Lover Beware

Besides, she was strong and healthy and more than capable of looking after the sheep and the few hens she kept.
    Now that Patrick was gone, sometimes it felt like her marriage had been a mirage, or a chimera, a magical creature of illusion, that had dissolved almost before it began, leaving her stranded, all the bright promise gone.
    She’d spent the past seven years marking time, preparing for emptiness, and now it was finally here.
     
    THE NOONDAY SUN poured down on Michael Rider’s back, burning his already tanned skin to copper and sending a trickle of sweat down the deep groove of his spine as his calloused, long-fingered hands closed around the Glock 19. A magpie squawked, striking a discordant note and causing a ruckus in the large, gnarled branches of the towering, ancient magnolia that occupied one corner of his backyard, as he slotted an empty clip into the handgun.
    As weapons went, there was nothing pretty about the Glock; it was matte black and made of composite materials that seemed to actively absorb light. Without its fully loaded magazine, the weapon weighed in at a lean one pound seven ounces. In plain English, that meant it was light enough to make carrying concealed a breeze.
    Not that he’d be carrying concealed anymore, or going anywhere he was likely to need a weapon. He was finished with war, and the way he saw it, war was finished with him. He was thirty-three, and he’d spent more than a third of his life either training for battle or actively participating. In the last thirteen years, he’d pushed his luck to the limit and he had the scars to prove it. He’d picked up a knife wound in Afghanistan that had netted him seventeen stitches and a stint in a military hospital in Germany because the infection that had gone with the cut had come close to killing him. He’d collected a bullet wound from a shady situation in Timor that had never made the news, and just to round things off, he’d broken his leg when a jeep he’d been a passenger in had rolled during a training exercise. That time he’d been laid up for four months, with further downtime while he’d rehabilitated the wasted muscles and regained his fitness. The limp had faded, and he’d made it back into active service again, but his leg still ached on him occasionally—especially when it was going to rain. A sign of old age creeping up on him fast.
    A wry smile curved his mouth, as he adjusted his comfortable sprawl on the verandah steps and tilted his head back, enjoying the sun on his face and the smell of freshly cut grass. He replaced the weapon with the others he’d pulled out to clean and inventory for a buyer who ran a gun shop in Winslow. A month ago he’d viewed these weapons as necessary tools—now he kept seeing them as finance for fencing wire and fertilizer, or maybe even a start on the prime beef herd he aimed on breeding.
    His dark gaze absently inventoried the down-at-heel corner of his farm he could see as he savoured the vision. His paddocks lush with blue-green grass; a herd of big, fat, lazy cows; some prime quarter horses just to make the place look pretty; and not a noxious weed in sight.
    He grinned as he ran a soft cloth over the oiled parts of a Ruger. These days the only battles he intended to fight would be with the aforementioned weeds and a mortgage company.
    With deft movements, he reassembled the weapon. The Ruger was—had been—his weapon of choice, and he’d carried it with him for more years than he cared to remember. He could break the rifle down and reassemble it blindfolded if he had to, and in the field he’d had to operate in pitch-blackness on more than one occasion.
    Rising to his feet, he eased the stiffness from muscles unused to digging postholes and chopping firewood as he stepped off the verandah onto the lawn. With the ease of long practice, he lifted the Ruger to his shoulder, automatically bracing himself as he looked through the crosshairs of the telescopic sight. The twisted limbs of a distant puriri tree sprang into stark, ice-pure prominence; the magnification was disorienting, so that for a moment the gnarled bark and dark, glossy green foliage looked close enough to touch.
    He drew in a breath and let it sift from between his teeth, then abruptly lowered the rifle.
    Like the sidearms, the Ruger had to go. He’d rotated off a peacekeeping mission in Timor two weeks ago, and as soon as he’d hit New Zealand soil and read the letter that Marg Tayler—an old