Stone Cold Christmas Ranger

by Nicole Helm

  “Her last name isn’t Clark,” Mr. Stevens offered with no preamble.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  Mr. Stevens sighed heavily. “Your mother is having a conniption.”

  “Then everything’s normal, I assume.”

  “She wants a name.”

  “She won’t get it from me.”

  “If the girl has nothing to hide, let your mother run her little background checks. And if she does have something to hide, well, you know your mother won’t go exposing her. It would only look poorly on us.”

  “Regardless of what’s in her background, I don’t want you two poking around in it or coming after her. She is none of your business. If Mother can’t get that through her head after all this time, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “And yet you’re here, under our roof.”

  Alyssa edged closer to the door, trying to see through the crack in the door. She could see a sliver of Bennet—who’d pulled on a sweatshirt at some point—but she couldn’t see his father. She couldn’t help but be curious about what Mr. Stevens’s reaction might be to that cold fury in Bennet’s expression. And, more, she couldn’t understand Bennet’s relationship with his parents.

  She knew her family was warped beyond belief, and she knew that her brothers fought, sometimes furiously, over cartel business, but she’d assumed that was the life of criminals. Not the life of someone like Bennet and his parents.

  “What do you know about Sal Cochrane?” Bennet asked with no finesse, no easing into it. Alyssa frowned. Couldn’t he be smoother than all that?

  “Is that a friendly question, son, or an official one?” Mr. Stevens returned easily.

  “Is that a political evasion or you just being difficult?”

  After another long sigh, Mr. Stevens answered. “He’s one of your mother’s silent donors, I believe. Never met the man myself, so that’s about all I know. You’re not going to bring your mother into trouble.”

  Which was not a question. Even Alyssa knew that from her eavesdropping spot in the hall.

  “If she isn’t already in any.”

  “Bennet, we’ve never stood in your way when it came to police work or joining the Rangers. We’ve never—”

  “I’m not going after Mother,” Bennet interrupted, clearly irritated by his father’s line of conversation. He stepped out of her slim view through the crack in the door. “Sal Cochrane is who I’m after, and it’s only for information, so if you have any information, I’d appreciate it. Officially.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Mr. Stevens stepped into view. “In return for that young woman’s last name.”

  Bennet made a scoffing noise, and Mr. Stevens turned his head, in a seemingly casual move. But as Alyssa didn’t have time to move out of the way, she doubted there was anything casual about it.

  He’d either known she was there or suspected it, and she wasn’t stupid enough to believe Mr. Stevens hadn’t caught her spying. Crap.

  Still, better to give the illusion she didn’t know she’d been caught. She hurried as silently as possible down the hall and to the bedroom she’d slept in last night. She desperately wanted to listen to the rest of that conversation, to see if Bennet would trade her name for the information he wanted, but as she stepped into the blindingly white room, she realized she had bigger fish to fry.

  “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  Oscar smiled sheepishly. “Hi, sis.”

  “You...you can’t be here.” It would be bad enough if Bennet saw him, but if Mr. Stevens saw him, too? Alyssa didn’t have a clue as to what might happen, but she knew it wouldn’t be good. At the very least her brother would be arrested, and while he might be deserving of that...

  Oscar had snuck her checkers and Baby-Sitters Club books. He’d given her sweets and taken her on walks when none of her other brothers would. He’d treated her like a girl, a sister, not just a possession. A statue to protect.

  She couldn’t let anything happen to Oscar. Not like this. She grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him toward the door, but he jerked out of her grasp.

  “I don’t have time, but I had to warn you. Don’t try to figure this out. Don’t get involved. Stay low, get your Ranger to stay low, and you’ll be fine. But if you let CJ drag you into this, you will get hurt.”

  “Drag me into what?”

  “I’m risking my life here, Alyssa. That’s all I can say.”

  “Os—”

  But before she could even get the words out of her mouth, he was climbing out the window Alyssa hadn’t realized was open. She might have followed him, she might have grabbed him again, but she could hear footsteps in the hall and she couldn’t risk being discovered.

  “Alyssa!” Oscar hissed from outside.

  She pushed the curtains back and looked at her brother standing in the perfectly manicured yard of the Stevenses’ guesthouse, a figure all in black, the faint scar across his cheek he’d never told her how he’d gotten.

  “Don’t tell your Ranger I was here. Please.” And then he was gone, running silently around the corner of the house.

  “Well, I hope you know how to clean up,” Bennet said, and Alyssa whirled away from the window. Probably the only thing saving her from being caught was the fact Bennet’s attention was on a card in his hand.

  “Clean up?” she echoed stupidly, her heart hammering a hundred times in overdrive.

  He looked up at her, that charming smile so easily camouflaging his true emotions.

  “We’re going to a ball, Cinderella.”

  Chapter Eight

  Bennet sat at the kitchen table, casually eating his dinner, while Alyssa continued to rant. And rant. And rant, rant, rant. It was almost amusing, really, considering he’d watched this woman fly down a highway on a motorcycle waving at very bad men, watched this woman hold a gun on her brothers, and yet those weren’t the things that caused her to come unglued.

