Heroes In Uniform (143 page)

“Not at all. In fact, I’ve been researching the Susland family tree, and I’ve found out things – ”

“Oh, Lord, don’t let her get started on that,” Luke groaned as he took a seat at the table and reached for a cookie.

Marti swatted at his non-cookie-reaching arm without releasing Emily.

Grif also helped himself to a cookie and sat back to listen to the banter of old friends and family.

He’d wondered about Emily and he’d always liked Luke, but that didn’t explain why when they’d walked in, he had never been so happy to see two people in his life.

It wasn’t Marti’s questions that had worried Grif – it was his answers.

At The Heart’s Command: Chapter Three

Ellyn did something she hadn’t done in years. She tried on three combinations of clothes before she settled on what to wear.

Only because she wasn’t certain where they were going, she told herself.

With money tight, she hadn’t bought anything new except socks, a pair of jeans and some necessary winter outerwear since they’d moved to Wyoming. Her wardrobe’s saving grace was that she’d bought classics since she was in college, where she was also introduced to the wonders of mix-and-match dressing.

Continuing to mix and match in Wyoming what she’d brought from Washington had let her dress for work, school meetings, church and the few other occasions when she had to be presentable.

In the end, she settled on the black skirt with a hint of swirl to it, a black cotton shell and a red wool cardigan. With the black, red and white scarf her children had given her for Christmas – with an assist from Fran, she suspected – at her throat and loafers with a chunky heel, she looked good, but without any expectations.

That’s why she’d taken off her silk sheath dress – it had
expectations
. Now, as she considered her reflection, she was satisfied. After all, this was simply dinner with an old friend. An old
family
friend.

She gave an exaggerated smile, then stuck her tongue out at her image in the mirror.
Are we having fun yet?

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“Oh! Ben, you startled me.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She considered that, then added, “I also didn’t hear you knock.”

“That’s because you were making faces in the mirror,” he assured her, before adding quickly, “Mom, Meg won’t get ready.”

She gave him a look meant to make it clear she had noticed the flaw in his logic, along with his infraction of house rules, but was letting it slide this time. “What do mean she won’t get ready? If she’s doing homework...”

“Nah, she finished that a
long
time ago.” Ben had finished his homework in record time, bringing her all the papers to prove it, without being asked. He’d also meekly accepted her instructions on what he should wear. He must really want that steak. Ellyn’s internal grin twisted a bit, because she suspected what her son wanted even more was Grif’s attention. “She’s just sitting in her room, reading. And she’s got on those jeans you won’t let her leave the house in. I
told
her, she had to wear something else before Grif gets here, but she told me to go away.”

Ellyn started down the short hallway from her bedroom to the stairs at the back of the house that led to her children’s bedrooms, a bathroom, closets and a “guest room” that was bare of everything except dust bunnies. Ben trailed behind her, clearly intending to witness his sister’s comeuppance. Ellyn stifled a sigh. Sometimes her children’s greatest joy in life seemed to be seeing the other sibling get scolded.

“Ben, will you please go check that the front door is locked, so we’ll be ready to go when Grif gets here.”

The chances of the rarely used front door being unlocked were nil, but the possibility that it might delay their departure for dinner got Ben moving.

“Meg?” Ellyn knocked on the halfway-open door to her daughter’s room.

“What?”

Ellyn ducked her head through the small doorway of the room tacked on by some past generation of Suslands.

Meg was curled up on the upholstered chair that had once sat in the Sinclair family room. Ridge House had no family room, so Ellyn had been happy to agree to Meg’s plea that it be in her room. She’d recognized her daughter’s need to have tangible reminders of that earlier period of her life. Especially because in selecting what to sell before they came West, Meg’s little-girl bedroom set of white and rose had been among the items to go.

“Meg, Grif’s going to be here in a few minutes. You need to change.”

Meg slowly lifted her head from her open book, and gave her mother a look that it took Ellyn a moment to interpret. When she did, it gave her a jolt.

Pity.

Meg didn’t believe Grif would come. She didn’t believe he would live up to his word. He would disappoint them all – except Meg, because she was too smart to believe in him.

Grif’s not like your father
.

