Holiday Heroes

by Rachel Lee

  RACHEL LEE AND CATHERINE MANN

  Holiday Heroes

  CONTENTS

  A SOLDIER FOR ALL SEASONS

  by Rachel Lee

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  CHRISTMAS AT HIS COMMAND

  by Catherine Mann

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  A SOLDIER FOR ALL SEASONS

  Rachel Lee

  To peace, which can only be achieved through love

  Chapter 1

  Jon Erikson wandered into Conard City, Wyoming, like a man lost in the midst of a wild blizzard. Only he wasn’t lost, he had grown up here. But it had been so long, and he’d been so far away, that he felt more lost than he had since his first days in Afghanistan.

  He found Mahoney’s Bar where it had always been. The thought of bellying up to the bar and ordering a beer had been whirling in his dreams for a long time now. Stomping the snow off his boots, he walked inside.

  Nothing had changed, except some of the faces. They all turned to look at him, but none seemed to recognize him. Why should they? He hadn’t been back here in a long, long time.

  Only Mahoney gave him a second glance, as he drew a draft beer for him and put it in front of him. “I know you?” Mahoney asked finally.

  Jon wasn’t sure he wanted to answer, but finally he said, “I lived here a long time ago.”

  Mahoney nodded. “Must’ve been a kid. You look like you’ve put in a lot of tough miles.”

  Jon gave him a nod, then lifted the frothy beer to his mouth.

  Mahoney didn’t press him any further, apparently figuring it was none of his business. Jon was grateful. He wanted, needed, to be left alone for a while.

  The bar was too warm. He wasn’t used to central heating any longer. Worse, it seemed to be closing in on him. And the beer…it didn’t taste as good as he remembered.

  He told himself to cool it, that things were just fine, but he honestly couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t felt wired and wasn’t sure he knew how to unwind.

  So drink your beer and just wait.

  The tension would have to let go, sooner or later. There wasn’t a threat within thousands of miles. But while his brain knew that, the rest of him seemed unable to accept it. He downed the beer and ordered another one, standing with his foot on the rail, rather than sitting on one of the stools.

  “Hey,” said a quiet female voice.

  Every muscle in his body tensed, and he automatically reached for the weapon that wasn’t there.

  “Relax,” she said. “I just thought I recognized you.”

  He turned slowly and looked at a pretty dark-haired young woman, maybe twenty-five or so, dressed in a State Park Ranger’s uniform with an unzipped green parka over it.

  “Aren’t you Jon Erikson?” she asked.

  He nodded slowly, uneasy at being recognized. That, too, had been trained into him.

  Her smile started at her blue eyes, then traveled down to pink lips. “I thought so. You were three years ahead of me in school, so you probably never noticed me. I had a crush on you, though.”

  He should know how to respond to that. Words should come automatically. Something light, something about how could he possibly have overlooked her, kid or not. Some distant part of his brain remembered how to be sociable, but such things had been burned out of him a while back.

  “I’m Melinda Hawthorne,” she said, sticking out her hand. “State Park Ranger in these woods.”

  He shook her hand automatically, then abruptly became acutely aware of the warmth of her skin. It wasn’t soft skin; clearly she worked hard with her hands. But it was warm, and human, and it wasn’t threatening.

  “You look like you could use something to eat,” she said. “We can eat a sandwich here, or go over to the City Diner and have a bigger bite.”

  “You asking?”

  “I’m buying,” she said with a laugh. “It’s not often I meet someone from that far back who hasn’t been around ever since. I want to hear about the big world.”

  “Can’t tell you much. I’ve spent most of my time in…” He trailed off. He didn’t want to talk about that.

  “I know,” she said, taking his arm. “Come on, let’s go to Maude’s. You need one of her steak sandwiches and fries.”

  Now that did sound good. He was so damn sick of MREs—meals ready to eat? What a joke—and goat cheese. “Fine, but I’m buying,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I always go Dutch. Unless I buy.”

  “Dutch it is.”

  What the hell was going on? A few minutes ago he’d been living in his isolated world with his miserable self, and all of a sudden he’d been yanked out of it by a girl he couldn’t even remember.

  But she remembered him. And somehow, surprisingly, that made him feel good. As if somehow some part of him hadn’t died over there.

  Closing up their jackets and pulling up their hoods, they stepped out into the blowing snow. “This is global warming,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the wind.

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “I’m not kidding. We never used to get so much snow or so many blizzards. But I don’t want to argue about it.”

  Maude’s wasn’t very far, although tonight it was fairly deserted. Maude herself was the only one on duty, and in her usual welcoming way she stomped over to the table, slapped the menus down and said, “Coffee’s fresh, kitchen’s pretty much closed ’cause of the storm, but I can make you steak sandwiches and fries.”

  Melinda answered with a smile. “That’s exactly what we came for, Maude.”

