A Forever Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

So, making himself as comfortable as he could, given the circumstances, Gabe rested his head against his raised knees, closed his eyes and waited for morning to come.

  * * *

  SOMETHING—A SCENT? aroma?—teased his senses, weaving its way into his consciousness.

  With a start, Gabe woke up. It took him a second to orient himself. He was still on his bedroom floor, half leaning against the side of his bed. His limbs protested somewhat as he got to his feet. Falling asleep like that was definitely not the last word in comfort.

  But that wasn’t what was bothering him.

  His bed was empty.

  So was the room, he discovered as he quickly looked around it.

  “Angel?” he called out.

  His voice echoed back to him. There was no other response.

  Had she taken off for some reason? Had something more actually frightened her last night, something that she hadn’t for some reason elaborated on?

  He needed to find her.

  Already dressed, Gabe looked around for his boots amid the chaos on the bedroom floor until he remembered. His boots were still downstairs in the living room where he’d left them last night.

  Hurrying down the stairs, Gabe became aware of the strong smell of coffee. Not just coffee but…bacon?

  That was what had woken him up. The aroma of breakfast being made.

  By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the sense of urgency that had initially propelled him had abated. Instead, he followed the invisible, aromatic trail to the kitchen.

  And found Angel. She was up—and apparently cooking breakfast.

  As subtly as he could, Gabe blew out a long breath of relief, then crossed over to her at the stove. Unlike the bedlam that ensued whenever he cooked for himself, she seemed to be right at home in the kitchen.

  “You’re cooking,” he marveled.

  Startled by his presence, Angel swung around. Seeing Gabe, she flashed him an uneasy smile. “I hope you don’t mind. This seems to relax me,” she confessed. Like a puppy to a bowl full of treats, she’d found herself drawn to the kitchen pantry as well as the refrigerator. The rest had just happened. It was a little like being on automatic pilot.

  “Mind?” he repeated, mystified. “Why should I mind? A. I like to eat and B. more important than that—” he grinned as he pointed out the obvious “—you remembered how to cook.”

  The second part of his assertion seemed to surprise her, as if she’d just realized that what he’d said was true.

  A rather embarrassed, although pleased, smile curved the corners of her mouth. “I guess I did, didn’t I?”

  He looked over her shoulder. There were two skillets on the burners. The smaller one had the bacon in it. The larger skillet was exclusively devoted to an omelet she was in the middle of creating.

  “You sure did,” Gabe told her. “Not everyone takes on making an omelet the morning after they’ve lost their memory. Looks like the pieces are starting to come together for you.”

  “Yeah, but all the pieces have something to do with food,” she lamented.

  “Remember, you’ve gotta start somewhere,” he reminded her of their earlier exchange. He paused by the coffeemaker and inhaled deeply. “The coffee smells great,” he enthused.

  Coffee—good coffee—was his personal weakness. Pouring himself a mug, he noted out of the corner of his eye that she was watching him. Apparently she was holding her breath until he took a sip. Which he did gamely. Unable to wait patiently any longer, Angel asked hopefully, “Good?”

  “No,” Gabe answered. Then, just as her face began to fall, he raised the mug in his hand high, as if to toast her with it. “It’s great,” he emphasized.

  For the first time, he saw a glimmer of happiness enter her eyes. “Really?”

  Gabe inclined his head. “Really,” he assured her with feeling.

  Leaning a hip against the counter, he took another sip of coffee—a long one this time—and watched with interest the way she wielded the large knife in her hand. She moved it rhythmically on the chopping block, turning a red pepper into confetti, cutting the sections into equal tiny pieces.

  Observing the way her hands were moving came very close to watching poetry in motion.

  “Maybe you’re a professional,” he guessed out loud.

  Angel raised her eyes to his face, her hands stilled for a second.

  “A what?” she asked warily.

  “A professional. You know,” he elaborated, “like a chef or one of those people they have on TV, hawking their cookbooks and trying to hook people on preparing meals their way.”

