Fish and Game. They started laughing about something to do with Conner’s nose.
Dylan read that he’d been living on his grandmother’s Montana estate and a snort escaped him. It was a four-bedroom, two-bath, thirty-five-year-old ranch-style house. It was perfectly nice; he’d had the kitchen remodeled about ten years ago and replaced some carpeting. There were some real nice hardwood floors and he had landscaped the backyard a few years ago, adding a big patio and grill he could use about three months of the year. But estate? It was around twenty-four hundred square feet of house and except for the yard surrounding the house, it was raw land in the valley that was Payne. There was a barn, a shed, a corral, a pasture. And there was Ham, doing his chores, letting himself into Dylan’s house to make a sandwich when he got hungry.
And damn, he wanted her there. Suddenly that’s what he wanted. To take Katie home with him.
Katie was talking about someone who lived on Leslie’s street—the girls, she called them. Apparently Katie had settled in and had girlfriends.
Dylan poked through the trunk. He lifted out a photo album and flipped through some pages. Baby pictures of the twins, from the first day to about three months, but the man in the pictures wasn’t their dad, it was their uncle. The next album he recognized as a wedding album and that got him a little wound up. Being a fairly typical man, he’d usually only look at wedding pictures if torture were the alternative. But he wanted to see Katie all dressed up and he wanted to see the guy who caught her.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling quietly. She was spectacular. She wore a strapless dress that fit her snugly to her hips and then did some billowing. No veil, just a lot of baby’s breath in her hair. She was so natural that way that he was surprised to see shoes on her feet. And there was Charlie—tall and strong. And goddamn him, he was good-looking enough to be a movie star himself. Decked out in his uniform, covered with medals and ribbons, every photo of him gazing at Katie with absolute love and longing and the promise of making her cry out in pleasure every night.
And suddenly she was sitting beside him. “Our wedding,” she said.
“It’s a wonder the guy can stand up under all that brass,” Dylan said.
“He was highly decorated. He took way too many chances, I’m sure of that. He got the Medal of Honor posthumously for acts of bravery and heroism that cost him his life, but saved others. We weren’t married long, but I felt like I knew Charlie very well—he wouldn’t have thought twice. Did you know that only a few living soldiers have been awarded the Medal of Honor? I saw one interviewed on TV. And you should see how modest and humble he is. I must admit, that’s about the only time Charlie was modest and humble, when the army wanted to give him a medal, otherwise he was kind of full of himself.”
“Really?”
“You know guys,” she said. She turned the page. “We had six months together before he deployed, so he got to know the boys a little bit. But two months later he was killed.”
“Got to know the boys?” Dylan asked.
She put her hand on her tummy. “In here. While they were in here, moving around, going crazy. We named them before he left. And the nicest thing—the president made sure there were two Medals of Honor—one for each of the boys. And three flags—one for me, one for each of them…”
And all this time Dylan had been pissing and moaning about a half-whacked family and the rigors of fame…?
Charlie Malone, hard act to follow.
Dylan picked up the tabloids that sat beside him on the sofa. “Katie, throw these in the trash.”
“Why?”
“First of all, it’s all B.S. Second, this crap shouldn’t sit on top of Charlie’s medals. It’s sacrilege.”
“It must be really annoying, seeing that kind of stuff printed.”
“It would be if I ever bothered to look. I used to. When I was a kid it really bothered me. So—what did you and Leslie decide is going to happen to us—Conner and I?”
“Well, you’re going to face the music. After I pick up the boys this afternoon, we’re going to their house. The two of you will apologize, take an oath to stay out of each other’s business and shake hands.”