A Ranger for the Holidays (Lone Star Cowboy League)

by Allie Pleiter

  Finn stopped assembling the house. “How did you lose your mama?”

  “Pneumonia. I think it started out as some other infection but when the pneumonia set it, she just couldn’t fight it off. First she was sick at home, then in the hospital, then in intensive care...” Her voice trailed off. He thought about how much he hated being in the hospital, how much nicer it was to be in a home—even someone else’s—and sympathy made him want to touch her hand. He didn’t.

  “The first Christmas without Mama was the worst. I kept trying to make it big and wonderful in her place, for Lizzie and Daddy as much as for myself, but nothing worked. I couldn’t do anything the way Mama did, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Finn looked around the kitchen covered in holiday decor. He’d never seen anyone decorate every single room of their house in so much holiday cheer—except for his upstairs, thankfully. Even the bathroom had little trees and lights and special towels. “Seems to me you picked up her knack.” He pointed for emphasis at Bug’s Christmas sweater, a red-felt thing with little green trees all down the back. He’d counted five different holiday sweaters for the dog already.

  “I did, eventually.” Amelia scratched Bug under the chin and was rewarded with a hearty lick. “I found my own way rather than trying to duplicate Mama’s. But her love, her joy? I try to imitate that every day.”

  “You do,” Finn felt compelled to point out. “You’ve got more joy in one hour than most folks get in a month. A life, maybe.” Here she’d had so many hard knocks—parents gone, heart broken and who knew what else—and she still bubbled with joy and spent her days making other people happy. Where did that kind of bottomless well of mercy come from?

  Her cheeks went pink with the compliment, and she fiddled with a bit of fuzz on Bug’s sweater.

  “I mean it,” he said. “You’re amazing. That Rafe fellow was an idiot, if you ask me.” Finn swallowed hard, thinking that remark went a bit too far. If no one cared enough about him to recognize him missing, he hardly qualified to pass judgment on Amelia’s relationships.

  Her eyes came back up to meet his. Finn kicked himself for bringing up Rafe when they were supposed to be talking about happy holiday memories.

  “It would never have worked between Rafe and me. He just realized it before I did, that’s all.” There was so much regret in her words.

  “But he couldn’t work up the spine to tell you? Instead he just goes no-show on you at your own engagement party?” The words came out sharply; Finn really did want to slug this Rafe guy for stomping on Amelia’s heart the way he did.

  Amelia let Bug hop down off her lap and began arranging chairs around the tiny table. “He did tell me, in a hundred small ways. I just wouldn’t see them.” She capped the glue bottle. “I can be a mite single-minded, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  He had noticed. He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that single-minded nature. “Thank you again,” he said softly, “for rescuing me. I may have forgotten a lot of things, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget what you’ve done for me.” Mushy words, to be sure, but he felt all of them. “I don’t know where I’d be right now if it weren’t for you.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, and Finn felt his breath catch in his chest at the blue of her eyes. He felt the closest thing to safe he’d felt in days, despite the temporary nature of his whole world right now. Did she feel it, too? That pull between them that went far beyond rescuer and rescuee? It didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t help feeling she didn’t just find him in the woods—somehow, they’d found each other.

  Only, if he really was a Ranger, couldn’t his job consume his life the way Rafe’s had? It was easy to say no now, while none of that life invaded, but his old life would eventually return—maybe huge pieces of it when he met with Searle Monday—and who knew what would happen then?

  He forced a light tone into his words as he picked up the door piece of the dollhouse and began working it into the side wall. “I doubt I’d be spending my Saturday nights playing toy maker, that’s for sure.” The door frame snapped into place. “Two more of these?”

  From the corner of his eye, he watched Amelia fold the moment away, taking her “let’s not go there” cue from his unspoken retreat. “Yes. But then we’ll have to get started on the bicycles.”

  Chapter Nine

  Finn was glad Dr. Searle had given him Monday’s first appointment of the day. The weekend had dragged by, his impatience nearing the breaking point. Today would unlock everything. Details would start coming faster and faster until he had his whole life back.

  He’d expected Searle to be as pleased with the breakthrough as he was, but the doctor’s expression hit Finn as squarely as if the office door had slammed in his face. Searle didn’t have good news. The prickly ball of anxiety in Finn’s stomach solidified into a lead weight.

  “Come on in, sit down.”

  Searle placed his hands on a single file sitting on his desk. Finn noted Frank Brannigan typed on the tab, but the rush of excitement was now one of fear.

  “Did you keep your promise to stay off the internet?”

  “Just about killed me, but yeah.” Searle’s request had made a bit of sense—he could indeed end up chasing rabbit trails of false information or wrong identities and he wasn’t in strong enough emotional shape to handle big shocks—but given the doc’s face, it hadn’t saved Finn any grief.

  Some part of Finn—the Ranger instinct, maybe—recognized the carefully neutral face Searle wore. One steeled to relay bad news. Finn gritted his teeth. “With your full name and the information you told me,” Searle explained, “I was able to make contact with the Rangers and they sent over your confidential file. Did you happen to remember anything else other than what you’ve already told me?”

