A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  So, yeah. Gray wasn’t feeling nostalgic after all.

  “Sometimes I think you complain about every damn thing because you’re afraid if you don’t, you might actually like it here,” Gray said, without thinking it through. “And then what will you do with yourself?”

  Well, what the hell, he thought, maybe too defensively, as Brady’s jaw clenched tight. Why not?

  “I don’t hate it here,” Brady gritted out. Gray got the impression he was trying not to snap back the way he normally would. The magic of Thanksgiving at work, clearly. “But there are better ways to spend your days than working on land that’s never going to give you anything back. Or care if you live or die.”

  “Do big, bad cities like Denver care if you live or die? It must be my rural, uneducated ignorance talking here that I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s land, Gray.” Brady held his gaze. “It’s not a life.”

  Gray might have gone after that, but it was a freaking family holiday and he didn’t want to scare Abby off. He stood instead, moving over toward the makeshift bar Ty and Brady had set up on the side table because neither one of them wanted to walk a few more feet into the kitchen if they needed a drink.

  Gray wasn’t much of a drinker, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to blur his edges before he lost his cool when there wasn’t any food on the table yet. Amos had always waited for the actual food to come to flip his lid, and sometimes the table with it, the better to ruin everyone’s appetite as well as the holiday. And Gray was nothing if not a stickler for tradition.

  He smelled perfume, floral and cloying, and in the next second, Lily Douglas was right there beside him. A little too close beside him.

  “Gray Everett,” she purred at him, filling up a glass with white wine Gray was certain she didn’t need. “Haven’t you grown up handsome?”

  A lot like one of those women Gray had gone out of his way not to meet in a sleazy bar somewhere. As if her daughter, the woman he was marrying in two days, wasn’t in the next room cooking for them.

  Gray fixed her with the kind of blank look he usually saved for unscrupulous bankers, which was to say all bankers, and then excused himself.

  But he watched her. She had too much to drink with Ty, then even more all by herself when Ty roused himself to help Becca set the table, and Gray figured she’d decided that gave her license to let loose when they finally all sat down. A snide comment here, a sly sort of smile there, just to liven up the festivities.

  Mashed potatoes couldn’t make it down the table without a comment about “stick-to-your-ribs farm dinners.” The stuffing, which made Gray want to weep with joy though he would never actually do that kind of thing, made Lily muse about fitting into her high school jeans. Loudly.

  Gray would have ignored her entirely because she appeared to be talking to herself, but Abby stopped eating. She bowed her head and stared at her plate instead. Gray watched color stain her ears and had to talk himself out of throwing a few choice words Lily’s way. Lily was her mother, he reminded himself.

  He didn’t get mouthy with people’s mothers no matter how drunk they were at his table.

  And no matter how wide his own daughter’s eyes were as she looked back and forth between Abby and Lily.

  “I can’t tell you how grateful we are,” Lily cooed when everyone except Abby had stuffed themselves silly on Martha’s good cooking and were sitting around the table, trying to breathe.

  “Grateful?” Abby asked, her voice tight and her gaze still on her plate. “You? Are you sure that’s the right word?”

  Lily ignored her daughter. She leaned forward, her smile like a razor and aimed straight at Gray. “Here between family, I know it’s all right to say that no one expected our Abby to catch any man’s notice.”

  Lily let out a peal of laughter to go along with the scorn in her voice and didn’t seem to know—or care—that no one was laughing with her.

  “Lillian Douglas.” Martha sounded tired and, for once, as old as her years. “You know full well this isn’t the time or place.”

  “What?” Lily asked, smirking as she sat back in her chair, a triumphant look on her face that Gray couldn’t read. But he knew he didn’t like it. “You might not be grateful, but I am. It kept me up nights, wondering what would become of her.”

  “Stop,” Becca whispered harshly from beside Gray. It was a sound he’d never heard her make.

  But before he could react to it, there was a scraping sound. It took him a second to realize that it was Abby, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet.

  She looked pale. But strong. She stared down at her mother for a moment, then shifted her gaze to Gray.

  “It’s only going to go downhill from here,” she said quietly. Steadily. “And here’s a spoiler alert. It always goes downhill.”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer or for Lily to laugh at her some more. She walked stiffly from the room.

  Becca was gaping at Gray like she expected him to fix everything. Brady was glaring across the table as if Lily was his next rant. Even Ty was frowning, suggesting something had finally penetrated his whiskey haze. But Gray didn’t need any help getting his temper up—he needed to make sure he didn’t lose it and make everything Amos-level worse.

  He stared at Lily. Lillian. Whatever the hell she called herself.

  “You’re a guest in my house,” he said quietly, and for once Brady didn’t break in to argue whose house it was. “A house that’s going to be Abby’s before Sunday. And I don’t care who you are. If you talk to her like that again beneath this roof, you’re going to have to leave and you won’t be welcome back.”

  He found himself up and on his feet, looking in the kitchen for Abby. But she wasn’t there. He wondered if she’d headed upstairs or into the living room, but then he saw flash of movement at the corner of his eye, through the kitchen windows, and realized she’d headed out into the yard.

