“That was...you?”
Rafe had grown even more still in that eerie way he had, that jungle cat, as if he were fusing himself into the background, merging his skin and his bones to his surroundings.
“Yes.”
“You said you were in the navy. You never said you were a SEAL.”
He said nothing. Where was the man who had kissed her so tenderly? Who had held her and whispered delicious words about her mouth and how she tasted?
This man seemed like a stranger—dark, dangerous, indestructible.
“You’ve known all this time and you never said a word about being there. We even talked about Colombia and you still didn’t mention anything. Why?”
“It was...wrong not to say anything, especially when you brought it up. I should have. I’m sorry now that I didn’t. I tried a few times but the moment never seemed quite right.”
This was the reason he had helped her, she suddenly realized. Not because they were friends, not because he was coming to care about her as she was him. It was all tangled up in the past, in that pivotal moment that had altered the course of her life. The fear and the pain and the helplessness she couldn’t outrun, no matter how far she traveled.
She stared at him, feeling as if everything had changed in a matter of moments, as if all the soft, hazy daydreams she was beginning to spin about him had just turned into the dark, ugly stuff of nightmares.
Chapter Eleven
Okay, he had seriously mucked this whole thing up.
Rafe did his best not to stagger beneath the combined weight of the glares delivered by the two Nichols sisters.
He thought he had been doing a good thing, helping the family out by making The Christmas Ranch ready for guests, but somehow he had made several serious errors in judgment.
He should have told her. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure why the words had been so difficult. At first, he hadn’t wanted to dredge up something he knew must be difficult for her or add another layer of stress when she was already dealing with so much.
Later, after he had come to know her better and—yes, he could admit it—to care about her, he had put off telling her because he had been trying to avoid this moment, the shock and betrayal in her eyes.
He supposed some part of him had also worried that when she found out he had been involved in her family’s rescue, she would tell him to stop coming to The Christmas Ranch. That would have broken Joey’s heart, since his nephew loved coming here every afternoon—and without his help, she never would have been able to whip the place into shape in time.
In the back of his mind, he had known she would find out eventually. It was as inevitable as deep snow in the mountains around here.
“You knew who I was from the beginning,” she said with dawning realization. “That very first day, when Joey threw a snowball at my pickup truck.”
“Not until you told me your name,” he said. “After that, yes. I knew you and your sisters had come to Pine Gulch after everything went south in Colombia. Our lieutenant made a point of keeping track of your whereabouts and passed that intel along to those of us he knew were concerned about you all.”
“You’ve probably been on hundreds of missions since Colombia,” Faith said. “How could you possibly remember three girls you met seventeen years ago?”
“I remember everything about that day.” He didn’t tell them it was his first mission as a SEAL and his first actual combat experience and it would have been indelibly etched in his brain even if everything hadn’t fallen apart as it had. “When Cami called me and told me she was in jail in a little town she was sure I’d never heard of called Pine Gulch, Idaho, I was stunned at the way fate could twist and turn like a python.”
He should have told her, damn it. That very first day, he should have mentioned they shared a history. Each and every time the thought had come to him over the past week that now would be a good time, he should have acted instead of sitting on his ass and waiting for the perfect moment.
He might have told himself he was thinking about her feelings but the truth was, withholding the information hadn’t been fair to her.
“Before that day with Joey and the window, I always intended to come out here and meet all three of you. In the back of my head, I guess I thought maybe I would check and see how you were, all these years later. I couldn’t quite figure out how to just show up on your doorstep and say, ‘Hey, surprise. Remember me?’ I guess I just never expected to meet one of you on the other end of a broken car window.”
The explanation didn’t appear to ease any of the stormy emotions he could see building in Hope’s expression. She faced him, all tangled blond curls and kiss-swollen lips and flushed cheeks.
“You’ve been working here a week and you didn’t think it was important to bring it up once. You kissed me—multiple times, I might add—and you still never told me.”
Faith cleared her throat. “I should, uh... I’ve got some things to do at the house.”
Right. Just come on in and interrupt in the middle of an epic kiss, ruin everything, then leave again.
He knew the thought wasn’t fair. He was the only one to blame in this whole mess.
“You don’t have to leave,” he and Hope both said at the same time.
“I think I do. I only stopped to see how things were going down here and...to see if you need a hand with any last-minute things.”
“Oh, Faith.” Something he didn’t understand passed between the sisters, something intense and emotional. Hope crossed to her sister and hugged the other woman, though he wasn’t quite sure why.
“Thank you. I can’t tell you how much that means.”
Faith hugged her back for just a moment then extricated herself. “I’ll come back after I, um, finish some things at the house.”
She clearly wanted to escape. Rafe couldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t mind slipping away either. Before he could, Faith approached him and gave him a steady look. “Has Hope invited you and your—nephew, is it?—for Thanksgiving?”
