by Grace Walton
“Is that why the woman and children were kidnapped? Because they are different?”
“For the most part, yes,” he said. “Under the tenants of the majority religion in the area, those people have no rights. They are considered heretics, even though their religion is one of the oldest in the world.”
“And you, you were considered a heretic too?”
“I was even less than a heretic. Because I would not profess a religion they saw me as nothing. A least the others could claim some sort of faith. I don’t”
“You don’t believe anything?” she asked.
Maggie tried as hard as she could to make sure there was no judgement in her voice. She was dismayed he could so easily confess he believed in nothing. But from some of their earlier conversations, she knew that was the case. She’d just hoped his recent brush with death may have caused him to reevaluate his position. Apparently, it had not.
“Maggie, you know where I stand on the issue of religion.”
“I do,” she agreed.
“I’m glad you have the comfort of a belief in a higher power. But that kind of life is not for me. I make my own decisions, my own choices. I live with the consequences.”
“I understand,” the girl said.
And she did understand. She just didn’t like his unbelief. She knew, from her own personal experience, that her faith was far more than just a comforting myth.
“Tell me the rest,” Maggie coaxed.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?” Hollister growled.
He was more than sure he didn’t want to tell the story. And he would still edit it, for her sake. Even the few details he’d give her were bound to be disturbing.
“I do.”
“Fine,” he said as he leaned back as far as he could in the sagging chair. “I was locked up with the survivors. I used every means to win over my captors. After a while, they began to ignore me. They were holding me for ransom, so I was treated relatively well.” That was a lie, but he would never tell her the real details.
“Gage didn’t get you out of there?” she asked horrified.
Hollister shook his head. “No, he didn’t. But it was all part of the plan. I needed to be in the very heart of the terrorist operation. I needed to learn their patterns. And I needed to hear their intel. I speak their dialect, though they didn’t know that fact. So everything they said, I understood. I was intelligence gathering. And I learned important facts integral to helping, not just the women and children from one village, but from many places in the rebel held territory. When I’d gotten all the details I needed I led a prison uprising that led to the escape of most of the civilians who’d been held prisoner. Then I came home… to you”
Maggie blushed at the intensity of his words. “But you went back?”
“I did.” He nodded. The room was silent except for the crackling of the fire and sound of the blowing snow outside the house.
“Why?” she asked.
“Gage received an urgent piece of information. The terrorists had taken more prisoners and were preparing to make a beheading video of their executions. The number was twice as many as the people who’d been jailed with me for three years.”
“So you went back to save them?”
His dark laughter was chilling. “Yeah, I guess you could say that was my mindset. I thought since I knew the layout of the compound and the patterns of the terrorists’ behavior, I could take a small team in and get the prisoners out with no problem.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“No, the whole mission went south before the plane even touched down. The little airstrip was overrun with an enemy militia as we were landing. The pilot was immediately killed by a barrage of bullets through the plane’s windshield. The men who came with me were shot as they exited the plane. They were dead before they hit the sand.”
“How did you escape?”
“I didn’t,” he said grimly. “I was shot as well. But my wounds weren’t life threatening. And this time, my captors recognized me. They wanted revenge. When I came to, I was chained to a stone column. It was dark. There were the sounds of crying and the sounds of people being beaten. My cell was deep in a hole under an ancient fortress. It was dank and hot. There was no water. I was bleeding. In fact, I thought I’d bleed out. But somehow, some way, I didn’t. The first three days nobody bothered me. I was in and out of consciousness. At the end of three days, a man came in with a canteen. He tossed it to me and left without a word. I portioned the water out as long as I could. Three days later, he came back. This time he threw me a hunk of rancid goat cheese and a handful of dried dates. It went on like that for several weeks. He’d come into my cell every few days with more water and the sparse food. They were giving me just enough to survive on, but not enough for me to heal or gain strength. Thankfully the gunshot wounds I had were superficial.”
“Why? Why were they doing that. Didn’t they know you were a foreign national?”
“Of course they did,” he replied. “If I hadn’t been worth something to them, they would have killed me. Then they separated the women from their children.”
“Oh, no,” she gasped.
“That was a hard day,” he acknowledged. “There was a lot of screaming and crying punctuated by sporadic gunfire.”
“So they were executing them?”
“They were. I found out later that women over a certain age were automatically shot. They weren’t of any use to the militia. The children were taken away. It’s my understanding the unattractive ones were to be trained as suicide bombers. The pretty ones were to be sold.”
“Oh those poor, poor kids,” she moaned.
“The young women who were virgins were the most valuable. They were to be sold or given to the officers as wives. The others were used badly.”
Maggie swallowed. “And you?”
He looked away from her for a second. He would not tell her of his torture. He would never let her know how they’d abused him. How they’d shamed and humiliated him.
“They left me alone, for the most part. When I was able to stand, I was put to work emptying the toilet pots.”
“And you were able to communicate with the other prisoners?”
“I was,” he said. “I was sent into the cells to haul out the pots, carry them to the makeshift latrine pit, and empty them. Then I brought the pots back.”