  Without a coat when the temperature had been dropping all day.

  He grabbed his off the peg, and an extra fleece. He walked outside and breathed in the wind that rushed straight down from the snowcapped mountaintops, filling his lungs and clearing his head. He shrugged into his jacket as he moved, keeping his gaze on Abby. She’d stopped at the fence next to the barn and was already shivering, her arms wrapped around her, trying to warm herself up when she was only wearing the thin layer of the pretty shirt she had on.

  Gray stopped next to her and settled the fleece on her shoulders. Hesitantly, like she was one of the jumpy, nervous animals he spent so much of his life trying to soothe. But she didn’t try to bite or kick at him. She threaded her arms through the fleece’s sleeves and zipped it all the way up to her chin.

  They stood there together out in the wind and quiet, staring out at the winter fields through the falling dark.

  “Well,” Abby said after a while, with a kind of pointed brightness that seemed to wedge its way between Gray’s ribs and stick there, “that was humiliating.”

  “She always like that?”

  Abby made a noise that could have been a sigh. Or a sob. Or anything in between. “No. Sometimes she’s much worse. Believe it or not, she was on her best behavior for you today.”

  Gray was no good at talking. He was no good at digging around in emotions and finding the right words. But he hated feeling helpless, especially when he could tell that Abby wasn’t only upset—she was trying her best to hide it.

  He didn’t know why that about killed him.

  “Hey.” He reached over and took her shoulders in his hands, turning her to face him. And then he didn’t let go the way he should have. “The only thing that matters is you and me. Not what anyone else says or thinks or does.”

  Her mouth trembled, and he would have liked a punch to the face a lot more. He wouldn’t have felt it shatter its way around inside of him. He wouldn’t have felt it like this.

  “I don’t…” She swallowed, and Gray was lost somewhere between her too-b
right eyes and that mouth. She was looking at him like he could either pick up the planet and carry it around with him, or break her in two. And like she had no idea which way he was going to go. “I never wanted you, of all people, to hear the things she says about me.”

  “I don’t care what other people say, Abby. I care what I think.”

  “She wears people down. It’s her gift. You have no idea what she can—”

  “All she is to me is the woman who had you and left you with your grandmother a long time ago,” Gray interrupted gruffly. “What can she do? And why would I listen to a word she says?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked small then. Or miserable, maybe. Her gaze got brighter, and that pointed, wedged thing in Gray’s ribs started to ache. Especially when her voice broke. “Maybe you should. Maybe she’s right.”

  Gray was aware of the wind and the crisply sweet scent of impending snow. He could smell the earth beneath him, the horses and the barn, but better than all of that was Abby and the way she looked there, zipped up in a fleece that had once belonged to Ty or Brady. It was much too big, and she was everything he’d wanted and nothing he’d expected, and he didn’t recognize the urge that made him hold her shoulders tighter.

  On the other hand, he had no trouble recognizing the need that rolled through him, pooling heavily in his sex. More than that, he understood that if he didn’t taste her again, right now, he was going to lose it in a way that had nothing to do with the temper he was determined to keep locked down tight.

  Gray pulled her closer and liked the way her expression changed. Her gaze heated and that flush warmed her cheeks again.

  And when he lowered his mouth to hers, she met him.

  She was hot and yielding, sweet and right. She surged up on her toes, and he felt her hands on his stomach where he hadn’t closed his coat.

  He remembered that kiss in her grandmother’s house like it had been in black and white, but this was all color, bright and wild.

  And he wanted more.

  He wanted everything.

  Gray angled his head, and everything was hotter. Fire and need, and a longing so pure and so intense he might explode with it.

  He wrapped her in his arms and bent her back, unable to get close enough. He wanted her naked. He wanted her beneath him, above him.

  God, the ways he wanted her, shooting through him like wildfire and clouding his head.

  He backed her into the fence and fit himself between her legs, leaning a bit so he could get himself where he wanted to be, cradled between her thighs.

  Abby moaned against his mouth, and Gray shoved aside that last tiny part of him that tried to whisper that there was something bizarre about the fact it was Abby Douglas who was lighting him up like this.

  She was everything he wanted. She was so much more than he’d imagined.

  He laughed when she gasped as his hand found its way beneath her fleece and shirt.

  “Too cold?” he asked.

  “Uh. Not cold at all.” Her face reddened, her lips were full from his, and Gray had no idea how he wasn’t inside her. “Just … new.”

  He kissed her again, deeper and harder, and traced a lazy little pattern right there above the waistband of her jeans. This way, then that. Just his rough fingertips against the impossible satin of her belly.

  And he could taste the way she shook. He could feel it.

  He pulled his mouth from hers while all the need and chaos clamoring inside him was still this side of manageable.

  “We’re outside. In full view of the house where my daughter and your grandmother are.” He gritted the words out. And had to bite back a groan when Abby opened her eyes, and he could see they were a dazed dark gold that made him feel like a god. A god who was so hungry for her that he seriously debated carrying her off to the barn right here and now.

  “Not to mention your brothers,” she said, as if she was coming back to him from far, far away.