  No, she was losing it at the prospect of going to one of his parents’ idiotic Christmas balls or galas or whatever they were calling this one.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I don’t work for you, Bennet.”

  “No, but you’re working with me.”

  “Are you always this infuriatingly unruffled?”

  He shrugged, grinning at her. “When it suits.” He hadn’t been unruffled this afternoon. Not with his father, and certainly not with Alyssa and the kiss.

  The fake kiss. That had made him far more irritable with his father than he should have been. Too direct. Too...everything.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Alyssa said, and when he looked up at her, she had her back to him while she pretended to make herself a sandwich. Pretended because she’d been doing so for the last twenty minutes without finishing.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t what?”

  He watched her shoulders lift and fall as though she was inhaling deeply, steeling herself for something. She turned, and though she looked at him, he got the distinct impression she was staring at his nose instead of meeting his actual gaze.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t work together. Work...period. If my mother’s death was cartel business, what does it matter?”

  Bennet stood slowly. “It’s an unsolved murder case, that’s what it matters.” He narrowed his eyes at her. Suddenly she was fidgety, and backing off, and that was very much not the Alyssa Jimenez he’d come to know in a short few days.

  So maybe you don’t know her at all.

  “You said yourself that CJ wants us to find this all out, and I’m worried about playing into that trap.” She hugged her arms around her even as she kept looking at him defiantly. But something had rattled her, and Bennet wasn’t about to let her get away with it.


  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? Did it escape your notice my brother is a dangerous man?”

  “Who didn’t hurt you when he had the chance.”

  “That doesn’t mean he won’t ever hurt me or...”

  “Or what?”

  “Or you, idiot,” she snapped. “He wants us to go looking for this information, but what will happen if we find it? Why can’t he find it himself? It’s stupid to go after it. It’s like helping him.”

  Bennet took a few steps toward her, and no matter that what she said held some truth, this was all a sudden change from how she’d been earlier. A woman didn’t change her mind like this without provocation. “Alyssa. What happened?”

  “Noth—”

  He curled his fingers around her shoulders and cut her off. “Do not lie to me again. What happened?”

  She swallowed, but she didn’t lose that defiant tilt to her chin. “It isn’t safe to go after this, and I don’t want to go to your dumb ball.”

  “Is that all this is, Princess? Don’t want to wear a dress?”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Dangerous! And not just to us, or to my family, but to your parents. CJ wants to bring them into this. All of us. Why are we falling for it?”

  “And why are you suddenly skittish?” Something inside him went past irritation to worry, but that only served to irritate him. He had no business worrying about her state of mind. He had a case to solve.

  She gave him a push, stalking past him, though she didn’t leave the kitchen, just started pacing across it.

  “Alyssa, we’ll get nowhere if you lie to me.”

  Her breathing hitched, and a little sob escaped, and no matter how clearly she tried to fight back the tears, they slipped down her cheeks.

  “I don’t know who to trust. Who to believe,” she said in a squeaky voice, tears tracking down her jaw.

  Bennet knew he should keep his hands to himself, but he’d known a lot of things in his life that feeling had taken over, and this was no different. He stepped toward her and brushed the tears off her cheeks. “I know what that’s like, and I know I can’t make you believe or trust me, but I haven’t let you down yet, have I?”

  She shook her head.

  “I grew up in a world of lies and deception, where it mattered more what people thought than what people did. ‘Oh, Mr. So-and-So beats his wife, but the checks he writes for the campaign are quite large, so we’ll look the other way.’ I hated it, always, so I sought out the exact opposite of that world. Not truth, not honesty, but—”

  “Justice,” she finished for him in a whisper.

  He blinked at her, but he shouldn’t have been shocked she understood. She’d grown up in a cartel, and since her kidnapping release had built a bounty hunter business. It might not be legal, but it was a search for justice.

  Just like him.

  He should stop touching her face, and he would. In a minute or two. “Yeah, I guess you know something about that, don’t you?”

  “Oscar was here,” she said in a whisper.

  His hands dropped from her wet face. “What?”

  “While you were talking to your father. He...he was in my room. He told me not to listen to CJ. That it was dangerous.”

  Bennet wanted to yell at her, demand to know why she’d kept it from him for hours. Demand everything, but he’d seen that look on her face in so many victims he’d come across in his work.

  Fear, and—worse, so much worse—a kind of grim acceptance that pain and suffering were just around the corner.

  So, he swallowed down his anger, flexed his fingers from the fists they wanted to curl into. He breathed evenly, doing his best to unclench his jaw. “And you believe him?”

  “Oscar was always the nicest of all of them. The one with a heart, if you can believe it. There’d be no nefarious reason to warn me off. No self serving ones. He was trying to warn me so CJ didn’t hurt me. Didn’t hurt both of us. He told me not to tell you, Bennet. He’s afraid, too. If CJ found out...” She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t bear to think about it.

