MemoriesofParadise (3 page)

From what Clay could tell, every species had a shifter side—dogs, cats, bears, just name it and, according to the ancient records stored in the secret vault below Paradise, they were out there somewhere hiding, the same as the people in this town.

“Will she need a transfusion, Doc Parker?” It was the first thing out of Gunter’s mouth when they entered the examining room. Both of the beds were occupied. Each of the women already had an IV and the woman’s daughter sat by her side, holding her mother’s hand.

“What are
they
doing in here?” the girl asked as she grabbed the doctor’s lab coat. “We don’t even know these two and,” she paused to point at Clay, “that one doesn’t even understand the concept of field triage.”

“What?” Clay scowled at the girl. Of course he understood it. “I learned field triage from the best Army doctors in the service. Don’t you tell me I can’t hold my own.” How in the hell did the girl even know what triage was? She was a teenager, for Christ’s sake.

Turning away, he ran his fingers through his hair in an effort to calm down. Tempers flared because everyone was scared for the women. She wouldn’t understand their concern. In her eyes, they were nothing more than strangers. She couldn’t understand. The teenager was human. How could she?

Chapter Four

Riana woke up in a strange room. Sun streamed in through the curtained window and she heard arguing. Mainly, she heard Holly’s mouth. Turning her head toward her daughter’s voice, she saw her little girl standing between her and two very large men as if she were a mother protecting her young.

“Holly.” As she knew it would, the sound of her voice drew her daughter’s attention. “What happened?” She rested her hand on her forehead and groaned. “I have a headache from hell.”

“You should, young lady.” An older man stepped into view. By his appearance, Riana guessed his age to be around sixty, but something told her he was much older than that. “You have sixteen stitches in your scalp.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but we had to shave some of your hair to get to it.” He smiled at an older woman as she walked into the room. “However, my wife helped me and shaved it in a way that she hopes won’t show much.” He bent down and peered into first one eye, then the other. “I don’t like the way your pupils respond. You could have a concussion. I’d like to keep you here over night, but…” Pausing, he turned to Holly. “I can see that you have responsibilities. I could see my way clear to releasing you to these two men or the people at the hotel if they want to take on the responsibility of waking you up every few hours.”

“What happened?” Closing her eyes, she remembered. It came to her in a rush. The plane crashed, the pilots talking about losing the engines and ice coating the wings or something. There was something about ice. “Never mind. I remember. Plane crash.”

“Yes. You were lucky that Gunter and Clay here were out there.” He turned to them. “Gathering dead wood, I suppose?”

She looked at the two men who nodded at the doctor in way of an answer. Good grief, they were huge. Both of them had sun-kissed skin. One had blond hair, the other light brown. She could see the hard bodies beneath their clothes and it made her shiver. It surprised her that they didn’t make her shudder like most men did. Even the doctor, as gentle as he looked made her wary, but not these two men.
Why
?

If anything, she was attracted to them. For some reason they…intrigued her. Yes, that was it. But why?

Holly moved to her side and lifted her hand. Tears filled her daughter’s eyes as she looked down at her. “Mama, I was afraid—” Holly closed her eyes and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

Reaching up, Riana cupped her daughter’s cheek and smiled. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily. I’m going to stick around long enough to see you graduate from college, at any rate.”

“Mom!” Holly narrowed her eyes. “I told you, I’m not going to college. I’m going into the military like Uncle Mel.”

“Even
he
doesn’t want you in the military.” Riana shook her head, grimacing when her headache spiked and her head spun.
Uncle Mel
wasn’t really her uncle. He was just the man who had lived upstairs from them. He had moved a few years before. He had moved to some utopian small town just after retiring from the Army. “We’ll talk about this later. Right now, we need to find a place to stay the night.”

“It’s already been settled, ma’am. You’ll have a room at the Paradise Inn lodge, to make you more comfortable. However, Clay and I will be staying in an adjoining room to make sure you’re okay. One of us will wake you every hour.”

She looked up at the blond man. “No.”

“You have no choice. Your daughter cannot stay here with you. If you don’t want to be separated, I would suggest you agree to the arrangements we’ve already made for you.”

“I don’t even know who you are.”

“We are the men who saved your lives. If we wished to harm you, we could have done so out in the wilderness instead of calling for help to rescue you.”

She looked at Holly who scowled at one of the men before she met her gaze. “He’s telling the truth.” She waved her arm at the larger of the two. “This is the one who climbed down into the airplane to haul you out. The other one,” she said with a scowl, “sat outside where it was safe and waited for a handoff.”

“So that’s what you’re problem is.” The smaller of the two men said. “Look, little girl, I have to follow his orders.” He jerked his thumb toward the man next to him. “He told me to wait, so wait I did. If you don’t like it, take it up with Gunter.” He waved his hand toward the other man.

“I’m Gunter,” the other man said as he stepped forward, “and yes, I did order him to stay outside. There was no way of knowing how much weight the plane would hold before it lost its precarious position.” He looked at Holly. “If that’s why you were giving Clay such a hard time, then you owe him an apology.”

“I don’t owe anyone crap.” She crossed her arms and stuck her chin in the air. “I reacted to what I saw as an unfair situation. Period.”

Leave it to Holly to give any adult a hard time. Riana was just glad that temper wasn’t directed at her for a change.

“I’m thirsty. Do you think I could—” Before Riana knew it, both men held a glass of water in front of her face. “Uh… thank you.” She took the closest glass, which just happened to have been the one that Gunter had held and tipped it up. “God that tasted good.” She handed the glass back and smiled at Clay. “Perhaps you can get me the next one. “

Riana didn’t like the idea that these two men would be in the local hotel in an adjoining room, but there was no way she would allow Holly to stay in a hotel room on her own. She was just a child.

