Millie Criswell, Mary McBride, Liz Ireland

by A Western Family Christmas Christmas Eve; Season of Bounty; Cowboy Scrooge

  “Think you can keep up?” he asked.

  She answered with a withering look. “I’ve ridden before.”

  Once.

  “Good.” Justin clicked his tongue and he was off. Way off. Ivy gawked in amazement. The man tore across the barnyard and toward the road without so much as a glance back at her. She had no idea how to make a horse go that fast, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The quickest pace she’d achieved on Old Pokey was a jolting trot, and that had been frightening enough. Nevertheless, she tapped her heels into Brindle’s sides and hoped the command would at least result in a walk.

  It did better. Brindle executed a short, impatient dance and then took off. Bolted. Stunned, Ivy grabbed the reins and then the saddle horn and hunched forward, praying she could just hold on. She had no idea where the horse was taking her. Corral and house went by in a breathless blur. She heard hoof beats and caught the swishing black tail of Justin’s horse and knew she had made it to the road—and closed the distance between them.

  Then she passed him.

  “Ivy, stop!” Justin hollered after her.

  How? Ivy wasn’t certain how to stop and, furthermore, wasn’t sure she even wanted to. She had the sneaking suspicion that if the horse came to a halt, she wouldn’t. That she would just go shooting off into the air like a ball launched from a cannon.

  Biting the bullet, she gathered the reins more closely in her white-knuckled fists and searched her mind for the right words. “Brindle, whoa!” She wasn’t sure whether the command came out as a whisper or a terrified shriek. Her own body was beyond her control now, lost to wind and speed, and she had already delivered herself up into the hands of her maker.

  But the words did the trick. Brindle’s breakneck pace slowed to that familiar bone rattling gate Old Pokey had executed so expertly, and Ivy jostled weakly until the horse came to a standstill.

  Justin was alongside her in a second, gaping at her with unchecked surprise. “You really do know how to ride!”

  Now that her horse was still, Ivy felt so lightheaded and trembly that she feared she might just slither off the animal’s back She had a hard time keeping her hands from shaking, and Lord only knows how she found breath to answer. She could barely draw air into her lungs. “Of course,” she said shakily. “Did you think I was lying?”

  He chuckled. “Not exactly. I just didn’t know what a quick trip it would be into town.”

  Before she could answer, much less ’fess up to her true equine ignorance, he clicked his tongue and galloped off again. And Brindle, who was apparently just warming up, charged after him.

  Though they discovered Beulah tied to a rail by the saloon, Joe Junior was nowhere to be found. A couple of men at the bar recalled having spotted a scraggly youngster and a mule, but that had been hours ago, they said. Justin left the saloon discouraged. He’d known all along that these children would be more trouble than he could contend with, though he had to admit that Ivy had kept a tight rein on them. Until now.

  But now Ivy had slipped away from him, too. He strode down the street, irritation prickling inside him. He shouldn’t have let Ivy out of his sight, but foolishly he hadn’t wanted to take her into a saloon, which wasn’t a fit place for a decent woman. If Ivy even was decent. How did he know what she’d been back in Boston?

  It was a question he’d wondered about more than he cared to admit. In fact, he’d been daydreaming about Ivy entirely too much. The woman was a termagant, and yet there was something about her bluntness that seemed refreshing. No one had spoken to him like she did. Ever. It took guts, just as it had taken guts for her to keep her seat on Brindle during the wild ride into town when she’d only had that one riding lesson from Wink.

  He’d known she was lying. And wasn’t it just like her to stare at him with those green eyes and not admit it! He’d never met a woman so stubborn, which was especially surprising given her beauty. She seemed not to understand how much more easily she could manipulate him with just a smile than by launching herself at him and yelling. Because if the truth be told, despite everything, he was drawn to her.

