The Stranger and Tessa Jones

What now?

She hustled to her bedroom, her dog and cat at her heels, and grabbed the cell she’d left by the bed. She tried 9-1-1. Nothing happened, except a pair of short beeps a few seconds later that meant the call had been dropped before it ever connected. She tried again.

No good. So all right. She would have to move the unconscious stranger herself, after all. Somehow.

And quickly. The snow was coming down so fast and thick now, it was going to be hard to see two feet in front of her face out there. At least her Subaru wagon had all-wheel drive. She would have to get the stranger into it and take him to the clinic herself.

Somehow…

Sled, she thought. She had a small one, a gift from her dad years and years ago, propped up on the enclosed front porch. She put her mittens back on, whispered, “Wish me luck,” to Mona Lou and Gigi, and grabbed another jacket. She got a wool blanket from the closet and snatched her car keys from the key rack in the kitchen. As ready to face the near-impossible challenge as she was likely to get, she rushed back out the way she had come, only pausing to command Mona Lou, “Stay.”

The dog couldn’t hear much, but she picked up expressions and body language. She dropped to her haunches with a disgruntled whine.

On the porch, Tessa grabbed the sled and hoisted it under her free arm. The porch door bumped shut behind her as she emerged into the storm.

Lucky she’d put her purple coat on the man. The wind was blowing so hard, the heavy-falling snow swirling and eddying. She would have had to spend several precious minutes walking in circles until she stumbled on him—if not for the bright purple quilted fabric wrapped around his chest.

Muttering unheard apologies for moving him, she managed to hoist his head and torso onto the too-short wooden slats. She tucked the coat around him tighter and wrapped the blanket around the coat and under his legs. He didn’t look comfortable, not in the least. His poor head was canted at an odd angle on the red steering bar, his legs and feet dragging in the snow.

But it couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t carry him—she was strong, yes. But not that strong. What there was of the sled would have to do most of the work. Pausing only to check one more time and make sure he was still breathing—he was, thank the Lord—she looped the sled’s towrope over her shoulder and hauled him, with considerable effort, toward the Subaru, which was parked in her driveway not far from the house.

How she did it, she hardly knew. But grunting and puffing, she dragged the man’s limp body to the door behind the driver’s seat. She even managed, by bracing herself in the open door and getting him firmly beneath her arms, to hoist him up across the backseat. Then she threw open the other door, wedged herself at the end of the seat, and dragged him the rest of the way inside. Finally, she raised his knees enough to get his boots clear of the door, tucked the coat and blanket around him again and shut both doors on his still form.

Panting, starting to sweat in spite of the frigid wind, she got behind the wheel and turned on the engine. Switching the heater on high, she aimed the defrost jets at the frozen, snow-thick windshield, which wouldn’t be clearing any time soon unless she gave it a hand.

With a low moan of impatience and frustration, she found her scraper in the console, got out and scraped at the icy snow frozen to the glass, aware the whole time that precious seconds were ticking past and the stranger needed aid immediately. When she had the glass mostly cleared, she climbed behind the wheel again, shifted to reverse and backed the wagon toward the snow-covered road.

Luck was with her. She got turned around and pointed in the right direction, even got onto the road. But the snow was coming down so hard and so fast, she could hardly see, even with her wipers going full speed—which they weren’t, since the snow had piled up so swiftly on the windshield, her wipers were laboring almost from the start. She saw that the snow would stop them. So she put it in park, got out and tried again to clean the snow out of the way.

Behind the wheel once more, she forged ahead. But the wipers were laboring again almost immediately, even though she had the defroster going full blast. The snow was just too much. She’d never seen such a storm.

Then the wipers stopped.

She turned them off, and then started them again. They made half an are of the windshield, scratching ice, dragging snow, and then quit. So again, she turned them off. She stopped the wagon, got out, and again went through the process of brushing as much of the snow free of the wipers and windshield as she could.

When she got back behind the wheel, she tried them again. They worked. For a minute or two. But it was no good. No wipers in the world could keep up with the sheer volume of the white stuff tumbling down from above.

She tried leaning her head out the side window and driving that way. But the whirling snow made it almost impossible to see more than a few feet in front of her nose.

It wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t dare go on.

Moaning in distress for the unconscious man on the seat behind her, she put the Subaru in Reverse and backed it the way she had come. It was rough going, agonizingly slow.

