The Rancher's Expectant Christmas

by Karen Templeton

  In other words, it was a perfect party. For everyone else, anyway.

  And that was all that mattered, wasn’t it?

  “Lookin’ good, Mama,” Val shouted over the din as she came up beside Deanna, a zonked-out baby Katie in her arms. More people had held this kid tonight than had probably held Deanna in her entire life. “That dress is the bomb. Especially with that necklace.”

  Black velvet. Straight, short and a little more snug than it had been prebaby. And the bib necklace had been a birthday gift from Emily, the chunky red stones appropriately festive for the occasion.

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  “Is it okay? I’m not one for dressing up much.”

  “It” was a lovely lace top worn over a pair of jeans, loose enough to hide the merest suggestion of a baby bump. A pair of dangly, glittery earrings and a messy updo had the little blonde looking every bit as chic as anyone Deanna had ever seen at one of the gallery openings. Which she told her.

  Val laughed. “Levi just said I looked hot.”

  “Then what more do you need?”

  “True,” Val said, gazing over the crowd. And a crowd, it definitely was, bigger than Deanna ever remembered from when she was a kid. The band leader, a Willie Nelson clone if ever there was one, asked if anyone wanted to do a sing-along, which got an instant chorus of approval. Val turned to Deanna, her eyes soft underneath newly cut bangs.

  “Now they’re saying goodbye. To your dad, I mean. In a way he would’ve wanted.”

  “I know,” Deanna breathed out. “Which is why I agreed when Josh suggested it. Why...” Her gaze took in the giant, stately tree at the far end of the great room, glittering with the hundreds of glass ornaments her mother had loved so much, most of which Dad had bought for her. “Why I did all this. To soften the blow.”

  “Oh, honey...” Val shifted the baby to one arm to tug Deanna to her side. As much as she could, anyway, since in her heels Deanna was nearly a head taller than her new friend. “I think they all understand a lot more than you’re giving them credit for. Tradition might be the thing that holds this town together, but adaptability is what keeps everyone going when tradition falls on its sorry butt. And since my husband is giving me that look, I guess I need to give you back your child...”

  A moment later, gently bouncing her daughter, Deanna retreated from the raucousness to the marginally quieter dining room. The goody laden table—she sent up yet another prayer of thanks for Annie and AJ, who’d happily catered the affair—glowed not only from the candlelight of her mother’s treasured wrought iron candelabras, but from the luminarias lining the edge of the veranda outside. Not to mention the driveway and roof, a labor of love from all the Talbot men.

  “You want to look outside?” she whispered to her daughter, kissing her downy head as she carried the baby over to the ceiling-high paned window, the shutters open to what could only be called a magical view. Another light snow had fallen, golden in the hushed, softly flickering light from hundreds of candle-filled paper bags. Deanna blinked back tears, practically seeing her parents, her mother with her head on her father’s shoulders as they watched the last of their guests leave after a party much like this, their entwined figures limned in the same burnished glow.

  And oh, how Deanna would practically shimmer with her own expectation for the holiday to follow, infected by her mother’s love for the season. More images floated past her mind’s eye—the almost worshipful look in Dad’s eyes when Mom would set the Christmas roast on the table, their laughter as they cleaned up afterward.

  Together. Always together.

  A silent, shuddering sigh left her lungs. Her parents’ love for each other was never a question. But that wasn’t enough, was it, to overcome her mother’s crippling loneliness—?

  “Hey,” Josh said behind her, his voice barely audible over the singing in the other room. “You okay?”

  Nodding, Deanna hastily wiped her cheek, startled to realize she’d been crying.

  “Just...remembering.”

  “That good or bad?” Josh said, taking the baby from her, his smile gentle when Katie did her funny little frowny face before settling back to sleep.

  “Not sure. Don’t suppose it’s surprising, though, stuff popping into my head I haven’t thought about in years.” She smiled at him. “I’m glad we did this. Thank you.”

