Colton’s Blizzard Guardian (The Coltons of Dark Canyon #2)

Chapter 1

It was blustery and cold when Ava Colton got out of her car and hurried toward the Baldwin Memorial Hospital.

The white stone-and-concrete building was large and housed multiple wings.

It was one of the top teaching hospitals in the state.

Didn’t matter that she’d been listening to beach music and dreaming of a getaway to anywhere sunny and warm.

Winter always hit her extra hard in February.

She liked it in January, when the first snowfalls of winter meant she could spend time snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

But come February…things got tougher. Which really wasn’t all that bad considering her latest patient’s recent experiences.

Fern Hensley had been rescued from a makeshift cabin after being roughed up and drugged, and now the woman was struggling to deal with the trauma of being kidnapped and left in that cabin for dead.

As a psychologist, Ava was working with Fern trying to help the other woman process everything that had happened to her.

Not that it was ever easy to move on from trauma.

Something Ava was intimately familiar with.

She’d been stalked by an ex-boyfriend in college, and while she’d never been kidnapped or beaten, she knew what it was like to lose her sense of safety.

Walking in through the main atrium, Ava always found herself admiring the large rock formations that were designed as seating for hospital visitors and the abundance of Native American sculptures and art decorating the space. Her cousin Sassy probably knew most of the artists by name.

She smiled her hellos to the staff on duty as she walked into the hospital and down the corridor that led to her office.

The doctor who’d been seeing Fern usually left some notes on her current condition.

The woman had been in the hospital for four days.

Her recovery was no doubt hampered by fear and uncertainty.

It was hard not to let rage build if she thought too long about what had been done to Fern, her protective instincts flaring.

Instead of giving into her rage she focused all of her energy on helping Fern heal.

That was her mission—to give Fern the tools she needed to heal mentally from everything that had happened to her.

“Morning, Ava,” Darla said. The other woman was in her mid-thirties, with short blond hair. She had a rounded face and easy smile.

Darla was her rock. She ran the psychiatric department and had been here for almost fifteen years.

She was very organized but also a good listener.

Currently they were both binge-watching a current reality television show where ordinary people are taken out of their everyday lives to compete with each other.

As a psychologist she loved watching the way people reacted to everything and how the slightest change in behavior often made everyone suspicious of them in the castle.

“Did you watch our show last night?” Darla asked.

“No. Went to my parents’ for dinner. I’ll catch up at lunch so we can dish later,” Ava said.

She planned to keep her office door firmly closed when she was in it, which meant she’d stream the episode on her phone.

Chay Benally a tall Navajo man with dark brown eyes and black hair kept stopping by her office trying to get her to give him information from Fern.

She had nothing to tell him that wasn’t in the police report.

Her patient either didn’t remember or simply didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her.

“Looking forward to it,” Darla said as her phone rang.

Ava went into her office, closing the door behind her.

Shrugging out of her coat, she hung it on the hook on the back of the door and then walked around to her desk to turn on her laptop.

She saw the photo of her and her cousins that had been taken last summer and smiled as she always did.

Their family was large and the faces were all smiling a mix of Caucasian and Navajo. Thanks to her Aunt Bly.

Fern didn’t smile, exactly, when Ava walked into her room, but the other woman did nod at her. She was starting her recovery, but it was going to be a long trip. Ava always let her patients set the tone for the sessions. It helped to build rapport.

“How are you doing today?” Ava asked.

Fern was twenty-five and had long brown hair, which she’d braided and left to lie against the hospital bedsheets.

Her hazel eyes were direct, but her smile never reached her eyes.

From her records Ava knew she was a medical coder, so she had to have some knowledge of what was going on with her situation.

She never discussed it. In fact, she really hadn’t discussed much yet.

She answered questions in short answers—mainly yes or no.

But Ava was determined to get her talking…

she might not be chatty, but the other woman had been found near the edge of the Navajo Nation.

After a fire broke out in the makeshift cabin where she’d been held by two men who’d kidnapped her while she’d been walking to her car in downtown Oso a few blocks from the doctor’s office where she’d worked.

