Christmastime Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  It hadn’t just been about love. She had been taught at her father’s knee not to give trust. Not to friends or anyone. To hold her emotions close. To keep walls in place to stay protected, and she’d done that. With everyone but him.

  When she’d lost him, she’d not only lost the man she’d fallen in love with, she’d lost her first real friend. The only person who knew all of those things about her. How hard she tried to please her father. How she felt continually caught in the middle of being a good daughter and trying to fit in with friends. Trying to have friends at all.

  Then he’d left. Proved all those things her father had told her right.

  She had willfully, defiantly and almost gleefully destroyed her relationship with her father then. Had done her best to hurt him as she had felt he had hurt her. Because of course at seventeen she hadn’t seen the difference between her feelings for Liam and her father’s pride. His relationship to his wife of twenty-five years. No. Of course, teenage Sabrina had seen none of that.

  It was as if her seventeen years of sensibility had simply dissolved, leaving behind no sensibility at all, leaving behind nothing but a mass of unguarded, unprotected, senseless feeling.

  And that Sabrina—that ridiculous, emotional Sabrina, seemed to be making a reappearance. Because she was certainly able to be goaded by Liam. Though she supposed, since he was the one who had brought her out in the first place, it stood to reason that he would make her reappear now.

  “What?” he asked his green eyes sharpening.

  “Yes. You look about as shocked as everyone else did.”

  “Back up. Where was this? When was this?”

  What she hated was that it felt like a simple thing to tell him. How was it that three months of her life had affected the next thirteen years so profoundly? And how was it that this man, the one that had always been so easy to talk to, still was, even when he was the root cause of all of her problems?

  “A few weeks after you left. Remember, my father was hosting a campaign event for Richard Bailey. He was running for mayor for like the three hundredth time, or something. Everyone influential from Copper Ridge came. Everyone influential from Gold Valley, from Portland, from everywhere, they all were there. Our function at things like that was to simply smile and pretend we were working at the party. Make it all look like a glossy, classy family event.”

  “Sabrina, I knew you when you were seventeen. You did not drink.”

  She squared her shoulders. “Well, I decided that I would start that night. I took a bottle of wine into one of the barns and sat in the corner. I guess I should back up and let you know that I had a confrontation with my dad after you disappeared. I thought that he fired you. I thought that he had found out about me going to the cabin that night. Because when I came to see you the next day, after I recovered from being embarrassed and upset, you were gone. I was going to apologize. I was going to tell you that I wanted to preserve our friendship... But you were gone. And I knew that you wouldn’t have just... I thought that my father had to be involved.”

  “You were right,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “Yes. I was.” She closed her eyes.

  She would never forget that. Tiptoeing into her father’s office, because quiet was always demanded if one was going to enter Jamison Leighton’s inner sanctum. She had been fighting back tears, fighting down panic.

  She couldn’t cope with the idea that Liam might actually be gone. But none of his things were back in the cabin, and he had taken his motorcycle. And for her, Liam had been...freedom.

  The first and only person in her life to ever pay attention to her when she was just being her. Opening up to him had felt easy, and there had never been another time or another person in her life that had made it feel that way.

  In order to have her father’s attention, she had to be quiet. She had to be good. She could hardly ever command her mother’s attention, and her older brother didn’t care. Beatrix had been too young for Sabrina to care, and of course, that irony had been lost on her at the time.

  “I was just so angry,” she said. “And I felt like I had escaped a box, and when you left I thought I was going to have to get back inside of it.”

  He frowned, the brackets by his mouth deepening. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Of course not. It’s not like I explained it to you. But the me that you knew then was not the person that I was for most of my life. I was seventeen, so I met you and I got giddy. I won’t pretend it was anything else. I made an idiot out of myself following you around. But you gave me attention. And you never made me feel stupid. You never made me feel like I had to be different. It wasn’t like that with anyone else in my family. With anyone else at all. You made it seem like being me might be easier than I had thought before I met you. It wasn’t just you I liked. I liked who I was when I was with you. Braver. Funnier.” She shook her head. “I was afraid that when you left I would lose that.”

  The terrible thing that she had to contend with, even as she spoke the words, as emotion threatened to crush her chest like a pair of snapping iron jaws, was that it had changed her to lose him. That she had lost something she’d found over that carefree summer, where she had learned what it meant to smile so much her face hurt for the first time.

  She hadn’t lost all of it though. Because while she was angry about a lot of what had happened, it had also shaped her into who she was. She was definitely stronger. Definitely more independent. But lonely sometimes too. And cautious.

  She could never be as innocent as she had been. But that was the cost of growing older. It happened to everyone. It wasn’t like she was a special case, even if, when she got lost in her own personal darkness, it started to feel like it.

  “Anyway. My father used your taking the money as an example of the fact that he had been right and I was wrong. That what he had done had been to protect me, that I had committed the unpardonable sin of being led around by my unstable emotions.”

