A Texas Rescue Christmas. Caro Carson
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Becky. Straight. At least pretend you’ve got some confidence, for God’s sake.
The landscape of central Texas all looked the same. As far as she could see, stretches of scraggly brown grasses were broken up by scraggly waist-high bushes. The only color she saw was her own pastel-pink ski parka, chosen by her mother for appearance, not survival.
Who am I going to impress with this fake Cargill confidence, Mama? But she stayed on her feet.
She spotted an occasional cactus, which proved that Hollywood didn’t lie when it put a cactus in a cowboy movie. But there was no shelter. As she’d driven the ATV four-wheeler away from the barn, ice had crunched under her wheels. Although the exposed skin of her face had been stung by the wind almost immediately, she’d kept driving, feeling like the control she had over the loud engine was the last bit of control she had in the world.
She’d turned up her collar and buried her chin in her jacket, and kept going. Somewhere. Away from the house that her mother would find. Far from the house and the barn and the sheds, she’d crossed acres of ground that shined in the afternoon sun, for they were completely covered in a thick but beautifully reflective sheet of ice. By the time the next bank of storm clouds had rolled in, hiding the sun and killing the enchantment of her ice world, she’d been low on gas.
She’d turned around—a U-turn that was easy in the right kind of ranch vehicle—and started heading back, but she hadn’t made it far before the engine had run out of fuel.
That had been hours ago. Literally, hours ago. Forced to seek shelter as the wind picked up and fresh sleet started to fall, she’d left the bright blue ATV out in plain sight—as if she’d had a choice—and she’d headed for a line of trees. Gnarled oaks had seemed not too far away, and clusters of shockingly green cedar trees were interspersed among them. They weren’t much, but they were more shelter than the ATV provided.
They weren’t close, either. She’d begun sweating as she crunched her way across the uneven land, so she’d unzipped her coat to let any moisture evaporate. One thing she’d learned while skiing in Aspen was that getting wet when it was freezing outside led to intolerable cold. Even the most devil-may-care snowboarders would have to get off the mountain and change into dry clothes when they worked up a sweat.
The Aspen ski school had included some lessons on building emergency shelters. Too bad Becky didn’t have ski poles and skis with her, because they’d been used to build every kind. Too bad there was no snow. In Aspen, the snow had been so deep, they’d dug a trench that they could sit in to escape from the wind.
Actually, the instructors had dug the trench. The rich kids and Becky had just sat in it. Some survival training. Maybe she would have learned more if her mother hadn’t tracked her credit card so closely.
I’m going to die because some teenagers convinced me to buy them vodka. I missed the rest of the survival lessons because of vodka. And Mother.
She wouldn’t cry. The tears would freeze on her cheeks.
She huddled against the trunk of the largest oak. It provided a little protection from the wind, at least, but the bare branches blocked nothing from above. Ice was falling from the sky, and it was falling on her.
She was so cold. She could just slide down this tree, take a little nap...and never wake up.
Stand up. Straight. For God’s sake, Becky, your shoes can’t hurt that badly. You will stay in this receiving line and shake hands with the club president before I give you permission to leave.
Becky stomped her boots to stay awake. With each thump of the ground, she heard the thud and she felt the jarring impact, but she realized, in an almost emotionless acknowledgment of fact, that she could no longer feel her feet.
I could possibly die today.
It would be so unfair if she died. Damsels in distress were supposed to be rewarded for trying to avoid a fate worse than death.
Well, she’d avoided going to the Bahamas with Hector Ferrique, all right, but she couldn’t say if that fate really would have been worse than this one. For starters, although it sounded repulsive, she didn’t know how difficult it was to have sex with a man one didn’t like. She didn’t know how difficult it was to have sex at all.
I’m going to die a frozen, twenty-four-year-old virgin. Out here, no one will find my body for months. Maybe years.
Terror made her colder. She would not give in to terror.
She needed to find some way to cover her head, because the snow or rain or sleet or whatever it was had started soaking through her ski hat. Its high-tech material was water-resistant, but apparently not water-proof. It could only repel the sleet for so many hours.
Becky looked around for smaller, broken branches on the ground and gathered them up, clomping her way from one to the other on her numb feet like a frozen Frankenstein. Her arms were growing numb, too, so she stuffed the twigs and thin branches haphazardly into a fork in the tree’s lowest branch.
The bare sticks weren’t going to block many drops of icy rain. Becky looked at the green cypress trees. She remembered them from her elementary school days. They were tall and narrow, green from ground to the top, and when she was a little girl, she’d been very aware that adults complained about them incessantly. She stumbled her way toward one now, thinking its evergreen branches would be useful stacked on top of her bare sticks.
The cypress tree disagreed. Becky got as good a grip as she could manage, but the flat, fan-like greenery slipped through her gloves like it was coated with wax or oil. Frustration made her eyes sting with more tears she couldn’t shed. The exertion of tugging and pulling was making her too warm in her coat, yet her feet weren’t warming up at all with the activity.
She tried a new approach, stomping on the lowest branches with her clumsy Frankenstein feet. She lost her balance several times and grabbed at the slick greenery to stay upright, but she succeeded in breaking a few branches off at the trunk.
In triumph, she carried them back to her twig roof and layered them on top. Then she hunkered underneath her little roof, hugged the oak tree’s trunk to keep the wind from whirling around her, and she waited.
For what?
There was nothing to wait for. Help was not coming. No one knew her at that ranch house. Her mother had left her a message about how she’d tracked her to the Austin airport, but it would take her time to get here and more time to figure out that Becky had gone to the groom’s ranch, not the Cargill mansion. It was getting dark already. Mother would not find her tonight.
I left the ATV out where anyone could see it overhead.
There was nothing flying overhead, however. No planes. No helicopters. Nothing would come searching for her by air, not while this storm raged. It could be another day or more before anyone at this ranch realized an ATV was even missing. When the storm was over, when they could search for her, it would be too late.
Sweet little Becky Cargill, the good and obedient child, had defied everyone’s expectations and run away.
Now sweet little Becky was going to die.
* * *
Trey could find Rebecca Cargill. Of that, he had no doubt. The only question was, would he find her before she succumbed to the cold?
Hang in there, miss. I’ll be there soon.
All he needed to do was guess where there was.
Had she left the house on foot, Gus and the ranch hands would have found her by now. Trey checked the barn as a formality, but he knew she hadn’t taken a horse. The cowboys would have noticed one was missing, and the horse itself would have had the sense to buck her off and run back to the warmth of the barn.
That left the ATVs. Trey walked out the other side of the barn, turned up his collar against the biting cold and crossed the yard in long, rapid