Coming Home for Christmas: Christmas Angel / Unexpected Gift / Navy Joy

“It smells great,” he offered. “Are you okay?” He searched her profile. Anna was a cattleman’s daughter. She was the only child of Paul and Nancy Campbell. The family had a hundred-year ranching history in this part of Montana. Anna had always been strong and confident, but now she seemed just the opposite to Kyle. And it scared him.

She grimaced. “My head.” She pointed to the scar above her left ear. “The neurologists are telling me with a grade-three concussion I’ll have some dizziness and maybe other symptoms for a while. Eventually, they said, they’d go away.” She opened her hand. “Right now, since being released, I deal with dizziness. It just comes and goes. I don’t have any control over it, and I wish I did.” She looked up, no doubt seeing his concern. “I’ll be okay, Kyle.”

“You’ve been out of the hospital how long?”

“Three days. Every day is better,” she assured him, stopping at the entrance to the kitchen. “I’m going to let you get the bowl down from the cupboard and take as much soup as you want.” She gestured toward the gas stove, where a five-quart pot sat. “I don’t trust my equilibrium that much tonight.”

Kyle guided Anna to one of the heavy oak chairs and pulled it out for her. His fingers tingled where they met her elbow. “Do you remember where everything is?” she asked.

He smiled and shrugged out of his coat, placing it over the chair next to Anna. “I think I do. Are you hungry? Can you eat a little something, too?”

Anna had become thin, and it pained him. He knew her parents had died in an auto wreck a year ago. Running a huge ranch like this took more than one person. All the weight of responsibility had fallen on Anna’s slender shoulders. Automatically, Kyle found himself wanting to protect her, lift her burden, give her the time she needed to heal herself.

“Maybe I’ll try just a little.”

Kyle moved to the drain board and opened up a cupboard where the blue-and-white Delft-patterned bowls were kept. It was so easy to fall back into the routine of how they’d grown up together. He and his parents had eaten with Anna’s parents every night. His father had been the foreman for the ranch. They were like extended family, and damned if anything had ever felt so fitting as this right now. “You’re thin, Anna.”

Walking to the stove, Kyle unhooked a metal ladle from the wall, opened the lid and inhaled the flavorful scents of the soup. He piled his bowl high with beef chunks, potatoes, carrots, onions and peas and put about a third as much in a bowl for Anna.

“It’s the work,” she admitted, resting her hands on the long, rectangular oak table.

“Don’t you have a foreman?” he asked, handing her the bowl and giving her a soup spoon. And then Kyle remembered that Jepson had told him Trevor Bates, the foreman, had been driving the truck to Great Falls with Anna when the accident had occurred. It had killed Bates outright and damned near killed Anna. As he sat down at her left elbow, he noticed how her eyes darkened with grief.

“I did...but Trevor died in the accident.” She dragged in a ragged breath and slowly moved her spoon through the thick, hearty soup. “I still don’t remember the accident. Nothing.... I couldn’t even be there for his funeral.”

“I’m sorry,” Kyle murmured, reaching out and briefly touching her arm.

“There’s a lot to do around here,” Anna uttered tiredly before sipping the soup.

Kyle hungrily dug into the beef and veggies. He watched her eat, and she seemed tentative about the food. Between bites he asked, “Are you not hungry?”

“I am.” Then Anna shrugged. “I get nauseated off and on. Sometimes, food triggers it. The doctors said in time that will go away, too.”

Which was why she was so pathetically thin, Kyle thought. He smiled into her eyes. “Can I give you my appetite? I can guarantee you, I’m going back for another bowl here in a few minutes.” He was starved for good home cooking. Anna had cut up the vegetables and added the spices, and this soup had been made with love as far as Kyle was concerned.

She seemed to rally beneath his teasing and picked at her clothes. “I lost twelve pounds in two weeks. Can you believe that?”

“Yeah,” he said bluntly. “You look like a toothpick, Anna. And that worries me.” He motioned to her bowl. “Come on, get some of the meat into you. I’ll even spoon-feed you if you want.”

Her cheeks suddenly flushed pink. Anna was blushing. She used to do that all the time when they were growing up. The first time Kyle had leaned over on his horse and given Anna a peck on the cheek when they were thirteen, her cheeks turned as red as an apple.

Giving him a wry look, Anna said, “No, I can feed myself. You’re wolfing down your food.”

Kyle felt heat steal into his cheeks as he looked down at his nearly emptied bowl. “That’s what we do. When I first joined the Navy, I learned to eat fast.”

There was that sadness in her eyes again. Anna had once dreamed of them being married, having a family, sharing their love here on this sprawling ranch. His heart clenched and he felt guilty. He could remember when Anna was eight and she had her dolly in her arms, telling him that someday they would be married and they’d have more dollies. God, the innocence of childhood. And he’d gone off to the Navy and left her.

