The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle

by Anne McAllister

  She gave him an odd look. But then she went back to something she called a "cutting board," which she'd laid on the floor, and began to crawl around on it as she spread out another old sheet and started pinning a dismantled angel costume to it as a pattern. He could see it was going to be an all-evening project.

  Well, fine. He'd work on his project, too. He got up and wandered around the room, turning to snap another picture or two now and then. Every time he pressed the shutter, Erin flinched.

  Finally she scowled over her shoulder at him. "Don't feel you have to stick around," she said through the pins she held between her teeth, "just because Zack is here. You can go out, you know. Go visit your sister. Go have a beer."

  He shook his head. "No, thanks." He was getting into this. The view was much more interesting right here.

  He wondered if Erin had any idea how enticing she was, crawling around the floor in her formfitting jeans with her bottom up in the air. Every once in a while when she stretched, her sweatshirt hiked up above her waist, and he got a glimpse of a thin band of the creamy skin of her back.

  Deke was a visual sort of guy. His eye was trained to see and interpret, to seek out hints and ask questions. And that single narrow strip of flesh tantalized him. Every time it came into view, his gaze was riveted on it. It had all the allure of a glimpse of Victorian ankle. When it was all a guy saw, and it hinted at more, it drew his eye, tempted him, tantalized him.

  Surreptitiously Deke eased the fit of his jeans. He tried to think of something else without actually averting his gaze, determined to enjoy the view without losing his cool—or his mind. If he wasn't going to get to have her undivided attention, she was certainly going to get his.

  He watched. He snapped pictures. Finally Erin finished pinning the damn thing and began to cut. And as she moved, her bottom swayed. It bobbed up and down. The sight made his mouth dry and his palms damp and his jeans way too tight. So did the occasional glimpses of flesh at her waist.

  He remembered the night he had seen more flesh. He remembered Erin naked. Remembered her lush curves and her long limbs wrapped around him.

  Now she stretched and pinned and wiggled forward to pin some more.

  Gripes, a man could only take so much. When had Erin Jones become a sex object? Deke slapped his camera down on the table. "I need to go for a walk!"

  Detachment—that was the key.

  Unfailing politeness, common courtesy, and determined detachment. If anything would get her through Deke's tenure in her house unscathed, Erin knew that was going to be it. And keeping a high chair or an angel costume or a coffeepot or a child between them at all times wouldn't hurt, either.

  Because the trouble was that just having him in the house felt absolutely right. It was like playing house with the man of her teenage dreams.

  He and Zack fit right in. They immediately "belonged" as if they had always been an integral part of the family. Deke handled her kids with ease. He talked photography and Raiders of the Lost Ark with Gabriel, he built a snowman with Sophie and Nicolas. And he treated her with his perennial casual charm.

  And his son might as well have been one of her own. Zack followed her everywhere like a duck. He listened to everything she told him, absorbing her words like a sponge. He brought her books to read and tried to repeat the rhymes she told him. Every morning they fed the dog together and every morning they went out and fed and patted the bunnies in the hutch. They read again before his afternoon nap, and when he got up to find that Sophie and Nicolas and Gabriel were home from school and would play with him, he was in seventh heaven.

  "We should keep him, Mama," Sophie said. And though she knew they couldn't, Erin couldn't help feeling her daughter was right.

  Every night when she kissed him good-night, Erin had to keep reminding herself that he wasn't her son, that he and his father weren't part of her family, that this situation was just temporary—and that no matter how right it felt, it was going to end. Deke didn't make it easy for her. He was gone a lot of the day, of course. But she saw him in the morning coming shirtless out of the bathroom. She saw him in the evening talking cameras with her son. She saw him build that snowman with Sophie and Nicolas and Zack. She saw him spend hours and hours after working in the store, talking with Milly about potential employees and trying to do things right for his dad.

  One of the things she had always admired about Deke was his determined devotion to his dad.

  It had always been easy to love her own father. Will Jones was an amiable, cheerful, happy man. He loved his family and made it clear in word and deed. And he inspired similar feelings in both Taggart and herself.

