A Texas Rescue Christmas

by Caro Carson

  Trey started sliding his thumb over the screen, skimming through the photos stored on the phone. They weren’t very personal. Seascapes of some rocky shoreline that looked nothing like the Texas coast. Distant children wading in the surf, silhouetted against a sunrise. A couple walking away from the camera, holding hands.

  Finally, he saw a more typical snapshot of a woman holding a mutt. Trey was able to mentally compare this woman with the one in the driver’s license. Not Rebecca Cargill.

  He slid his thumb across the screen once more. The next shot was also of the mutt, but this time, it was held by the woman on the driver’s license. Same pretty face. Same brown bangs. Same strain beneath the smile.

  “She looks so young,” his aunt said, looking over his shoulder. “I can’t believe her license says she’s twenty-four, can you?”

  Emily was looking over his other shoulder. “I thought we could use that photo if we needed to call the sheriff.”

  That snapped Trey into action. He handed Emily the phone as he addressed his aunt and uncle. “You haven’t called the sheriff? Dark’s coming. There isn’t much time to get a search party out here.”

  “Your foreman, Gus, he’s got the ranch hands doing the searching. They’ve been stomping all over the grounds. She couldn’t have gone that far on foot.”

  His foreman? Trey didn’t have a foreman. Luke did. Trey hadn’t set foot on the ranch in a decade. With his parents traveling ten months out of the year as retirees, Luke was the Waterson who ran the James Hill Ranch. Luke had decided to promote their longtime ranch hand, Gus, to foreman. Trey had only agreed over the phone. He supposed it was just by virtue of being a Waterson that Aunt June addressed him as if he were still part of the James Hill.

  Trey turned to Emily. “The sheriff’s got helicopters. We don’t. Call them.”

  She ran to the house phone, the one that still hung on the kitchen wall as it had for the past twenty years or more.

  His aunt patted his arm. “Honey, even the big Austin airport has been closed for hours now. They aren’t puttin’ anything up in the sky while ice is coming down out of it.”

  “That may be true, but we’ll let the sheriff’s office make that decision. I’m not a pilot. I’m just—”

  He stopped himself, then turned on his heel and headed back to the front door, past his father’s arm chair, past his mother’s lamp, the one he and his brother had broken and glued back together. He picked up his sheepskin coat where he’d left it and shrugged it on.

  Aunt Jane followed him. “You’re just what?”

  He chose a Stetson from the few hanging on pegs by the door. Whether his father’s or his brother’s, it didn’t matter. The men in the family were all built the same. It would fit.

  “I’m the only Waterson around here right now, and I’ll be damned if a young woman is going to die on this ranch on my brother’s wedding day.”

  He crammed the hat on his head, and headed out the door.

  Chapter Three

  I am not going to die today.

  Becky forced herself to stop sliding down the tree trunk.

  Stand up, Becky. Straight. At least pretend you’ve got some confidence, for God’s sake.

  The landscape of central Texas all looked the same. As far as she could see, stretches of scraggly brown grasses were broken up by scraggly waist-high bushes. The only color she saw was her own pastel-pink ski parka, chosen by her mother for appearance, not survival.

  Who am I going to impress with this fake Cargill confidence, Mama? But she stayed on her feet.

  She spotted an occasional cactus, which proved that Hollywood didn’t lie when it put a cactus in a cowboy movie. But there was no shelter. As she’d driven the ATV four-wheeler away from the barn, ice had crunched under her wheels. Although the exposed skin of her face had been stung by the wind almost immediately, she’d kept driving, feeling like the control she had over the loud engine was the last bit of control she had in the world.

  She’d turned up her collar and buried her chin in her jacket, and kept going. Somewhere. Away from the house that her mother would find. Far from the house and the barn and the sheds, she’d crossed acres of ground that shined in the afternoon sun, for they were completely covered in a thick but beautifully reflective sheet of ice. By the time the next bank of storm clouds had rolled in, hiding the sun and killing the enchantment of her ice world, she’d been low on gas.

