Christmas at Twilight (17 page)

Her mother had been a kooky free spirit who believed in the universe giving signs on which path to follow, and if you paid attention to the signs, they'd guide you to your destiny. Mom considered getting caught in the Albuquerque box with Meredith's dad as a sign they were meant to be. He was her True North.

Meredith had never been a believer in that sort of thing. It defied logic, science, and the laws of nature. But here she was with a man she was swiftly growing to love, holding a box branded with the very words her mother used to describe her philosophy about life.
When you find the right mate, he will be your True North.

If this wasn't a sign, then nothing was.

She'd never heard of a True North jewelry store. Nevertheless, she held her breath as she lifted the lid on the box.

There, nestled inside a Styrofoam base, was a key-chain-sized pink canister of pepper spray. There was a card underneath the canister that read:
To my Meredith. For when I'm not around to keep you safe.

My
Meredith.

She raised her head.

He knelt before her, shoulders back, chest forward, jaw relaxed in a beguiling posture that said,
I'm solid, have faith in me.

She laughed, palmed the pepper spray. “Wicked sense of humor, Brian.”

The left side of his mouth quirked up and he dropped a sly, you-ain't-seen-nothing-yet wink.

“Mommy,” Ben said, picking at his seat to remove a pajama wedgie. “There's one package left with no name. Is it mine?”

“No, that package belongs to Hutch.”

“Aww, man. I thought it was mine.”

“Told ya it wasn't,” Kimmie said.

“It's not yours neither.”

Those two acted more and more like real brother and sister with every passing day. Their endearing squabbling brought a smile to her face. “Ben, why don't you hand Hutch his present?”

Hutch's grin hung crooked like a door half off its hinge. Genuine. Beguiling. Irresistible. She liked that smile. She hitched up to it. Smiled back.

They sat watching each other for a long moment, grinning.

The radio played Pachelbel's Canon in D for Christmas. It was her favorite piece of classical music. Surely, in heaven they played Pachelbel. The beautiful sound stirred all of Meredith's long-buried hopes, and a tear rolled from her eye and slid down her cheek.

Tenderly, Hutch leaned forward, cupped her chin in his palm, and gently wiped the tear away with his big calloused thumb. Her bottom lip trembled. He knew just as much as she did how precious and fleeting this moment was. They breathed in a shared breath, held it, and then released it in tandem.

Kimmie waggled her tiara in time to the musical beat and clomped across the hardwood floor. Ben nudged Hutch in the ribs with his knee. “Aren'tcha gonna open it?”

Hutch removed the bow and stuck it on top of Ben's head.

“Hey!” Ben laughed and slapped both hands on the bow.

Kimmie giggled. “You look bootiful.”

Hutch removed the wrapping paper.

“It's not much,” Meredith apologized.

He tilted his head back and lasered her a look that let her know he didn't care what was in the box. The fact that she'd given it to him was enough.

“We made you fudge,” Kimmie said in the overly loud whisper of a four-year-old.

Hutch opened the box, took out the fudge she and the children had made for him, and offered everyone a piece.

“There's something else in there too,” Meredith said.

He examined the box, pulled out the folded piece of paper she'd stuck underneath the fudge, a gift certificate for a free massage.

The glint in his eyes silvered. He refolded the certificate, slid it into the front pocket of his shirt, and patted it solidly over his heart as if it was the most priceless gift he'd ever received.

H
utch cleaned up the wrapping paper mess in the living room while Meredith put a roast in the oven for Christmas dinner and they did the dishes together. The children begged to go outside and play in the snow, so all four of them bundled up.

They showed the children how to fall backward in the snow and make snow angels, and then they had a snowball fight. It was Meredith and the children against him. They shrieked and laughed as Hutch pretended to be the Abominable Snowman, and tossed the children into the snowbanks, only to have them come right back at him.