Rolling to her side, she sat up gingerly. The two men rushed to help. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she was their long lost…something. She looked up at their intense expressions. No. She definitely wasn’t their sister. The looks they gave her were anything but brotherly.

Gently, they helped her stand, holding her when she would have fallen on her face, then, when she found out she couldn’t walk, Gunter lifted her and carried her to the front room.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“Here you are, dear.” An older woman held up a coat for her to put on. “Yours is lost somewhere in that plane. It caught fire and they had a devil of a time putting it out with all of that jet fuel. It’s just a good thing they managed to get it put out before the thing exploded.”

“Thank you.” Riana accepted the coat. “I’ll return it as soon as I get another.”

“That old thing?” The woman waved her hand. “You can have it. It was mine, but I have a new one. If you still want to return it after you get another one, just bring it here. This is our home as well as our hospital.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Parker,” Clay said as he opened the door. “We’ll return it as soon as she gets a new one.” He smiled. “I know you use it when you go out to chop wood. We’ll see that you get it back.”

“Thank you,” Riana said as she reached out and touched the woman’s arm. “I’ll get this back to you as soon as I get to the hotel. I don’t want you to ruin your new coat chopping wood.”

Riana found it difficult to believe that this woman, who had to be near sixty, actually still chopped wood. Though, she supposed, living in the boonies must give people different priorities.

Against her better judgment, she left with the two strange men. The doctor and his wife didn’t see anything wrong with it, though people never knew when the people in their communities were axe murderers or gun toting nuts.

Though neither one of them had an axe or a gun at the moment, didn’t mean they couldn’t go out and get one.

They had gone only about five-hundred feet when she stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk and Gunter swept her up off her feet to carry her. “Put me down, please. I can walk. I just stumbled over a crack.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t want you to slip and fall on the ice. You could open the stitches the doc set into your scalp.”

She wriggled a bit, then stopped and bit her lip. She wasn’t sure, but she was almost positive that her wriggles had given the man an erection. Riana looked at him from the corner of her eye. He looked at her and winked!

“Don’t worry. You aren’t heavy. I don’t mind carrying you. We carried all three of you out of that plane and down a thirty-foot tree. If we can do that, we certainly can carry you to the hotel.”

“See. It’s just down the street there,” Clay said, pointing to a sign about a half mile down the quaint-looking cobblestone road.

Crossing her arms, she sighed. “Fine.” The scent of French fries wafted over the breeze and her stomach grumbled.

“Can we stop and eat, Mom?” Holly asked, turning around to give her a pleading look.

“I don’t have my purse.” That was when her entire situation hit her. “Oh, my God! I don’t have my purse!” All of her money, her credit cards, identification, and her daughter’s birth certificate were in her wallet. What would they do? How would they survive without it?

“Don’t worry, Mom.” Holly reached into her overstuffed fanny pack and drew out Riana’s wallet. “I couldn’t carry your purse out of the plane because it was too heavy, but I knew you wouldn’t want me to leave your wallet there.”

“Thank goodness you thought to grab it. If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t have had a way to live.”

“Something tells me we wouldn’t have had to worry.” Holly spun around in a circle. “This kind of looks like a town you would see on one of those hokey programs on TV that you’re always making me watch. I’m sure the people here wouldn’t have let us starve to death.”

Chapter Five

Gunter felt the need to agree with the woman’s daughter. Hell, they didn’t even know either of their names yet. Shouldn’t they have asked by now? At Doc Parker’s house, he couldn’t help but stare at the woman in awe. One of them should have asked what her name was then, but like idiots, they forgot.

“No, ma’am, we would not have let you starve to death. Nor would we have left you out in the street. Besides, the airline would have stepped in and paid your expenses if you had found yourself in dire straits. After all, you were on one of their planes that crashed.”

“Stop calling me ma’am.” She sighed. “My name is Riana O’Connor. She gestured to the girl. And this is my daughter Holly. Will you please put me down now? If not out here, you can set me down in the diner there. I’m starving and right now, having a coffee and something warm in my belly seems more important than lodging.”

“Sure. Doc Parker never said anything about not letting you eat.” He smiled at her expression. “However, you will have to go back and have your stitches removed next week.”

“I don’t plan on being here next week. I plan on being in Washington.”

“DC?”

“No. Washington State. I’ve got a bid on a storefront there. I plan to buy it and settle down.”

“Just a bid?” Gunter wouldn’t have moved until he knew he had won the bid. What made this woman pick up and leave everything for an uncertain future in a new state?

“There are other properties if I don’t win the bid on that one.” She shrugged. “Washington is a big place. I’m sure there are other storefronts to be had.”

Gunter was sure there was as well, but he wanted to convince her to stay in Paradise. Perhaps he and Clay could persuade her to open up her shop—whatever it was—right here in Paradise.

“There are plenty of places right here in town where you could hang your sign.” He waited for Clay to hold the door open and carried her through, into the diner, once Clay stood to the side.

Walking to his favorite booth, he sat her down before moving to sit across from her. They could let her daughter sit next to her this time. They needed each other right now more than he and Clay needed to assert dominion over them. That could come later, after they explained who and what they were. With luck, that would also be after she fell in love with them.

“What do you think will happen to the other lady?” Holly slid into the seat next to her mother and looked up at him. “I heard the doctor say she needed a transfusion, but he didn’t have enough blood. Does that mean she’ll die?”

“No.” Gunter shook his head as Clay slid in next to him. “She won’t die. What the doctor will most likely do is send one of the sheriff’s deputies to Mason to see if they have any. If not, they will ask for volunteers to donate blood for her.”