At Close Range

“Like for you to forgive me for last night?” Mack’s voice, deepened by emotion, seemed to slice right through her. Her gaze cut to his and the rough demand in his blue eyes snared her completely. She must have looked confused because he added, “For the stupid things I said?”

“I should apologize, too.”

“No, Corrie,” he said firmly, taking a step forward. “You had every right to be angry. You’ve been nothing but wonderful from day one. I’m the one whose been slinging a bushel of mixed signals.”

“You were pretty clear last night,” she said. Her voice felt rusty, her jaw stiff.

“Yes, if you mean my wanting to kiss you. And liking it. And wanting to do it again.”

“You do?”

“God, yes.”

Dear Reader,

Our exciting month of May begins with another of bestselling author and reader favorite Fiona Brand’s Australian Alpha heroes. In Gabriel West: Still the One, we learn that former agent Gabriel West and his ex-wife have spent their years apart wishing they were back together again. And their wish is about to come true, but only because Tyler needs protection from whoever is trying to kill her—and Gabriel is just the man for the job.

Marie Ferrarella’s crossline continuity, THE MOM SQUAD, continues, and this month it’s Intimate Moments’ turn. In The Baby Mission, a pregnant special agent and her partner develop an interest in each other that extends beyond police matters. Kylie Brant goes on with THE TREMAINE TRADITION with Entrapment, in which wickedly handsome Sam Tremaine needs the heroine to use the less-than-savory parts of her past to help him capture an international criminal. Marilyn Tracy offers another story set on her Rancho Milagro, or Ranch of Miracles, with At Close Range, featuring a man scarred—inside and out—and the lovely rancher who can help heal him. And in Vickie Taylor’s The Last Honorable Man, a mother-to-be seeks protection from the man she’d been taught to view as the enemy—and finds a brand-new life for herself and her child in the process. In addition, Brenda Harlan makes her debut with McIver’s Mission, in which a beautiful attorney who’s spent her life protecting families now finds that she is in danger—and the handsome man who’s designated himself as her guardian poses the greatest threat of all.

Enjoy! And be sure to come back next month for more of the best romantic reading around, right here in Intimate Moments.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

At Close Range

Marilyn Tracy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARILYN TRACY

Ranging in subject matter from classic women-in-jeopardy scenarios to fallen angels fighting to save the universe, Marilyn’s books have placed on several bestseller lists and earned her such awards as Romantic Times Career and Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Best of Series. She claims to speak Russian with fair fluency, Hebrew with appalling mistakes and enough Spanish to get her arrested at any border crossing. She lives with her sister in Roswell, New Mexico, where the only aliens they’ve seen thus far are the critters in their new home, a converted railroad warehouse.

For Dar, who lost Jim but has dear friends.

For Linda, who survived chemo and has dear friends.

And for Mom, who scared us all this year,

but has cool daughters.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 1

“They say that curses follow blessings,” Rita said, snapping a top sheet over the bed. “That’s the way it happens. First the good, then the bad.”

“Who’s saying this?” Corrie asked the housekeeper, not looking up from her notebook. She crossed out a word, penned in another.

“Oh, you know. People. Lots of different people, smart people. Too many good things have happened here, they are saying.”

“And there’s something wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with good things. Good is good. But when so much good happens…”

“It’s time for the bad?”

“Sí, señora, that’s how it works.” Finished with the sheets and the comforter, Rita plumped the pillows with a vigor belied by her tiny frame. Five feet tall, with black hair and snapping black eyes, she couldn’t weigh more than ninety pounds dripping wet and could wrestle the most recalcitrant child into washing behind her ears. “And that Doreen at the post office? She’s talking about ghosts again.”

Corrie chuckled, thinking of the bold young mother of three who peddled more gossip than stamps. “I should have thought she was too busy with her wedding plans to worry about ghosts out here,” Corrie said.

