A Forever Christmas(23)

His house.

That was still taking some getting used to. Originally it was known as the old Douglas place. He’d bought it several months ago from Alec Douglas. The latter had returned to Forever to settle up his late father’s affairs, sell the house and go back to his life in Virginia where he’d been working for the past ten years.

Both he and Alec had been happy with the deal that had been struck for the two-story house. True, the fifty-year-old house needed a lot of work, but like everyone who lived around here, he was handy, plus he didn’t mind working with his hands. He found it therapeutic and it gave him something to do on his days off—when he wasn’t helping out on the family ranch.

As long as he kept too busy to think, that was just fine with him.

Pulling up in front of the house now, Gabe left his truck parked to the left of the porch steps. He glanced at Angel again. The woman just kept right on sleeping.

Gabe got out of the vehicle, rounded the back and came up to the passenger door. Opening it, he paused for a second, debating his next move. With a shrug, he thought he’d try to wake her by gently shaking her shoulder.

When he did, she just kept right on sleeping as if he hadn’t touched her at all.

“Damn, but you could probably sleep through a twister, couldn’t you?” he marveled, murmuring the assessment under his breath.

Leaving her where she was for the moment, Gabe went up the steps to his front door, unlocked it and left it wide open. Angel was still asleep when he returned to the vehicle.

Her body probably needed to recharge itself, he reasoned.

Leaning over her, Gabe very carefully released the seat belt clip and unbuckled her. Then, as gently as possible, he picked her up from her seat and began to walk up the steps to his front door.

To his amazement, as he reached the top step, Angel continued sleeping. Not only that, but as he made his way into the house, the sleeping woman curled into him. A sigh that sounded suspiciously like contentment escaped her lips as she apparently made herself comfortable against his chest.

He caught himself looking down at her face. It was relaxed and there was almost a purity about it. He reasoned that, asleep, Angel didn’t resort to a barrage of defense mechanisms.

This was the real woman, the one beneath the bravado. Soft, innocent. Relaxed.

He found himself intrigued.

Because he had just recently moved into the house, Gabe wasn’t anywhere near finished furnishing the different rooms. To be honest, he had hardly gotten started.

So far, there was only one bed—his—and that was in the master bedroom. The other two bedrooms had a variety of things piled up in them, none of them meant to provide any kind of rest for the weary. In actuality, the exact opposite was true. Both rooms were in a state of varying degrees of chaos.

Since it had a bed, Gabe decided to give Angel his bedroom while he made himself as comfortable as possible on the secondhand sofa he’d picked up for his living room.

Gabe made his way up the stairs slowly, watching Angel’s face as he went. Though her lashes seemed to flutter a little, she continued sleeping. When he finally set her down on top of the covers on his bed, it had no effect on her.

Angel went on sleeping.

A quirky smile curved his lips as he stepped back for a second. Taking the extra blanket he had folded at the foot of his bed, he spread it out and covered her.

She really did look like an angel, sleeping that way, he thought.

He hoped that the morning would turn out to be better for her. Maybe she’d even remember who she was.

People shouldn’t be shut out of their own lives, he reasoned.

It occurred to him, as he all but tiptoed out of the room, that he was pretty damn tired himself. He hadn’t exactly been sitting around these past eighteen hours, twiddling his thumbs.

Closing the door softly behind him, Gabe went downstairs.

As he passed by the kitchen, he glanced toward it out of habit. For exactly ten seconds, he considered making himself something to eat. But his need to sleep far outweighed his desire to eat. He made his way into the living room. Gathering the newspaper that was haphazardly strewn over the sofa, he dumped the pages onto the floor and sat down. The worn leather sofa creaked a little as it accepted his weight. Like the house, it was old, but comfortable.

Putting his muscle into it, he pulled off first one boot, then the other. He placed them on top of the newspapers so he could find them readily enough in the morning and lay down. No sooner had his head touched the flattened-out pillow in the corner than his cell phone began to both ring and buzz in his pocket.