Christmas at Twilight

by Lori Wilde

  He dropped to his knees, and through the pain was barely aware of voices, and people surrounding him. They were talking, but his ears rang so loudly he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  First mute, now blind and deaf. Move over, Helen Keller.

  His chest heaved and he made a noise like a wounded wildebeest. Tears poured from his puffed-up eyes, a torrent of liquid streamed down his cheeks. He coughed, gagged, and inhaled a big mouthful of pepper-tainted air that triggered more coughing.

  “Water,” a man said. “We need to get him inside and get his eyes rinsed out with water, immediately.”

  Hands went around him, helping him up. His muscles twitched and quivered, marshalling to fight the potent chemicals flaming through his nerve endings. He staggered, stumbled, slumped heavily against someone.

  A female someone. Soft and pliant.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered in his right ear. “I thought you were trying to harm me.”

  Aw, this must be the driver of the minivan that had crashed into his fence. He wanted to ask her if she was okay, but he couldn’t speak, and even if he could, he was too busy trying to catch his breath to forgive her for pepper-spraying him.

  “This way.” Her slender arm went around his waist.

  Someone else had hold of Hutch’s left hand—the hand missing an index finger—and was guiding him forward. Was it the man who’d suggested washing his eyes out with water? The ringing in his ears lessened and he could hear other voices. He recognized some of them. Friends and neighbors he hadn’t spoken to since he’d left on his last deployment.

  His final deployment, as it turned out.

  “Lift your feet up if you can,” the woman said, one of her hands on his right elbow, the other still pressed against his lower back. “We’re going over the curb.”

  Blindly, he lifted his leg, pawing at the ground like a high-stepping pony until he made contact with the curb. The trip to the house seemed like a thousand miles, each step jarring painfully.

  How long did this shit last? He felt as if a heavyweight-boxing champ fist-clutching Morgua Scorpions had beat the hell out of him in a back alley.

  The woman guided him up onto the porch and he heard the door creak open. She had the softest voice and a gentle touch that conflicted with the aggressive way she pepper-sprayed him.

  No shrinking violet. This gal was tough.

  The aching in his lungs lessened and he was finally able to suck in a full breath of air. Bad idea. A fresh burn seared all the way down.

  “I’ll help you get him into the bathroom,” the man said.

  Hutch tried to pry his eyes open to see who was talking, but nothing doing. The second he opened his eyes, the stinging intensified and his eyelids involuntarily shuttered back down.

  A bumping noise, the scrape of chair legs against hardwood.

  He was weaker than he should be. That damn two-month hospital stay had sucked the wind right out of his sails. Maybe it was the medication. He’d stopped the benzos cold turkey even though Gupta had told him to taper off slowly. He wanted that crap out of his system.

  Hutch reached out a hand, touched the wall, the wainscoting. He wanted to sit, but the woman put her knee against the back of his leg and nudged him forward. “Bathroom,” she explained.

  Another door hinge creaked, the scuffling of feet. His. Hers. Theirs.

  “How you doin’, buddy?” the man asked, and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

  Hell, no. He nodded.

  The woman released him.

  Aw, where did she go?

  Hutch heard the shower come on and he slumped against the wall, concentrated on pulling air into his lungs and tasted the oily heat of pepper.

  “Bathroom isn’t big enough for all three of us,” the man said.

  “I’ve got it from here, Jesse. Thank you.” The woman’s voice sounded as shaky as Hutch’s kneecaps.

  The man must be Jesse Calloway. Jesse had been released from Huntsville penitentiary four years ago, after serving ten years for a crime he had not committed, and had married Hutch’s next-door neighbor, Flynn MacGregor. Hutch had even attended their wedding. When he was on leave last Christmas, Jesse and Flynn had been renting a small house in downtown Twilight, and they’d been expecting their first child. They must have moved into Flynn’s family home across the street.

  But Hutch was too knotted up with misery to give his neighbors more than a fleeting thought.

  “You sure?” Jesse asked the woman. “Can you handle him?”