“Oh, Doreen was talking wedding plans long before she snagged that young deputy marshal. See, there’s another good thing.”

Corrie nodded absently, already back to studying what she’d written. It was less a journal than a song notebook, but as usual, the lyrics were too sharp and pointed, contrived in a harsh fashion. She sighed. She’d come to Rancho Milagro to join her friends and partners, giving up her safe career—or fleeing it—to help run the ranch. But secretly dreaming she could follow her heart’s desire, she’d run to the ranch in order to give herself the chance to write songs.

If what she’d penned that morning was any indication of the future, and if Reba McEntire decided to sing songs with a decided bite, Corrie Stratton would be a surefire hit; otherwise, she’d better get back into journalism. No one wanted to listen to songs that dripped with romanticism only to end in a kick-in-the-face at the denouement.

Rita moved to the carpet sweeper and began scratching it across the woven rug. “My mother had a saying, ‘Talk about something bad and the Devil won’t notice you.’ The priest, I don’t think he would agree, but me, I think she was right.”

“What rhymes with loss?” Corrie muttered.

“You writing a poem? I like the versos at church. I know, how about sauce? Moss?”

“Or floss.” Corrie groaned and closed the notebook for the fiftieth time in a month. She laid her head down on the desk. “Why did I ever think I was a songsmith, anyway?”

“You’re writing a song? Like ‘Qué Buena Esa Vida’? I like that one. ‘How good life is.’ Mmm. You write songs like that?”

Corrie raised her head from the desk. “I wish,” she said. She pushed up and turned her attention on Rita. “Let me get this right, because so many good things have happened here at the ranch….”

“Sí, like the children coming and being so happy. Like Señora Jeannie falling in love with Chance Salazar and marrying him even if he was a marshal. Like the water coming from the spring after all these years, just like the legend said it would. You coming here, even if your hands still shake and you have no meat on your bones. These things are all good things. Little milagros. Miracles. Of course, you know that because you speak such good Spanish.” She smiled, then sighed, placing both hands on the handle of the sweeper, looking for all the world like a Henriette Wyeth painting. “Now it’s the Devil’s turn. Mischief time. Bad luck.” She raised her hand in the old sign against the Devil himself, a crooked forefinger over a thumb, making a rough cross.

The doorbell of the hacienda rang, and when Rita didn’t make a move, Corrie leaned back, waiting.

Rita looked to the bedroom door and then to Corrie.

Corrie looked from Rita to the bedroom door, sighed and pushed away from the desk.

“Don’t go, señora,” Rita said. “‘When the Devil knocks, don’t answer the door.’ My mama, she says that.”

Corrie withheld a shiver and shook her head. It seemed to her that Rita’s mother was obsessed with devils and demons. She hoped Rita didn’t pass along her mother’s little gems to the children. They’d had enough rough times before coming to the ranch that they didn’t need a heap of superstitious nonsense clouding their fragile psyches.

The doorbell peeled again, the rich chimes echoing throughout Rancho Milagro’s main hacienda before Corrie reached the foyer. If she’d been writing a song about it, the words would have started, Rita’s mama’s Devil knocked at the door….

At least Rita had a mother; Corrie didn’t, nor did either of her partners in the Rancho Milagro venture. There seemed some irony in the notion of three orphans tackling an orphans’ ranch. There was a feeling of coming full circle and, at the same time, one of embarking into completely new territory. They knew how to be orphans, but did they really know how to raise them?

Corrie pulled open one of the heavy wooden doors, sincerely hoping it wasn’t another of the tabloid journalists seeking a miracle story.

The man standing on the veranda didn’t look like a devil, but how could she be sure these days?

He had his back to her, apparently surveying the ranch outbuildings, a few of the children in the corral and the playground, or perhaps he studied the long view to the Guadalupe Mountains in the distance.

He wasn’t dressed in what Corrie thought of as cowboy garb—boots, buckle and snaps—though he still managed to look from the Southwest with his broad shoulders, chinos, crisp cotton shirt and corduroy sport jacket.

