A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  You knew what you were getting into, she reminded herself as she sat on Gray’s big, leather couch with her book. She found herself tracing cabbages against the leather, as if she could make them appear that way. You know how little Grandpa was around when there were things to be done in the orchards.

  She ought to have been happy. Ecstatic, even. She got to live her life exactly as she’d been living it, only she got to spend time with Gray too. It was her dearest fantasy come true, and she should have been joyful as she sat out on that couch.

  She hadn’t meant to fall asleep in the living room that night, but she’d stirred awake when she’d felt herself lifted, then turned against his shoulder.

  “Are you waiting for me?” Gray had asked in that deep, low rumble while he carried her, his arms and chest so warm it was better than a fire.

  Abby hadn’t meant to wait for him. But once he’d asked the question it was clear to them both that, of course, that’s what she’d been doing. Because she didn’t have it in her to slip into a bed she was expected to share with him. Not without any guidance.

  She scolded herself not to get used to being carried around in his arms. It felt too good. It made her too … dreamy.

  Upstairs in the bedroom, their bedroom, she’d been flushed and overly aware of every move she made as the two of them had navigated their way around the room together, in and out of the bathroom they now shared. Getting ready to sleep together.

  “I didn’t want to take any space that you were keeping for you,” she said nervously when he paused at the closet door, and she knew—she just knew—he was eyeing the clothes she’d hung in there. “I can move everything around again if this doesn’t work. I wanted to get the boxes—”

  “It’s fine.” He turned and studied her expression a moment. “It’s good, Abby. Whatever you want.”

  She’d wanted more of the things he’d taught her the night before, stretched out in that hotel bed, all sensation and greed. But she certainly didn’t know how to ask for it.

  Abby had pulled on the usual long T-shirt she wore to sleep in and did her best to ignore it when Gray stripped down to his boxers. Meaning, she’d nearly fainted, but hadn’t actually toppled over.

  And when he’d headed toward the bed, she’d done the same, afraid that her heart was thumping loud enough for him to hear it. Or possibly kill her. They both crawled under the covers, as if that was normal. As if they did that every single night and always had. Abby was wired and wide-awake, but still, when Gray turned off his light, she turned off hers too.

  Then she’d lain there in the dark, her eyes wide and her heartbeat wild, having no idea what was supposed to happen. Or if anything was supposed to happen. She didn’t know how any of this was meant to work.

  Her head was spinning so fast she was surprised it wasn’t rocking the bed when Gray turned over and wrapped his arm around her middle, and everything in her … stilled.

  “Hello, wife,” he’d murmured, there in the dark, his mouth to her neck.

  And then he’d taught her how to melt.

  Tonight, standing in the door of his study, Abby was used to their routine now. Gray didn’t touch her much during the day. He saved it all for those nights when the lights went out and it was only the two of them in a hushed dark of their bedroom.

  Abby told herself that would have to be enough. It was so much more than she’d ever imagined.

  “You going to say something?” Gray didn’t look up as he spoke. “Or are you just going to stand there?”

  Abby moved into the room and took a seat on the other side of his desk. “Do you have to do this much work every night?”

  “I swear the paperwork grows and grows,” he said darkly. “If something happens and I skip a few days, I’m backlogged for months. And then sooner or later, all hell breaks loose. I took over most of it for my dad a few years ago, but there were still a few things he was supposed to be doing. He wasn’t.”

  He threw down the pen he was using and sat back in his chair, looking tired. And rumpled. And delicious.

  “Can I help?” Abby asked.

  “Help?” he echoed, as if he couldn’t comprehend the word.

  “I like office work. I’m good at it. There’s no reason I can’t do some of it, is there?”

  “Not at all. I guess it never occurred to me that you would want to.”

  “Isn’t this supposed to be a team effort? You shutting yourself away in here every night to do a few angry hours of work doesn’t seem right. Not when I’m sitting around doing nothing.”

  A look of surprise moved over his face. He followed it with his hand. “I can’t say I’ve ever been on a team. I got used to doing things by myself a long time ago.”

  Abby wanted to rub that part of her chest that ached again as she pictured solitary Gray, always alone no matter how many people lived in this house with him. She didn’t.

  She smiled instead. “You? A lone wolf of a rancher? Never.”

  He blinked at that, and then a different sort of heat lit those dark green eyes of his.

  “Did you come in here to poke at me?”

  His drawl was different then. Thicker. And thrilling.

  It kicked around inside of her, so many brushfires they might consume her whole.

  “No,” she replied. “I didn’t even come in to help you, though now I feel badly that I didn’t offer that sooner.”

  Those crinkles in the corners of his eyes made her feel giddy. Again. “We’ve been married for eight days. There’s not a lot of sooner to worry about.”

  “I came in about Christmas.”

  The mood in the room shifted, abruptly. Gray’s gaze went cool and those laugh lines disappeared. Having convinced herself she’d misunderstood the tension at the dinner table, Abby wasn’t prepared. It was alarming, so Abby sat a bit straighter and swallowed, hard. She couldn’t say she liked the way Gray was studying her.

