A Forever Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  She laughed shortly as they walked through the maze of hospital corridors, heading toward the main entrance/exit. The parking lot where he’d left his truck was just beyond that.

  “Bet the pharmaceutical companies don’t want that getting around or else they’d be out of business. What?” Angel asked when she saw the satisfied expression on his face.

  “See? Something else you know.”

  Had she missed something? What was he referring to? “What do I know?” she asked.

  “You know about pharmaceutical companies enough to form an opinion.”

  And more than just in passing, would be his guess. Most people said “drug companies.” Referring to them as “pharmaceutical companies” could mean that she had some sort of connection to that field. She could be a researcher or even a sales rep for one of companies, or know someone who was. It might give them a starting point to begin their search for her name.

  Angel opened the truck’s passenger door and got in. She slanted a glance in his direction as she pulled out the seat belt. “That’s really reaching.”

  “Maybe not as much as you think,” Gabe countered as he got in on his side.

  She supposed he had a point. Leaning back in her seat, she secured the seat belt and then let out a long breath. Gabe started up the truck.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  That was simple enough. “Now we drive back to Forever.”

  For a second, she looked at him, confused by his answer. And then she remembered. “That’s the town’s name, right?”

  “Right,” Gabe answered with a grin.

  “Forever,” Angel repeated, rolling the name along her tongue. “Is there some kind of legend that goes along with that name?”

  In no time at all, they’d reached Pine Ridge’s town limits. Gabe thought for a moment. “I think the original founder fell in love with the countryside and said to his wife that he hoped that it would stay like this forever, that civilization with its progress and its grimy fingerprints would just bypass them.”

  That sounded incredibly hokey even to someone with no memory, Angel couldn’t help thinking.

  “Seriously?” she pressed. And then she saw that the corners of Gabe’s mouth were curving ever so slightly. He was pulling her leg. “You just made that up, didn’t you?” she accused.

  “See?” he pointed out. “And now you remember how to read people.”

  She didn’t see it that way. “Not people,” Angel corrected. “You.”

  Despite her protest, Gabe saw no contradiction. “Well, the last I checked, I do fall into that category,” he told her.

  “But you’re not typical,” she protested with feeling that surprised her.

  They were traveling at a steady speed now and the road was wide open before them. Gabe looked at her pointedly for a brief moment.

  “And you would know that how?” he prodded.

  “Because…”

  Her voice trailed off, losing its steam. She realized that she had no explanation, no way to answer his question. All she had, she became aware, was just the faintest glimmer of a feeling that this deputy, who had come to her rescue, who was even now putting himself out to help her regain her memory, was not like other men.

  At least, not like other men who she knew…

  What men did she know? Angel couldn’t help wondering as frustration continued to mount within her.

  No names came to her, no faces. Nothing except some half-gelled, prickly feeling that refused to take on a recognizable form.

  For all she knew, her reaction was based on just a guess on her part.

  A frustrated sigh escaped her lips.

  Without being fully aware of it, she fisted her hands in her lap. An overwhelming feeling of being trapped within this wall-less world with no other inhabitants save for her all but cut off her air and threatened to strangle her.

  “Just because,” Angel finally told him helplessly.

  To her surprise, Gabe laughed softly.

  Almost immediately she felt her back going up. Okay, something else to know about herself. She didn’t like being laughed at.

  “What’s so funny?” she challenged.

  “‘Just because,’” he said her words back to her. “You answered with the exact same argument that my sister uses when she can’t come up with something concrete to use.”

  He had a sister. Why did she feel she was supposed to know that? Had he already mentioned her? Or had she seen her?

  Was it ever going to get any clearer, or at least less obscure? Or was she always going to have this haze inside her brain?

  “Your sister?” she asked, hoping he’d offer a little enlightenment without her having to play more word games. His cheerful approach was beginning to grate on her nerves.

  Or maybe her nerves were in a state because she found herself depending on this man and she didn’t like that feeling.

  Dependence led to entrapment, or disappointment. Or both.

  How did she know that?

  There were no answers, just more and more questions, it seemed.

  Gabe nodded, his manner neither condescending nor impatient. “You met her earlier. She was the other deputy who came with Mick, the mechanic who towed away your car,” he added when he saw that the man’s name meant nothing to her.

  “My car,” she repeated, waiting for some sort of image to occur to her.

  It felt as if she was straining her brain, but she continued to focus, trying to summon the image up, to have something come to her that at least felt as if it was vaguely familiar.

  With a sigh, Angel surrendered with a shake of the head. Pointless. Gabe could have been talking about an old Roman chariot for all the difference it made.

  Okay, she needed help here, Angel decided. She forced herself to ask, “What did it look like?”

  “Like a piece of charcoal last I saw it.”

  Gabe knew that wasn’t being very helpful, but he had to confess that before the explosion that had reduced Angel’s vehicle to a charcoal briquette, he’d been so focused on getting her out of the precariously perched car that he hadn’t noticed any actual details about the vehicle.

