Battle for the Soldier's Heart

The attacker aimed a hard kick with cowboy-boot-clad feet at Rory’s shin. Still slightly off guard, Rory shot out his arm and held the child at arm’s length. The kick missed but, undeterred, the kid tried again.

A boy. Rory had not been around children much, so he didn’t know how old. Seven? Eight? Maybe nine?

Despite his size, the boy had the slouch and confidence of a professional wrangler. And he was dressed like one, too. His jeans had holes in both knees, his denim shirt had been washed white. A stained cowboy hat was pulled low over his brow. It was more than obvious this child had not been at the upscale birthday party that had just ended.

“Don’t you ever touch my mama,” he said, glaring up at Rory, not the least intimidated by the fact his opponent was taller than him by a good three feet and outweighed him by about a hundred and fifty pounds.

He was the kind of kid—spunky, undernourished, defiant—that you could care about.

If you hadn’t successfully killed the part of yourself that cared about such things. Rory had seen lots of kids like this: chocolate-brown eyes, white, white smiles, spunk, and he’d learned quickly you couldn’t allow yourself to care. The world was too full of tragedy. It could overwhelm you if you let it.

Rory let go of the boy, backed away, hands held up in surrender. “Hey, I was just trying to rouse her so she could catch her ponies.”

“I’ll look after the ponies,” the boy said fiercely.

“It’s okay, Tucker,” Gracie said, and put a hand on the boy’s narrow shoulders. “Nobody’s going to hurt your mother.”

The boy flinched out from her touch and glared out at her from under the battered rim of his straw cowboy hat with such naked dislike that Rory saw Gracie suck in her breath.

Rory looked at the boy more closely.

And then Rory looked at Gracie’s face.

She was clearly struggling to hide everything from him, and she was just as clearly a person who had never learned to keep her distance from caring. Her tenderness toward that boy was bald in her face. And so was the hope.

But she hid nothing at all.

Rory Adams was a man who had lived by his instincts, by his ability to distance himself from emotion. He had survived because of his ability to be observant, to see what others might overlook.

Rory looked back and forth between the boy and Grace, and he saw immediately what the complication was.

He studied the boy—Tucker—hard.

“How old are you?”

Grace gasped, seeing how quickly he had seen the possibility.

The boy did not look like Graham. But he certainly looked like Grace had looked just a few years older than this: freckle-faced and auburn hair.

A million kids looked like that.

For a moment, Rory thought the boy wasn’t going to answer him at all.

From Serenity, a moan, and then, “Come on, Tuck, tell the man how old you are.”

“I’m seven,” he said, reluctance and belligerence mixed in equal parts.

So, there it was. A little quick math and the complication became a little more complicated, a little more loaded with possibility. And Grace was clinging to that possibility like a sailor to a raft in shark-infested waters.

Serenity crawled back under the truck.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, grimly, to Grace. He pointed at the boy. “And you need to go catch those ponies.”

“You’re not the boss over me,” Tucker said.

The flash in his eyes and the tilt of his chin were identical to those of the woman beside him.

And the defiance was likable, if you were open to that kind of thing. Which, Rory reminded himself, he wasn’t.

“You’re the one who said you’d look after the ponies,” Rory reminded him. Tucker left, making it clear with one black backward glance it was his choice to go.

When he was gone, Rory turned his full attention to Gracie, whose expression clearly said he was not the boss over her, either.

“Did Serenity tell you that kid was Graham’s?”

“Don’t call him that kid! His name is Tucker.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling how forced his patience was, “did she tell you Tucker was Graham’s?”

“No.” That very recognizable tilt of chin.

“Did she insinuate it?”

“No. I had them over for dinner the other night. She never said a word about Graham and Tucker. Not one word.”

“You had them over for dinner? At your house?”

The you’re-not-the-boss-over-me expression deepened. Rory had to fight an urge to shake her. All those years of discipline being tried by a hundred-and-ten-pound woman!

“Why wouldn’t I have them over for dinner?”

Because it’s akin to throwing a bucket of fish guts to seagulls. They’ll be back. He said nothing.

“I actually enjoyed it. She’s had a very tough life, but she’s very interesting.”

“You don’t know anything about her!”

Her chin was tilting stubbornly.

“You can’t save the whole world, Gracie.”

“No? Isn’t that what you and Graham were so fired up to do?”

He let that bounce off him, like a fighter who had only been nudged by a blow that could have killed had it landed.

His voice cold, he said, “That’s precisely why I know it can’t be done.”

Instead of having the good sense to see what he was trying to tell her—that he was hard and cold and mean—that soft look was in her eyes again.