Stone Cold Christmas Ranger

by Nicole Helm

  “Alyssa Clark,” Mrs. Stevens repeated blandly.

  Alyssa didn’t have to be a mind reader to know Mrs. Stevens did not approve. She might have squirmed if it didn’t piss her off a little. Sure, she looked like a drowned sewer rat and was the daughter of a drug kingpin rather than Texas royalty, but she wasn’t a bad person. Exactly.

  Alyssa smiled as sweetly as she could manage. “It’s so good to meet you, Ms. Stevens. I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, adopting her most cultured, overly upper-class Texas drawl.

  Mrs. Bennet’s expression didn’t change, but Alyssa was adept at reading the cold fury of people. And Mrs. Stevens had some cold fury going on in there.

  “I didn’t realize you were seeing anyone at the moment, Bennet,” Mrs. Stevens murmured, the fury of her gaze never leaving Alyssa.

  “I don’t tell you everything, as you well know.”

  “Yes, well. I just came by to see what all the noise complaints were about. If I’d known you were busy, I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “It was no bother, but I do have to get ready for work.”

  “And what’s Ms. Clark going to do while you work?”

  “Oh, I have my own work to do,” Alyssa said. She smiled as blandly and coldly as Bennet’s mother.

  “Yes, well. I’ll leave you both alone then. Try to avoid any more noise disturbances if you please, and if you’re around this evening, bring your young lady to dinner at the main house.”

  “I’ll see if our schedules can accommodate it and let Kinsey know,” Bennet replied, and Alyssa had not seen this side of him. Cool and blank, a false mask of charm over everything. This was not Ranger Stevens, and she didn’t think it was Bennet either.

  “Wonderful. I hope to see you then.” She gave Alyssa one last glance and then swept out of the kitchen as quickly as she’d appeared.

  Alyssa looked curiously at Bennet. “That’s how you talk to your mother?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Why did she hate me so much?”

  “You’re not on her approved list of women I’m allowed to see.”

  “She doesn’t have a list.”

  Bennet raised an eyebrow. “It’s laminated.”

  Alyssa laughed, even though she had a terrible feeling he wasn’t joking. “So, she wants you to get married and have lots of little perfect Superman babies?”

  “It’s a political game for her.”

  “What is?”

  “Life.”

  Which seemed suddenly not funny at all but just kind of sad. For her. For Bennet. Which was foolish. She’d grown up in a drug cartel. What could be sad about Bennet’s picture-perfect political family?

  “Why’d you give her a fake name when you introduced me?”

  “Because her private investigators will be on you in five seconds. If you’ve ever stripped, inhaled, handed out fliers for minimum-wage increases, I will know it within the hour. But a fake name will slow her down.”

  “She checks out all your girlfriends?”

  “All the ones I let her know about. Which is why I don’t usually let her know. Which I imagine is why she’s here at five in the morning and overly suspicious. But you don’t have to worry.”

  “Because you didn’t give her my real name?”

  “Because I think you can eat my mother for lunch.”

  Alyssa glanced at the way the woman had gone. She didn’t think so. She might be a rough-and-tumble bounty hunter, but Mrs. Stevens had a cold fury underneath that spoke to being a lot tougher than she looked.

  Still, Alyssa didn’t mind Bennet thinking she could take his mother on.

  “Let’s head over to your office.”

  Alyssa nodded and followed along, but Bennet’s mother haunted her for the rest of the day.

  Chapter Five

  “I can’t find a damn thing,” Bennet muttered. They’d spent over two hours searching Alyssa’s office from top to bottom. Meticulously. They’d taken her desk apart, pulled at loose flooring, poked at soft drywall.

  It was possible they’d overlooked something, but Bennet didn’t have a clue as to what. Surely, surely the office had been bugged. How else would anyone have known to follow Alyssa last night?

  He tried to push the frustration away, since it wouldn’t get him any further in this case—and he’d already come further than he’d expected to in twenty-four hours—but something about knowing who the Jane Doe was, and who cared about her, made it seem all the more imperative to unravel this mystery.

  Alyssa tossed some debris into a corner. “This is pointless. It could be anywhere. In anything.”

  “We’ve been through everywhere and everything. Maybe there was no bug.”

  “Then why would they have followed me last night?” She looked out her smudgy windows, frowning. Her profile reminded him of last night, when she’d stood in the middle of that parking lot and all but dared two thugs to harm her.

  He shifted, trying to ignore the uncomfortable way his body reacted to that memory. “Maybe it’s something else. Something seemingly unrelated. Had you ever seen those guys before?”

  “No... Wait. Wait.” She rushed over to her desk, pulling a crate off the floor.

  “We already went through that.”

  She waved a hand. “Did you get the license plate off that car last night?”

  “License plate. Make. Model. Picture on my phone.”

  “Pull it up.”

  He pulled out his phone and pulled up the information and placed it on the most level side of the desk. She pulled a little notebook from a seemingly endless supply of them and began rifling through it.

