A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  “Sometimes I think I’m nothing like the old man,” Gray said bitterly. “But then nights like tonight, it turns out I’m a mirror of him. He would have loved knowing that. He always told me I was made like him, head to toe.”

  Abby had known Amos Everett all her life, and except for a vague height comparison, she didn’t think Gray was made like him at all. She’d always assumed that all the Everett brothers had gotten their looks from their mother.

  But she knew Gray wasn’t talking about superficial likenesses.

  “Tonight, when I stopped by my grandmother’s place, I saw my mother’s car,” Abby said after a moment, when it was clear Gray wasn’t going to continue letting that bitterness pour out of him. Likely because he was keeping it inside instead, where it would do nothing but poison him. She knew all about that. “I knew it was hers. And all I wanted to do in that moment was accelerate. Ram that car straight out of my grandmother’s yard. Then hit it a few more times, for fun.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t. The car is in one piece. So is Lily, which is probably more miraculous.”

  When he started to shake his head, Abby reached over and slid her hand into his. She braced herself for him to pull away. And his gaze was too dark as it touched hers, but he didn’t shake her off.

  Speaking of miracles.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think, Gray. We all think terrible things, all the time. We all have dark parts inside of us that whisper things we worry and sometimes hope we might listen to one day. But what matters is what you do.”

  “Sometimes,” Gray said with quiet conviction, “I worry I’m holding on by a thread. Just the thinnest little thread. And the next time Brady shows his face…”

  He shook his head, his fingers tightening around hers as he stiffened.

  “Brady is a thirty-four-year-old grown man. How many times have you beaten him up in all that time?”

  Gray gave her a look as if she was deliberately misunderstanding him. But he didn’t let go of her hand. “We were all a lot rowdier when we were younger.”

  “Roughhousing as a boy is normal. It doesn’t make you your father. You’re not your father.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do know it.”

  Abby shifted then, so she could take his other hand in hers too. Then she was standing there in front of him, her chin tilted so she could look him full in the face. Eye to eye. As if they were made to see each other clear, just like this.

  “Your father couldn’t hide who he was. I didn’t live in this house, but I knew. Everyone in the valley knew. And maybe what you should ask yourself isn’t why you didn’t fight him off yourself, but why no one intervened.”

  “You can’t tell a man how to raise his own children. I’m not sure anyone tried, especially once I was old enough to act like the adult in the house.”

  “But when was that?”

  She could feel the emotion in her gaze. She made no attempt to hide it. And Gray’s fingers tightened around hers, matching the almost convulsive way he swallowed, his gaze locked to hers.

  Which was answer enough.

  “I don’t think you’re talking about turning eighteen, Gray. If I had to guess, I’d imagine it was a long time before that. Were you eight? Twelve? How much responsibility did you give Becca at that age?”

  His hard mouth tightened. “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re not the only one who spent their whole life trying so hard to be perfect it crippled them, because the alternative was being like the parent you hate most in the world.”

  “I don’t hate my father.” The brackets around his mouth stood out. “And I wouldn’t call myself crippled. Or you.”

  “Hate. Love.” Abby shrugged. “All I ever wanted growing up was to be able to count on my mother. Just once. But I wanted that so desperately, with every single part of me, that sometimes I was afraid it might suffocate me. What word would you use to describe that?”

  “I felt sorry for him.” Gray’s voice was rough. As if the words were leaving marks as he spoke, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. “I thought living here was some kind of steadying influence. I was taking care of Becca and keeping the old man from killing himself. Two birds, one stone. It never occurred to me that he was spending all that time getting in my head.”

  “All the voices in my head are my mother,” Abby whispered, and it hadn’t dawned on her before that moment how true that was.

  Ponderous. Plain. A big girl. A not-very-bright country simpleton. Sneaky and two-faced one moment, plodding and dull the next.

  Not worthy of love—or even a telephone call, some years.

  Abby was the first to call herself forgettable. Except maybe she wasn’t the first. Maybe these days she said things like that—even if only to herself—to make sure it was clear that she knew what she was. That being exactly what her mother had always told her she was. With words, often. And with her neglect, always.

  It was one thing to fight Lily off when she was right there in front of Abby with that smirk at the ready and her running snide commentary. And it was something else entirely when Lily hadn’t been seen for years, and yet Abby still took care to dress herself so that her “hefty farmer’s shoulders” were minimized.

  But this wasn’t the time to think about her mother. Not when Gray was finally opening up to her, one hard crack at a time.

  “You should know that when my mother said nasty things to my face tonight, Becca didn’t hesitate to jump right in and defend me. It’s possible that even if your father is in your head, he’s not in hers.”

  “She’s a good kid. Maybe wound too tight, but I know where she gets that from.” Gray shook his head, his mouth tightening again. “I never thought too much about where I get things from. Maybe I should have. It took Brady, of all people, to point out that the old man is the only one who ever benefited from the three of us at each other’s throats.”

  “Maybe. But also, you do know that brothers are kind of famous for fighting with each other, right? Cain. Abel. Ring any bells?”