  Too much steel. Not enough heat. “I told you I like to keep things simple at Christmas.”

  That look he was giving her made her even more nervous than she already felt. She tried to ignore it. “Becca talked to me about it on the drive home today. I don’t know if you remember what we do over at the farmhouse—”

  “I don’t like Christmas, Abby. I don’t know how to be more plain.”

  It was like a wall had come down between them. Abby wanted to shove at it with her hands, but she couldn’t move.

  “I don’t know what that means. No tree? No lights? No decorations of any kind?” A more horrible possibility occurred to her. “You don’t mean no presents?”

  “Becca took you for a little ride,” Gray said after a moment. “She already knew what the answer would be. She wanted it to be directed at someone else, for a change.” He stared at her for another moment or two, and then a faint crease appeared between his brows. “You’re staring at me as if I’m not making sense.”

  “Because you’re not. Are you telling me that you don’t celebrate Christmas?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “… at all?”

  He shifted in his chair, impatiently.

  As if she was annoying him.

  Treating her like an annoyance was a surefire way to make her curl up inside herself and crawl away, but Abby forced herself to stay where she was. Gray’s frown deepened.

  “I don’t appreciate being spoken to like something’s wrong with me,” he said, low and clipped. “You don’t have to understand it. Everetts haven’t celebrated Christmas in years. Not my brothers, not me. Definitely not Amos. That’s just how it is.”

  “You’re all grown men who can do as you like. What about your daughter?”

  What about me? she didn’t quite dare ask.

  Because she doubted she’d like his reply.

  “Becca goes and sees her grandparents at some point over her Christmas break every year, and from what I hear, they do it up. That’s more than enough Christmas.”

  “Gray. You sou
nd very sincere and very certain, but you really should have brought this up before. Because I would have told you that ‘no Christmas’ is not a concept I understand.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  There was a note of finality his voice. But on the off chance she’d missed it, he redirected his attention to his paperwork, effectively dismissing her where she sat.

  Abby had loved this man forever. She was already discovering the image she’d had in her head was very different than the reality, but until now, all those differences had been kind of wonderful.

  There was a huge part of her that was urging her to walk out of the room. There was no point drawing lines in the sand if she had no intention of doing anything about them. She wasn’t going to leave him after a week, no matter what holidays he celebrated. She didn’t want to leave him at all.

  But there was small voice inside of her whispering that if she backed down on something that mattered to her now, she always would.

  She’d married this man because she loved him. He might not love her back. Maybe he never would. But if there was any chance at all that he might, however small, Abby knew with every fiber of her being that she had to be her. No matter if that disrupted these routines she’d already come to like so much.

  It didn’t matter that a huge part of her wanted to slink away and do what he asked, for fear he’d take all the marvelous things he’d given her away. His body. That smile. This marriage she’d never dreamed could ever happen.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” Abby said quietly. “But that’s not going to work for me.”

  15

  Gray had never seen that expression on Abby’s face before.

  Stubborn, yes—but not in that adolescent way that Becca got stubborn. Abby didn’t look emotional at all. Her gaze was cool and direct. There wasn’t any trace of red on her cheeks.

  There was no reason that should make Gray uncomfortable.

  He refused to use the word “nervous.”

  “What do you mean it’s not going to work for you?” he demanded.

  He expected her to crumple and blush. She didn’t.

  “I love Christmas,” Abby said simply. “I decorate the farmhouse with Grandma every year, and I do the coffeehouse too. And it’s still not enough. I love the lights. I love stockings over the fire. I love baking Christmas cookies, delivering them around town, and then baking some more. I like the house to smell like mulled cider and sugar at all times. And that’s not even getting into the Christmas tree.”

  “We’re not doing any of that.”

  His teeth were gritted and his hands were balled into fists, and he hated that she was making him feel out of control. He’d already done out of control. He’d married Abby for peace.

  “I love going through the boxes of ornaments that Grandma and I have collected over the years,” Abby continued as if she hadn’t heard him. Or worse, didn’t care. “Every ornament is a story. A memory. They’re precious and beautiful, and if I could wear them on my heart, I would.”

  “No.” Gray was astonished they were still discussing this.

  He preferred the Abby who gazed at him as if he were a dream she’d had, come true there in front of her. He’d overlooked the fact that she’d managed that coffeehouse for years, which suggested she had more backbone than he’d ever seen in action before. Given that managers had to deal with hiring and firing and other kinds of decisive action. And it wasn’t that he had anything against a backbone in general. He wanted her to have one, out here in these fields that could take far more than they gave, but he didn’t want it used as a weapon against him.

  “I think you’re misunderstanding me.” Abby smiled at him, but it wasn’t that sweet smile he’d been getting used to this past week, up there in that bed of his that he’d never spent so much time obsessing about before. “I’m not asking your permission.”

  An old, familiar darkness roused itself inside of him, shook itself off, and sat up tall. And as much as Gray hated the things that made him like Amos, he did nothing to tamp it down.

