A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  And suddenly, neither one of them was laughing.

  He reached up and tugged her hair out of its ponytail so it tumbled down over her shoulders and teased the tops of her breasts. Abby braced her hands against the taut ridges of his abdomen as if they’d been put there for her fingers, then rocked herself against him.

  Again and again.

  He was so hard, everywhere. Inside and out, and she loved that too.

  She loved everything about this man. She loved more and more by the day.

  Gray let her control their pace, but she knew as well as he did that he could shift that in a moment. And probably would.

  She took her time. She moved up, then down, as if she was trying to feel every last inch of him. She experimented with pace and depth. She … enjoyed him.

  The glory that was this thing they did. The slick, impossible beauty of it.

  Meanwhile, she couldn’t seem to look away from the dark passion that made his cheekbones stand out against his beautiful face. She couldn’t seem to jerk her gaze away from all that hard, possessive green.

  Abby thought about walls. All the time she’d slammed her head against them to no avail. She couldn’t seem to break or bend a thing, but it occurred to her as she lowered herself on Gray and then lifted herself up again that she was looking at things the wrong way.

  A man like Gray couldn’t break. It would kill him. But Abby didn’t mind bending. And God, but she loved the way they bent together.

  Over and over and over again.

  And after all the things they’d lived through out in these fields, in these houses that looked so pleasant from a distance with their windows lit up bright to hide the heartache inside—so much heartache over so many years—she couldn’t see how a lie by omission was any different from a full-on, flat-out lie.

  Abby wasn’t her mother. She certainly wasn’t Cristina. She was Martha Douglas’s only grandchild, and she wasn’t a liar.

  So when things began to get crazy, when Gray tugged her down and rolled her over so he could brace himself on his elbows and thrust that much deeper inside of her, Abby stopped biting her tongue.

  “I love you,” she told him, with her head tipped back, too much pleasure to bear stampeding through her body.

  Gray went still for a single second, so brief Abby almost missed it, and when he started again, he was wilder. Darker.

  But he didn’t stop.

  “I’ve always loved you,” she said as he moved her closer and closer to that edge, because the confession felt like part of this thing they were doing. The way their bodies danced together and made better sense that way. “My whole life.”

  He dropped his head close to hers, pounding into her with a beautiful fury that she felt flood through her.

  “I love you, Gray,” she cried out as everything exploded.

  Inside her. Around her.

  But it was only when she’d fragmented into a trillion sparkling pieces, glittering and perfect, that she realized that he’d followed her over but hadn’t said a word.

  19

  She didn’t say it again.

  After they were done, Abby went boneless. Gray couldn’t move with those words echoing in the air, eating up all the oxygen in the room and pounding at his temples like a hangover, but Abby seemed to have no trouble slipping off into sleep. He shifted himself off of her, flipping over to his back, and he expected her to curl up on her side of the bed the way she often did.

  But she curled up on him instead. And when he went to right the situation, she made a tiny sound of protest, like she was a sleepy cat, and burrowed her face into his shoulder.

  He didn’t have it in him to do anything about that.

  Gray lay there, wide awake and much too agitated. He stared at the ceiling until he was surprised he didn’t rip off his own roof and send it spinning off into the fields.

  But nothing changed. She’d said what she’d said, and there was no taking that back.

  Gray didn’t want love. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t want to be anywhere near it, and he sure didn’t want it in his bed.

  He didn’t know how long he lay there anyway, staring into the dark of their bedroom, feeling a lot like Abby had strangled him.

  When his relentless alarm went off the next morning, he was cranky from lack of sleep. Abby murmured something before burying her head in her pillows, and all Gray could do was sit there on the edge of their bed like it was a cliff. And he’d already lost his footing. He took a shower to try to wake himself up, pulled on his clothes, and was working his way toward full-on surly by the time he made it downstairs.

  Where his predawn coffee was made already, waiting for him in the sparkling clean kitchen that no longer felt precarious. Because Amos wouldn’t be swaggering in, ready and willing to throw down at the slightest opportunity, and if he had, he wouldn’t have recognized the place. It was organized, well-stocked, and … comfortable.

  Gray had lived in this house his whole life, but he’d never considered it comfortable before.

  He slammed his mug down on the counters Abby kept clean enough to eat off of, and watched as the hot coffee—from beans she ground herself at Cold River Coffee and brought home to him, a major upgrade from whatever supermarket coffee he’d been drinking all these years—sloshed over the side. And he didn’t rush to clean it up as it formed a pool.

  Because it was Gray who was spoiling for a fight these days, he realized when he’d stood there scowling at the dark puddle in front of him for much too long. A lot like he was waiting for someone to come into the kitchen and give him a reason to get mad.

  The way his father had done every day of his miserable life.

  It doesn’t matter what you think, Abby had told him. It matters what you do.

  But Gray was pretty sure that his thoughts were like kindling, just waiting for a match.

  He kept up the bad mood all day. Normally some time out on the land sorted his head out, no matter what had happened. The sweeping views. The grandeur of the mountains. The big sky that stretched out over everything like a prayer. Somehow it all usually worked together and lightened whatever load he was carrying.

