A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  His own mother had been quiet until she’d packed up and left. Cristina had started off sweet and whatever you think and you decide, honey, hadn’t she? And look how that had ended up. Sweet and biddable were good qualities in cattle, but not so great in a rancher’s wife. A good rancher’s wife needed to be independent, stubborn, strong-willed, and capable, or she wouldn’t last a single winter out here.

  Much less a few rounds with Gray.

  He told himself that was why he found himself grinning as he rose to his feet to stand in front of her.

  “People put a lot of faith in chemistry,” he said. “But there’d be a lot fewer people wandering around this planet if we all sat around waiting for chemistry to hit us.”

  Her scowl deepened, which shouldn’t have been possible. “Is that supposed to be a positive? Are you going to tell me that a good marriage requires I lie back and think of England?”

  “Why would you think about England?”

  “Why would you try to tell me that chemistry doesn’t matter? Of course it does.”

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. But sheer stubbornness matters more.” He heard the intensity in his voice, but did nothing to temper it. “If people want to stay married, they do. If they want that marriage to be a good one, they work on it and make it that way. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t require your online profiles. You don’t need to get matched on your smart phone. You make a commitment to someone, then you keep it. It’s as simple and as hard as that.”

  He watched in fascination as her hands curled into fists at her sides.

  “I appreciate that you have experience being married, and that gives you a platform to make sweeping statements,” she said, her voice low, as if she was fighting back her own intensity. “That’s great. But you’re missing that I’m not interested in the state of marriage in a general sense. I’m telling you I am not going to marry someone I have no chemistry with. That has nothing to do with me being stubborn, not stubborn, or insufficiently committed. It’s actually all about the fact that I’m not staggering around in a grief-induced daze, proposing marriage to people I’ve never looked at twice before in my whole life.”

  That should have annoyed him, because he wasn’t dazed. Amos had been a mean, unhealthy old man. His death hadn’t been a real surprise. Gray wasn’t sure he was grieving him so much as the father Amos had never been, and he knew he wasn’t crazy with it. But he couldn’t seem to lose his grin, especially when he moved closer to her.

  Because when he did, she lost that scowl. Her eyes went wide, that cute flush brightened up her face again, and she had to tip her head back to look at him. Not as much as some of the other girls he’d dated had, as she’d pointed out. Gray liked that too. He didn’t have to hunker over her.

  She was … right there.

  He had an urge and went with it. He reached over and curled his fingers around her ponytail, then pulled them gently along the length of it.

  And figured the chemistry question was answered by the way her breath went shuddery.

  But he didn’t end it there.

  “If I’m following all this,” he said, his drawl low. Thick. “You don’t actually have any objections. You think we maybe ought to date first. You’re worried we don’t have chemistry. But at the end of the day, you’re not opposed to the idea.”

  “It’s crazy. And I’m worried that you’re crazy, in a clinical sense.”

  “If you agree to marry me, I’ll take you on a date or two. If that’s what you want.” His hand was still tangled in her hair, and he was close enough now that he could catch her scent. Gray breathed deep. She smelled like rosemary. And something that reminded him of the pies she and her grandmother had brought over the day after the funeral, warm and good. Right. “But we can settle the other question right here.”

  “What do you mean…?”

  Gray didn’t wait. He didn’t answer her question, half stammered out with her hazel eyes so wide they looked like summer gold.

  He used his free hand to cup her cheek, flushed and smooth beneath his palm. Then he bent—only a little, which struck him as unexpectedly hot—to take her mouth with his.

  He felt her tremble. And there was something about the way she melted into him as their lips touched, then brushed, as if she was being pulled by some kind of magnetic force he was half certain he could feel himself.

  Gray had only meant to kiss her to make a point. The way a gentleman might, not that he’d ever met too many gentlemen out here where the mountains and the land were the only things that mattered.

  But Abby’s lips were soft and velvety beneath his. And she made a tiny sound in the back of her throat that he could feel like a flickering flame.

  Before he knew it, Gray was angling his head to one side and licking his way into her mouth.

  As if he couldn’t help himself.

  And everything got hot. Bright. Impossible.

  This was Abby Douglas. Abby Douglas. There was something deliciously wrong about it being Abby that made it hotter, wilder.

  It rolled in him and made a joke of him imagining he was in control of any of this. Of her.

  Of this sudden storm of sensation that would have taken him off his feet, if that didn’t mean he would have had to let go of her.

  When the door slapped open, both of his hands were sunk deep into her hair, and Abby was up on her toes, pressed against him, her arms wrapped around his back.

  It turned out Gray wasn’t going to have to worry about easing his way into some or other form of eventual chemistry with the woman he already knew would make him a good rancher’s wife. He was going to have to worry about what the hell to do with all this chemistry—so much it was like a lightning storm and he kept getting hit—with a woman he’d never paid the slightest attention to until his father’s funeral.

  The fact that the front door had opened penetrated the heat and fog that was swirling around him.

  Finally.

