Close Range Christmas

by Nicole Helm

  Now, as November rolled on toward Christmas, she was having to come to grips with the reality of being a very pregnant woman on an isolated ranch during a severe, unpredictable winter.

  She would say Dev didn’t act any differently toward her—they still argued and bickered. He was annoyingly high-handed about decisions that affected both ranches. But he sneakily kept her from overtaxing herself, especially in these later months, and he had a way of watching her that made goose bumps pop up on her arms and had her casting back for any dim memory of that night.

  She reminded herself, almost daily, that she had gotten exactly what she’d wanted, and any lingering weirdness she sensed was both a figment of her imagination and something that would disappear once the baby was born.

  Baby boy Knight was due on Christmas Day, and Sarah liked the idea of it. He’d always have a birthday full of family, no matter how far-flung they may all be.

  She still hadn’t figured out a name. She could name him Evan after her late adopted mother, Eva. Evan Knight. It might work.

  There was always DJ. She couldn’t help but laughing at the image of telling Dev she was going to name the baby Devin Junior. His horror would be epic. But it could also be an homage to her father. Duke Knight.

  There were so many options. She pulled her scarf up over her mouth as she walked from her truck to the barn where she knew Dev would be mucking out the stalls. It was a frigid cold winter already, and every day seemed to dig deeper into the subzero temperatures. Inside, Sarah was an overheated mess of giant pregnant belly, so the cold felt good.

  She walked into the stables, knowing Dev would kick her right back out. She’d needed the walk, the fresh air. A few moments alone, and then spending some time with someone who wouldn’t fuss.

  He’d tell her to go away, or to sit down, but he wouldn’t flutter about like her father and sisters did. She stepped into the building, immediately smiling at the smell of hay and manure. Home.

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” Dev said without turning around.

  “Why not?”

  “No mucking. No overexerting yourself. Isn’t that what your doctor said after your last checkup?”

  Sarah wrinkled her nose. Her blood pressure had been a little high and she’d been having some mild on-and-off contractions. She was supposed to “take it easy” and it was driving her insane.

  “I’m bored to death. Women on the prairie—”

  “Spare me a lecture about women on the prairie and sit your butt down,” Dev muttered irritably, never breaking his mucking stride. “There’s plenty of paperwork to do.”

  “God help me.”

  Still, she sat down. Because the baby had begun to kick. She could feel the press of either his heel or knee against her belly. She loved feeling the shape of him through her stomach, the roll and kicks. Even the hiccups.

  She looked up to find Dev watching her. He did that more and more as her body bloomed. She hadn’t pressed him on becoming more involved. That wouldn’t work with Dev. She just held on to that hope.

  She pushed herself back up to her feet and waved him over. “Come here.”

  “Why?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Because I’m fat and miserable. Come over here.”

  Reluctantly, he moved to her. She grabbed his hand and placed it over her stomach, under her coat but over her sweater.

  He made a pained face, like she was forcing him to pet a snake. But what he could hide on his face, he couldn’t hide in his voice. “That feels like a foot,” he said, full of awe.

  “Doesn’t it?” She kept pressing his hand right there, following the rolling movement of the foot across her side. “He can kick like the devil, right up here in my ribs. He’s going to be a hell of a rider. I can tell.”

  Dev shook his head. “You can’t tell,” he muttered, but he didn’t take his hand away.

  She let the moment stretch out, and even knowing what his reaction could be, she felt like she had to offer it again. “Dev... Just so you know. If you ever want—”

  “I don’t.”

  Well, she supposed that was that.

  “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

  She forced a smile. “It’s almost like you knew I came over here to have Grandma Pauline ply me with biscuits and gravy.”

  He made a noncommittal noise as he limped for the door. Winter made his limp worse, which meant his pain was worse. Sarah wished there was some way to help him. Usually she took over chores this time of year—snuck in before he could get to them. One week last December she’d had to get up at three in the morning every day to beat him, but she’d done it.

  None of that this winter, only sympathy and a weird twist of guilt that was totally out of place.

  She followed him outside and toward the house. Dev’s truck was parked in front of it, at an odd angle.

  “You lose a tire?”

  Dev stopped short, studied his truck and shook his head at the way it listed to one side. “Not that I knew of.”

  She followed him closer to the truck, but her heart started beating hard in her ears as she realized the cause of the flat tire.

  A knife was sticking out of the rubber, a note attached.

  It’s Not Over was written in big thick black letters. Underneath were two letters. AW. Ace Wyatt.

  Sarah could scarcely catch her breath. It couldn’t be. Ace Wyatt was dead. It had to be a mistake. She looked to Dev for some kind of reassurance, but he stood so preternaturally still, there was no comfort to be found.

  * * *

  DEV STARED AT the words. The letters. He’d forgotten Sarah behind him. Forgotten the world around him entirely. For a few awful seconds he was back in the Badlands with his father.

  It’ll never be over, Devin.

  “It can’t be Ace.” Sarah’s voice was shrill behind him. “He’s dead. You all made sure. He’s dead.”

  Dev came back to the present, to the reality. “We identified his body,” he said, his voice an awful rasp even to his own ears.