Wood smoke curled from chimneys. The smell of turkey floated in the air. Other families had been outside, and lawns were dotted with snowmen. To be different, they decided to build a snow fort rather than a snowman. When they were finished, the kids crawled inside the snow fort to play.

“I have to go check on the roast,” Meredith told him. “Don't let them stay out too much longer. Not too long ago they both had a fever.”

Hutch nodded and he watched her go, unable to tear his gaze from her magnificent butt. He touched his left front pocket, the gift card for a massage. By giving him that gift card, did the woman get that she was tossing gasoline on an open flame?

Meredith stopped when she reached the porch and turned back to catch him staring at her. A happy smile stretched across her face, aimed right at him.

Hutch's heart warmed in the dead center of his chest. If he could spend the rest of his life putting that smile on her face, he would consider it a life well spent. The warmth spread out, slipping into his bloodstream, circulating throughout his system until his entire body tingled.

He wanted her. Yearning swelled. Hope crested.

Ever cell in his body hummed her name—
Meredith, Meredith, Meredith.

But he had nothing to offer her. He had some money put away and he'd get his government pension, but he had no job and he couldn't even speak. It killed him that he couldn't tell her with his own voice how much she meant to him.

He curled his gloved hands into fists.

She waved.

He waved back, feeling stripped naked and hung out to dry by his feelings. Too much. He wanted her too much. It wasn't healthy, this need.

She shivered, wrapped her arms around herself, nodded toward the house, and gifted him with one last wide Christmas smile before she went inside.

God, he was a lucky bastard, even if it was only for this brief span of time. To have a woman like her smiling at him like that. As if he was something truly special. Some people went an entire lifetime without ever brushing up against something so divine.

The kids giggled at him from the snow fort. Two little faces with red noses and cheeks beaming up at him. He wanted to tell them they looked like Rudolph, but he could not say the words. Instead, he motioned as if he was drinking a cup of hot chocolate and rubbed his hands together, pantomiming warming himself in front of a roaring fire.

“No way, Jose,” Ben shouted.

Both kids shook their heads and backed into the snow fort so deeply that he could no longer see them.

Hutch got down on his knees in the snow, dug them from the fort, and carried them inside, a laughing child hanging from each arm.

Their faces could have passed for tomatoes, their eyes sparkling as they chattered about the snow. Less than a week ago, they'd both been sick with a fever, now it was as if they'd never been sick at all. Kids were miraculous. They healed so quickly.

Ben and Kimmie skipped toward Meredith, chanting in unison, “Hot chocolate, hot chocolate, we want hot chocolate.”

“Where's your ski cap?” Meredith asked Ben.

Ben shrugged repeatedly and shuffled his feet all loose-limbed and jerky, making it look as if he was afflicted with Saint Vitus' dance.

“You're always losing your winter clothes. I'm not made of money, son,” she chided gently. “Go back and look for it.”

“Okay-dokey.” Ben darted for the back door.

Meredith turned to Hutch. “Could you go with him? Sorry to be so skittish but ever since I thought I saw Sloane on the town square—”

Hutch understood. She hated letting the boy out of her sight, but she also recognized that he was growing up, she could not keep him tied to her apron strings. At this age, Hutch made a better guard dog for the boy. Plus he was better equipped to deal with Sloane if he did appear. Meredith seemed to have the idea the bastard she'd married was as untouchable as Lex Luthor.

He went out the back door, stepped off the deck, and rounded the side of the house into the front yard.

Ben was nowhere in sight.

Okay, kid, where are you? A fissure of panic wormed into his gut. Igloo cool. Nothing to freak out about. The boy had most likely gone across the street to visit the Calloways.

Behind Hutch lay the swollen Brazos River. The kid could have taken a header right off the deck and gone into the water. In his mind's eye he saw the boy's body swirling in the cold, murky waters. His palms slicked with sick heat. He staggered to the edge of the deck, his boots kicking up snow, and peered over the rail.

Nothing but rocks and trees and swift-moving water. Nah. The boy had not gone down there. He would not believe that.
Easy, easy. Don't get freaky-deaky
.