  Angel appeared skeptical, he observed, even though she never stopped chopping. She slid the resulting heap of finely sliced vegetables into the skillet. “You really think so?”

  He answered her question with a question. “How does that knife feel in your hands?”

  She’d instinctively selected it from his chopping block after quickly examining all the knives mounted in the block. This one looked up to the job. How she knew that, she hadn’t a clue. But she’d been right.

  Looking down at it now, she said, “Good,” then added, “Like it belongs there.”

  Gabe nodded at the answer he’d expected. “Which makes you either a professional chef—or an apprentice ax murderer—and something tells me that it’s probably not the latter.”

  When she laughed in response, pleasure wove through him. He liked the sound of her laughter.

  It took Angel a few more minutes to finish making the omelet. Gabe was on his second mug of coffee and had done justice to three pieces of bacon, nibbling them to oblivion, when she transferred her creation onto a plate and then pushed it in front of him.

  “Tell me what you think.”

  He heard the hopeful note in her voice. There was no way he was about to burst her bubble even if what she’d just made tasted like shoe leather left out in the sun for three days and stuffed with rotting rattlesnakes. She was obviously making progress and he wanted to keep it that way.

  “Well?” she asked as the first forkful slid between his lips.

  To his relief, it definitely did not taste like three-day-old shoe leather stuffed with rotting rattlesnakes. Instead, magnificent tastes exploded on his tongue, tantalizing him.

  He nodded with feeling. “You’re definitely a professional.” Setting aside the coffee mug, he drew the plate closer and began to eat in earnest. “This is really great. You’ve got a gift,” he told her.

  Angel hugged his words to her. They filled her insides like the first rays of sunshine rising after a long and dreary winter. Why hearing them from Gabe meant so much she wasn’t able to explain, but there was no denying the end result.

  “You really think so?” she pressed, barely able to suppress her enthusiastic reaction.

  Rather than answer verbally, Gabe just nodded. He was too busy polishing off the rest of the omelet. As he ate, an idea came to him. And in its wake, a sense of relief along with it.

  “Now I know what to do with you while I’m at work,” he told her.

  He’d been a bit concerned about that. Since he’d just begun to fill in for Larry, he couldn’t exactly take off to watch over Angel, and yet he didn’t feel that he should leave her by herself. She seemed a bit fragile to him and he was afraid that she might wind up losing the ground she’d gained so far.

  Angel frowned slightly. She wasn’t quite following him. “You want me to cook for you?”

  Gabe held up his hand to keep her from making any more guesses until he could tell her himself. He didn’t like to talk with his mouth full, but there was no way he was about to leave even so much as a single morsel on his plate.

  “Not for me,” he corrected, even though he had to admit that he was strongly tempted to keep her and her culinary talents all to himself. He couldn’t remember when he’d eaten anything this good. “Miss Joan could use you in her kitchen. Eduardo, her short-order cook for what seems like the past century, told her he was retiring at t
he end of the month, which means that she has to find someone to take his place before then.” He grinned at her as he reached for the last of his coffee. “I think you’re about to solve her problem. It’ll only be temporary,” he added quickly, in case what he was saying made her feel hemmed in. “Just until you get your memory back and she finds someone. And who knows?” he posed. “Cooking for her might even help you get your memory back.”

  She looked at him hopefully. “Do you really think so?”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Things never go according to plan. Sometimes they go better, sometimes worse, but always, it seems, at their own pace, not ours.” Finished, he set down his mug, his eyes still on her. “How does that sound to you?”

  Angel smiled warmly at him. “It sounds great,” she told him. “Really great.”

  He found himself fascinated with the look that came into her eyes.

  Chapter Eight

  “So it’s all right with you?”

  Gabe looked at Miss Joan closely as he asked the question an hour later.

  He and Angel were in the diner, standing off to the side of the counter and trying to keep out of the way of a steady stream of breakfast “regulars.” The latter group were coming in to jump-start their day with Miss Joan’s famous coffee and one of Eduardo’s special breakfast platters.

