost in her own apprehensions, Yancy imagined, though she was pretty sure they weren’t nervous for the same reasons. Laila would be worrying about the riding lesson, given her fear of horses. Yancy was more concerned about the instructor.

Sam Malone.
What did one say to a grandfather barely remembered? A man known mostly for being unknown. A man notorious for his exploits and scandals, for his meteoric rise from mysterious beginnings to unimaginable wealth and power, and his equally rapid descent back into the shadows. A man who had never been interviewed, was seldom quoted and whose few appearances on film or camera predated the advent of color television. Based on her own brief experience with him, he was obviously a man of few words.

Although...there was that letter.

But this is not the time for regrets, and I can’t change the past anyhow.

Those words echoed in her mind now. A shiver rippled through her, one that was more anticipation than fear. She wondered which part of her was looking forward more to the meeting with Sam Malone: the reporter on the brink of the story of a lifetime or the little girl yearning for her grandpa.

* * *

Sitting relaxed in the saddle on his favorite horse, Old Paint, Sam watched the two figures come walking down the lane toward the barn. The woman—his granddaughter, goldarn it—was slim and long-legged like her grandma, and the early-morning sun lit up the red in her hair like fire. The kid was wearing a ball cap today, he was glad to see—he’d have to find one for her mother, or she’d burn for sure in the California sun. She looked like a boy, the kid did, and for a second or two there, he could’ve sworn it was Kate and John Michael come to life again.

“Don’t be a fool, old man,” he said aloud, having reached the age where he didn’t give a hoot whether anybody thought he was crazy.
He
knew he wasn’t, which was what mattered.

He took his handkerchief out of a hip pocket and blew his nose to get rid of the sting that had slipped up on him unexpected. Then he slipped back into the shadows behind the corral fence while Sage went out to meet the two visitors. Sage had stuck around this morning to saddle the horses and help the kid with her goat chores, since he was of the opinion she was too small to stand up to a hungry animal taller than she was. Sam’s opinion was that the kid needed to learn to stand firm and show the critter who was boss, but he’d been overruled.