  Gray did nothing but look at her for a moment. A long moment. So deep and so long that it felt as intimate as a kiss. He squeezed her fingers in his, then let go.

  Abby figured he wouldn’t appreciate it much if she complained about that. So she bit her tongue the way she always did. And she headed upstairs, her husband behind her as he turned off the lights and made sure all the doors and windows were shut against the cold.

  It was still hard to believe that she got to live with this man. That she got to call him her husband. She got to move around the same bedroom as Gray every night, when the dark pressed in and the wind rattled the windows. She got to watch him strip down, toss his clothes in the hamper, and stand there in the bathroom with all his hard, muscled perfection on display. Better still, she got to crawl into the same bed with him.

  She kept waiting for it to get old. For the excitement she felt every time she slipped into her side of the bed to fade out.

  Tonight, Gray lay there beside her the way he often did, his hands stacked behind his head as he gazed up at the ceiling. And as much as Abby liked to keep this time sacred—or whatever the opposite of sacred was that included a whole lot of wholesome, married sex—she knew there was still more to talk about tonight.

  As little as she wanted to discuss Cristina here in this bed.

  “Becca didn’t just defend me from Lily,” she said, forcing herself to launch into it before she talked herself out of it. “She got very upset.”

  Beside her, Gray tensed. “What did Lily say to her?”

  Abby had almost forgotten that part. “She said something cutting about Becca’s prospects. The way she does.” When Gray only waited, she pushed on. “That Becca is the kind of pretty that disappears fast, so she’d better grab onto a high school boyfriend and settle down while she can. The usual Lily foolishness, though she usually directs things like that at me.”

  To Ab
by’s memory, her mother had never told her she was any kind of pretty.

  She wondered what was wrong with her that she was even thinking something like that. As if she wanted to compete with Becca to get her feelings hurt by Lily. It shouldn’t matter what Lily thought or said. About anything.

  Gray took his time before he answered, his tone even. Steady. It made Abby feel steadier too. “Seems to me Lily spends a lot of time talking about other people’s looks and not a whole lot thinking about all that ugliness she carries around inside of her.”

  “Well. Yes. That’s her whole thing.”

  Gray shifted so he met Abby’s gaze. “Then why do you believe her?”

  That hit her. Much too hard, especially after what she’d been thinking down in the kitchen. “I don’t.”

  But her voice was weak. And she felt the way she had the first time she’d been thrown off a horse. Winded and … betrayed, almost.

  “I know she’s your mother,” Gray said, something glittering in his eyes that Abby could tell had to do with how stiffly he was holding himself. As if he was keeping himself from jumping up and doing something to protect his daughter by sheer force of will. “And I respect that. But I don’t like her dumping her poison on Becca. She’s had enough to deal with. Is that why she was crying?”

  “She was crying because my mother reminds her too much of her mother,” Abby said. Carefully. “Who she hates. Or wants very badly to hate.”

  “She doesn’t hate Cristina.”

  “She feels responsible.” When Gray frowned as if that was impossible, Abby forced herself to keep going. “Of course she feels responsible. She said her grandfather took every opportunity to tell her how her mother never wanted to stay home with her. As if that was the reason she…”

  Abby didn’t finish that sentence. And she knew the reason she didn’t wasn’t to protect Gray, though she wanted that too. But because she couldn’t imagine what would make her crawl out of Gray’s bed and into someone else’s. She couldn’t conjure up the kind of loneliness she assumed Cristina must have felt to do something like that. Repeatedly.

  But you didn’t marry him expecting him to love you, another voice whispered, deep inside, neatly cutting her in two.

  “Great.” Gray sounded distant. Wrecked. “All this time I believed I was keeping her safe, and I wasn’t. Perfect.”

  Abby could still feel the way Becca had shook against her. She could still hear the younger girl’s sobs—and she felt the same wave of fury and grief and pain she’d felt in that car.

  But really, Gray was just another motherless child. Except instead of growing up with wonderful grandparents to balance out his mother’s desertion, like Abby, or even with a great dad like Becca, he’d had nothing but Amos.

  “You need to forgive yourself,” she told him, with far more conviction than she felt when she was trying to find her own way to the same place.

  “I don’t need forgiveness. I’m fine. But apparently my kid isn’t, and that’s on me. The same way the situation with Ty and Brady is on me. I’m the oldest. I should have known better.”

  “Becca blames herself for her mother leaving,” Abby said quietly. “Because that’s what kids do, Gray. I did it. I still do it, when if you asked me, I’d be the first to tell you that I don’t even want Lily around.”

  He scowled at her. “I told you I’m fine.”

  “Becca does it. I do it. Maybe you do it too.”

  “Of course my mother left. The only reason to live in this house with Amos is the land, but that means you need to love it, and she hated it here. She hated the winter. The mountains made her feel claustrophobic.” He rubbed his hands over his face like he was trying to rub the memory away. “She’s much better off in California.”

  “That sounds very adult. Kind of like when I say my mother is actually tremendously sad because she doesn’t have the slightest idea how to have relationships with other humans. But it doesn’t change the fact that she gets under my skin. Still. And easily.”

