JAG and it's character's don't belong to me. I'm only playing in Mr. Bellisario's world. Any characters NOT taken directly from JAG or making cameo appearances from other televison shows DO belong to me.

A/N: Thoughts are in *'s

CHAPTER TWO

Mac chuckled. "I needed that this morning. One of these days you'll have to tell me what you did to her. I don't think I've ever seen her that venomous!" She glanced at the clock on her desk. "I've got to leave in about 20 minutes to meet my client and I really need to go over my notes one more time. Could we get together another time?"

Kate smiled. "We'd love to have you come out to our place. Maybe this weekend? We have room in the house, or if you'd like a little more peace there's a small guest house out by the barn. I keep it stocked for company and it's got full cable, internet connections and telephone. You're dog is welcome to stay with you or he can play with my beasts if that makes him happier."

"Wow! That sounds great and for once, I don't think I have anything planned. Give me a map and tell me when you want us to be there."

"For once I'm ahead of you. I drew up directions complete with phone numbers and everything. I'm SUPPOSED to be off duty this weekend, but that doesn't always mean anything. If I'm not around when you get there, the kids will be happy to entertain you. I'll try to call if I'm going to be really late. Maria will let you know." Kate pulled out the paper and handed it to Mac. "I'd better be heading to work too - I told them I was going to be late, but with the beltway traffic it could be quitting time before I actually make it."

"See you Friday," Mac said when she left. **This could be a lot of fun,** Mac thought as she gathered her paperwork into her briefcase.** I wonder what her husband is like.**

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Later that afternoon, Harm strode into Mac' s office. "What was that all about this morning? And what did she want?"

"She's an old friend, Harm. She was my best friend for years. We had a terrible fight and I guess we both went our separate ways."

"So why is she here now? Look, I know Renee isn't always the easiest person to get along with but apparently your friend is worse. She tried to ruin Renee's career." Harm walked over closer to Mac's desk and leaned over. "I just want you to be careful. Don't let her take advantage of you."

"I'll be fine, Harm." Mac smiled. "Not get out and let me get some work done."

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Driving home from work Friday afternoon Kate wondered what the weekend would bring. Mac had seemed glad to see her and had actually taken her up on the offer to come out to the farm. The kids had been threatened beyond all belief to be on their best behavior this weekend, and Maria and Juan had been reminded that there would be an extra guest. **Maria is such a perfectionist that I don't even have to worry about THAT, at least. She keeps the guest house as clean as the rest of the place even when no one stays in it for months.**

Kate sighed as she crawled along in the afternoon rush. **THIS is why I like living in the country!** Peace and quiet was hard to come by on the crowded east coast. Sometimes she missed the huge hacienda they had rented in Killeen, but when the job at National Zoo had come up it was too good to pass up. It looked great on her resume too. Maybe someday she could take Steve and Terri up on their offer to let her work at their zoo, but she wasn't ready to immigrate anywhere right now.

Finally Kate turned into her driveway and was pleased to see a shiny red Corvette, **WOW! Sarah's got great taste in cars!** parked in the driveway. There didn't seem to be a lot of movement around so everybody must be inside. Getting out of the car, she braced herself for the daily greeting. She wasn't disappointed. The back door to the house banged open as her children and dogs came running outside. As they swamped her with affection, she saw Mac step through the door watching with great amusement.

"Does the happen frequently?" Mac asked. She couldn't imagine living with that kind of turmoil for very long.

"Only daily," Kate laughed. "You'd think I was gone for weeks. Have you met the troops?"

"I just got here," Sara replied. "I think they were trying to show me around, but there seemed to be some confusion where we were going to start."


**I can only image what kind of disaster this has been...wait, she's smiling maybe we haven't ovewhelmed her too much...**


"First things first, I think. Have you decided if you want to stay in the guest house, or do you think you can put up with these hooligans?"