  “I’ve got him, if you could just check on Ben and Kimmie for me. I left them with Dotty Mae and I know two four-year-olds can be a handful for me, much less a senior citizen.”

  “Sure thing,” Jesse said. “I’ll get the kids and bring them over to our house. Flynn is picking Grace up from day care, but she’ll be home any minute.”

  Kimmie. His niece.

  But who was Ben? And who was this woman? And where in the devil was Ashley?

  The door clicked shut and Hutch could only assume that Jesse had closed it, leaving him alone in the small front bathroom with the woman he did not know and could not communicate with.

  He forced his eyes open, blinked hard against the zinging sting. Everything was blurry, fuzzy. She was moving around, opening drawers, digging around underneath the cabinet for something. He could barely make out her silhouette before pain forced him to snap his eyes closed again. Underneath his boots the floor tiles seemed to shift.

  Shit. Don’t faint. You’re Delta Force.

  Was. He was Delta Force. Emphasis on past tense.

  Still, that was no call to faint like a girl.

  The woman came closer. He could feel her body heat. Feel her nervousness too.

  She touched his left forearm with a gloved hand. But of course, she had to protect herself. That’s what she’d been looking for in the cabinet. Medical gloves.

  Through the blistering stench of peppery chemicals, his nose finally caught her scent. It was a lovely smell, talcum powder and sugar cookies and raspberry shampoo, and her sweet fragrance instantly soothed his excoriated senses.

  She took him by the shoulders, maneuvered him around until his back was flat against the wall. He hated being backed into a corner, but he was in no position to protest or resist. One blast of that canister and she’d effectively rendered him helpless.

  Dammit. He hated being helpless.

  It had come to this. Would he ever be whole again?

  He felt her hands at his chest. Unbuttoning. She was unbuttoning his shirt. He stiffened, pulled away from her.

  “I don’t like this any more than you do,” she said in the no-nonsense tone of voice that reminded him of military nurses. “But we have to get this contaminated clothing off you.”

  He wanted to tell her that he could do it, but hey, he couldn’t talk. And for another thing, it was all he could do not to topple over.

  “I’m sorry I sprayed you,” she said. “But you did come storming out of my house.”

  Your house? Lady, this is my house. Who was she and what was she doing laying claim to his home?

  “How was I to know you were Ashley’s brother? For all I knew you were a burglar.”

  She was just trying to justify her edgy trigger finger. Why did she have such an edgy trigger finger?

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know Ashley had a brother until a few days ago.” She had already undone his second button, was working on to the third. “It’s Brian, right? That’s what Jesse told me your name was when you were out of it.”

  Not since he was a kid. Hutch. Everyone called him Hutch.

  “Jesse also said you’re a captain in the Army and a war hero. Is that what happened to your finger and your . . .” Her voice hitched. “Throat? The wounds still look fresh.”

  Yakety-yak. Was that all people in Twilight ever did? Talk. Gossip. Chat. Tittle-tattle. Chew the fat. Shoot the breeze. Open their gobs and spew?

  “Jesse a
lso said you were the nicest guy he ever met.”

  Sorry, sweet cheeks, things change. Hutch’s shirt gaped open and he welcomed the hit of air against his chest.

  She inhaled sharply, and her hand tensed on his arm before she dropped it to her side.

  Ah. That was why she was gabbing. She was nervous. He scared her.

  Scared maybe, but apparently undaunted. She reached underneath the waistband of his jeans to pluck out his shirttail, and in the process her fingers brushed against his skin.

  Holy shit.

  Despite that just a couple of minutes ago, he’d taken pepper spray to the face. Despite that he’d been through hell and back these last few months, losing his finger, his voice, his career, and his entire team. Despite that he had no idea what the woman looked like other than that split-second glimpse of a short, black, wavy hair and a startled, wide-eyed face when he’d peered into the window of her minivan before she’d brought the hammer down on him. The ludicrous happened.

  Hutch got hard.

