Christmas at Home

by Carolyn Brown

  Creed was glad that the dog had taken to Sage and not him. Reba and Wynonna would pitch a for real bitch fit if he let something like that live in the house and they had to stay outside.

  “This is probably too hot for you, girl. I’ll find something after we finish,” Sage said.

  Creed used the spatula to remove a piece of corn bread and crumbled it into his soup, saving one bite for Noel. She caught it before it hit the floor, gobbled it down, and wagged her tail.

  “She thinks your corn bread is passable,” Creed said.

  “What do you think?”

  He shoved a spoonful of bread and soup into his mouth and nodded. “I don’t like sweet corn bread in soup or beans. This is perfect. We make a pretty good kitchen team, lady.”

  “Sweet corn bread is for dessert or for crumbling up and pouring milk over, not soup,” she said.

  “You got that right. What do you intend to feed this hungry momma dog? I bet she’d eat the soup if it was cool. Without the bulge of those puppies she’d be bonier than a starving greyhound.”

  “We could try.” She nodded. “I’ll get a pie pan out and fill it. That way it’ll cool faster.”

  Noel followed her across the kitchen floor to the stove and watched with hungry eyes while she dipped soup into the pie pan.

  “Not yet, girl. It’s too hot,” she said.

  Funny she should use that word because he was thinking the same thing about Sage. She was entirely too hot.

  * * *

  Dammit! Sage thought but managed to keep from saying it aloud.

  Half a day and she was already talking to the dog. Chances were that someone would come to claim the animal when the blizzard stopped and another living, breathing thing would abandon her. It was so easy to get attached and so hard to let go.

  She vowed she would not get close to Creed even if they were holed up together for the duration of the storm. Not even if he did have the dreamiest green eyes in the world and she’d always been a sucker for a man with green eyes and dark hair. Not even if he did fill out his jeans just right and it had been a very long time since she’d even been kissed.

  After they’d eaten, talking only about Noel when either of them did break the silence, Sage said he could wash dishes and she’d dry them.

  “Why don’t you wash?” Creed asked.

  “Because I know where they go and you’ll have to ask.”

  “Okay, that’s fair enough.”

  In the tiny corner where the sink was located, their bodies bumped together more often than they did when they had made dinner. She dropped the drying towel and he grabbed for it at the same time she did, their hands getting tangled up in the process. A plate slipped from his soapy hands as he transferred it to the rinse water and she quickly got a hold on it with one hand and his wrist with the other.

  By the time they finished there were as many sparks hopping around the kitchen as there were snowflakes falling outside in the yard.

  “You going to paint now?” he asked when the last fork was put away.

  She nodded.

  “Then I’m going to read.” He disappeared down the short hallway and came back with a book.

  Sage reclaimed her palette and began to work in earnest on her picture of the swirling snow angel. Creed was probably one of those cowboys who liked his women petite and dainty, with a little girl’s voice and a clingy attitude that said, “Protect me, big old rough cowboy.” Most men did. It made them feel all macho and needed. Tall women like her seldom got a second look.

  Noel wolfed down the whole pie pan of soup and curled up on her warm blanket at Sage’s feet. Sage wanted to talk to the dog and figure out how she’d gotten things so confused in less than twenty-four hours, but Creed would hear every word so she kept quiet.

  She mixed just a dot of ivory black into a big glob of titanium white and stirred it with her palette knife. Then she squeezed out a small amount of pure titanium white on the side. Glass wasn’t easy to paint, with its glares and shadows, but snow was even harder unless it was lying on a tree or hiding in the crevices of the rock formations.

  Next she put a tiny bit of cobalt blue in the corner of her palette. Snow was cold and the blue mixed with lots of white would create the icy shadows in the angel’s wings. The cardinal would require red light hue and a dot of pure black for around his eyes and under his fluffed out feathers. She glanced at the window and added colors for the mistletoe and the valance that Grand had put up in the past two weeks.

  Sage almost giggled out loud. There it was! Living proof in the form of a kitchen window valance. Grand wouldn’t sell out, not when she’d put up the Christmas curtain, the one with the poinsettias embroidered on the border. If she was really going to sell, she would have taken that valance with her because her mother had done the stitching on it and it was one of her most prized possessions.

  She dipped a brush into the paint and started working on the poinsettias in the valance, happiness filling her heart as much as the soup had taken care of her hunger. Painting was good for Sage’s soul. That day she painted because she was all happy that the paint gods had smiled on her and given her an inspiration for a new picture and that she had no worries.

  She felt a little bit sorry for Creed. It wasn’t his fault. He wanted a ranch and Grand had set a price so low that any cowboy in the whole canyon would have jumped on it with both boots.

  At least the painting had taken her mind off Creed and his sexy eyes.

  “It’s an angel,” Creed said.

  She jumped when he spoke. Did he read minds? If so, did he know that she’d been thinking about his sexy eyes?

  “You can see it?” she asked.

  “How could I not see it? It’s an angel in the swirling snow and it’s looking at the little cardinal on the outside and the mistletoe on the sill there. Where did you get three pieces, anyway?”

