Cowboys Under The Mistletoe: Five Christmas Christian Romance Novellas

by Kristen Ethridge

  “What?” he asked, clearly confused by the change in her expression.

  “I may have a barn we could use. Nothing that would take the country theme a step too far animal-wise or odor-wise. If I remember correctly, this barn was only ever used to store hay and old tack. All we would have to do is sweep the floor, put up a few Christmas wreaths and maybe a tree or two, set up hay bales around the perimeter for guests to sit on, and borrow tables and chairs from the church to set up for the dinner portion of the evening. Guests could help us take them down and put them aside afterwards for the dance.”

  “That’s all?” he teased.

  “Hey, I’m on a roll, here.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  Her heart fell. “Possibly. Or maybe not so much. It’s complicated.”

  He frowned in concern and rubbed a palm across her shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  She pulled in a breath and held it for a moment, knowing she was about to plunge right back into No Man’s Land, into a subject she’d been prudently trying to avoid all evening.

  “Yeah. It’s hard for me to talk about. You see, the barn I’m thinking about is located on the Weaver ranch, Bar W.”

  As she expected, the sound of her last name caused a spark of anger to cross through his eyes and his nostrils flared.

  He pressed his lips into a hard line, presumably to keep himself from letting loose and blowing up on her.

  “It’s a good idea.”

  He didn’t sound enthusiastic about the possibility, but then, she hadn’t expected him to. Not with the as-yet-unnamed, invisible elephant in the room.

  “Yeah, that’s the complication.” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. She hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to talk about this. “I don’t even know if the barn exists anymore. And if it is, I don’t know if my brother Ash is using it in the same way Daddy did.”

  “You haven’t been to your ranch recently? Not even on holidays?”

  He couldn’t possibly know how painfully his question gutted her.

  “That’s the kicker,” she admitted. “It isn’t my ranch at all. It’s Ashton’s. And we’ve been estranged for ten years over a stupid argument we had when we were young.

  “So, yes, there is a barn—one that would be the perfect venue for Brady and Chelsea, if it hasn’t changed too much over the years. But whether or not Ash will let me onto his property, much less a whole wedding party, is another thing entirely.”

  He narrowed his gaze on her and she swallowed hard.

  “I wasn’t planning to deal with my past just yet. But I guess it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Because the only way to find out is to ask.”

  Chapter Four

  All at once, an array of emotions exploded in Matthew’s chest, like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  Blue, green, red, yellow, gold.

  Highest among those feelings was, surprisingly, grief. Not so much at what he’d lost and what might have been if the land had remained in his family, as how much time he’d wasted being infuriated about it. He’d been carrying around the heavy burden of anger so long that he’d grown used to the heat simmering just under his skin. But grief was new to him, and it struck him hard in the chest. He’d held onto his anger so tightly that there hadn’t been room for anything—or anyone—else in his heart.

  All these years, he’d thought that without his land he was nothing, but he now realized it was his own attitude toward life that had kept him from really living it.

  He hadn’t let anyone in.

  He was envious of Brady, who’d been blessed to have found his soulmate. Brady was a simple cowboy, the same as Matthew, but he’d managed to snag a beautiful, classy woman. As a couple they would never have worked on paper. But God had brought them together and made something truly special out of their union.

  It wasn’t Matthew’s job as a wrangler, or even that he’d lost the ranch, that had kept him from truly living his life all these years.

  He was the one to blame. He’d been standing in his own way.

  And if he’d understood Riley correctly, then he wasn’t the only one who had lost out in the brouhaha that was the Weaver takeover of the Wilde ranch.

  Not that he expected that a city girl would appreciate country living. Then again, in truth, she was a displaced country girl, which wasn’t exactly the same thing, was it?

  “Yes? No? Maybe so?” Riley’s sing-song voice cut into Matthew’s thoughts.

  “I’m sorry, what? I’m afraid I didn’t catch that last part.”

  She snorted. “I’ll say you didn’t. What I asked is if you would mind coming with me to talk to my brother. Confronting Ash is something I have to do on my own, but if he agrees to let us hold the wedding reception there, I could use your help cleaning it up tonight.”

  “Yes, of course,” he agreed, and then immediately wondered if that was a big mistake.

  No matter what the family dynamics were, Ash had ended up owning land that by rights should have been Matthew’s, and they both knew it.

  He recalled Ash from their high school days. Unlike Riley, Ash’s dad had insisted that Ash be educated at the local public school so he could learn how to manage the family ranch.

  Matthew and Ash hadn’t traveled in the same circles, even though they were both rancher’s sons in the same class at school and their acreages connected.

  Matthew had always been a loner, keeping mostly to a small group of trustworthy friends whenever he was on campus, which was as little time as possible. He would bolt out of school went the end bell rang, heading for the privacy and peace of herding cattle and riding the range on his favorite quarter horse, Selah, short for Selah Vie.

  Ash Weaver, on the other hand, was outgoing and popular amongst his peers, both boys and girls, and he was extremely athletic, as well, leading the football team in autumn as a star linebacker and as first baseman in baseball in the spring. He also rodeoed some, bull riding more for the thrill of the adrenaline rush than to follow the circuit.