  She found a page, read it, then glanced at his phone screen and swore. She shoved the notebook toward him, poking her finger at a few lines of chicken scratch. “I have seen those guys—well, their car. It was following me when I was on my last skip in Amarillo. Kept getting in my way. I thought it was friends of the skip trying to stop me, but...” She shook her head, forehead furrowed in confusion. “It is the same car. Same plate.”

  “So, your brothers have sent someone after you before, which means your office might not be bugged.”

  “But why? Why now?” She shoved her fingers into her hair, pulling some of the strands out of the band they were in. “Two years. I...” She trailed off, shaking her head, grappling with something bigger than this case.

  She hardened her jaw, tossing the notebook back into her crate of notebooks. She stalked around the desk, shoving his phone back at him, something like fury in her gaze. A fury that definitely did not come from this alone.

  “Okay, what’s next?”

  Bennet stilled. Next? Hell if he knew. He’d expected to find a bug and then go from there. He hadn’t expected this twist.

  “You’re the Ranger. You have a plan. Don’t you?”

  “Why don’t we take a deep breath and—”

  “You don’t have a plan.”

  “Alyssa—”

  “You’re probably not even really a Texas Ranger. Your mommy and daddy gave you a badge and everyone plays along. Pretends you aren’t some idiotic—”

  “Have a seat,” he barked, gratified when she jumped a little.

  “You don’t order me around,” she replied, lifting that chin, leveling him with that furious glare. It was only the fact there was some panicky undercurrent to it that he didn’t bark out another order.

  But he did advance, no matter how defiantly she kept his gaze. He stared her right down, getting up in her personal space until they were practically touching. “I said, have a seat,” he growled.

  Her screw-you expression didn’t change, but she did blink and, after a few tense seconds, where he was thinking far too much about the shape of her mouth and not nearly en
ough about the threat he was trying to enact, she glanced behind her and pulled one of the folding chairs toward her.

  She sat carefully, scowling at him all the way.

  “I understand this is emotionally taxing for you, Alyssa.” She scoffed, but he kept talking. “You will not lash out at me if you’d like me to allow you to—”

  “Allow me, my a—”

  She tried to stand up, but he took her by the shoulders and firmly pressed her back into the seat. “You’re an asset, but don’t forget you are working with me because I consider you one. Should you stop being one, I will no longer require your assistance.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, speaking in the same way she had this morning when his mother had been around, mimicking a smooth, soft drawl, “I no longer require your assistance, Ranger Stevens.” She shoved his hands off her shoulders with a flourish.

  Which irritated him about as much as her words and her fake drawl and everything else about today that wasn’t adding up.

  So, he took her by the face, which was a mistake, his big palms against her soft cheeks. He felt her little inhale of breath, could see all too easily the way her pupils dilated as he bent over her.

  He could feel the way her cheeks heated, the little puffs of breath coming out of her mouth, and there was an insane, blinding moment where he forgot what he was doing, why he was here. All he could think was that if he pressed his mouth to hers he’d know if she tasted as sharp as she always sounded.

  He released her face and stepped back, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Getting pissed off at each other solves nothing. We need to arrange a meeting with your brothers somehow. Ferret out what they know.” He paced, trying to focus on the information he had rather than the way the strands of her hair had felt trailing against the back of his hand. “Did your skip have something to do with them?”

  “No,” Alyssa said quietly. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “But he could have?”

  She frowned in concentration. “I think I would have found a connection somewhere, something that rang familiar, but...”

  “But what?” he demanded, no patience for her inward thinking that she wasn’t sharing.

  “I didn’t know much about cartel business. I was kept very separated and very isolated from their world. My brothers always acted like I was in imminent danger. They told me if I ever went somewhere alone, there’d be a target on my chest. They were protecting me, they always said.”

  She seemed to doubt it now, in retrospect, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been so protective, so diligent in keeping her separate, then how had she been kidnapped? He hesitated to point that out, then berated himself for it.

  He had an investigation to figure out. He could not be ignoring pertinent questions to spare her feelings. “How were you kidnapped?” he asked, gently. Softly. Certainly not in a tone befitting a Texas Ranger.

  She hugged herself in that way she seemed to do only when she was really rattled, gaze sliding away from his. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  Something about that whisper, the vulnerable note, made the desperation wind inside him like a sharp, heavy rock, and he knew then and there he’d find out. He’d find out just how she’d come to be kidnapped, regardless of his case.

  And if that was stupid and foolish, well, so be it.

  * * *

  ALYSSA DIDN’T WANT to talk about the kidnapping. She didn’t want Bennet to talk to her in that gentle way that had to be a lie. Gentleness spoke to care, and all she was to him was a means to an end.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he asked, and all of that fury and those hard edges from before when she’d insulted him and he’d ordered her to sit down were gone, softened into this...concern.

  Which was too tempting, too alluring. She wanted to tell him everything, when she’d never told or wanted to tell anyone anything. Even Gabby knew only bits and pieces, because Alyssa didn’t like to bring that pinched, pained look to her friend’s face. Gabby had been a prisoner for eight years. Nearly all of her twenties. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

  But life never had been, Alyssa supposed. Which meant she had to tell Bennet the facts. She wouldn’t let emotion get wrapped up in it. She’d just tell him what had happened, and if this had something to do with that...