  “And Jamison had those tests done. He made sure it was Ace.”

  Dev sucked in a breath. Sarah was right. Even though he’d seen Ace’s lifeless body in the morgue himself, it was so easy to believe he was some kind of...evil spirit. But Sarah’s reminder grounded him to reality. They’d seen him. They’d tested the body to make sure.

  Ace was dead. The father who’d tortured them as children in his dangerous biker gang, then made their adulthoods as much hell as he could, was gone.

  But there was an AW from his past who wasn’t.

  “You have to—”

  Before Sarah could tell him what he had to do, the sound of an engine interrupted the quiet of the morning. Faint at first, but growing louder until Jamison’s truck appeared on the rise.

  Sarah let out an audible whoosh of breath, but Dev didn’t match her relief. She was happy Jamison was here to take care of things, but if Jamison was here this early, it could only mean he’d gotten a similar threat.

  When Dev realized Cody was in the passenger seat, his dread dug even deeper. The secret he’d kept, no matter how guilty it had made him feel for a decade now, was showing up on his doorstep in the worst possible way.

  A threat to his brothers.

  They got out of the truck—his oldest and youngest brothers, respectively. Both lived out in Bonesteel with their wives and children. For Jamison that meant his wife, Liza, and her young half sister, Gigi. For Cody that meant his high-school sweetheart, Nina, eight-year-old daughter, Brianna, and a baby on the way.

  Just like you.

  Except he did everything in his power not to think about Sarah’s baby as anything close to his. Because Sarah’s baby wasn’t his. It was a favor he’d done her at only a slight cost to himself. Mainly, his sanity. There couldn’t even be that cost now. That secret was ev
en more paramount than the one he’d carried since his father had injured him irrevocably.

  Jamison and Cody wore matching grim expressions as they walked toward him and Sarah.

  “I see you got the same message we did,” Cody said, nodding toward the tire.

  Dev pointed at Jamison’s truck. “Quick fix.”

  Jamison shook his head. “Mine was on the door to my office at city hall. Along with a machete.”

  “Mine was wrapped around a brick that went through my storefront window,” Cody said with an even tone, though fury was stamped across his features.

  “Gage had an arrow through his patrol car window, Brady had a dead animal on the porch with the note, and Tucker’s was on his porch as well—sticking out of a charred, headless doll,” Jamison continued, using that emotionless cop voice that usually grated on Dev’s nerves.

  This morning he found it oddly reassuring.

  “The notes all said the same thing,” Cody continued, as if the image of a charred, headless doll didn’t bother him.

  “It can’t be Ace,” Sarah said, her voice an octave too high. Dev had forgotten about her there.

  “You need to get inside,” he said gruffly. It was cold and she was supposed to be taking it easy, not panicking in the frigid temperatures. He thought of the feeling of the baby’s foot pushing against her stomach. A real, living, thriving human being.

  He couldn’t think about any of that.

  “You will not order me inside, Dev Wyatt,” she fumed.

  “We’ll all go inside,” Jamison offered in a conciliatory tone, gesturing Sarah toward the house. “And you’re right, it can’t be Ace,” he agreed as they all trudged toward the door of Grandma Pauline’s house. Except for Cody, who was collecting the note and knife in evidence bags.

  “We were too careful to doubt he’s dead,” Jamison was saying to Sarah as he held the door open for her.

  “What else isn’t over that has to do with all six of you, though?” Sarah asked.

  Jamison and Sarah moved into the warmth of Grandma Pauline’s kitchen, but warmth seemed all wrong. So Dev could only hesitate on the threshold, even as Cody came in behind him.

  Grandma stood at the stove. She had a wooden spoon in one hand and her white hair was pulled back in a bun. Dev noticed the flash of worry in her gaze before she schooled it away into her usual take-no-prisoners demeanor.

  “Well, what are the cavalry doing here?” she demanded.

  Jamison and Cody gave her weak smiles. When Grandma saw Sarah she immediately grabbed her and had her in a chair with a plate of food in front of her before Dev could even move.

  “You rest and eat,” Grandma ordered Sarah. “You three can discuss your business elsewhere.”

  “No,” Sarah argued through a mouth full of biscuit. “I have to hear this too. I think we all do.”

  “Tucker, Brady and Gage will all be here when they can. We want to compare notes,” Cody said. “We all got threatening notes this morning.” He held up the bag to Grandma Pauline, and she squinted to read.

  Her mouth firmed, but she went back to stirring her gravy without another word.

  “I talked to my friend at North Star on the way over,” Cody said, referring to the secretive group he’d worked for to help take down their father’s gang. “The Sons of the Badlands are weak, mostly disbanded, but that doesn’t mean they’re all gone or in jail. Any one of them could still harbor a grudge.”

  “Wouldn’t they just hold that grudge against North Star?” Sarah asked.

  “Not just. I think they’d hold a grudge against anyone they could. And North Star is a group of highly trained operatives. Hard to find, harder to pin down. We’re a much easier target. We’re the reason Ace was in jail when he was killed.”

  “But you’re not the reason he’s dead,” Sarah argued.

