A Family For Christmas. Tara Quinn Taylor

      “I’ll be out in a minute,” she told him, throwing off the covers and grabbing...nothing. She’d left her clothes outside the door to be washed the night before. Was wearing the makeshift gown he’d crafted for her.

      “I left your clothes just outside the door for you,” he said, almost as though he could read her mind. Who knew what she might have told him when she’d been out of her head with pain?

      She didn’t think she’d said anything. She hadn’t been out of her head. She’d been beaten to a pulp and exhausted. “Thank you,” she called back and, giving him a second to retreat, went to reach her arm around the door for her clothes.

      The underwear was there, the bra and jeans, and three shirts. Hers and two others. T-shirts, both of them. A purple and a blue. From different years for the same Heart-Run. They’d be too big for her.

      But better than the bloodstained T-shirt of Shawn’s she’d had on under her sweater jacket.

      She chose the purple one. Because, in the color world, purple was known for bringing spiritual peace. For assisting in honest, deep, true thought. She’d lost any hope of good Karma having her back. She was well and truly on her own now.

      She had to be able to count on her own mind.

      As she pulled the shirt down over her torso, she suffered a stab of guilt. Purple was a healing color. Violet vibrated at the highest frequency and, as such, healers believed it to be a potent tool. Cara might have an aversion to doctors, but she’d done a lot of reading. Studying. Learning.

      For Joy’s sake and for her own, too.

      Joy.

      Her heart caught, her throat tightened. Tears sprang to her eyes. And her mind closed in.

      No. She’d lost any right she’d had to think of...

      She had no business healing. So the purple shirt was the wrong one.

      Taking it off, she replaced it with her own. Bloodstains were her style now. She couldn’t pretend otherwise.

      With a last look around the room that had offered solace to a criminal, she went out to face the doctor. To convince him that she was just fine and could be on her way that morning.

      As soon as she got back out on the mountain, she’d figure out what that way would be.

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      THE FIRST THING Simon noticed when Cara came out of the bedroom was that she’d foregone his clean shirts for her washed but bloodstained one.

      She wasn’t settling in.

      He took her message in stride.

      Other than the one cheek, her face looked better. So much so that he could begin to make out natural features. Her expression remained bland, giving the same nothing away he’d been getting since he brought her inside, but he figured the pain of facial movement alone would explain some of that.

      In his usual jeans and flannel shirt, Simon handed her two pills—an antibiotic and a pain reducer. She took the antibiotic.

      “In exchange for putting drops in your eye,” she told him, waiting, apparently, for his acquiescence.

      “I’ve already done them this morning.” Six tries. Not good, but not bad, either.

      Her nod didn’t give away anything of what she was really thinking. Now that she was up and about, her reticence bothered him.

      Made him curious.

      Probably because he’d made his life so damned small she was consuming it. That would explain why he’d lain awake the night before trying to figure out how to keep her from leaving and either returning to the bastard who’d hurt her and left her for dead or being found by him.

      “I made oatmeal and toast,” he said, taking two bowls from the counter and bringing them to the table, then going back to retrieve the plate of buttered toast.

      She’d used neither milk—probably because it was reconstituted from powder and pretty crappy—nor brown sugar the last time he’d served the dish, so he didn’t bother with either.

      Mouth open, as though she was going to argue, Cara looked away, pulled out the seat by the kitchen and sat. Ahead of her now, he’d set the opposite side for himself. Because everything about the morning was planned.

      “I know you’re anxious to be on your way,” he started, more nervous than the conversation warranted. He was a grown man with a mission—one that he’d been neglecting for the five days she’d been there—not a schoolboy lacking confidence.

      Her nod was directed more toward her bowl than him.

      “I’d advise against you doing anything as strenuous as hiking out of here,” he told her. “With that facial fracture, slight though it is, something as little as a branch to your face could cause serious, permanent and possibly life-threatening damage.”

      He wasn’t her jailer. She was a free adult.

      And so was he. An adult with a troubled conscience with which it was already hard to live.