  “Yes.” Miss Joan gave him a look that said he should know better than to think that she wouldn’t agree to this. “Even if you weren’t my brand-new granddaughter’s brother,” she added with a smile.

  Having married Harry Monroe, she now had the family she’d been denied for so long. And with Harry’s grandson marrying Alma, that made Alma’s five brothers part of her family, as well. It filled a need within her that had gone begging far too long.

  Miss Joan glanced around Gabe’s shoulder at the young woman he’d first brought in with him yesterday. “With Eduardo running out on me, I’ve got to find someone to take his place.”

  “I am not running out on you, old woman,” the cook spoke up from the kitchen where he was furiously working to keep up with the incoming flood of orders. “I am retiring,” he declared, stressing every single letter of the word. “Before I fall on the floor, dead, because you have worked me to that state. A man has a right to live and enjoy himself in his last few years.”

  Speculation went that Eduardo was actually younger than Miss Joan, but no one really knew for sure and, in the interest of peace, no one was about to bring that matter up with Miss Joan.

  “Huh.” Miss Joan blew out a breath, exasperated. “You’re going to live to be over a hundred, Eduardo, and we all know it, so stop trying to paint yourself as some kind of a victim. You go through with this, and you’ll go stir-crazy before your first month of ‘retirement’ is up,” she predicted. Miss Joan leveled her gaze at Angel, then nodded toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. “Go in and get yourself an apron and show me what you’ve got, girl. And don’t let that old man scare you,” she added, raising her voice so that Eduardo heard. “He’s all bark and no bite.”

  “Ha! You should talk,” Eduardo retorted. “You yap enough to give a man a headache forever!”

  Gabe looked from the narrow space above the counter, where all the orders were placed once they were filled, to Miss Joan. He lowered his voice and said, “You’re really going to miss that old man, aren’t you?”

  Miss Joan shook her head, not in denial but in sad anticipation of what was to come in a far too close future if Eduardo actually did retire.

  “More than words can say,” she whispered back. “But don’t let him know,” she warned, slanting a look over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

  Gabe grinned. “I’ve got a feeling that he already knows, Miss Joan.”

  But Miss Joan wasn’t all that convinced. “If he thought that, he’d say it, believe me. Hell, he’d crow it. Not one to stay silent, that one.”

  Still, it didn’t change the situation. Unless something happened, Eduardo was leaving right after Christmas. She dreaded the thought. She and Eduardo had struck up a rhythm of friendly antagonism and it always made the eighteen-hour day go by faster.

  “Now, you be nice to this little girl,” Miss Joan instructed, raising her voice so that the cook could hear her. “Don’t be scaring her off. With you deserting me, I’m going to be needing someone to do the cooking. She can probably cook rings around you without even half trying,” she predicted.

  “She had better do much more than that if she is to survive here with you, old woman.”

  For a moment, as the swinging doors closed behind her, Angel thought of turning right around and vacating the relatively small, utilitarian kitchen. But something held her fast and wouldn’t allow her to flee.

  Was that “something” a basic part of her real makeup, or…

  Or what? a voice in her head asked.

  She had no answer for that, any more than she had an answer for any of the other dozen and a half questions that had assaulted her this past day and a half.

  Eduardo’s dark brown eyes looked her up and down slowly, his shaggy graying eyebrows drawing together little by little.

  “So,” he finally said, “you are here to take my place?”

  “No, sir,” Angel replied quietly and respectfully. “I’m just here to see if I can help out.”

  A small, almost nonexistent smile settled on Eduardo’s thin lips and he nodded his approval at her choice of words.

  “All right, then, come and help,” he instructed. “You will find an apron in there,” he added, nodding toward the small closet where towels, aprons and a host of other kitchen-oriented things coexisted in a jumbled heap.