  Tucking Katie’s head under his chin, Josh gave Deanna a look she couldn’t quite define. “Closure?”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but...maybe. Speaking of which...my current boss called today, badgering me again about when I was coming back to work.”

  “And?”

  “And I quit.”

  “Ballsy,” Josh said, and Deanna laughed.

  “You have no idea. But I realized... I deserve better than that. No matter what happens.”

  A long pause preceded, “Does this mean you’ve decided to take the other job?”

  “It means I’m free to take the other job, if I want—”

  From the great room, a great roar went up from the crowd. Josh turned to her, grinning.

  “I’m guessing Santa’s here. Come on,” he said, his hand going to her waist to steer her back to the party. Never mind that she hadn’t finished her sentence.

  Then again, maybe it was just as well. Since she wasn’t entirely sure she could.

  * * *

  “So did you have fun tonight?” Josh asked, finally getting his son into bed nearly two hours past his bedtime. Nodding, Austin yawned, grabbing for his ratty Kanga, a gift from Josh’s parents two years ago that had inexplicably become The Toy, although Roo had gone missing ages ago.

  “Uh-huh,” his sleepy little boy said, yawning again. “’Cept I know that was Grampa playing Santa.”

  Josh chuckled. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. But don’t tell ’im I know, ’cause I don’t wanna hurt his feelings.”

  “Got it. Okay, buddy, I need to get back to help Dee clean up—”

  “Are Dee and the baby really gonna leave after Christmas?”

  Remembering their conversation—not to mention the pain in her eyes all those memories had obviously dredged up—Josh felt his chest go tight. “As far as I know, yeah.”

  Austin’s forehead pinched. “How come?”

  “Because she doesn’t live here, guy. She was only visiting.”

  The little boy tugged the kangaroo closer, and Josh could practically hear the wheels turning. “But she feels like she lives here. Like this is her house. She feels like...”

  Gently, Josh brushed his son’s hair away from his face. “Like what?”

  “A mom.”

  Josh started, thinking, And how do you know what a mom feels like? But he’d had enough examples, hadn’t he? His grandmother, for one thing. And more recently Val with her girls. Not to mention the other mothers in town who brought their kids to the church day care. The kid was four, not blind. Or immune to the concept of feeling like something was missing.

  Something Josh knew all about, didn’t he?

  “I know, squirt—”

  “You need to make her stay.”

  Oh, jeez... “Can’t do that, buddy.”

  “How come?”

  “Because trying to make people do something they don’t want to do isn’t good. Dee would have to want to stay. Otherwise she’d be unhappy.” Never mind how easily she fit in tonight, crouching to talk to kids she’d never met, completely tuned in to whatever they were saying; laughing at old people’s jokes; freely dispensing hugs. Giving Josh a grin and a thumbs-up at one point when it was obvious the party was a hit. “And you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  “Noooo, but...” The frown got deeper. “So how do we make her want to stay?”

  “We don’t. Sorry. But maybe�
�” Because he was not above grasping at straws. “Maybe after Dee goes back to DC, we can go visit her sometime. And you can see where the president lives. And there’s a great big museum there where they have all kinds of neat stuff, like a whole bunch of really old airplanes. And dinosaur skeletons. Wouldn’t that be cool, to go see all that?”

  That got several seconds’ worth of Not buyin’ it, dude, before the kid’s eyes got wet, and Josh remembered that for a four-year-old, today was the only thing that mattered. The only thing you could count on. Even tomorrow, in most cases, was sketchy. Even so, it wrecked Josh something fierce, that some things, you couldn’t promise a kid. No matter how much the kid might want them, or how much you might want to make those promises.

  Or want those things yourself.

  Yeah, sometimes being a parent sucked. Especially when you could see in your kid’s eyes questions he didn’t even know how to ask, that you couldn’t answer even if he did. Questions that would probably surface one day or another, questions like How come my mother left?

  Or Why does loving somebody hurt so much?

