A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  If he had to live with that, he’d rather do it out here where there was nothing but the wind and the evergreens bristling on the sides of the mountains, his cattle in the distance, and his land beneath his feet.

  He didn’t expect Brady, who’d never stuck with anything or thought much beyond himself, to understand that.

  Sometimes he wasn’t sure he understood it himself.

  But he knew one thing. If he didn’t want to end up as bitter and twisted as Amos, and he didn’t, Gray was going to have to figure out a way to live this life without drowning in his own darkness out here like so many of his ancestors had. And he had to believe the way to do that was to make sure Becca didn’t succumb to it either. That the legendary Everett tendency toward wholescale self-destruction ended with Amos.

  The brothers walked in what Gray held to be blessed silence the rest of the way down to the house. Despite Amos’s clear instructions—delivered to get out ahead of the decided lack of interest in celebrating his miserable carcass, in Gray’s opinion—there were trucks and a few SUVs parked in the yard. He recognized almost all of them, and the ones he couldn’t identify he figured were his brothers’. Otherwise it was a showing of Kittredges, Douglases, and Everetts, the way it had been almost a hundred and fifty years ago when the three families had come to settle these mountains from different points back east.

  There was something about that he liked. It settled in him like a long pull of the whiskey he enjoyed as much as every other man in his family, but preferred to limit so he never behaved like any of them. A good, warm weight of the history here, bound up in all of those who stayed.

  “Listen,” Brady said when they made it to the yard, a kind of warning in his voice that put Gray’s back up.

  “Not real interested in listening to you lecture me on ranch life, Denver,” Gray drawled.

  “Hilarious.” Brady squared his shoulders when he faced Gray, reminding both of them that he wasn’t a kid anymore. He was built more like a quarterback, and not all of it came from the weird gym he was obsessed with, where they flung tires and carried bags of sand around in the middle of a city as if that was more worthwhile than an honest day of backbreaking ranch work. “It’s going to be just you out here, Gray. Becca’s going to leave you sooner or later.”

  “She’s fifteen.”

  “So you have what? Three years? Then she’s off. And there’s going to be nothing here but the Everett legacy, too many freaking cows, and you.”

  “And the quiet, Brady. Don’t forget the quiet. That’s sounding pretty fantastic right about now.”

  Ty laughed at that. Brady didn’t.

  “It drove Grandpa crazy, in the end,” he said with a certainty that made something Gray refused to call dread or foreboding knot in his gut. “He got weird and you know it. And God knows this place never did anything good for Dad. It poisoned him. It scared Mom so badly she ran off to California and never came back.”

  “I’m pretty sure Dad made that happen all by himself.”

  “And what about Cristina?”

  “Jesus Christ, Brady,” Ty interjected then, sounding slightly less lazy than usual. “You’re relentless.”

  “What you are is out of line,” Gray said, cold and sure. “There have been Everetts on this land for more than a century. That’s not going to change on my watch. But rest easy, little brother. It doesn’t have to be you saving the ranch. No one’s expecting it to be you, least of all me.”

  “Great,” Brady replied hotly. “Die of loneliness, bitter and mean and crazy, like all the rest of them.”

  And they’d put their father in the ground less than an hour ago, which was the only reason Gray kept his fist out of Brady’s face. The only reason he bit his tongue and stood there while Brady shouldered his way into the house. Amos might not have been much of a father to any of them, but that hardly mattered. They’d had to bury him all the same. The world was going to feel wrong without the old man in it, whether they’d liked Amos all that much or not. And Gray pummeling his uppity younger brother until he shut his mouth wouldn’t help anything.

  Not today, anyway.

  The back door slammed behind Brady, leaving Ty and Gray standing there in all that brightness with the cold right there beneath it.

  “He’s only trying to help,” Ty said after a minute or two.

  “And maybe sell our birthright to fatten up his bank account,” Gray agreed. “Sure.”