If it had been twenty years before, she’d have taken him to be a reporter, but the new breed of journalists didn’t wear sport coats or starched shirts, and their pants usually looked several years worse for wear. She ought to know; she’d seen enough of them in her lifetime, and even more than that in the past month.

“Can I help you?” she asked softly.

He turned slowly, as if steeling himself against something unpleasant, and swiveled an unsmiling and scarred face toward her. Though healed, the scars were obvious results of skin grafting, and done by a rather skilled surgeon. The lack of a smile could be attributed to any of a thousand reasons.

Her first thought was that he must have been a remarkably handsome man before whatever accident had befallen him. Rugged, square features, high cheekbones, piercing blue eyes and graying black hair. Then she realized the scars only accentuated his looks, as if he’d been born of tragedy and it and not genetics had carved his fierce features.

He nodded.

She inclined her head in response and waited, her heart pounding a little faster.

“I’m Mack,” he said. His voice was pitched low and was somewhat gravelly, as though he spoke infrequently or smoked too much. A blues voice. “Mack Dorsey.”

The name seemed familiar, but the man did not. “Corrie Stratton,” she said automatically.

It was customary in the Southwest to hold out one’s hand immediately upon meeting, greeting or saying farewell. But Corrie wasn’t from the Southwest and still found the practice uncomfortable around strangers. Besides which, and to her relief, the screen door still served as a distinct barrier between them.

He gave a half lift of his lips, not, she thought, as if he were trying to smile, but as if trying to remember how. The scars on his face notwithstanding, nothing about him spoke of a damaged man. He looked tough and hard. Cold and unapproachable. His eyes told a story of a sorrow she didn’t think she wanted to know. It was too intense, too wrenching. And too challenging. She suppressed the urge to shut the door and suffer the agonies of rudeness rather than continue to stand there facing the imposing man.

“I’m here about the teaching job,” he said.

Relieved, she almost smiled. She knew who he was now. Jeannie had told her that a new teacher would be coming by for a personal interview. Jeannie and Leeza had already checked his references and investigated his past. Jeannie just hadn’t mentioned that it would be today.

Her partners happened to be in Roswell that day on a shopping run and, perhaps because she’d come to the ranch with trembling hands and jumpy nerves, she hadn’t had a hand in hiring any of the crew there thus far. But she’d been there long enough now that Jeannie and Leeza had been teasing her of late that she needed to take a more active role in the ranch governance, not just play with the children. It was all too likely that, in the manner of swimming instructors of old, they’d simply thrown her into the deep end, foolishly confident she would learn to keep her head above water.

This would be her first employment interview, and while she might have grilled heads of state, she didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to go about hiring a teacher for the children at Rancho Milagro.

Besides which, the man looked nothing like a teacher. With those forbidding icy-blue eyes, squared shoulders and scarred face, he looked as if he’d be more at home riding in a general’s jeep, eyes scanning the horizon for snipers and enemy troops.

“I had an appointment,” he said, and held out one of Jeannie’s cards with the Rancho Milagro logo emblazoned across it. “At one today.”

“Right,” she murmured, though she wanted to ask him to come back another day, sometime when Leeza, Jeannie or her husband, Chance, was there to talk with this stranger.

“And it’s one now.”

“So it is,” Corrie agreed, though, typically, she had no idea what time it might be. She was quaking inside. No matter how many interviews she’d done over how many years, and discounting the numerous tough situations she’d found herself in, she nevertheless still suffered from nervous qualms at bridging the first question. The obvious one seemed easier than most. “Won’t you come in?”

She pushed the screen door out and waited for him to take it, pulling her hand back before his could come within inches of it.

“Thanks,” he said, and let the door fall softly closed behind him as he brushed past her.

