Dark Sky (Joe Pickett #21)(13)

Nate had a way with wildlife and his message had been received. The two coyotes had quickened their pace and kept going until they vanished over a hillside.

Kestrel, his thirteen-month-old daughter, had toddled into the kitchen from the hallway. He loved to watch her figure out the act of walking, the way she held her arms out at her sides for balance and took small mincing steps. When she saw him there, her face lit up and she cried, “Da!” and broke into a gallop until she tripped over her feet and crashed to her hands and knees.

Before she could realize she was hurt and start to cry, Nate scooped her up and held her out away from him at arm’s length and said, “How’s my little angel?”

“Da!”

“She’s fine now,” Liv said. “She found her daddy.” Liv had followed Kestrel down the hall from the baby’s bedroom.

Liv had accomplished something no woman had ever been able to do before: she’d convinced Nate to come back on the grid, open a legitimate business, and remove his shoulder holster while eating.

“Did I hear the trespass alarm?” Liv asked.

The arrival of his daughter had pushed everything else out of his thoughts, he realized.

“Yes,” he said, and handed Kestrel to Liv.

Nate parted the curtain on the dining room window and looked out. Their property was wide and treeless, and his view of the road was unencumbered. He liked it that way, especially since they rarely got visitors and those who found the place usually brought bad news of some kind, like the ex-FBI agent the year before who’d informed Nate there was a Sinaloa cartel hit out on him. Not long after that, Nate had installed the alarm at the front gate so he’d at least have some warning that someone was coming.

But there was no vehicle on the road.

Instead, a liquid herd of twenty pronghorn antelope slid in an undulating line up a hillside to the right of the gate. They’d obviously passed through and triggered the alarm. The herd trailed a spoor of dust as they ran.

“All clear,” he said.

“I thought it might be Sheridan,” Liv said. “She’s coming this morning, right?”

“Yes.”

Sheridan Pickett was Yarak, Inc.’s lone full-time employee, Nate’s apprentice in falconry, and Joe’s oldest daughter. She had been with them for nearly a year.

“Are you sure you want to get her involved in all of this?” Liv asked Nate. “I mean, everything?”

“I do,” he said. “She’s really coming along. She’s smart and she has bird-sense. It’s time she learned every aspect of the job.”

“I worry about her,” Liv said, bouncing Kestrel on her hip while pouring a cup of coffee.

“What about?”

“Put aside the fact that she’s your best friend’s daughter,” Liv said. “I get worried that she’s isolated out here and on her own. I know she used to have a pretty steady boyfriend back on that ranch she worked at, but pickings are pretty slim in these parts. I think about her all by herself in that little cabin, with no friends or social circle. Women need people, Nate. Even if you don’t.”

“I’ve never heard her complain,” he said.

“It’s not something she’d bring up to you. You aren’t exactly a sympathetic ear.”

“I thought I was,” he said.

Liv laughed and smiled at him. “Don’t forget she’s a twenty-four-year-old single girl who has barely seen the world. She may want a lot more in her life than a bunch of falcons to take care of.”

Nate didn’t know how to respond.

“My question is,” Liv continued, “are we holding her back? Is she staying with us because she feels obligated, because all of the things you and Joe have been through together? I don’t want her to get to a point where she resents us.”

“I don’t either,” he said.

“And when you say she has a lot more to learn, I hope you’re talking about falconry in particular and the business in general. You’re not having, you know, philosophical discussions with her, are you?”

“What’s wrong with my philosophy?” he asked.

“In the past it got a lot of people killed,” Liv said, deadpan. “Sheridan doesn’t need to know what led to all that . . . mayhem.”

“If it weren’t for that, I never would have met you,” Nate said.

“No,” Liv said, waving a finger back and forth, but unable to completely stifle her grin. “You don’t want to go there with me right now.”

“Even though it’s true,” he said.

As he did, the trespass alert chimed again. Nate turned back to the window.

“Here she comes now.”



* * *



—

Once you get cocky about rock climbing,” Nate had lectured Sheridan, “your chances of doing something sloppy or stupid go way up. That’s how you fall and die, and then I have to find another apprentice falconer.”

His bedside manner left a lot to be desired, she’d thought at the time, but his words stuck with her.

Nate had been an important player in Sheridan’s life—and her family’s—since she was ten years old. He’d always simply been around—despite long absences that were whispered about by her parents and kept from their daughters, and then showing up at odd times. But when he did show up, he was larger than life and he filled the room with a kind of smoldering charisma that she’d never encountered in a man before.