  Finn recognized the stall and fought the urge to reach out and grab the file out of Searle’s hands. “Just tell me, Doc. I can already see it’s not happy news, so let’s just get it over with, okay?” His heartbeat thundered under his ribs, making them hurt from the tension building in his whole body.

  Searle took a deep breath and opened the file. “You are a member of the Rangers—Company F out of Waco, to be precise, but you have been away from Waco and on leave since February.”

  Leave? As in placed off duty for a reprimand? “What’d I do?” he gulped out. Based on Searle’s face, it was something huge.

  “Nothing you did, Finn. More what...happened to you.”

  “Happened to me? I’m here, aren’t I? I’ve got no injuries other than the ones from when Amelia found me. What’s in there?”

  The doctor adjusted his glasses. “Not exactly to you.” He took another deep breath. “But we know B stood for Belinda.”

  Stood. Finn felt the past tense of Searle’s words wrap around his throat.

  “Rangers as a rule shy away from any press, but you can see why they had extra cause to keep this quiet. You were with a special ops unit, Finn, and something went wrong. All the details are in there.”

  Finn scanned a gruesome photo of a car wreck and a few sentences of the accompanying report. Belinda’s car had been sabotaged by associates of someone Finn had helped to put in jail. The room spun around Finn in angry circles, yanking him off balance and stealing the air so that he couldn’t breathe. An excruciating combination of grief and numbness—after all, how could he grieve someone he didn’t remember yet—came at him as if someone was hurling rocks at his chest. Belinda. He desperately wanted the name to mean something, to call up a face, a house, a life, anything, but nothing came. Finn wanted to get up and run somewhere, anywhere, but his limbs wouldn’t obey. Instead, he felt as if he were melting on the spot, losing all the things that held him in place, threatening to disappear into thin air.

  And hadn’t he? He had disappeared. Who wouldn’t want to disappear from what Searle just described? He looked back to the report and saw the terrible word infant. He’d had a baby? A baby daughter who had been lost, as well? Finn’s whole
body shook. For one horrific second he thought, I wish I never knew, only to feel even worse for wishing it. The unfocused pain, the sheer faceless tragedy of two lives needlessly lost, pressed down upon him until he thought he was going to black out.

  “Finn?” Somewhere from beyond the swirling room Dr. Searle’s voice was calling to him, and there was a hand on his arm but Finn felt he was a hundred miles away, somewhere black and painful. “Finn? Do you want me to call someone?”

  The stinging truth of that question snapped Finn’s eyes to the doctor’s face. “Who? Who? There’s no one to call, Doc. I’m alone. That’s why no one’s come looking for me. There is no one.”

  “The Rangers had no idea you were missing until our call. They’re worried about you. They offered to send someone—a counselor trained in this sort of thing.”

  “No!” Finn didn’t even need a second to think about it. “No. I’m alone in this.” He finally made his hands move, willing them up to cover his eyes, where the cold, fluorescent overhead light hurt too much all of a sudden. At least the pain was something to feel, some human reaction he could hope to understand.

  “I wish you’d reconsider. This is more shock than anyone should handle without...”

  “Did they get him?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who did this!” It came roaring out of Finn with a startling rage. He didn’t bother to hold it back; it was something to feel, the only thing that made him human at the moment. Even a senseless anger was better than the hollow, horrified emptiness that threatened to swallow him right now.

  “Yes. But he died of the gunshot wound inflicted when they brought him in.”

  “What was his name?” Finn began rifling through the pages of the file.

  “Why do you...”

  “Tell me his name, Doc!” Surely, Finn would never totally forget the name of the man who murdered his family. If anything would unleash the flood of recollection that even those images in the file could not unlock, it would be a man he surely hated above all else.

  “Tony Stone. His name was Anthony Stone.”

  Finn waited for the awareness to break open, for the anger to find a target so it could go out instead of pounding down upon him, but it didn’t happen. It was as if he was looking in on someone else’s life, hearing atrocities that happened to some other man. It’s me, he kept reminding himself, that’s me. It happened to me. To my wife. To my child. For a ridiculous moment, he understood why his brain had betrayed him so; what man on earth wouldn’t forget all that pain if he could?

  “I’m so sorry, Finn. I wanted better news for you. We all did.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “What I’ve just told you?” Searle replied.

  “Yeah, who else knows?”

  “I wouldn’t release this information to anyone without your consent, Finn. No one else knows except the Ranger headquarters in Austin. And like I said, they’ve offered to send someone over here and I think you should...”

  “No,” Finn shot back, throwing the file on Searle’s desk. “I’m not ready for them. I’m technically on leave still, right? I don’t have to talk to them?”

