A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  Abby wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so … helpless. As if she’d been shoved off the edge of a cliff, and like it or not, she kept on falling. Her heart was kicking at her. Her palms felt as damp as her mouth felt dry.

  “Are you telling me I should marry him?”

  “It’s not up to me to tell you who you should or shouldn’t marry. But I do believe that a marriage proposal deserves celebration. Whether you accept him or don’t, it doesn’t matter. You’re the same girl who used to lie on your bed and cry your heart out, telling me that no one would ever want to marry you.”

  “I was thirteen. No thirteen-year-old thinks anyone is ever going to want to marry them. That’s the joy of puberty.”

  “Well, I told you you were wrong then, didn’t I? And I do like to be right.”

  Abby didn’t know whether to cry, the way she had when she’d been thirteen and distraught about everything and nothing. Or whether she should find a way to laugh all this away before it got any more real, which should have been impossible, because this was all impossible.

  While she was dithering, her grandmother rose from her seat, moved over to the counter, and uncovered a freshly baked pie Abby had been so distracted she hadn’t even noticed sitting there. Something that should have terrified her, given her deep and abiding love of all baked goods.

  But she didn’t seem to have any more room for terror tonight.

  “That’s the thing,” she said quietly while Grandma pulled out plates and clean forks. “When I imagined somebody wanting to marry me, I imagined that they would want to marry me. Not any old woman who fit their idea of what a wife should be. I might as well be a mail-order bride.”

  “Your great-grandmother was a mail-order bride,” Grandma replied serenely.

  Of all the things Abby imagined her grandmother might say, it wasn’t that. It had the immediate effect of clearing Abby’s Gray-muddled head.

  “You’ve been telling me stories about your grandparents as long as I can remember, and you never mentioned that one of them was a mail-order bride,” she argued, feeling … breathless.

  She’d imagined her ancestors as pioneers in covered wagons, but never something so specifically western. And somehow thrilling.

  “My mother’s mother was raised in a big family back east in Pennsylvania,” Grandma said calmly. That part Abby knew. “They didn’t have much, so when she came of age, she answered an ad from an enterprising young man with a few acres out here in Colorado, and the rest is history.”

  Abby felt more shaken than she should have. More than she would have been the day before. Too invested, maybe. She’d seen pictures of her great-grandparents, stiff and faded in their old sepia ovals like the world might end if they gave away any hint of their actual personalities while they stared at the camera.

  “Were they happy?” she heard herself ask, as wistfully as her thirteen-year-old self might have.

  Grandma came back over to the table, holding two plates heaped with pie and freshly whipped cream, the way they both liked it. She took her seat across from Abby and fixed her with one of her looks.

  “Happy isn’t something you stumble over on the street like a penny, Abigail. You can’t pick it up, put it in your pocket, and consider it done. Happy is something you choose. And keep choosing.”

  “Grandma.” Abby hated that her voice cracked on that, but she couldn’t seem to help it. “Even if I believed that Gray meant it, I couldn’t possibly say yes. Because that would be taking advantage of somebody who’s clearly taken leave of his senses.”

  “He seemed perfectly normal to me.”

  “You don’t live your whole life next door to somebody, never pay them any attention, and then wake up one morning determined to marry them. That’s not how it works.”

  “Oh? How does it work?” Grandma asked, much too placidly, in Abby’s opinion.

  “I don’t know. If he was really interested in me, me as a person rather than some tab he can shove into the appropriate slot, he would … ask for my number. The way people do.”

  “What people? He knows your number. You’ve had the same number your whole life. Which is also my number, by the way.”

  “I have a cell phone, Grandma. And you know that’s not what I mean. He could ask me out. To dinner. Or coffee, if dinner is too much pressure.”

  “The man runs a cattle ranch. He also has a teenage daughter. Until recently he also had the primary care of an ornery old man who’d made an enemy of every last person in the Longhorn Valley. I can’t imagine when you imagine he’s supposed to be painting the town red and going on coffee dates.”

  “You can’t possibly think it’s perfectly normal for him to show up one morning, knock on the door, and tell me that he wants to marry me.” There was something like panic clawing at her insides. “Whatever else you want to call it, it’s not normal behavior.”

  Grandma took a big bite of her pie and chewed thoughtfully for a moment or two. She took a swig from the milk she still drank at all three meals because she had dairy farms in her bones. Literally. Only then did she meet Abby’s gaze again.

  “I wouldn’t say I think it’s normal, necessarily, though it’s true that burying a parent can be clarifying in all sorts of ways. But I’m surprised that you’re focusing on the possibility something’s wrong with him and ignoring the more important part.”

  “How can there be something more important than the fact he’s acting completely out of character?”

  “You’ve never so much as looked at another man,” Grandma said quietly. With far too much uncomfortable knowledge in her gaze. “Maybe now you don’t have to. Seems to me you should stop worrying that he’s lost his mind and start considering the possibility that if he hasn’t, you might just get everything you ever wanted.”

  * * *

  Obviously Abby had no intention of considering anything that … impossible.

