He was sticking right by her side. Every minute, until the stalker was all sewed up tight.
Someone helped Allison remove her coat, a task slightly hampered by the folded shirt she held so tightly in her hand.
The front door opened, and the four men filed out, faces grim, expressions varying from anger to determination.
“You be careful out there, Dallan,” Mickey Peterson called out, and her admonition was echoed by other wives.
The last of the men out the door gave a whoop, and the front door slammed open as something huge charged the room. Several shrieks punctuated the lunge, and Allison automatically ducked, but not soon enough.
Hit squarely in the black, she was shoved face-first into the crowd of family and friends by the full weight of an assailant. An assailant who began frantically licking her face, whining desperately at her.
The crowd started laughing and scolding and pulled the happy dog from Allison and helped her to her feet.
“Looks like you’ve got yourself a dog, Allison,” Jackson Bean said.
Allison shook her head.
“What’s her name, Aunt Allison?”
“Yeah, whaddya gonna call her?”
“I’d call her ‘Leaper,’ because she sure can jump.”
Allison looked down at the dog standing at her side, gazing up at her with utter adoration. Her tail was whipping Alva Lu Harrigan’s leg, much to that lady’s disgust.
“So you think you’re mine, do you?”
The dog chuffed and grinned up at her.
Allison sighed, not having the foggiest notion how she felt. Was it possible to have too much love?
“Well, then, the boys are right. You’d best have a name.”
The dog’s tail wagged more furiously, and she wriggled a little.
Just looking at the dog, Allison felt immeasurably connected. The way she felt in Chas’s arms, when gazing into his eyes. Maybe, just maybe love had a chance.
“Chance,” she said aloud. “Will that do?” she asked, knowing that she’d seize any chance now. She glanced over at Chas and saw that, in his wholly empathetic way, he’d discerned part of her reasons for the unusual name. His eyes seemed to blaze even brighter.
“You’d better come with me, then, Chance, because I have to put this away,” she said, waving the shirt in the general direction of Chas’s bedroom.
As if on her wavelength completely, the dog jumped forward, happily leading the way through the opening people were allowing them, her tail beating against knees and, in the case of the smaller children, giggling faces.
Chance raced around the bedroom sniffing at everything as Allison deposited the shirt on Chas’s dresser. She was relieved to be alone for a second. She stared at herself in the mirror, assessing the flushed glowing face of her reflection.
She looked as she was, a woman in the deepest of loves.
Behind her, near the closet, Chance suddenly let out a shrill bark, followed by another and another. In a volley of frantic growls and barking, the dog lunged at the closet door.
Even as Allison turned to see what the trouble was, Dorchester burst from the closet, kicking viciously at the dog, sending Chance sprawling beneath the high bed.
Before she could draw breath to scream, he’d leaped across the room and grabbed her in a half nelson, cruelly dragging her against him, backing away from the opened door leading to the hallway still crowded with people.
“Chas!” one of the triplets yelled.
A woman screamed. A baby began to cry. The Boston Pops played “Jingle Bells.”
“Remember me now, Allison?”
She couldn’t talk, could scarcely breathe. His forearm pressed against her throat, cutting off her windpipe. She gagged a little at the pain, at the pressure.
Chas burst into the room and teetered over the threshold as he took in Allison’s predicament.
“Stay back, stud!”
Chas held his hands before him in a conciliatory openness.
“What is it?” Delbert Franklin asked. “Won’t somebody tell me what’s going on?”
Homer Chalmers pushed Chas on into the room and stepped inside himself. Allison felt his ancient eyes swiftly assess the situation. “You don’t wanna hurt that little gal, boy,” he said.
“You stay back, Grandpa,” Dorchester said. Perhaps as a warning, he wrestled Allison roughly, making Chas jerk as if it were his body pinned and not hers.
Homer didn’t move. “You ain’t my kin, so you got no business calling me Grandpa.”
Amazingly the man holding her chuckled a little. “Now, there’s a really scary threat.”
“Is it the stalker?” Allison heard Alva Lu ask someone.
“What’s he doing to her?”
“Quick, Martha Jo, Johnny’s gun is the glove compartment of the pickup.”
“Is he crazy or what?”
The man holding her jerked her back against him. “Are you people insane?” he screamed. “It’s not Christmas! And Allison doesn’t belong to you! She belongs to me!”
His voice stretched so hard and tight with his roar that it screeched on his final note. He wrenched her around so that he could see her in the mirror. See himself, Allison realized.
It wasn’t until that moment that she knew that he had a knife blade pressing against her temple. Everything had hurt, all had been frightening, but until then she’d thought her greatest danger lay in his arm squeezing the breath from her. She gave a small whimper.
From her angle, she could see Chas clearly reflected in the mirror, saw every nuance of his anger, his fear for her. And she saw Homer Chalmers calmly reaching behind him for something someone was handing him from the hallway.
“Let her go,” Chas said. “You can’t possibly get away with hurting her. There’s too many people here. You can’t kill us all. One of us...me...will stop you.”
