Highlander's Need: Winter Solestice (Against All Odds Series 4) Page 4

  “Sounds good,” Aila smiled. “Thanks again Sven. I’ll send Dagmar your way when I see him.”

  “Thanks, Aila. I’ll see you again soon.”

  ***

  Dagmar paced up and down the length of the food tent, gnawing on his finger nails as he waited. Even without a way to mark the true passing of time besides the sun, he was a nervous wreck, looking up at the exit of the tent every five seconds. “She’ll come through with flying colors,” Breslin smiled. He knew too well the anguish Dagmar must be going through. His own wife was just days away from delivering their child and it was a race to see if he or Bregnan would be a father first.

  “Aila’s a strong, brave woman,” Bregnan agreed. “She’d whoop us and I have no doubt she’ll deliver herself of a beautiful baby.”

  “I can’t take it,” Dagmar said, springing toward the back of the village. He burst into their home as the first tiny cries ripped through the air. He saw Aila on their bed, a huge smile on her face as she held his daughter, their daughter in her small hands.

  “You’re the new father of a beautiful little Ceana Danga Stalson.”

  “You named her after our mothers?”

  “It seemed fitting, considering neither of them are here to enjoy her.”

  Overcome, Dagmar simply sat down on the edge of the bed. He watched as Aila put his dark haired beauty to her breast. The new babe suckled easily and seemed so content with the world around her. Within what seemed like minutes, his own arms were full of sweet smelling baby. “I’ve never held a newborn before,” he whispered.

  “Not even our siblings?” Aila asked, truly astonished. “I can just imagine what would have happened should my parents have had more.”

  “You’re not thinking about more right now are you?”

  “Not right now,” Aila chuckled. “My body is wrecked right now, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t entertain the thought in the future. I’m partial, but she’s gorgeous and I like the baby we’ve made together.”

  “She was made with love,” Dagmar smiled. “Even if we didn’t know it at the time.”

  “That she was,” Aila agreed.

  The pair spent their lives loving each other and the people of Hail. The village thrived through the centuries, always choosing Dagmar and Aila’s descendants to rule. They taught through modesty and moderation, instilling in them the kindness that saw to the needs of the people before the needs or wants of the ruling family. Decades and centuries later if you were to look at the Pict people now, you would see that those same fundamental beginnings ring true, even now.

  They have technologies now that weren’t available back then, things like working indoor plumbing, washers and dryers, cars, and the like. But beneath it all, you can look back to see through the generations that Aila and Dagmar’s children and grandchildren kept to the principles of Hail and it’s generous king and queen. To see their beginning you might not think that Aila and Dagmar would have made such a great ruling couple, but they came to complement each other in the most advantageous way. They’d come through mutual tragedy and found that through promised pleasure and by holding each other accountable to pleasure they were able to bare the pain that life sometimes sent their way.

  Aila and Dagmar might not have lived a long time when compared with today’s lifespans, but their legacy, even now, lives on in the Scottish people. Everything from kilts and bagpipes to red hair and freckles, Scotland became the backdrop of a love story that would span the ages and go down in history as one of the most elegant and lovely stories of romance, war, and pleasure.

  THE END

  *** Thank you for reading this story ***

  I want to let you know that as my way of thank you I’ve decided to give you a bunch of romance stories for FREE!

  Just keep reading, the stories are just below!

  Or you can click here and go to the Table of Contents where you can choose which story you want to read first.

  By the way, have you solved this book’s Riddle?

  Q: What two things can you never eat for breakfast? ?

  SHOW ANSWER!

  Protected By The Cowboy

  Western Romance

  Prologue

  Inez Guzman dreamed of being a nurse since she was a little girl. When she was 5-years-old, a mobile medical clinic came to her neighborhood in Mexico City to vaccinated the children and old people against the flu. She remembered swarms of women in blues scrubs walking from family-to-family down the long line of people waiting for their shot, gathering their names and medical information, asking all of them if they needed to see a doctor for another reason other than receiving their vaccination. Almost all of them did. Inez’ neighborhood was a poor one and most of the children had not seen doctors since they were born, the same could be said of a good number of the adults as well.

  When the nurse came to her family, she smiled at Inez with a brilliant perfect smile. Her voice was so cheerful and happy as she asked her about how she was feeling. But then a rough man came and interrupted the nurse, shoving her by the shoulder, telling her to hurry up, that people were waiting. The nurse apologized to the man for the wait and politely asked him to wait his turn and then tried to start talking to Inez again. But the man was very angry and he shoved the nurse again, harder this time causing her to stumble backward.

  And then the nurse hit the man.

  Inez remembers it so clearly. The man’s large, beefy hand shoving the nurse in the chest and her feet tangling briefly, but then finding solid footing. The nurse’s face was so full of rage, the corners of her mouth turned downward, her jaw set, and then she reared back and seemed to punch the man with her entire body right in the man’s nose. She remembered the sound of her fist against the soft bones of the man’s face, a hard packing sound followed by a spray of blood from his broken nose. The man fell straight back into the dirt, unconscious. The nurse then returned her attention to Inez with the same broad and friendly smile.

