Battle for the Soldier's Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

battered rim of his straw cowboy hat with such naked dislike that Rory saw Gracie suck in her breath.
    Rory looked at the boy more closely.
    And then Rory looked at Gracie’s face.
    She was clearly struggling to hide everything from him, and she was just as clearly a person who had never learned to keep her distance from caring. Her tenderness toward that boy was bald in her face. And so was the hope.
    But she hid nothing at all.
    Rory Adams was a man who had lived by his instincts, by his ability to distance himself from emotion. He had survived because of his ability to be observant, to see what others might overlook.
    Rory looked back and forth between the boy and Grace, and he saw immediately what the complication was.
    He studied the boy—Tucker—hard.
    “How old are you?”
    Grace gasped, seeing how quickly he had seen the possibility.
    The boy did not look like Graham. But he certainly looked like Grace had looked just a few years older than this: freckle-faced and auburn hair.
    A million kids looked like that.
    For a moment, Rory thought the boy wasn’t going to answer him at all.
    From Serenity, a moan, and then, “Come on, Tuck, tell the man how old you are.”
    “I’m seven,” he said, reluctance and belligerence mixed in equal parts.
    So, there it was. A little quick math and the complication became a little more complicated, a little more loaded with possibility. And Grace was clinging to that possibility like a sailor to a raft in shark-infested waters.
    Serenity crawled back under the truck.
    “I need to talk to you,” he said, grimly, to Grace. He pointed at the boy. “And you need to go catch those ponies.”
    “You’re not the boss over me,” Tucker said.
    The flash in his eyes and the tilt of his chin were identical to those of the woman beside him.
    And the defiance was likable, if you were open to that kind of thing. Which, Rory reminded himself, he wasn’t.
    “You’re the one who said you’d look after the ponies,” Rory reminded him. Tucker left, making it clear with one black backward glance it was his choice to go.
    When he was gone, Rory turned his full attention to Gracie, whose expression clearly said he was not the boss over her, either.
    “Did Serenity tell you that kid was Graham’s?”
    “Don’t call him that kid! His name is Tucker.”
    “Okay,” he said, feeling how forced his patience was, “did she tell you Tucker was Graham’s?”
    “No.” That very recognizable tilt of chin.
    “Did she insinuate it?”
    “No. I had them over for dinner the other night. She never said a word about Graham and Tucker. Not one word.”
    “You had them over for dinner? At your house?”
    The you’re-not-the-boss-over-me expression deepened. Rory had to fight an urge to shake her. All those years of discipline being tried by a hundred-and-ten-pound woman!
    “Why wouldn’t I have them over for dinner?”
    Because it’s akin to throwing a bucket of fish guts to seagulls. They’ll be back. He said nothing.
    “I actually enjoyed it. She’s had a very tough life, but she’s very interesting.”
    “You don’t know anything about her!”
    Her chin was tilting stubbornly.
    “You can’t save the whole world, Gracie.”
    “No? Isn’t that what you and Graham were so fired up to do?”
    He let that bounce off him, like a fighter who had only been nudged by a blow that could have killed had it landed.
    His voice cold, he said, “That’s precisely why I know it can’t be done.”
    Instead of having the good sense to see what he was trying to tell her—that he was hard and cold and mean—that soft look was in her eyes again.
    It made him wonder if maybe, just maybe, if she couldn’t save the whole world, if she could save one person.
    And if that person was him.
    The thought stunned him. It had never occurred to him he needed to be saved. From what?
    “You want desperately for that boy to be Graham’s,” he said softly.
    “Don’t you? Don’t you want some part of