  “My goodness,” came Martha Douglas’s familiar, scratchy voice, laced through with a ripe sort of amusement Gray couldn’t identify entirely, but had no doubt was aimed right at him. “That will teach me to go into town for the bingo. Look at the show right here in my living room.”

  “Mrs. Douglas,” Gray gritted out as a greeting, stepping back from Abby and not sure he liked how difficult that was. Especially when she looked as if separating from him … hurt her. “I don’t mean any disrespect. This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “I’ll thank you not to treat me like I tripped and fell into your daddy’s grave along with him, Gray,” Martha retorted, her gaze level on his. “I haven’t forgotten what a kiss looks like, especially when it’s happening to my granddaughter right here in the room where I taught her how to walk.”

  4

  Martha Douglas was many things—and in her later years, had gotten a bit looser with the edge of her tongue—but she was no gossip.

  That simple truth had frustrated Abby when she was younger and had longed to dig into their friends and neighbors the way everyone all around the valley seemed to do with such relish. Martha had always steadfastly refused. It wasn’t that she didn’t have opinions, but she wouldn’t share them until she judged it the right time. Until then, she wasn’t one for unnecessary or idle chatter—especially when it was none of her business.

  But tonight, her grandmother’s solemn refusal to ask a single question about what had transpired earlier might actually eat Abby alive.

  Gray had left shortly after Grandma had come home.

  After that first moment, no one had mentioned the fact that Gray and Abby had been kissing. Kissing, for God’s sake. There had been about three minutes of awkward conversation about the calves Gray had shipped this season and those he’d kept back to wean in his corrals, the usual exchange about the weather forecast and the cold front moving in, and then he’d been on his way with only a single dark look Abby’s way.

  After the sound of his truck had disappeared
entirely from the dirt road outside, Abby waited for Grandma to ask her what had been going on and what on earth she’d been doing, kissing their neighbor in the front room when anyone with eyes could see the man needed grief counseling.

  But Grandma didn’t say a word.

  It had been like any other weekend afternoon in the farmhouse. There were the usual housekeeping chores to do, laundry and the weekly clean of the rugs and floors to set up for the week ahead. Tasks Abby usually found oddly meditative, but today couldn’t seem to concentrate on. Because she kept flashing back to that kiss and marriage proposal and all the other impossible things that had happened to her on this otherwise perfectly ordinary day.

  She couldn’t really grasp it. And she’d lived through it.

  Or she’d had an extended hallucination. It was maybe telling that there was a part of her that hoped it really had been all in her head. Because a complete break from reality and sanity seemed liked it might be easier than … whatever this was.

  Abby couldn’t think about it. She couldn’t think about anything else either, but she definitely couldn’t think about it. Not about Gray. Not directly. Every time she started to remember his mouth against hers, she skittered away from the memory, her heart pounding and her skin flushed and clammy, as if it were some kind of flu that threatened to take her to her knees.

  After full dark fell hard out the windows, coming down like a curtain the way it always seemed to this time of year, Grandma started to pull together their dinner. Abby helped without being asked, the way she always did. They were long past the days when her grandmother took care of everything and Abby was the dependent child who had to be asked to contribute. They were more like roommates now, bustling around in the kitchen together and then sitting down to eat at the kitchen table, because Grandma didn’t believe that good food and decent companionship should be frittered away in front of the television.

  “He wants me to marry him,” Abby blurted out when she couldn’t take it any longer, staring ferociously at her pork chop.

  Grandma made a noncommittal sound.

  For a while there was nothing but the usual noises of the farmhouse. The creaking from the old porch swing outside. The summery song of the wind chimes dancing out there in the dark that Abby needed to remember to take down before winter hit in earnest. The wind itself, moaning a bit as it rushed past the windows, sneaking inside in the form of the drafts they’d spend all of the cold months battling.

  “That’s why he was here,” Abby continued, because now she’d started, she couldn’t stop. Because she was either having a serious mental health episode or, far more frightening, it had all really happened. “Apparently, Gray Everett woke up this morning over there in his big ranch house, decided he was in need of a wife, and looked no farther than the farm next door.”

  “I’ve always appreciated practicality in a man,” Grandma said, after a moment. And even smiled as she said it.

  Abby stop pretending to eat. “I could be anyone, Grandma. He has an opening he wants to fill, that’s all. And I guess when he looked around, he felt there was a shortage of capable, dependable, salt of the earth single women in Cold River, so he landed on me. By default.”

  Her grandmother dabbed at her mouth with her napkin. Cloth, of course, because Martha Douglas didn’t like the waste or expense of paper.

  “You’ve been silly about that Everett boy as long as I can remember,” she said, matter-of-factly, which didn’t exactly take away the sting of it. Given this was something they’d never discussed. Ever. Abby felt her face burn, and the steady way Grandma eyed her from the other side of the table didn’t help. “Did he ruin it when he kissed you?”

  Abby blinked. “Ruin it?”

  “Nothing is worse than kissing a man after a long buildup only to discover that he’s terrible at it. Sloppy. Or worse, too much—”

  “Grandma. I beg you not to finish that sentence.”

