A Forever Christmas

Chapter Six

Angel was positive that she was far too wired to fall asleep tonight—possibly ever. Wound up as tightly as a coil in an old-fashioned box spring mattress, if anyone had asked her, Angel would have sworn that sleep would elude her for a good long while to come.

This despite the fact that, along with being wired, she felt incredibly drained.

She had initially closed her eyes to rest them because it felt as if they were wearing themselves out, staring at a world and at people that were equally unfamiliar to her. Toward the end, her lids actually felt as if they were burning.

Now, of course, there was just miles and miles of miles and miles. Nothing differentiated one section of land from another as they drove back to Forever from Pine Ridge.

Back to Forever. As if that was where she’d come from, Angel mocked herself. She didn’t belong in Forever. And she was getting to believe that she didn’t belong anywhere.

The restlessness that insisted on haunting her was back in spades. A restlessness that came from not knowing.

Would she ever know where she belonged? Or, for that matter, even what kind of a person she was? It was awful, not knowing.

Was she kind, heartless, intelligent, lazy, a little of all of that—or what?

As before, no answers came to her, not even so much as a vague hunch that she might be on the right path to discovery.

God, but she was getting tired of feeling like a living question mark.

So very tired…

* * *

ANGEL HAD BEEN QUIET for the past ten, twelve miles Gabe thought, glancing toward the woman to his right. Were things coming back to her? Or was it frustration that kept her silent?

Whether he liked it or not, because he’d rescued her, he felt responsible for this lost woman.

Gabe wasn’t the type who immediately shouldered responsibility with gusto and enthusiasm, but neither did he attempt to shrug it off or hide behind some rock in an out-and-out attempt to avoid it. It was what it was and he accepted it. In some cultures, he knew, because he’d saved her, the woman he’d christened “Angel,” her soul was his.

Just what he needed, he thought with a touch of cynicism, a spare soul to trip him up. These days, he wasn’t all that certain what to do with his own, not after the way Erica had left him at such loose ends.

He’d never seen himself as some fancy-free playboy, but neither had he thought of himself as being the marrying kind—at least, not until Erica had crossed his path. Suddenly the thought of settling down with a wife and two, three kids didn’t seem so bad. As a matter of fact, it sounded pretty good.

Except now he wouldn’t get to find out because Erica had decided she could “do better.” Dumping him without warning, she’d turned around and made Seth Madden the center of her world.

Just like that.

Granted, Seth was a banker and came across more polished than he did, but hell, Seth had eyes that belonged to a flounder that had been dead for two days. Was that what Erica really wanted, a man with lifeless eyes?

Gabe couldn’t manage to convince himself of that—and he definitely couldn’t bring himself to either forgive Erica, or let the whole thing go.

He felt as if he was permanently stuck in limbo.

Probably not unlike Angel and her memory loss.

He tried to picture himself in that sort of a situation and found himself being very grateful that he wasn’t in that sort of a situation.

“We’re here,” he announced.

By “here,” Gabe meant that they had just crossed the town limits and were now officially in Forever.

“Angel? We’re here,” he repeated when he received no response in return. When she failed to say anything the second time, Gabe slowed the car down to almost a crawl—which was less than twenty miles an hour to his way of thinking—and looked at Angel’s face more closely.

He forced himself not to get distracted by how very pretty she was and only think of her as someone who had had one hell of a day.

“Really awful to be you right now, isn’t it?” he murmured softly in sympathy.

She seemed to be sound asleep, her head leaning slightly forward. Watching her, Gabe was fairly certain she was going to have a really bad crick in her neck to add to the litany of aches and pains that she would have tomorrow. All of which would be due to the car accident she’d barely survived.

“Angel?” he said softly, trying to rouse her but not startle her.

The only thing he received in reply was the sound of her even breathing.

Gabe frowned, thinking. He couldn’t very well just leave her here, sleeping in his truck, but he felt bad about waking her up. If he did, she might wind up being awake all night.

Still, it was getting really cold and he couldn’t just run the engine so that he could keep the heat on for her. Other than that being an impossibly expensive way to keep someone warm, there was also the very real danger of filling the inside of his vehicle with carbon monoxide.

Maybe she’d wake up on her own if he just gave her a little more time. It was worth a try.

With a shrug, Gabe drove the truck to his house.

His house.

That was still taking some getting used to. Originally it was known as the old Douglas place. He’d bought it several months ago from Alec Douglas. The latter had returned to Forever to settle up his late father’s affairs, sell the house and go back to his life in Virginia where he’d been working for the past ten years.

Both he and Alec had been happy with the deal that had been struck for the two-story house. True, the fifty-year-old house needed a lot of work, but like everyone who lived around here, he was handy, plus he didn’t mind working with his hands. He found it therapeutic and it gave him something to do on his days off—when he wasn’t helping out on the family ranch.

As long as he kept too busy to think, that was just fine with him.

Pulling up in front of the house now, Gabe left his truck parked to the left of the porch steps. He glanced at Angel again. The woman just kept right on sleeping.