  Matthew hadn’t seen Ash since the day Uncle Travis had handed the Wilde ranch over to Dirk Weaver, Riley and Ash’s father. Dirk had passed away, and Matthew had always assumed the ranch had been split equally between his heirs, Ash and Riley. Apparently, he’d been mistaken, and Riley had nothing to do with it. But if Ash was coldhearted enough to cut his sister out of his life, what kind of reception would Matthew get?

  “We should probably get everyone organized and on the move,” Riley suggested, once again breaking into his thoughts. Matthew hadn’t had this much to mull over all at once in forever.

  “Right.” He stood and whistled to get everyone’s attention. “It’s time for us to move out and make this wedding a reality. Does everyone know what they are doing?”

  “Everybody is paired up,” Brady assured Matthew, and then wrapped his arm around Chelsea and planted an overdramatic kiss on her forehead.

  “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss!” The group laughed, hooted and hollered, and the gave the engaged couple a round of applause when Brady and Chelsea obliged with a proper smooch.

  Matthew clapped, but he couldn’t have made a sound if his life had depended on it. Seeing Brady and Chelsea so happy made his throat close so tightly he couldn’t even breathe.

  Everyone had paired off, some in more ways than others. Groomsmen working with bridesmaids.

  Brady and Chelsea.

  He and Riley.

  He scoffed inwardly and shook his head at where his thoughts had wandered.

  What was with him today? He was getting sappy in his old age.

  He turned to Riley and to the business at hand.

  “Take my truck?” he offered.

  “Sounds good.”

  She looked pensive, and he’d noticed she hadn’t been as gleefully expressive as he’d expected her to be when the others were cheering for their friends.

  Riley had mentioned the possibility of a confrontation with her brother. Was she
troubled about meeting Ash again? If they hadn’t even spoken in a decade, this might not go so well.

  He wished he could help her, but he knew that if anything, his presence would be a hindrance. If it wasn’t for Brady and Chelsea’s wedding reception, Matthew wouldn’t even be concerned about the kind of reception he would get.

  He snorted at his own pun.

  It was too late for him and Ash to mend fences now.

  But for Riley?

  She had such a tender heart. It must be hard on her to be estranged from her brother.

  As they drove toward the Weaver’s ranch, Matthew surreptitiously watched Riley’s expression, his gut tightening when a frown creased her pretty lips. This was way more to her than just finding them a barn in which to hold a wedding reception.

  Ash was family.

  Without a second thought, he reached across the cab and threaded her fingers through his, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. She glanced at him and offered a shaky smile.

  “Do you really think Ash will turn you away?” he asked, his voice low and throaty, with the consistency of gravel.

  Her gaze widened and locked on his. Her hazel eyes were glassy, and even in the darkness of the cab, he could tell she was blinking back tears.

  “Honestly? I don’t know. Ash resented me when we were kids because Daddy appeared to favor me. He sent me to private boarding schools and made sure I went to the best college my grades would allow for the digital marketing degree I wanted to pursue.

  “He was much tougher on Ash, always pushing him harder to do better and be the best at everything he did. Dad made Ash come straight home after school and sports practice and do ranch chores until well into the evening. If Ash wanted to study and keep up with his homework, he had to do it late at night.”

  “I suppose I can see your brother’s point of view,” he admitted.

  The portrayal Riley presented wasn’t at all the Ash that Matthew remembered. He hadn’t seen behind the popular jock façade, hadn’t realized the kind of pressure and drama Ash faced in his home life.

  It was a good reminder not to judge a book by its cover. People were complicated. Things might be going on behind the scenes that outsiders couldn’t see.

  Forgive me, Lord, he prayed silently, for all the times I’ve judged others without knowing the whole story.

  Matthew straightened his shoulders. This whole misadventure of a wedding was making him feel more vulnerable than he’d ever been before, even when he was cast off the Wilde land and made to fend for himself, burdened with an uncle who was totally broken by his divorce.

  “I do understand why Ash felt that way back then,” Riley agreed. “But things changed dramatically when Daddy died. It seems to me that the resentment should have died with him.”

  “How so?”

  “Daddy left everything to Ash.”

  Even the land that had once belonged to the Wilde’s.

  “Really? I find that hard to believe. After raising you rich, your father left you with nothing?”

  “That wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. Daddy didn’t realize how bitter Ash had become toward him—and me. Daddy had been extra hard on Ash when he was young, just as his father had done before him, in order to fully prepare him to take over the ranch as soon as he had graduated from agricultural college. So it made sense that Ash would inherit the whole ranch.

  No, it didn’t.

  Matthew didn’t share his opinion aloud.

  “Daddy assumed Ash would take care of me the way Daddy had always done. He never stopped thinking of me as his little girl and expected Ash to watch over me as Daddy had always done.

  “Needless to say, Ash cut me off without a dime the moment our father was in the ground, may he rest in peace. I was in my junior year of college at the time, and suddenly had no way to pay for tuition and books, never mind room and board.