  She blinked rapidly. “Again, he wasn’t necessarily wrong. But I was so wounded by it. By all of it. And I let it fester over the next week. And when the party happened... And everyone was happy. Having fun. Putting on that polite, calm face that people in our position always do. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t support it. I couldn’t be part of it. I went off by myself, and I was just going to...well, to soak my misery in alcohol for a while. I’d had tastes of wine, of course, you don’t grow up in a winery and not have samples here and there. But I had never gotten drunk before. So, I made it my goal.”

  She spared him the finer details. Of her sitting in the corner of the barn, the cold soaking through from the floor to her clothes, chilling her, as tears rolled down her cheeks. As she wept pathetically in the corner, drinking straight out of the bottle like a mortally wounded soldier trying to blunt the reality of her upcoming death.

  Truly, there had been no less elegant expression of heartbreak in the history of the world.

  But then, as she’d had more to drink, her grief had begun to fade to something else altogether. To anger and righteous rage. And she had begun to feel bold again, not so crushed and defeated. All of that bravery, all of that recklessness that had fueled her to leave her bedroom in the middle of the night, to go down to Liam’s cabin wearing nothing but a trench coat, fueled her again.

  She had stood up on wobbly legs, and taken herself down to the big outdoor seating area where everyone was standing, drinking and socializing in the most civilized of ways.

  She could remember clearly the way the lights had looked, strong over the party. Double, tripled in her vision, and hazy. Everything was so hazy. A blessed relief next to the sharpness she had experienced ever since Liam had left her.

  It made her feel strong. Made her feel like the most bright, distinct thing there. Like she was owed the floor. Like she was owed this moment.r />
  “After I was...compromised, I walked down to the party and I found my father. And I started yelling at him. And believe me when I tell you that every eye in the place was on me. And I was thrilled. I wanted that attention. I had always earned my father’s favor, his notice by being good. And I was ruining it all then. And getting all the attention I could ever want. It was the best thing. The most amazing, empowering thing. So I kept going. I yelled at him for ruining my life. For sending you away. For thinking he was so much better than everyone else, even though his wife was sleeping with another man.”

  She closed her eyes, pain washing through her. “I didn’t think he knew. Isn’t that terrible? Telling my father that his wife was cheating on him in front of all those people...”

  “When did you find out?”

  She swallowed hard. “The first time I saw my mom with another man I was maybe six? But I didn’t understand then. What it meant that she had a visitor in the middle of the day, that they disappeared for a couple of hours. Everything looked like friendship in my eyes. I think it first hit me when I was thirteen. I started to suspect that she had affairs then. But it was confirmed a couple of years later when I saw her kissing someone. I came downstairs one night, and heard people down there, so I hid in the hall. My father was out of town on a sales trip. I knew that she wasn’t down there with him. I looked around the corner and into the living room and I saw them together. I don’t know who it was. I had never seen him before. And I didn’t see him after.”

  “You just kept that secret to yourself?”

  She shrugged. “What else was I going to do with it? If I told, it would destroy everything. Destroy our family. I couldn’t do that. Until I was drunk and wounded, and destroyed myself, so I figured I might as well ruin everything around me too.” She sighed heavily. “He knew. He told me later.”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she tried to blink them back. Liam Donnelly had had enough of her tears. She didn’t want to give him any more tears. Particularly not in front of him. But it was hard to talk about this without feeling emotional. Mostly because she had never talked about it. She had never told anyone this whole story.

  She had been angry at her father, and she had humiliated him in an unforgivable way, but not just him. She hadn’t even considered what it would mean for her mother to announce that. What it would mean for Damien. And poor Beatrix, who had of course been shielded from everything up until that point.

  “After the party my mother went to their room, wailing like I’d personally cut her open. My father dragged me into his office, white-faced. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen my father to losing his temper. But even then, he kept his tone completely calm. He asked me if I thought he was stupid. If that was all the respect I had for him. He said he had tried to protect me. To protect me by instilling in me the importance of control. Of doing the right thing. Being led by that sense of morality and not by feelings. Like him. Because the alternative was being like my mom. And of course he knew her shortcomings, but he honored his vows. He was never unfaithful. And he refused to divorce her.”

  Liam crossed his arms over his broad chest, angling his face upward. “Sounds like a martyr to me. Not a saint.”

  “Same thing, historically speaking.”

  “Maybe historically, but not so much in practice. What does he want? Accolades for sticking it out, even though it sucks?”

  “No,” she said. “Because nobody knew. Nobody knew but him. Until I uncovered it all. He said... He knew that Damien was just like our mom. He knew it. He never expected him to be better. And Beatrix... She was wild, then and now. Kind of untamed, marches to her own beat. But me... He was sure that I was like him, but when I met you, he could see me going down the same road he had gone down.”

  “With your mother?”

