Battle for the Soldier's Heart

“The pony person is, um, incapacitated. Not your problem,” she said, flashing him a smile that made him frown. She had been aiming for a smile that said, This? Just a temporary glitch. Nothing I can’t handle.

And she had obviously missed that smile by a long shot. Grace hoped he didn’t catch her anxious glance toward the parking lot.

Thankfully, she’d had the trailer the ponies had arrived in moved way across the parking lot into the deep shade of the cottonwoods on the other side. She had not wanted the partygoers to bump right into it in its decrepit condition.

“Maybe we’ll meet again under different circumstances,” she said, hoping he would take the hint and leave.

But he did not have the look of a man who responded to subtlety, and he had caught her glance toward the parking lot. Now he was looking past her. She moved in front of him, trying to block his view, but it was no use. He looked over her head, easily.

Not a single person at the party had mentioned the trailer. It was as if they hadn’t seen it at all.

But then, most people weren’t like him.

And Rory Adams had become a man who saw everything, who missed absolutely nothing.

Of course, she knew from the few things Graham had said when he came home on leave that these men led lives that depended on their ability to be observant of their surroundings, every nuance of detail, every vehicle, every person, every obstacle.

Rory stepped around her, and headed right toward where the ramshackle horse trailer was. It was painted a shade of copper that almost hid the rust eating away at it around the wheel wells.

On the side, in fading circus letters, three feet high, it said, Serenity’s Wild Ride.

He looked over his shoulder at Grace, his eyes narrow. “What’s she doing here?”

He recognized the trailer. He knew Serenity. Was it what Grace feared? Or what she hoped?

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU know her,” Grace said, scrambling to keep up with him on her one shoe. “You know Serenity.”

She stopped and picked up the other on her way. Since one had a heel and the other didn’t, she took them both off and dangled them from her fingertips.

“A chance encounter a long, long time ago.” Rory glanced back at her, hesitated, and then waited. “Watch for pony poo.”

“Oh!” Life was so unfair. Well, that was hardly a newsflash. But, if Grace had to see Rory Adams, wouldn’t it have been nice if she had been sipping a glass of white wine and looking entirely unflappable, rather than chasing after him in bare feet, avoiding poo?

“What’s she doing here, Gracie?”

She wanted to remind him she didn’t want to be called Gracie, but something about the way Rory had stopped and was looking down at her made her feel very flustered.

The weak compulsion to share the burden won.

“She came by the office a week ago.”

“She knew where your office was,” he said flatly.

“I’m in the phone book. She said she knew Graham.”

Grace did not miss how his eyes narrowed at that.

“She knew I had an event company.”

“So, she’s done some homework.”

“You don’t need to make it sound like she’s running a sting, and she found an easy mark.”

He raised an eyebrow. It said exactly.

“She just wondered if I could give her some work. She had ponies, I had an upcoming birthday party. It seemed like it might be win-win.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Hell’s bells. She did not like it that he could see through her that easily. It meant she had to avoid looking at his lips.

Naturally, as soon as she told herself not to look at his lips, she did just that. Why did men like him have this kind of seductive power over people? Female people anyway!

“What makes you think I’m not telling you something?” she hedged.

“I was Graham’s best friend for ten years and you refused to see me, but a complete stranger shows up who claims a passing acquaintance to your brother and you’re forming a business partnership with her?”

“I rented her ponies for an afternoon. That’s hardly a business partnership.”

“It’s not ‘I can’t see why we need to talk,’ either.”

Something crossed his face.

“I hurt your feelings,” Grace said, stunned.

For a moment, he looked stunned, too. Then a shield came down over his eyes, making them seem a darker shade of emerald than they had before. A little smile tickled the sinfully sensuous curve of his mouth. His expression was not exactly amusement, and not exactly scorn. More a kind of deprecating self-knowledge.

“Gracie, honey—”

Gracie wasn’t bad enough? Now he had to add honey to it?

“I don’t have feelings for you to hurt.”

That was what he wanted for her to believe. And she saw it was entirely possible that he believed that himself. But she didn’t.

And suddenly Rory Adams was more dangerous to her than ever. Because he wasn’t just handsome. He wasn’t just the first man she’d ever had a crush on. He wasn’t just her brother’s best friend and fellow adventurer.

Because just before that shield had come down in his eyes, Grace was sure she had caught a glimpse of someone who had lost their way, someone who relied totally on himself, someone lonely beyond what she had ever known that word to mean.

“There was a complication,” she admitted slowly. “That’s why I agreed to have her provide ponies for the party.”

“The thing about a woman like Serenity?”

She hated the way he said that, as if he knew way too much about women in general and women like Serenity in particular.

“What kind of woman is Serenity?” Grace demanded sweetly, though the kind of woman Serenity was was terribly obvious, even to Grace. Serenity was one of those women who had lived hard and lived wild, and it was all catching up with her.