A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  He could barely make out the outbuildings in this light, but he looked in the direction of the one Ty had taken since the funeral. His own private bunkhouse, which at least Gray could say he’d earned. Ty had donated money he’d won bull riding more than once, if the ranch’s ledgers their father had kept so ineptly were to be believed. It was more than he could say for Brady, who could have used his college education to give back to the ranch that had paid for all those classes that made him think he was better than everyone else. But hadn’t.

  Gray doubted it had even occurred to him.

  “Can we just have a conversation for a change?” Brady asked, his voice fierce. With something else beneath it Gray didn’t want to acknowledge. “Or do you get something out of constantly being in a fight with everybody?”

  Gray wasn’t in a fight with anybody, because there was no point fighting when he already knew who’d win, but he didn’t tell his brother that. He made himself take a breath. Two.

  “I like conversation as much as the next man,” he said when he was sure he could sound completely unbothered. Because he was enough of a jackass himself to enjoy the prospect of getting right up there beneath his little brother’s skin whenever possible. “But every time you open your mouth, it’s to comment on my business. My life. My choices. And yes, Brady, my land.”

  “Excuse me for being interested in your life and giving a crap what happens to you.” Brady’s voice was clipped and hard. “Particularly when you make sweeping, random announcements out of nowhere that you’re marrying a woman who, as far as I know, you’re not dating.”

  “You don’t have to come to the wedding if you don’t want to,” Gray replied mildly. More to rub some salt on the wound, he could admit. To himself. “It won’t hurt my feelings, though I can’t vouch for Abby’s. You were in high school together, weren’t you?”

  Brady had his arms crossed and his hands tucked beneath his armpits against the cold, but that didn’t prevent him from pivoting, slowly, to glare at the side of Gray’s face.

  “Abby Douglas is a sweet girl,” he said in a voice that broadcast how pissed he was without him having to yell. “She was a couple of years behind me in high school, as a matter of fact, and she’s not your type.”

  Gray hadn’t much cared for it when Abby had said the same thing to him. He really, really disliked hearing his snot-nosed brother echo it.

  “You an expert on her too?” Gray didn’t know where that came from, his voice like steel and bad weather. “How many times do you figure you’ve spoken to her in your entire life? Three, total, including at Dad’s funeral?”

  Brady made a rude, anatomically impossible suggestion.

  “I would,” Gray threw at him, “but I’m Cold River’s resident monk. Isn’t that what you just said? None of that for me.”

  Brady sighed as if he were in actual, physical pain. “Maybe sweet Abby Douglas deserves more than this life you say you love so much, that’s all. Stuck out here with nothing but mountains and cows for company. I’d ask you what kind of life that really is, but I don’t think you know, because you seem to like it no matter how many women it drives crazy. Mom. Crist—”

  “Brady.” Gray didn’t know how he managed to keep from shouting. Or letting his hands do the shouting for him. “My daughter isn’t your business and neither is her mother. And sweet Abby Douglas isn’t a problem you need to worry about solving. All you need to know is that she and I are getting married. You can do with that information what you want, but I’d advise you to be real careful how you talk about it around me.”

  He didn’t wait for whatever smartass remark his brother might make because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle it. Not in a way that wouldn’t leave one or both of them bloody in the dirt, which wasn’t how he’d wanted to start the day, thank you.

  He headed for his truck, swinging himself into the cab and ignoring the fact the Brady was still standing there in the dark. Watching him go, as if Gray was the one being unreasonable.

  Gray found himself stewing on that all along the winding dirt roads that led out to the pastureland he used for the herd during the winter. He didn’t know what Brady wanted. Other than the money selling the land would put in his pocket, and Gray knew he wasn’t very reasonable where that was concerned. But why should he pretend to be reasonable about something like that? He didn’t want to sell. He didn’t want to give up his life’s work. His home.

  The Everett family legacy.

  And he wanted to beat the crap out of his own brother every time he mentioned it.

  That’s why you’re getting married, he reminded himself.

  It was one of the reasons, anyway. Because he had to believe Brady would find it more difficult to get excited about kicking Gray off the ranch if there was a real family to consider displacing when he did it. He had to believe his brother couldn’t see the ranch as a home because, in fairness, it had never been much of one for any of them. Amos had been a tyrant when he hadn’t been passed out somewhere, and once she’d left, their mother had made it clear she was perfectly happy to have a distant relationship with her own sons if that meant no more dealing with Amos.

  Brady didn’t understand there was a pull here that had nothing to do with one mean old man.

  But that pull was all Gray had.

  And he wanted to pass it on to Becca.

  He could drive up to the pasture blindfolded, though he was never reckless enough to test that theory. He knew every hump and hollow beneath the truck’s tires as he went. And the more he contemplated marrying again and making the ranch a family operation—this time in a way that didn’t involve Amos’s various reigns of terror—the less he concentrated on the bumpy dirt roads he knew so well. And the more his thoughts turned to sweet Abby Douglas and the fact she’d agreed to be his wife.

  She’d actually agreed.