"Kate, your children are wonderful, but I think the guest house would be best for everyone if you don't mind." Mac answered. She was still a little awed by what she was seeing. **How many acres was this place? And right outside of Falls Church. Heaven only knows how much she paid for it - and do vets actually make that much? And the kids... who had four kids these days?**


"I'm sure introductions were missed. The oldest, Jason, is 13, next is Heather (7), Connor (5) and Megan is 3. Jace, please get Miss Mackenzie's luggage out of the car... and stop drooling over I it or you'll be washing it tomorrow... Take her things to the guest house for her. The rest of you need to get in the house and get cleaned up for dinner. I want to check homework when I come inside. Heather, you take care of Connor and Meggie." Kate looked at Mac and smiled apologetically.


"Let me show you around the place. After the kids go to bed we can sit down and actually visit for a while. "


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By 10:00 all the kids had been hugged, kissed and sent to their rooms. Jacen was still up and watching a movie, but Kate had promised he could put himself to bed whenever he got ready. Mac and Kate were sitting in the beautiful living room with cups of tea. Kate had offered to open some wine, but when Mac explained her difficulties she switched easily to tea. Kate had her shoes off and her feet on the coffee table.


"So Sarah, what ever happened with Scott?" Kate knew it was a touchy subject, but she figured she might as well dive in head first.


"Gee, you don't give up do you?" her voice sounded angry, but she was smiling. "It all came to a head about a month after the fight. He went out with his buddies and got drunk, came by the house at 3:00am and wanted me to go parking with him. I told him it was too late and I didn't feel like it. We argued for a few minutes and things got out of hand. Scott got all bent out of shape and really beat me up. I'm the one in charge and you'll do what I tell you to ... and all of that garbage. All of a sudden all the pinches and slaps that I had brushed off become more threatening. All the anger that always seemed directed to me... All the times he had yelled and cursed at me for spending more time with you than I did with him... I just knew you were right and I had to get away. I ran away for a while and lived in and out of the shelters. I saw you at Eddie's funeral so you know about that," Kate nodded, "then I met another guy, named Chris. We had a very short, very drunk and abusive marriage. When it all got to be too much, I called Uncle Matt and he came to pick me up. I finally made the decision to go to college and got a military scholarship when I joined the Marine ROTC..." Mac briefed Kate on her life between high school and JAG, and ended with, "Then after Harm's F-14 crashed during our rehearsal dinner Mic couldn't deal with Harm being my best friend. He left and went back to Australia." She smiled. "So what have YOU been up to and how on earth did you manage to get all of this?" Mac waved her arms around.


Kate eyed Mac critically, "Why don't you tell me what the real story is behind you and Harmon Rabb."


"What on earth are you talking about? I told you he is my best friend." But Mac couldn't look her in the eyes.


"Don't lie to me Sarah MacKenzie. I've got four kids and can spot lies, fibs and mis-directions from a mile away. I have a lot of friends too and there aren't any of them that I would follow into a war in Russia at the expense of my career. Let's not go into all of the minor scrapes you've told me about, " Kate raised her hand to stop Mac from interrupting, "much less become such a threat to my fiancee that he left me and called off the wedding. You don't have to admit anything to me unless you just want to, but you need to work on those answers for yourself before you wake up some morning 20 years from now and regret it."


Mac could only stare at Kate. "And quit looking like I just shot Jingo. There is a lot more there than you're admitting. On both sides. All it would have taken in your office was for you to look just a little bit uncertain and he would have tossed me out of there on my ass. I've only seen you guys together for less than five minutes and the air in your office was sizzling. If you to are like that all the time, I'm not sure how anybody in that building gets any work done."


"But Renee..." Mac tried to recover her senses.


"Renee is looking out for Renee, I promise. She's a flightly little bird who has to have a date equally beautiful. Not that I don't think she cares about him - I heard her yammering on her cell phone for a week - but she wouldn't have looked twice if he wasn't drop dead gorgeous."


"So you noticed," was all Mac could come up with.


"While you work on all of that, I'll answer all of the questions I didn't get to in your office, and the maybe even the ones you've wanted to ask since you've been here." Kate smiled.


"Deal," Sara h smiled.


