A Forever Christmas - By Marie Ferrarella Page 0,49

agitation, he read the paragraphs again. And then a third time. Finally the fog around his brain began to release its hold. He could make out the words.

The woman had been found in Forever, Texas. Whoever had sent out the poster was trying to find out who she was. Apparently the woman had been involved in an accident and had lost her memory.

Yeah, right, he silently jeered.

Anger, relief and disbelief all stampeded through him as he reread the words for yet a fourth time.

Maybe it was true. Maybe Dorothy had lost her memory. He turned the idea over in his head. That meant a clean slate, a clean start.

He smiled for the first time since the poster had caught his attention. If it was true, maybe this time she would get things right. There’d be no problems if she just got things right.

He could bring her home and start over.

A second chance.

He nodded to himself as he took down the poster. Maybe it would work out, after all.

Changing direction, he went in search of his lieutenant. He was going to need some time off to go down to Forever and bring her back.

Forever.

He laughed shortly under his breath. Had to be some little pimple of a town that undoubtedly housed a couple of hayseed families and a bar. He’d never heard of it before, but that didn’t matter. He’d find it. And bring her back.

One way or another.

* * *

“SHE GOT YOU TO GET a Christmas tree, huh?” Alma asked her brother the second Gabe walked into the sheriff’s office the next morning.

He was late and that wasn’t like him. Ordinarily she’d rag on him for that, but the Christmas tree purchase was just too good to pass up without a comment. That took front and center.

Gabe could see that his sister had been all but bursting, waiting to spring the subject on him. That was Alma, all right. He supposed he should count himself lucky that his sister hadn’t called him in the middle of the night to laugh about the change he’d undergone since he’d saved Angel’s life.

It seemed that by saving hers, he’d transformed his own.

He did his best to look as if he was scowling at his sister. He and Angel had gone directly home with the tree, not stopping to talk to anyone. How the hell did Alma find out?

“Who told you?” he asked.

“I have my sources,” she informed him smugly.

“Mona saw you when she was coming home after paying Ed Sawyer’s colicky mare a visit,” Joe Lone Wolf told him matter-of-factly in his monotone voice. Gabe turned around to look at the sheriff’s brother-in-law. Joe shrugged, as if the outcome had been predestined and inevitable. “She told me, I told Alma.”

Gabe sighed. He should have known that nothing remained secret or private in Forever. Some things just took longer to get around than others. But they all got around eventually.

He shrugged as he sat down with the coffee he’d gotten at Miss Joan’s when he’d dropped Angel off. It was still steaming.

“No big deal,” he told his sister with an indifferent shrug. Removing the lid, he tossed it into the wastebasket. He figured the coffee wasn’t going to last him long enough to require being covered again.

“No big deal?” Alma echoed, getting up and crossing to his desk. “When I asked you at Thanksgiving if you needed any help in picking out a Christmas tree for your new place, you gave me a ten-minute speech about ‘not needing any commercial trappings’ to remind you what holiday to celebrate.” Making no effort to suppress the grin on her lips, she pinned him down with a penetrating look. “As I recall, you were pretty adamant.”

Gabe took a long sip of his coffee as he looked away. “So I changed my mind,” he said with a touch of impatience. “It happens.”

Alma’s grin turned into an utterly enigmatic smile. “Yes, it seems that it certainly does.”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” he warned her.

“Okay,” Alma agreed. “No big deal.” She pinned him with a look. “Does that mean you don’t care if I got any responses to that poster of Angel I sent out?”

He hadn’t thought he could switch from being seemingly casual to a man on tactical alert in under a second, but he could and he did.

“Did you?” he demanded sharply.

“Then you do care,” Alma concluded.

“Alma, give me a straight answer to my question or so help me…”

When his voice trailed off, she jumped