A Forever Christmas - By Marie Ferrarella Page 0,21

Miss Joan for quite a while before Dan had come into town and promptly fallen for her. “Me,” he added in case she thought he was distancing himself from her.

Her eyes darted toward him. “Oh,” Angel murmured.

He didn’t know if the information comforted her or agitated her. He couldn’t tell by the single-word response. For now, though, maybe it was for the best to leave the matter alone. Angel had enough to deal with without his quizzing her.

Turning on the radio to combat the silence before it became overpowering, Gabe kept on driving.

Chapter Six

Angel was positive that she was far too wired to fall asleep tonight—possibly ever. Wound up as tightly as a coil in an old-fashioned box spring mattress, if anyone had asked her, Angel would have sworn that sleep would elude her for a good long while to come.

This despite the fact that, along with being wired, she felt incredibly drained.

She had initially closed her eyes to rest them because it felt as if they were wearing themselves out, staring at a world and at people that were equally unfamiliar to her. Toward the end, her lids actually felt as if they were burning.

Now, of course, there was just miles and miles of miles and miles. Nothing differentiated one section of land from another as they drove back to Forever from Pine Ridge.

Back to Forever. As if that was where she’d come from, Angel mocked herself. She didn’t belong in Forever. And she was getting to believe that she didn’t belong anywhere.

The restlessness that insisted on haunting her was back in spades. A restlessness that came from not knowing.

Would she ever know where she belonged? Or, for that matter, even what kind of a person she was? It was awful, not knowing.

Was she kind, heartless, intelligent, lazy, a little of all of that—or what?

As before, no answers came to her, not even so much as a vague hunch that she might be on the right path to discovery.

God, but she was getting tired of feeling like a living question mark.

So very tired…

* * *

ANGEL HAD BEEN QUIET for the past ten, twelve miles Gabe thought, glancing toward the woman to his right. Were things coming back to her? Or was it frustration that kept her silent?

Whether he liked it or not, because he’d rescued her, he felt responsible for this lost woman.

Gabe wasn’t the type who immediately shouldered responsibility with gusto and enthusiasm, but neither did he attempt to shrug it off or hide behind some rock in an out-and-out attempt to avoid it. It was what it was and he accepted it. In some cultures, he knew, because he’d saved her, the woman he’d christened “Angel,” her soul was his.

Just what he needed, he thought with a touch of cynicism, a spare soul to trip him up. These days, he wasn’t all that certain what to do with his own, not after the way Erica had left him at such loose ends.

He’d never seen himself as some fancy-free playboy, but neither had he thought of himself as being the marrying kind—at least, not until Erica had crossed his path. Suddenly the thought of settling down with a wife and two, three kids didn’t seem so bad. As a matter of fact, it sounded pretty good.

Except now he wouldn’t get to find out because Erica had decided she could “do better.” Dumping him without warning, she’d turned around and made Seth Madden the center of her world.

Just like that.

Granted, Seth was a banker and came across more polished than he did, but hell, Seth had eyes that belonged to a flounder that had been dead for two days. Was that what Erica really wanted, a man with lifeless eyes?

Gabe couldn’t manage to convince himself of that—and he definitely couldn’t bring himself to either forgive Erica, or let the whole thing go.

He felt as if he was permanently stuck in limbo.

Probably not unlike Angel and her memory loss.

He tried to picture himself in that sort of a situation and found himself being very grateful that he wasn’t in that sort of a situation.

“We’re here,” he announced.

By “here,” Gabe meant that they had just crossed the town limits and were now officially in Forever.

“Angel? We’re here,” he repeated when he received no response in return. When she failed to say anything the second time, Gabe slowed the car down to almost a crawl—which was less than twenty miles an hour to his way of thinking—and looked at Angel’s face more