The question took him unawares and he had to collect his thoughts for a moment before he could answer. “Yes,” he admitted.
“I’ve invited them over a few times,” Hope said, with dawning awareness. “He refused each and every time. Now I’m beginning to see why. You couldn’t be sure Faith or Celeste wouldn’t be as ditzy as I apparently am. You figured one of them would recognize you.”
Yeah, that had been part of the reason for his continued refusal, but not the entirety. “I told you I didn’t want to intrude on your family dinner.”
“It’s no intrusion,” Faith assured him. “Come to dinner, if you don’t already have plans. It’s the least we can do to repay you—not only for what happened seventeen years ago but for all the help you’ve apparently given Hope these past few days.”
She waved to both of them and hurried out of the lodge, leaving a heavy silence behind.
“Well,” Hope finally said. “This is an unexpected turn of events.”
He drew in a breath and faced her. Her usually bright, open expression had become hard, almost brittle, in the past few moments.
“Hope. I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Stupid reasons,” he admitted. “I see that now. I didn’t want to upset you when you were already stressed and exhausted.”
He exhaled. He might as well get this over with, tell her the rest of it while every ugly secret was bubbling up like an acidic mineral pool.
“At first, I didn’t tell you because, well, I didn’t know how to bring it up. Later, I suppose it was...self-protective, in a way.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I made mistakes in that raid. Mistakes that have haunted me ever since. They’re hard to admit, especially now that I’ve
come to know you and better understand the cost of my mistakes. It was my first mission and I screwed it up. That’s why I never forgot any of you, why I was interested in your well-being after the mission was over. That’s also why I didn’t want to tell you after we became...friends. I guess I didn’t want you to hate me.”
She stared at him, eyes huge in her delicate, lovely features. “What mistakes? How did you screw up?”
“We don’t need to go into this now, do we?”
“What mistakes, Rafe?” she pressed, her tone relentless. He knew that stubbornness. The same grit had kept her on the go constantly the last week, until she was about to drop from little sleep. She wouldn’t let up until he told her everything, each ugly misstep.
“We can at least sit down.”
Not knowing quite what else to do, he gestured toward the chairs arranged around the huge Christmas tree she and the children had decorated a few evenings earlier, near one of the massive river rock fireplaces.
He sat down next to her and fought the urge to reach for her hand. This was much harder than he expected. He had spent seventeen years as a freaking navy SEAL and had scuba dived, parachuted and prowled into all manner of hazardous situations. So why was his adrenaline pumping harder than he ever remembered?
“First of all, I guess I should tell you, this was my very first operation as a SEAL. I was a dumb twenty-one-year-old kid just weeks out of BUD/S. I spent my first few years in the navy stationed on an aircraft carrier and had never been in actual combat.”
She was silent, watching him out of eyes that didn’t seem to miss anything.
He swallowed. “It was supposed to be an easy extraction, just sneak in during the early morning hours when everyone was sleeping, separate you and your family from Juan Pablo and his crazy militants and take you all back to the helipad. But something went wrong.”
“Yes. It did.”
He closed his eyes, reliving the confusion of that night. “Your father was my responsibility but he wasn’t being held where he was supposed to be, where our intel reported.”
“They moved him to another hut a few days before Christmas to keep him separate from our mother and us, thinking he wouldn’t try to escape without us and we couldn’t escape without him.”
“My partner and I finally found him. He was being guarded by one small kid who looked like he was no more than thirteen or fourteen.”
His sister’s age, he remembered thinking. “I should have taken him out in his sleep but I...didn’t.”
He should have at least immobilized the kid and removed any threat with a sleeper hold, but the kid had already been sound asleep, snoring like an elephant and he and his partner had made the disastrous decision to leave him sleeping.
“We managed to get your father out of his restraints and the hut where they were holding him. But just as we were heading to the extraction site, something awoke his guard—the kid I didn’t have the stones to take out in his sleep. He yelled and all hell broke loose as you all were loading up. I turned to fire but I was too slow.”
“And?”
He swallowed. “If I had been a fraction of a second faster, your father might still be alive.”
He waited for her to get angry or hurt or something. She only continued to stare at him out of those huge eyes.
“You said the mission haunted you for all these years,” she finally said. “Is this the pack full of guilt you’ve been carrying?”
“Not all of it, but it makes up a few of the heaviest stones I’ve got back there.”
“Well, you can set those down right here. What happened to my father wasn’t your fault. He made his own choices, all along the way. He was the one who chose to drag his family to that particular area, despite all the warnings. My father was a great man whose heart was always in the right place but he was also an idealistic one. He believed in the inherent goodness of people and he refused to accept that some people and some situations couldn’t be fixed by an outpouring of love or charity or generosity of spirit.”