  She’d rather worry about Gray’s sanity than accept that he might have meant it. Because if he meant it … if he’d really meant every word he’d said and didn’t actually require a therapist …

  Well. That forced her to face all kinds of possibilities she’d ruled out a long time ago.

  She refused to consider any of them as she tossed and turned in her little bed tucked up under the eaves in the farmhouse that night. She rejected them all over again when she woke hours before dawn, shivered through her shower because the old pipes were temperamental at best, and stomped out to her car to head into town for her early shift at the coffeehouse.

  Abby usually liked the days she had to open the shop. She liked being up so early that it felt as if the world was only hers, especially out in these fields where she couldn’t see any lights but the ones she’d left on back in the farmhouse kitchen for Grandma when she woke up.

  She waited until her serviceable old car warmed up, then pulled out onto the dirt drive that cut through the fields and led to the county road she’d driven nearly every day of her life. It was a kind of reflex to turn right and ease into the familiar route she knew as much by feel as sight, at this point.

  Her grandparents had sold off the bulk of their farmland to the Everetts not long after Abby was born. Grandpa had been ten years older than Grandma, and arthritis had already been sitting on him, hard. Selling to the Everetts wasn’t the same as passing the farm on to his own children, Grandpa had always said, but no one expected Lily to come back and care for the land that had been in her family for so long—and it was a sight better than handing it over to one of those corporate farm operations that Grandpa had always hated.

  Abby had grown up with it like this. A scant seven acres that were still Douglas land tucked in with all those miles and miles the Everetts owned and worked. Room enough for the farmhouse, Grandpa’s garden and orchard, and space to breathe besides.

  This morning, it was frigid and cold and unquestionably November. The dark seemed thicker than usual, inside and out, as if it were sticky, somehow. Her car was old and cranky, or may
be that was her, and she couldn’t seem to get warm as she sped along the lane toward the mountain pass that led into town. It was too dark to see the mountain itself before the road started to climb, but she could feel it there. She could sense it, looming over her in what was left of the night, waiting. Abby tucked her chin into the scarf she’d wrapped around her neck a few times, and she tried not to think too much about what Gray had offered her.

  Or that kiss.

  That kiss that made her feel chills for a completely different reason.

  She forced herself to consider the land instead. Because she was supposed to be so practical, wasn’t she? Wasn’t that why she was the whole of Gray’s shortlist for a wife? And she couldn’t think of anything more practical than marrying an Everett so that Douglas land belonged to a Douglas again.

  She knew perfectly well that people in these parts had married for a whole lot less in their time. Land was land. And family legacies meant something out here, where people threw around the names of the Cold River founding families as if they were all still ambling up and down the streets of the quaintly preserved town in period attire.

  It’s definitely not about kissing Gray at last, a voice inside her said, deeply sardonic. You tossed and turned all night long because you’re worried about the land. Not the taste of him. His hands in your hair. Or the way he slanted his mouth—

  “Stop,” she ordered herself. Out loud.

  Her voice sounded strange in the dark. Her rickety old heater was starting to spit out the tiniest bit of warmth, better late than never. She wrapped her gloved hands around her steering wheel and frowned fiercely at the road ahead of her as it started its incline. The mountain between the farmhouse and the town of Cold River wasn’t much of one by general Rocky Mountains standards. Only a few thousand feet. But it didn’t pay to take it for granted. Gray’s first wife wasn’t the only fatality on a road that was always slicker and more perilous than any on the valley floor.

  Luckily, Abby was safe and dependable and a pillar of salt, or whatever, even when no one was watching. Because she drove the speed limit, cautiously making her way over the hill and down into Cold River at last.

  Town always seemed like a miracle to her, no matter how many times she saw it spread out before her on her way in. Cold River still sported Old West buildings lined up along Main Street, pretty brick structures that hearkened back to the early days of the Colorado Territory. She liked the long drive down from the mountain, the climb over the river that had given the town its name, then down on into the historic town itself. This time of year, there were pretty holiday lights on the outsides of all the buildings, making everything gleam against the night like a real, live Christmas card.

  For a blessed moment, Abby wasn’t thinking about kissing Gray after approximately twenty years of imagining what that might be like. She wasn’t thinking about her grandmother’s surprising support—it seemed like support, anyway, because Grandma certainly hadn’t sounded at all opposed—to the idea of marrying him. She wasn’t even thinking about taking up the mantle of mail-order brides that was, apparently, family tradition.

  Because there was nothing quite like soaking in the quietness in her pretty hometown. It had soothed her all her life. It made her feel … right and rooted.

  The things Gray had said to her yesterday swirled around inside her. That she’d never left home, the way so many others did. That she had chosen instead to stay right here in Cold River, where nothing ever really changed. Where there was the pushy Longhorn Valley Historical Society forever at war with the Chamber of Commerce to make certain nothing changed too much, ever, no matter the march of progress or the clamoring from the tourists for fast food and Starbucks.

  Abby had been waiting to feel badly about staying her whole life. Her own mother took it upon herself, every time Abby saw her, to point out how provincial Abby was. How small town and therefore less than.

  Just another dumb country girl, Lily had said once, with that half smile of hers.