Gabe got out of the vehicle, rounded the back and came up to the passenger door. Opening it, he paused for a second, debating his next move. With a shrug, he thought he’d try to wake her by gently shaking her shoulder.

When he did, she just kept right on sleeping as if he hadn’t touched her at all.

“Damn, but you could probably sleep through a twister, couldn’t you?” he marveled, murmuring the assessment under his breath.

Leaving her where she was for the moment, Gabe went up the steps to his front door, unlocked it and left it wide open. Angel was still asleep when he returned to the vehicle.

Her body probably needed to recharge itself, he reasoned.

Leaning over her, Gabe very carefully released the seat belt clip and unbuckled her. Then, as gently as possible, he picked her up from her seat and began to walk up the steps to his front door.

To his amazement, as he reached the top step, Angel continued sleeping. Not only that, but as he made his way into the house, the sleeping woman curled into him. A sigh that sounded suspiciously like contentment escaped her lips as she apparently made herself comfortable against his chest.

He caught himself looking down at her face. It was relaxed and there was almost a purity about it. He reasoned that, asleep, Angel didn’t resort to a barrage of defense mechanisms.

This was the real woman, the one beneath the bravado. Soft, innocent. Relaxed.

He found himself intrigued.

Because he had just recently moved into the house, Gabe wasn’t anywhere near finished furnishing the different rooms. To be honest, he had hardly gotten started.

So far, there was only one bed—his—and that was in the master bedroom. The other two bedrooms had a variety of things piled up in them, none of them meant to provide any kind of rest for the weary. In actuality, the exact opposite was true. Both rooms were in a state of varying degrees of chaos.

Since it had a bed, Gabe decided to give Angel his bedroom while he made himself as comfortable as possible on the secondhand sofa he’d picked up for his living room.

Gabe made his way up the stairs slowly, watching Angel’s face as he went. Though her lashes seemed to flutter a little, she continued sleeping. When he finally set her down on top of the covers on his bed, it had no effect on her.

Angel went on sleeping.

A quirky smile curved his lips as he stepped back for a second. Taking the extra blanket he had folded at the foot of his bed, he spread it out and covered her.

She really did look like an angel, sleeping that way, he thought.

He hoped that the morning would turn out to be better for her. Maybe she’d even remember who she was.

People shouldn’t be shut out of their own lives, he reasoned.

It occurred to him, as he all but tiptoed out of the room, that he was pretty damn tired himself. He hadn’t exactly been sitting around these past eighteen hours, twiddling his thumbs.

Closing the door softly behind him, Gabe went downstairs.

As he passed by the kitchen, he glanced toward it out of habit. For exactly ten seconds, he considered making himself something to eat. But his need to sleep far outweighed his desire to eat. He made his way into the living room. Gathering the newspaper that was haphazardly strewn over the sofa, he dumped the pages onto the floor and sat down. The worn leather sofa creaked a little as it accepted his weight. Like the house, it was old, but comfortable.

Putting his muscle into it, he pulled off first one boot, then the other. He placed them on top of the newspapers so he could find them readily enough in the morning and lay down. No sooner had his head touched the flattened-out pillow in the corner than his cell phone began to both ring and buzz in his pocket.

He didn’t know which he hated more, the ringing or the buzzing.

The cell phone was something he would have just as easily done without. But the phone had come with his badge and the job. It was the sheriff’s belief that since the terrain they oversaw was so scattered and large, a cell phone—when the signal found it—was a good way to stay in touch. With that explained to him, Gabe couldn’t just ignore the phone even though he had little use for it, or any of the other new “toys” out there. Electronic novelties carried absolutely no fascination for him.

Pulling the phone from his pocket, he pressed the accept button. “This is Gabe.”

“Where are you?”

It wasn’t Rick, it was Alma. And she sounded pretty miffed.

“Home,” he told his sister. “Technically,” he added before she could bombard him with any more questions, “my shift is over. I’m off the clock.”

“That shouldn’t stop you from swinging by the sheriff’s office at the end of the day.”

“It can,” he contradicted, “since I got shanghaied into being someone’s fairy godmother,” he informed his sister.

She supposed she was worrying too much about Gabe making a good impression. If Larry, the deputy whose place he was taking, decided for one reason or another not to return to Forever, she wanted Gabe to be the one to fill the position permanently. That started by making a good impression—every single day.

“How is she?” she asked about the woman who’d been placed in his care.

“Right now? Asleep,” he told her. Just like I’d like to be.

There was a pause on the other end of the line and he knew that questions were popping up in his sister’s mind like toast out of a squadron of toasters set on low.

“Where is she asleep?” he heard Alma finally ask.

“In a bed. I didn’t think the rock garden was a good place to put her,” he deadpanned.

Alma ignored his sarcasm, sailing right by it as if he hadn’t even tapped into the tone. “Your bed?” she asked.

“Well, yeah, it’s the only one I got in the house, remember?”

She knew the kind of man her brother was, so she didn’t ask the one question that begged asking: Where are you going to sleep? Instead, she went to another line of questioning altogether. “Then I take it they didn’t want to keep her overnight at the hospital?”

