All right, maybe just give him a slightly cold shoulder, instead of an ice-cold shoulder. After all, Momma raised me to be nice to everyone, even assholes who don’t deserve it.
Carmelita bustled into the dining room, bearing a tray with small dessert plates arrayed on it.
“Cinnamon rolls for everyone for tonight,” she said cheerfully as she distributed a plate to each person. Bonnie stared at the plate set down next to her dinner plate, her eyes wide.
Oh man, if I’d known this was coming, I would’ve ate less pot roast!
As everyone dug into their cinnamon rolls, the topic drifted back to Paul, Jennifer’s ex, and the visit he’d made to Stetson’s house that summer.
“And then, he started threatening me that he’d call the sheriff on me!” Stetson laughed, which caused Luke to laugh also, a strangely rusty sound that…she liked more than she ought to.
It took her a moment to put meaning to Stetson’s words. “Hold on, why is that funny?” she asked, confused.
“‘Cause the sheriff goes hunting out here each fall,” Luke said, as if that explained everything. She just stared at him. Again.
“Out here, you don’t mess with the people who let you go hunting on their private property,” he continued when it became obvious she had no idea what his statement was supposed to mean. “Stetson doesn’t have to give permission to anyone to go hunting out here, so if the sheriff wants to continue to get good access to deer and elk, he isn’t likely to piss off Stets. I mean,” he shrugged nonchalantly, “I doubt the good sheriff would allow Stetson to murder someone and just get away with it ‘cause he wants to go hunting, but is he going to believe the word of some blustery fool over Stetson? Hell no.”
Stetson laughed. “Yeah, that look on his face was priceless. I never saw someone run backwards so quickly in my life. And then after that…” He turned and looked at Jennifer, and the heat arcing between them had Bonnie blushing. It was obvious that they were deeply in love, and a pang of longing shot through her.
Someday, I’d love to have someone look at me like that. Someday…
Chapter 5
~Luke~
Luke awoke in a panic, jackknifing into a sitting position. He’d slept in! He’d better get up and get the horses fed. They were probably starving by now. And—
Oh. Right. I’m at Stetson’s house. For Christmas. On vacation.
Several different concepts that were completely foreign to him.
His nose twitched. Hold on, was that bacon and pancakes? He hopped out of bed, sucking his breath at the icy floor beneath his feet, and hurried into his clothes. If Carmelita had made breakfast, there was no way he was going to be late getting downstairs.
He thought back to the night before as he headed down the stairs. Was Bonnie going to continue holding it against him that he’d walked in on her? He just hadn’t expected to be sharing the guest bathroom with someone else, especially not a female. It hadn’t occurred to him to knock, although he regretted his smart-aleck response to her rhetorical question about being raised in a barn.
Wasn’t there something about how you should stop digging when you’re already in over your head?
“…never done it before,” Bonnie was telling Stetson as Luke walked into the dining room. There was a spread on the sideboard to make a grown man cry, and as Luke listened to the discussion, he was busy loading up his plate with scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage, and homemade biscuits. He was pretty sure he couldn’t eat everything, but he also knew he couldn’t keep himself from loading up on it anyway.
“Well, I’m good friends with another rancher who has a patch of land that he’s kept in timber. I’ll go call him and see if he’ll let us wander through today.”
“What are we wandering through the forest for?” Luke said, sliding into his seat at the table. Bonnie was sitting across from him again this morning, her hair tousled, her cheeks flushed from sleep.
Damn, she’s gorgeous.
He stopped that thought right there. Absolutely no reason to continue down that rabbit hole. A city girl and him were a good idea, just like setting his house on fire would be a good idea.
“Bonnie here has never chopped down a Christmas tree before,” Stetson said, as if declaring that she’d just recently wriggled out from underneath a rock to plop herself down at his dining room table.
Luke stared at her and she just shrugged. “It’s easier to put up a fake tree every year.”
A…fake…tree? His mind turned the words over and over again, as if trying to understand a new language, and then gave up on the concept.