  She thought it must be one of the hardest things on earth to persevere in caring about a man who seemed not to care about you.

  "That's just the way he is," Deke said. Then he admitted, "Yeah, sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot. And I was ready to leave and not come back, but he did come to my opening…" He shrugged.

  The words were unspoken: So he must really care.

  Erin desperately hoped it was true. But even if it wasn't, believing it had made Deke a better man.

  Besides if there was any doubt that his father cared about him, there was certainly no doubt that Deke cared about his old man. He, who had hated that store, was working ten-hour days dealing with the butcher shop and the groceries and interviewing potential employees. Then he came home and asked about her day with Zack, and about her kids as well.

  She wished he wouldn't get involved with them. It would just make it harder when he left. But she couldn't say that.

  And she couldn't regret the attention he paid them, either. He brought out things in them that neither she nor her brother or parents had tapped.

  Gabriel, for example, who had never once talked to her about being interested in photography, talked to Deke about it nonstop.

  But last Sunday when she and Deke had begun talking about photography before dinner—a determined effort on her part to keep things on a "friendly but detached" level with Deke—Gabriel came and listened. And the next thing she knew he disappeared upstairs, only to reappear moments later with a camera in his hands, saying to Deke, "Do you want to see my papa's camera?"

  Erin had been astonished—and dismayed. So much for keeping things impersonal.

  Especially when Deke had said, "Yes, I'd like to very much," with exactly the right amount of respect and interest.

  He had taken the camera from Gabriel, handling it almost reverently, telling the boy what a fine camera it was, how much better it was than the first one he'd had, and how he was sure Gabriel's father must have valued it highly.

  "I guess he did. He said he always knew he wanted to take pictures," Gabriel replied.

  And Deke nodded gravely. "It's a camera for a man who means business."

  Gabriel hesitated, swallowed, then ventured, "Will you teach me how to use it?"

  Erin very nearly blurted, Why are you asking him? I can teach you!

  She had managed to keep her mouth shut—barely—because some shred of maternal intuition told her that Gabriel knew she could, and if he hadn't asked her there had to be a reason. Hurt, she'd vowed to talk to him later and find out.

  When she did, later that night, he'd explained, "I thought it would make you sad."

  And she couldn't lie and say it wouldn't. "But I'd be glad to do it," she'd said. "You don't have to bother Deke."

  "He said it wasn't a bother," Gabriel had replied. "He said he'd be honored. He let me use his camera."

  She knew that. She'd tried not to notice. She couldn't help it. And nearly every evening since, when Deke got home, he and Gabriel talked serious photography. After dinner Deke put Zack in the backpack and, carrying the little boy, he and Gabriel went out to shoot pictures. He suggested things for Gabriel to do after school, and every evening they discussed them, too.

  "You don't have to spend so much time with him," Erin had told Deke, feeling awkward but obliged to make that clear.

&
nbsp; "I want to spend time with him. I like him. I hope he likes me." There was an edge to his voice that sounded almost hurt.

  "Of course he does. I just—" But she couldn't finish. Her dreams were too muddled. Her hopes had been dashed years ago. And now … now she didn't know what to do.

  Friday night Erin thought Deke would be exhausted from the thirty-mile drive to and from Livingston, his long day at the store and from having stopped to see his father, who was two days past his surgery now, recovering well, and already demanding to know what was going on at the store.

  She expected he would be happy to collapse on the sofa after dinner and take advantage of Gabriel's being at Mark Nichols's house that evening and thus unable to talk photography.

  Instead after they'd finished supper and dishes, Deke had looked around the room and said hopefully, "Who wants to go sledding?"

  "Me!" cried Nicolas.

  "Moi, aussi," shrilled Sophie.

  "Meeee!" crowed Zack, who didn't have a clue. He just wanted to do what the bigger kids did.

  So Deke bundled up Zack and Sophie and Nicolas, pulled on jackets and mittens and hats and got ready to go to Sutter's Hill.