  “You brought them in with you. I guess the wind blew a bunch down from one of the scrub oak trees. One piece was stuck on your shoulder when you came in the first time. Then you tracked the other two inside.”

  “We’ll tie a red ribbon around them and hang them up for the holidays. When are we putting up the tree?”

  “Well, it won’t be today, will it?”

  “Don’t get all cranky on me, lady.”

  “Statin’ facts. Not bein’ cranky.”

  “You do put up a tree, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we do. A big real cedar tree and we decorate the whole house even if just me and Grand are the only ones who see it. She might be gone this year until the last minute, but I’ll have the whole place decorated up by the time she gets home.”

  Creed laid his book aside. “I love Christmas. Momma sends me and Dalton and Blake to the woods the day after Thanksgiving while she and my brothers’ wives do the Black Friday shopping. That night everyone comes home for leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner and we decorate the tree. I won’t be there this year, but we can find a cedar tree and start our own tradition right here.”

  There was that word again, or at least a derivative of it.

  Us. We. Our.

  They all meant a joining of minds to form relationships, friendships, or otherwise. How could things change so quickly? Wasn’t she fighting against it with all her soul and heart?

  “If this wind doesn’t stop we might have to dig a tree out from under the drifts before we could even cut it down,” she said and went back to painting.

  “It’s doable. When it does stop we’ll go find just the right one and we’ll drag it in here, snow and all. These floors will mop up, and the branches would soon dry in the warm room. Did you ever wish you’d grown up in a big family atmosphere?” he asked.

  “All the time,” she said wistfully as she carefully dotted in the angel’s eyes with her smallest brush. “You’ll miss them if you stay, Creed. The canyon is a
lonely place.”

  “But it’s peaceful and that doesn’t come cheap. And lonely is just a state of mind. Sometimes peace can override lonely if…” He stopped.

  “Go on.”

  “I was engaged a while back. Head over heels in love with a woman named Macy. She went on a trip and when she came home she said she didn’t really love me. She loved the idea of being in love, but she didn’t think she’d ever really loved me. Turned out she’d met someone else that she did love on that trip. The engagement was over and I kept asking myself what I could have done different. This place has brought me the first peace I’ve known since then.”

  Sage’s heart stopped. After that confession, how could she push him out of the canyon? Or maybe he was just playing her so that she wouldn’t put up a fight for her grandmother to back out of the sale. He said he always told the truth and could be trusted, but saying and doing were often two horses of very different colors.

  “Well?” he said.

  “At least she was honest,” Sage said.

  “Yes, she was.”

  “It is peaceful here if you don’t mind the solitude. Grand is an old hermit. She won’t ever like being cooped up in a house with her sister or living in a congested part of the world.”

  “I thought her sister had a farm.”

  “Five acres. One old two-story house. A barn. Two cows, some chickens, and an apple orchard. Not much of a farm really.”

  “And is it in the middle of a big town?”

  “Shade Gap is a rural community. Barely even anything left there except for a gas station and a picnic ground.”

  “Sounds like she’d be real happy there. As for me, there are cows, hogs, chickens, and when there is electricity there’s good country music to listen to. And now Noel is here and there will be puppies.”

  “What happens when her owner comes to take her home?”

  Creed looked at the poor skinny dog. “No one is coming to claim her, Sage. She’s a castoff that someone tossed out before the storm hit. She’s probably been living on field mice for a week and sleeping in barns. She’s too skinny to have been thrown away just before the blizzard hit. She’s found a home and a friend in you. Darlin’, she ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Sage laid her brush down and scratched Noel’s ears. “Stop callin’ me darlin’. I’m not and I will never be your darlin’.”

  “It’s just my way and I’m not changing,” he said.

  As if Noel understood that men were strange creatures who couldn’t be reasoned with, she wagged her tail so hard that it sounded like a drumbeat on the hardwood floor.

  “Look, Creed! I swear she smiled.”

  “Dogs do that when they’re happy, just like humans.”

  Sage rubbed her fur and said, “You’re a good girl. I bet you were raised on Venus with the rest of us girls and not on Mars with a bunch of mean old boys.”

  “I read that book,” Creed said.

  Sage turned her head so quickly that her neck cracked. “Why would a cowboy like you read that book?”

  “Because my brother’s wife mentioned it and because I wanted to understand why women are the way they are.”

  “Did you learn anything?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Not much. Just that y’all are temperamental. That y’all approach things you can’t change with anger or tears. And that to really understand a woman is impossible.”

  He changed the subject abruptly. “Wonder what the puppies will look like? Maybe they’ll have some old redbone in them.”

  “Not a chance. Noel wouldn’t fall in love with a huntin’ hound. She’s going to have Irish setter puppies or maybe even beagles, but not an old coonhound, are you, baby girl?” Sage kissed the dog between the eyes and went back to her painting.

  It was nearly time for chores and the storm had gotten even worse. Sage finished what she was working on and cleaned her brushes. She went to the kitchen and put a pan of milk on a burner to heat for hot chocolate, took down the cocoa and sugar and marshmallows, and then reached for two mugs.