What did you expect? She’s a city girl, through and through, which is why you made the “Yeah, kinda” comment yesterday in the middle of her yelling at you. You can’t help yourself. Needling city girls is an Olympic sport at this point.
“Well, I think it’s about time we pop your real-Christmas-tree cherry,” Luke said, smirking at her. She gasped and then narrowed her eyes at him, opening up her mouth to give a stinging retort…just as Carmelita bustled in with a coffee pot.
“I will not have that kind of language here,” she said mildly as she refilled Stetson’s mug, stroking him absentmindedly across the shoulders as she moved around him. Bonnie grinned at Luke triumphantly as Carmelita walked past him, coffee pot in hand, ignoring his empty coffee cup.
Dammit, I need to remember Carmelita’s filter on language is a little more stringent than mine. When am I going to stop shoving my boots in my mouth?
His mom had always told him his smart-aleck mouth would get him in trouble one day. Well, “always,” as in before she up and abandoned him and their whole family. After spending years whining about living in the Middle of Nowhere, as she’d christened Sawyer, she’d gotten stuck one night, trying to get out of the driveway. The snow drifts were high — it was Christmas Eve, after all, and there’d been snow on the ground for a couple of months by that point — and she’d skidded off into the ditch several times before Luke and his dad could get the car pointed in the right direction.
Cursing, she’d slammed her car door and took off down the driveway, her red taillights brilliant in the dark and bitter cold. She was just going to go get some milk.
Years later, and still no milk. Luke hadn’t seen his mother since that night.
He wouldn’t touch milk. It was his own silent protest against the injustices of the world.
Now, he was facing yet another city girl — another woman who thought that roughing it was when her iPhone got four bars of service instead of five.
She may’ve won this round, but she wouldn’t win the war.
Jennifer came stumbling in, her hair mussed, her PJs askew, her belly starting to round beneath her PJ top.
Stetson is a damn lucky guy.
Luke made himself stop right there. The last thing he was going to do was covet his best friend’s wife. He hadn’t been to church in a while, but even he remembered that commandment.
“Did I hear Christmas tree talk?” she said around a wide yawn.
“Yup — we were talking about going up to Colt’s place and chopping one down for the living room.”
“Oh good!” she said, her enthusiasm temporarily outweighing her yawns. “It’s been bothering me that here we are, the day before Christmas, and still no tree in the house. It’s just been so crazy with everything happening…” She sat down with a plate overflowing with food, and Carmelita bustled back in to fill her coffee cup.
She ignored Luke’s empty mug again, and he realized with a sigh that the coffee he’d managed to drink thus far was all he was going to get for the day.
They finished the meal, the conversation ebbing and flowing like the tides. Despite the missing coffee, Luke was enjoying the hell out of the meal. He usually made a pot of coffee in the morning and then headed out to the fields to work. A lavish breakfast like this was…unheard of.
It wasn’t long before they headed out the door, jumping into Stetson’s four-door pickup and driving
up into Colt’s place. Sticks was in the bed, his head sticking out the side, ears flapping in the wind. Sticks refused to get into the cab of a truck; his place was the bed and that’s where he was going to be, dammit. Luke used to worry about him getting cold but if he ever was, he didn’t show it.
“Man, those clouds don’t look good,” Jennifer said, peering through the windshield towards the Goldfork Mountains. There was a storm front coming in, dark and ominous clouds moving steadily over Long Valley.
“I’m trying to pull up the weather app to see what we’re looking at, but I can’t get the page to load,” Bonnie said, staring at her phone in irritation. Stetson glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“I watched the news this morning,” he said reassuringly. “It looks worse than it is. We’re only supposed to get about an inch of snow from the storm. ‘Round here, that’s nothing.”
“Oh,” she said, surprised. Luke couldn’t help it — he actually agreed with the city girl. It didn’t look like a one-inch-of-snow kind of storm. “Thanks. I’ll stop worrying about it then.” She turned off her phone and set it off to the side, something else that surprised him. He thought if she wasn’t messing with the weather app, she’d be scrolling through her Facebook app or taking a selfie or something else equally obnoxious.