  Matthew’s stomach was roiling with emotion. He didn’t know what to think. He understood Ash’s point of view, maybe far too well, having life’s circumstances dictating every move he made.

  But then again, wasn’t that exactly what Ash had done to Riley? In a way, she and Matthew had suffered very nearly the same experience, being completely abandoned with nothing to their name. Everything had been taken away from her and she’d had to find her way on her own.

  Maybe they were more alike than he’d thought.

  *

  Still sitting in the cab of Matthew’s truck, Riley and Matthew been parked out in front of the Weaver ranch house for at least five minutes. Riley was staring at the unlit and unwelcoming front porch, but she hadn’t yet roused up enough courage to actually exit the vehicle and climb the stairs, much less ring the doorbell.

  This was a really bad idea.

  Ash probably didn’t want to see her, and even if he was willing to bury the hatchet somewhere other than in her back, she would be asking him for a very large favor, considering they hadn’t spoken in ten years.

  “Do you want to leave?” Matthew asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes, but I’m not going to. I have to see Ash sooner or later, and we need that barn.” She opened the truck door and glanced back at him. “Are you coming?”

  “No.”

  Her breath caught in her throat and her adrenaline pulsed.

  No?

  Then what was he here for, if not to support her in what was sure to be an uncomfortable situation?

  “I’ll wait for you in the truck,” he continued. “I’ll be right here if you need me, but I suspect things are going to go better for you if I’m not standing at your elbow.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he’s a Weaver, and I’m a Wilde.”

  Riley sighed loudly, aggravated by his broken-record excuse for everything.

  “No, really,” he insisted. “I think you’d better hear this story before you meet with your brother.”

  “Go ahead, then.” Stress was eating her alive. She had enough on her mind just having to confront her brother, much less deal with Matthew’s issues. But he appeared determined to tell her whatever it was that had been bothering him all evening, so she leaned against the truck’s door frame and met his gaze. “I’m listening.”

  “Many years ago, when your Aunt Heather divorced my Uncle Travis, your dad hired a top-of-the-line lawyer to draw up the papers. My uncle was so devastated by what was happening that he signed them without getting legal counsel of his own. He was a broken man. He should have been treated by a psychiatrist, not signing his life away, which is exactly what he did. He gave away his land—the land I stood to inherit—over to Heather.

  “What I didn’t know until recently is that your dad was manipulating both of them. He’d hired a phony P.I. to feed Heather a lot of false information. They had her convinced that Travis was cheating on her.”

  “Which he wasn’t.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No. He wasn’t. He adored Heather, and when she divorced him, it shattered him. She obviously had no interest in the land, but Dirk did. And me? I ended up wrangling for somebody else’s outfit my whole adult life instead of running my own ranch.”

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered through a clogged throat.

  “Yeah, I figured that out somewhere between the moment we met and when we ate pizza at dinner. Sorry I was accusing you of stuff you didn’t even know about. I shouldn’t have assumed you were guilty by association.”

  “Well, thank you for that. And I am really sorry about what happened to you. And Auntie Heather and your Uncle Travis, for that matter. How awful.”

  “He never married again. Never even dated, that I know of. He started drinking heavily. I don’t see him much anymore. He works on a ranch in Wyoming.”

  “Heather got her cosmetology license and works in a salon in Highlands Ranch,” Riley said. “She never married again, either. Now I think I understand why.”

  Matthew gripped the steering wheel with both fists and blew out a breath.
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  “How much of this does Ash know?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he knows the whole story. Maybe he only suspects what happened. He would have been—what? About seven when Travis and Heather divorced? So he might remember suddenly gaining double the ranch land they’d once had. But then again, he might not. He might have grown up thinking all that land belonged to him from birth. And I have no idea whether or not your father shared anything with Ash when he got older.”

  “Wow. Maybe I should have known all this before we drove all the way out here?”

  Matthew grunted. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Well, we’re here now. I need to talk to my brother either way. I’ll leave out the part about you being out in the truck waiting for me unless he asks.”

  “I hope I didn’t just ruin everything.”

  “If it’s a messed-up situation, it isn’t because of you,” she assured him.

  He scoffed.

  “Just hang tight. I’ll be back in a few with a barn available for our wedding reception.” She paused and shrugged. “Or not.”

  She shut the truck door and took a deep breath as she ascended the porch steps. The lights were off. Maybe Ash wasn’t even home.

  She half didn’t want him to be home so she could avoid an immediate conflict, but then she thought of Brady and Chelsea and rang the doorbell, simultaneously offering a silent plea to God for guidance.

  For a moment, there was no sound or movement. Riley was about to leave it at that, and she had actually turned back toward the truck with the intention of calling it done. Ash wasn’t home and they’d have to settle on a Plan B. But then she felt the tiniest niggling in her gut to turn back and ring the bell a second time, just for good measure.

  A light flipped on inside the house, and then the porch light came on.

  The door opened, and Riley stared, silent and stunned, at the man standing before her. Ash had aged a lot since she’d seen him last. His golden hair was shorter now, contoured into jagged peaks as he combed it back with his fingers. His face was weathered by years of working outdoors, and he’d put on a few pounds.