Dammit. He wished he could yell. Call Ben home. He returned to the front yard and scanned the street with warrior precision, taking note of everything, on the lookout for enemies.

From the north a white sedan toiled slowly up the street.

He felt a hole open up in his stomach, an eddy of tornadic whirls spinning there and sucking up all his insides.
Who goes there? Friend or foe?

Where was the boy? Not in the sedan. If someone in the white sedan had kidnapped Ben, the vehicle would be moving away from the house, not toward it.

The white sedan edged closer. Hutch honed in on the only thing moving in the lonely, snow-strewn landscape and recognized Dotty Mae Densmore behind the wheel. What was the little old lady doing out in this weather? If he weren't focused on finding Ben, he would offer to drive the sedan home for her.

How could the child have vanished so quickly? He hadn't been a minute after him.

Hooyah. Snap to. Footprints. Look for footprints.

Footprints. Easy tracking.

In the aftermath of their snowball fight a flurry of footsteps furrowed the middle of the yard. A slurred mix of his big boot prints, Meredith's petite foot, and twin pairs of identically sized tiny impressions marked the path from the middle of the yard, to the snow fort and back to the house. But there were no other prints anywhere else in the yard. None going into the road, or to the neighbor's house on the left or to the ranch land yawning right beyond the white split-rail fence.

Unless something or someone had snatched him up from thin air, the child had to be in the snow fort.

Relief pushed his belly out, expelling pent-up air from his lungs. Hutch trod toward the snow fort. No rush now. He knew where the boy was.

The acrid taste disappeared from his mouth and the release of tension left his muscles shaky. He'd never panicked in the heat of battle. That's why they'd called Igloo. Calm. Cool. Collected. Level-headed and easygoing.

With his own life, he was fearless, but when it came to children . . .
his
children—because while Kimmie and Ben might not be his children biologically, he felt as responsible for them as if they were his own—it was a different story.

Hutch was not a poetic guy. He was not given to deep thought. But in that moment, in the snow, he had an epiphany. He loved those two kids.

Ben poked his face out of the snow fort, grinned impishly.

On the road, the sedan hit a slick patch and Dotty Mae's mouth opened in a wide O as her car fishtailed and she lost control.

Hutch's legs were running, but they felt as useless as paddlewheels churning a molasses sea. No matter how fast he moved, he wasn't going to reach Ben in time to stop disaster.

Invisible fingers closed around Hutch's throat, squeezing down, cutting off his breath. Too late. Too late. There was nothing he could do.

In an icy, vehicular ballet, the white sedan spun a full three-sixty, hit another slick spot, and flew across the road, heading straight for the snow fort. Through the windshield, Dotty Mae's eyes locked with his and something like hot-wet electricity shocked the dead center of his heart, blue lightning shearing a tree, killing it dead with one split-second strike. It charred the tip of his tongue and burned a smoldering path down his throat to his lungs.

No! No!
His knees and his heart stumbled, collapsing into the snow.

The headlights of the sedan glinted off the tinkling Christmas lights lining the walkway, making them look to Hutch's eyes like muzzle flashes. Instantly, the snow melted into sand and he was no longer in Twilight, but back on the streets of Aliabad. It wasn't noon on Christmas Day, but just after dawn on Labor Day. They'd come up empty-handed. Their target in the wind. The Unit didn't fail often, but when it failed, it failed spectacularly.

In his flashback, Hutch saw now what he had not seen then because he had not wanted to believe what he was seeing. It wasn't his voice that had failed him in Abas Ghar.

It had been his eyes.

Hutch reached out a hand, opened his mouth, and in a hoarse, gruff voice he did not recognize as his own, shouted. “Ben! Get out of that fort now!”

M
eredith had just settled the roast onto a serving platter and picked up a kitchen towel to wipe away a dribble of au jus on the kitchen counter when she heard a man yell Ben's name.