Jennifer turned up the radio and began singing along lustily to music.
A beautiful sight
We’re happy tonight
Walking in a winter wonderland
Laughing, Bonnie and Stetson joined in. Luke kept himself from rolling his eyes, but only barely. How did these people actually like Christmas? It was a concept that seemed…impossible to him. Christmas was jangling music and people buying presents they couldn’t afford for people they didn’t like and…
And mothers leaving their three children to fend for themselves, with only a mostly absent father to occasionally try to fill the void.
Luke pushed the thought of his mom away, just like he always did. This time of the year just tended to bring up her memory more often than usual, was all.
The switchbacks finally ended and they pulled off into a wide spot in the road. They all clambered out of the truck, Stetson pulling two hand-axes out of the bed of the truck and handing one over to Luke before they set off traipsing through the woods, Sticks following along behind. Luke grumbled as he swung the ax over his shoulder, “What’s up with the hand axes? Are we pretending chainsaws haven’t been invented yet?”
Stetson shrugged. “Jennifer said axes would be more romantic.” When Luke rolled his eyes so hard, he was afraid they were in imminent danger of falling out of his head, Stetson just grinned unrepentantly. “Wait until you’re married. Oh, how the mighty falls. You’re gonna find yourself doing all sorts of stupid-ass shit, like chopping down a pine tree with an ax.”
Luke couldn't help laughing. The idea was just preposterous. He glanced at the two women trudging through the snow, Bonnie’s snow pants a little too tight across her hips because she’d tried to squeeze into a pair of Jennifer’s, and caught his breath.
All right, fine, so maybe there’s some things I might be willing to do to get a female into bed. But chopping down trees by hand isn’t one of them!
“Stets!” Jennifer shouted, glancing back at them, her cheeks flushed red by the cold and exertion from wading through the snow. She was beaming from ear to ear. “I found it!”
Luke looked at the tree she was pointing at, and grudgingly admitted that if they were going to pick a tree to stick inside of a house, that was the tree to pick. Tall, straight, and full, it looked like it’d jumped right off a Christmas card.
“It’s perfect,” Stetson said as they stopped next to it, everyone admiring for a moment.
Even Luke, although he wasn’t going to admit it out loud.
“Ready?” Stetson asked him, grinning and they began formulating a plan of attack on the tree, trying to figure out the easiest way to fell it and drag it back to the truck. Jennifer and Bonnie began wandering off, looking for “Christmas greenery” as they put it, although Luke was damn sure there was no ivy growing in this forest.
Well, maybe poison ivy.
Stetson and Luke began hacking away at the tree, the thunks of the ax strikes ringing through the cold, thin air. Luke could hear the girls giggling over something off behind him, but he didn’t pay much attention to them. He was starting to get into a rhythm, his arms swinging without conscious thought guiding them.
Bored, Sticks wandered off into the trees, and then his happy bark started echoing back, telling Luke that he was finding a rabbit or two to chase through the snow. Sticks was dumber than a rock and would never catch a rabbit, but that didn’t keep him from trying again, and again, and again.
Just as they were getting close to the end, the wood crackling under the pressure of gravity, Luke saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Bonnie and Jennifer had wandered right into the fall zone of the tree.
“Watch out!” Luke yelled, throwing his ax to the side and hurrying through the deep snow as quickly as he could. The women glanced up as he bore down on them, surprise and shock lining their faces, and then he was scooping them up and carrying them, one under each arm like a football, his lungs burning from exertion but they had to go, they had to go right now and the tree was cracking and Stetson was yelling and then whoosh! the tree fell just behind him, snow spraying everywhere.
He dropped Jennifer and Bonnie and doubled over, his hands on his knees, his lungs gasping, burning, begging for air. They were talking but Luke couldn’t hear them over the rush in his ears and the adrenaline spiking in his system.