  Sometimes at night it seemed that he’d never get those green eyes out of his imagination so he could fall asleep. Or her pert little nose. He’d thought about her cascades of dark, softly curled hair, her tiny waist, and how light her step was in the morning as she helped John Tall Tree by pouring the men’s coffee. He’d even foolishly wondered if she was a good dancer. He wasn’t much of a dancer himself, although lately, he felt so light of foot sometimes it seemed as if he were dancing.

  He’d also wondered if she’d had a man before, though the very notion flooded him with foolish jealousy. Was that what she was doing here—running away from a love affair? A married man who had led her on? He couldn’t imagine. He didn’t want to think about it.

  Yet some days, when he should have been concentrating on his work, it seemed he could think of nothing else.

  As he reached the end of the feed store, he heard voices. Fierce, whispered voices from the alley. One of them was Ivy’s. Instinctively he stopped, then ducked against the dark wall.

  “You’d better thank God for a roof over your head,” Ivy was saying, “and more than that, you’d better behave. You understand me?”

  Justin felt his muscles relax. Ivy had found Joe Junior. He was more relieved than he’d expected to be.

  In the alley there was a drawn-out silence in which Justin could perfectly picture Joe Junior’s sullen face.

  “Why?” the boy retorted. “What’s gonna happen if I behave?”

  “You’ll still have a bed to sleep in and food to eat, that’s what,” Ivy said. “That’s nothing to sneeze at.”

  “But don’t you see? He doesn’t even like us,” Joe Junior said. “He could boot us all out tomorrow ’cause he doesn’t like us on account of we remind him of what our ma did to him.”

  Justin felt the blood drain out of his face, and he closed his eyes. For a moment he felt he was drowning in the dark, the confused silence. He’d never dreamed the children knew about what had happened between him and Josiah and Mary.

  “What your ma did to him?” Ivy repeated slowly. “I thought it was your uncle who did the terrible thing that caused all the bad blood. That’s what you said.”

  “That’s what I let the young ’uns think,” Joe Junior admitted. “They don’t really remember Ma. But when she used to cry, it wasn’t because she hated Uncle Justin. It was on account of she loved him.”

  Justin clenched his fists. Why didn’t the kid be quiet? Why couldn’t he—

  He sagged against the building, letting it take his weight as if he been a sack of flour someone had kicked over. Mary had loved him, Joe Junior had said. She’d pined for him, cried about jilting him…all those years? Had she really been that unhappy?

  Wasn’t that what you wanted?

  When Mary, his beautiful fiancée, the woman he’d started his ranch for so they could marry and have children, had run off with ne’er-do-well Josiah, he’d let her go, though he’d sworn she’d regret it. He was all wounded pride, and envisioning her potential misery had made him feel better at first. He knew deep down that he would have been the better husband, the better father. Probably she’d come crawling back to him someday.

  But after a few years went by and Mary hadn’t returned to Wishbone, much less to him, he had been forced to conclude that she’d run off with fast talking Josiah because she’d just plain loved him more. After that he’d been so consumed by jealousy that he’d finally had to forget, to bury himself in his work. He had single-mindedly avoided thinking about Mary all these years.

  Until now.

  Now, it turned out, his first impression had been correct, but his heart reaped no satisfaction at the thought.

  It was a while before Ivy spoke again, but when she did, her voice was lower, more thoughtful. “I didn’t know…”

  “She was in love with him all those years.” A petulant sigh came from Joe Junior. “Now I suppos
ed you’ll fall in love with him, too!”

  “Me? What nonsense!” Ivy exclaimed.

  “You already stare at him all the time,” Joe Junior said accusingly.

  She did? Justin, who had been lost in thoughts of the past, straightened with interest.

  “Fiddlesticks, I don’t, either,” Ivy said.

  “Then what’re you hanging around for?”

  Money was the obvious answer. But that’s not what Ivy said.

  “I’m staying to look after you, Joe Junior, and see that you don’t grow into a muddleheaded fool like me!”

  They rounded the corner and plowed right into Justin. All of them jumped in surprise. Though it was dark, he could see a stain creep into Ivy’s cheeks. He felt flushed himself. Had she really been staring at him ?