  But not today. He was grumpy with his foreman. He was short with his hands.

  He was a jackass, in other words.

  For a man who had always vowed he’d never be anything like his father, Gray was sure doing a dead-on Amos impression.

  When he got back to the house that afternoon, he saw Abby’s car in the yard. He’d forgotten that this was her early day, and that Becca would come home later with one of the kids in her class who lived out this way.

  Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten, he thought grimly as he pushed the back door open and stepped into his kitchen. Maybe he’d taken the dirt roads too fast on his way home because he was still spoiling for the fight he hadn’t gotten this morning.

  Because he needed her to take those words back before they burned him alive.

  Except when he pushed his way through the back door, it didn’t smell like his kitchen. He was momentarily disoriented, like he’d accidentally walked into someone else’s house.

  It smelled like sugar and cinnamon. Chocolate and a sharp vanilla. It smelled like …

  “Are you baking cookies?”

  His voice rang out, a gruff accusation that didn’t make the burning in his gut any better. But Abby didn’t jump. And when she looked over her shoulder at him, she didn’t look guilty. Or worried, for that matter, the way she ought to have been after what happened last night.

  After what she’d done.

  Those words seared through another layer inside him, like a brand.

  “I am.” It took Gray a minute to process that she was actually smiling. Smiling. At him. Like it was perfectly normal and even okay that she’d turned his ranch house into a bakery, which it wasn’t, and that wasn’t even touching on the whole love thing. “Six dozen for the Winthrops’ annual cookie exchange and another few dozen just for fun.”

 
“Fun?” He didn’t exactly spit the word out, but he made it sound like some kind of disease either way. He could have been talking about mad cow.

  “Yes, Gray. Fun. Baking cookies makes some people happy. And by some people, I mean me. And then when you’re done baking, as a bonus, you have delicious cookies to eat.”

  He knew there was a straight line from her I love you last night to this. A straight, dangerous line with that burning thing in his gut and Christmas a mess right there in the middle. There was that same hollow feeling scraping at him, the one that had kept him up half the night—while she’d slept there beside him, warm and cute and cuddled up against him like she belonged there.

  The worst part was that he’d been starting to think she did. He’d let his guard down.

  It was the betrayal that was getting to him today. The fact that she’d taken it upon herself to fundamentally alter the terms of their marriage—and she didn’t seem to be the slightest bit concerned about what she had done.

  “We already agreed about Christmas.”

  If she heard the darkness and warning in his voice, she didn’t heed it.

  Instead, she laughed. First the smiling. Now the laughing. When nothing was funny.

  Gray couldn’t remember ever feeling less like laughing.

  “We did not agree about Christmas. You made a great many proclamations about Christmas, and I stopped arguing with you about them.”

  She said all that as if she was telling a charming story about something hilarious, which was not how Gray remembered that conversation. Then she wrinkled up her nose, and he saw there was flour on her cheek. His fingers itched to brush it away. To touch her, whatever the reason. It was too much.

  “And then we had sex,” Abby continued brightly. “It’s hard to stay mad after sex. Don’t you think?”

  Gray did not think. He’d been mad all day.

  “That’s sidestepping the point by a mile or two.” He sounded as grave and grim as he ever had. And it didn’t seem to matter because it still felt like everything was out of control. Like he was out of control. “I’m pretty sure I made myself clear.”

  “Have I decorated the house against your wishes?” she asked, whisking something in a big bowl with quick, sure strokes. She eyed him as she did it, and he saw too much of her grandmother in her. All that quiet steel. “Is there a giant, decorated tree by the fireplace? Do you hear Christmas carols playing?”

  Gray wanted to say something about the spirit versus the letter of the law, but caught himself. Because he wasn’t actually pissed about cookies, surely. Or issuing actual proclamations about anything. There weren’t laws, only his preferences, and he wasn’t that much of a monster.

  Not yet, anyway.

  He waited because Abby was still studying him in that disconcerting way. And he figured she would surely bring up what happened last night. Any second now. He stared back at her, ready for her to ask him why he hadn’t responded. Or point out his obvious bad mood that he wasn’t exactly hiding. Or do something—anything—so he could tell her what he thought about her declarations.

  But Abby only held his gaze, hers mild and steady, while the whisk made that scraping sound against the bottom of her bowl.

  “I’ll be in the barn,” Gray muttered.

  And he didn’t really appreciate Abby’s sunny “goodbye” as he headed out the door.

  He stayed out in the barn for a long time, until even the horses were sick of the black cloud he was carrying around today.

  So long, in fact, that when Becca’s friend dropped her off and she headed out to the barn to do her share of the evening chores, Gray had already done them.

  “Why?” Becca asked worriedly, her gaze darting around as if she expected a judge and jury to be waiting for her in the stalls. “Was I doing something wrong?”

  “You do your chores just fine. And even if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have to panic about it.” He considered her for a moment. “There’s nothing to panic about. You know that, right?”