  Searle picked the file up. “They’re deeply concerned about you, Finn. You’ve been through a horrible ordeal, now made worse by your recent accident. There was a counselor assigned to your case back at the time of the accident. Let me call him. You need assistance getting through something like this.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t need anything.” Everyone knew more about him than he did. He’d forgotten so much, Belinda and—with a stab of torment he realized he didn’t even know his own daughter’s name—were just facts on a page. Facts that must have been his fault. The room began closing in on him again. “I don’t want anyone from the Rangers here. I don’t want anyone here.” He glared at Searle. “No one else hears this. No one. I’ll say something when I’m ready, when I remember them, but not one moment before, understand?”

  “Finn, I don’t think that’s wise.”

  “Well, it’s not your call, Doc, is it?” Finn shouted. Right now, he needed to be alone. Solitary, in some wide-open space big enough to handle the explosion of pain when it came. Because it would. It had to. He grabbed the file out of Searle’s hands without asking whether or not he could have it, glad when Searle didn’t resist. There was a park of sorts out back behind the medical center, and Finn knew he had to go there until he could get the rage and hollowness under control.

  “Don’t call Amelia. I need to be on my own. I was going to walk back when I was done anyways. You are to say nothing, not one bit of this to her.” He pointed at the doctor. “Do I have your word?”

  “Finn...”

  “Do I?”

  Searle was at least smart enough to know when negotiation was not an option. “There are a lot of people waiting to help you.”

  Finn stuffed the envelope in his jacket and headed for the door. “Well, they’re all going to have to wait.”

  * * *

  Lizzie’s request to meet for breakfast comforted Amelia that things hadn’t gone entirely south between her and her sister. She was more than glad to spend time with Lizzie at Maggie’s while Finn was with Dr. Searle, even if her intuition told her the sisterly invitation meant something had gone wrong.

  The coffee shop was crowded. Judd and Anne Derring were there, enjoying a breakfast with their foster children, Timmy and Maddy. Gareth and Winston McKay—Byron’s teenage sons—were there as well, so it it must have been a “late start” day at school today. The McKay boys and half the shop were talking about the latest “Robin Hood gift,” a set of bicycles for the Ramierez boys and some new equipment for their rancher father, who’d had a rough time of it since his wife left.

  As they settled into their booth, Lizzie leaned in. “Fess up now, Lia, were those bikes from you?”

  It was flattering—in an annoying sort of way—that people continued to suspect she was behind these gifts no matter how many times she denied it. “I don’t give anonymously. I give because God’s blessed me to bless others. I want them to know God’s hand in all of this, so no, again, it’s not me.”

  “Well, then—” Lizzie sat back “—who’s been doing all of this?”

  “I have no idea. I know Lucy has her theories.”

  “Which are?”

  Amelia gave her sister a sharp look. “I wouldn’t stay friends with the sheriff for long if I didn’t know when to keep my mouth shut, would I?”

  “Are they close to catching him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it someone from Little Horn?”

  Amelia considered ordering pie for breakfast. “I don’t know, Lizzie. Besides, we came here to talk about the wedding. What did Boone’s parents say when you told them your plans?”

  Liz looked down. “They weren’t too keen on the idea, actually.”

  Amelia suspected that was an understatement. She’d met Boone’s folks once, and they didn’t strike her as subtle. I bet that stings. Show grace. “How so?”

  “Well, Boone’s dad said it was ridiculous.”

  Ouch. Then again, hadn’t Gramps said something similar? At least he’d never put it quite so sharply to his granddaughter’s face. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. You were so excited about the whole thing.”

  “Oh, they can say whatever they want. Boone and I are still going through with it. It’s our wedding, after all.”

  A circus wedding was bad enough, but a defiant circus wedding? This looked like a marital nightmare on any number of levels. “And what does Boone say?”

  “He’s behind me one hundred percent. He told his father if he doesn’t like the theme, he doesn’t have to come.”

  Amelia could just imagine how that went over. “It’s your wedding. You want his family there. His family will be part of your life together. You wouldn’t dream of getting married without Gramps there, would you?”

  Lizzie’s eyes flashed. “Why? Does Gramps have a problem with what we wan
t, too?”

  “He wants you to be happy. I’ll admit, he found the whole thing a bit—” she searched for a word that would keep the most peace “—unusual, but...”

  “Why can’t anyone see how much fun this will be?” The whine in Lizzie’s voice sounded far younger than her twenty-four years.

  “Maybe folks just think of weddings as more solemn affairs. It’s a big, important step. A circus may sound a little more like a birthday party than two people committing their lives to each other.”

  Lizzie’s eyes told Amelia that last remark had been a step too far. “So you don’t like it, either.”

  “I’m not saying that. It’s not mine to say in any case. But if you want my honest opinion, it might make everyone happier if you tone it down just a bit. We can still have lots of fun with the idea, just...”

  “So you do hate it. How can you hate it? It was your idea. Boone said you were brilliant for coming up with it.”

  It was the first compliment Amelia could ever remember receiving from Boone. At least that was something. “I don’t hate it.” She recalled the sparkle in Lizzie’s eyes that day that was clearly gone now. “I think maybe we might need to tweak it a little, that’s all.” The more prideful part of her worried Lizzie had told the world her brilliant big sister had come up with the idea. Just what Amelia needed—more Little Horn tongues wagging about her.