An Angel For Christmas

An Angel For Christmas
Heather Graham

A snowy mountainside. . . A starry night. . . The makings of a miracle. . .Christmas has never brought out the best in the MacDougal family. Still, year after year, they gather together in the Blue Ridge Mountains to try to make the season merry and bright. But this year is an especially strained one, with Shayne’s impending divorce, Morwenna’s slavish devotion to work and Bobby’s reluctance to face what life has to offer.They’ve never felt less like a family. Then, in the midst of a snowy sibling shouting match, a mysterious stranger appears. He could be a criminal, a madman—or something far more unexpected. Despite their fears and the growing danger in the dark woods around them, the MacDougals take a leap of faith.But when another stranger arrives on the mountainside, they don’t know which of them to believe. One of these men can’t be trusted. And one is about to bring Christmas into their hearts.

An Angel for Christmas

HeatherGraham

www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)

To Eric Curtis Certainly one of the world’s finest photographers

Prologue

Gabe Lange’s quarry was right in front of him.

The chase had begun in vehicles, his a police cruiser. The perp had quickly taken the lead in a stolen Maserati. Still, Gabe had discovered that the police car was well equipped to handle such a race, and he’d been right behind him all the way. In fact, while the con had eventually crashed into a snowbank, he’d managed to swerve to a stop, without even spinning in the snow and ice as he might have done.

Luke had surely faced some injury in the crash; sore muscles, if nothing else. Gabe had come out unscathed. But Luke appeared to be good at disappearing, even amidst a crash, and for a moment—when Gabe had followed him up the first steep hill that led to the road up the mountain—he’d lost him.

He could not lose him; it was Christmas Eve. He couldn’t let Luke loose on some unsuspecting family about to settle down to a Christmas Eve dinner. He could already picture the kind of home where Luke might try to find entry; a couple placing the last of the presents under the tree, perhaps. There might be a crèche set up on a coffee table, a tree with brilliant lights facing the parlor or living room with a multipaned window allowing the lights to shine upon the snow. Little ones would be put to bed; the father might be doing the last work, scratching his head as he tried to follow the “simple” instructions for finishing a bike or a video system that would be there, big and beautiful, beneath the tree. Here, especially here, in the mountains of Virginia, people had a habit of being welcoming. The houses and old cabins were few and far between, and the neighbors, even those who only came for the summer and holidays, learned to be welcoming and giving. Usually, of course.

Maybe Luke would happen upon the one family who was more than wary of strangers, and ready with a shotgun.

But Gabe hadn’t lost Luke; when he came around a copse of trees, he saw him again, limping, but continuing upward once again. The roads here were poorly plowed, but even with snowdrifts swirling through the air and the few feet of accumulation, the path that led to the sparse population here was apparent; it was an indentation in the banks of snow.

And Luke was heading toward it.

Gabe quickened his pace, grateful that he had the kind of body that had been kept in shape; powerful arms and legs, and good lungs. That seemed especially important now. Breathing was good one minute—the air being so crisp, smogless, empty of diesel fuel, the fumes of buses and trucks—and then hard the next; the snow was still coming.

He heard his own breathing as he surged on upward. Luke had a body that was honed as well; young, muscled and lithe. Had he been a gymnast or a sprinter at some time? He was moving just like—just like a bat out of hell.

Huffing and puffing, Gabe kept climbing. When he reached the road, Luke had once again disappeared.

He held very still, trying to listen.

But the snow kept the dried branches of the naked, skeletal trees snapping and the wind that hurried the snow flurries along seemed to whistle and moan; he couldn’t hear any other sound.

He turned, searching out the trees, and then he looked to his feet, hoping that the flurries weren’t falling fast enough to erase all signs of footprints.

He could barely make them out. Luke had escaped across the road into the trees to the northwest, but it seemed that he’d somehow doubled back….

That realization dawned just in time for Gabe to turn around halfway and almost ward off the blow that came his way when the perp, Luke, cracked him hard over the head with a massive oak branch. The wood was dry and brittle, and he could almost hear it cry out at the abuse as his own head began to spin, and the jarring pain took hold.

Gabe fell to his knees. Luke let out the sound of delighted laughter. “Gotcha!” he said.

No. It wasn’t ending here. Gabe wasn’t dying in a pile of snow while Luke went on to torment a family on Christmas Eve.

Or worse.

He reached out, glad of his strength as he snaked a firm grip around his opponent’s ankle, jerking him off his feet. Luke crashed down beside him. He tried to seize the advantage and jump on his quarry, but Luke rolled, and Gabe was left to stagger to his feet. There was something trickling down his forehead, blinding him.

