Star Valley Winter

by RaeAnne Thayne

  A shudder racked her little frame. “In the back, in a quarantine room just like you have. That’s where he kept me.” She nibbled her bottom lip nervously. “Um, he might need an ambulance. He hit his head on the cement floor pretty hard.”

  Matt started to take a step toward the hallway, his face blazing with fury, but Jess reached a hand out to stop him. “No way am I letting you go back there right now. That’s all I need is a murder investigation on my hands in addition to the kidnapping case. I’ll handle this. You stay here with the ladies.”

  Despite everything, Ellie had to fight a smile when Dylan preened a little at being called a lady.

  “Oh. The door’s locked,” she said suddenly. “I have the key.”

  She fished around in the pocket of her parka then pulled it out and held it out to the police chief. “Are…are you gonna shoot him?”

  Jesse crouched and took her small hand, key and all, and folded it into his. “You want me to, sweetheart?”

  “No,” she said seriously. “He didn’t hurt me. Just scared me a little.”

  “Sounds like you scared him right back.”

  Dylan gave a watery giggle then handed over the key, and Jesse disappeared down the hall.

  After he was gone, Dylan’s smile slid away and she looked nervously at her mother. “This is all my fault, Mom. I’m really sorry. I should have gone right to the clinic after school and I didn’t. I just went to see Cheyenne’s horse but I’ll never do it again, I promise. Don’t be mad. Please?”

  “Oh, honey. I’m not mad. You’re not to blame for this.” She was, for not keeping her daughter safe. Just another thing she would have to deal with later. “What happened? How did you get away?”

  “I tried to stay calm and use my brain, just like you always tell me to do. I didn’t think he’d hurt me, but I still wanted to go home. The first time he came in, I saw he left the key in the lock and it gave me an idea. When he brought me dinner, I tripped him and he fell over and hit his head. I didn’t know it was Dr. Nichols until he fell and his mask fell off but as soon as he did, I ran out and locked the door.”

  How on earth had she managed to raise such an amazing daughter? Ellie hugged her tightly again. “It sounds like you did exactly the right thing.”

  “You’re about the bravest kid I’ve ever met.” Matt’s voice was rough, and he reached a hand out and squeezed Dylan’s shoulders.

  Dylan blushed at his approval and looked at him with an expression of such naked longing in her eyes that Ellie suddenly remembered Lucy’s confession earlier in the evening, about how the two girls had connived and schemed to throw her and Matt together.

  Dylan wanted a daddy, and she had obviously picked Matt for the role. Oh, sweetheart. Her heart ached knowing her daughter was destined for disappointment. She would give Dylan the world, but she could never give her this.

  She pushed the thought away. She couldn’t worry about how she would ever ease the pain of futile hopes and unrealized dreams. For now, all she could do was hold on to her daughter and whisper a prayer of gratitude that she had her back.

  * * *

  Hours later, Ellie sat in her darkened living room watching the gas logs and their endless flame.

  Dylan was finally asleep, lulled only by the grudging promise that, yes, she could go to school the next day and tell everyone of her harrowing adventure and how she had single-handedly rescued herself.

  Ellie had held her hand until she’d drifted off. Even long after her daughter was lost to dreamland, she hadn’t been able to make herself move, had just sat on the edge of that narrow bed feeling each small breath and thanking Whoever looked over mothers for delivering her baby back safely.

  Eventually she’d wandered here. Hard to believe that just a short time ago, the old house had been a frenzy of activity with people coming and going, the phone ringing, all the lights blazing. Now the air was still, with only the low whir of the artificial fire to keep her company.

  She didn’t mind. In truth, she was grateful for the chance to finally catch hold of her fluttering thoughts and sift through the amazing events of the day.

  Every time she thought of Steve and what he had done, her stomach burned and she wanted to break something. He had tried to destroy her in every conceivable way. Financially, professionally, emotionally. She’d never before been the subject of such undiluted hostility, and it frightened her as much as it shocked her, especially because she had been so completely blind to it.

  When Steve regained consciousness and found Jess and six other officers surrounding him, he had first tried to bluff his way out of the situation. Faced with the overwhelming evidence against him, though, he’d finally blurted out everything.

  He had been desperate and had come to blame all his problems on her for scheming to take his uncle’s clinic away from him. It should have come to him, Steve said. He’d spent years working there, even as a kid, cleaning cages and doing miserable grunt work, all with the expectation that someday the practice would be his and he could reap the benefits of his uncle’s reputation in the community.

  Then Ben had ruined everything by refusing to sell the clinic to him, instead bringing in an outsider with wacky California ideas that didn’t mesh at all with the conservative Star Valley mind-set.

  Left with no other choice, Steve had been forced to build his own clinic and had ended up getting in over his head.

  He told Jess he realized too late that the community wasn’t big enough to support two veterinary clinics so he tried to persuade Ellie to go into business with him to cut down overhead. When she refused, he knew he had to find another way to make her leave, especially after she started to eat into his patient load.