She felt the heat he carried on him, and told herself she was imagining things as the day had dawned with frost that covered the ranch. Still, they were in the desert and temperatures could easily soar into the nineties during the daylight hours.

Her hands were shaking as she closed the heavy wood door behind him. Before turning around, she drew a deep breath and whispered the oft-repeated litany that had gotten her through so many bad times in the past and countless interviews after that, “I’m Corrie Stratton, and if I survived my childhood, I can survive this.”

Mack waited for Corrie to turn around and wondered if she might just stay there, forehead pressed against the wood of the oak door, whispering to herself.

Not that he minded the view, he thought. Corrie Stratton was small in stature with a slender frame. Her curves were imperfectly hidden by her long fall of silky chestnut hair, a baggy but elegant emerald shirt and sweatpants that had seen better days. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted a cheery red that seemed at odds with her lack of makeup and inexplicably trembling hands.

“Corrie Stratton. Aren’t you one of the owners of Rancho Milagro?” he asked finally, though the moment she’d spoken to him he’d known exactly who she was. “And from your National Public Radio network, this is Corrie Stratton. Good night.” Maybe she played a larger role in his reasons for appearing at the ranch in the first place.

He watched as her shoulders straightened and her head lifted before she turned around. Her face was composed now, almost as if she’d never had a stray nerve in her life. He was struck by the change in her. Before, she’d seemed disconcerted, even a little frightened. Now she kept her expression neutral, a small smile playing on her full lips.

She nodded as she walked up to him. She held out her hand, and he had the feeling she’d accomplished the simple act by sheer force of will and, moreover, that she’d rather be on any other planet than standing there about to shake hands with him. And because of that he had no choice but to take that slim hand into his.

As always, the shock of feeling someone else touching the new skin on his hands gave him the sense of déjà vu, as if he simultaneously remembered how he was supposed to feel another’s palm and the reality of encountering it through new skin.

He imagined there was something different in Corrie Stratton’s fluttering touch. And that something struck him purely viscerally. Whatever the feeling was, it had nothing whatsoever to do with scars, nerve endings or wounds too recently healed.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He released her hand. He wasn’t sure what she was sorry about, but hid a smile as she curled her hand into a fist and cradled it against her chest, almost as though she were holding his imprint to her.

Or, perhaps, as if he’d injured her.

“Leeza and Jeannie aren’t here today.”

He frowned. “My interview is with you, I believe.”

She blinked. “It is?”

“That’s what I was told,” he said. He glanced down at the business card Jeannie Salazar had given him, though he knew Corrie Stratton’s name was scrawled on the back with the time of the interview beneath it. He flipped it over and held it out.

He thought of the endless hours he’d spent listening to her on the radio and wondering if any woman could measure up to that incredible voice. She did and then some. “Yep, here it is.”

She glanced at the card but didn’t reach for it. “You’ll have to forgive me. I must have forgotten to jot it down in my book.”

She wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d heard her voice a million times, a thousand hours beyond that. Low and sultry, her subdued voice, with its inherent sexuality, had led him to picture her to be long-legged, lush and ultraseductive.

Instead, she appeared scarcely tethered to this planet, held down by sheer gravity only. The epitome of petite, she was an almost elfin creature, only some five foot something, all long, delicate fingers, sloe eyes and cheery red toenails. And yet, her gaze, somewhat shy and attempting to hide her nervousness, spoke volumes. And let him know she was lying.

Someone had neglected to tell her about the interview. How he knew this, he wasn’t sure, but he knew it nonetheless. Corrie Stratton wasn’t the kind of person who might blame another. He wondered if she’d have been more nervous or less had she known he was coming there this afternoon. For the first time in a long, long time, he found himself curious about a real someone; he wanted to know what made a renowned radio journalist like Corrie Stratton so skittish.