  "Aren't you coming?" Deke said, clearly surprised when Erin made no move to accompany them.

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. I've got these—" she waved a hand toward the heaps of sheets she had volunteered to turn into angel costumes for the pageant in two weeks' time "—to work on."

  "Oh, Mama, come," Sophie pleaded.

  And Nicolas hopped from one foot to the other. "Come on, Mama. You'd have fun."

  Erin, looking at their shining eager faces, knew she would—and knew just as certainly how dangerous to her emotional health that would be. And so once more she shook her head firmly. "Duty calls."

  "Is that what it is?" Deke said, challenging her over the tops of the children's heads. "I thought you were just chicken."

  Then he opened the door, and they all scampered out, leaving Erin to fume indignantly as she watched them head up the street.

  Sutter's Hill, which sat behind Artie Gilliam's house, had been the town sledding spot for as long as Elmer had been a town. Everybody came to Sutter's, young and old alike, because it was fun. There was a long, reasonably swift slope that angled in one direction, and a gentle shorter hill that ended in Gilliam's backyard.

  "Somethin' for everyone," Artie always said. And afterward, he and his late wife, Maudie, had always invited everyone in for coffee and cocoa and Maudie's wonderful cookies. It was a town tradition. In fact, even ranch kids and their parents, who could have sledded on any of a dozen places in their own backyards, so to speak, came to Sutter's just because their friends were there, because everyone liked to visit, because it was more fun at Sutter's than anywhere else.

  Erin was sure it was still fun, though she doubted Artie was doing the coffee, cocoa, cookies bit anymore. He was, after all, ninety-odd years old now, and Jace and Celie Tucker were living with him. She was sure Celie, who had only finished cutting hair at the Spa at six, wasn't likely to be entertaining sledders all evening.

  Picking up the angel costume, Erin determinedly set to work.

  She should have accomplished much more than usual, being alone in the house. There were no distractions, no questions from the kids, no conversation from Deke. Only Sammy the dog and Minou the cat distracted at all—if you could call feeding them and putting Sammy out once distractions.

  She was more distracted by her thoughts. She kept remembering earlier visits to Sutter's. More often than not she and Taggart had done their sledding at home. But sometimes they'd been able to come with their parents to Sutter's on snowy days. And it had always been such fun—zipping down the long hill on the bobsled, clinging to each other and shrieking as they'd hurtled along at breakneck speed, or building snow forts in Artie and Maudie's yard and pelting each other with snowballs, or helping the little kids make snowmen and decorating them with Artie's old pipes and funny vegetable noses. She remembered the one with the zucchini nose that she and Deke had made the last winter she was home.

  She and Deke…

  Because even though Deke had been a Livingston boy, once he'd come to work on the Joneses' ranch, he, too, had discovered the joys of sledding at Sutter's.

  They had come together several times when they'd been in college, whenever Deke had been able to get away from work at the store. She wondered if he'd spent today at the store thinking about Sutter's, about how much fun they'd had there, about the snowmen they'd built and the sled rides they'd taken.

  And about the day he'd kissed her.

  It had, of course, been purely spontaneous—the product of a hair-raising toboggan ride in which she'd burrowed back against him for dear life as they'd careened down the slope and plowed headlong into a snowbank at the end, tipping and rolling over and over until they came to a stop with Erin pinned beneath him. And the two of them had lain, breathless and laughing, their mouths bare inches apart—until Deke had closed the gap and pressed his lips to hers.

  It had been quick and, though fierce, nothing at all like the hungry kisses he had given her last Saturday night. That long-ago kiss hadn't been overtly erotic at all. It had been all enthusiasm and exuberance and the sort of thing a guy did with a girl he'd just tipped into a snowbank.

  Yet Erin could taste it still.

  She sat motionless at the sewing machine, remembering that ride, savoring it again in her mind and her heart and the pit of her stomach. Remembering the snow as it melted against the back of her neck, remembered the heat of Deke's breath on her cheek, remembered his laughing blue eyes suddenly becoming dark as he'd bent his head and kissed her.