His retelling of the ordeal left so much unsaid. He didn’t tell her about the broken and bloodied bodies of the poor women. He didn’t tell her about the way their eyes seemed dead. He didn’t say a word about the many he’d ended up burying in the burning desert highland. For the first time in his life, he’d hated his own strength. He’d hated the fact that he couldn’t just die and escape. Sometimes, even now, in the middle of a long, cold Montana night, he still hated himself. Death looked more and more appealing.
“How did you escape?’
“Gage came for me, like I knew he would. He brought a contingent of our best men. They stormed the compound. They got me out.”
“How could all this have happened without me knowing?” she asked herself aloud.
He answered, “At the time, not even Carrie knew. It was a black op. Nobody knew. And only you and she and the men involved know to this day.”
“The terrorists?”
“They were eliminated.”
“How about the prisoners?”
“The ones who remained in the fortress were evacuated out. There weren’t too many. We’re still searching for the ones who were sold or married against their will.”
“I’m so sorry, Hollister.”
“So am I,” he ground out. “I failed. And because of my failure women and children died. Some are in horrible situations right now, because I failed.”
“You did all you could,” she argued.
“It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.”
He believed the statement to be true. He believed he was bad, evil even, and somehow fatally flawed. No matte
r how hard he fought against that feeling of ultimate despair, he believed it. He’d always believed it. After all, it was what his abusive father always told him each time he’d been beaten as a kid.
“Hollister, you’ve got to forgive yourself. You did everything, everything within your power.”
He snorted sarcastically. “Forgive myself?”
“Yes.” Maggie nodded. Her face was earnest. Her beautiful dark eyes shone with a deep, deep compassion.
“It’s a pretty word, but it’s just a crutch.”
“Forgiveness is a crutch?” The young woman was astounded to hear him say such a thing. “No, forgiveness is real. It’s healing. Forgiveness is a gift.”
“Maggie,” he responded, his voice intense. His eyes were hard as agate. “There is no forgiveness for a man like me.”
“You’re wrong,” she cried out.
“I wish I was,” he said heavily. “But I know I’m not.”
A groan from the man on the couch stopped their conversation. Maggie sprang over to him. She felt his face. She frowned.
“He’s cold,” she said.
“Because of the drug withdrawal, his body is having a hard time regulating his temperature.”
“Is that dangerous?” she asked.
Hollister’s jaw tightened. “It could be. I’ll go out to the barn and hitch the horses to an old sleigh. There’s a vet who lives about three miles away. We can get Brown to him. The vet will be better than no doctor at all.”
“How do you know there’re horses and a sleigh in the barn? For that matter, how do you know there’s even a barn?”
Hollister smiled, but the gesture didn’t reach his eyes. “Didn’t you hear? I own this place. I bought it a few years back.”
“You did?” She was flummoxed.
“Yeah, I was going to use it as a horse breeding operation.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in horse breeding.”
“There are a lot of things about me you don’t know,” he replied cryptically. “I’ll pull the sleigh around to the front. When you see me, come on out. I’ll get you settled and warm then I’ll come back and get Brown.”
She knew better than to try and argue with the man. She just nodded. Though she did wonder how she might be able to help in getting a big, burly unconscious Chase Brown out through a howling blizzard and into an antique sleigh.
Twenty minutes later, she heard the tinkling of little bells. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, she’d have thought it romantic. She’d been on plenty of sleigh rides over the course of her life. When a girl lived on a ranch in Montana, she learned all about snow sports. Maggie loved skiing, sledding, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, ice skating, and sleighing. None of these were generally done during the height of a punishing blizzard. But, at the moment, a sleigh seemed the most logical means of transportation.
“Let me help you?” she insisted as she came out into the driving snow to meet the sleigh.
Hollister set the brake on the sleigh. He even went so far as to tie off the lead horse to a nearby tree before he jumped off the running board and down to the ground.
“Get in. There’s a couple of old buffalo robes. Get under the one in the front seat.”
“Hollister?” she said patiently. “You’re going to need my help. Chase probably weighs over two hundred pounds.”
“Get in the sleigh and cover up,” he ordered. He turned his back and disappeared into the blinding snow.
Maggie wanted to keep arguing, but she knew it would do no good. She hoisted herself up onto the passenger’s seat of the old sleigh. It had definitely seen better days. The paint was chipped and almost gone. The runners were black with caked and frozen mud. The leather seats were ripped. The two big draft horses hitched to the monstrosity looked back at her with wild eyes. It was plainly apparent they were not used to pulling such a conveyance. These were not horses trained to give rich tourists a trot through powdery snow. These were farm animals, plow horses. Maggie would bet her last dollar, Hollister had bought them from the nearby Amish community. They were too big and muscular to be buggy horses. She just hoped and prayed Hollister could handle them on the short trip to the vet’s house.
Her attention was captured by the sight of Hollister dragging Chase feet first through the drifting snow. At the side of the sleigh, he hoisted the big man onto the back bench as if the man weighed less than nothing. With a few quick, economical movements, Hollister had the sleeping man covered in the other musty old hide.
