A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  “You look like you’re staying a while.” Gray’s tone was not welcoming. In the least. “Am I missing something?”

  “It’s Christmas, Gray. People come home for Christmas. Even me.”

  The last thing Gray wanted to hear about from anyone, but especially his little brother, was the looming horror of another Christmas. Especially after what had happened with Abby.

  “Christmas isn’t for weeks.”

  “Just about ten days, actually. You do know the date, right? And how Christmas is on the same day every year, rain or shine or seven feet of snow?”

  “You usually rush in Christmas Eve and head out as soon as possible Christmas Day, weather permitting. Why the change?”

  A kind of shadow moved over Brady’s face, and if Gray didn’t know better, he might have been tempted to imagine he’d hurt Brady’s feelings. He didn’t like the dark, oily thing that kicked around inside him then. It was much too close to outright shame, and it just made him mad.

  “The reason I used to avoid coming home is dead now.” Brady was stiff. “Though you’re shaping up to be the same kind of reason.”

  Gray had no memory of getting to his feet. One minute he was sitting on his couch, a sports channel playing on the TV, pretending he was still enjoying his quiet evening alone. And the next he was standing there like he was getting ready to throw down with his brother the way they had as kids.

  It was Christmas. Christmas, again. He was so damned tired of hearing about Christmas. Brady should have known better.

  But then, Brady should have known better about a whole lot of things.

  “I know you didn’t just compare me to Dad.”

  “If the lonely ranch house fits, brother,” Brady retorted, offering Gray the kind of slick smile that was as good as two raised middle fingers.

  Gray didn’t have it in him to hold back. Not anymore. Not when things were finally okay—so okay, in fact, that he’d actually allowed himself a measure of cautious optimism that they might stay that way.

  “You have realtors calling me on the phone when I told you I didn’t want to sell,” he gritted out. “You roll in here every weekend to live off the ranch you don’t do anything to support. Maybe you’re counting your money in advance. But you think I’m like Dad? Me?” He let out a bitter laugh. “Take a look in the mirror, Brady. You give nothing. You complain and you take and you complain some more. You act like you’re owed something, but you don’t do a single thing to earn it.”

  Brady rubbed a hand over his hair, and Gray recognized it as a thing he did himself when he was trying not to lose his cool. He didn’t like the comparison.

  “I’m more than a little tired of you talking to me like I’m still in diapers.”

  “Then don’t act like it.” Gray was aware that they were squared off with only a few feet between them. His hands were in fists, and he could see Brady’s were as well. And he didn’t want to be that dark thing he could feel inside of him, pulsing and thick. He didn’t want to give into it. But the urge to punctuate this conversation with the fist to the face Brady so richly deserved was almost overwhelming. “You keep telling me you’re a grown man. Prove it. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Brady. Let me know when you figure that out.”

  Brady took a step toward him, that same shadowed look on his face, even with that temper crackling his gaze. “You might want to put your persecution complex aside for five minutes, Gray. Everyone’s not out to get you. I’m certainly not out to get you.”

  “You’re real supportive. I can tell. That’s why you had some slick scumbag from Denver call and talk at me about ‘parcels’ and ‘build lots’ and ‘planned communities.’”

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen. But it doesn’t hurt us to have all the information, does it? It’s not an attack on you that I want to know exactly how much we’re worth after all those years of Dad claiming the bank was three seconds away from taking everything.” He blew out a breath. “Doesn’t it make sense to figure out exactly what it is you’re fighting so hard to protect?”

  “Because you’re just that altruistic.”

  “You could try trusting me,” Brady threw at him.

  “Oh, son,” came Ty’s lazy drawl from the kitchen. “Don’t you know by now? Saint Gray doesn’t trust anyone but his own self.”

  Saint Gray. Gray didn’t care for the way that echoed around in him, settling too hard in his gut. He also didn’t like the fact that Ty had walked into the house while Gray had been too busy trying not to kill Brady to notice.

  “Great. A pile on. It’s like the two of you are still the same little brats who used to follow me around.”

  “I’ve been called many things,” Ty said, that grin of his taking on a hard edge. “Terrible things, as a matter of fact, and most of them true. But I haven’t been a little brat following you around for a lifetime or two, Gray. You might want to let that go.”

  “He can’t lord it over everyone if he lets a single thing go, ever. Not one single thing.” Brady made a show of rolling his eyes. “The world would fall apart.”

  “Why are either one of you here?” Gray asked, more loudly than he’d planned. He glared at one, then the other. “You’re happy to move right into an outbuilding and pretend you’re not on a bender, Ty, but the truth is, you could do that anywhere. And there’s a lot of real estate in these mountains, Brady. You’re so rich and fancy these days, go buy some. There’s no reason for either one of you to subject yourselves to being in my house, under my roof, eating food that’s in that refrigerator because of the work I do with my own two hands. I didn’t invite you. I certainly don’t need you—”

  “You made that part clear,” Ty drawled, daring to sound bored.

  “Repeatedly,” Brady agreed.

  “Is this where you tell me off for fighting with drunk people who aren’t in the room again, Ty?” Gray demanded. “Because guess what? I’m actually fighting with you. The drunk person who won’t get the hell out of the room I’m in.”