Oso was a town more than one hundred miles from Dark Canyon. Fern had been given injections of a drug that kept her knocked out while she was held captive. The men had been coming daily to feed her and take care of the generator but then suddenly stopped coming.

“Feeling a bit better,” she admitted. But her leg had been severely broken—her physical recovery was going to be just as serious as her mental one.

“Being somewhere safe will do that for you,” Ava said. Remembering when she’d been stalked by a guy she’d been casually dating. There was nothing like that feeling of insecurity to really wreak havoc on every detail of daily life.

“Yeah.”

“So, we left off on when you woke up alone in the cabin…”

“Yup.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” she said.

“What would you like to discuss?” Ava asked her.

Fern shrugged.

“The cops were in here with a baby…I think they thought she was mine,” Fern offered. She looked fragile and like her spirit had been broken.

“Do you have a child?” Ava asked.

“No,” Fern said, shaking her head. “Definitely not. I can’t take care of me…”

“I get that,” Ava said. “Do you want to talk about the baby?”

“Not really. I mean, I probably should say yes then we could talk about that…but no.”

“It’s okay. You’re in control here—we can talk about anything.”

“Anything?” Fern asked.

“Sure. Like, how do you feel about cowboys? I like a man who knows how to wear a pair of jeans.”

Fern relaxed against the pillows of her hospital bed. Moving to cross her arms over her body before realizing that she was connected to the IV. “I do too. Can’t help that.”

Ave stayed with Fern for another twenty minutes until she faked falling asleep.

Ava sighed quietly and left. Having struggled with grief after the death of her fiancé, she was very aware of the different techniques that could be used to get people to leave you alone.

So, she didn’t press Fern. Her patient needed time, and Ava understood that better than anyone.

As Ava was heading back to her office, Marg Lesser stopped her. “Hey, Ava, are you available to foster for a few days? We have a baby girl—still trying to figure out who she is exactly.”

“Yes. I can take her,” Ava said. She’d been fostering for the last year or so.

At twenty-nine, she was settled in a way that she hadn’t anticipated.

But her life was good. She liked her house and her job and her family.

Her community needed her, and her work was fulfilling.

But she had always dreamed of being a mom, something that she wasn’t too sure was still in the cards for her after Greg’s death.

Fostering satisfied that need in her, and the children and babies she fostered needed to be loved. And Ava had a lot of love to give.

“I’ll stop by your office after my shift,” Ava said.

“Thanks.”

Chayton Benally didn’t really love coming into Dark Canyon.

He had enough work to keep him busy on the Navajo Nation as a Tribal Police officer.

He’d been an officer for almost five years.

He’d gone to Salt Lake when he was eighteen just to get away and joined the police department there.

But he’d missed home, and his grandmother wanted him to move back.

So he’d applied at the tribal police…and he found he was more content.

His usual routine of patrolling and filing reports had been interrupted by the discovery of a woman near the border of the Navajo Nation. Ava Colton’s younger brother Ryan had been on duty and was the firefighter who rescued Fern.

The fact that she was so close to the Nation raised a few questions for Chay. However, he hadn’t wanted to add to the trauma the woman had already experienced, so when he came to the hospital, he’d tried to speak to the psychologist who was working with her. Ava Colton.

Damn if she wasn’t one of the stubbornest women he’d ever crossed paths with. Stonewalling every question he asked and now dodging him while he waited outside her office for her return.

He caught a glimpse of the tall, athletic woman at the same moment that she spotted him.

Ava did a one-eighty—heading back into a corridor of the hospital he wasn’t allowed to enter.

Her assistant, frustratingly, hadn’t been cooperative, either.

Sighing, Chay asked Darla to inform Ava he’d stopped by—again—and headed out to the parking lot to figure out his next move.

He’d already spoken to Ryan Colton, the firefighter who’d rescued Fern, but he had no leads on the men who’d taken Fern or any idea if either of them were Navajo.