  Her grandmother raised her famous brow, capable of silencing small children and stopping grown men in their tracks. “I hate to offend your delicate sensibilities, Abigail, but I have in fact kissed and been kissed a time or two in my day.”

  Abby sighed. “I fully support any and all kissing you’ve ever done. I just don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I’m not certain I wanted to wander into my own front room to find my granddaughter locking lips with the neighbor boy, now that you mention it, but I’ve rallied.”

  “But that’s the problem. We don’t have any relationship. He’s never looked at me twice. Or even once.”

  “Maybe he’s finally come to his senses. Sometimes men get there on their own.”

  “He didn’t have any senses to come to,” Abby retorted, the heat in her cheeks in her voice too, and constricting her throat. “It’s not like he’s been nobly resisting me for all these years. As far as Gray Everett is concerned, I might as well be one of the fence posts he’s forever putting up all over his property. And now he wants me to actually be on his property too. As his wife. Because he seems to think it’s perfectly reasonable to get married when you don’t know the other person at all.”

  Grandma sat back in her chair and regarded Abby for a moment.

  It was times like this that Abby normally took comfort in the fact they were so alike. She even looked like her grandmother, so much so that staring at Martha’s creased cheeks and gnarled hands was a lot like staring her future in the face—something Abby would have said she found comforting. Usually. They had the same wide, capable shoulders, a hand-me-down from the generations of Grandma’s relatives who’d been slopping milk pails around on dairy farms since the dawn of time. Grandma had been strong and sturdy all her life. She’d turned eighty-three in September and was less of both than she had been while Abby was growing up, but wasn’t slowing down. Grandpa’s death seven years ago had left her more frail for a while there, but she hadn’t let it take her under. She was a proud, fierce woman who knew precisely who she was and was grateful for it daily.

  She was exactly who Abby had always intended to become one day, when she finally grew up.

  And tonight, she was looking at Abby as if she was a remarkably silly girl who wasn’t likely to get there anytime soon. If at all.

  “Your generation thinks all the knowing each other has to happen before you get married. It used to be you liked a person, married them, and then whiled away the years getting to know each other as you went. You might call that inside out, but I promise you, it worked fine for hundreds of years.”

  Abby wanted to ask her grandmother questions about her marriage to Grandpa, but didn’t. Because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers. Her grandparents had married late, there in the supposed calm after the second World War. They’d had Abby’s mother when Grandma was thirty, which must have seemed ancient in a place where teenagers marrying right out of high school was still common.

  Had they spent their childless years before Lily’s arrival getting to know each other and turning into the solid unit Abby had always considered them? And if they had, did she really want to know the details?

  “You can’t possibly think that I should consider Gray’s offer,” Abby said instead, rubbing her hand on her chest because it felt as if she had her own draft, chilling her from the inside out. “Not seriously. He’s obviously insane with grief over his father.”

  Grandma sniffed. “It’s hard to imagine anybody grieving a bully like Amos Everett much at all, much less to the point of insanity. Especially not his own son, who knew him better than most and had to live with him day in and day out. The poor boy.”

  “But…” Abby felt drafty inside and uneven outside, as if the sturdy old floor in the farmhouse kitchen was pitching and rolling beneath her feet. “This is all ridiculous. People don’t run around marrying people they have no actual relationship with. That’s a recipe for divorce.”

  “Here’s some free marriage advice, Abby. If you want to stay married, don’t get divorced. The end.”
r />   It was a lot like what Gray had said. Abby didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

  Abby rubbed her hands over her face. “Is this … Are you … You’re supporting this? I was positive you’d laugh.”

  Her grandmother studied her for a long moment. “There are worse things than a marriage proposal from a man you’re already sweet on.”

  “Most grandmothers would be appalled at the very idea of their granddaughter marrying some guy who turned up at the door one day. Out of the blue. And approached the whole thing like he was negotiating for a few more acres of adjoining land. Aren’t you the one who spent my whole life telling me I should know my own worth?”

  “I also told you that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.”

  “I still don’t know what that means. Why would I have a bird in my hands? Why are there so many birds that it’s turned into some kind of shrubbery situation? Why does everything end up a Hitchcock movie?”

  “Abigail. There’s no need to get wound up. You know Gray Everett as well as I do.”

  “Meaning … enough to bring a hot dish to a family funeral, the way you would for every person in this valley.”

  The look her grandmother aimed her way then was familiar. It was the same one she used whenever Lily rolled into town, and the same one she’d used more sparingly during Abby’s own, far more infrequent, teenage episodes.

  And Abby, predictably, felt instantly chastened.

  “You’ve watched him work that land. You’ve watched him run cattle. You’ve watched him raise that girl of his. You watched him marry that Cristina, and better still, watched him take the high road when it all went bad. Every man has his own private life, I grant you, that’s not necessarily on display outside the walls of his house. But he’s not a mystery to you. He’s not some stranger who showed up on the porch this morning.”