She pulled her hair up into a rough ponytail that she held with her fist and walked past him to a long credenza-like entry table, rummaged in the upper drawer and retrieved a couple of pens. One she stabbed through her hair—and, amazing him, it held the mass of brown locks—and the other she tucked over an ear. She tugged a notepad free from beneath the hall telephone, flipped over the top few pages, smoothed them down and turned to him, all cool, calm and collected prospective employer.

“If you’ll follow me,” she said, and led the way across the massive living room through an archway into a dining room that could easily sit twenty people. She took a seat at the head of the table and gestured to a chair flanking hers.

He waited until she sat, then joined her at the table. He took in the children’s drawings over a long sideboard flanking the dining table. At least twenty of them had been carefully matted and framed and hung in rows beside a low mirror. The mirror reflected the living room he’d passed through, the fireplace on the wall behind him, some hand-woven baskets, a couple of original Holly Huber oil paintings, and an R. C. Gorman print.

His eyes continued their survey of the room and rested thoughtfully on a simple but highly effective alarm system on the dining room wall. It was the kind that could be triggered by hand, excessive heat or smoke. If he remembered the shriek it produced, it was worse than deafening.

“So,” she said, after drawing a deep breath. “Please tell me a little about yourself.” To his delight, she lifted her feet to the seat of the chair and wrapped an arm around her legs. After a glance in his direction, she cleared her throat and lowered her bare feet to the floor, crossing her legs in a decidedly studied, ladylike fashion.

He swallowed the smile threatening to surface. And admired the way she’d pulled herself together for an interview she obviously knew nothing about.

“I’ve taught for twelve years, have a master’s degree in history from Texas Tech and am certified in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, grades K through 12. And, if you have tennis courts, I can coach tennis, too.”

“I see,” she said, jotting down something in her notepad. “And what is it that makes you want to work at Rancho Milagro?”

He hesitated and she looked up to meet his eyes. Hers were a deep, rich brown, he saw, like coffee liqueur. Eyes a man could get drunk and drown in. He thought it was a lucky thing she’d made her mark in radio broadcasting; those eyes on television would have made the male population newsaholics.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you ask?”

She paraphrased her question about working at the ranch.

He looked away from those liquid brown eyes. “I heard what you were trying to do out here. I liked the sound of it. And wanted to be a part of the miracles.” He attempted a chuckle as he finished blurting the raw truth.

He couldn’t tell her that he’d wanted to be around the woman who had pulled him through a nightmare of torturous procedures, that he craved a slice of the joy Rancho Milagro apparently served for breakfast. At least he hadn’t blurted out that he wanted a new life.

Simply wanted.

He didn’t really believe wanting made anything so. He used to, once upon a distant time, but not any longer. He fought the nightmare images that threatened to rise to the surface, the tragic sound of children crying for help, the scent of burning linoleum and, ultimately, the stench of despair. He didn’t believe miracles were possible, but he wanted any and all to come his way so much more than he could ever begin to tell her.

He felt dazed as she gave him a swift, conspiratorial smile. A knee tucked back up into her chest. She clasped it and leaned forward. “Me, too,” she said.

She, who seemingly had everything, wanted a miracle? What could she possibly want? To meet another king, interview another world leader? What was she even doing on this lonely ranch, miles away from everything?

He didn’t voice any of his questions, but apparently his silence seemed to make her potential-employer consciousness take over again. Her leg lowered and crossed again. He resisted the urge to look beneath the table to see if her toes even touched the floor.

She asked, “What was it that you liked the sound of?”

The miracles—and you, he almost said, lured by her eyes into telling more unvarnished truth. “The kids. Taking foster kids and orphans, giving them a working ranch and home environment. Letting them have half a chance before sending them out on their own,” he said.

He’d wanted, perhaps needed, to come to work there because the tabloids and news features referred to the place as a ranch of miracles. When cynical journalists waxed ecstatic, a huge kernel of truth must lie within the story. And one truth was obvious, the Rancho Milagro partners took in the strays of the world and offered them new lives.

He asked, “How many do you have now?”