  The two of them stood glowing at each other like lightning bugs.

  “Where have you been?” His tone came out harsher than he’d intended. “I’ve been looking all over hell and gone for you.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Then why didn’t you call for me? What were you doing, spying on us?”

  “No!” The answer came so quickly, though, it was pretty clear that’s exactly what he had been doing.

  She tilted a skeptical glance at him, her green eyes shining.

  “We’d better get back,” he said tightly, then turned and went back to where they’d left their horses. Beulah was still tied in front of the saloon, and they fetched her, too.

  For his part, Joe Junior was so happy to be spared a lecture from his formidable uncle that he didn’t dare break into the long, awkward silence during the ride home. He simply took the absence of reproach from his uncle as a gift.

  More than likely it would be the only one from him he’d ever receive.

  Chapter Five

  Ivy reached back with a broom handle and gave the braided rug hanging on the clothesline the strongest beating she or it could stand. The old tattered carpet had shed most of its dust already; it was probably cleaner than it had been at any point in its long, much abused life. Trouble was, Ivy’s frustrations remained.

  Not a word! Not so much as a syllable or a smile had Justin directed at her today. Even his usual growling would have been more welcome than silence. How much of her conversation with Joe Junior last night had he heard? Had he heard Joe Junior tell her the truth about Mary? Or that Ivy was always staring at Justin?

  Had she always been staring at Justin?

  This had come as a shock to her, but the truth was, in retrospect, she seemed to remember so much of what Justin looked like in certain moments, what his reactions had been to various snippets of conversation, that she wondered if she had actually taken her eyes off the man since coming to Wishbone.

  Of course, she wasn’t about to go falling in love with Justin because he had a handsome face. Lord help her, she was immune to that kind of nonsense by now. But ever since last night, it wasn’t exactly Justin’s handsome face—handsome as ever this morning, she noted as she gave the rug another forceful whack—that was plaguing her thoughts. It was that tale Joe Junior had told of his mother. The woman who had loved Justin, then run off with his brother and lived to regret it. Bitterly, apparently.

  And on the other side of that tale was Justin—a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, living out on this isolated ranch, all these years, nursing that old wound. She’d been so wrong about him! Called him all sorts of names to his face. She’d thought that he was a man without a heart, when really he was all heart. All broken heart. No wonder Wink had been so certain that there would never be a Mrs. Murphy. She was probably the only woman who’d gotten so much as a toehold on the Bar M in all these years, and she was only tolerated out of dire necessity.

  Ivy gave the rug several more slugs before she stopped. Someone was chuckling behind her. She whirled and found herself face-to-face with the object of her thoughts.

  Justin was standing just a few feet away from her, rubbing his clean-shaven chin. Her insides did an uneasy flip at the sight of the line of white teeth glinting at her. “What’s so funny?”

  “You. You’re flogging that carpet within an inch of its life,” he drawled. “What’s the matter with you today? You’re jumpier than a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

  She leaned on the broom handle. My, he was handsome. She did want to just stare and stare at him, precisely as Joe Junior had said. “What’s the matter with me?” She laughed incredulously. “As if I’m the one who’s been silent as a tomb all day!”

  His smile disappeared. He didn’t answer her.

  She felt rattled. Didn’t he know this tightlipped westerner behavior was driving her to distraction? ‘ ‘I don’t know how you can try to pretend that nothing happened last night.”

  “You mean about Joe Junior? Oh, well, the less said about that—”

  She huffed in irritation. “I mean about Joe Junior and everything. Unless you’re not just pretending that you didn’t overhear our conversation last night,” she said, and by the way his face blanched she could tell that he had indeed overheard every word.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked stiffly.

  What, indeed? She didn’t have the faintest idea. She only knew that she wanted him to say something, to acknowledge how wrong she had been. “I would think you’d want to gloat at me, for one thing. I was so wrong!” She felt a rush of fresh shame at how terribly she’d behaved with him. “I called you Scrooge! A reptile! A fiend!”

