At Close Range. Marilyn Tracy

job?”

      She shook her head, though her eyes implored him to understand something she didn’t voice. He clearly saw her wary rejection. “I…I don’t think I can do anything without the approval of my partners, Mr. Dorsey—”

      “Just call me Mack.” Two could play at that game.

      “Mack.” He thought she repeated his name as if savoring it. Her eyes flickered and she shook her head. “I don’t think I can—”

      A horse’s angry whinny and a child’s scream cut her words off midstream. In the split second of hesitation following the scream, their eyes locked. Hers, he thought, carried a wealth of fear and helplessness, a pleading that he do something. His, he was sure, told her he couldn’t do a thing to help, that people had died because of him before.

      But looking into the depths of her coffee eyes, he felt powerless to resist her. Without a word, he shoved away from the table and was through the doors and across the veranda.

      From the time of the scream to his leap from the steps, no more than three seconds could have passed.

      A flashy pinto, with a small kid of nine or ten looking like a rag-doll saddle decoration, bucked and lurched toward the hacienda steps, whinnying shrilly and trying his best to rid himself of the child-burr on his back. The boy, all eyes and scrawny legs, screamed bloody murder and held on to the saddle horn for dear life.

      Without thinking about it, Mack jumped from the bottom of the steps, directly into the heaving horse’s path. The beast shuddered and whinnied anew but skidded to a halt.

      Mack heard a swift shriek from behind him. He heard other yells and ignored them. All his attention was focused only on the horse and the small boy perched above him.

      The little boy, who had somehow held on during the wild ride, lost his control at the abrupt stop and pitched forward. He somersaulted down the horse’s neck to land at Mack’s feet.

      Mack hooked a leg around the boy and flipped him behind him, not worrying how the boy would fare against the dirt, but terrified that the shivering horse would decide to rear and bring its sharp hooves down onto the child.

      Though he knew less than nothing about horses, he instinctively reached for the fallen reins of the horse’s bridle and, talking to the horse the whole time, managed to secure them. The horse turned a white, rolled eye in his direction and, trembling, stamped the ground and huffed several times before seeming to realize he was all right.

      When he could find his voice, Mack asked gruffly, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

      Corrie stood frozen on the veranda steps, both hands holding a scream inside. Fractured images of alternate timelines flashed through her mind, other presents and myriad futures: Mack Dorsey sitting calmly at the dining table, handing over references while Juan Carlos flew across the air to thud on the ground with a final groan of pain. Mack and Corrie laughing over something and Juan Carlos trampled by Dancer’s hooves. A funeral, a pregnant Jeannie crying in her husband’s arms, a headstone with Juan Carlos’s birthdate etched and the death date today. Juan Carlos riding Dancer and Mack Dorsey deciding not to come to Rancho Milagro that fine early spring afternoon.

      She heard him ask, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

      Juan Carlos sat up, perfectly all right, using Mack Dorsey’s jeans as a pulley. “Y-yeah, I think. Yeah, I’m okay.”

      Somehow, Corrie managed to get down the steps despite her watery legs and reached Juan Carlos about the same time the groundskeeper and sometimes groom, Jorge, came limping around the corner of the hacienda, gasping and cursing in little bursts of winded Spanish.

      Even as she patted the boy down, trying unsuccessfully to pry him from his grip on Mack Dorsey’s legs, Corrie felt like laughing at Jorge’s bedraggled curses. Juan Carlos, according to Jorge, would fall down a rabbit hole and be twitched to death by bunny whiskers. Juan Carlos, before the day was over, would have his face torn off by magpies and sewn on backward by prairie dogs. Juan Carlos, if he didn’t learn to listen to Jorge, would have to learn the entire alphabet in both Spanish and English backward and forward.

      “Niño,” Jorge panted, seeing the boy alive and tremulously smiling up at Mack Dorsey, “next time you want to kill old Jorge, just get a gun, okay?” He bent over, a hand on his chest, another on one knee.

      “El hombre stopped the horse for me,” Juan Carlos said, but didn’t let go of Mack’s jeans. Corrie knew how he felt. Her own legs gave way about then and she sat down in the dirt, one hand on Juan Carlos’s shoulder and the other on the toe of Mack Dorsey’s tennis shoe.

      “His name is Mr. Mack Dorsey,” Corrie said faintly. “And you better say a very good thank-you.”

      Juan Carlos looked up. “Thank you, señor. But you made me fall off the horse.”

      Corrie gave a ragged chuckle that was all too close to a sob. “Not quite good enough, Juan Carlos. Try again.”

      “Thank you for getting in the way of my horse, Señor Mack.”

      “J-Juan Carlos!” Jorge sputtered. “You get up right now and say you’re sorry.” After some effort, the older man stood upright and took the reins from Mack’s hands. “I’ll take the horse now, señor. Thank God you were here.”

      The two men clasped hands and Mack withstood a hard backslap from Jorge before leaning over to shake Juan Carlos’s upstretched hand.

      “Take it easy, kid,” Mack said.

      “You, too, Señor Mack.”

      Corrie looked up to find Mack’s eyes on her, a crooked smile on his lips. He held out a scarred hand.

      She put hers in his, felt the smooth skin enveloping hers, let him pull her up, smelled the dust the horse had kicked up, and smelled her own fear and the heady, all-male scent of Mack Dorsey.

      She nodded at him. He nodded back.

      She smiled and he didn’t.

      She drew a deep, tremulous breath. “The sooner you can bring your things, the better,” she said.

      Then he smiled.

      Chapter 2

      If Mack was surprised that everyone shared evening meals together at Rancho Milagro, the others seemed to find it perfectly normal. Within seconds of his entering the hacienda for a second time that day, he was subjected to a rapid-fire introduction to the rest of the household.

      He nodded at the awesomely tall and gorgeous Leeza Nelson, whom he’d spoken to on the phone when he first applied for the job. Leeza was only on the ranch for a short time, Corrie had told him earlier; she had to go back to Washington, D.C., to run her company. He also nodded to Jeannie, another of the partners, and Chance Salazar, her U.S. Marshal husband, and raised a hand to their two kids, Dulce and José. He was reintroduced to Juan Carlos—much improved by soap and water—the ranch hands, Clovis, Jorge and Pablo, and four other children ranging in age from six to eleven whom he didn’t have names for yet.

      Places were set at the enormous table in the dining room. Only a couple of the chairs were without mats, plates and silverware. Three large pitchers of iced tea with lemons and ice bobbing to the surface served as centerpieces and the cloth napkins adorning each plate all held a different shape.

      The housekeeper, Rita—a tiny stick of a woman in her forties—plopped the last dish down on an enormous sideboard before taking a place at the table herself and heaving a huge sigh. “Señors, señoras, and niños…dinner is ready.”

      Mack expected the kids to launch from the table and attack the sideboard, but no one moved. Finally, Jeannie held out her hands on either side, clasping her husband’s in one and her daughter Dulce’s in the other. “Grace,” she said. “Juan Carlos? I believe it’s your turn.”

      Mack couldn’t remember the last time he’d been a party to saying grace before dinner—some long-ago Thanksgiving when