  “Depends on how in touch with reality you are. Ace’s cronies often weren’t. We’d be easy to blame. He doesn’t get stabbed in jail if he’s not there,” Jamison said.

  “But that wasn’t all six of you,” Sarah insisted. “You and Cody were the ones instrumental in getting him in jail.”

  “But Felicity and Gage were instrumental in the trial,” Cody returned, speaking of their brother Gage and his wife, Felicity. “Which was what prompted Ace to be moved to the prison where he died. Brady too, for that matter.”

  “What about Dev? He hasn’t done anything.”

  That might have felt like a stab if it were true. Unfortunately, it wasn’t true at all. He’d done something no one was ever going to forgive him for.

  He thought of the list Cody had gone through outside. All the different ways this message had been given to his brothers. All the ways they were now in danger. Maybe it wasn’t because of him, but it didn’t matter now. He had to tell them the truth.

  And it would change everything.

  “There’s something I’ve never told you. Any of you.” Dev heard nothing but a buzzing in his own ears. He didn’t want to say the words. Didn’t want to do any of this, but that AW was impossible to ignore.

  And his brothers’ lives were at stake...their families’ lives. “Ace had another son. His name is Anth Wyatt. AW.”

  Chapter Two

  Dev waited. For the questions, the demands, the accusations. He should have known better. All of those things he expected he could have met with cool detachment.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Jamison asked, his voice rough and...wrecked. Dev had never heard that tone from his brother no matter what had happened in their lives. And boy, had they survived some wreckage.

  Dev swallowed down the emotion coating his throat. He fell back into the black void of detachment that had gotten him through those first months after he’d come out of the coma his father had beaten him into. “Anth is the only reason Ace didn’t kill me back then,” he managed to say, sounding flat and unaffected even though he was anything but. “In return, I made a promise. Which I’m now breaking by telling you he exists.”

  “You think it’s him?” Cody asked. He’d recovered his voice more than Jamison.

  “I don’t know why, after all this time. But AW isn’t some coincidence. You don’t sign a note to us with AW and not expect it to be Ace or someone connected to him.” Ace was dead. They’d made sure of that.

  But the effects of Ace would live on. Why had he been stupid enough to think they wouldn’t?

  Silence swallowed the kitchen whole. Dev wasn’t sure he’d ever heard such a silence in this kitchen. There had been months of danger and fears last year, but someone had always had something to say.

  Dev couldn’t help but glance at Sarah. She sat at the table, eyes wide, mouth open, still holding onto a forkful of food that had never made it up to her mouth. Her belly was big and round and all he could think about was his hand on her belly—feeling the outline of that foot inside of her.

  A foot they’d made together during a night that played over and over again in his mind when he didn’t want it to.

  Especially now.

  He’d failed her. He’d believed it was over and let himself be stupid enough to think he could give someone something.

  “I guess you should tell us everything you know about this Anth Wyatt,” Cody said, finally breaking the heavy, choking silence. “Starting with...” Cody trailed off. That stoic demeanor he’d been trying to hold on to slipped, and he raked his hands through his hair. “I don’t understand, Dev.”

  His brothers looked at him like he’d killed something in front of them. And he supposed he had. Their trust. So, what was there to understand? He was no upstanding Wyatt. He wouldn’t say he was like his father—he wasn’t an evil madman. He was like their mother—weak-willed enough to care more about self-preservation than any of his loved ones. The ones he should have protected.

  Sarah got up from her seat and came to s
tand between him and his brothers. She laid her hand on his arm—gently like she had at Brady’s wedding. Like Sarah had some well of gentleness she’d always hidden.

  “I’m sure if we all sit down, Dev can tell us the whole story,” Sarah said authoritatively, reminding him of Grandma Pauline. Until she tried to force a smile at him. “There’s an explanation, of course.”

  “Not the one you’re hoping for,” he replied bleakly.

  She swallowed at that, but she didn’t drop her hand or flinch. She pointed him to the table, and Dev didn’t know what else to do but sit.

  His brothers did too, on the opposite side of the table from him and Sarah. Grandma Pauline piled plates with food and set them in front of each of her grandsons. She still hadn’t said anything.

  When had Grandma Pauline ever not said anything?

  Dev could only stare at his plate, words tumbling around in his brain, but none of them making it to his mouth.

  Sarah reached beneath the table and took his hand. He didn’t know what to do with her faith in him, because God knew he was about to destroy it. But wasn’t that what he needed to do? Just blow it all up, lay it all out there.

  Because someone thought it wasn’t over, and he knew who.

  “It goes back to when Dad and I had our little standoff,” Dev managed to say. He didn’t sound so devoid of emotion now. The emotions all but strangled the words and they sounded like just that.

  He wasn’t sure he could do this with Sarah holding his hand. He wasn’t sure he could do it without.

  “You’ve never told us much about that,” Cody said, with enough detachment Dev could only be jealous.

  “What was there to tell? I thought I had him. I thought in a one-on-one fight I could take him down and arrest him. I didn’t. He beat me within an inch of my life and then let me go.” Dev tried to tug his hand away from Sarah’s, but she held firm under the table. It was a curse and a relief. “The only part I left out was that someone else was there.”