  She’d turned around—a U-turn that was easy in the right kind of ranch vehicle—and started heading back, but she hadn’t made it far before the engine had run out of fuel.

  That had been hours ago. Literally, hours ago. Forced to seek shelter as the wind picked up and fresh sleet started to fall, she’d left the bright blue ATV out in plain sight—as if she’d had a choice—and she’d headed for a line of trees. Gnarled oaks had seemed not too far away, and clusters of shockingly green cedar trees were interspersed among them. They weren’t much, but they were more shelter than the ATV provided.

  They weren’t close, either. She’d begun sweating as she crunched her way across the uneven land, so she’d unzipped her coat to let any moisture evaporate. One thing she’d learned while skiing in Aspen was that getting wet when it was freezing outside led to intolerable cold. Even the most devil-may-care snowboarders would have to get off the mountain and change into dry clothes when they worked up a sweat.

  The Aspen ski school had included some lessons on building emergency shelters. Too bad Becky didn’t have ski poles and skis with her, because they’d been used to build every kind. Too bad there was no snow. In Aspen, the snow had been so deep, they’d dug a trench that they could sit in to escape from the wind.

  Actually, the instructors had dug the trench. The rich kids and Becky had just sat in it. Some survival training. Maybe she would have learned more if her mother hadn’t tracked her credit card so closely.

  I’m going to die because some teenagers convinced me to buy them vodka. I missed the rest of the survival lessons because of vodka. And Mother.

  She wouldn’t cry. The tears would freeze on her cheeks.

  She huddled against the trunk of the largest oak. It provided a little protection from the wind, at least, but the bare branches blocked nothing from above. Ice was falling from the sky, and it was falling on her.

  She was so cold. She could just slide down this tree, take a little nap...and never wake up.

  Stand up. Straight. For God’s sake, Becky, your shoes can’t hurt that badly. You will stay in this receiving line and shake hands with the club president before I give you permission to leave.

  Becky stomped her boots to stay awake. With each thump of the ground, she heard the thud and she felt the jarring impact, but she realized, in an almost emotionless acknowledgment of fact, that she could no longer feel her feet.

  I could possibly die today.

  It would be so unfair if she died. Damsels in distress were supposed to be rewarded for trying to avoid a fate worse than death.

  Well, she’d avoided going to the Bahamas with Hector Ferrique, all right, but she couldn’t say if that fate really would have been worse than this one. For starters, although it sounded repulsive, she didn’t know how difficult it was to have sex with a man one didn’t like. She didn’t know how difficult it was to have sex at all.

  I’m going to die a frozen, twenty-four-year-old virgin. Out here, no one will find my body for months. Maybe years.

  Terror made her colder. She would not give in to terror.

  She needed to find some way to cover her head, because the snow or rain or sleet or whatever it was had started soaking through her ski hat. Its high-tech material was water-resistant, but apparently not water-proof. It could only repel the sleet for so many hours.

  Becky looked around for smaller, broken branches on the ground and gathered the
m up, clomping her way from one to the other on her numb feet like a frozen Frankenstein. Her arms were growing numb, too, so she stuffed the twigs and thin branches haphazardly into a fork in the tree’s lowest branch.

  The bare sticks weren’t going to block many drops of icy rain. Becky looked at the green cypress trees. She remembered them from her elementary school days. They were tall and narrow, green from ground to the top, and when she was a little girl, she’d been very aware that adults complained about them incessantly. She stumbled her way toward one now, thinking its evergreen branches would be useful stacked on top of her bare sticks.

  The cypress tree disagreed. Becky got as good a grip as she could manage, but the flat, fan-like greenery slipped through her gloves like it was coated with wax or oil. Frustration made her eyes sting with more tears she couldn’t shed. The exertion of tugging and pulling was making her too warm in her coat, yet her feet weren’t warming up at all with the activity.