“Shut up!” Dorchester snapped. His eyes darted from Chas to Allison to his own tortured gaze. But amazingly, as he met his own reflection’s wild eyes, he seemed to steady, to calm down. He drew a deep breath, then another.
While he was doing this, Homer quickly yanked his hand back behind him, and Chas took two gliding steps farther into the room.
Dorchester’s eyes shot to Chas. “Stop right there, stud. You’re never going to touch her again. I’ll make sure of that. I know what you did to her in the past. I know. She told me. She never told you, but she told me.”
“She told me everything,” Chas said.
A flicker of doubt crossed Dorchester’s face, but he hid it immediately. “She didn’t,” he stated firmly. “You see, stud, I know her innermost thoughts. Everything she wants.”
“I know she doesn’t want what you’re doing now,” Chas said. His voice was far calmer than his face.
“She will. Allison. Are you listening, Allison?”
She tried to nod, unable to vocalize.
Sickening her, he continued to hold her against him while playing with her hair. She heard Chas utter a choked groan.
“Then I want you to sleep, Allison. Sleep for me now, Allison.”
“No!” Chas yelled, and started to lunge.
Dorchester raised his knife arm menacingly, pressing the point of the knife painfully against her temple. A thin trickle of blood snaked down her cheek. “One more move, stud, and she’ll be asleep forever.”
Allison felt a flicker of hope. When Dorchester had been exhorting her to sleep, she had felt a curious tingle in her arms and realized that she was susceptible to a posthypnotic suggestion. He could make her go into a trance. Right here, in the midst of danger, he could make her fall asleep.
But only if she allowed him to do so. When he’d so thoroughly abused her mind before, she hadn’t known what was happening to her, had no tools to fight him with. Now she did. She knew what he was, and she understood everything about herself and the loving people behind her.
“Allison,” he said commandingly. Compellingly. “Test case.”
H
er arms tingled and her vision wavered. A phrase. He’d used a specific phrase. That’s what she’d been, his test case. His experiment. The tingling sensation passed, and Allison realized that she had won her battle against his will.
She closed her eyes anyway, hating the sound of Chas’s agonized moan.
“You hurt her, you bastard, and I swear I will tear you from limb to limb all by myself,” Chas growled, then he called her name aloud.
It took every ounce of will she had not to respond to the despair in his voice.
“Raise your hand, Allison.”
She did so, hoping he wouldn’t notice how badly it was shaking.
“Very good. You can lower it now.”
She did this, as well, balling her hands into fists, waiting for an opportunity.
“Now, tell this country stud what you really think of him. Tell him all about the past.” He loosened his grip around her neck, rocked her forward. “Open your eyes, Allison. Look at him when you tell him how you really feel.”
She opened her eyes and found Chas’s tortured gaze. Trying to mask any expression on her face, she spoke directly to this man she loved beyond reason or thought, and beyond anything in the dark past.
“I love you, Chas. I always have. I always will.”
Dorchester was so stunned by her statement that he rocked back slightly, but just far enough away from her that she could now use her arms to flail at him. She slammed her fisted hand into his groin and felt a flash fire of dark satisfaction as he let loose an explosive cry and released her.
She whirled away from him even as Chas lunged and Homer Chalmers grabbed her and pushed her back behind him. And Chance, that brave and wonderful dog, joined the fray.
The fight was mercifully brief. Chas outweighed the madman by some forty pounds and had anger, fear and adrenaline spurring him onward. Dorchester went down like a bag of cotton seed. And went out like a light at one solid punch from the man who could lift a three-hundred-pound heifer from the back of a trailer.
“What did he think?” Homer asked the room at large, “That we was just going stand around and let him kill our Allison?”
Chapter 14
Allison stifled a yawn and then chuckled.
“What?” Carolyn asked from her position on the sofa, nestled in Pete’s embrace.
“I was picturing the write-up Alva Lu will put in the Almost Historical Society notes. ‘The February Christmas party ran very late at the home of the local veterinarian, Dr. Charles Jamison.”’
The last of the guests, mostly family, grinned tiredly.
“Where’s Doc?” Carolyn asked.
“He’s in with Billy,” Allison said. She turned to Cactus Jack and Sammie Jo. “That was really great of you to go fetch him.”
“It was a wonder the hospital let him out,” Sammie Jo said.
“You didn’t give them a whole lot of choice, honey,” Cactus explained. “She threatened to beat the whole lot of them with her wig if they didn’t turn him over to her.”
“I guess I still don’t get what that guy was after,” Jason said. “I mean, he just wanted to know stuff about you, Aunt Allison?”
She shrugged. By the time the state troopers had come to take Dorchester away, he’d only rambled on about his great love for her and how she’d betrayed him. “I don’t know,” she said. “He was crazy, honey.”
“Like a bedbug,” Sammie Jo said, patting her husband’s leg.
“Think I’ll get me another piece of pie,” Cactus said, pushing to his feet.
“I’ll join you,” Pete said, doing the same.
And within seconds, everyone in the room had moved to the kitchen, leaving Allison alone in the glow of the fire and the Christmas tree. She heard them laugh, her family, and smiled, at peace with the world for the first time in fifteen years.