  “Once again, I don’t recall asking for your commentary on what I drink, how much I drink, or anything else,” Ty murmured, with a dangerous glint in his dark eyes. The way a man had when he was about one second away from taking a swing.

  They were all facing off now, in a weird trinity right there between the living room and the kitchen. Gray wanted to knock their heads together as if they were in an old movie. His hands twitched as if they planned to do it on their own.

  He wasn’t sure he had it in him to stop them.

  “Dad isn’t here anymore,” Brady said, his quiet tone cutting through the tension in the house like an axe falling.

  Ty blinked at that and looked away.

  Gray frowned. “What are you talking about? You were at his funeral. We all were. You know he’s not here.”

  “Dad’s not here,” Brady said again, more urgently. “But he might as well be sitting at that table, scribbling out that stupid will again and again. The man’s been in the earth for over a month, and he’s still pulling strings around here. We’re still at each other’s throats. We’re still fighting. Everything is exactly the way he left it. He’d be thrilled.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” Gray gritted at him.

  “Gray’s the martyr. Ty’s the drunk.” Brady listed both things off much too easily, glaring at each of them as he said them. “And I’m the kid. Congratulations, jackholes. We’re the living legacy of Amos Everett, exactly as he made us.”

  Gray didn’t know what to say to that. Because it wasn’t true, he assured himself, even as his gut twisted. It wasn’t completely true, anyway—

  But that was when Abby and Becca finally came home. First the headlights swept along the front windows. Then Gray could hear Abby’s car pull up out in the yard. And he guessed he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to do with the tense atmosphere in the ranch house. His brothers stared at the floor, the walls. Gray found himself with his hands on his hips.

  “What’s the
matter now?” Becca asked the second she came inside, sounding weird as she shrugged out of her jacket and looked from her uncles to Gray and back again.

  Gray took in his daughter’s appearance with a single glance. Red eyes. Too pale. And her voice was dull, which wasn’t like her—especially not these days when she seemed to be auditioning to be the world’s most constant cheerleader. He cut a glance to Abby as she came in behind Becca, who met his gaze and made a quick face that told him, without a word, that whatever it was, she’d handled it.

  It took Gray a minute to understand why that felt so warm inside of him. And when he did, he didn’t know where to put it. He wasn’t used to having another parent around. He wasn’t used to sharing the load.

  Or any load at all, a small voice deep inside him chimed in.

  “Your uncles and I were just having a family meeting,” Gray told Becca. “Everything’s fine.”

  He ignored the scoffing sound that Brady made at that, the same way he was ignoring the way Ty lounged against the nearest wall as if he was entirely too lazy—or too drunk—to stand up straight. And maybe it was the steady way he held Becca’s gaze that let her blow out a breath, then nod.

  “I assume you’ve all already eaten,” Abby said briskly, heaving a bunch of metal cookie sheets onto the nearest counter and then going back to hang up her coat. Cookie sheets that Gray knew, without having to ask, had something to do with Christmas. Hadn’t she said something about cookies? But he couldn’t get into that right now. “I was going to throw something together for Becca and me. Unless anyone else needs some food? Ty? Brady?”

  “I made chili,” Gray said gruffly. Reluctantly. And he wasn’t sure he liked the way everyone swiveled to look at him like he’d suddenly grown horns. “What? I can cook. Who do you think fed everyone around here the last ten years?”

  “Dad’s actually a great cook,” Becca said staunchly, because she was his girl. She straightened her shoulders like she was heading into battle. “And you’re lucky, because his chili is actually amazing.”

  Which was how Gray found himself sitting at the kitchen table with his entire family, all of them eating his chili and talking about random, impersonal things like traffic on the I-70 at this time of year and the icy, treacherous conditions on the Vail Pass that claimed unprepared tourists and the unwary every season because they braved it without the proper chains, snow tires, or four-wheel drive.

  But Gray had already eaten, so he didn’t have as much to distract him from what Brady had said.

  Or the fact the little brother he wanted so badly to dismiss had been right.

  Amos wasn’t here, but he might as well have been, slumped at his end of the table with that mean glitter in his narrowed eyes as he looked for his next target. Amos had loved nothing more than keeping everyone at each other’s throats. And Gray hadn’t noticed before tonight that it had only benefited Amos when they’d obliged him.

  Did he not trust his brothers because they weren’t trustworthy? Or because Amos had convinced him that he shouldn’t?

  Was he afraid of the darkness in him because he was like his father? Or had his father convinced him that all it would take was the slightest slip on Gray’s part and he’d be exactly the same as Amos—because he liked watching Gray fight himself?

  Gray didn’t know how to answer those questions. But he was all too able to identify the feeling that squatted on his chest then, heavy and misshapen.

  Grief.

  The grief he hadn’t felt at the funeral. The grief he hadn’t felt since, every single day on the ranch that passed without him missing his father at all.

  He felt it now.

  For the father he’d never had, sure. But more, for the family he’d missed out on, all these years with these brothers he hardly knew. The lies he’d swallowed down, one after the next, never bothering to ask himself if they were true. Or if Amos had always had a really good reason to make certain that everyone in the house hated each other and did nothing at all but react to him.