  “I know they’re your brothers, but I need you on my team, Alyssa. I need your eyes, and I need your brain and memories. I need you to be in this with me so we can find out what happened to your mother, and to you. Justice. For both of you. But you have to trust me, and if Oscar contacts you again, I have to know you’ll tell me. I have to be able to trust you. It is necessary.”

  She used the back of her hand to wipe off her cheek.

  “Is there anything else you’re keeping from me?”

  She looked up at the ceiling as if she was shuffling through all her memories of what she might have kept from him. She eventually shook her head. “No. You’ve been with me every moment except that one.”

  “And last night.”

  “I was sleeping last night,” she said, her tear-stained cheeks turning an appealing shade of pink.

  There was something seriously warped with him. He should still be angry. He should be nervous and worried and thinking about Sal Cochrane.

  But all he could think about was that kiss. Fake kiss. Fake.

  “Why’d you say you don’t know how to kiss?”

  Her cheeks darkened into a shade closer to red, but she met his gaze, attempting and failing at looking regal. “Because I don’t. My brothers didn’t exactly let me out of the compound to date, and then I was, you know, kidnapped by a psycho who wouldn’t touch me because my belly button wasn’t symmetrical.”

  “Your belly button wasn’t... What?”

  But she was bulldozing on. “So, I haven’t exactly been kissed or anything else, thank you very much.”

  “You’ve been free two years.” Which he shouldn’t have pointed out, nor should he continue this line of conversation, or step even closer.

  But he did. Stepped closer and continued.

  Her eyes were wide and dark and on him like she couldn’t quite force herself to look away. “I... I... I’ve been building a business,” she said, her voice something like a squeak. “And a f-family of sorts, and I... Guys aren’t really impressed when you can kick their ass.”

  His mouth curved. “I don’t think you could kick my ass, but you can try if you’d like.”

  “Bennet,” she said so seriously he held his breath, afraid to speak and ruin the moment when her eyes held his and she looked like she was going to confess the world.

  Or move in for a real kiss.

  “I can’t go to a ball,” she said in that same serious, grave tone. “Look at me.”

  His breath whooshed out and he cursed himself for an idiot. She was not going to kiss him, and he should hardly want her to. She was innocent on every level and involved with the most important case of his life.

  He needed to get himself together. Focus. Channel a little all-business Vaughn Cooper. “Admittedly your current look is a little bedraggled, but I can fix that.”

  “You can fix that?”

  “Well, my staff can make you blend right in.”

  She folded her arms over her chest and scowled at him skeptically, but he noticed she stopped arguing.

  “The ball will be attended by a variety of my mother’s political supporters and donors, which means the possibility of Sal Cochrane being there is high. I need you there, on the off chance you recognize him or something about him. I’ll need an extra set of eyes who knows at least enough about the Jimenez and Dominguez cartels to notice something that might connect. You’re integral, Alyssa.”

  She seemed to consider that very hard and then finally rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

  Bennet grinned. “Who knows, you might even enjoy it.”

  * * *

  WHEN ALYSSA WOKE the next mornin
g, it was with her cheek stuck to a variety of printouts Bennet had given her last night to pore over. She yawned, peeling the paper off her face. She’d dozed off before finishing the read-through.

  But lists of people she’d never heard of and the kind of money they handed over to Bennet’s parents for political crap was not exactly tantalizing reading. She’d much prefer criminal records or something with a little pizazz.

  She stretched out on the big bed and sighed. Oh, a girl could get used to this kind of luxury. She’d had nice things growing up, even if she had been kept mostly locked up and away, but between two years with The Stallion and two years on her own, luxury had been sorely missing from her life.

  But this was a luxury borne of the investigation into her mother’s murder. Which caused her to think about last night. A few too many things about last night, but mostly Bennet saying she deserved justice, too.

  She was afraid of how much that disarmed her. How much all those little touches that seemed to come so easy to him—an elbow touch, wiping tears off her cheeks—kept throwing her off balance, changing something.

  Alyssa blew out a breath. She had to find some kind of power against him. Something to shield herself from all that charm and random acts of sweetness or saying things that felt like soul-deep truths.

  Justice. For both of you.

  Her life had been unfair, and she knew dwelling on that would send her spiraling into the same awful mental space she’d been in when she’d been kidnapped by The Stallion, but justice had been a foreign concept. The fact it no longer was, the fact someone wanted to fight for her own justice was... Overwhelming. Scary.

  Irresistible. And she’d never had to resist anything before. There’d been nothing to resist. She’d only ever wanted freedom, and she’d been given it at twenty-two and somehow created her own little box to exist in.

  But all her boxes were colliding, and she didn’t know what to do with that. Unfortunately, staying in his comfortable bed was not an option. Something had to be done, and...

  She stared hard at the ceiling above her. Bennet had said he needed her. Her help. Her brain. No one had ever needed her before. Gabby had been the first person in her whole life to ask her for help, but Gabby had always been the clear leader in the kidnapping house. Alyssa had followed, had helped, but Gabby hadn’t needed her. Not really.