A Cold Creek Holiday

by RaeAnne Thayne

  She sat up, looking out the window at the brilliant sunshine glistening off the snow. She needed to go now. Why postpone the inevitable? Every moment she spent here would make her leaving all that much more difficult. She didn't have a flight for two more days, but she would change her plans and find an earlier one.

  Christmas Day itself was one of the slowest air travel days of the year. She remembered reading that somewhere.

  As she slid from the bed, grabbed her toiletries and headed for the shower, she had to wonder just how far she would have to go next year to outrun the memories of her holiday here at Hope Springs.

  Antarctica, maybe?

  Or perhaps somewhere warm, like sub-Saharan Africa.

  No matter where she fled, she had a feeling she was doomed for next year and each December 25 afterward to compare every Christmas to this one.

  * * *

  "Come on, Uncle Nate! The French toast is going to be cold by the time we get there."

  Nate raised an eyebrow at Claire's bossy tone, but decided not to get on her case about it. The girl ought to think about a career as a drill sergeant. His own grizzled hardcase of a sergeant at Basic Training hadn't ridden him half as hard.

  "I'm coming. Hold your horses." He paused and managed a smile. "Oh, yeah. I'm the one with the horses."

  Both girls giggled at his lame joke, which he had to admit was one of the best things about being their guardian. They laughed even when he was being silly or stupid.

  "I hope Emery likes it," Tallie said, gnawing her lip as she looked at the flat package he carried, covered in rather juvenile wrapping paper with grinning snowmen and penguins on it.

  "I'm sure she will," he said.

  The girls seemed to have had a good Christmas. Though they had all experienced moments of poignancy, even melancholy, about celebrating the holiday without John and Suzi, they had been excited about their gifts. Even now, they each wore one of the new sweaters Emery had picked out for them.

  But from the moment they unwrapped the last present, their dark heads had been close together as they cooked up some scheme while he put together breakfast. They finally revealed to him as they ate their French toast that they had a present for Emery and could they take it to her, along with some breakfast?

  He hadn't been able to come up with a good reason to refuse, so here they were. He carried the gift—a watercolor of the ranch, complete with horses in the foreground and the jagged mountains in the back.

  They had given one very similar to him, along with a sweater they said Joanie had helped them pick out before she left and a box of his favorite kind of cherry chocolates.

  Emery would probably love the picture, but he wasn't at all sure he wanted to be here. He didn't need a repeat appearance of all those terrifying emotions churning through his gut. After their awkward parting the night before, he imagined Emery wouldn't exactly be thrilled to see him, either.

  "I'm going to knock," Tallie declared, racing ahead of them to scamper up the porch steps.

  She answered the door a moment later and the slightly tousled woman who had awakened on his great room sofa last night was nowhere in evidence this morning. Now she looked sleek and elegant in gray wool slacks and a red sweater with her hair pulled back in that complicated twist thing and perfectly coordinating jewelry.

  She looked as if she were preparing for a luncheon at some fancy club. Who dressed up like that just to spend Christmas Day alone?

  Her gaze found him and something intense and unreadable flashed in her blue eyes for just a moment before she turned to the girls with a bright smile.

  "Good morning! Merry Christmas to both of you. I was hoping I would see you today. How was your Christmas?"

  "Cool," Tallie exclaimed. "We got a ton of clothes and earrings and a bunch of books. And I got a new bike with eighteen speeds since my old one is a little kid's bike."

  "I got an iPod," Claire said. "Want to see?"

  "Of course. Come in."

  "We brought you breakfast," Claire announced. "It's French toast. We helped Uncle Nate make it from our mom's recipe and it's pretty good."

  "I had four pieces," Tallie confided.

  "Is that right?" Emery smiled faintly.

  Claire held out the parcel in her arms. "We brought you a present."

  Astonishment flickered in those eyes and then a soft delight that somehow made all those crazy feelings start zinging around inside him again.

  "You did?"

  Tallie nodded. "We started it even before you gave us the quilts. But then we really wanted to give you something."

  "How wonderful!"

  Nate held it out for her and after an awkward pause, she reached for it. Their fingers brushed as she took the gift and it was all he could do not to yank her against him. Instead, he leaned a hip against the kitchen table as he watched her take the gift and begin to carefully unwrap it.

  When she had pushed the last bit of paper aside, she turned it over and gazed for a long moment at the painting without saying anything.

  Her reaction was everything the girls might have wished. Her eyes filled with tears and she gave a shaky-looking smile. "Oh, it's beautiful. Absolutely wonderful."

  "We painted it together," Tallie said proudly. "Claire did the horses and the house and I did the mountains. I'm really good at mountains. And this morning after we had breakfast, Uncle Nate found a frame for us in the attic and helped us put it in it."

  "This is the perfect gift for me to remember my time here when I go home. Thank you so much."