  He was the one who had left the warning in her truck. And, he confessed, he’d broken into her truck and read her planner. It hadn’t been difficult to study her treatment log and inject specific horses with a virulent bacteria to make it look as if her shoddy care had spread disease.

  When that didn’t work, he knew he had to take drastic measures, so he’d come up with the twisted kidnapping plan.

  She could forgive him the rest. Although it would take time and effort, she could rebuild her reputation, her practice.

  But she would never be able to forgive him for terrorizing her little girl.

  She’d been a fool not to see it before. No. She hadn’t wanted to see it, the ugly bitterness he hid so well behind a veneer of friendship. It had been much easier to take Steve at face value, to see what she wanted to see.

  SueAnn had seen it, had tried to warn her about him, but she hadn’t listened. She had trusted him, and her daughter had ultimately paid the price for her mistake.

  She wrapped her arms around her knees and gazed at the flickering flames. How had she forgotten the lessons she’d learned so early in life? Depend only on yourself and you won’t ever have to know the cruel sting of disappointment.

  A soft knock at the front door disturbed the silence of the house. She felt an instant’s fear and then she remembered all was well. Her daughter was safe at home, where she belonged.

  She pulled aside the lacy curtain at the door and felt only a small quiver of surprise to find Matt standing on the other side. He wore that shearling-lined ranch coat again, leather collar turned up against the cold night, and his chiseled features were solemn, unsmiling.

  He looked strong and solid, and she wanted nothing more than to fall into his arms and weep after the emotional upheaval of the day.

  She couldn’t, though, and she knew it. Instead, she opened the door and ushered him inside. “Matt! What are you doing here? I thought you went back to the ranch hours ago.”

  “I did. But I couldn’t stay away.” He stood just inside the door watching her, a strange light in his blue eyes that suddenly made her as nervous as a mouse in the middle of a catfight.

  She cleared her throat
and seized on the only benign topic she could think of. Food. “Would you like something to eat? I’ve got enough here to feed most of the town. I haven’t tried any of it, but SueAnn said Ginny Garrett’s cinnamon sugar cookies were to die for.”

  To her intense relief, he shielded that strange light from her with his lashes. “Ginny does make one fine cookie,” he said after a moment. “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “Eat as many as you want.” She led the way to the kitchen, where the table practically bowed from the weight of all the plates of goodies covering it. “I’ve got enough stuff here to have a bake sale.”

  She peeled back the plastic wrap covering the plate the mayor’s wife brought over, and Matt took one cookie and bit into it. “It’s comfort food,” he said after he’d swallowed. “Sometimes people don’t know how else they can help.”

  “I know. Everyone has been so kind. I’ve just been trying to figure out how I’m going to find room in my freezer for everything. Maybe you should take some home to your ranch hands.”

  He leaned a hip against her counter. “Sure.”

  Grateful for something to do with her hands, she found some paper plates in the back of a cupboard and started loading them up with fudge and lemon bars and chocolate chip cookies.

  “So how are you?” he asked solemnly while she worked.

  She flashed him a quick look. “Okay. A little shaky still.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. I keep thinking, what if it had been Lucy? I wouldn’t have handled it with nearly the guts you did.”

  A bitter laugh scored her throat. “I didn’t handle anything. I completely fell apart.”

  He studied her solemnly out of those blue eyes, and for a terrible moment she feared he was going to cross the space between them and pull her into his arms. And then she really would fall apart, would give in to the tears of relief and hurt and remembered terror that choked her.

  She turned to the table, ashamed that she couldn’t control her emotions better, and after a moment of silence, he spoke again. “Almost forgot. One of the reasons I dropped by was to give you this.”

  Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw him hold out a wrinkled paper. It took her a few seconds to realize what it was, and then her face burned. It was the note deeding the practice over to him in exchange for the money to have her child returned.

  She made no move to reach for it, mortified again that she had needed his help, that she had failed her daughter once more.

  “Here. Take it. I don’t want it,” he growled.

  As reluctantly as if it were covered in razor blades, she reached for it. A thousand unspoken words hovered between them. She would have preferred to leave them all that way—unspoken—but she knew she had to say something.

  “I… Thank you for what you were going to do. I can’t say I understand why you would be willing to do such a thing, but it meant a lot to me anyway.”

  “Did it?”

  The hardness of his voice shocked her. “Yes! Of course!”

  He didn’t say anything, just continued to study her out of those blue eyes, and she flushed under his scrutiny.

  “I said I appreciated it. I don’t know what more you want from me.”

  “Why is it so hard for you?”

  “What?”

  “Accepting help from me. Admitting you’re not some kind of superwoman and can’t handle every rotten curve life throws at you by yourself.”

  She tensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie burned her tongue, scorched her heart.

  “No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me away.”

  Better to hurt him by pushing him away than the alternative. He would leave her shattered if she let him. Would make her weak and needy and vulnerable, and she could never allow it, especially after tonight. She was all Dylan had, and she needed to remember that.