  “What are you trying to say, Abby? Because, like I said, I don’t have issues with my mother. My father was nothing but issues. Neither one of them is here.”

  “Haven’t you noticed how determined Becca is that you be happy with me? Don’t you think it’s a bit over the top? There are a lot of teenage girls who wouldn’t be that excited about a new stepmother. Who’d have some growing pains with another woman in the house after all these years on their own.”

  “Do you want her to have a problem with you?”

  Abby sighed. “I want her to be happy for us because she’s truly happy for us, Gray. Not because she secretly believes that she’s the reason your first marriage broke up.”

  “She doesn’t think that.”

  “Are you sure? I can tell you that I spent a lot of years making sure I was as perfect as possible because I hoped that might bring my mother back. Becca know she can’t bring her mother back, but what she can do—”

  “Is act like a cheerleader who never gets the day off.”

  Abby didn’t realize how tense she’d been until then. “Yes.”

  “It’s like I’m turning into him whether I want to or not,” Gray said after a moment, and there was so much raw despair in his voice.

  As if he’d already given up and given himself over to his fate.

  Abby wanted to crawl on top of him. She wanted to show him how little he was like Amos. She wanted to prove it to him with her mouth, her hands. With all the love she had bottled up inside of her and didn’t dare say out loud.

  “That’s up to you,” she said instead, her voice wasn’t harsh, exactly. She sounded like her grandmother. Matter-of-fact and unafraid of what the response might be. “If you don’t want to be like your father, don’t be like him. You get to choose that every day. Amos’s life didn’t happen to him. He made it. Day by day, year by year, until even his own sons didn’t tear up at his funeral. You can do the opposite. If you want.”

  She had never taken that tone with him before. Or anything close to that tone.

  Abby wished that she’d laid down too, so she could have been staring at the ceiling and pretending she didn’t notice the sudden, dangerous stillness that hunkered between them.

  But instead, she was looking directly at Gray. She watched his expression shift from something like arrested into something … molten.

  When she’d gotten into the bed, she’d sat up against the headboard, curling her body toward Gray while they talked. Now she felt frozen there as he shifted again, his wide, work-sculpted shoulders lifting from the mattress. His hands found her face, then cupped her cheeks.

  “You giving me a little tough love?”

  “Just a little.”

  She didn’t know which one of them sounded grittier. Too much emotion. Too much truth. Too much.

  He looked stern now, but she could see the heat in his gaze. The combination made her shudder, deep inside until her bones felt like rubber. And between her legs, she was nothing but needy.

  Greedy. Again.

  Always, a voice inside her whispered, and this one had nothing to do with her mother.

  “Good,” Gray said gruffly.

  Then his hard mouth was on hers, and Abby couldn’t tell the difference between tough love and this love and that same, giddy love she’d been carrying around inside her all these years.

  It didn’t matter. She melted against him, and she poured herself into him.

  He could cancel Christmas. He could turn out to be different in so many ways from the character of Gray Everett she’d carried around in her head all this time.

  But there was still this.

  The way he kissed her, deep and sure. His callused fingertips against her skin, stirring up heat wherever they brushed her.

  And there was nothing she wouldn’t find a way to live with if it meant she could have this. Him. Naked and hot and hers.

  Because this was worth putting up with anything.

  His strong, muscled arms wr
apped around her, and then he was pulling her down against that steel wall of his chest. And she knew him now. She knew how to settle herself astride him, so she could push herself up on her hands and gaze down at him, breathless with wonder and need.

  “You’re still wearing underwear.” His voice was dark like honey, and it pooled in her like all that sweetness was lit on fire. His thumbs moved lazily at her hips. “Didn’t we agree that was pointless?”

  A month ago Abby wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told her she could smile the way she did then, beaming down at him while laughter bubbled out of her of its own accord. Surely sex was no laughing matter, she would have said. It was serious. Mysterious, despite the internet.

  But tonight she laughed. And laughed some more.

  “Martha Douglas’s only granddaughter can’t go to bed naked,” she told him, shaking her head in mock-seriousness, as if she was scandalized. “The world would end.”

  She knew him now, so she reached down to the hem of the oversized T-shirt she wore and pulled it up, then tugged it over her head, glorying in the way his expression went tight. Fierce. He moved his hands from her hips to find her breasts, and she found herself arching into his palms.

  The fire burned hotter. Or maybe it was Abby who was on fire. She couldn’t tell the difference. She didn’t care.

  She could feel the thick, hard ridge of his need jutting against her, and she moved against it until they were both breathless and lost somewhere between laughter and a curse.

  They got lost there so much, it was starting to feel like home.

  “I told you what would happen,” Gray warned her.

  But Abby didn’t care. She felt the tug at her hip, then he was tearing the panties off of her, and she couldn’t seem to do anything but feel the thrill of it.

  Inside. Outside. Everywhere.

  Then her own hands felt clumsy between them as she reached down and wrapped her fingers around the hard length of him, sitting up so she could work the thick head inside her, where it belonged.

  Then everything was better.

  Perfect, even.

  Because Gray was inside her at last, again. And she settled herself back to take more of him, shivering with pure delight as he slid deep, burying himself to the hilt.