  “I think he actually just hates the ranch.”

  Gray turned his scowl on Ty then. “Do you?”

  He expected one of Ty’s usual careless replies, tossed out for a laugh or adoration. But instead, his brother looked back at him with an odd expression on his face. Gray couldn’t quite place it. He was used to that faint scar at Ty’s temple and the loose way he carried himself, all cowboy swagger and bravado, which he guessed a man needed if he was going to fling himself on the back of a pissed-off bull. Repeatedly. For sport. What he wasn’t used to was Ty, of all people, looking … thoughtful.

  “I don’t know,” Ty said after a moment. His smile seemed longer in coming than usual. “What’s home supposed to feel like?”

  “According to Brady, a kick in the gut.”

  “I don’t think I’m that emotional.” Ty nodded toward the ever-watchful mountains that rose all around them, catching the light and casting shadows and making Gray’s chest feel tight. “Besides, I like the view.”

  Gray nodded at that, and didn’t say anything when Ty walked into the house too.

  That left him alone, which was how he preferred it. He had a hundred chores to do, dead father or not. He always did. There was a part of him that liked it that way. He didn’t feel tied down here—he never had. He felt needed.

  The land didn’t take care of itself. Neither did the cattle. That was Gray’s job. And Brady was right—Becca would leave, sooner or later, whether she went to school or married one of those punks down at the high school in town. The very idea gave Gray indigestion, but that was reality. Kids left and many of them stayed gone. Look at his brothers.

  Gray breathed in the only home he’d ever wanted. The change of seasons in the wind, smelling like fresh snow from the higher elevations. The rich scent of the livestock mixed with the sharp slap of the pines. Cold and clear, sunshine and cedar.

  Home.

  He’d tried marriage once, but for all the wrong reasons. He’d been young and hot for Cristina, and had made the cardinal sin of confusing his hormones for something more. He was still paying for that mistake, but two good things had come out of his reckless, doomed early marriage. Becca was the first and most important thing, of course, hands down.

  But the second was the fact he would never, ever be that stupid again.

  Gray didn’t mind being on his own. But that didn’t mean he’d ever intended to live his life lonely. Much less keep Becca from the kind of family she’d clearly always wanted, or she wouldn’t have tried so hard to make Amos the cuddly, sweet old grandfather he wasn’t.

  That was the piece he was missing. And unlike Amos, he didn’t plan to endlessly repeat his mistakes until he keeled over of his own sheer orneriness one day.

  He’d always intended to fill this house with a family and hope that he made at least one child who got bit by the ranching bug the way he had and grew to find he or she didn’t want to leave. It had worked for Amos, despite what a misery the old man had been to live with, so why not Gray too?

  What he needed was a practical woman. A solid, dependable woman who understood reality and could commit as much to the legacy of this land as the man who worked it, instead of making demands and dreaming of far-off cities Gray would rather die than live in. Or even visit. A woman who knew who she was and didn’t set off to find herself in every smile a cowboy threw her way. A woman who wanted the things he did, would work beside him to get after them, and help keep his obnoxious brother from pretending to be concerned about him when what Brady really wanted was his third of the profit fro
m any sale of this land.

  Better still, a woman who could be the kind of mother to Becca that Cristina hadn’t been. And Gray hadn’t either, these past ten years.

  The back door opened again, and when Gray turned, Abby Douglas was standing there in the wedge of space between the screen and the doorjamb.

  “I’m heating up some chili,” she told him, sounding perfectly comfortable in his kitchen. “Do you want some?”

  He’d never really paid much attention to Abby Douglas because she’d always been there, as familiar to him as the long drive from the ranch house to the county road, or the mountain pass that wound its way into town.

  Abby Douglas, whose roots stretched back as far into this valley as Gray’s did. Abby, who was a year or so younger than Brady and lived with her grandmother on the old Douglas homestead out there on the road into town, making her Gray’s closest neighbor.