  She tried a new approach, stomping on the lowest branches with her clumsy Frankenstein feet. She lost her balance several times and grabbed at the slick greenery to stay upright, but she succeeded in breaking a few branches off at the trunk.

  In triumph, she carried them back to her twig roof and layered them on top. Then she hunkered underneath her little roof, hugged the oak tree’s trunk to keep the wind from whirling around her, and she waited.

  For what?

  There was nothing to wait for. Help was not coming. No one knew her at that ranch house. Her mother had left her a message about how she’d tracked her to the Austin airport, but it would take her time to get here and more time to figure out that Becky had gone to the groom’s ranch, not the Cargill mansion. It was getting dark already. Mother would not find her tonight.

  I left the ATV out where anyone could see it overhead.

  There was nothing flying overhead, however. No planes. No helicopters. Nothing would come searching for her by air, not while this storm raged. It could be another day or more before anyone at this ranch realized an ATV was even missing. When the storm was over, when they could search for her, it would be too late.

  Sweet little Becky Cargill, the good and obedient child, had defied everyone’s expectations and run away.

  Now sweet little Becky was going to die.

  * * *

  Trey could find Rebecca Cargill. Of that, he had no doubt. The only question was, would he find her before she succumbed to the cold?

  Hang in there, miss. I’ll be there soon.

  All he needed to do was guess where there was.

  Had she left the house on foot, Gus and the ranch hands would have found her by now. Trey checked the barn as a formality, but he knew she hadn’t taken a horse. The cowboys would have noticed one was missing, and the horse itself would have had the sense to buck her off and run back to the warmth of the barn.

  That left the ATVs. Trey walked out the other side of the barn, turned up his collar against the biting cold and crossed the yard in long, rapid strides to the outbuilding where they’d always kept two ATVs. Sure enough, one was missing.

  She’d left the spare two-gallon gas can on the floor. The sight of that gas can sitting on the concrete slab, forgotten, chilled Trey in a way the weather could not. If the gasoline was here, then she’d run out of gas there. The only way she’d make it back to the ranch was if he went and got her.

  He’d known that, too, standing in the black-and-white kitchen.

  He shut the shed door against the howl of the storm and started tying supplies onto the back of the second ATV. It only took him minutes, thanks to the miracle of having his memories of the ranch. He’d gone camping with his brother, when his brother had wanted to learn how to build a campfire. Gone fishing with his father, when his biggest problem had been deciding if he liked baseball or football better. Gone riding the fence line after his last football game as a high school senior, checking all seventy-five thousand acres of the main section of the ranch with the foreman. He knew how to survive outdoors on the James Hill Ranch.

  Trey rolled the ATV out of the shed, shut the door as Miss Rebecca Cargill had, sat on the ATV as she had and started the engine. Tracks led in every direction from the shed, and with the ground hard with ice, none of them look fresher than any other. Instead, he looked to the horizon and tried to view the ranch through her eyes, so he could guess which way she’d decided to go.

  The strained girl in the driver’s license photo had needed to get away. She’d shown up to a wedding where no one knew she existed, and a phone call had sent her right back out the door. He couldn’t imagine what from, but she’d run. He didn’t know why, but she’d wanted to be alone. Badly. Immediately.

  Straight. She wouldn’t have headed to any of the scenic spots like a visitor would, nor had she gone to check the water level in the creek like a ranch hand. She’d only needed to get away from some kind of situation that had no other solution, so she’d left her phone and her purse and her life, pointed the ATV away from the house and gone.

  She’d driven as fast as she could, eating up the gas. She’d wanted space. Freedom. So as Trey drove, he chose the most obvious routes and the most level ground, keeping the last signs of civilization at his back. At every decision point, he chose the easiest path, the one that would allow him to get as far away as quickly as he could. And when his gas tank was on empty, he saw the bright blue ATV parked in the middle of one of the most remote pastures on his land.

