He bowed his head with the others when Jeannie signaled Juan Carlos to perform the blessing.
The boy cleared his throat and sang out a version of grace he’d obviously been practicing. “Thanks for the tacos, thanks for the beans, and thank you, God, for my blue jeans!”
Mack wasn’t the only one who chuckled. And to his combined surprise and relief, no one reprimanded the boy. The little girl, whose hand had rested so trustingly in his, removed it to cover her giggles.
Jeannie’s husband, Chance, gave a sharp bark of laughter, followed by deep chortles. Leeza muttered something and, shaking her head, hid a grin that threatened to soften her somewhat forbidding features. Jeannie tsked but smiled fondly at the kid whose gift for rhyme might not meet a holier person’s standards.
But Corrie’s reaction was the best, he thought. She bit her lower lip while giving the boy a slow, deliberate wink, as if they’d cooked up the crazy blessing together. And when the boy gave her a cocky thumbs-up, Mack realized that they had. No wonder miracles happened around this place.
When she glanced at him, and recognized by his answering look that he’d caught her coaching, she flushed a little, shrugged, and by tilting her head at Juan Carlos, let him understand that she didn’t want him to say anything. Mack remembered her conspiratorial smile earlier that afternoon. Before the bucking horse episode, prior to her offering him the job, when she’d asked him why he wanted to be at Rancho Milagro, and, at his answer of wanting to be a part of the miracles, she had hunched forward, guileless, conspiratorial, and said “Me, too.”
The little girl next to him leaned against him, still giggling, sharing her laughter in her shaking shoulders. He resisted the urge to place his arm around her. Corrie’s wish of teacher-cum-kindly-uncle might be her dream, but in the real world of lawsuits and traumas, a simple touch could so easily be misconstrued. Still, the little girl pressed against his arm and rested her forehead on his forearm. He couldn’t help but chuckle at her helpless laughter. And for a fleeting moment, wondered how long it had been since he’d laughed.
“Okay, tonight, even though we have a newcomer, kids get to go first,” Jeannie said. “And Juan Carlos? Keep your fingers away from the alarm.”
Seven chairs, including the one next to his, scraped across broad, burnt-sienna-colored Saltillo tile and seven giggling children raced to the sideboard.
“Chance? Would you pour the wine? Thanks, honey. So, Mack, what do you think so far?” Jeannie asked him over the children’s clamor and clanking of serving utensils.
Mack accepted the glass of wine from an openly smiling Chance, and nodded at the kids. “I’m intrigued,” he said.
“Good,” Jeannie said, and put her hand over her own empty wineglass and grinned up at her husband. “Can’t, remember?”
Chance kissed her and lowered a hand to caress her neck. “Worth it?” he asked.
“Every minute,” she said, taking his hand to kiss it.
Mack felt riveted by the overt love in their eyes. He’d read one of the tabloid accounts of the undercover marshal and the ranch owner falling in love, the first of the long string of Milagro’s so-called miracles.
“Jeannie’s pregnant and not letting a single second of the pampering get away,” Leeza explained in a dry voice. He’d have suspected a snipe hiding in her words if he hadn’t seen her eyes, which were, he thought, starkly and unknowingly wistful.
Mack resisted the urge to look over his shoulder for a disaster lurking in the shadows of the large dining room. Kids laughing and jostling in line, adults relaxed and easy, mixed cultures and backgrounds, beautiful scents rising from the food spread on a lavish sideboard; it all seemed too good to be true.
Instead, he nodded, as if Leeza had asked him a question. He gave a rusty smile at the glowing-faced and obviously happy Jeannie. She smiled back at him and raised a protective hand to her scarcely showing belly. “I’m sure it all seems pretty strange to you right now,” she said.
He hoped the kids returning to the table, scraping chairs and trading friendly insults in a mixture of Spanish and English, precluded the need for an answer from him, for if he’d had to give one, it would have been in the negative. It didn’t seem strange; it seemed completely alien. It was too perfect. And anything too wonderful, too perfect was sure to have a downside.
“Señor Mack?” Pablo rose and waved his hand at the sideboard. “You first, yes?”
Mack was in awe at the array of foods prepared for the Rancho Milagro crowd. Far from mere tacos and beans, the fare included an enormous roast beef tenderloin, a salad with seemingly every known vegetable and some cheeses he didn’t recognize, home-baked bread with sun-dried tomatoes, a large bowl of herb-and-butter pasta, and a host of soft or crispy finger foods that would normally be served as hors d’oeuvres.
As he helped himself to a healthy portion of the dishes, knowing from the quantity that he needn’t stint whatsoever, he listened to the easy conversation behind him.
“What’s this, Corrie?” one of the kids asked.
“Fried grasshopper,” she answered promptly. “With enough tempura batter, it tastes just like lobster.”
“Eew!” chirped one of the boys. “Not really?”
After the pause that followed her question, several of the kids laughed, and so did the little boy. “It doesn’t taste like a grasshopper. It tastes good!”
“See?” Corrie said, her sultry voice all the more alluring when filled with teasing laughter. “It’s all in the batter.”
“And this?” another kid piped up. “What’s this?”
“That’s the snake that was bothering me by the back gate. Deep-fried rattlesnacks, I call ’em.”
Beside him Pablo chuckled. “That Corrie, she’s like a kid herself.”
Mack turned his head to look at her.
No employer facade masked her face now. Pablo was right; she almost looked a child herself as she pressed against the table, her eyes sparkling, her face flushed, and a soft, inviting smile curving her generous lips. “And those little ones that look like fried spiders? Well, there you go. I decided we needed to wage war. So instead of nuking the little critters, we’re frying them.”
“Yuck,” one of the boys said.
“That’s what they’re called. Yuckums.”
Juan Carlos laughed and popped one of the spidery confections in his mouth. “Mmm,” he said after crunching noisily, swallowing elaborately. “They’re delicioso.”
Mack found himself mesmerized by Corrie’s face. She looked so at home, laughing with the children, not an aunt or a mother, a mere child herself, lost in the teasing moment, full of merry delight and wonder. So different from the woman who had greeted him at the door, the one who had been unable to remain standing as she ran to the little boy thrust behind his legs, and certainly not the famous newswoman the world knew so well. Here, she was one of the kids, her sultry, well-known PBS voice a beacon and her smile a lighthouse of warmth.
Something inside him twisted and pulled. If he’d met her only a few years before, he thought he’d probably have moved heaven and earth itself to spend some time with her.
Mack’s dinner partner, the little girl with the hapless giggles and the trusting grip, studied Juan Carlos’s antics with now-solemn eyes. “It’s squash,” she announced to the table at large. “I helped. It’s just squash from the pantry place, not spiders. We graded it. It gets an A-plus. Corrie wouldn’t make us eat spiders.”
“Señor?” Pablo asked.
Mack realized he’d been staring