  “Hey,” Josh said, gently tickling Austin’s tummy and getting a tiny smile for his efforts. “You got any idea how much I love you?”

  The smile got a little bit bigger. “Lots?”

  “Oh, way beyond lots. Like, so much more than lots it can’t even be measured.”

  “More than God loves me?”

  Josh smiled. “Maybe not more than that, He’s pretty big. But as close to that as a person can get, how’s that? And I’m not going anywhere. Or Grandma and Grandpa. Or a whole bunch of other people who love you like nobody’s business. So. Are we good?”

  A moment passed before Austin lurched onto his knees to throw his arms around Josh’s neck, and Josh wasn’t sure which one was holding on harder. Or whose heart was being squeezed more.

  “I take it that’s a yes?” he said, and his son nodded against Josh’s neck, then slipped back down onto his pillow, Kanga strangled in his arm.

  “How many sleeps until Christmas?” he asked.

  “Let me see...six.”

  “That’s way too many.”

  Chuckling, Josh stood, his fingers in his front pockets. “It’ll be here before you know it. Now go to sleep, and when you wake up, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “It’ll only be five.”

  Grinning, Austin squeezed shut his eyes and was somehow instantly asleep, and Josh sent up a short prayer of thanks: one crisis averted, a million and three to go.

  The house, as he walked back down the hall toward the kitchen, shimmered with the calm-after-the-storm silence that had always followed these shindigs as long as Josh could remember. The elves—as in, his family—had already cleaned up and, apparently, left. But he found Dee and Katie in the kitchen, the infant asleep in a baby seat a safe distance away from the woodstove, the cat on one side, the dog—who looked up when Josh came in to thump his tail—on the other. Dee stood at the counter, wrapping up leftovers, softly singing along to the “Hallelujah Chorus.” That, he knew. Not well enough to join in, no, but at least he recognized it. And even liked it. Kind of.

  But instead of announcing his presence, Josh stood in the doorway, his hands slugged in his back pockets, watching. Listening.

  Longing.

  How do we make her want to stay?

  Damned if he knew. What he did know was how effortlessly she meshed with the town, his family. His life. That the way she’d interacted with everybody tonight, her smiles and laughter, the way she’d glowed—that’d been the real Dee, whether she realized it or not. Sure, there was still stuff, if her subdued mood when he’d found her in the dining room was any indication. But everybody had stuff. That didn’t mean—

  Dee turned, her face flushed and her lips tilted in a questioning smile, and the longing turned into something more...insistent.

  Foolhardy.

  “Hey,” she said, the smile softening. “Didn’t know you were there.”

  “Everybody else gone?” Josh asked, his heart rate picking up speed. Like a freaking runaway train.

  “Yep. It’s just us,” she said, forking a hand through now limp spikes, and the train ran right off the damn track. “Josh?” she asked, questions swarming in her eyes as he approached her...cupped her face in his hands...kissed her...

  And damned if she didn’t kiss him back.

  Hallelujah, was right.

  * * *

  Not until that very moment, when Josh’s lips touched hers and his tongue slipped into her mouth—cowboy was not shy, that was for sure—had Deanna realized she’d been wondering what it would be like to kiss Josh Talbot since she was fourteen years old.

  Well, now she knew.

  And all she could think was, when he claimed her mouth again with a second kiss so deep it threatened to eviscerate her soul, And aren’t we in a whole heap of trouble now, missy?

  As in, nipple-prickling, clutching-his-shirt, please-don’t-stop kind of trouble.

  Except—big sigh, here—somebody had to, and that particular ball would seem to have landed in her court. Before other balls landed in other courts and, well, yeah. But no.

  Because at least this time, she knew she was needy.

  At least this time, Deanna knew from the outset there wasn’t a chance in hell this could work. The same as she always had with Josh, for pretty much the same reasons—that they were too different, wanted different things from life. And it would kill her, to break his heart. Let alone Austin’s.