"I'll start with the easy part -Renee. Apparently she is supposed to be some kind of hot-shot commercial producer. The Board of Directors had seen her Navy commercial with your Commander a couple of years ago. Lately, the zoo has been losing money and they wanted to try to prop up the image a little. They hired Renee to do for them what she did for the Navy. Sounds simple, right?" Mac nodded.


"Well, apparently they didn't give Renee much of a budget to work with and even less time to get it done. She showed up one Monday morning on the assumption that she was going to film immediately. Part of MY job description as head vet says that any contact between animals and the general public must be carefully supervised and documented. I busted her bubble pretty quickly when I told her I needed written documentation stating what animals she needed for her shoot and what she intended to do with them."


"I'm sure that didn't go over well," Mac said.


"That's only the beginning. The woman had apparently never been to a zoo and didn't even know what animals we had. I spent the better part of the day showing her arou nd and pointing out some of the smaller details about the animals. Then she waltzes in the next morning with her list of animals and this disaster of a script."


Mac smiled, "I think I remember Harm talking about this project. She was driving him nuts too."


"Do you remember... I don't know what they were selling, but the basic concept was a bunch of wild animals in a bar socializing?"


"Yeah, sort of.


"This was the general idea she had to promote the zoo. Get a bunch of animals together in a tour bus talking about all the wonderful things they had seen. Then she hands me the list. Bengal tigers, lions, giraffes, zebras, and a polar bear. I tried to explain to her that these are wild animals. They are not used to a lot of human contact and most certainly aren't trained like the ones they use in the commercials. I tried to explain that the commercials she wanted to imitate had shot the animals separately and put them together in the cutting room. I got a lecture that she knew what she was doing - that they had given her a dinky little budget and the timeline was far too short for all that technical nonsense. She started giving orders to the zookeepers to bring all the animals out at once and I had to step in. I told them if anyone followed her instructions they would be fired. She was furious. I think she went in and complained to the Board of Directors because they called me later that afternoon. Once I explained what she wanted to do, I think they told her that if anything was going to happen with their animals, it would only happen with my cooperation and approval because she came in the next morning and begged for my forgiveness. We finally managed to get a commercial together, and it seems to have improved the attendance at the zoo, but I know she hates me and after trying to beat some common sense into her head, I don't have a lot of respect for her either. She lost money because it just took too long to put the thing together. And I think they've all talked to their "good-old-boys" clubs and slowed down some of her engagements."


"That's kind of the impression I've gotten. Harm complained about how moody she was for a long time after the zoo commercial came out." Mac commented.


"Now I guess you want the story of me, huh?" Kate asked. Mac smiled and nodded. "I left your house that night feeling really rotten. I didn't think anything I had said had gotten through your thick skull, I had lost my best friend, and I didn't really know what I was going to do. I had applied to several colleges and had been accepted by all of them. I hadn't committed to any of them and I wasn't sure if I still could, but I decided that I'd go ahead and call Texas A&M and see if I could enter in the fall. I moved to Texas and did my undergrad work in Biochemistry. I knew I wanted to apply for vet school so I worked in the clinic, volunteered at a couple of local clinics and worked my ass off trying to keep my grades up. I took an Animal Science class for fun and the lab let us ride horses. I had a blast. I took it again the next semester taking the advanced lab and learned to jump. My junior year I met this really great guy. He was in the Corps of Cadets, was getting ready to graduate. He was SO gorgeous, all muscles and testosterone." Kate sighed at the memory. "He was talking about trying to go Special Forces... maybe Delta, you know, the regular adrenaline junkie. He had already learned to skydive, had a pilot's license, climbed every rock he could find... I was hooked. The best part was that he supported everything I wanted to do and didn't seem to mind the amount of time that I had to spend on homework. He'd go with my up to the clinic at nights to help me feed and clean cages. He drug me around with him to all of his clubs and parties. Get this - I even got my pilot's license because he was in the flying club.