  She decided to become a nurse on that very day. She had never seen a woman so powerful, so strong. Her father was a gentleman who never laid his hands on his wife or children. But Inez knew many men who did. Men who used their wives as punching bags when they were drunk, or just whenever they became angry. Men like her uncles, her grandfather. But the nurse, Inez knew no man would ever touch her. She was to be treated with respect or you would face her wrath.

  So Inez worked hard in school, was always at the top of her class, but her family was poor, and she was sent to work at one of the cell phone factories when she turn thirteen. She hated it, but her family needed her. She saved her money, though. Every extra peso she made, she stashed it away, keeping it buried in a coffee can in the weed backyard of an abandoned house two streets down from her. Every week, the amount grew larger and larger, and she knew that God was looking out over her because no one ever discovered her can. God wanted her to become a nurse as much as she did. He wanted her to go to America, find a better job, and then go to school to become a nurse.

  And on her 24th birthday, Inez counted up her money—her pounds of coins and wads of dirty bills—and she had saved up $5000, which was enough to pay the coyotes to take her across the border into the deserts of Arizona. She had to admit that it wasn’t the way she wanted to come to America. But it seemed like America only let the wealthy into their country legally, and not even her $5000 was enough to convince the American government that she would be a productive citizen. So her only way across the border was to give her money to the coyotes and pray to God that when they dropped her off in Arizona, the sun would not be too hot, or her walk to civilization too long.

  But the coyotes were not good men. In fact, they were not even coyotes, but killers. Dirty white men who smelled of sweat and cigarettes who did bring her group to America, but they only brought them here to execute them and leave their bodies to rot under the boiling sun.

  Inez ran, though. The minute they stopped, she felt that something was wrong, and when the men rolled up
the door of the box truck her group was riding in and she saw the semi-automatic rifles over their shoulders, she knew she was about to die, so she ran. She ran out into the hot desert with bullets chasing her, slamming into the dirt around her feet, whizzing through the air over her head. She had never been so scared in her entire life, but she didn’t lie down and cower in the hot dirt, she ran. She ran for hours under the scorching sun, her body dripping with sweat until she found an asphalt road and a sweet retired couple picked her up just as she was about to collapse.

  She told them her car had broken down and for some reason they believed her and told her they would take her as far they were headed, to a town called Apache Junction.

  Inez felt so lucky. She was safe, she still had a few hundred dollars hidden in her shoe, and she believed she would never see the dirty white men again.

  But she was wrong, they were coming for her.

  Chapter 1

  Most people think that Arizona is nothing but a bunch of gun crazed hillbillies running around in the desert, and the fact is, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that assumption. Arizona has more than its fair share of yahoos and peckerwoods running around shooting their mouths off, carrying around some big guns they don’t need, and driving around in gas guzzling pickup trucks that they don’t have much use for, either, other than proving that they have a lot of money, or at least pretending they do. But for the most part, Arizona has a lot more good, hard working people than we do crazies, and the only reason you hear about them more is because the whacko’s have bigger mouths and make for more interesting television footage.

  Arizona is in my blood. My family—the Collins—have lived in the state for 100 years longer than it's been a state. My family were a group of madmen who traveled across the country from Pennsylvania and Ohio in covered wagons, fought off bandits, fought off Apaches looking to collect their scalps, and decided for one reason or another that a nearly uninhabitable stretch of copper orange desert was a fine and dandy place to set up a homestead and raise a family. And I’m sure if I knew my ancestors from way back when, I would have laughed at them and told them to hustles their asses back home because one-half of them were going to die of heat stroke, and the other half burn up with fever caused by small pocks. But a couple of them, well, they would make it out of those harsh early times alive and prospered.

  The first of our wealth came entirely from gold. Back in the mid-19th century, southern Arizona was absolutely teeming with the stuff, but the thing was there weren’t enough people around to pick up off the ground and turn it into folding money. But the Collins’ were here and we scooped up by the ton. And when that all disappeared, we became a bit more sensible and went into copper. Needless to say, but precious metals were good to my family … At least until it all ran out. Well, the family at least with the family claims. Then for some reason or another, my father—the senior Henry to my junior—thought it was a fine idea to go into horse and cattle ranching. Which would have been incredibly profitable if we didn’t live in a sun-blasted desert?

  Now I won’t say that the Collins Ranch of Gold Canyon, AZ went belly up—it’s alive and well, obviously, because it's running takes up the bulk of my time and money—but it’s really just more of an expensive hobby as opposed to an actual business. Don’t get wrong, it brings in an income, and I’m damn proud of the horses—we dropped the cattle back in the mid-80’s due to the overall cost—that come out of here. But the fact is, year-after-year, more money goes out than comes in, and on certain days it feels like a thousand pound weight dragging off my shoulders. But on days like today, when the sun comes up and turns the sky into a riot of brilliants oranges and reds, and I’m riding on top of my favorite horse watching it happen, I love it more than life itself. Just like Arizona, ranching is in my blood, and even if it was completely bankrupting me—which it’s not even close to doing—I would still soldier on and work two or three jobs just to keep it afloat.

