Defender Read online

  She grinned. “Mandy has a friend who still makes fresh butter the old-fashioned way, with a churn and a wooden mold. We’re having some with the rolls.”

  “What’s a churn?” he asked.

  “City boy,” she teased. “It’s a round, oblong container, usually made of thick ceramic. You put fresh milk in it, then you use a dasher—a long stick with a crosspiece on the bottom—to churn the milk until it finally starts to make butter. Then you scoop the butter out and salt it and put it in a mold.”

  “Wow. That sounds complicated.”

  “It is complicated,” she agreed. “Especially when you’re the person who does the churning.” She grimaced. “Whenever it was churning time, no matter where I hid, my mother would always find me.” She smiled sadly. “But she was sweet about it. I got a whole quarter for my efforts. That was a lot of money to a seven-year-old. I could buy a comic book or an ice cream cone with it.”

  “Good luck finding a comic book for that price today,” he scoffed.

  “I know.”

  “Well, I’ll go scout the perimeter and make sure all the surveillance systems are up and running,” he said. “Call me when there’s food.”

  “I will.”

  She watched him go out the back door with quiet, faintly worshipping eyes. After last night, she thought they might be closer. But he was as distant as ever. In fact, he seemed even more distant than before.

  She went into the kitchen and started taking out ingredients for the rolls. Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day. She had time. Paul wasn’t going anywhere. And she was patient. She smiled and sang to herself as she put yeast and sugar into the mixing bowl and added warm milk to start the yeast rising for Mandy.

  * * *

  They ate silently. Paul went through the rolls like mad, even forgoing extra stew for them. “You have a gift,” he told Mandy when he was sipping his second cup of black coffee.

  “Thanks,” she replied, beaming with pride.

  “Who taught you to make rolls?” he asked. “Couldn’t have been her.” He indicated Sari with a grin. “She can only make biscuits.”

  “Biscuit bigot,” Sari muttered.

  He burst out laughing. So did Merrie and Mandy.

  “It was a trainer who came to work with one of the Thoroughbreds,” Mandy said with a smile.

  “A horse trainer?” he exclaimed.

  She nodded. “He was Australian. Before he became a trainer, he worked in a bakery with his parents, who owned it. He could make anything. He taught me how to make rolls and breads and cakes and even French pastries. You remember, Sari, he had that hunky son who was your age. He spent some time with you while his dad was teaching me new recipes.”

  Paul frowned. He didn’t like the sound of that. He was jealous, and furious with himself because he was. “When was this?” he asked abruptly.

  “I don’t remember,” Sari said, oblivious to Paul’s expression.

  Mandy saw it and winced. “Oh, it was years ago. You were fifteen,” Mandy said. “And I had to make the boy stay in the kitchen with his dad the whole time I was learning, because your father was afraid the boy might make a pass at you.”

  “That’s right,” Sari said. She sighed. “The trainer was so nice. Blond and big and handsome.”

  “And married,” Merrie added gleefully.

  “Yes. And married.” Mandy laughed as she finished her own coffee. “Besides that, he and his wife had two little girls, much younger than the son who came with him to work with the horses. He had photos of them. They were so beautiful.”

  Paul had pushed back his chair. “Sorry, I have to make one last pass around the stables. Back in a jiffy.”

  Sari frowned and exchanged glances with Mandy and her sister. “Did we say something wrong?” she asked.

  Mandy had a suspicion, but she didn’t dare voice it. “You know how he is,” she laughed. “It’s hard for him to sit still.”

  “I guess so,” Sari replied. She smiled and asked Merrie about the art classes she was taking, the subject of the handsome horse trainer and his family quickly forgotten.

  * * *

  Outside, Paul lifted his face to the cool air, and his eyes were closed as he fought back memories that terrified him. Sari hadn’t known, hadn’t meant to resurrect the past, but it came sometimes without warning.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets and moved toward the stables, pushing the memories away, locking them back into a compartment where they were harder to access. It had been four years, but he couldn’t escape them. The Bureau had offered psychological counseling. He should have taken it and stayed where he was, not tried to run away from it. The pain had been so severe, the trauma so reaching, that he couldn’t think past it. He’d thought running was the answer. In retrospect, he realized it wasn’t. Memories were portable, invincible, eternal.

  He kicked at a rock and sighed. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing, but he couldn’t really regret it. He loved it here, with the girls, with Mandy. It was the only peace he’d ever found in his turbulent life. He was reluctant to think of giving it up.

  But he was thinking of it. The job, while nice, was a dead end. Not only that, Darwin Grayling’s behavior was deteriorating to the point that it made Paul wary of him. The man had issues, and his paranoia was getting worse. Someday, Paul might be required to take action, and that would only hurt the girls.

  He kept remembering Sari’s pert little breasts under that silky gown, and his physical reaction to it. She was almost twenty-two. Years too young for him, he told himself, at thirty-two. But one day, maybe, the years wouldn’t matter so much. It was possible…

  No. He had to stop thinking that way. She was a Grayling. She was already worth millions. One day she’d inherit half the money her father had, and she’d be worth even more. It, like this job, was a dead end. He couldn’t let himself be tempted. It would only lead to tragedy. Darwin Grayling planned to arrange his daughters’ marriages to other wealthy men so that the fortune wouldn’t be squandered. While the girls didn’t like the idea, and he didn’t blame them, it was sensible to make sure the money stayed in the family.