  Meredith tried not to look at him. For one thing, it hurt clean to her bones to see how badly she’d messed him up. His face was violent crimson, his eyes swollen, his breathing shallow and jagged.

  For another thing, he was more magnificently built than any man she’d ever seen, and she’d seen a lot of people naked. There was no softness to him. Not a morsel of fat. He was rock sinew, hard bone. Every muscle was honed and delineated. Where was he when she was in nursing school learning the musculoskeletal system? What a gorgeous teaching aid he would have made.

  No time for admiration. She had to get these clothes off, get him in the shower and that pepper spray washed off him. Immediately.

  Besides, she had zero desire to check him out. She’d written off sex five years ago and hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in rekindling those primitive and unwanted urges.

  Her body, however, disagreed. When she peeled off his shirt and got a good look at his hard, masculine form, something stupidly feminine inside her whispered, Woo-whew.

  Alarmed by her response, she dropped her hand and her gaze.

  He had an erection.

  For a fraction of a second pure panic swept through her, and her mind, alert and trained for danger, thought of the pepper spray and the gun underneath her bed. But then the inner calmness she’d spent the last five years cultivating through yoga and meditation and time spent in nature, the inner calmness that had escaped her when this man had lumbered up to her minivan, whispered in her ear.

  Listen to your instincts. Hear your intuition. Ignore the chattering monkey mind.

  She took a deep breath and slowly let it out, felt her muscles loosen.

  Instinct told her that he was not going to harm her. She knew it in her core. If she hadn’t, she would never have come in here with him. It surprised her, this knowing, because he was rather frightening to look at. But if the past had taught her anything it was that looks could be deceiving.

  But the brain was hard to ignore or defy, even if she had learned that intellectual reasoning could lead her astray when her heart and gut never had. Unfortunately, she didn’t always know how to listen.

  Meredith swallowed and stepped back.

  Honestly, his hard-on wasn’t the real issue. She understood that men couldn’t always control their erections. She had been undressing him. It was a normal biological response. She got that. It might even be some kind of bizarre physiological reaction to the pepper spray.

  No, it wasn’t the involuntary erection that shocked her as much as it was his potent virility and her unexpected attraction to him. Five years. She hadn’t wanted a man in five years.

  Vulnerable. She was so damn vulnerable right now.

  Then again, so was he. Debilitated not only by her pepper spray, but by combat as well. The index finger of his left hand was missing and his neck was puckered with dark pink scars.

  Guilt took hold of her. He was in pain because she was hypervigilant, consumed by fear, and had overreacted. But what else could she have done? She’d seen a stranger coming out of the place where she lived.

  Overkill.

  Blasting him with the pepper spray had been overkill. She’d seen it on the wary faces of her neighbors as they’d gathered around identifying and vouching for him. She’d worked herself into a panic when she’d seen the black pickup truck, imagining that her stalker had found them again, and primal fear had eclipsed everything else.

  He didn’t apologize for the erection, but he did place a strategic hand over his crotch and turn his face from her, clearly embarrassed.

  “Most of the pepper spray went on your shirt,” she said. “You can probably leave your pants on for the shower. Can you get out of your shoes?”

  He nodded, bent over to untie his shoelaces, but immediately lost his balance and crashed heavily against the wall.

  “Hang on. I’ll get those laces for you.” She squatted in front of him, but kept her head ducked so that she wouldn’t be eye-to-eye with his crotch.

  She untied his shoelaces, rocked back on her heels, and stood up.

  He toed off his shoes and, using his palms, felt his way into the shower. The water hit his chest first. He fumbled for the nozzle, found it, and tilted it up to catch him squarely in the face.

  With her gloved hands, she picked up his shirt, redolent with the stench of pepper spray, and stuffed it in a trash bag she retrieved from the bathroom cabinet. Smelling the stuff secondhand in the closed space made her eyes and her nose sting. She coughed against the fumes, stripped off her gloves, and tossed them in the trash basket.

  “I’ll wait outside,” she told him. “Holler if you need anything.”