  He’d found Rebecca Cargill, because he’d known that she’d been running from a fate she couldn’t control. He understood that emotion.

  The year that he’d turned nineteen, he had done the same.

  Chapter Four

  The storm was getting worse. Becky’s time was getting shorter, her body getting colder, her lungs struggling as the air temperature dropped lower and lower. She wanted to sleep, oh, so very badly. Staying conscious in the constant, inescapable cold had worn her out in a way she’d never experienced. If only she could sink down among the oak’s roots and sleep...

  She would die. When she finally closed her eyes today, they would not open again.

  She wasn’t ready for that.

  There was so much she hadn’t experienced. Her entire life, she’d been waiting to start living. Wrapped in her demure cashmere sweaters, standing still by her mother’s side, she’d been waiting for permission.

  Waiting to meet a wonderful man. Waiting to have her own home, a permanent home, the kind that children would return to every Christmas, even when they were grown with families of their own. Waiting to live a life Becky knew existed for other people, one full of ups and downs, one she wanted to experience for herself.

  Now, she was waiting for a miracle.

  She curled her arms around herself a little tighter and slid down the tree trunk. She looked up at the little roof that had kept the worst of the sleet off her head and shoulders. She was afraid her meager attempt at shelter had only delayed the inevitable. Really afraid.

  She couldn’t stay on her feet any longer, but she kept her eyes open, because she did not want to die yet. One little miracle, that was all she needed.

  “Rebecca Cargill!”

  She shuddered in misery as she imagined an angry male voice shouting her name. When the brain froze, did one suffer delusions before dying?

  “Rebecca!”

  Goodness, that sounded so real.

  “Where are you, darlin’?”

  It was a miracle. Somewhere close by, an angry man was her miracle.

  Here, I’m here, she tried to call. Her jaw had been so tightly clenched against the cold, she couldn’t force the muscles to relax so she could speak.

  I’m here, I’m here, don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave.

  She hugged the tree trunk instead of herself. Using her arms as much as her legs,
she hauled herself back to her feet.

  “Rebecca. Good God.”

  Before she could turn around, she was swept off her feet, wrenched away from her tree and held against a man’s chest instead. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck, not because it felt like he might drop her, but because she was so grateful he was here. But her whole body was so stiff, her arms wouldn’t obey her brain.

  “Stay with me, darlin’. We’ll get you warmed up. Just stay with me.”

  Did he think she’d rather stay with that tree? That tree had not cared that she was there. Now that she was not alone, she realized how very lonely she’d been. Hour after hour, she’d been the only living creature. Even the birds and insects had disappeared into their own shelters. It had been Becky and a tree. And ice.

  His boots crunched over the ground as he carried her, and he seemed to take very long strides and move very quickly. It was disorienting, to suddenly be with another human being. She was no longer alone. Thank God, she was not alone.

  “Okay, Rebecca? Are you with me?”

  I’m trying to answer you. Give me a minute. Her jaw didn’t want to unclench, but she nodded.

  He looked down at her then, and over the scarf that covered the lower half of his face, under the brim of his cowboy hat, she tried to make eye contact, but he wore wide ski goggles.

  Goggles. The concept burst into her brain like they were a new invention. How convenient goggles would have been while riding in the cold wind. Every inch of his face was covered, which made him seem incredibly smart to her. And beautiful. The mere fact that he was here made him the most beautiful person on earth.

  “Was that a nod,” he asked, “or just a shiver?”

  She tried to smile at her beautiful rescuer, and she thought she’d succeeded in making her frozen facial muscles move, but he only looked away again, and kept walking.

  He can’t see my face, either.

  She hadn’t been smart enough to prepare for this weather, so she’d had to make do. She’d pulled her ski hat down low and her collar up high, but her eyes had been exposed, so a few hours ago, she’d taken the long strings of her ski cap and wrapped them across her eyes and tied them behind her head. She could see out through the slit in between them.