Authors: Elaine Levine
Mandy smiled at Fiona. “We’d be lost without Fee.”
Eden shook her head. “I think I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole somewhere along the way. Nothing makes sense to me.” She looked at Mandy. “Fee’s dad blew up your riding center and you’re not mad at her?”
Mandy lifted a shoulder. “She had nothing to do with it. Her dad was the town plumber. Everyone knew him. No one expected him to do something like that.”
Eden looked at the two women. “So now what? We all just live here, and what, grow veggies on this commune?”
Mandy sighed. “Kind of. I was hoping to have the construction done by late summer so I could open my therapeutic riding center. But, now that we’re in the middle of this war, I can’t do anything other than work with my horses in preparation for a future opening.”
“How do you support yourself?” Eden asked.
“I’m a licensed physical therapist. I worked for several years in Denver, but I had a crazy dream of opening my own therapeutic riding center on my family’s ranch. The explosion put me back to square one. I’m not supporting myself. I can’t without the center. Rocco is helping me with the bills. As is my brother, Kit.”
Eden looked at Fee. “How about you?”
“I usually worked for my stepdad during the summers, but not any more. The guys won’t let me off the ranch to take a waitressing job in town.”
“This really is the Hotel California.”
“Maybe,” Mandy shrugged, “but it’s better than the alternative.”
Eden thought about her two friends and their terrible injuries. Perhaps Mandy was right. They chatted for a few more minutes, then both girls left. She patted the bed and called Tank up. He settled close to her side, half leaning on her.
She pulled one of the pillows over to hug in front of her. The bed linens smelled freshly laundered. She squeezed the pillow as she listened to the sounds in the house. It was quiet downstairs. She wondered where everyone was. She felt so alone and yet, strangely, safe for the first time in weeks.
Ty was standing with Rocco by the front door when she came downstairs the next morning. He looked tired and disheveled, still wearing the clothes he’d worn yesterday. It surprised her to see him up. She could almost believe he cared to see that she settled in here comfortably.
“Morning, Eden. Rocco will be running with you today.” Rocco was dressed in a tan tee and cargo pants. He wore black sneakers and was fully dressed out with a Kevlar vest, a thigh holster for his pistol, and a wire in his ear. Ty held up a smaller version of the Kevlar vest Rocco wore. “You’ll need to wear this. We eliminated one sniper this week. Don’t want to chance that they’ve put another one to work.”
“All right.” She took the vest from him and slipped it over her head. For a minute, she just looked at him. There was so much to say, too much with his friend standing nearby, waiting. She was still furious about her situation. She’d lost all of herself—her freedom, her job, her future. But was that really Ty’s fault?
“Ready to go?” Rocco prompted.
Eden nodded. Ty touched her cheek, capturing her attention. “I’ll be in the living room when you get back. Breakfast will be on by then. Come and get me, okay?”
Again she nodded. Rocco held the front door open for her and Tank.
Rocco, Eden soon discovered, had been all over Ty’s property and knew the best jogging trails. They crossed rolling hills of short grass prairie before they hit a line of trees about a mile from the house. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen in the deep, pure blue sky. The air was fresh and crisp. The summer heat had come in. She knew the day would be blazing hot. But right now, for their run, it was still cool.
Ty’s ranch was the only residence at the top of the ridge. It was bordered, she learned, to the south by Mandy’s property, to the west by the highway, and to the north and east by BLM land. Rocco told her Ty had thousands of acres of land. It was a heaven up here, with low, green hills of short grass and patches of thick evergreen forests. Here and there, huge outcroppings of aging granite formations speared up through the ground. She wasn’t much of a rock climber, but the buttes looked like they’d be fun to scale.
“Rocco?” Eden asked when they’d stopped at a halfway point. “Why does Ty hate this place? It’s breathtaking up here.”