He’d tried to convince her to marry him at twenty-two and follow him out to the West Coast, out to SEAL Team 3 headquarters at Coronado Island. Anna had refused. Kyle never forgot that tearful, gutting day. He’d bought a set of wedding rings and come home on leave to propose to Anna. And she had burst into tears, sobbing, making him feel like a selfish bastard. Kyle couldn’t handle a woman’s tears very well at all. He didn’t know any man who could.

How many times had he replayed that conversation in the living room of this ranch house? That Anna was afraid he’d be killed in combat. And where would that leave her? What if she was pregnant? Or they had children? Where would he be? Never home. Never there as a father to his children, or a husband to her. Anna was right on all accounts.

In the end, he took the rings, pocketed them and understood why she refused to marry him. He could give her nothing except worry, loneliness and maybe a funeral because SEALs led dangerous lives. And they were rarely home to help the wife or be a parent to their children even when stateside. It all fell on the shoulders of the wife. He never blamed Anna for her decision. He blamed himself.

Sliding the chair back, Kyle walked over to the stove and put another heaping amount of food into his bowl and then sat down. “How can I help you while I’m here?” he asked her.

“You can help Jepson. We have wranglers, but many of them are going home for Christmas and it’s leaving us shorthanded. He needs another wrangler.”

“Okay. What else? What about you, Anna?” He looked around the bright white kitchen with red and green curtains across the heavily frosted windows. There was a huge fireplace in the living room that moved heat everywhere within the two-story ranch house. Already the blizzard outside was coating the double-paned windows, the temperature dropping drastically.

“I’ll be okay, Kyle. If you could just help Jepson, that would take a huge load off my shoulders.”

“Do you need to be driven into Great Falls to see your doctors? Any other medical appointments?”

She wrinkled her nose. “No one is going anywhere with this blizzard. I have my medications and I’ll be fine. Just lots of sleeping and rest are what they prescribed. I have an appointment in Great Falls in two weeks.”

Nodding, Kyle watched her sipping her soup. She was trying to eat, he realized. For him. He felt euphoric. And then reality crashed down on him. Was Anna going to count the days until he left? Again? Always? That tormented him. It had to hurt her, seeing him again. Did she still want a life with him that she couldn’t have?

Anna was a good person who always did right by others. She was a hard worker, honest as the day was long, and was always there when Kyle had needed her in the past. He would be here for her.

“I noticed a tree holder in the corner,” he said, hitching a thumb toward the flagstone living room. “For your Christmas tree?”

“Trevor had just put it down before the accident. He and I were planning to go up to Christmas Tree Hill the day after we got back from Great Falls, and cut two trees down. One for here and one for the wranglers’ bunkhouse.”

Kyle nodded, holding her gaze. “Would you like to do it with me? Remember every year as kids we’d go up there with our parents? They’d let us find just the right trees for our homes.” His heart squeezed with all those fond memories, the laughter and fun they’d had choosing the Christmas trees. He saw Anna considering his idea and wasn’t sure if she was well enough to drive up there and tromp around in the snow, looking for a tree.

“Yes, I’d love to do that, Kyle.”

Hope and emotion were combined in her suddenly husky tone. For a split second, Kyle swore he saw moisture in Anna’s green eyes, but just as suddenly, it was gone. Had he imagined it? The look of longing in her expression was there to read. The joy in her eyes was there, too. Kyle felt his heart expand. God, he wanted nothing more than to lift her depressed spirits. He’d give his right arm to see her smile instead of that sad curve to her lips that always haunted her mouth instead.

She had a lot to be grieving about. The loss of Trevor was a huge blow to a ranch of this size. Anna had the innate ability to make everyone feel nurtured by her maternal warmth, to be inclusive of everyone, as if those who worked at the ranch were like family to her, too. And that was just the way Anna was built.

Right now, Kyle was feeling that warmth exuding from her toward him. That invisible sensation of being special, of being loved and cosseted by her.

“This blizzard isn’t a good time to do much of anything,” he said, eating the hearty soup with enthusiasm. Kyle saw she’d finished just about everything in her bowl, a good sign. He was grateful Anna had an appetite. Kyle knew from too many experiences that on patrol, if a team member got wounded or killed, no one had an appetite. They forced themselves to eat because there was no choice. The only way to get back to the FOB was to continually eat food and keep hydrated.

“Maybe in three or four days?” Anna asked.

“Yeah,” he murmured, cleaning up the last of the food in his bowl.

“Let’s see what Jepson says about the road up to the hill,” she counseled, pushing the emptied bowl away.

“Sounds like a plan.” Giving her a fond look, he said, “You ate everything.”

Touching her stomach, Anna made a slight shrug. “It must be you, Kyle. I haven’t eaten this much since returning home from the hospital.”

Preening inwardly, Kyle wanted to believe her. He knew he had influence over Anna. Despite her hesitancy, her reluctance to share any feelings with him, he sensed it. If the SEALs didn’t give him anything else, they had given him a powerful, unquestioned intuition. And if Kyle was accurately reading Anna, she was more than glad to see him.

It almost felt like old times when they were young, naive and innocent to the ways of the world. And Kyle was aware that his decisions had made Anna sadder than anyone else’s actions had in her life.