  She lit two oil lamps, carried one to the end table beside the sofa, and put the other one in the middle of the kitchen table. That brought precious little light into the room, but it beat trying to do anything in the darkness. After supper she’d scrounge around in the pantry for candles or more lamps so they could have one in each bedroom and the bathroom.

  And matches! She’d need to put them beside the lamps so they could reach them without fumbling around and knocking off the lamp. Grand would be really mad if they wasted expensive lamp oil.

  Creed looked up from his book when she set the mug of hot chocolate on the table beside him and said, “Thank you. That looks good.”

  “I thought we’d need a warm pick-me-up before we went out to feed. I’ll gather the eggs and feed the hogs if you’ll milk the cow. I hate milking and I’m so slow the milk will freeze in the bucket before I ever get the job done,” she said.

  “It’s not in the contract that you have to help with chores,” he said.

  “You helped cook. I’ll help with the outside work.”

  “I don’t turn down willing help.”

  Willing or otherwise, she would help him because it was fair. It wasn’t fair at all that she had an almost instant attraction to the very man she had been determined not to like at all.

  Sage was not innocent. She was twenty-six and she’d had a couple of relationships. There was Victor, a fellow art student in college that lasted at least six months before he accused her of being afraid of commitment. Then there was Justin who’d worked for Lawton four years ago and had accused her of the same thing. True, it had been a long time since she’d been to bed with a man, but she wasn’t a casual sex woman. If there wasn’t something there beyond a one-night romp in the hay, she wasn’t interested. But the honest truth was that she could never remember any man in her past that had created the stir in her heart like Creed had that day.

  She finished her chocolate and Noel followed her to her room.

  “You ready to go back out, are you? Well, you wear your fur coat. I have to get my insulated coveralls on before I can go,” she said.

  Sage removed her sweat suit, pulled on long thermal underwear, and then put her sweats back on, along with two pair of wool socks and a mustard-colored coverall much like Creed’s. She zipped it up the front, jammed her feet down into work boots, and picked up her face mask and gloves.

  When she reached the kitchen, Creed was putting on his boots.

  “Ready to brave it?” he asked.

  “I’m ready,” she answered.

  Noel barked and danced around the back door.

  “Oh, no, young lady. You can’t go out in that kind of weather,” Creed said.

  “You’d best let her go if she wants to. She’s been inside all day. I bet her bladder is about to explode. Don’t you know that pregnant women have to go a lot?” Sage said and then stopped before she opened the door. “You don’t think she’ll run away, do you?”

  “She knows where the food is.”

  The minute she could get out, Noel disappeared in the snow, chasing around like a puppy.

  Sage bent into the wind and went straight for the barn. She filled two buckets with feed for the hogs and carried them to their trough. It was easy to fill without going into the lot. Just open up a trap door on the back of their shed and pour the feed in. That done, she braved the biting snow back to the barn.

  “Hey, give me a hand here. I’m thinking if we leave the back door of the barn open, we can shove one of these big round bales into it and it will stay dry longer. The lean-to will keep the snow from drifting up against it. If the barn was bigger, I’d just open it up and bring the cattle all inside.”

  “Poor old cows, but they are better off in the lot than they’d be out in the canyon,” Sage said.

>   “At least this way their hay will be dry. Open the doors when I get close.”

  It was an ingenious idea. The hay was wedged into the space so the cows couldn’t get into the barn. The lean-to kept the snow from blowing into it so the cattle at least had dry hay, even if it was cold. If they had Dutch doors they could shove a big round bale of hay in the bottom and shut the top doors. She’d have to remember to talk to Grand about that when she got home.

  Creed hopped off the tractor and said, “Now to the milking.”

  “And to the eggs. Meet you in the house… Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “It sounded like a baby crying.”

  The cattle were eating and the ones who couldn’t get to the hay were fussing about having to wait. The milk cow was putting up a bawling fit about her full udder, and Noel had joined them in the barn. She cocked her head to one side and sniffed the air.

  “Shhh, there it is again,” Sage said.

  Creed turned his ear toward the empty stall behind Sage.

  “I don’t hear a thing. You sure it’s not the wind?”

  She listened intently. “No, it’s coming from the stall next to the cow.”

  Creed took a step in that direction. “I’d say it is kittens, but it’s the wrong season. Cats don’t usually have babies in the winter because they don’t survive.”

  “We don’t have cats.”

  Creed opened the door and pointed. “You do now. Those are newborn kittens right there. Recognize the big old yellow mother?”

  Sage dropped down on her knees and moved the mother cat to one side. “There are three of them and I’ve never seen any of these animals before.”

  Noel plowed right into the stall and touched noses with the momma cat. She purred when Noel nosed each of the newborn kittens.

  Creed smiled. “Would you look at that? She’s not afraid of the dog and Noel isn’t killing kittens. Those two are friends. There ain’t no doubt about it. A normal momma cat would have scratched a dog’s eyes out if she’d gotten close to her babies, but they know each other. They were probably hauled off at the same time. Looks like it’s a two-for-one day for you, Sage. You get a cat and a dog and you’re going to get Christmas presents early in the way of kittens and puppies. I can put some warm milk in a pan for her when I do the milking.”