A Holiday to Remember

A quick check of the rest of the house had him deciding to put his duffel bag in the second bedroom that he thought he remembered was his. At least he remembered the queen-size bed when he’d last been here. The thing was barely large enough to handle his growing body then. It wouldn’t provide a great sleep tonight, but he couldn’t think of sleeping in his father’s bed. Not tonight after what Alana had confessed. Maybe never.

All he wanted was a shower, a drink and a few hours’ escape from any more thinking, even though that’s what he’d also come here to do. But the future suddenly seemed as unpleasant as the past.

“You better not have drunk all the bourbon, you old buzzard,” he muttered, stripping off his T-shirt.

* * *

“On to the next chapter,” Alana murmured, as she turned her silver pickup into Pretty Pines Ranch the next morning. Not even her late aunt’s sweet coining of the property’s name could bring a smile to her lips as it usually did. She was running late and knew that Duke would be making breakfast, with one ear tuned to the police-scanner radio, an eye on the TV on the kitchen counter catching up on the morning news, and everything else directed at the driveway, waiting for her arrival. Nothing had changed since the accident—she could barely think the word crash, let alone say it—and that was mostly her fault. She’d given her uncle no reason to stop worrying about her. From the time she arrived for work at the station every afternoon, until she returned home in the morning—in fact, any minute that she wasn’t asleep in her own bed—he stressed. Countless sessions with doctors, psychiatrists...even lectures and threats from Duke hadn’t achieved much. She still lived with her torment and pain. But she did her best to make sure he knew that she did adore him.

The widower cop had been the center of her universe—more like her anchor—since their world turned inside out. That was saying something considering that he looked like your stereotypical drill instructor and had a personality to match, particularly when someone crossed him, or one of his officers caused him trouble or embarrassment. But even when she was the one on the receiving end of his wrath, Alana loved no one more; however, she still hoped that with Mack’s arrival, Duke would now take a little of that intensive watchfulness off her.

“Morning, handsome,” she called with determined brightness, upon entering the sun-filled white-on-white kitchen. Immediately, unfastening her paraphernalia-heavy belt, she beamed at him as she set it on the breakfast-table chair to the left of the one she would be using. Duke stood by the stove dressed in his summer blues with one of her aunt Sarah’s aprons over it. She could already smell his Brut cologne before she reached him to rise on tiptoe and kiss him just beside his ear. “You smell better than the bacon.”

Duke Anders pretended to swat at her as she stole a piece. “Don’t play me, young lady. You’re late. Imagine what I thought when I called the station to see what was keeping you, since there was nothing of importance happening on the radio. Then to learn that Eisley had taken his patrol car—on time and properly clean, lucky for you—and that you weren’t at your desk completing reports.”

Alana made a face at the mention of her day-shift counterpart and ripped a piece of bacon off the strip to pop it into her mouth. “Phil was born with the wrong chromosomes. He’s as finicky as some prissy Southern belle. Plus he won’t ever stop believing day-shift personnel have seniority over us night crawlers. Is he still whining about the bag with the bottle of water and empty bag of chips that I accidentally left in the car the other day?”

“Procedure is set for a purpose,” Duke recited in a tone that exposed he’d done it numerous times. “You leave the vehicle as clean and full of fuel as you found it.”

“It was water and a wrapper, not a box of tampons.”

He grimaced as though she’d uttered a vulgarity. “Do you mind? I’m cooking here.”

Alana popped the rest of the bacon into her mouth on her way to the coffeemaker where her red mug was set, waiting for her. She wasn’t about to tell him that she’d stopped at the grocery store and picked up a few things that she planned to carry next door as soon as he left for the station.

“I went to the cemetery.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t a fib—she had gone, only not after her shift change. She’d done so under cover of darkness, which she often did because she didn’t like or need people spying on her and the gossips saying, “Did you hear? Ally was back at the cemetery. As much time as she spends there, you’d think she can’t wait to join her family.” She had touched her mom’s and dad’s and Chase’s gravestones, which were in the same row, but she’d gone to tell Fred what she hoped he already knew—that his son had returned.

“Are you okay?”

Filling her mug halfway from the machine that was the same as the one she’d put at the station, Alana returned to watch Duke work. “Sure. But I guess this is where you tell me that you already know something you think I’d hide from you?”