  Angel went to help herself to an apron. There was no denying that there were colliding butterflies in her stomach, but all the same, she did have a good feeling about this.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Miss Joan chided Gabe as he watched the kitchen’s swinging doors close behind Angel. “She’ll be just fine. Eduardo hasn’t required a human sacrifice since his third wife had the good sense to leave him.”

  “I heard that, old woman!” Eduardo called out. “And it is I who left her, not she who left me,” the cook corrected.

  “Whatever helps you get through the night,” Miss Joan allowed with a dismissive shrug. “She left him,” the older woman whispered to Gabe just before she accompanied him to the diner’s exit. “Eduardo makes a lot of noise, but your little friend’s going to be just fine,” she reassured the new deputy.

  Gabe started to issue a disclaimer that Angel wasn’t “his little friend,” but the truth of it was, he was stuck for an alternate label to apply to the woman he’d rescued yesterday. If Angel wasn’t his “little friend”—and she was petite—how did he refer to her? As his project? As his work in progress? Or maybe just a lost woman?

  Stumped, Gabe opted to leave the initial label alone until he could come up with a better one to take its place.

  He supposed he should be grateful that Miss Joan hadn’t referred to Angel as his new “girlfriend.” Aside from that being totally inaccurate, it would have also been awkward for both of them if Angel had heard Miss Joan calling her that.

  Weighing the two options, he came to the conclusion that “little friend” was definitely the lesser problematic of the two.

  * * *

  HEARING HIM ENTER, Alma glanced up from her computer.

  “Where’s your friend?” she asked. Craning her neck, Alma looked to see if he was indeed alone. “Her memory come back?” she asked.

  “I left her with Miss Joan.” He saw Alma’s eyebrows rise in a silent question. “Turns out she knows how to cook really well.”

  “You made her cook for you?” Alma asked in amazement.

  Gabe took exception to the implication. “I didn’t make her do anything. When I woke up this morning, she was making breakfast in the kitchen.”

  “In the kitchen,” Alma repeated, the full impact of what he was saying finally hitting her.

 
; “Yes,” he answered, bracing himself for what he assumed was going to be another round of interrogation.

  “And just what did she ‘make’ in your house last night?” Alma asked.

  He knew exactly what she was asking and he wasn’t about to get caught up in being defensive. He’d played that game before.

  “We’ve already gone through this last night, remember? Get your mind out of the gutter, little sister, and make yourself useful,” he told her. Nodding toward Alma’s computer screen, he asked pointedly, “Did you find anything on her yet?”

  She’d told him that she was going to go through the missing-persons reports. “So far, no,” she answered. “Nobody’s filed a missing-persons report looking for anyone who even vaguely matches Angel’s description. But that’s just in this county,” she added. She spared a dark look toward her computer. “I’m going to widen the search as soon as the computer comes back to life.”

  Puzzled, Gabe looked at the screen. “Back to life?” he echoed. “What do you mean? The computer looks all right to me.”

  “Look closer,” she urged, moving her chair to the side to allow her brother better access to her computer. “Try moving the cursor,” she suggested.

  When Gabe took possession of the mouse and moved it around on the desk, nothing happened. He had the exact same results hitting various keys on the keyboard. The last couple of keys he all but sank into the keyboard. Still nothing.

  Alma physically removed his hands from her keyboard and pushed them to the side. “I think you get the picture,” she told him.

  Gabe’s frown went down to the bone. “How long has it been like this?” he asked.

  “For approximately the past ninety minutes. I actually came in early to get to work on finding our mystery woman’s identity. What a waste that was,” she complained.

  “What did you do to it?” he asked.

  “I didn’t do anything to it,” she retorted. “And for your information, the other computers have the same problem. As near as I can figure it, the system’s been hacked into and infected with a virus.”

  Unlike the men in the office, Alma knew her way around computers and was, in effect, the one everyone turned to whenever they had any sort of a computer problem or question. But this seemed to require specialized expertise, not hit-and-miss tactics.