Rocco’s dark eyes considered her for a moment. He shifted his gaze back down the trail they’d used. “He wasn’t treated very well here as a child. He doesn’t have good memories about this place. If you want to know more than that, you’ll have to ask him yourself.” He looked at her again. “I sincerely hope you are the woman he thinks you are, Eden.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s falling hard for you. To my knowledge, he’s never been in love before, and I’ve known him a long time.”
“He’s not in love now. We’ve only just met.”
“I would not like to see him hurt,” he reiterated in a calm voice. She suppressed a shiver at the things that were unsaid in his comment.
“Got it. Should we head back?” She started back the way they came without waiting for Rocco.
By the time Eden showered, changed, and came down for breakfast, some of the team were moving about. Ty was drinking a cup of coffee by the open patio doors in the living room. He turned to her when she stepped off the stairs.
“Good run?” he asked.
Eden looked at him, wondering if what Rocco had said was true. Nothing in his expression revealed anything about his feelings. She nodded. “You have a beautiful property here, Ty. I think I could never get tired of exploring it.”
“I hope you’ll do that to your heart’s content—as long as one of us is with you. Hungry?”
“Starving.” Geez, it was hard staying angry with the man. “I need to feed Tank. I usually do that in the kitchen. Will that be okay here?”
He made a face as they walked down the hall. “Eden, you’re stuck here. Might as well make it your home. Besides, Tank’s better behaved than some of the guys—feed him at the table if you want.”
“Morning, Eden, Ty!” Mandy greeted them cheerfully when they stepped into the kitchen. Mandy, Fee, and Greer were in the kitchen, helping Kathy with breakfast preparations.
“Eddie,” Greer flashed a smile at her.
“Hi. You’re working so hard. Is there something that I can do to help?”
“No,” Kathy answered. “It’s under control. You guys shouldn’t even be in here.” She sent a harried glance toward Ty. “I’m sorry. I do have a helper starting this morning.”
“I’m not my father, Kathy. None of us minds lending a hand. I don’t want you to be overwhelmed.”
Eden wondered about that exchange as she filled Tank’s dishes and found a little stretch of wall for them away from the other animal dishes in the room. There were odd undercurrents in the group that she couldn’t yet understand.
“I don’t know if Ty told you, Eden,” Mandy said, “that breakfast is a help-yourself buffet. Lunch is, too. Dinner’s the only time everyone tries to sit down together. So feel free to keep whatever hours you like.”
“Thanks. That’s good to know.”
“Want a cup of coffee?” Ty asked her as he headed back out to the dining room.
“Sure. Cream and sugar, please.” Eden followed him. A young boy—Rocco’s son, she presumed—was sitting alone at the enormous dining room table. She sat across from him. He looked like a miniature of his father, with the same dark eyes and hair.
“Hey, weedlet,” Ty said from the buffet where he was fixing their coffees. “This is Eddie.”
Zavi looked at her, then back at Ty. “Is she my aunt?”
Ty grinned. He shot a glance at Eden. “Not yet.”
Zavi nodded, then switched from sitting on his chair to kneeling on it. “Who do you belong to?” he asked Eden.
She blinked, sending a confused glance over to Ty, then to Mandy, who’d come out of the kitchen with one of the inserts for the chaffing dishes. “I don’t belong to anyone.”
The boy gave her a worried look. “Everyone belongs to someone,” he argued. “I belong to my dad. Mandy does too. And my dad belongs to Owen. He’s the chief.”
“He’s the chief?” Eden repeated. Was the man humble or what?
Zavi nodded. “My dad said he was.” He dabbed a piece of bacon into a puddle of ketchup, painting the plate with the red sauce as he recited the web of relationships for her. “And Fee belongs to Uncle Kelan. And Uncle Kelan belongs to Owen. And all of my other uncles belong to Owen.”
“Your other uncles?” Eden asked.
“Everyone here. Except the Jacksons. They belong to Uncle Ty. But Uncle Ty belongs to Owen.”
She looked at Ty as he took the seat next to her. He set her coffee mug down in front of her, still grinning. He sipped from his coffee, totally avoiding the conversation.