The thought came too fast to block, but Ellyn had no temptation to speak it.

Their first months at Far Hills, the final months with Dale, had revealed what their network of friends and neighbors back East – especially Grif – had masked. Dale hadn’t been much of a father to the kids for quite a while. Meg had learned not to trust Dale over a longer period of time and with harder lessons of events missed, plans canceled, promises forgotten. But Grif, too, had disappointed her. Not breaking a promise, because he’d made none, but breaking an expectation he had built by being there time after time.

“Meg, honey... I know it’s hard, but...”

“Grif’s here!” Ben called from downstairs. “I’ll let him in.”

Meg glanced toward her window that overlooked the driveway, but didn’t move.

Ellyn walked across the room and looked out in time to see Grif emerge from the car. Right on time.

“It’s Grif,” Ellyn confirmed, then added firmly, “You need to change, and quickly.”

She headed out of the room, as if in no doubt that Meg would follow that order, but felt tension ease from her shoulders as she heard Meg moving around in the room.

With her mind less occupied by her daughter, she spared her son’s room a glance in passing – a glance was all she could take.

Downstairs, she found Ben regaling Grif with tales of both Meg’s behavior and his own triumphs in youth rodeo – simultaneously and very confusingly.

“Benjamin Madison Sinclair,” Ellyn intoned, stopping Ben in mid-word. “You will not be going anywhere tonight if you don’t get upstairs and deal with your room. The wet towels now residing on the floor and furniture are to be folded neatly over the towel bar in the bathroom. The clothes you were wearing are to be put in the hamper, or folded neatly and put neatly in the dresser or hung up neatly in the closet. Have you recognized the important word in all this?”

“Yes’m. Neatly.”

“That’s right. Now get to it. You don’t want to keep Grif waiting, when he’s so kindly offered to take us to dinner.”

“Yes’m,” Ben repeated with an anguished look toward Grif. “I’ll hurry. Honest.”

Then he was gone. Ellyn could almost imagine she heard the word
steak
floating in the air behind him like a prayer.

“I’m sorry we’re not ready, Grif.”

He smiled faintly. “You’re ready, Ellyn, aren’t you? You look very nice.”

“Thank you.” She must have had a dearth of compliments lately to have such a standard one from an old friend threaten to jumble her thinking. “Yes, I’m ready. But with Ben on cleanup duty and Meg, uh, delayed, we won’t be getting out of here on time. If you made a reservation for six-thirty – ”

“I didn’t. Seven, with a request for salads to be served immediately in case the kids were starving.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you – and wise.”

He handled compliments even worse than she did – he simply ignored them. “Ben said Meg didn’t think I was coming back.”

“It’s nothing personal, Grif, it’s – ”

“Of course it’s personal. I disappeared on her – on all of you. She’s got a right to be angry. And cautious. It’ll take a lot more instances of being on time to get her faith back than it took to lose it.”

His gaze dropped from her eyes, seemed to touch on her mouth, then lower, to the moon of skin between the scoop neck of her shell and the silk of the scarf.

She managed a smile. “How’d you get so wise about children?”

“I was one, remember?” His lips curled. With his head slightly dipped, shadow prevented her from telling if the smile reached his eyes. “Besides, I had a wise mother.”

She wasn’t sure he’d ever truly been a child. From the time she’d known him he’d been reliable, steady, serious. Intent on doing the right thing on important matters. Perhaps it had been the effect of his mother’s long battle with cancer.

“Your mother...” She tried to call up an image, but failed. “I don’t remember her. I know all the Suslands came back every summer when you and Kendra were babies, but by the time I started coming out to the ranch, it was just you and Kendra.”

“I wish you’d known my mother,” he said in a deep, low voice. “You’d have liked her. She’d have loved you.”

Ellyn became aware of her heartbeat in a way she hadn’t been even an instant earlier, not only the fact of it, but hearing the sound of it, feeling the warmth of the blood it pulsed through her.

“I wish I had, too.” The words came out a throaty whisper. She cleared her throat, trying to grab back normalcy. “It must have been hard for you – ”

“We’re ready! We’re ready!”