  “I try not to think about my brothers. And it would be okay with me if you never did, especially at a moment like this.”

  Her smile was so big and so wide then, he thought it might dwarf the mountains all around them. He didn’t realize he was smiling too until she reached up and touched his jaw as if she’d never seen anything like it. He knew the feeling.

  Gray pulled his hand away from her soft belly and wrapped it around hers.

  “Come on,” he said, his voice too rough and that powerful need making his knees want to bend. “We need to go back inside before we … don’t.”

  Abby didn’t move. “Would it be a bad thing if we … didn’t?”

  Gray was tormented with scorching hot visions of what he could do in that barn. All the ways he could feast on this woman, making Thanksgiving look like a light snack in comparison—

  “No,” he said. As much to himself as to her. “I don’t want our first time to have anything to do with your mother. I want it to have everything to do with you. With me. With us. We’re getting married in two days. We can wait and do it properly.”

  Abby frowned at him, her face still flushed and her mouth still soft, and it might have been the cutest thing Gray had ever seen.

  “What if I don’t want to wait?” she demanded in a voice he could only call sulky.

  He shouldn’t have liked that. Yet he wanted nothing more than to pull her close and eat her alive. And this time, he could feel his own smile as he looked at her.

  “Abby Douglas,” he drawled in mock outrage. “I’ll thank you to respect my virtue.”

  “I don’t see why you holding onto your virtue trumps my wanting to get rid of mine,” she retorted. “Right now.”

  He wasn’t sure he saw either. But he reminded himself he had a houseful of people, including an impressionable teenager and at least two drunk family members. They’d be married soon enough.

  Even if two days currently felt like centuries.

  “Because I’m bigger than you, and I say so.”

  Her frown deepened, but it only made Gray laugh. He pulled her close again and kissed her, hard. She sighed at that, there against his mouth, but when he pulled back her face had softened.

  “You’ll make it,” he told her, and he was buzzing with all that need and desire, mixed in with a kind of hope he was afraid to look at too closely. Could things really be this good? Was this truly going to work out the way he’d been half-afraid to imagine it could? “And I’ll make up for this, I promise.”

  All that heat was in her eyes when she slowly smiled back at him, that flush he was quickly becoming obsessed with making her cheeks glow.

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” she said, quiet and deliciously needy.

  Making him wonder how the hell he was going to make it through the rest of the day, much less to Saturday.

  10

  It seemed to take whole years, long and torturous ones, but Saturday finally came.

  Abby had spent late Thursday night and all of Friday packing up her things. She’d never moved anywhere before, and she found the process of going through everything she’d collected over the course of her thirty years as daunting as it was fascinating. Why had she kept every note she’d passed to Hope and Rae in class? Why had she carefully assembled boxes full of her old stuffed animals? And did she need to carry them with her into her new life?

  “You don’t have to decide whether to take it or trash it today,” Grandma had said on Friday morning when Abby had come down into the kitchen for more garbage bags. “This house isn’t going anywhere. You can leave things here if you like.”

  “We’re only supposed to keep things that bring us joy. Not store them away in the attic because we don’t know why we have them.”

  Grandma had gazed at Abby for a moment over the coupons she liked to clip and save, yet always forgot to use. “If things are what bring you joy, Abigail, you can expect precious little of it.”

  That stuck with Abby as she finally unburdened herself of the clothes she was never going to fit in o
r like enough to wear more than once a year. And she’d put a name to that fizzy, almost-uncomfortable feeling in her gut. It was hopeful. It was … longing, maybe. It was as close to joy as she knew how to get.

  Because, yes, she was marrying a man she’d known all her life and yet didn’t really know at all. But there was the kissing to consider.

  Different from the way he’d kissed her here in the farmhouse. Different but better. Hotter.

  Abby wasn’t entirely certain how she’d survived it. The whole thing seemed like a dream—the kind of dream she’d had a lot, actually. Lily’s usual behavior over the Thanksgiving table, Abby’s decision to walk away rather than engage, but instead of the usual, unsatisfying conclusion to interactions with her mother, Gray had been there to sweep it away. To make it better, simply because he was … him.

  Solid. Sure.

  That would have been enough. If all Gray had done was make sure she was warm and stand there with her a while, out by the fence with that sweeping view across the Everett fields, it would have been more than enough. Abby would have held that, warm and sweet, inside her. Maybe forever.

  But he hadn’t stopped there.

  With every box or bag she’d taken downstairs since those deliriously hot moments out in the cold with him, she’d run the gauntlet of her mother’s snide comments. Lily had set herself up in the front room, likely because it allowed her to watch the comings and goings of everyone in the house, and had taken the opportunity to work her usual magic.

  “I want to come back in my next life as a husky, giant farm girl,” she said once, not glancing up from the phone she kept in her hand at all times.

  Because she loved nothing more than to comment on Abby’s weight and build—though she never used those words, of course. Or said anything directly.

  Lily lived for plausible deniability.

  But Abby had Gray now, impossible as it still was to believe. She’d felt the way his hard hands had curved around her shoulders. The way he’d looked at her, stern on the surface and that other, warmer thing beneath.