“My single moment of hesitation cost your father his life.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know that. A helicopter was landing outside Juan Pablo’s camp. Do you really think that guard or Juan Pablo or anyone else would have slept through that? You risked your life for us. All of you did. That’s the only part that matters to me about your actions of that day.”
She genuinely meant it, he realized. He had expected tears and recriminations, anger, pain. Instead, she was offering solace.
What an amazing woman.
Her words seemed to seep into his heart, his conscience, like a balm, healing places he hadn’t realized were damaged, and he didn’t trust himself to speak for a long moment.
“I’m not angry with you about anything you did that day. I couldn’t be.”
Her voice abruptly hardened. “Don’t think for a moment that lets you off the hook for keeping this from me since the day we met. You owed me the truth from the very first.”
“I did,” he said, his voice gruff. How could he tell her he hadn’t wanted to risk damaging this fragile, tender friendship that was becoming so very important to him?
“I don’t know if I can get over that, Rafe. It’s going to take some time.” She stood up. “That said, Faith is right. You and Joey should come to Thanksgiving dinner. You have no excuse to say no now. We eat about three. I’ll tell Mary and Celeste to expect you.”
She rose, gave him a long look, then hurried away from him into the office of the lodge and closed the door.
* * *
By the time she made it to the office, Hope was almost running, though she hoped Rafe couldn’t see her from where he still sat by the fireplace.
With a pretend casualness she was far from feeling, she closed the door with great care so it didn’t slam then sank down into Uncle Claude’s big leather chair, desperately needing the comfort of the familiar.
She had barely had time to absorb the sweetness and aching tenderness of that kiss and this.
She didn’t have time to even think straight right now. In forty-eight hours, The Christmas Ranch would be opening to the public and she still had a hundred last-minute details to attend to—not to mention more reindeer to sew, if she could find time.
She had promised herself she would take Thanksgiving afternoon off to be with her family, which left her tonight, a few hours in the morning and Friday throughout the day, before The Christmas Ranch had its traditional opening at dusk on the day after Thanksgiving.
Now she had this stunning revelation to contend with.
Rafe was there. He was a navy SEAL and had been involved in her family’s rescue that fateful Christmas day seventeen years go.
Now she realized why he had seemed so familiar. She had blocked many things out about that day but now that she knew the truth, memories flooded back in a heavy deluge.
She couldn’t have pinpointed any particular features among any of the other SEAL team members who had rescued them except those eyes, so unexpectedly and strikingly hazel in his otherwise Latino features.
Now she could picture him as clearly as if she had a photograph of that day—young, tough, dangerous.
Why hadn’t he told her?
She still didn’t understand. She thought they had been able to push aside their obvious attraction for each other and had started to develop a friendship of sorts.
She had even begun to think maybe she was falling in love, for the first time in her life, even though she had known nothing would ever come of it.
How could it?
For one thing, he obviously didn’t share those burgeoning feelings if he could continue perpetuating a lie by omission. More important, he was completely focused on his nephew right now, as he should be. In a few weeks’ time, he would be moving back to San Dieg
o to start a new life with Joey and she had all but decided she was going to stay here in Pine Gulch with her family.
For another, how could she ever trust him now?
She buried her face in her hands for only a moment, surrendering only briefly to the pain and frustration churning through her. She had worked so hard to move past that life-changing day, to tell herself she was stronger than what had happened to her. She wouldn’t let the ideas of some misguided zealots control her life.
Now, when she had finally met a man she thought she could fall in love with, the events of that day reared back to consume everything good and wonderful in her world.
After a momentary pity party, she dropped her hands, rubbed them briskly down her legs and stood up again. She didn’t have time for this. The people of southern Idaho didn’t care about her petty problems. They needed a little Christmas spirit and she was going to deliver it, damn it, no matter what the cost.
Chapter Twelve
They shouldn’t have come.
Standing beside him on the front porch at the Star N Ranch house, Joey vibrated with excitement. It was like a force field of crackling energy around him.
“Can I ring the doorbell?” he asked.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
The boy rang it, waited about two seconds, then rang it again. He was about to go back for a third time two seconds after that but Rafe held a hand out to block him.
“Whoa. That’s good. Give somebody time to answer the door.”
“I’m starving. I can’t wait for turkey!”
Before Rafe could answer, the door opened and a vision appeared, silhouetted in the doorway. It was Hope, but as he’d never seen her before. She was wearing makeup for the first time he remembered and all that luscious hair had been curled. It fell past her shoulders in blond waves that made him want to trail his fingers through it.
She wore dressy slacks and a soft-looking sweater in rich blues and greens.
His mouth watered—and not because of the delicious aromas emanating from the warm doorway.
“You came,” she said, her features politely distant. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
The Christmas Ranch (The Cowboys of Cold Creek) Page 13