He untied the skittish lead horse and stepped up into the driver’s seat. He hauled Maggie over to him with one strong arm. She squeaked in surprise. But she soon saw what he was about. Their combined body heat soon thawed her frozen extremities.
Hollister bunched the reins in one hand while he anchored her to his side. He slapped the leathers against the horses’ broad shaggy backs. They lurched off with a start. For a few minutes it seemed the animals were at odds with each other. It was almost as if they’d never pulled a hitch together. Maggie was worried.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” she said.
“It’ll work,” Hollister said.
“The horses are green, the blizzard is just getting stronger, and Chase is in a bad way. We need to get him back to the house,” she insisted. “This isn’t going to work.’
“It’s going to work,” he said again.
Maggie could barely hear him over the fierce roar of the storm. She shook her head violently. The snow that had gathered on her raven’s wing hair flew around her head like a halo. She gripped his muscled forearm at her waist where it kept her prisoner.
“It’s not going to work,” she yelled over the tumult.
To her surprise, his face lowered to hers. She smelled the spicy scent of his cologne. She felt the hot rush of his breath against her cheek. And then he kissed her and she forgot why she was so afraid.
On and on the kiss went. What had started as a chaste salute morphed into a sensual exercise. His experienced cold lips played with the soft, plush warmth of hers. Maggie settled against the hard contours of his torso. She felt cherished. She felt loved, for the first time in her whole life, she felt loved by a man. Random thoughts bombarded her senses. She tasted the coffee he’d drunk. It was a dark, deep flavor. Almost like the man himself. She realized he was drawing her deeper and deeper into a place she’d never been. And instead of being terrified, she wanted to go there with him. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything in her whole life. Long drugging seconds later, she whimpered under the onslaught. It wasn’t that she wanted him to stop. No, if it was left up to her they’d never stop. The intimacy was like nothing she’d ever experienced. No to the contrary, the sound sprang from the depth of her innocent sensuality.
But to Hollister it sounded like she was struggling to get free. He immediately pushed her out of his straining arms. He hated himself in that moment. He hated himself more than he’d ever done before. He was no better than that animal Brown. The way he’d just forced himself on Maggie was nothing short of criminal. It didn’t matter that he loved her more than his own life. It didn’t matter that he would do anything, anything to make her his. It didn’t matter. He was no better than those heathen terrorists who’d held him prisoner. He’d taken advantage of a woman, something he’d never done before. And he’d done it to the one woman in the whole world who mattered to him.
‘Hollister?” Maggie asked softly.
“What?” he snarled at her viciously.
Maggie shrank back from him in fear. It was no less than he deserved, he told himself. What he failed to notice was that her cheeks were flushed and her breath was sawing in and out of her chest as rapidly as was his own. No, all he saw was what he thought was her fear of him.
While all Maggie saw and felt was his rejection, once again, of her. It was almost too much to bear.
“You still don’t think this is going to work?” he demanded harshly.
Maggie had no id
ea if he was speaking of their mercy mission to get help for Chase or the sputtering, cooling passion between them. She nodded, not knowing what else to do.
If anything, the man’s face hardened further. It was now a granite mask. He slapped the reins with unnecessary roughness onto the horses’ backs once more. They sprang forward dragging the heavy sleigh through the deep accumulating snow.
“Then you’d better start praying,” he growled without looking down at her.
Chapter Eleven
“Just because you pray about something doesn’t mean it automatically will turn out the way you want it to. God isn’t some kind of omnipotent servant just waiting to do your biding,” the girl said stiffly.
Hollister’s hands gripped tightly on the reins. He should have known better than to mention her faith. It was one of the many areas where their lives didn’t intersect. He narrowed his eyes to keep them free of the blowing snowflakes. Doc Fuller’s place wasn’t that far. Maybe he could just keep his mouth shut, get the blasted idiot in the backseat to him, and plan how to make things right with Maggie. Though, in his soul, he knew things were never going to be right between them. That kiss had been a huge mistake.
He still felt the heat of her blushing cheeks beneath his cold hands as he’d cupped her lovely face. He could taste the sweetness of her mouth on his. It was like some kind of addictive nectar. She seemed distant now. He was sorry for that. He’d never meant to do anything that made her afraid of him. He’d just been unable to keep from kissing her. It was almost like he’d wanted to brand her as his.
Which was a very foolish idea, he had to admit. A kiss was not a brand. It wouldn’t keep another man from sniffing around her. It wouldn’t even show to a casual observer. Nobody would ever know they’d shared a life-changing kiss, unless they told the secret. And he knew he’d never do such a reckless thing.
There were many reasons for the need for a certain amount of secrecy. One was the fact that he didn’t know if he’d ever get over the nightmares, depression, and mood swings he was now experiencing. As much as he loved Maggie Ferguson, he’d never put her at such a risk. He’d been jolted awake by a night terror several times in the last few weeks with a knife in his hand, ready to kill.