  Plain, sweet, easygoing, and helpful Abby, who had stuck close to home despite having a flighty mother folks still whispered about. Solid, practical Abby, who’d worked in the coffee shop in town through three or four owner and name changes, so long people had started to call it Abby’s instead.

  Abby Douglas, who was nothing if not steadfast and pragmatic.

  She blinked at him, and Gray didn’t know why he’d never noticed her eyes were that shade of hazel before, nearly gold in the light. It had to be all that bright November sunshine, dancing over both of them and presenting him with the perfect solution to a problem he’d only just realized he needed to solve.

  As soon as possible.

  “If you don’t want chili, that’s fine,” she said. “I threw together a few sandwiches too.”

  And this time when Gray’s mouth curved, it felt a lot closer to a real smile than anything he’d plastered on his face since he’d found Amos in the barn on Halloween.

  It felt real.

  And it held the promise of a much, much better life than the one he’d just buried.

  2

  Abby Douglas had spent most of her life fantasizing about Gray Everett, which as far as she could tell was a favorite pastime of most of the women in the Longhorn Valley. If not all of Colorado. She couldn’t blame them. Gray was six feet and three inches of straight-up cowboy fantasy, and what red-blooded Colorado woman could deny that siren call to her cowgirl roots?

  Abby had fallen head over heels with Gray, literally, when she’d been barely five. She’d fallen down at a church picnic, he’d picked her up and set her right, and she’d never quite been the same after. She’d spent long hours in high school daydreaming about touching Gray Everett. Kissing Gray Everett. It hadn’t ended when she’d graduated either. As she’d grown and settled into her quiet, simple life in Cold River, she’d indulged in a great many detailed fantasies about her gorgeous, remote, gruff, and fascinating neighbor. Her imagination had always done much, much more than simply let her live there on adjoining land, as her family had done with his as long as there had been settlers in this part of the Colorado mountains. And as Abby had been doing her whole life.

  Her imagination was never satisfied with merely yearning at him.

  Not that he’d ever noticed what she did or didn’t do.

  All the ladies in Cold River might smile a bit more brightly when Gray Everett walked by, it was true, but Abby had always longed for the man that much more. And had accordingly resigned herself ages ago to the bracing truth that she was destined to spend her life mooning over a man who paid about as much attention to her as he did to the scenery. Less, if she was honest, because she’d actually observed Gray stopping to take in the pretty view that surrounded them upon occasion.

  And yet despite the fact he had never appeared to see her as any different than her own grandmother, and had exhibited roughly the same amount of romantic interest in the both of them—which was to say, none at all—Abby had spent whole years imagining infinite variations on Gray proposing to her.

  Some sweet, some angsty. Some wild and hot, in a rumpled bed somewhere. On one knee, over a romantic dinner, or even on the back of a galloping horse. She’d covered every possibility.

  Except this one.

  She was having some trouble believing it was real.

  Because in all the many versions of this moment that she’d imagined over the years, she’d never imagined it happening in the comfortable sitting room of the Douglas family farmhouse. The cozy, happy place where her grandma had taught her how to mend her own clothes, how to convey acres of emotion and reaction with a single arched brow, how to enjoy the pleasure of her own company, and best of all, how to hide really good books behind unremarkable works of seeming piety so Abby could better amuse herself during boring family discussions.

  But unlike every one of her fantasies and all of her favorite racy books, now that the proposal she’d always wanted was happening somewhere other than inside her head, Abby didn’t want to fling herself into Gray’s lean, hard arms, she … kind of wanted to kill him.

  “Let me make sure I’m understanding you,” she managed to say into the awkward silence, threading her fingers together on her lap as if she were sitting in church.

  Not that Gray looked awkward. Abby couldn’t imagine a man like Gray ever really looked or felt awkward about anything. He was too … elemental.