Her eyes widened. Who was that?

Next came a high-pitched scream, followed by a quiet thud, and then a prolonged honking noise as if someone were laying on a car horn.

She tossed aside the cup towel, rushed past Kimmie, who was in the living room playing with the LeapFrog computer Hutch had gotten her for Christmas, and ran to fling open the front door. She blinked, her brain trying to puzzle together what her eyes saw.

Dotty Mae's car was on their front lawn, the front tires obliterating the snow fort. Inside the car, the air bags deflated. The continuously honking horn drew neighbors from their houses. Jesse came running from across the street.

Hutch was on his knees in the middle of the yard, facing the road, his back to her, and he clutched Ben tightly in his arms. With his red ski cap perched jauntily on his head, Ben spied her and raised a hand. “Hi, Mom. I found my cap, and oh yeah, Hutch talkeded.”

Neighbors thronged around the car. Dotty Mae was conscious and talking but no one wanted to move her or let her move herself. Ambulance sirens wailed, coming closer.

Dazed, Meredith stepped off the porch and walked toward Hutch and her son.

The ambulance arrived, lights flashing, the siren cutting off mid-scream as they pulled up beside the sedan. Two paramedics piled out, converged on Dotty Mae.

Still holding tight to Ben, Hutch got to his feet, turned.

She saw the story in his face. Ben had been in the snow fort when Dotty Mae's car had come careening toward it. “You spoke.”

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was scratchy, like the sound of a butter knife scraping the black off burnt toast. But the timbre, the weight of it was exactly how Meredith imagined his voice would sound—deep, resonant, peppered with a self-assured Texas drawl.

“To save Ben's life.” It fully hit her then that her son had almost been killed. Her knees gave way and she crumpled.

But Hutch was there, setting Ben on the ground, lifting her up. “Meredith,” he murmured. “He's okay. You're okay. We're all okay.”

Hutch put a hand to her back, holding her steady. He was her ballast. Her rock. He'd saved her son. “Breathe, Yoga Girl. Just breathe.”

She pulled in a couple of deep breaths but had no patience for it. “Come here, you,” she said, and scooped Ben into her arms, squeezing him hard.

“Mom!” He wriggled. “You're suffercating me.”

Reluctantly, she let him go, looked up into Hutch's magnetic dark eyes. He'd saved her son. Hutch. Her True North. Love for him spilled from her, a cup overflowing, and she could no more hold it back than she could stop breathing.

Oh God, she was in so much trouble.

Unable to bear the exquisite pain of her feelings, she glanced away. Over at the sedan, the paramedics were trying to talk Dotty Mae into going to the hospital to get checked out, even though she kept insisting she was okay. “Take care of that little boy,” she told them. “I almost plowed right into him.”

One of the paramedics came toward Ben, but Hutch held up his palm. “The boy wasn't harmed.”

His strong, commanding voice stopped the paramedic in his tracks. The man nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Kimmie joined them on the lawn, wanting to know what had happened. The paramedics finally convinced Dotty Mae to go with them. Neighbors, including Flynn and Jesse, walked over to comment on luck and disasters averted and how maybe it was time for Dotty Mae to stop driving. They congratulated Hutch on getting his voice back. He nodded, looked uncomfortable by their atta-boy sentiments, and barely said a word. Someone offered to drive Dotty Mae's car over to her house. Someone else volunteered to go to the hospital to check up on her. A third person went off to call Dotty Mae's sons and let them know what had happened and probably chew them out for leaving their mother alone on Christmas Day.

Kimmie and Ben and some neighborhood children started a snowball fight. That lasted until a parent took a snowball to the back, and then people started rounding up their offspring and drifting back home to their holiday celebrations.

Flynn shifted a grinning Grace to her other hip and put a hand on Meredith's shoulder. “I know getting his voice back is a big moment for Hutch. Jesse and I discussed it, and we'd like to take the kids for the evening so you two can have a chance to really talk.”