  The sense of satisfaction that gave him didn’t make a whole lot of sense, given he’d only come up with the idea at his father’s funeral, but there it was. It sat in him, solid and warm, like a slab of rock baking out in the summer sun.

  I don’t want a big production, she’d told him during one of their evening phone calls that had become a habit over the past week. I don’t need all that commotion.

  Because after making such a terrible choice the last time, Gray had managed to stumble into perfect when all he’d been looking for was practical.

  And better yet, she was right next door. Sure, “next door” was about six miles out here on these back roads that crisscrossed the fields and looped up into the hills, but that was part of what made Abby the right choice. She wasn’t his mother or his late wife, both outsiders who’d imagined their lives out here would be like a lazy summer’s afternoon beneath that endless blue Colorado sky. Abby wouldn’t have to figure out a way to adjust to the brutal winters or the aching quiet of the land that Gray knew some felt like loneliness instead of hope. She knew how far it was into town and the fact the road over the hill shut down at least three or four times each winter. She’d grown up in these fields, with nothing some days but the howl of the wind and the kind of inbred country stubbornness that allowed a person to call that “invigorating.”

  She was the perfect choice. The only choice. Gray couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized that sooner and saved himself and Becca all these years alone.

  He’d been all for getting it done as soon as possible, since they suited so well and Becca had been all for it when he’d told her the news.

  This is a fantastic idea, Dad, she had said. Really. Abby is great.

  Gray was all for heading down to the courthouse and calling it a done deal.

  Or we could try getting to know each other, Abby had countered, her voice scratchy and hushed over the phone, as if she was cradling it between her cheek and shoulder. An image that stuck with Gray, for some reason, and made him wonder about all kinds of things. The scent of her skin. Its softness. What she might do if he tasted her there in the crook of her neck. I’m
not suggesting we date or anything so outlandish, but we could try talking to each other before we jump headfirst into an entire marriage.

  Gray didn’t really want to wait. Or talk. But he did.

  Because really, was she asking that much?

  They’d settled on Thanksgiving weekend as their wedding date, which was slightly more than three weeks since Amos had departed the mortal coil with a lot less fanfare than he’d required while alive. Family and friends would already be gathering for the holiday, so they could throw a party or something after their trip to the courthouse, which Abby had assured him she didn’t care about. But it turned out Martha Douglas had insisted.

  And Gray wasn’t about to start off his second round of married life by getting on the wrong side of Martha Douglas.

  It wasn’t too long of a wait, he told himself now as the truck jolted its way up the side of a hill. It was next weekend, which only felt like forever because he was finally at the end of all his years of forced solitude.

  And then it would be done. Abby would move in, they would get to know each other better, and they would figure out how to build a decent life on this ranch whether Brady approved or not. Gray might not have seen it done, not in his lifetime anyway, but he persisted in imagining it was possible.

  Everetts had been here forever. Some of them had to have been happy. Somewhere down there in the tangled roots of his family tree, or there wouldn’t have been so many of them through the generations.

  Gray didn’t see why he and Abby couldn’t be happy too. He was convinced it had to be better to dive into a marriage with no unrealistic expectations. With everything laid out on the table up front. That had to take the edge off—and Lord knew, Cristina had left him pretty much allergic to any kind of edginess. He wanted a different kind of sweet this time. Simple and real. Not a woman who pretended one thing to his face and was something else entirely behind his back.

  He wanted Abby, who had somehow managed to get him talking on the phone. Just talking. Something he couldn’t say he’d ever done. Not deliberately. And certainly not every night for a week.

  Gray had learned a lot of interesting things in that week.

  He learned the different tones in her voice. The way she laughed, or even giggled occasionally. He discovered she wasn’t any kind of pushover. She was happy to argue with him if it mattered to her, which he respected. He learned how she sounded when she was teasing him, and the somber note she used when she was being more serious than she wanted to admit.

  Gray had never spent much time on the telephone. He considered his cell phone a necessary evil, because he was a doer, not a talker. But he was the one who had started them down the road of phone calls, and he couldn’t say he minded ending his evenings by talking to Abby.

  It boded well for the evenings they’d have together in the ranch house. Soon.

  The sun was starting to peek up over the eastern range in earnest when Gray finally bumped his way up the last bit of hill to the pasture. There were already trucks there, his foreman and hands drinking coffee from their thermoses while they waited for him, and he knew he needed to stop brooding about his personal life.

  Because this was just another day at the ranch. Brady might not understand that. Maybe it wasn’t fair that Gray expected him to, because if he was capable of grasping what the ranch meant, he wouldn’t have left skid marks getting away from it when he was eighteen. He would have stayed. He would have put his sweat and blood into the land the way Everetts had been doing for nearly a century and a half.

  The sun pushed itself over the ridge then, bathing the cold fields with thick, golden light. And Gray knew that really, he didn’t need his little brother to understand.

  He just hoped like hell that Abby would.

  8

  “I don’t know how to tell you this without coming right out and saying it,” Grandma said in a too-steady, too-intent way that instantly put Abby on her guard.