  He thought back to the scene now, doing his best to remember when he’d first glimpsed the tottering sedan. “White—I think,” he qualified. “Does that do anything for you?”

  Angel shut her eyes, thinking that might help. It didn’t.

  Opening her eyes again, she looked at him and shook her head. The sigh came on its own accord. She was sighing more and more today, she thought. But who could blame her?

  “Nothing,” she told him.

  “Why don’t you try again later?” he advised. “A lot of times people remember things when they stop trying so hard to remember them. It’ll come to you, probably in the middle of the night, or something equally as inconvenient.”

  Angel doubted that she was ever going to remember anything. It caused her to shrug helplessly in response to his advice.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice,” she told him, resigning herself to this life in limbo that was staring her in the face.

  “You always have a choice,” Gabe contradicted. “Just sometimes it doesn’t jump up, waving flags and grabbing your attention, that’s all.”

  She settled back in her seat. Dusk was beginning to creep up, coloring the scenery in darkening hues. “So it’s back to…Forever?” she asked, remembering what he’d just said in response to her question about their next step.

  “Unless you have another suggestion,” he told her, letting her know that he was perfectly open to anything she might have in mind.

  Angel shook her head in response. That was the problem. Try as she might, no other destination came to her. No town, no shop, no person. It was as if her mind had been sent into solitary confinement.

  And her fate was entirely in this man’s hands. A man she hadn’t even known early this morning.

  “And what happens when I get to Forever?” she asked him.

 
; He pretended to think it over before saying in a perfectly serious voice, “Well, we sell you into bondage and you have to work for Mick for the rest of your life.” That was as long as he could maintain a straight face. Then he asked her, “What do you mean, what happens when you reach Forever?”

  “I mean, well, where am I going to stay?’ she asked, tripping over her own tongue. “I don’t have any money to pay for the motel room.”

  She didn’t understand why he laughed at that until he told her, “That’s not exactly a problem since we don’t have a motel in Forever.”

  Every place had motels—didn’t they? Just where was she and why had she come here? It didn’t seem like a place she’d choose.

  Oh, right, she mocked herself. And your tastes run to what? Palaces?

  “What do you have?” she asked gamely.

  “Tourists who pass through on their way to somewhere else.” Which was true. Outside of Miss Joan’s cooking, the town boasted of nothing special.

  So, they did have people passing through the town. “Where do visitors stay?” she asked gamely.

  “Usually with whoever they’re visiting,” Gabe told her.

  She looked at him sharply, but he wasn’t saying that to tease her. “You’re kidding.”

  “On occasion,” he allowed, then qualified, “but not this time. Why?”

  Didn’t he see the problem? “Well, where am I going to stay?”

  “I’ve got a pup tent we can set up in the backyard,” he quipped. And then he smiled at her. “Don’t worry, we’ll work something out.”

  Suspicion rose in her eyes before she was even aware of it forming. “And by ‘we’ you mean…?” She left the end of the sentence open for him to fill in.

  “You, the sheriff, my sister. Maybe Miss Joan.” Although since the woman had gotten married, she wasn’t nearly as available to put people up the way she had previously been. The doctor’s wife, Tina, had stayed with Miss Joan for quite a while before Dan had come into town and promptly fallen for her. “Me,” he added in case she thought he was distancing himself from her.

  Her eyes darted toward him. “Oh,” Angel murmured.

  He didn’t know if the information comforted her or agitated her. He couldn’t tell by the single-word response. For now, though, maybe it was for the best to leave the matter alone. Angel had enough to deal with without his quizzing her.

  Turning on the radio to combat the silence before it became overpowering, Gabe kept on driving.

  Chapter Six

  Angel was positive that she was far too wired to fall asleep tonight—possibly ever. Wound up as tightly as a coil in an old-fashioned box spring mattress, if anyone had asked her, Angel would have sworn that sleep would elude her for a good long while to come.

  This despite the fact that, along with being wired, she felt incredibly drained.

  She had initially closed her eyes to rest them because it felt as if they were wearing themselves out, staring at a world and at people that were equally unfamiliar to her. Toward the end, her lids actually felt as if they were burning.

  Now, of course, there was just miles and miles of miles and miles. Nothing differentiated one section of land from another as they drove back to Forever from Pine Ridge.

  Back to Forever. As if that was where she’d come from, Angel mocked herself. She didn’t belong in Forever. And she was getting to believe that she didn’t belong anywhere.

  The restlessness that insisted on haunting her was back in spades. A restlessness that came from not knowing.

  Would she ever know where she belonged? Or, for that matter, even what kind of a person she was? It was awful, not knowing.

  Was she kind, heartless, intelligent, lazy, a little of all of that—or what?

  As before, no answers came to her, not even so much as a vague hunch that she might be on the right path to discovery.

  God, but she was getting tired of feeling like a living question mark.

  So very tired…

  * * *

  ANGEL HAD BEEN QUIET for the past ten, twelve miles Gabe thought, glancing toward the woman to his right. Were things coming back to her? Or was it frustration that kept her silent?

  Whether he liked it or not, because he’d rescued her, he felt responsible for this lost woman.

