Defender

“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.