  “Henry!” But, yeah, there are some days, though, where all I want to do is hide away out in the desert, and when I hear Juan calling for me, I know today is going to be one of those days where I wish I could disappear. Not that he’s coming up here to tell me anything bad’s happening, but some days, all I want to do is ride and pretend the land around me is the land of my ancestors and that the only people out here are me, Myself, and I. But the illusion is completely broken when Juan rides right up on me on one of the ATV’s.

  “Boss, it’s time to get the Sanderson geldings loaded up. I know you wanted to be there to make sure out goes smooth.” He says as he spits into the rocks. Juan has been the ranch foreman going on 25 years. The man is as much a father to me as my old man ever was and I largely blame him for my love of ranch life, I couldn’t love him more even if I wanted to. I’m still not quite to him calling me boss, though, even if it’s been 10 years since he’s been doing it.

  “Yup, let’s get on down there and get it done while it’s still cool out.”

  ***

  We get the Sanderson geldings—all 24 of them—loaded and secured onto the trailers in just a little over 4 hours. Roy Sanderson is one of the ranch’s oldest clients, and back in the day when my father was running the place, Roy was just about the only person keeping the ranch afloat. As much as the old man loved horses and the desert, he wasn’t much of a rancher. In fact, he wasn’t all that much of a businessman even though he came from such a long line of them. The old man craved action, and the thing with ranch life is, there ain’t all that much action to be found in it. Forget about anything you’ve read, or seen in the movies and whatnot where you see ranch hands moving around all day roping stray steers or horses. All that working from sun up-to-sun down stuff is nothing but pure nonsense. For the most part, ranching is really more about waiting to work and then waiting for more work to come. More than a few of my boys will get so bored sometimes that they’ll invent chores for themselves to do.

  Because of this, and my father’s nervous nature, he had to go outside of the ranch to seek his thrills and he went into law enforcement. At first, he joined up with the Phoenix police department, but after a few years of doing nothing but being parked out on the I-10 pulling over speeders—which, I imagine, was an even bigger torture than ranching for the old man—he ended up running for sheriff of Apache Junction. Which, because of his name and the family’s reputation, he won by a landslide.

  Apache Junction—or AJ as it’s affectionately called by the locals—used to be a small retirement village planted against the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. When the old man was sheriff, it was little more than a loose collection of mobile home parks, RV dealerships, and antique stores. It was quiet and peaceful. But then the Baby Boomers started retiring, and they brought in a load of their crappy, dependent adult children who brought along all of their crappy, dependent adult problems.

  Mostly drugs, specifically, methamphetamines, and lots of it.

  The old man basically went from having a sleepy little town of docile, white-haired grandmas and grandpas, where usually the worst thing that happened was that one of them would drop dead in the middle of the night, to having a town where break-ins and drug-related homicides became a daily occurrence. The old man got his thrills with his new job and then some. So much so that it eventually ended up getting him killed. He walked in on a couple of speed freaks tossing a trailer house, and both of them had shotguns. They let loose on him the second he stuck his head in the door. I was 25 when it happened and rounding out my second tour in Iraq. The army let me go a couple of months early to take care of things at home along with my brother Samuel and Paul.

  I thought when I came back, the three of us would re-bond over the old man’s death, and we’d end up running the ranch together side-by-side. But no such thing happened, it was nothing but a misty-eyed fantasy of a man who’d been gone from home for too long. Sam had his own thing going on down in Tucson—he was and still is a commander with the U.S. border patrol—and Paul was bent on reve
nge. Not so much revenge against the fellas who shot the old man—Dad’s deputies had taken care of that a couple of days after the shooting—but in a general angry young man kind of way. He joined up with the Phoenix PD with his eyes set on becoming part of their drug task force.

  For better or worse, the ranch was mine and mine alone. And for awhile, it was lonely as hell, but then I grew to love the solitude of it all and realized that I absolutely needed it.

  Chapter 2

  The retired couple dropped Inez off at a small motel on the outskirts of the town of Apache Junction called the Goldmine. It was a small, dusty looking place that only had two cars in the parking lot. But at that particular moment, it looked like absolute heaven. The front desk was attended by a little old woman who looked like she was evening older and more worn than the motel. But she was friendly and didn’t ask Inez for a credit card in order to check-in and she paid in cash for a two-night stay. She was actually quite surprised by the cleanliness of the room. The bed smelled of fresh sheets and the bathroom gleamed shiny and white.

  The very first thing she did once the door was locked behind her was strip out of her grimy, sweat-caked clothes and step under the ice cold spray of the shower and open her mouth to drink and drink until she felt like she was going to be sick. She had never been so thirsty in her entire life, nor had her skin ever felt so filthy. The dust and dirt that washed off of her left a dark brown ring in the tub. She climbed out of the tub shivering and exhaust and collapsed on the bed in a heap as her body finally gave out and she tumbled headlong into an 18-hour long sleep.