Mandy leaned over Zavi to make sure he was eating. “I’m full,” he told her. “Can I go play with the dogs?”
She kissed his cheek, then cleaned his hands and face. “Play with them in the living room. Your dad will take you outside after breakfast. Not too loud, baby.”
He called to Yeller and Blue, Mandy’s two dogs, enticing them to follow him with a piece of bacon he’d hidden in his pocket. Tank looked at them, then at Eden, but stayed where he was at her feet.
“Zavi recently joined us from Afghanistan,” Mandy explained after he’d run into the hallway. “An explosion killed his mother and extended family. Rocco was separated from him for a time. It was a huge relief when they were reunited.
“He’s learning about a new way of life here, but some lessons are harder to grasp than others—things that have to do with safety and who an enemy is or isn’t.” She sighed and listened to the boy playing at the front of the house.
“I can’t imagine having to relearn how you understand the world around you and what its rules are. He speaks English without an accent. I had no idea he was from Afghanistan,” Eden commented.
“Rocco’s a linguist. His son has inherited his unique abilities. Rocco’s already teaching him Spanish.”
“And Pig Spanish,” Ty added. “He already knows Pig English and Pashto.”
Kathy, Fiona, and Greer brought out the rest of breakfast choices. Ty stood up and waited by Eden’s chair for her to rise so they could go to the buffet. He was so polite. She was used to much less deference from men, probably because she only interacted with the guys at work. She was such an unfem, they probably thought her of as just another guy.
She and Ty filled their plates. When they returned to their places at the table, the room was filling with the rest of the team members. It was overwhelming seeing them all together. It didn’t matter that they wore civilian clothes—no guns, no war gear. They still sucked up all the oxygen in the room.
And none of them were average Joes. They all looked like they could bench press two of her without breaking a sweat. Having them surround her at the table was a bit like sitting on a parked tank—one that wasn’t actively firing at any targets but could in an instant.
Eden listened to the small talk going on around the table. She kept silent as she ate her breakfast, unsure of her role in the group.
“Eden,” Kit said from across the table, “Max and Angel work with the girls for a couple of hours each morning. Why don’t you join them? They spend some time learning self defense, then they go to the shooting range we have set up outside and work with Val.”
These guys were teaching the girls self defense? That was surprising. “Sure.” She looked at Mandy and Fee. “If you think I won’t bog you down, that is.”
“No! Join us!” Fee told her. “It’s insane. We do a mix of martial arts, yoga, boxing, and kickboxing. We’ve been doing it for several days now and I still hurt.”
“It’s brutal,” Mandy agreed. “You’ll cry like a baby later. But, given all that’s happening, it feels good to be learning how to protect ourselves.”
Ty began to frown while Mandy was talking. Eden glanced around the table and noticed he wasn’t the only one glaring at Max and Angel—Rocco and Kelan were, too. The testosterone in the room was off the charts. Eden looked from the growly-faced men to Fee and Mandy, curious how they reacted to the posturing happening at the table. Fee was buttering a bagel. Mandy was stirring her coffee. Both were completely oblivious to it. Eden shook her head. She was going to have to get used to a whole new normal here.
The training sounded like fun. And it would be good to know how to defend herself. She’d be able to go back to her old life without worrying if someone was stalking her. A month here might not be so bad after all.
“What?” Angel asked the guys who were still glaring at him. “You think our enemies are gonna be nice to the girls because they’re pretty? If Mandy had been able to do a week ago what she can do now, she’d never have been kidnapped. So, no, I’m not gonna ease up on them.”
Eden flashed a look at Mandy. She’d been kidnapped? What happened? Had they done to her what they did to Eden’s friends? She didn’t look nearly as broken as Sherri and Trudy had.
Oh, yeah. She was definitely going to make the most out of the training the guys were offering.
CHAPTER TEN
“Kit, take a look at this.” Rocco had four journals open on the white folding tables down in the bunker where they were translating the papers Amir left behind. He showed Kit several pages devoted to a handful of quotes from the Qur’an.