He flipped their hash browns a last time and then cracked one egg for her sunny-side-up preference and two for his over-easy choice. “Yeah, I’ll admit I thought you were going to try to sneak the news about the Graves boy by me. I should have known you felt Fred should hear the news first.”

And he did, Alana thought, smiling into her mug. “Mack is hardly a boy anymore. He’s thirty-eight and barely shorter than you, but he looks like he could bench press your weight with no problem.” At her uncle’s scowl, she added, “No, Bunny didn’t exaggerate this time. What she doesn’t know is that he’s retired from the marine corps and came by on his way to nowhere to see if he could make peace with his father.”

“That was decent of him.” Duke sounded approving, despite his downturned mouth. “How did he take the news?”

“Exactly as you would expect of a soldier.” In her mind, Alana relived the scene. “Don’t forget, they were strangers and hadn’t parted on the best terms. But I felt he was truly sorry.”

“Not so sorry that he wanted to try again over the twenty years.”

“Well, maybe Fred took the answer to that to his grave with him, but that communication thing works both ways. Besides, he’s done tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and who knows where else before that. Cut him some slack.”

Duke nodded as he digested that. “God bless him, then. And I wasn’t being judgmental, I was just curious.”

Alana leaned her head against his shoulder and rubbed his broad back. “I know.”

“I take it that you brought him next door?”

“It was foolish for him to insist he could walk when he was obviously sore. It seems he’s been hitching and hiking his way here all the way from the East Coast. So, after having him sign the appropriate paperwork, I called Eberardo to give him a heads-up, and drove Mack, yes.”

As her uncle put her egg on her platter, along with a portion of the hash browns and bacon, he handed it over, asking, “So? What do you think of him? He sounds like a fine specimen of manhood. If he didn’t inherit Fred’s ugly mug.”

“OMG,” Alana groaned. “You’re worse than Bunny. When I called in that I was checking out someone along the creek, she went into some nonsense about blue moons.”

Duke frowned as he plated his breakfast. “Was there a toxic spill in the area that I missed on the radio?”

“My thought exactly.” Leading the way to the table, she saw a way to get him away from his rabid matchmaking focus. “I told him about the will.” She’d never disclosed anything about Fred’s proposal to her uncle, afraid that it would upset Duke and forever alter the two friends’ relationship—if not destroy it. But she had shared the rest.

Sighing as he relieved his legs of some weight, Duke opined, “Bet he loved that.”

“You can say that again.” Remembering that kiss forced Alana to take her time with her napkin and taking a slice of toast from the plate on the center of the table. Her lips all but tingled as though she was reliving the experience again. “Why do you always make the toast first? It’s practically as hard as Sheetrock.”

“Don’t exaggerate. You can inhale your weight in those stale croutons they put on your Caesar salad at Doc’s, but you’re faulting my toast?”

“Now you sound like an indignant wife, all puffed up,” she teased.

“And you sound like an ungrateful husband,” Duke muttered. “Get back on topic.”

Instead, Alana took a big bite of toast with jam and chewed. The later it grew, the more compelled her uncle would be to get to the station. He was determined to retire with the pride of knowing that he’d probably had the best attendance record of most police chiefs in Texas, and a more impressive tardiness record.

“Ally, how did he take the news about the will?”

“He now thinks I’m a Jezebel. The kids today would just say ‘ho,’ but it all amounts to the same thing. He’s concluded I used my feminine charms to con Fred into making me the alternate heir.”

Duke’s eyes bulged. He stopped in midchew.

“Swallow, please,” Alana directed. “It’s a completely rational reaction if you consider what his opinion of women must be after what he learned about them through experiencing his mother’s behavior.”

“I can worry about you,” Duke said, poking his chest with his thumb. “People can gossip because you drive like you’re auditioning for a NASCAR sponsorship—”

“I was very respectful of the speed limit driving Mack to Last Call.”

“—but nobody calls you...that!”

As Duke’s fist struck the table, the reverberations had Alana lifting her mug to keep coffee from splashing into her plate. “One bright spot.” Alana continued to soothe him. “Fred can rest in peace knowing Mack doesn’t seem to have a cozy relationship with Dina.”

Duke’s coloring slowly eased to a mild pink. “Is that so?”

“He didn’t sound like he would be heading there anytime soon, even if things hadn’t worked out for him here.”

“You covered a lot of ground.”

“It’s a long shift.”