  Maude grunted, then looked more closely at Jon. “Aren’t you the Erikson kid? Old Lars’s son?”

  Jon nodded.

  Maude put her hands on her hips and frowned at him. “Boy, you can’t be much over thirty. Whatever you’re doing with your life ain’t healthy for you.”

  Then she turned and stomped away, leaving Melinda and Jon to look at one another across a Formica tabletop. Jon had chosen the seat with his back to the wall so he could see the entire room. But now, as he finally met Melinda’s eyes again, he saw something dark there, something that belied her outward friendliness and easy smiles.

  And somehow that darkness called to him. At once he looked away, disturbed.

  “So,” she said, “you left town a couple of days after graduation. Everyone said you’d enlisted.”

  He nodded, reluctantly looking at her again.

  “Marines, if I remember right.”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned faintly. “Given what the Marines have been doing for the last few years, I guess you haven’t been playing golf.”

  “Not exactly.” He felt his nerves tightening again, winding up as if a grenade were about to land in his lap.

  “Sorry,” she said, and let it go. As if she understood that he still felt like a combination of hunted animal and predator.

  Maude brought two mugs of coffee and plunked them down on the table with her usual lack of grace. “Five minutes on them sandwiches,” she said and stalked away. Maude always seemed angry with the world, and somehow that thread back to his childhood days made his surroundings feel more real to Jon. The ever-present prickle at the base of his skull eased.

  “I love Maude,” Melinda said. “No matter what goes on in the
world, she’s always the same. She’ll always grumble when she serves the same menu year in and out. Nobody in the world makes fat taste as good.”

  Jon felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth. It felt good. “My arteries are hardening already.”

  “Every month I come into town from my place in the park, and the first thing I do is stoke up on Maude’s food. Well, maybe the second thing. I always get a draft at Mahoney’s, too.” She paused for a moment. “How long are you in town for?”

  “I’m not sure.” He didn’t have to ship out for another three weeks, but whether he wanted to spend all that time here was something he hadn’t really decided, even though he had no idea where else he would go, except maybe to visit some buddies who’d come home wounded.

  “Well, if you’re still here in two weeks, why don’t you come with me to the Tates’ for Christmas dinner. You remember the Tates.”

  “How could anyone not? Is he still sheriff?”

  “Absolutely. Do you think anyone would be crazy enough to run against Nate Tate?”

  His faint smile broadened. “Probably not.”

  “He’s a good guy.” Something passed like a shadow across her face, then vanished before he was even certain he’d seen it.

  Maude brought their steak sandwiches, slapped the hot plates on the table and shook her head again. “Boy, you look like you been hung out to dry.”

  Then, before he could think of an answer, she vanished back into her kitchen.

  “You really don’t look so good,” Melinda said. “Like you need to be fed, and you need some rest. Where are you staying?”

  “The La-Z-Rest.”

  “Stupid question,” she said with a little laugh. “Where else could anyone stay here? I’m staying there, too, even though ordinarily I’d go back tonight. You’d be amazed how much trouble people can get themselves into by going into the mountains in winter.”

  “No, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She looked at him straight on, then nodded. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  The blizzard was blowing even harder by the time they stepped out of Maude’s.

  “My car’s just over there,” Melinda said, pointing to a heap of snow.

  “Are you sure we can find it?”

  She laughed. “We’d better, or it’s going to be a cold walk.”

  He helped her brush the snow off a park service four-wheel-drive truck, one of the big ones, and painted that icky green that park services seemed to like. The tires were studded, so they stuck to the road pretty well as she drove through the deepening drifts in the streets.

  At the motel, she bade him good-night as soon as they were out of the car.

  He stood in the blowing snow, hardly feeling the cold, watching her disappear into a room four doors down from his. Then he entered his own room and closed the door.

  At once he felt as if he were in a tomb. Too quiet. Too warm. Not even a draft under the door.

  He turned off the heater under the window at once and opened the window a crack. Cold air snaked into the room, transforming it, and the keening of the wind could be heard.

  Only then did he flop into the bed and slip into what he hoped would be a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Melinda had trouble sleeping. Something about Jon Erikson had gotten under her skin. The contrast between the high schooler she remembered and the man he had become was so stark as to be upsetting. She couldn’t imagine what he had endured.

  Not that she was the same person she had been, either. Innocence had been stripped from her at sixteen by a crazy man. Innocence and her sense of security. To this day, she really only felt safe in the woods and mountains, where her skills could protect her from nearly everything.

  Other people might be threats. In the park she only needed to see them when necessary, and there was always a gun on her hip and a shotgun in her truck. Not to mention all the martial arts she’d studied.

  Out there it was almost impossible for anyone to approach her without warning. Out there, people were few and far between, and that was the way she liked it.

  But running into Jon Erikson today had reminded her of how much she had changed since he left. Just as he had changed almost beyond recognition.