Ben’s announcement preceded him like a trumpet call, ending the adult conversation. She could see Grif’s relief, and understood it.

Where that moment of something else had come from, she didn’t know – probably her imagination – and clearly Grif didn’t want her imagining such things.

Hadn’t she learned that lesson when she was eighteen?

* * *

Dinner was going better than Grif had feared, mostly because of Ben’s enthusiastic anticipation of his steak. And to a small measure because of Grif’s foresight in having the salads preordered.

It helped take the edge off their appetites, of course, but it also gave them each something to do during the silences. And with Meg’s apparent vow of silence added to Ellyn’s tendency to drift into unfocused abstractions, on top of his own lack of small talk and Ben’s chatter being interrupted by the higher need to eat, there had been definite gaps in the conversation.

The waitress had cleared the salad dishes, and the main dishes hadn’t arrived yet. Grif reached for the basket of rolls, intending to pass it around a second time.

“I heard it was true,” came a female voice from behind him, “but I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.”

Grif was already rising from his seat and turning before the final phrase, a grin spreading across his face.

“Kendra.” He wrapped the always-elegant figure of his cousin into an easy hug. “How are you?”

“I’m great, Grif. The question is, how are you? And why didn’t you come see me? My cousin, whom I haven’t seen in several years, drives right past my house and doesn’t even stop to say hello.”

“I was going to come by in the morning,” he defended himself. “I wish I could have been at the wedding, Kendra.”

“I do, too.” She smiled and hugged him again. “Well, you’re not getting out of it this time – you are going to meet the newest members of your family.”

She gestured to a dark-haired man holding the toddler who looked like a miniature version of him with added hints of Kendra. She smiled at the man and boy in a way Grif had never seen his cautious, self-contained cousin smile.

“Grif, this is my husband, Daniel Delligatti, and our son, Matthew. Daniel and Matthew, this is my cousin – Grif, to one and all, except the United States Army where he’s now Colonel John Griffin Junior.”

“Congratulations, Colonel,” said Daniel Delligatti, extending a hand with easy grace.

“I should be the one saying congratulations to you – for marrying Kendra.” Delligatti’s dark eyes warmed. “I’ve heard a lot about Daniel Delligatti from the family and...other sources.”

Delligatti’s eyebrows quirked up in immediate recognition of the “other sources” available to someone who worked at the Pentagon. “Other sources” could find out about someone who until recently had worked for the government, ostensibly strictly as a pilot. Delligatti’s eyes revealed a shade of amusement.

“I’d be willing to bet that those sources found out no more than my brother wanted them to find out.”

“Robert Delligatti Junior’s not a bad man to have in the family tree,” Grif acknowledged with a small smile.

“You knew Daniel and Robert are brothers?” Kendra asked, as she reached over to adjust the collar of her son’s jacket. Matthew had watched the entire proceedings in wide-eyed silence. “Wait a minute!” She turned and faced her cousin. “You had Daniel checked out? Grif, how could you do that? That’s – ”

The rest of what promised to be an indignant tirade evaporated under Daniel’s laughter. “What are you griping about, Kendra? You had me checked out, too.”

“That’s different. It was my life – and Matthew’s. I had every right.”

“And if the situations had been reversed, you know darn right that you’d have checked out someone Grif was getting involved with,” contributed Ellyn from her seat.

Grif immediately picked up that opening. “And would have been at the front of the line promising dire retribution if this someone ever hurt me.”

“That was subtle, Grif.” Judging from the twitches at the corners of her mouth Kendra was having a hard time keeping a grin under control.

“Sorry, Grif, but you’d have to get way back in a long line, anyhow,” Daniel said cheerfully. “Behind Ellyn, here, and Marti and Luke Chandler and Fran and – ”

“Me,” Kendra inserted.

“And that’s the most frightening of all.”

The newly married husband and wife smiled at each other in a way that had nothing to do with fright.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Grif offered, “We just ordered. I’ll get more chairs and – ”

“No, no, we can’t stay,” Kendra said. “Daniel’s on call tonight with Search and Rescue and Matthew’s tired out. He just had a shot, and I think it’s made him particularly sleepy. Believe me, he’s not usually this subdued.”