A Hasty Wedding

It came to her then, where this path was leading.

What came to her in that moment with the blade pressed sharply, in uncomfortably close proximity to her jugular, was a startling clarity of thought.

What came to her was a stunning secret that she had kept from herself for eight months. A secret that filled her with a stunning sense of warmth, again, totally inappropriate to the situation she was in.

But she held the thought, and in it she found a great well of courage and calm inside of herself. She dipped into it.

“Why don’t you put the knife down?” she suggested, amazed at what was in her voice. Not just calm. But a compassion born of her new self-knowledge.

“You tell me where my sister is.” Her attacker’s voice was harsh, and his face was so close to hers she could feel the heat of his breath, smell his desperation.

“I don’t even know who your sister is,” she said evenly. She looked into his eyes. He was just a child, despite a faint stubble that darkened his cheeks. He might have been sixteen. His eyes were dark and wild. With fear.

Under different circumstances she might have thought he was a good-looking boy. She made herself look at him analytically. If she lived, she would have to tell the police.

His hair was dark and curly, his eyes a dark, velvety brown that reminded her of a deer caught in headlights. He was taller than her, but lithe, and wiry. His jeans and jacket were torn and dirty.

“You people,” he said furiously, “think because I’ve made a few mistakes, I don’t care about my sister? Don’t you understand nothin’?”

Her clarity was holding, because she felt from her moment of studying him, she understood everything, and realized it did not have a thing to do with filling out a police report. Her voice came out gentle, filled with the most amazing tenderness.

“I understand love.”

The statement amazed her, because she spoke it with such conviction.

And really, if there was a topic she had no understanding of, it was probably that one. The Lamb family were not the ones who had put the “fun” in the word dysfunctional. Her mother and father had divorced when she was a child, and she had harbored the secret belief it was probably her fault.

While others had tested the waters of passion and romance in college, Holly had studied.

And yet the words “I understand love” had come from some place so deep within her, she recognized it as her own soul, and she felt some subtle change in the boy, as the words, powerful in their authenticity, touched him.

The pressure of the blade on her neck faltered, eased, and then was gone. She had not even realized she had been holding her breath until she began to breathe again. She touched her neck and looked at her hand. No blood.

A deep awareness permeated her. Those words—“I understand love”—had saved her life.

The fight was gone from the boy. His thin shoulders sagged under the worn fabric of his denim jacket, and the fury of his expression melted into sad bewilderment.

“I’m so tired,” he whispered. “I’m so damned tired.”

“I know,” she said. It was true. She could see the gray lines of fatigue around his eyes and his mouth, in the sag of his young body.

“I’ve been trying to find her for three weeks. Me and her, we’re all we got, you know?”

She nodded, reached out tentatively and touched his arm. He stiffened, but didn’t pull away.

“I went to the foster home she was in before I got put in juvvie. She wasn’t there anymore. Nobody will tell me where she is. She’s just little and I promised her, I promised her I’d find her as soon as I could.”

Holly listened to his voice and watched his face. Suddenly, she recognized something in the wide, lovely set of his eyes. And his words sounded so familiar. She cast back in her mind, trying to get to a place before the children had been evacuated from the Hopechest Ranch.

“She’s got to have something to believe in,” he said, broken. “She’s got to be able to believe in me.”

It came to her. A little girl looking up at her, her eyes wide, her thumb pulled out of her mouth for only a moment. Has my brother come yet? He promised. Then furious sucking on that thumb, as if that pushed back the tears that she wanted to cry.

“Lucille,” Holly whispered.

The boy’s head flew up, and he looked at her with tortured eyes, eyes that were afraid to believe.

“You’re Tomas,” she said with soft realization. “You’re Lucille’s big brother.”

He looked back down swiftly, but not swiftly enough to hide the sudden moisture in his eyes, the twitch around his lips.

“She talks about you all the time,” Holly said gently. “She told me you were coming. I’ve been waiting for you.”

His mouth fell open, as if no one in the world, besides his little sister, had ever waited for him before.

Holly’s mind clicked over the file. Mother drug-addicted. Father dead. No one had ever waited for him before.

“I didn’t know how to find you,” she apologized softly. “Sometimes the records get mixed up. Especially the last couple months.” She didn’t want to think about the last couple months right now. “But Lucille told me not to worry. That you would come.”

He came to her like he was walking out of a dream, like a wounded warrior, his head hanging, his shoulders slumping, a great and pressing weariness in him. And ever so slowly he laid his cheek on her shoulder.

It was when she gathered him to her, like the hurt child he really was, when she put one arm around his waist and stroked the beautiful dark silk of his curls with the other, that he began to cry.

The knife clattered to the floor, and when she heard the door open behind Tomas, she nudged the fallen weapon gently under the corner of her desk with her toe.

Over the heaving jean-clad shoulder, she met the eyes of her boss, Blake Fallon, director of the Hopechest Ranch, where she had come to work eight months ago as his secretary.

Gray eyes, somber, deep, quiet. His eyes reminded her of a mountain lake reflecting storm clouds and rugged, soaring peaks. The strength and wisdom of those ancient peaks seemed to be at the heart of those astonishing eyes. Even the fabulous abundance of thick sooty lashes that framed those eyes, did not detract from the impression of strength.

It was an impression that repeated itself in his features over and over again. Rugged strength proclaimed itself in the slight bump of a once-straight nose, in the uncompromising line of his mouth, in the proud angles of his chin and his cheekbones.

The theme of strength continued in the hard line of an athletic build. Just over six feet tall, Blake Fallon was immensely broad across his shoulders, his stomach was hard and flat, his hips slim. His legs were long and tapered, the pressed jeans he was wearing clinging to the large muscle of his thigh.

Today, he was dressed casually, as he usually did when he would be spending the day in the Hopechest Ranch office. His blue plaid shirt open at the collar, tucked neatly into belted jeans, sneakers on his feet. His brown hair was short and neat, the kind of cut that policemen and Secret Service men and those who exercised authority on a regular basis seemed to gravitate to naturally.

Despite the casual dress, she knew after eight months as his secretary, there was not much casual about Blake Fallon. He had a mind as intimidating and as powerful as a steel trap. He ran the Hopechest Ranch with a seeming ease that didn’t come from graduating with his MBA at the top of his class.

Her best friend, Jennifer, had given her the low-down on Blake Fallon. He could have done anything. When he’d finished college the Fortune 500 companies had been knocking down his door. Flying him to interviews. Wining and dining him.

He’d turned his back on all that, for this.

To run a ranch for kids in trouble.

She saw him appraising the atmosphere in the room now, alert to the tension and emotion, ready, like a big jungle cat, to spring in whatever direction was needed.

“Hi, Holly. What’s going on?” His voice betrayed none of that alertness. It was deep and pleasant, relaxed. The kind of voice a cowboy used to tame a wild horse, the kind of voice that encouraged frightened things to trust, and lonely things to believe—

She stopped her mind from going there, much too close to the place of the secret that beat with delicate new life in her breast.