Blood.

He let out a cry of determination and flew at Luke, tackling him down into the snow. Luke fell once again. Gabe landed a good hook to Luke’s left cheek, but he had no time for satisfaction. Luke, bellowing in pain, still managed to catch hold of something in the snow.

A rock.

“Oh, my old friend! The night is mine now. I’m ahead of you at every step!” Luke said with pleasure.

Go figure. Luke found a rock on the road beneath the snow. As proud as a crow, he held it for a fraction of a second above Gabe.

“The challenge is on—and you’ve lost already!” he said.

He brought the rock down hard against Gabe’s skull, and Gabe went down….

He saw the flurries in the sky, and couldn’t help but think, How beautiful. So much on God’s earth, even in winter, was stunningly beautiful …

He slumped down, stars spinning before his eyes, and then fading away to the blackness of a moonless night …

Gabe came to; he didn’t know how much later. He blinked away the pain, and pressed cold snow against his face, hoping that would help clear his head. It did.

He tried to stagger to his feet. His first attempt failed; he tried again.

When he stood, he realized that his vision was fine. The world seemed to be a strange shade of gray because dusk was falling. Somewhere, people were watching the extraordinary show of the sun sinking in the west; here, the day was just going from opaque and overcast to the murky gray that promised a very dark night very soon.

Which way had Luke gone?

He brought his gloved fingers to his face, and noted that something was off. He stretched out his arms and looked down at his legs, and groaned.

Luke had stolen his clothing—his Virginia Department of Law Enforcement uniform.

God help him. The challenge was really on now.

Chapter 1

The landscape was crystal, dusted in a fresh fall of snow that seemed to make tree branches shimmer, as if they were dotted with jewels.

Of course, the same new snow that made everything so beautiful could also become treacherous, Morwenna thought, trying to adjust her defroster as the car climbed up the mountainside.

With her initial reaction of, “How beautiful,” barely out of her mind, she wondered why her parents hadn’t decided to buy a retreat in the Bahamas, Arizona or Florida instead of forever maintaining the centuries-old, difficult-to-heat rustic old cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. If the snow started up again—which forecasters were predicting—the beauty would definitely become dangerous.

“Other people opt for warmth,” she muttered aloud. “Birds do it—they fly south for the winter!” If the snow had started up a bit earlier, she might have had a great excuse not to come.

That thought immediately made her feel guilty. She loved her parents. She even loved her siblings—with whom she’d been fighting all her life. But this was going to be a rough Christmas. She winced; Shayne was going to be miserable. His own fault. She’d tried to tell her brother many times that he needed to start working harder at communicating if he was going to save his marriage. Shayne always thought that he was doing the right thing, and, of course, if it was the right thing in his head, everyone knew it was the wrong thing. Then, of course, there was Bobby. Baby brother Bobby, hardly a baby anymore; he was on his third college, having come home midsemester twice. Bobby was brilliant, which made her all the more angry with him, but so far, he’d majored in political science, education and biology. Now, he was once again searching for himself.

She was about to stop the car; the flurries were growing stronger, and even in her nice little Audi, the defrosting system was beginning to wear out. But then it appeared before her. The old family “cottage” in the woods on the mountaintop. Her mother had grown up there, but Morwenna and her siblings had not. When Stacy Byrne had met the rising young attorney from Philadelphia, Michael MacDougal, she had fallen head over heels in love, and had left home behind to follow him, wherever he might lead. But she’d lost her parents at a young age, and the house had become hers. By then, of course, it had needed extensive repairs and just about a new everything to remain standing. Her father might have joined a zillion private firms as a criminal defense attorney and made oodles of money, but he liked working in the D.A.’s office, and that was where he had stayed. They had never wanted for anything, but she often felt sorry for her dad—maintaining the cottage in the mountains had precluded any possibility of him buying one of those nice little time-shares in the islands or a warmer climate.

They were all grown up now—well, more or less. Bobby was twenty-one. But every time Morwenna thought about a brilliant excuse not to join her family for Christmas and accept one of the invitations she so often received to head to Jamaica or Grand Cayman for the holiday, she always chickened out at the last minute. Was that actually chickening out? No! Honestly, it was doing the right thing. Maybe she was feeling an edge—even an edge of bitterness—because Alex Hampton had urged her to join him for a jaunt to Cancún for an eight-day hiatus, a lovely bout of warmth from Christmas Eve until January 2. Of course, she’d asked Alex to join her in the mountains, but others from their office were going to Cancún, and, he’d explained, he had to go since he was the one who had instigated the trip.