Finally, his heart rate slowed down just a tad, and he could hear again. Stetson was checking Jennifer over, and she was telling him she was fine, nothing was wrong, and then he’d start all over again. God, he’d turned into a real mother hen since she got pregnant.
Hold on. Bonnie? Where’s Bonnie?
He straightened and scanned the area until his eyes fell on her, sitting on a rock above the snowline, staring off to the mountains. He pushed through the snow.
“How ya doing?” His voice came out more gruff than he’d intended but he couldn’t take it back now.
“Okay,” she said but the shake in her voice belied her answer and he slipped behind her, wrapping an arm awkwardly around her shoulders, even occasionally patting her on the head when he thought of it. She didn’t say anything for a long time, and then finally, “Thanks, Luke. And…thanks for saving us. I don’t normally get picked up and toted around by a guy on Christmas Eve, so, you know, bonus points for originality.”
He could hear the smile in her voice, and he struggled to come up with something to help her completely take her mind off what just happened.
Just then, he saw a tan and black form turn its majestic head to stare at him. A pair of piercing yellow eyes blinked.
“Look,” he whispered, pointing at the owl. “It’s a great horned owl.” She followed his arm to find the owl amongst the trees, its browns and tans blending into the scenery so perfectly, it was only its movement that made it possible to spot it.
“Oh…” she breathed softly. “I’ve never seen one in real life before.”
“C’mon, Luke!” Stetson hollered. “We need to figure out how to pull this pine tree back to the truck.”
The owl took off, wings flapping silently through the air, and Bonnie gave a moan of disappointment at its disappearance.
Luke pulled away and headed to Stetson, pretending that he didn’t care that Stetson had interrupted their birdwatching adventures. That he hadn’t been enjoying the flowery scent that had wafted up from Bonnie’s hair and into his nose. That he hadn’t been aware of her soft curves pressed against his body.
He heard Sticks thrashing through the underbrush and then a small flock of birds taking to flight as he scared them away. Luke rolled his eyes at his goofy dog. If Sticks thought he could catch a bird, he was in for a world of disappointment.
Toge
ther, Stetson and Luke worked to jerry-rig some straps and dragged the tree back to the truck, chests heaving by time they got there. The cold air was burning in Luke’s lungs after they finally got the tree loaded and strapped down. They secured the axes and then Stetson called out, “Hey, we’re ready to go!”
Jennifer waded through the snow towards the truck. “Carmelita packed a lunch for us, with a hot thermos of coffee and everything. Why don’t we stay out here and eat?”
Luke was taken aback. She wanted to just…sit out here? And do nothing but eat and hang out? That was so…unproductive. Didn’t they need to hurry back to the Miller Farm and feed the animals or plan next year’s crops or something?
And then he remembered that this whole weekend was supposed to be nothing but relaxing and having fun. It was such an odd thought, he had to force himself not to ask that they let him head back to his farm right then. He had about a half dozen projects in the barn that he could stand to spend some time on, and just hanging out was…pointless.
But dammit, he’d agreed — no, been shanghaied into — this weekend, and he wasn’t about to be rude to Jennifer, even if Stetson probably deserved it. She’d think she’d done something to piss him off, and he didn’t want to make a pregnant woman get all sniffly and emotional on him.
Or any female at all, come to think of it.
Everyone began digging into the two picnic baskets that Carmelita had filled to the brim and as Luke began to suck down the beef stew, balanced on a rock as he ate, he began to question why it was he hadn’t hired a Carmelita of his own. He and ol’ Willie swapped cooking duties for dinner, and he wasn’t sure which he hated more — eating ol’ Willie’s burnt food, or the nights where he was in charge of cooking. At this point, it was kind of a toss-up.
Sticks found a stick — finally, something he could catch — and flopped down in the snow, happily chewing his way through it, content as a bear in a honeypot.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Bonnie asked.
“Sticks,” Luke said.
Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe: A Small Town Holiday Novella Collection Page 13