  He didn’t know how he was supposed to handle that revelation.

  It reminded him of the night he’d realized exactly what Cristina was doing. What she must have been doing for some time. The cell phone she never put down, always texting “friends” when she’d often complained she didn’t know anyone local, and taking care never to leave it out where he could see anything. Her sudden interest in nighttime “meetings” in town when he should have known that other mothers weren’t gathering together that late on school nights.

  He’d watched her get ready to go out one night. She’d been sitting at that prissy little princess table she’d loved, with all its mirrors, that he’d long since turned into kindling. Gray had pulled a muscle out in the fields that day and had been giving himself an extra long soak after the baby went down. And he’d been toweling himself off, standing there in the bedroom while she’d pouted at her reflection and made her eyes smoky.

  Just like that, he’d known.

  Everything had slipped out of place, all at once. The world. Him. As if the bottom gave out, everything was suddenly in a different language, and worst of all, it wasn’t only that Gray had lost the life he thought he was living. But the entire future he’d had planned too.

  It was knowing himself one moment and discovering he was a stranger to himself the next, trapped in a life he didn’t recognize.

  Because he remembered when Cristina had dressed up like that for him. And how long it had been since she’d bothered.

  Tonight that grief had a different flavor, but it was shot through with the same regrets that he hadn’t seen what was right in front of him. That he hadn’t noticed the signs. That he’d gone along with it until it was much too late to turn back.

  Maybe it was always too late to turn back.

  Becca left the dinner table first, murmuring something about homework and having to wash her hair. Gray let her go without comment, knowing enough about his daughter to understand that pushing her to share something with him before she was ready wouldn’t end well. She was too much like him for that. Ty headed out not long after, not meeting Gray’s gaze as he went. And Gray got the impression that Brady was deliberately biding his time at the table to prove that he wasn’t bothered by the conversation they’d had. Or the fight they’d almost let themselves have. But even Brady eventually excused himself, swiping up his duffle bag and heading down the hall off the living room toward the guest room he’d taken over.

  Then it was Gray and Abby in the kitchen, quietly doing the dishes together, making him feel a kind of peace he didn’t feel anywhere else. Not in this house, anyway, no matter how she’d changed it since she’d moved in. Not unless he was far out on his land somewhere, surrounded by nothing on all sides but silence and mountains.

  But that was how it felt to do this domestic dance with the woman he’d expected would help him, but not like this. Not quite like this. He ached to touch her. He missed her when she wasn’t home. He wanted her more by the day and the truth he was trying so hard not to admit to himself was that he liked it.

  He more than liked it.

  “What was that when we came in?” Abby asked quietly as she wiped down the counters. Gray finished loading the dishwasher and leaned back against it when it was closed. “You looked like you were about to rip each other’s throats out.”

  Gray’s instinct was to tell her that nothing had happened. That it wasn’t her business if something had. That he was on top of it, anyway.

  But she was bustling around his kitchen like she’d lived here forever. She liked to organize things, and she did it without a second thought, from the cupboards to the pantry to the overstuffed fridge. She made everything better, and Gray didn’t know what he was supposed to do with something so sneaky and impossible to ward off. Not when her gaze was so kind and gleamed like gold, and he wanted to be inside her so much it hurt. It actually hurt.

  Maybe that was why he opened his mouth and said the kind of things he never, ever said
out loud. Because he had no one to say it to. He never had. And because he’d never wanted to make it real by admitting it.

  “I don’t want to be like my father.” He sounded like a stranger, strained and rough. Abby froze, her eyes wide on his, and Gray supposed he looked like a stranger too. “I don’t want anything of him in me. Not one drop. I told myself it didn’t matter what he did because I was different. And yet somehow he died a month ago, but he might as well be alive and well because he’s living it up right here.” His fist hit his own chest. Hard. “He turned me into him year by year, and I didn’t even notice. I let him do it, Abby. I let him.”

  18

  Abby had been right.

  Gray’s mask of unbothered perfection was just that—a mask.

  But the fact she’d suspected it didn’t make the anguish on his face or in his voice any easier to bear.

  She’d always loved this man from afar. But she knew, without a shred of doubt, that she was in love with him tonight. Because she wanted to reach inside him and tear out the things that made him hurt. She wanted to do this with her own two hands and she would have done a whole lot more to ease that terrible look on his face, and that awful sound she’d never heard before in his voice.

  “What did you let him do?” she asked. She wanted to touch him, but she suspected that he’d be even more skittish than his daughter.

  And she knew that if she ever said the word skittish to him—about him—he would hate it.

  “All I want to do is take this dark thing inside of me and let it out. I want to punch through walls. I want to beat down both of my brothers for being the same jackasses they were when we were all teenagers. I want to flip tables like my father did. Why not? He might not have gotten what he wanted, but he always got a rise out of anyone unlucky enough to be around him.”

  Abby let him talk. She stayed where she was, leaning back against the counter in this kitchen that didn’t feel like home, exactly, but still felt like hers. The same way Gray did.

  And she kept her hands to herself. No matter how hard it was.