She smoothed out the letter she still held in her lap, the letter Sammie Jo had given her after the troopers had hauled Dorchester away.
“I want you to read this, honey. It’s your letter, but I didn’t know if I was ever going to get an opportunity to give it to you. Your daddy wrote it and gave it to me, telling me I was only supposed to hand deliver it to you, so if you had any questions you could ask me about ’em. It’s yours now,” Sammie Jo had said.
Allison had had to stop twice in the act of unfolding the single sheet of paper, her hands had been shaking so badly.
My little Allison, I know you are thinking some pretty harsh things about me, about all of us most likely. But some of those things aren’t true and you’ve got to hear those things right from me. First of all, I never did blame you for what happened in the car that day. I was so damned upset about Susie and so scared for you, the words just came out all wrong. And I was so guilty about being glad it wasn’t you down in that morgue. You’ve got a lot of me in you, Allison. Good stuff, I hope, but some of my stubbornness, too. You don’t have to always look for the bad side of things, honey. Everything comes with two sides. You can look for the good just as well. And there’s a lot of good things out there. I just want you to know that I love you and I always have. And I’m as proud of you as a parent could ever be. You’ll come back home someday and you’ll read this letter, and you’ll know that in my heart, you were never gone.
Love, Daddy.
She raised the letter to her lips, tears falling softly. “I love you, too, Daddy,” she whispered. “I always did.”
Some slight sound made her lift her head to find Chas standing just inside the room, his face hidden by shadows.
“Are you okay?” he asked, not stepping forward.
She nodded. “I’m fine now.”
He didn’t answer. She saw him make a rather convulsive movement with his hands.
“Did you mean what you said in there, Allison? When he was hypnotizing you?”
“He didn’t hypnotize me,” she said. “I blocked it.”
“I know that,” he said roughly. “Did you mean it, though?”
It was too soon to talk about this, she thought, and then realized how close it had been to always being too late. Most of her life she’d spent ducking love, ducking the joys and pains that came with it, and all because she hadn’t spoken so long ago, hadn’t said what was on her mind when Chas had laid out his enthusiastic forecast for their future together. The letter from her father crumpled in her hand.
“Yes, Chas, I meant it. Every word.”
He slowly walked forward, until he towered above her just inches away from her. Then he slowly lowered to one knee and drew her suddenly trembling hand into both of his.
“Allison Leary, will you please, please marry me and be my dearest love for the rest of my life?”
And she understood so very clearly at that precise moment that the past, any doubts she’d had before, could not be allowed to have any weight when balanced with the sheen of moisture in his eyes, the depth of his love for her.
“Oh yes, Chas. Nothing on earth would make me happier.”
Chance the dog sat up and chuffed her approval.
And before she was drawn into Chas’s loving arms, Allison caught a glimpse of her family all gathered in the kitchen doorway smiling at the two of them.
She knew then there was no such as thing as too much love.
Epilogue
Two years later...
Allison rested her cheek against Chas’s bare chest and ran her hands along the muscled planes of his warm body. She smiled when she felt him absently petting her hair much as he might have done to Chance had the faithful dog not been outside guarding the clinic.
The glow of the lights from the Christmas tree turned his long legs to rich roseate color.
His heartbeat was still a little fast, belying his casual caresses, and her smile broadened. She knew from her reading, from hearing friends talk, that intimacy between married couples generally ebbed after the so-called honeymoon period. Not with her and Chas. If anything, it grew deeper, richer and infinitely more rewarding with each encounter. She wo
ndered if it had to do with the lost years, that perhaps each of them had a burning need to smooth away the time they had missed.
She wasn’t surprised when his stroking stilled; his uncanny knack for reading her every thought even stronger than it was back in the days of her youth or when she’d returned home after all that time gone.
“Allison?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you have any regrets?”
Her smile faded abruptly. “No,” she said. The single word was definitive. Everything in her life, good and bad, had led her to this moment with Chas, to his strong and good love, to her total acceptance of that miracle. But he probably knew she was lying. There was one regret.
“I love you,” he murmured, pressing his lips to her crown. “I always have. I always will.”
In that mysterious way they shared, she knew he wanted to say more, had something that needed telling, so she hugged him back but waited for him to disclose whatever it might be.
“It’s quiet around here now that Billy’s off to college.”
She thought about the gangly boy who had seemingly overnight transformed into the tall young man majoring in biology in preparation for medical school. Not Chas’s by blood, but by every stamp of his innate character. And now her own in addition.
Like Chas, she missed the boy with an ache as much physical as emotional. “He’ll be home at Easter.” As always, the simple use of the word ‘home’ struck her forcibly, making her hold Chas a little tighter.
At first, in those early days of marriage, he’d worried that she’d become bored with her new ‘simpler’ life. But he’d finally come to accept that she’d never been happier in her life. And she knew the same was true of him.
Except for today, when something was clearly bothering him.
“Sammie Jo was saying the other day that with the triplets growing up and Carolyn’s Shawna and Jenny turning into young ladies right before her eyes... that she was going to miss having little ones around.”
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