  Because that was the kind of charming thing a woman like Lily said to the daughter she hardly knew and had, in fact, abandoned.

  And here in the quiet of her car as she drove down a deserted Main Street in Cold River, hours before most people were anywhere close to waking up, Abby could admit that half the reason she’d always claimed she had no interest in going anywhere was in direct response to Lily’s inability to stay put.

  But it was more than that. Spite could only take a girl so far. There had to be love too, or she’d be as bitter as her mother was—a fate worse than death, as far as Abby was concerned.

  Abby wasn’t bitter. She hadn’t made her choices out of fear. Or not entirely, anyway. She’d also believed her grandparents had needed her, and she’d wanted to be needed. Didn’t everyone?

  She parked her car around the back of the coffeehouse the way she always did, and then pushed her way out into the cold again. She stood there for a moment in the crisp, clear dark with only the faintest suggestion of a bluer dawn to the east. She breathed it all deep into her lungs, filling herself with the clean, sweet mountain air. It smelled like winter. That aching little lilt, like tears in the wind. Like foreboding.

  But she’d always chosen to call it hope.

  Gray Everett had kissed her.

  She laughed wildly into the solitary night because one of the dearest dreams of her childhood had come true when she’d least expected it. And she wanted to cry in the next breath—because one of the dearest dreams of her childhood had come true, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do now it had.

  She heard the sound she made then, a kind of shuddery thing, here where no one could hear her. There was nothing around but a coffee shop she had yet to open, pretty lights on all the brick buildings, and looming high all around her, the watching mountain sentinels that made her feel exalted and humble all at once.

  The same way Gray Everett always had.

  He’d kissed her. He wanted to marry her.

  There was no going back from that.

  Whatever happened next, whatever happened between them or didn’t, Abby understood out there in the dark that nothing about this safe, sweet, comfortable life she’d loved so much was ever, ever going to be the same.

  5

  Abby was wiping down the tables in the cozy back part of Cold River Coffee, outfitted with several couches around a decorative fireplace, a bookcase filled with much-loved romances and thrillers that operated as a community honor-system library, and battered brick walls that made her unreasonably happy every time she looked at them. She was listening to Noah Connelly, the latest owner of the coffeehouse and its resident chef, bang his pans around the way he liked to do to announce his typical bad mood to all and sundry. The music playing from the speakers was brooding with a side of acoustic guitars. There was the usual scattering of locals and tourists at the long, family style, shared tables toward the front, some with laptops open and others bouncing infants on their laps.

  She cleared off the table in front of her, adjusted the festive holiday centerpiece she’d set there, and let the coffeehouse’s particular magic work on her. Abby had started working here part-time when she’d still been in high school and had moved to full-time after graduation. And instead of putting in the usual six months to a year that most baristas did before bailing, she’d stayed. She’d been promoted to manager two owners back and Noah had asked her to stay in the job when the business changed hands because she knew it backwards and forwards. She did the books and most of the orders.

  Abby hadn’t necessarily meant to end up running a coffeehouse, but here she was. She knew some whispered that she was stuck here. That poor Douglas girl with no prospects, she’d heard gossipy Theresa Galace whisper overloudly to one of her friends a while back as Abby had been making her drink. That had stung, but she didn’t want “prospects,” she thought darkly as she moved from one table to the next.

  She’d never had any desire to move on to something else. She loved
the coffeehouse. She loved working in a place most people in town treated as a part of their extended living room. It felt like home.

  And Abby loved her home. She wasn’t like some other people she knew, who were forever worrying about what was over the horizon and what they might be missing. She liked Cold River. She liked her life as it was, happy and sweet and hers.

  She was complimenting herself on her choices when the front doors slapped open, letting in the bite of the November afternoon. It was a reflex to look up from wiping the last table in the section—but when she did, she froze.

  Because Gray was shouldering his way inside.

  It was Gray, except that was impossible, because Gray Everett didn’t drink fancy coffee.

  Abby blinked, but the vision didn’t go away. It was still Gray. He was dressed for ranch work the way he always was, which made his presence in this place of polished wood and brick … confusing. When Abby pictured him, she realized, she pictured him outside. He wore a different flannel and different long-sleeved T-shirt beneath that barn coat of his, but for some reason all she could concentrate on was the way his jeans outlined every single muscle in his thighs.

  Who knew there were so many?

  She watched him as he frowned up at the big, chalkboard menu that hung behind the cash register and pastry cases, as if the very concept of a coffee shop was a scam and he was bracing himself for the inevitable con. He looked as if he’d never darkened the door of such a questionable establishment before.

  Because, of course, he hadn’t. Gray was old school in every possible way and that included getting his coffee for $1.25 in Mary Jo’s Diner down at the other end of Main Street, where working men in the Longhorn Valley had been devouring huge plates of food with cheap, strong coffee as long as anyone could remember.

  Abby wasn’t one to make mountains out of molehills, especially if the molehill in question was her. But she couldn’t come up with a single reason Gray would break from his decades-long tradition. Today. After that conversation in the farmhouse. And the kiss that had gone with it.