But she made it at last, sliding into the parking space, right where she’d started, only pointed the opposite way. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she told the man in back, as if he could hear her. “I’m so sorry. It was just too dangerous to go on.”

Tessa put her head down on the steering wheel and let out a low moan—of fear for the stranger, of hopeless frustration. But no sooner had that moan escaped her than she drew herself up.

She was a Jones. She came from hardy, determined stock. A Jones man was the toughest, orneriest, unbeatable-est guy around. And a Jones woman? She was tougher still—after all, a Jones woman spent most of her life standing up to Jones men.

The man in the back seat needed warmth and shelter and a soft place to rest, at the very least. Tessa could do that much for him.

And she would.

Chapter Three

Warmth.

Impossible, but somehow, he was warm again. He moaned and opened his eyes. A ceiling. He was in a room. In a bed, his head on a white pillow, his body covered in a clean-smelling sheet and thick blankets. There was a dresser against the wall and a rocking chair in the corner. A shut door—to the closet or a bathroom?—on one side of the dresser, and an open one to a hallway on the other.

Gray daylight shone weakly in the wide window to the right of the bed. It was snowing hard, the white flakes hurling themselves at the glass.

A clock on the nightstand said it was 4:15 p.m. Vaguely, he recalled passing out in the snow. It had been sometime after noon then, hadn’t it? That would mean he’d been out for at least a few hours. That is, if it was still the same day.

He looked around some more. There were lots of framed photographs on the wall and on the dresser beside the dark eye of a small TV. They were, for the most part, pictures of a lot of people he’d never seen before.

But he did recognize the big blonde, the one who threw dishes and yelled at a guy named Bill. She was in several of the pictures. Laughing, with her head thrown back in one. Smiling broadly in another. And shyly in a third.

I’m in a bedroom in the blonde’s house. He remembered the house—the tin roof, the chimney pipe with its trail of smoke spiraling into the gray sky…

When he’d passed out cold in the snow, the blonde must have brought him in here. Somehow. Or maybe someone else was here, someone who’d come out of the house after he was unconscious, someone who had helped her.

His mouth was dry as a desert ravine. He needed water. There was a white pitcher and an empty glass on the nightstand. He reached out his hand to the pitcher—and then let it drop. He’d have the pitcher’s contents all over him if he tried to fill the glass lying down.

Okay, then. He would sit up.

With a groan, he popped to a sitting position. His head spun. So he dropped back flat again.

After a moment, he dragged himself up more carefully. That time, he managed to stay sitting until the spinning slowed a little. About then, he realized that beyond a wide variety of bruises and welts, his torso was bare. He pushed away the warm blankets.

She had taken his pants, too, leaving him in his boxers—black ones. Of silk, it appeared. Or was that satin? He felt a pained smile curve his lips as he realized that he didn’t even recognize his own underwear.

The smile faded to a scowl as he continued the inventory of his battered body. His bare feet and legs were crisscrossed with strange, violent-looking bruises. She’d bandaged his cut-up knees.

He touched his face, felt gauze over the cut on the left side of his forehead. Weakness claimed him and he knew he didn’t have the energy required to reach over, lift the pitcher and fill the glass.

Pitiful. Just pitiful. Wincing, flopping back down onto the pillow and dragging the blankets over himself again, he looked around the bedroom for his clothes and his shoes.

If they were there, he couldn’t see them.

From somewhere in another part of the house, he heard conversation. A low drone of voices. At first he thought the blonde must be talking to someone, maybe whoever had helped her get him inside and into this bed—but then he heard music, a vaguely familiar commercial jingle, and he figured it out: Someone was watching TV.

He considered simply lying there until he felt up to trying to drink water again, to getting on his feet. Or until someone entered the room and saw he was awake. But in the end, he needed to know if the blonde was there, to be certain he wasn’t alone in a strange house, with a TV left on in the other room.

“Hello?” It came out a raspy whisper. As if his voice had stopped working with the rest of him. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello?”

A moment later, she appeared, tall and strong and so healthy-looking, in the doorway. She wore a yellow sweater and blue jeans and a shining, hopeful smile. Her blond hair fell, thick and loose, on her shoulders.

There was a dog, too. A bandy-legged bulldog with a patch over one eye. When she stopped in the doorway, the dog lumbered around in front of her and sat at her feet.