  Money. His nose twitched. He’d hated his relatives’ greedy planning and plotting as they searched for ways to get instant wealth. Most of their plots were outside the law and they were lucky that they hesitated to put anything into motion. Because Paul would have turned them in, and they knew it.

  The absolute worst was his cousin Mikey. The man, younger than him by a few years, would do almost anything for money. His thirst for it had led to tragedy. Paul wished he could blame his own tragedy on Mikey, but it was his own fault. He’d prodded the wrong man, trying to make a name for himself, trying to prove that just because his whole damned family was on the wrong side of the law, he wasn’t. That decision had produced devastating results.

  In the end, he’d brought the mobster down. But the cost. Dear God, the cost! The Bureau had lauded him, rewarded him. But he’d walked through the accolades like a zombie, his heart broken. His grandmother had comforted him, stayed with him. But so soon afterward, he’d lost her, too. Now there was just him and his cousin left. Out of respect for family loyalty, he kept in touch with Mikey. Who knew; one day there might be a good reason for it.

  * * *

  Any outing, regardless of its routine, required Paul to accompany whichever of the girls had to make it. Today, it was a trip to the law school in San Antonio to register. Sari already had her letter of acceptance, but registration was required.

  Paul went with her and waited while she filled out forms, learned the campus and spoke with a faculty advisor about courses she had to take in the fall semester.

  When she was finished, he was still waiting, his eyes on a black anvil cloud in the sky nearby. He didn’t like the look of it. Texas was notorious for tornado outbreaks in the
spring, and his cell phone had already flashed a tornado watch alert.

  “You look worried,” she accused, holding a sheaf of papers in one hand. “What’s up?”

  “That.” He indicated the black clouds gathering. “There’s a tornado watch.”

  “Nothing unusual for here, sadly.” She cocked her head. “How about lunch before we go home? There’s a nice little place beside the River Walk.”

  “Suits me. I’m starved.”

  He drove them to the touristy area and parked the car. It was hard to find a spot, because traffic was teeming.

  “How about that one?” he asked, nodding toward a small café with tables overlooking the river.

  “Perfect,” she replied.

  They ordered sandwiches and coffee and waited for them to be brought out. Paul’s eyes were still on the clouds, worried.

  “Will you relax?” she chided. “It’s just storms.”

  “I don’t know,” he mused. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  He had them infrequently. Mostly about weather. He’d predicted the last very unusual snow that fell on San Antonio, and a downburst that had destroyed trees nearby in an earlier storm.

  “You’re a weather magnet, that’s what you are,” Sari chided. “Like that guy in the movie about tornadoes.”

  He chuckled. “Maybe I am.” He shook his head. “I guess I watch too much TV.”

  “You should surf the internet, like I do,” she replied, biting into a thick roast beef sandwich. “I learn things.”

  “Such as?” he asked with twinkling dark eyes.

  “How to bathe a cat, for one thing.”

  “You don’t have a cat, so why would you need to know how to bathe one?”

  “Oh, cat ownership is an impossible dream of mine,” she confessed. “We’ve never been allowed to have animals inside. Or outside.”

  “Why not?”

  Her mind avoided the memory of why not. She forced a smile. “Daddy’s allergic to fur,” she lied. “Anyway, if I ever get a cat, and I might one day, I need to know things like that.”

  He finished a bite of his own sandwich and washed it down with coffee. “Okay. So how do you bathe a cat?”

  “First you put on a raincoat and galoshes and one of those scuba diving thingies, with a scuba mask and a snorkel.”

  He stopped eating, blinked and stared at her. “Excuse me?”

  She was laughing uproariously. “I read it on a website. I could barely get through it all. It doubled me over.”

  He chuckled. “I think I read that one, too,” he mused. “No sane person would even attempt to bathe a cat, though,” he added. “They have groomers who do that.”

  “Groomers?”

  He nodded. “They do cats as well as dogs, didn’t you know?”

  “No. How did you?”

  “We… I had a cat once.”

  She forced herself to ignore the slip. She sipped her coffee while she tried not to think about what it implied. “There was this other video,” she continued, “about goats.” She grinned, putting on an act so that he wouldn’t realize she was reacting to his statement.

  “Goats?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Here. Let me show you.” She pulled out her phone, went through a few screens, hit a button and handed it to him. There was a goat. But when he opened his mouth, he screamed like a human.

  Caught by surprise, Paul burst out laughing.

  Sari watched him, smiling. She loved to see him laugh.

  He handed her back the phone and caught his breath. “I can see that YouTube has a lot to recommend it,” he confessed.

  “It’s so much fun.” She put up the phone. “I don’t have a social life, so I hang out on YouTube to see what the rest of the world is up to. Some of it is just hilarious.”