  The girlish crush she’d had back then was so far away she couldn’t believe she had ever felt it. And the man she had met this evening was not someone a woman could have a crush on. Hardness filled him. Inside him, she had sensed emotional granite. Maybe the Marines did that to a person. Maybe that was the only way to survive.

  She knew something about survival, but not that kind, not to that degree.

  Finally, tired of tossing in a bed that was not her own, she got up and went to the window, pulling the curtain back to look out at the blizzard. Thank goodness she didn’t have any registered hikers or skiers in the park right now. If there were any, she would be out in this hunting them down.

  The snow was so thick and whipped so wildly in the light from the motel that she couldn’t even see all the way across the parking lot.

  Global warming. Everyone thought the weather would just get hotter. If she were to make a bet on it, she would bet on the next ice age. Of course, no one could say for certain, but paleoclimatology suggested that when the earth warmed just a few degrees, it went quickly into an ice age.

  Which would explain the kind of weather they’d been having here for the last ten years or so.

  She smiled at herself. Being a park ranger had turned her into a rabid environmentalist. She watched the trees grow higher up the mountain-sides year to year as the carbon dioxide level rose in the atmosphere, just as she watched the winters get worse. And try as she might, she still had to use a gas-powered vehicle and a gas-powered generator at times.

  No way around it.

  But the snow was pretty, whirling like dervishes out there, turning the night bright with its reflection of the light. It brought back childhood memories of waking up in the morning to a suddenly hushed world, realizing that the first snow had fallen. Memories of rare snow days that fell like a gift from the heavens, giving her the opportunity to disappear into fresh snow, slide down the hill behind the house, make snowmen…. It had been so magical then. Maybe it still was.

  She could almost smell cookies baking and hot chocolate with a peppermint stick to stir it, could almost feel her icy fingers burning from the hot mug.

  That child still called out to her, but the contact had been severed. Sighing, she pressed her forehead to the icy glass and closed her eyes.

  Get over it, she told herself. Just get over it.

  Easier said than done, like so many things in life.

  After a few minutes, the windowpane sucked enough warmth from her forehead that it became uncomfortable. She straightened and once again looked out at the snow, wishing she were up at her cabin, where she could be sitting before a crackling fire in the woodstove, while watching the world turn white and the tree branches bend under this new burden.

  Giving another sigh, she turned back to face the room. On the floor beside the bed was a huge sack of books. The town bookstore held copies of every new novel they thought she would enjoy, and once a month she picked them up. The library also allowed her to borrow books for longer than the usual two weeks, so she never lacked for reading material. Her tastes were eclectic, running the entire gamut of fiction and non-fiction. Better than television, she always thought.

  So, she could go stretch out on that bed with one of her new treasures and read away the rest of the evening, as she would if she were up at her cabin.

  For some reason, though, the idea didn’t tempt her tonight. She felt too antsy, too uneasy. Ordinarily, when she came into town, she was gone by evening, having finished all her errands and stocked up on food for another month. But the blizzard was keeping her from leaving tonight, much as she wanted to.

  And her thoughts kept drifting to Jon Erikson. He was gutted, she thought. Twisted out of all human norms. But of course he h
ad to be, given what he’d probably been doing in Afghanistan. As she knew only too well, some experiences changed you forever.

  She cocked her head suddenly, surprised to hear the sound of an approaching engine. Surely even the deputies were off the road now.

  Curious, she returned to the window and was amazed to see a Conard County Sheriff’s vehicle pull up into a spot right next to her Jeep. The tan Suburban carried a plow blade, as did her Jeep. At this time of the year, anyone who had to travel the back roads had to be prepared to clear the way.

  To her amazement, she saw Nate Tate, the sheriff, climb out. Then he reached inside his vehicle and lifted out something wrapped in a blanket. Moments later he was standing at her door knocking.

  She opened it immediately, blinking as blowing snow stung her face and eyes. “Nate! What…?”

  “Don’t ask me,” he said, stepping inside and shouldering the door closed. “Talk to Marge.”

  “Marge?” Why was his wife involved in whatever he was doing?

  “This was her idea. I had nothing to do with it. And why she did it now instead of at Christmas, I still don’t know. But she said I had to bring it tonight.” His weathered face split into a grin. “Of course, I get to see the fun.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see.” Still grinning, he handed the blanket-wrapped bundle to her.

  It squirmed, and she almost dropped it. “Nate!”

  “Unwrap the poor bugger before he smothers.”

  Still gaping with astonishment, she put the bundle on the bed and pulled the blanket away. A Siberian husky pup looked up at her with black-limned, brilliant blue eyes, then plopped on his bottom and let forth an indignant howl. “Ahrooo!”

  “He’s very vocal,” Nate said. “Marge calls it singing.” His tone left no doubt that he thought otherwise.