  She closed her eyes, trying to breathe, trying to work this all out in a way that made her want to act instead of cry.

  “Take your time,” Bennet said softly, giving her arm a quick squeeze, nothing like the way he’d grabbed her face and had those blue eyes boring into her, dropping to look at her mouth as though...

  She snapped at him to keep her thoughts from traveling too far in that way-wrong direction. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  His mouth firmed, some of that softness going away, thank God.

  “All I know about the kidnapping is one minute I was asleep in my bed, the next moment I woke up in the back of a van with a hood on my head. I was taken inside some giant warehouse, and there wasn’t one person I recognized. A guy examined me, The Stallion, and I got taken to one of his little lairs.”

  “You would’ve had to have been drugged,” Bennet said, focusing on the details of the kidnapping rather than the emotional scars as if he could read her mind and what she wanted.

  “It’s the only explanation,” Alyssa replied. “I just don’t know...how. My brothers kept me locked away. They brought me my food. They protected me all those years. Before my mother disappeared. Before...” Well, she didn’t feel right about letting Bennet in on their biggest family secret—that Dad wasn’t in his right mind, or even in his right body. He was a shell in a locked-up room, just like she’d been.

  “There’s no way they could have arranged it?” Bennet asked, with something like regret on his face.

  Or maybe that was projection, since she regretted this conversation, regretted and hated the doubts plaguing her. “Why would they protect me for twenty years, keep me safe and from harm, then with no warning hand me over to some crazy guy?” Who only ever kept me as locked up as my brothers did.

  “I don’t know,” Bennet said carefully. “But if they protected you so well for twenty years, I don’t understand why all the sudden you were kidnapped.”

  She swallowed at the lump in her throat and did everything she could to appear unaffected. “Well, neither do I.”

  “Come to think of it, the other night, they followed you. Not me. Alyssa, maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with me and what I talked to you about, and everything to do with you.”

  She forced herself to breathe even though panic threatened to freeze her lungs. Why would it have to do with her? Why had they left her alone for two years? Why would they come now?

  “I could be wrong,” Bennet said, and he studied her with those soft eyes that made her want to punch him.

  That’s not really what you want to do with him.

  She shook her head trying to focus, trying to think. “We need a next step,” she said more to herself than him. “We need to get this over with so that I can enjoy Christmas with my...” She almost said “family.” She’d let Gabby and Natalie become her family because her brothers hadn’t come for her.

  They’d left her. Abandoned her. And now they were back, lurking around the corners of her life.

  Bennet reached out to touch her again, but before he could say anything, her door violently screeched open.

  Two men in ski masks stepped inside, one with a very large gun, and when Bennet reached for his gun, they fired off a warning shot all too close to Bennet for Alyssa’s comfort.

  “On the ground,” one of the men growled. Bennet didn’t move, his face impassive, his hand on the butt of his weapon, though he didn’t move another inch.

  Alyssa knew she should move off her chair, should
follow instructions, but Bennet’s stoicism kept her calm, as did the way the man without the gun tapped long fingers against his thigh.

  “I said get on the ground,” the gunman said in that fake raspy voice.

  Alyssa slowly stood, staring at the shape of the man’s mouth, the breadth of his shoulders. The way he held that gun.

  “Jose,” Alyssa said, making sure it was clear she knew it was him, not just suspected. She glanced at the man without the gun, the brother closest in age to her. “Oscar. It’s been a while.”

  Both men froze. Jose glanced at Oscar, still training the gun on Bennet. “How did she know it was us?” Jose demanded in a sad attempt at a whisper.

  “I told CJ she wasn’t stupid,” Oscar muttered in disgust.

  Alyssa swallowed at the odd lump in her throat, blinked at the stinging in her eyes. Four years. Four years ago her entire life had been torn from her, and now here was half of her entire life, the brothers who’d kept the closest tabs on her, in ski masks and with a gun.

  Men she’d trusted her entire childhood to keep her safe. At least she’d always thought that’s what they’d been doing. Had she been so wrong? So naive and stupid?

  Two years she’d been imprisoned with that madman, The Stallion, and had slowly gone crazy realizing she’d always been imprisoned, for her entire life, but she’d waited. Waited to be rescued. To be found by the men she’d loved and trusted.

  But she hadn’t been rescued by them. She’d been rescued by the FBI. And for two years her brothers hadn’t done a damn thing to contact her. They’d left her for dead.

  Now, now they’d crashed back into her life and were just standing there discussing whether CJ was right about her intelligence level.

  Furious, and more than a little emotional, Alyssa stomped over to them and their sad little whispered argument. Jose’s eyes widened, but he kept the gun trained on Bennet, who was standing calmly and placidly near where she’d been sitting.

  She ignored Jose for the time being, and instead stood toe-to-toe with Oscar, her closest brother, her sweet and kind and caring closest brother, and slapped him across the face as hard as she could.