  He should have known better. He should have laid down the law from the start. The problem was, he hadn’t expected all that damned chemistry. It had knocked him back, that first kiss. And then the sex had been way too good. Not only the night they’d gotten married, which Gray supposed he could chalk up to having waited all those years, but every night thereafter. If anything, it kept getting better. Abby was built for his hands, his mouth. He wasn’t sure he could ever get enough of her—but it had made him lose sight of his actual goals here, which had nothing to do with what happened between them in bed. That was a bonus.

  Gray needed to put more distance between them. Maybe he should have been glad she was apparently throwing down about Christmas, of all stupid things.

  “I get it,” he said, his voice hard. “You thought you’d come in here, butter me up with an offer of something you know would help me, and then demand something in return. Guess what? This isn’t a transaction. That’s not how this is going to work.”

  “This?” Abby repeated the word, and she looked paler than usual, but other than that, she was still. And no less focused than before. “Do you mean this marriage?”

  “This marriage. This life. This.”

  He jutted his chin to indicate the space between them.

  Him, her. This.

  Abby tipped her head to one side, her gaze darker than he’d ever seen it outside of a bed. “Do you get to decide what our marriage is? I could have sworn that was a team activity.”

  “I’m starting to remember why I don’t do teams. If you think you can come in here and manipulate me, whether it’s offers to do paperwork or access to your body or whatever else you have up your sleeve, you have another think coming. And I’d suggest you go on out there and get working on that second thought.”

  She stared at him for much too long. “Access to my body?”

  Gray shouldn’t have said that. He was folding the past into the present, and he knew better.

  But this was classic Cristina. It was like a terrible flashback. Her endless bait and switch, giving him something he wanted so she could take something he didn’t want to give, and he could still feel that cold shock fall through him when he’d realized what she was doing.

  It made him furious that Abby was no different.

  But it wasn’t a simple fury. It was threaded through with betrayal, and that was the part that gnawed at Gray, making him angrier than he ought to have been.

  “I didn’t trick you into this, Abby,” he gritted out. “You knew exactly what you were getting into.”

  “Really? Because I don’t recall you mentioning that you were the Grinch in the middle of our wedding ceremony.”

  “This isn’t a debate. You already got your answer. I’m not going to waste my time arguing about the fact you don’t like it.”

  Finally, color flooded her pretty face. But it didn’t make him feel any better.

  “So this is it? You get to lay down the law, and that’s the end of the discussion? Because I didn’t sign up for that either.”

  “I never made any secret about who I am or what I expect. Maybe you need to ask yourself why you imagined that would change once you moved in.”

  “Gray—”

  “I married you because I needed help, Abby. Not because I wanted grief. I get enough of that from my brothers. My kid. I don’t need it from you too.”

  He was letting that darkness in him get the better of him, he knew. But he couldn’t stop it. Just as he couldn’t control the rawness that had taken over his voice. God knew what expression he might have on his face.

  And the worst part was he had no idea what his new wife might do next.

  For a moment, she did nothing. She sat across from him, her cheeks hot and her eyes burning, and merely stared back at him. And it hit Gray how little he really knew her. He didn’t know what that steady gaze meant. He didn’t know how she handled her temper. His own mother had g
otten quieter and more thin-lipped. His short-lived stepmother had preferred stomping around the house in a fury, sharing her feelings with slammed doors, the heavy tread of her feet, and the odd glass or plate against a wall. Amos’s other girlfriends had run the gamut between operatic tears, threats, and in one particular case, actual attempts at bodily harm.

  Cristina, meanwhile, had preferred a war of attrition. Burned dinners. Sleeping in the guest room or once, notably, on the bathroom floor. Refusing to do any housework for weeks at a time. And then, when she was really mad at him, she’d sweetly agreed with every word he said and had gone out and cheated on him behind his back.

  He told himself it was curiosity, nothing more, rolling around inside of him as he waited to see which way Abby would go. There was no reason for him to feel tense, or scalded by a familiar and acrid disappointment.

  After an eternity, Abby shifted slightly. Then rose to her feet in that unconsciously graceful manner of hers that drove Gray crazy. Not least because she was totally unaware of the effect it had on him.

  “My offer to help with the paperwork stands,” she said, and there was something about the even tone she used that set his teeth on edge. “I don’t offer my help with strings attached.”

  “Meaning I do?”

  Abby shrugged. “I can’t possibly answer that. As you’ve made very clear, I don’t know you at all.”

  Gray didn’t want to yell. He didn’t want to start down that road. He wasn’t sure why he felt halfway down it already. “You know everything you need to know.”

  “I know a whole lot more tonight.”

  “Don’t make a holiday into a war, Abby.”

  “Because, of course, there’s nothing between obedience and war. Certainly not anything that looks like compromise. Got it.”

  “I get that you want to fight about this.” But it was Gray whose fists were clenched. “I still have a couple hours of work left, and this isn’t making it go any faster.”

  Abby looked down at him and she didn’t do anything, particularly. And still, he felt small. Like a tightly-packed ball of all that ugliness he’d never wanted in his life. All that darkness he did his best to pretend wasn’t there inside of him, even when it sloshed around the way it did now.