  “It is.” He shook his head. “I never heard a goat scream.”

  “Me, neither,” she said, grinning.

  His dark eyes went over her face like searching hands. Something inside him clenched. She was beautiful. Not in a conventional way, perhaps, but what was inside her was beautiful. She had a soul like a poet.

  Her reddish-gold hair caught the light and shone like gold touched by sunlight as she bent over her cell phone. Paul watched her, aching inside for something he knew he could never have.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  She looked up and grimaced. “It’s a text from Daddy. He wants to know why we haven’t come back home yet.”

  Which meant Darwin Grayling was tracking them. It made him furious, but he had to hide it. He smiled. “Tell him there’s a storm and I don’t want to get caught on the road in it.”

  She nodded and typed some more. Then she drew in a sharp breath. “He says come home anyway, he has to speak to you about something.” Her blue eyes narrowed with concern.

  “Okay. His call. But if that storm hits, I’m getting off the road and to hell with being a little late getting home. Tell him that,” he dared, dark eyes glittering.

  She bit her lip. “Will you send flowers, if I do?” she asked with graveyard humor. “Okay. But I’m editing that a little,” she added, as she started typing again.

  “Chicken,” he taunted.

  She laughed hollowly. “Paul, you haven’t ever really seen Daddy in a temper,” she told him when she was putting up the phone in her purse. “If you had, you’d think twice about making him angry.”

  “Why?” he asked innocently as he drained the last of his coffee. “Does he start turning green and burst out of his clothes?”

  She didn’t get it at first. Then she did, and she exploded with laughter.

  He leaned forward and said in a ghostly voice, “You wouldn’t like me if I was angry!”

  The laughter increased. She wiped tears from her eyes.

  He grinned and got up to pay the bill, beating her to it.

  “I was going to get that,” she protested.

  “I might not be a millionaire, but I can afford lunch,” he said with apparent good humor, but there was hurt pride beneath it. He was painfully aware of the differences between them.

  She glanced at him, with his hands deep in his pockets as they walked, his lifted chin as eloquent as a eulogy.

  “It bothers you, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  He frowned. “What does?”

  “That I’m…that I stand to inherit millions,” she blurted out.

  “Nah,” he said, passing it off. “I like you in spite of it.”

  “Oh, you!” she laughed, punching his muscular arm.

  “All the same, your dad’s going to be particular about any man who comes into your life,” he added.

  “That would be pure luck,” she said with a sigh. “We’re wrapped in cotton and packed in a box when we aren’t studying. I had to beg and plead just to get to go to college in San Antonio. And he only made that concession because he knew you’d be driving me both ways.”

  He stopped walking, aware of boats going by on the river in front of the businesses, draped in bright colors and packed with tourists despite the summer heat. “Don’t you feel like breaking out of that satin prison? Ever?”

  She looked up at him with her heart in her eyes. Of course she did. With him. She wanted to run away with him, live with him, love him, take care of him. And that would never be possible. Her father would kill him, even if he actually wanted her. Which he didn’t.

  She smiled faintly and turned away, walking again. “There’s not really any way to get out, unless Daddy loses his millions. Then it wouldn’t worry him if I got involved with someone, because he’d have nothing to lose.”

  “Not much chance of that ever happening,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “Not much,” she agreed.

 
“He won’t let you date, will he?” he asked suddenly.

  “No.”

  He glanced at her. “I don’t like that note in your voice, Isabel,” he said quietly.

  “What note?”

  “Fear.”

  She swallowed. He couldn’t know how her father reacted to threats of male interaction with his girls. She couldn’t tell him, for fear of what he might do. He’d lose his job and she’d never see him again. Or even worse.

  “Can’t you talk to me?” he asked softly.

  She hated that deep, tender tone. It made her toes curl, made her hungry for things that had no real physical expression. “I wouldn’t dare,” she said, and then laughed as if to make a joke out of it.

  He didn’t realize that she wasn’t kidding. He’d never seen her father raise a hand to her or Merrie. In fact, all he saw was that he was overly protective of them.

  “I read somewhere that millionaires marry among their own, to keep the money in the families that have it,” he said as they reached the car.

  “It’s pretty much true,” she had to confess. “Two of my friends at college married men their parents picked out for them.” She made a face. “Neither of them was happy about it. One girl even tried to run away, but her parents’ security team caught her at the airport and brought her home.”

  He unlocked the car with his smart key and put her inside. He was quiet, uncommunicative. He’d just recalled what he’d learned about the bodyguards that watched Sari and Merrie any time they were away from the ranch, even when they were with Paul. It made him angry, as it had when he heard about it. It was as if Mr. Grayling didn’t trust Paul to take care of his daughters.

  Unless, he thought irritably, the man thought he might get fresh with one of them, Isabel in particular. He knew Mandy wouldn’t give them away, but there might have been a hidden camera somewhere that he hadn’t known about. Mr. Grayling might know that Isabel often came into his room at night and sat on his bed, talking to him.

  “You’re positively morose,” Isabel teased. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Did you know…?” His foot hit the brake and he turned suddenly into the parking lot of a closed business.