  He simply grunted.

  She sneaked a peek over at him. Water splashed his face, sluiced down his bare chest. His wet jeans were plastered against his body, and thankfully his erection was gone.

  Meredith closed the door behind her, paced the hall, and wrung her hands. He was going to need something to put on. The last thing she wanted was for him to come strutting out of there wrapped in nothing but a towel.

  Strut? Considering the shape he was in, Captain Brian Hutchinson wasn’t going to be strutting anywhere anytime soon. And it was her fault.

  Cringing, she thought about going across the street to ask Jesse if he could lend Brian jeans and a T-shirt, but the captain was a lot bigger than Jesse.

  What about the spare upstairs bedroom on the second floor where she and Ben lived? Maybe there was something in that room that he could wear. She wasn’t a snoop. She’d never been in that spare bedroom, but perhaps that’s where he stayed when he came to visit his sister.

  Torn between waiting by the door to see if he needed anything and the need to find him clothing, Meredith hesitated.

  She knocked. “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She knocked again, raised her voice. “Brian?”

  Nothing.

  Oh no. What if he had passed out in there?

  She wrenched open the door.

  He was standing there in front of her, wet and naked as the day he was born, glaring at her with bloodshot devil eyes.

  She yelped.

  He snorted like an angry bull.

  She peeked down.

  He was no longer erect, but even so, he was still frighteningly large.

  She slammed the door, raced into the living room, her heart pumping so fast it set her head spinning.

  It wasn’t his fault. She had gone charging in there.

  But he hadn’t answered her. Surely he’d known she would come in there if he didn’t answer her. Why hadn’t he answered her?

  From the top of her scalp to the bottom of her toes, every nerve ending in her body tingled. Her cheeks burned. She plastered her palms on either side of her face. Her arms quivered. Her knees buckled. What was this feeling?

  Not fear.

  Why wasn’t it fear?

  Instead, she felt bizarrely ultra-alive, the way she did as a kid when sh
e and her playmates had played tag between the chase-crew vehicles and hot air balloons being inflated across flat grassy fields. The rhythmic whoosh of the gas burners, the damp scent of morning dew, the freedom, the thrilling pleasure of running to reach base ahead of the tagger just as dawn broke brilliant over the horizon.

  A crazy smile yanked at her mouth and for a moment, she thought she might be losing her mind. Finally, she identified the feeling.

  Giddy. She was giddy.

  But why?

  Maybe it wasn’t giddiness as much as delayed relief that the intruder was not her stalker and the grateful realization that now Brian was here, he could figure out what to do about Ashley.

  Hutch’s eyes still burned like flamethrowers. The cool shower had helped and the swelling was slowly going down, although his blister-hot lungs cried out for cold fresh air.

  With a towel wrapped around his waist, he stepped from the bathroom. He glanced left, then right, searching for the woman. No sign of her.

  Maybe she’d hightailed it out of here. Who was she anyway? One of the strays Ashley inevitably took in?

  Great. He’d have to be the one to send her packing.

  He lumbered down the hallway, still unsteady on his feet. That was some potent pepper spray, as heavy-duty as the variety that riot cops used. He paused at the foot of the stairs, wished he could call out and warn her in case she was quivering in some corner somewhere armed with more pepper spray.

  Ouch. He winced at the mere idea of being sprayed again. Cocking his head, he listened for sounds of her.

  Silence.

  Coast clear.

  He went up to his bedroom, retrieved the duffel bag he’d dropped on the floor when he arrived. Dressed in cargo pants, a green T-shirt, and a pair of deck shoes and no socks. He felt naked without his dog tags. After more than a decade in the military, he missed the tags almost as much as he missed his ability to speak.

  Forget it. Move on. Somehow, he’d muscle his way through this confounded PTSD and get his voice back if it killed him.

  Hutch started to go back down the stairs, but on impulse stopped outside the bedroom across the hall. He turned the knob, booted the door open.

  It wasn’t the empty bedroom he’d left behind on his final deployment.