  Grandma was peeling potatoes at the kitchen table in the farmhouse, her expression placid while her gnarled hands moved deftly. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Abby was getting married—married—on Saturday. To Gray Everett. Gray Everett.

  It was all her dreams come true, and none of them, all at once.

  So of course there was bad news.

  “That always bodes well,” she said, trying to remain upbeat. Or at least sound it.

  Grandma didn’t react to that. She kept peeling her potatoes as if she could keep doing it forever. More importantly, she didn’t look up.

  A heavy, all-too-familiar weight thickened inside of Abby, three parts dread and one part sick experience. It was always there, lying in wait and ready to roll out and smother her at a moment’s notice.

  Because there was only one reason for her grandmother to worry about telling her something instead of coming right out and saying it the way she did everything else. And it was always and ever the same reason.

  Lily.

  “Your mother has decided that this is one of her on years,” Grandma said evenly. Because that was the charming shorthand they’d developed to discuss the times Lily actually condescended to appear in the general vicinity of a major holiday. “You know I always invite her to Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “That doesn’t mean she has to come.” Abby found herself scowling ferociously at her own pile of peelings. Bright orange curls of carrots because she and Grandma loved their carrot cake in addition to the carrots they’d use to make more traditional side dishes. “It’s been five years, at least. I was under the impression she was never coming home for the holidays again.”

  “No one is more surprised than me.”

  Snick. Snick. Snick. That was the only sound in the kitchen for what felt like an eternity as they peeled, the heaviness of all the things they weren’t talking about seeming to expand with every second, blacker and darker than the late autumn night outside the kitchen windows.

  “We’re not having our usual Thanksgiving,” Abby said fiercely, fighting to keep the thickness out of her voice. “Does she know that?”

  Thanksgiving usually involved treks deeper into the mountains to the dairy farms where Grandma had grown up, where Abby had swathes of second cousins and huge, loud family dinners to choose from. Lily had declared herself allergic to what she called “the milk run” ages ago. But this was an odd year in every respect, because Gray had suggested Abby and her grandmother come over to his house—the house that would be hers too in a matter of days.

  Seems like a good opportunity to spend some time together as a family, he’d said in that raspy, lazy voice of his that was the last thing Abby heard before she went to bed at night and the only thing she thought about all day.

  She got overheated thinking about it.

  “She knows.” Grandma sounded resigned. “And you know your mother. It’s more than likely she won’t turn up. But I wanted to give you a warning.”

  Abby suddenly felt a searing sort of pain at her temples and wrestled her shoulders down from around her ears. She cleared her throat. “Grandma. Please tell me you didn’t tell her…”

  “That her only child was getting married? Of course I did.”

  “Grandma.”

  Grandma put down her potato and her paring knife, and met Abby’s gaze. “I didn’t tell her to hurt you, Abby. But she is your mother. And my daughter. Not telling her felt like a lie.”

  And Martha Douglas was no liar. She didn’t stretch the truth. She didn’t pretend this or that to save someone’s feelings. She shot from the hip, and that was one of the things Abby had always loved most about her.

  But it also meant … situations like this.

  If it had been up to Abby, she would have written her mother off years ago. Instead, she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop where Lily was concerned. She could turn up at any time and had, because she knew she was always welcome in her parents’ house. The fact that her only child wanted nothing to do with her didn’t appear to concern her in th
e least.

  On the contrary, she seemed to delight in it.

  Abby had spent her life blinking back angry tears, torn between feelings of betrayal on the one hand—Why couldn’t Grandma and Grandpa stand up for her? Why couldn’t they dismiss Lily the way she’d dismissed them a thousand times?—and a sad sort of compassion for two parents who couldn’t really understand the child they’d brought into the world or the damage she did.

  All while she nursed this scraped-raw feeling, so big and bright in her chest that she sometimes wondered if she would collapse into it. When she thought about family with Gray, she had no idea what that would look like, but she wanted … more than these terrible, vicious moments that made her feel small.

  She wanted more than the ache inside her like a tide, pitiless and mean.

  Abby frowned at her carrots so hard it made more than her temples hurt. “What did she say when you told her I was getting married?”

  “You know your mother,” Grandma replied, sounding as if she was forcing that calm tone. “It’s hard to say what she feels about anything.”

  And that was the end of the conversation, because further comment would slide too close to gossip, to Grandma’s way of thinking.

  Because whether or not Abby stewed over the conversations they didn’t have and the things she couldn’t say was neither here nor there and never had been.

  She didn’t mention it to Gray in their phone call that night.

  “You okay?” he asked a few minutes into their usual back and forth, these little discussions about nothing in particular that Abby kept telling herself mattered. They were a foundation. They were a start, anyway.

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. She was curled up in a knot on the bed she’d slept in all her life, staring around the bedroom that had been the center of her world all that time. It was hard to imagine that this time next week, she’d live six miles down the road.

  With him.

  She had to take an extra couple of breaths.

  “You usually talk more,” Gray said quietly. “Second thoughts?”