  So elemental, in fact—so commanding and big with those dark green eyes that never failed to make her belly flip over and a body too solid and smoothly muscled to really fit in that armchair he’d chosen to sit in—that there had almost been too much noise in her head to fully comprehend what he was saying to her.

  Almost.

  Gray’s mouth curved, that fascinating quirk of his firm lips Abby had spent quite a lot of her time contemplating. She’d been doing exactly that when he’d appeared at the front door of the old farmhouse that only company ever used, which was why it had taken her longer than it should have to realize he hadn’t come by today to share what passed for the usual neighborly news and information out this way. Cows busting through the fences or horses leaping out of their paddocks or rumors of coyotes. The usual.

  She’d told him her grandmother was in town, and he’d aimed that half smile at her, which Abby assumed had no other purpose than to make her knees weak. Then he’d told her that was just as well because he was there to see her.

  Abby had been rendered speechless by that declaration and had no idea how she’d managed to move from the front door to the sitting room. It was lost forever in the tumult inside of her.

  Though that had subsided a bit, she had to admit.

  And normally the rare sight of Gray Everett this close to her, much less his version of a smile, would have left her feeling giddy. Today, she had the urge to smack it. Him.

  He was sitting there in the chair that had once been her late grandfather’s, except he was much taller than Grandpa had ever been, a fact that was impossible to ignore with his long legs stretched out in front of him. He was dressed in his usual uniform of boots, jeans, and a T-shirt—a long-sleeved T-shirt today, beneath something flannel and that barn coat of his. He was holding his cowboy hat in his hands, though he wasn’t fiddling with it, because of course Gray Everett was the only man alive who could ask a woman he wasn’t dating or even really connected to in any way to marry him and never feel the slightest urge to fidget.

  Correction, Abby eyed him. He didn’t exactly ask.

  “You want to marry me,” Abby said, and it was interesting in a kind of clinical way to hear herself say that. Out loud. To him.

  Some part of her expected him to belt out a laugh. To tell her she’d misheard him and had completely gotten that wrong. To then wonder why she’d ever imagine he would say something like that to her. She was half blushing already, ready for that kick of humiliation—

  But Gray nodded. Decisively. “I do.”

  Abby felt too hot. Her head was spinning. She went to sit down and then remembered she already was, there on the old sofa with the cheerful printed cabbages she’
d always loved. The sofa where she’d read a thousand books before the fire, fitfully slept off her colds and flus beneath throws her grandma had knitted over the years, and had watched her grandparents grow old as they’d raised her when her mother couldn’t be bothered.

  This was reality. Gray’s bizarre proposal wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

  “Your father’s funeral was last week,” Abby said as gently as she could, because Amos’s death had obviously hit him harder than anyone had imagined. “It’s possible you’re having a reaction to that.”

  That curve in the corner of his mouth deepened, and even though this was all crazy, it still seemed to sizzle straight through her. “You think I’m breaking out in spontaneous marriage proposals? Is that a thing?”

  She reminded herself that he was insane with grief. Clearly. “You’ve never glanced at me, Gray. Not once. In your entire life.”

  “I’ve glanced at you.”

  Abby couldn’t argue with him on that, since it would involve explaining that she would have known if he had or hadn’t glanced her way because she was always, always, paying entirely too much attention to what, where, and who he was looking at.

  She smiled politely instead. “You don’t know a single thing about me.”

  “I’ve known you since the day you were born.”

  “I’ve known most of the people in this town since the day I was born. That doesn’t mean I know them. It means I know whether or not to pretend I see them in the supermarket on any given day.”

  “I already covered this,” Gray said patiently. Too patiently, as if Abby were the one being crazy here.

  “Right. Something about shared goals and roots, and did you call me uncomplicated?”

  Gray regarded her for a moment. “That’s a compliment.”

  “I think you’ll find that no matter how you phrase it, there are very few women who like being called uncomplicated.”

  “Because you’d rather be an impenetrable mystery?”