  Gabe wasn’t the type who immediately shouldered responsibility with gusto and enthusiasm, but neither did he attempt to shrug it off or hide behind some rock in an out-and-out attempt to avoid it. It was what it was and he accepted it. In some cultures, he knew, because he’d saved her, the woman he’d christened “Angel,” her soul was his.

  Just what he needed, he thought with a touch of cynicism, a spare soul to trip him up. These days, he wasn’t all that certain what to do with his own, not after the way Erica had left him at such loose ends.

  He’d never seen himself as some fancy-free playboy, but neither had he thought of himself as being the marrying kind—at least, not until Erica had crossed his path. Suddenly the thought of settling down with a wife and two, three kids didn’t seem so bad. As a matter of fact, it sounded pretty good.

  Except now he wouldn’t get to find out because Erica had decided she could “do better.” Dumping him without warning, she’d turned around and made Seth Madden the center of her world.

  Just like that.

  Granted, Seth was a banker and came across more polished than he did, but hell, Seth had eyes that belonged to a flounder that had been dead for two days. Was that what Erica really wanted, a man with lifeless eyes?

  Gabe couldn’t manage to convince himself of that—and he definitely couldn’t bring himself to either forgive Erica, or let the whole thing go.

  He felt as if he was permanently stuck in limbo.

  Probably not unlike Angel and her memory loss.

  He tried to picture himself in that sort of a situation and found himself being very grateful that he wasn’t in that sort of a situation.

  “We’re here,” he announced.

  By “here,” Gabe meant that they had just crossed the town limits and were now officially in Forever.

  “Angel? We’re here,” he repeated when he received no response in return. When she failed to say anything the second time, Gabe slowed the car down to almost a crawl—which was less than twenty miles an hour to his way of thinking—and looked at Angel’s face more closely.

  He forced himself not to get distracted by how very pretty she was and only think of her as someone who had had one hell of a day.

  “Really awful to be you right now, isn’t it?” he murmured softly in sympathy.

  She seemed to be sound asleep, her head leaning slightly forward. Watching her, Gabe was fairly certain she was going to have a really bad crick in her neck to add to the litany of aches and pains that she would have tomorrow. All of which would be due to the car accident she’d barely survived.

  “Angel?” he said softly, trying to rouse her but not startle her.

  The only thing he received in reply was the sound of her even breathing.

  Gabe frowned, thinking. He couldn’t very well just leave her here, sleeping in his truck, but he felt bad about waking her up. If he did, she might wind up being awake all night.

  Still, it was getting really cold and he couldn’t just run the engine so that he could keep the heat on for her. Other than that being an impossibly expensive way to keep someone warm, there was also the very real danger of filling the inside of his vehicle with carbon monoxide.

  Maybe she’d wake up on her own if he just gave her a little more time. It was worth a try.

  With a shrug, Gabe drove the truck to his house.

  His house.

  That was still taking some getting used to. Originally it was known as the old Douglas place. He’d bought it several months ago from Alec Douglas. The latter had returned to Forever to settle up his late father’s affairs, sell the house and go back to his life in Virginia where he’d been working for the past ten years.

  Both he
and Alec had been happy with the deal that had been struck for the two-story house. True, the fifty-year-old house needed a lot of work, but like everyone who lived around here, he was handy, plus he didn’t mind working with his hands. He found it therapeutic and it gave him something to do on his days off—when he wasn’t helping out on the family ranch.

  As long as he kept too busy to think, that was just fine with him.

  Pulling up in front of the house now, Gabe left his truck parked to the left of the porch steps. He glanced at Angel again. The woman just kept right on sleeping.

  Gabe got out of the vehicle, rounded the back and came up to the passenger door. Opening it, he paused for a second, debating his next move. With a shrug, he thought he’d try to wake her by gently shaking her shoulder.

  When he did, she just kept right on sleeping as if he hadn’t touched her at all.

  “Damn, but you could probably sleep through a twister, couldn’t you?” he marveled, murmuring the assessment under his breath.

  Leaving her where she was for the moment, Gabe went up the steps to his front door, unlocked it and left it wide open. Angel was still asleep when he returned to the vehicle.

  Her body probably needed to recharge itself, he reasoned.

  Leaning over her, Gabe very carefully released the seat belt clip and unbuckled her. Then, as gently as possible, he picked her up from her seat and began to walk up the steps to his front door.

  To his amazement, as he reached the top step, Angel continued sleeping. Not only that, but as he made his way into the house, the sleeping woman curled into him. A sigh that sounded suspiciously like contentment escaped her lips as she apparently made herself comfortable against his chest.

  He caught himself looking down at her face. It was relaxed and there was almost a purity about it. He reasoned that, asleep, Angel didn’t resort to a barrage of defense mechanisms.

  This was the real woman, the one beneath the bravado. Soft, innocent. Relaxed.

  He found himself intrigued.

  Because he had just recently moved into the house, Gabe wasn’t anywhere near finished furnishing the different rooms. To be honest, he had hardly gotten started.