  She nodded. “Yes. And so, he had tried to protect me, and I had refused to allow it. And that it was too late to fix.”

  “He cut you off.”

  “I lost my job at the winery. He didn’t kick me out of the house, but he didn’t speak to me anymore. I don’t know if he would have paid for me to go to school, I never asked. I just started arranging all of it by myself. I moved out. I went and got my own work. My mom forgave me,” she said. “Which I’ve always found so strange, because I didn’t humiliate her any less. But, I think she’s in general a lot more forgiving of uncontrolled emotions. Damien never cared either way, because Damien has never cared what anyone thought.”

  “I imagine his marriage to Lindy wasn’t a popular decision on his part?”

  She shook her head. “He met her while he was traveling with the rodeo, which was another unpopular decision. Her brother, Dane, also rides, and he and Damien became friends. Of course, my father considered them a class of people that we were far too good to associate with.”

  “So you’ve stayed around, stayed close to the rest of your family, and your father just...doesn’t speak to you?”

  “He asked me to pass him the potatoes at Christmas one year.” She wasn’t kidding.

  “Well. That’s bullshit.”

  “Says the man who left town and never spoke to me again?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Right. Because you were protecting me. You know what, my father thinks he was protecting me too.”

  “I didn’t have anything to give you, Sabrina. I didn’t. And I shouldn’t have encouraged our friendship, whatever it was. I shouldn’t have done it. But I was being an idiot. I already told you, I was young, and I wasn’t any smarter than you. And I’ll tell you something, I wasn’t a virgin. So when I met you, and I thought you were cute and funny, and I wanted to listen to you talk more than I wanted to see you naked, I figured that maybe it was all right to get to know you better. I didn’t think I would be tempted to do anything.”

  “You weren’t,” she said.

  Something shifted then, his stance, the light in his eyes. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that even if he was dressed like a civilized man, he was still a very large one. Muscular. That the tattooed bad boy was underneath the long-sleeved shirt and tie.

  Her heart was beating rapidly, her palms starting to sweat a little bit. “You’re an idiot,” he said.

  She hadn’t expected that. “Was that your version of an apology? Because it sucked.”

  “No. I’m not apologizing to you. You think that I didn’t want you? With all of your wisdom gained in the last thirteen years that’s really what you think?”

  “Yes, asshole. Because that’s what you told me. You said you didn’t want me. You said you didn’t do... Well, you remember. I’m not going to recite your screed back to you.”

  “If I hadn’t wanted you, I would have wrapped you in a fuzzy blanket and set you down on my bed. I would have explained to you why it wasn’t a good idea. I wouldn’t have had to get your naked ass out of my house as quickly as possible before I threw you down on a rug and had my way with you.”

  Involuntarily, her fingers drifted upward, and she grabbed hold of her necklace. “On a rug?”

  “Or just the hardwood.”

  “Then why? Why did you leave?” She shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t really need the breakdown on how that would have been really expensive sex, all things considered.”

  “It’s funny, Sabrina, you’ve done a lot of lecturing me about how I don’t know you, but I think you didn’t know me very well at all. It’s been thirteen years. I’ve never had a long-term relationship. I’m not married. This doesn’t surprise me. I’m not the marriage and family type.”

  “Well, I’m not married either.”

  “You’ll find somebody. I don’t want to.”

  She sniffed. “Maybe I don’t want to either.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Well, my father is an icicle who has spent the past
thirty-six years being cheated on. My mother is a cheater. My brother is a cheater. He cheated on the most wonderful woman in the world. Lindy is amazing, and she did nothing but love him. Not exactly advertisements for love and happiness, my family.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Fine. Maybe we didn’t know each other. But the last thirteen years... Everything I’ve done, I had to do. I’m not going to apologize for taking your father’s money.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “But you wish I would.”

  “The fact that you’re actually not very nice doesn’t surprise me.”

  “It has nothing to do with being nice. I didn’t have any opportunities in my life. I was raised by a mother who had no money, and if she had money, she wouldn’t have spent it on me. I got the opportunity to get a leg up, and I was sure as hell going to take it. Just so you know...he offered me the money before you came to the cabin.”

  Sabrina’s heart jerked forward, slammed against her breastbone. “He offered you money before,” she said, not a question, just trying to get confirmation.

  “Yes. He had noticed that you were...fascinated by me.” The corner of his mouth tilted upward, and she wanted to punch it.

  “I was not.”

  “You were. And it was obvious. To everyone.”

  That old shame, that old embarrassment, washed over her. She had exposed herself like that to everyone. Anyone who cared to look.

  “Why were you still there? If he’d already offered you the money, why were you still there when I came to you?”

  “Because of the kiss.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FIRE WORKED ITS way through Liam’s veins. Neither of them had spoken about this. And there was a reason for that. At least, on his part. He wasn’t sure he could get into this without...without doing something they were both going to regret.