  She wet her lips without realizing it. She breathed quickly, heart pounding with the memory. She pressed hard on the pedal, the material whizzed through her fingers. She'd sewn right through four thicknesses. The wing was now attached to the body in an anatomically impossible place.

  "Oh, hell!"

  And now she had inches—no, feet!—of stitching to unpick and resew. Annoyed, Erin slapped the angel costume down and paced the room. But the room wasn't big enough for her feelings so she prowled the house upstairs and down. She went to the window and saw it was still snowing, let the dog out again and felt the sting of snow on her cheeks and heard the sound of shrieks and laughter all the way from Sutter's Hill.

  She had taken the kids sledding herself the week before Thanksgiving, when they'd had a foot of snow. They'd laughed and played and she'd come home happy, more satisfied than ever that she had done the right thing bringing them back to Montana. The next morning she'd had a call from an editor she'd worked with at a magazine in Paris and had told her about the experience, about how it had brought back memories of her own childhood.

  And the editor had said, "You must shoot it, Erin. We would love such a nostalgic piece—and the photos. Yes, you would bring life in small-town America to Parisians."

  "Maybe," Erin had agreed, though she hadn't been in the mood to shoot any photos then. She'd still been drifting then.

  But now…

  The shouts and shrieks from Sutter's Hill continued, calling to her, beckoning her. And what would she do if she just stayed home? There would be plenty of opportunity later tonight to unpick that entire seam.

  Deke had never seen himself as part of a family.

  In fact, he'd resisted the notion for years. But having Zack in his life had forced him to take another look at options, to stop and rethink his priorities. Zack—being a good dad to Zack—was his number one priority.

  And after four days in Elmer, playing house with Erin was ranking pretty high on his list, too. He discovered he didn't even mind spending every day in the grocery store when he could come home to Erin. Not that he wanted to do it for the rest of his life, but it was certainly easier to do when he had Erin and the kids to come home to.

  She was still a little stiff with him, still a little starchy. She still eyed him warily whenever she thought he wasn
't looking—and sometimes, damn it, when she knew he was. But he had faith that deep down she still liked him. She was just afraid of what she thought he expected of her. She still loved her husband. And she wasn't ready to let anyone take his place in her life.

  Fair enough. Deke even admired her for it.

  She was loyal, his Erin. And stubborn. He knew she had determined not to come sledding with them this evening because she might undermine her own resolve, she might have too good a time. He shook his head, despairing, as he reached the top of the hill, Zack riding on his shoulders, and the toboggan rope in his hand.

  "Okay, everybody on." He settled Zack in front with his feet under the curve, then wedged Sophie right behind him, then Nico next, and himself last.

  "Give you a shove?" Jace Tucker offered.

  Deke nodded. "Appreciate it. Hang on tight," he told the kids.

  Jace shoved.

  "Whooo-hooo!" they yelled. And then they were sailing down the hillside, swooshing past those climbing for another run, with Sophie shrieking madly, Nico yelling and cheering, and even Zack emitting high-pitched squeals until they cruised to a halt in Artie's backyard.

  And Sophie shouted, "Mama! You came!"

  And Nico called, "Mama! Did you see?"

  And Zack clapped his hands and yelled, "Mama! Mama! Mama!"

  That startled Deke as much as seeing the woman Zack was calling. But there she was, laughing, too, and wearing a puffy scarlet down jacket over her jeans and shirt as she stood in the snow taking pictures of them.

  The kids bounced off the sled and ran over to her.

  "Come on, Mama! Come ride with us!" Nico begged.

  "Come on, Mama!" Sophie's cheeks were as red as Erin's jacket as she grabbed her mother's arm to pull her over to the toboggan. "C'est fantastique!"

  "Mama! Mama! Mama!" Zack kept yelling.

  And Deke could tell the moment the words registered. The laughter vanished. And she looked from Zack to him, stricken.

  "He's glad to see you," Deke said, trying not to make anything of it, trying to restore her equilibrium, make her glad she'd come.