  Becca blinked at him. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her coat, rocked back on her heels, and tucked her chin into her collar. Pulling herself together, he knew, and Gray felt something clutch in his chest. She wasn’t a little girl anymore, but he could still see the little girl she’d been whenever he looked at her. Her sweet face and too-smart eyes. He could still remember the first time he’d ever held her right there in the Longhorn Valley hospital, tiny and hot, red-faced and squirming, with that same clever gaze when she’d been minutes old.

  He knew better than to mention it. Because she wasn’t his baby these days. She was fifteen and … complicated. She was pretty like her mother had been, but she didn’t have Cristina’s too-delicate fragility, like the next wind might break her in half. Everything about her made Gray proud.

  He wished he could find a way to tell her that.

  “I guess Abby told you what happened,” Becca said after a moment, her voice cautious. “I asked her not to.”

  “Did she tell you she wouldn’t?”

  “She told me she wouldn’t keep secrets from you, but that if I wanted, we could tell you together.”

  That was another sucker punch. Gray didn’t know where to put it or how to breathe through it. He didn’t know what to do with relentlessly cheerful Abby, who flung love words and smiles around like tinsel, baked dozens upon dozens of cookies in a kitchen where no one had done anything so sweetly domestic in decades, and knew without his having to tell her that secrets were something he couldn’t abide.

  And more than that, she’d assured his daughter—the only one who’d suffered more from the secrets that had polluted his first marriage than Gray himself—that secrets and the lies that went with them weren’t going to be a factor any longer.

  It made him kind of lightheaded and much too aware of those damned words still on fire in his gut, so he shoved it aside.

  “I’m not sorry,” Becca declared, and even squared her shoulders. “I know I’m supposed to be respectful to my elders, but you didn’t hear how Abby’s mother was talking to her. It was worse than Thanksgiving.”

  “Becca. I’m never going to have a problem with you defending family.” That word poked at him. “Family.” It had come out on its own. And now he couldn’t think about anything else but what that word meant. What it had always seemed to mean to other people not trapped in Amos Everett’s family, that was. “I’m more interested in what happened after.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders drooped. “You mean about Mom.”

  “I do.”

  She seemed to get smaller while he watched, but to her credit, Becca didn’t look away. “I don’t think I’m going to apologize for that either.”

  “No one’s asking you to apologize for anything.”

  Gray felt gruffer than usual. Awkward, even. But then, while he’d always cared a whole lot about his daughter’s feelings, they didn’t usually spend a lot of time talking about them. Her emotions struck like storms, they both weathered them as best they could, and then they moved on. Until Abby, he’d thought that was the right thing to do. Now all he could think about was the way Abby had said “motherless girls.” More words to careen around inside of him, burning wherever they touched.

  “I didn’t know how you felt about it,” he said, feeling like he was picking his way over ice on a pond when he had no idea if it would hold his weight.

  Becca shifted from one foot to the other, reminding him of one of their fall colts, all legs and emotion.

  “Really, Dad? How did you think I would feel about it?” He recognized that slap of pure teenager that took over her voice then, and it was amazing how much a dose of attitude could ease a man’s mind. But before he could answer her, she kept going, the words spilling out. “She made you so unhappy. You’ve been unhappy for as long as I can remember.”

  He wanted to deny it. He would have, a few months ago. Gray hadn’t considered himself unhappy.

  But everything had changed since Amos had d
ied. Since he’d looked up after the funeral and seen Abby Douglas standing in his back door like she belonged there. And whatever he was now—or had been until last night—was so markedly, inarguably different from what he’d been before that he was forced to consider the possibility.

  That he’d been unhappy all that time. And more amazing by far, that he was happy now.

  Him. Happy.

  It felt like another sucker punch. As did the fact he didn’t know how to think about himself or his life if he wasn’t fighting something.

  But this wasn’t the time to dig through his own mess.

  He focused on his daughter. “That’s not your fault, Becca. You shouldn’t have to worry about something like that.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about whether or not you’re happy? You’re my father.” And Gray watched helplessly as her face crumpled. “And I know the worst part is that I look like her.”

  The hits kept coming. Gray didn’t know what to do first. Punch a hole in the side of the barn. Go outside and shout at the stars until this made sense. Yell at Cristina herself, the way he’d done too often after the accident, out there where there was no difference between the sky and the land, and no one to hear the things he said to her that he would never have said to her face. Out there where the wind stole his guilt and shame and fury away like it had never been.

  Whether any of those things could actually make him feel any better was debatable, but it certainly wouldn’t help Becca.

  He reached out, wrapped an arm around her and cradled her head in his hand as he took her in a hard hug.

  “What is this?” he asked softly. Very softly, so he wouldn’t yell. “How could it ever be a bad thing that you look like your own mother?”

  “She was evil. Evil. You must look at me and see nothing but—”

  “She was beautiful,” Gray said, as if he was laying down the law. Because he was. There was no ambiguity here. “You got your laugh from her, and that smile that could light up this entire valley in the dark. There’s no shame in that.”