  “Maybe you were right to.”

  “I was terrible! But I swear I had no idea…I mean, of course you wouldn’t jump at the chance to take care of children who, well, who would be reminders of…” Try as she might, the name wouldn’t come out of her mouth.

  But he could say it. A dark shadow came over his face, and his lips were tight, but he spat out the word, his tone terse and pained. “Mary.”

  She felt her cheeks go red. “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “But you must be, or else why…?”

  She couldn’t go on. She felt so silly. He obviously didn’t want to talk about Mary, but she had been able to think of nothing else since last night. She’d stayed up until the stars began to disappear, wondering whether, after all these years, Justin was still in love with the woman who had jilted him. Oh, he was capable of far more emotion than she had ever given him credit for!

  He was also capable of making her feel more for a man than she’d ever dreamed. For weeks she’d been flying at him, huffing and insulting him. Now she felt like flinging herself at him in a completely different, shameless way.

  “When you look at me, I know now you’re thinking about all the terrible things she did to you,” she said.

  “You’re wrong, Ivy.”

  She couldn’t believe it. She closed the distance between him so that he would have to look her in the eye. “I used to wonder why you were so hostile with me, but now I know. You were thinking of her.”

  He grabbed her shoulders. “You couldn’t be further from the truth.”

  She wasn’t listening to him. “You’ve been pining for her all this time, so lovesick that you’ve forgotten how to love. You probably haven’t thought of anyone but Mary—or yourself!—in years.”

  “No, Ivy.” He pulled her closer, gruffly, almost as if he were angry. The look in his eyes was heated, intense. “I’ve thought about you. Some nights it seems as if I think of nothing but you.” He looked into her eyes, then dashed aside a lock of hair the nippy wind had blown across her cheek. The touch of his hand on her skin made her shudder. Or maybe it was his voice, so rasping it sounded as if every word were being dragged directly from his soul. “I’ve lain awake nights thinking about those bow lips of yours, and what it would feel like to kiss them.”

  She could hardly believe his words, yet she clung to them, savoring them. Her? He’d been thinking about her?

  “Oh, heaven!” She was unsure whether it was a simple exclamation or an ans
wer to his late night wondering.

  “Yes,” he agreed just before his mouth descended on hers.

  At the touch of his lips, the whole world seemed to tip crazily. Justin, kissing her. Her, melting against him like butter in July. Nothing was certain anymore; the only thing solid was the feel of Justin against her, holding her to him. She hung on for all she was worth, delighting in the heat of him, the smell of tobacco and leather and sweat.

  She had never felt so full of desire for any man’s kiss. Maybe because she realized, as she lifted up on tiptoe to tilt her lips more fully to Justin, that she had never been kissed by a real man before. Zack had not been a man, but an overgrown wiry youth whose usury she’d had foolishly mistaken for passion.

  She wondered now, as she felt Justin plunder her lips, how she could have mistaken Zack’s immature fondling for the real McCoy. Justin’s slightest move felt more sensual, more dangerous than anything she’d experienced. The touch of his tongue awakened her senses in a way that made her feel flushed and weak-kneed yet powerfully alive.

  She grabbed onto the lapel of his jacket, knowing what they were doing was a mistake…though a powerfully irresistible one. He anchored her firmly against him right there in broad daylight for anyone to see, and she shamelessly moved against him, testing him, trying to gauge if she really held sway over his imagination as he had claimed.

  He let out a groan, and she pushed away, suddenly embarrassed that she could have been so bold, so brazen.

  But he held on to her hand, unwilling to let her flee from him.

  She pulled back more, surprised that her legs could still hold her up. The world around her was reeling in confusion. She was reeling. Justin had kissed her, and she had welcomed his kisses and would have gladly welcomed more if he’d offered. She’d behaved like a wanton, just like those women she’d lived with in prison. The thought filled her with chagrin, made her want to run. What must Justin think of her?