Page 16 of Hero for the Holidays

“He’s not. We probably have a little bit of a jailbreak. Is Uncle Denver out there?”

“He went somewhere back by the house.”

“Can you grab him, and then he’ll get the pickup truck and I’ll meet him in about ten minutes?”

“Sure,” she said, scampering back out of the barn. And Fia felt a strange panicky sensation in her stomach. This awful fear that she would never see the child again. It was like terror. And she found herself moving out of the barn quickly, her heart pounding hard. And then he had grabbed her arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

Helooked panicked. And that only made her that much more so.

“Landry, what... What is this?”

“I can explain it. But the thing is, Fia, I haven’t talked to her about you yet. She... It’s complicated, the time hasn’t been right. I don’t want her finding out that you live on the ranch like this.”

“You were okay with me finding out that she was here like this?”

She knew who this was. Just like he did.

He had broughttheirdaughter back to the ranch.

Herbaby. The one she’d only held for a moment, because she’d needed to protect herself. The one no one else knew about.

No one but her and Landry.

Their child.

The one that she had very deliberately made not theirs. She had given that child a family. Parents. The most wonderful parents.

Why was she here? Here at Four Corners, where she was never supposed to be?

It didn’t make any sense.

“I don’t understand...”

“I was going to talk to you,” he said. “But only after I talked to her.”

His words blended in with the buzzing in her ears. She was...dizzy. Overfull with so many feelings and she didn’t have the words for any of them. The anger was easy. It was the...the hope, the panic, the joy, that was what she couldn’t sort through. The feeling like she was standing in the center of a miracle, one so fragile it was like dandelion fluff. And if she breathed too hard it would fly away on the breeze.

So she didn’t explore those feelings. She clung to anger.

With Landry, anger was always safest.

“Why is she here?”

“Fia,” he said. “I don’t want her to see us having a fight about this. I can’t...not like this. She isn’t in the right space.”

“So she can know about you but not...about me? You don’t want her to know...”

It was like something grabbed hold of him then, something feral and not quitehim.

“That you gave her away. I don’t want her to know that her mother gave her away.”

His words sent her reeling backward, like they were a gunshot that hit her right in her heart. “I... I gave birth to her, and I put her directly into her mother’s arms. Because it was the right thing to do. Because I couldn’t give her what she needed. I didn’tgive her away. I gave her alife. And you dragged her back here? For what reason? Why?”

His gaze was frighteningly flat. “Her parents are dead.”

She really couldn’t breathe then. “They’re dead? Jack and Melissa...”

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