A Hero's Redemption. Suzanne Mcminn
his condition when she could get him out of here. She checked on the stranger again. He was alive, sleeping. She went to the living room, grabbed the folded quilt off the back of it and stretched out. She tried really hard not to think about the fact that a man was sleeping in the next room. In her bed. A stranger.
Mostly, she tried not to think about the morning.
Chapter 3
Dawn crept through lace at the windows and Dane McGuire stared at the rectangle of light in the shadowed room, his head throbbing, his mind searching through some disembodied sea of broken pieces that slipped and slid on waves of pain. The courthouse, the conviction, the crash—The woman who couldn’t be Calla Jones.
It nearly killed him but he got out of the bed, holding on to the bedpost and his breath. His chest felt like someone had used him for a punching bag. As for his head—He reached up, felt the bandage there. He pulled the sheet with him, wrapping it awkwardly around his waist. He had to get out of here. He had to find his clothes. She’d said something about putting them in the laundry.
He made it to the window on legs that felt like water, pushed the curtains aside and grabbed on to the window frame for support. Outside, a winter world greeted him, winter, not summer. It was June. How could there be snow? The sun broke through the clouded morning, and he blinked against the suddenly bright light on all that white landscape. Snow. There was a barn, snow drifting high against it, right where he knew it would be. The greenhouse and the trees, the mountains scraping sky above. And the snow was still falling, light now, but continuous. He knew this farm. He’d been here before. This really was Haven Christmas Tree Farm. He was back where it all started, last December, when his entire life had been destroyed in one fell swoop.
And the woman who said she was Calla Jones, looked like Calla Jones, had shown him Calla Jones’s identification—He pivoted, ignoring the rush of pain and wave of sickness. The dresser where the woman had gotten the purse with the driver’s license was there. There were photographs all lined up; a little girl, a teenager, an adult, a woman as she grew. A lifetime in a few pictures. There was a framed West Virginia University diploma with Calla Jones’s name. A stack of envelopes, bills, addressed to Calla Jones.
Winter, not summer.
A calendar was tacked to the wall with a stick pin, open to December of the previous year. There was a CD player on the dresser. He fumbled for it, pushed the button. Classic rock poured out. He pushed it off the CD mode, switched to radio. No cord, so it was on battery. Fuzz. He pushed the selector until he found a clear station. More music. Another one with a commercial jingle. He kept pushing the button. Weather for today, December 20, in the Appalachian foothill region—
Something bone-deep and dark rushed him and he felt his knees shaking, hard.
Calla woke with a start, her eyes blinking open against the pale dawn shafting through the windows of the front room, nerves strung taut—A bang. That’s what had woken her. A loud bang from the back of the house—
She jerked forward, tossing the blanket, uncurling her legs, remembered the stranger and—She rushed to the next room.
The radio played the day’s news to an empty bed. He was gone.
Her blood pumped hot in the chilly room. Panic at the stranger’s disappearance combined with the realization that there was no heat. The generator must have died.
And the stranger, the stranger who was in no fit state to travel on foot, was gone. He’d die out there.
The forecast airing on the radio was for a bad one, the storm expected to last at least another day, steady snow this morning and increasing again by noon to blizzard-strength. Mountainous roads were already impassable. People were being warned to stay home, even in the towns. Electric and phone service out for thousands of homes. The governor was calling for a state of emergency, requesting federal assistance in clearing roads and restoring basic services.
She rushed out of the room. The sound had come from the back of the house. Grabbing and shoving on shoes, she ran, through the kitchen, through the utility room, blasting out into the icy morning. As she took the first step, she slipped and then slid on the concrete stair. She grappled for the railing, desperate to keep from landing on her ass. Failed. The heels of her bare hands hit the snow-covered steps, barely breaking her fall. The cold impact stunned her for a beat then arms swept her, warm arms in the cold snow.
Blinking, her vision clearing, she saw it was him.
“Get in the house!” Calla barked at him, angry, she realized. Very angry. It was his fault she was out here. Saving his life yet again and mad about that, too. She didn’t want to have to save his life, didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
He stared back at her, snow on his very long, very dark eyelashes that she noticed suddenly, sharply. He didn’t say anything, just pulled her to her feet, set her steady and stepped back. He wasn’t even wearing a shirt, she realized.
“Are you crazy?” she yelled at him. He was wearing only the pants she’d dried last night, and his shoes. His stained shirt was still soaking, she remembered. Then she saw him wincing in pain. His ribs, she remembered that, too. He’d hurt his ribs. And maybe he was crazy.
But he’d die out here.
“Just get back in the house,” she said, lowering her voice, though the words still came out clipped. And shaking. Her teeth were starting to chatter. “You’ll freeze out here. And if you want to kill yourself, that’s fine, but not on my watch.”
She wanted to tell him he deserved to freeze, but that wasn’t true or necessary or kind. It would just be venting. Maybe he did have a head injury. He was still staring back at her through the snow as if in some kind of shock, though he’d been with it enough to come to her aid. What the hell had driven him out into the snow half-dressed?
He didn’t move so she grabbed his arm with one hand, the railing with the other, and dragged him back the few steps to the door, pushed him inside ahead of her. She shoved the door shut with a slam. She was back in her house with a frozen, mysterious stranger.
She stood there, shivering.
“You’re underdressed,” she said into the sharp quiet of the house. She crossed the utility room, grabbing open the cellar door.
The utility room was an add-on to the old building, connecting what used to be a separate cellar to the main house. There were boxes and boxes stacked against one wall of her grandfather’s things and a hanging rack with some of his old clothes. She jerked open a box and grabbed the first shirt on top, a heavy plaid flannel shirt. Another box held folded jeans. She pulled down a jacket from the rack.
“Here,” she said, returning to the stranger. “Put this on.” She handed him the shirt and the jeans, which would be heavier protection than the slacks he’d come with last night. Then she set the jacket on top of the big chest freezer across from the washer and dryer. “And if you take a hankering to go strolling outside again, wear a jacket!”
Her irritation vanished as she watched him slide his arms awkwardly into the flannel shirt and try to use his frozen fingers to connect the buttons. She marched the few steps between them and took matters into her own hands. Her knuckles brushed his solid, very muscular chest. Something she would have been better off avoiding. She was actually turned on. It was ludicrous. Here he was, a stranger, half out of his head for all she knew, and she couldn’t stop noticing that he was extremely attractive.
She finished with the buttons. She felt his eyes following her every nervous movement and she blamed the cold that her own hands were shaking, almost as useless as his.
“Come on,” she said abruptly, stepping back from him. He was still watching her. Just watching her. Like she was some unknown specimen. Well, she felt the same about him, so she supposed that was fair. “I’ll fix some coffee. You need to get something warm inside you. There’s a bathroom there—” She pointed it out on the way to the kitchen. “You can change your pants in there.”
She headed for