  Not to mention she wasn’t all that wild about getting hers broken again, either. Especially since she wasn’t all that sure it was fully healed after the last debacle.

  So, with an oh-so-mighty effort, she unclutched his shirt to press her hands to his chest, refusing to look at him as his heart hammered against her palms, and took a very...deep...breath.

  “Oh, Josh,” she said, in this stringy little voice that didn’t even sound like her.

  He let her go as though she’d just caught fire.

  And laughed.

  Frowning, Dee finally met his eyes, full of Joshness. And still, if she wasn’t mistaken, arousal. Even though he briefly clamped his hands around her shoulders to place a quick, brotherly smooch on the top of her head before releasing her again.

  “You’re not...mad?”

  His brows dipped. “After a kiss like that? Why would I be mad?”

  “Because... I...” She blew out a short sigh. “Because we can’t. Okay, I can’t.”

  “Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say,” he said with a shrug, then lifted the plastic lid off the nearest container to snag a stuffed mushroom, which he popped into his mouth. “But to be honest I’ve been wanting to do that since I was fifteen. And I figured, since I might not get the opportunity again, to go for it while I had the chance. Can’t say as I’m sorry.” He filched another mushroom. “Damn, Dee...where’d you learn to kiss like that?”

  Her face warmed. “Is that your usual modus operandi? Kissing someone whether or not she’s indicated she’s good with that?”

  The mushroom hung suspended six inches from his mouth before he lowered it again. “No, Dee,” he said softly. “It’s not. And frankly I never have before this. Before you. But you know what?” Tossing the mushroom in the trash, he backed away, hands up. “I take it back, I am sorry. More sorry than you have any idea. Because you’re right, that was a real dumb move on my part. And I promise you, it won’t happen again.”

  Then he left the kitchen before her tongue came unglued from the roof of her mouth long enough for her to point out the obvious, which was that she had kissed him back—with more enthusiasm than she’d ever kissed anyone back in her entire life, actually—so she was every bit as complicit in what had just happened as he.

 
And he would’ve been totally justified in calling her on it.

  That he hadn’t only balled up everything in her head even more.

  * * *

  Even though Deanna apologized to Josh the next day for her reaction—an apology he seemed to accept graciously enough—there was no denying the tension now present in every conversation, every interaction, that hadn’t been there before that kiss. Honestly, it was ridiculous, how hard they were trying not to offend each other. And this...carefulness between them hurt far more than she could have imagined. As though one little make-out session had somehow turned them into different people. Into strangers.

  So she was beyond grateful when Val invited her to meet up with her and Mallory and all the kids in town to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. Despite the heaviness clogging her heart, Deanna had to smile at the same tacky decorations she remembered from when she was a kid, how several businesses still decorated the spruces in the town square with everything from miniature chile ristras to traditional cornhusk figures to giant, glittery globes the size of basketballs. And the air was crisp and clean and smelled of woodsmoke and evergreens, and the frosted mountains sparkled against the deep blue sky, and little kids sprinted from tree to tree, laughing, their innocent joy wrapping around Deanna’s heart, soothing it. Healing it.

  Confusing the hell out of it.

  They’d gotten churros and hot chocolate from Annie’s and were sitting on one of the battered benches in the square—well, Val and Deanna were on the bench, Mallory was in her wheelchair—bundled against the cold, although at this altitude the glaring midday sunshine kept the frostbite at bay. Mallory had commandeered Katie, practically invisible inside a snowsuit that used to belong to the toddler now shrieking back to a crow pretending to be a tree topper. They’d brought Austin, too—of course—and it almost frightened Deanna how much she’d grown to love the sweet, funny little kid in only a few weeks.

  Although that wasn’t nearly as frightening as how she felt about his father—

  “Ohmigosh, Dee,” Mallory said, sweeping her long red hair back over her shoulders as she grinned at the baby. “She is so freaking gorgeous. And don’t you love how they can sleep through—” Risa shrieked at the crow again, the sound echoing around the square “—anything?”