“No reason to.” Thank God, he added silently. It would have been a hassle for him if they had. He would have either had to get a room at a local hotel, or driven back and forth from Pine Ridge twice. Neither of which appealed to him. “All the tests they took of her came back negative.”

“But she still doesn’t remember.”

He could hear the frown in Alma’s voice. “But she still doesn’t remember,” he echoed, confirming his sister’s assumption.

“You didn’t have to bring her to your place, you know. You could have brought her here,” Alma told him.

He was in no mood to justify his actions to his sister right now. Lack of sleep made him less tolerant and more irritable.

“Made a spur-of-the-moment decision,” he told her. “Angel fell asleep while we were driving back from Pine Ridge. I didn’t have the heart to wake her up.”

“Angel, huh? Well, I guess if you had to come up with a name, that’s as good as any. But did it ever occur to you that she might have wanted you to wake her up?” Alma pointed out.

“Well, we won’t know until she does, will we?” he countered. Tired of sparring, however innocuously, with Alma, he asked, “Is there anything else? Because if there isn’t, I’m pretty beat and I’d like to turn in. On the sofa,” he underscored in case she felt duty-bound to ask him where he was spending the night.

“Never doubted it for a moment,” she said. “Go, get your beauty sleep, Gabe. By my count you’re about three years behind and are getting to look pretty mangy and scary.”

“I can always count on you to feed my ego,” Gabe quipped. “Good night, Alma.”

Not waiting for her response, he hung up. He didn’t want to give her any time to regroup and ask him about something else.

With a sigh that came from deep down in his bones, Gabe stretched out on the sofa. He pulled down the crocheted throw lying along the back of the sofa and wrapped it around himself to ward off the pending cold.

Gabe had always had the ability to fall asleep within three minutes of his head hitting anything that could remotely pass for a pillow. Tonight was no exception.

If anything, he was asleep in two minutes rather than three.

And he would have slept right through until morning—if the scream hadn’t woken him up.

Scissoring apart a dream that evaporated the instant he opened his eyes, Gabe bolted upright, trying to separate reality from any remaining strands of his dream that might have somehow managed to linger around.

Confusion temporarily dimmed his ability to think.

That vanished the moment he heard the scream again. It wasn’t bloodcurdling so much as profoundly heartbreaking.

And it was also not a dream. Both screams had come from upstairs.

Angel!

Gabe’s feet hit the floor, running. He made it across the living room in record time, heading for the stairs. Taking them two at a time, he quickly made it up the stairs and to his room.

It didn’t even occur to him to stand on ceremony and knock, or call through the door. Rules and polite behavior quickly died in the face of Angel’s screams.

He threw open the door. A solid block of darkness met him. He felt the left wall for a light switch. Finding it, he flipped it to the up position.

It didn’t really help all that much.

He blinked, trying to adjust his vision as he looked around. Angel wasn’t where he’d left her. The bed was empty.

“Angel?” he called out. “Where are you? Why are you screaming?”

She didn’t answer.

He found her huddled in the corner on the floor just beneath the window. There was a crescent moon out and an eerie yellow glow touched the windowsill. It seemed to heighten the aura of fear emanating from her.

“Angel?” he said, worried as he crossed to her. “Are you all right?”

Rather than answer, Angel looked up at him with enormous, frightened eyes. Gabe crouched down to her level. What had spooked her this way? If someone had tried to break in, he would have heard them.

He needed to calm her down, he thought. Otherwise, the situation could grow out of control.

“You’re shaking like a leaf in the wind,” he noted. “Why? What happened?”

As he tried to put his arm around her, Angel stiffened and pulled back.

Was she still asleep? He’d heard that people could look awake when they really weren’t. Sleepwalking didn’t just involve walking. It took in all facets of this strange condition.

Was she in the throes of some kind of a nightmare that was holding her prisoner?

“Angel, it’s me,” he told her as softly as possible. He refused to remove his hands from her shoulders. He saw it as the only way he could anchor her. “It’s Gabe. You’re in my house. You’re safe,” he said, then repeated with emphasis, “Safe. Do you understand?”

Angel struggled, trying to pull away again. And then she began to sob. Within a moment, she suddenly slumped against him, her sobs growing louder. And then they began to subside.

“Gabe?”

Did she recognize him, or had her nightmare somehow caused her to forget him, as well?

“Yes, Gabe. You know, the guy who’s been hanging out with you all day, taking you to hospitals and fun places like that.” And then he dropped the teasing tone. Instead, he lightly stroked her hair, still trying to calm her. “You had a nightmare.”

“No, I—” She stopped abruptly. “A nightmare?” she repeated. She looked at him in wonder. “But it was so real.”

Maybe this was the key they needed to unlock her memory. He loathed having her relive something that obviously terrified her, but if it meant that she could start to remember, Gabe felt that he had to try. “What was it about?”

Distress filled her eyes as she looked up at him and realized, “I can’t remember.”