He graduated and did his OBC stuff, tried out for SF and got it... he was thrilled. Then he got orders to Korea about the time I was ready to start vet school. We'd seen each other as often as we could manage but it wasn't enough. He asked me to marry him. I was floored. I wanted to do it so badly, but I didn't want to quit school either. He said the tour was unaccompanied anyway and he'd try to come back and go to Texas even though SF was based out of Fort Bragg. We got married, spent two nights together and he left. Six weeks later I found out I was pregnant. I made it through vet school with a child but it was tough. I know I did some things that if the police had ever found out I would have lost him. I went to work after Jace went to bed at night - it was just a couple of hours - but still. I graduated and within weeks I was pregnant again. Even though my specialty was in exotic animals I did enough work in small animal and horses that I was able to find jobs in vet clinics everywhere we moved. By the time Connor was born we were at Fort Hood and I'd managed to get on at the Waco Zoo, and was on call for the San Antonio zoo and the ones in Dallas and Fort Worth. I was pretty sure by this point that Kyle was more than a little bit unfaithful. I all but caught him in the act one afternoon when I came in from Dallas. Traffic had been light and I got back much faster than usual and as I opened the front door I heard the back one slam. He was upstairs in the middle of the day getting dressed in the same uniform he'd worn that morning. I wanted to believe that I was wrong so I let it go. Then about the time I got pregnant with Megan I got a call from one of his girlfriends. I kicked him out of the house and started divorce procedures. In Texas they won't finalize it until the baby is born so they can nail him for child support. She was about three months old when we were supposed to be in court to finalize the divorce. He was late. Kyle was being an ass and insisting on joint custody and between his lawyer and the judge they decided reschedule. By the time I got home there was a State Trooper on my doorstep telling me that he had been killed when he ran a red light on his new Harley. So instead of being divorced, I became a widow. He hadn't changed his will so I got everything. Really ticked off his new 21 year old girlfriend." Kate laughed.


"Good grief," Mac said. "And when did you come here?"


"After that I was ready to get out of Texas. The real kicker was when they read his will and I found out that not only had his parents been killed in a plane crash but that his dad had been on the Board of Directors at Boeing. There was money and accounts that I had no idea about. I wondered how he managed to afford the house and the land. It never occurred to me that he might be rich. When he hired Maria and Juan I asked him how we could afford it. He just told me not to worry and I didn't. I had kids and a career to take care of. Anyway, after he died, I started applying for jobs in other states and out of the blue I get an offer to come to DC. I didn't see that I could turn it down so I packed up the animals and the kids and moved to Virginia. When I got settled in and school started I had a hard time finding anyone to watch over the kids so I wrote back to Maria and asked if they would come here if I provided them with room and board. They moved into the mobile home, they eat with the family, I cover most of their bills - the only thing they pay for is the phone."


"But how did you get this place? It's huge!" Mac asked.


"That was pure luck. The couple who owned it had gone into an assisted-living center and their kids had just put it on the market when I came out to go house-hunting. It's 20 acres and the property had been in their family since something like the Civil War, but the kids lived in California and Washington State. They didn't have any use for the property so they sold it, pretty much as it. They took some of the heirloom pieces, but most of this is original furniture. The guest house was here but it was empty so I took the stuff from our house in Texas and fixed it up. Getting the payments down to something that I could actually afford meant that I spent more than I should have out of the trust fund from Kyle. I had to really wheedle and beg with the trustee, but he finally agreed it was a terrific place to raise kids."


"So have you figured out what;'s going on between you and Harm?" Kate smiled.


Mac made a face. 'You are tenacious," she sighed. "OK, I give up. I love him and I think he cares about me too, but somehow we can't seem to get on the same track at the same time."


"And the problem is...? "


"He and I are probably the most emotionally train-wrecked people I have ever met. We both come from a string of bad relationships and I think we're both afraid that if we get to close it will all fall apart. He's my best friends and I can't imagine life without him... and what happens when he dumps me like everybody else has? Good Lord, what am I doing? I don't ever tell these things to people!" Mac was blushing.


"That's what girl best friends are for. To talk about the things you can't tell the guys." Kate smiled. "It's after 2, why don't we call it a night and we can go for a ride in the morning?"