  She said nothing, knowing there was nothing she could say. After a moment, he spoke again, his voice low and expressionless.

  “It makes loving you pretty damn hard when you won’t let anybody inside.”

  His words sucked the air from her lungs, every thought from her head. He didn’t say he loved her. He couldn’t have. It was a mistake. A terrible, cruel mistake.

  Terror flapped through her on greasy bat wings. How could he say such a thing? Didn’t he realize that she didn’t want his love, that she couldn’t handle it?

  Her breath started coming in deep, heaving gulps. What was she going to do? She didn’t want to hurt him, but she couldn’t let him destroy her like her father had destroyed her mother.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” he finally asked.

  I love you. Heaven help me, I love you. Even though I know you would leave me broken and bloody, I want to curl up against you, inside you, around you, and never, ever let go.

  Instead, she made her voice tight, toneless, and hated herself for it. “What do you want me to say, Matt?”

  He gazed at her, and she nearly sobbed at the hurt in his eyes, then those blue depths hardened. “How about the truth? That you love me, too. That you push me away because you’re afraid.”

  He knew. Shame coursed through her. How could he say he loved her when he knew what a terrible coward she was?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, curling her hands into fists at her sides. “I can’t tell you what you want to hear.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “That, too.” Her hands were trembling, and she didn’t know if they would ever, ever stop.

  “Dammit, Ellie. You don’t think loving you, needing you, scares the ever-living hell out of me, too? It’s the absolute last thing I ever wanted or expected.”

  She dared a look at him and found his eyes fierce with emotion.

  “My wife walked out on me, Ellie. Before that, she screwed around with just about every guy in town. I told myself I didn’t care, that I’d stopped loving her long before she took off, but Melanie still left me with deep scars covering every inch of my heart. I thought they’d be there forever, and I’d even learned to live with them.”

  He reached for her then, picked up one fisted hand and brought it to his lips. “But then you blew into town with your smart mouth and your compassion and your courage. And one day I realized I couldn’t even feel those scars anymore. You healed them, Doc. I don’t know how, but while you were treating my horses, you were working your magic on me, too.”

  This time a sob did escape her mouth, and she yanked her hand back to press it against her mouth so the rest didn’t follow.

  “I love you, Ellie,” he went on. “I want you in my life, forever if you’ll have me. Up until now, you’ve shown more courage than any woman I’ve ever met. Don’t let your fear win now.”

  For one wonderful, terrible moment, she let herself believe in fairy tales. In knights on white horses and orange blossoms and a happily ever after filled with laughter and love and joy.

  And then the glowing picture faded.

  In its place was a ramshackle trailer and a solemn-eyed little girl watching a woman who drank too much and sold her body and sobbed every night for a man who would never come back.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and blood seeped from her heart.

  “I won’t ask again.” His terse warning was edged with infinite sadness.

  She hitched in a ragged breath. “I know. I… Goodbye, Matt.”

  With one last, searching look, he shoved on his Stetson and walked out into the night.

  Only after he closed the door quietly behind him did her knees buckle, and she slid to the hard linoleum floor of her kitchen and wept.

  CHAPTER 17

  He never would have believed it.

  Matt stood in the gymnasium of the elementary school on Valentine’s Day, completely amazed at what creativity and a little elbow grease could achieve.r />
  Instead of a dingy old room that smelled like a cross between canned peas and dirty socks, the gym had been completely transformed into a magical place.

  Thousands of little twinkling white lights had been strung across the ceiling like stars in the night sky and wrapped around the branches of a couple dozen small trees temporarily commandeered from Jerry Clayton’s greenhouse in town. A city skyline painted by the elementary school art classes graced the stage, covered by even more tiny white lights so it looked as if the windows of the buildings really glowed.

  With the lights dimmed and the high school’s jazz band playing old dance numbers, this was the crowning jewel of the library fund-raiser—which by all accounts looked to be a smashing success.

  It had been Ellie’s idea to try to provide something for everyone at the fair. The little kids were still running from classroom to classroom using the tickets their parents had purchased for fishponds and beanbag tosses and cakewalks. Their older siblings were busy in the auditorium watching a PG-rated scary movie. And judging by the crowd already out on the dance floor, their parents and grandparents were obviously enjoying the romantic escape the committee had created.

  He thought he would feel pretty weird about having his name listed on the program as one of the organizers, but as he watched couples dancing cheek-to-cheek under the starry lights, he had to admit to a fair amount of pride.

  All evening, people had been telling him what a great job the committee had done. It seemed bitterly ironic that he’d been even a little instrumental in helping everyone else celebrate this holiday for romance, especially when things with Ellie had ended so badly.

  She was here somewhere, but he hadn’t caught more than a fleeting glimpse of her all night as she ran from crisis to crisis.

  Even those brief, painful glimpses were better than what he had endured the last three weeks. Before today, he hadn’t seen her since the terrible night he’d gone to her house, told her his feelings and had them thrown back in his face.