  There was a strange note of finality in her voice and he wondered if either of the girls noticed. They didn't look very thrilled at the reminder that Emery's visit was temporary, but they didn't say anything, especially after she reached out and pulled them both into a hug.

  "The picture will be priceless to me because you made it."

  "There's a surprise in it," Tallie announced in a voice that, for her, sounded almost shy. "Can you see it?"

  Emery studied the painting, her head tilted to the side as if she were standing in some fancy froufrou art gallery. She studied it for a long moment and then to Nate's surprise, her eyes filled up with tears.

  "Oh, sweetheart," she murmured and pulled Tallie into a big hug.

  Nate frowned. He hadn't seen anything unusual when he'd helped the girls frame it and now he craned his neck to see what all the fuss was about, to no avail.

  "What is it?"

  Emery pointed to a vee in Tallie's mountain peaks and he finally saw it, a small figure camouflaged by a couple of dark green pine trees. He looked closer and realized the figure had wings and a little gold-crayon halo.

  Tallie, Little Ms. Doubter who wouldn't even make an angel sugar cookie out of her defiance and anger, had drawn a tiny guardian angel looking over the ranch.

  A lump swelled in his throat and he cleared it a couple of times before he spoke. Even then, his voice sounded a little on the ragged side. "Nice," he said.

  Emery might not have wings or a halo, but she had been an angel to them, he realized. She had helped them through what could have been a very emotionally charged time, had given them all faith that things would get better.

  He owed her more than he could ever repay.

  "I have the perfect place in my townhouse to put it, right above my desk. That way I can look at it every day and remember our wonderful Christmas together," she said.

  He hated thinking about her leaving. About how empty the ranch would feel without her.

  "We're going to go see Noël," Claire said. "Would you like to come with us?"

  Emery was clearly not dressed for traipsing through the barn, but she nodded. "I'd love it. Let me grab my coat."

  She moved to the hanger by the door and suddenly Nate had a clear view through her bedroom door…to the suitcase open on the bed and the case holding her sewing machine that sat beside it.

  She was leaving. Not in a few days, but now, today. He suddenly realized what had seemed off to him in
her cabin. All the personal little touches she had brought to her living space these past few days were nowhere in evidence, all packed away for her return to Virginia.

  Panic clawed at him, raw and intense, and for a long moment, he couldn't think what to do, what to say.

  He could say nothing in front of the girls, so he blurted out the first thing that came to his head.

  "You girls go on ahead," Nate said. "We'll be along in a minute, okay? I need to talk to Emery."

  Tallie and Claire exchanged curious glances, but shrugged. "Okay," Claire said. "Can we give Annabelle some sugar?"

  "Sure thing," he said. "But not too much."

  They left in a clatter of pink boots and Nate closed the door behind them, then turned to face Emery, who was watching him with a hint of apprehension on her features.

  "You're leaving."

  The blunt words hung in the air between them, harsh and unadorned.

  "Yes." She lifted her chin.

  "I thought you weren't flying out for a few more days."

  "I decided to see if I can catch an earlier flight."

  Which was stronger? he wondered. The hurt or the regret or that panic that still squawked through him like static on a badly tuned radio?

  "Why? What's the big rush?"

  She didn't meet his gaze as she busied herself tying her scarf, something she did when she needed to keep her hands busy, he realized. "I have work waiting for me back in Warrenton. I finished several projects while I was here, but everything is piling up."

  Bull, he wanted to say. You're running away.

  But why shouldn't she? He had given her no indication she should stay.

  "Is that the only reason you're taking off?"

  She flashed him a quick look, then reached to pick up a pile of magazines from the coffee table.

  "What other reason would I have?"

  He said nothing, consumed by the grim knowledge that everything would be colorless and bleak when she left.

  "Don't…" Go he almost said, but the words tangled in his throat.

  "Don't what?" she asked, an arrested look in her eyes.

  He couldn't beg her to stay, even as the words tangled together in his throat. All those differences still remained between them, a deep, wide chasm he didn't have the first idea how to cross.

  "Don't forget these things."

  He picked up a stack of books from the end table and handed them out to her, then froze, his attention arrested by the top item. It wasn't a book, he saw now. It was a photograph in a dated wood frame. He pulled the picture off the stack and held it up so he could examine it more closely.

  "What the hell is this?"

  "Nothing. Just an old photograph." She reached for it, but he held it just out of her reach.

  The French toast he'd eaten for Christmas breakfast with the girls seemed to have suddenly congealed into a hard, greasy knot in his gut. "Why do you have a picture of Hank Dalton? And who's the woman?"

  He looked closer at the picture and he knew. Suddenly he knew. She looked very much like Emery, with the same high cheekbones and classical features, though her clothes and hairstyle were several decades out of date, and the stunning truth slammed into him like a runaway bull.

  "This woman is your mother, isn't she?"

  She nodded shortly, looking vaguely sick herself.

  "Hank Dalton is your father. The married man you were talking about."

  Chapter Fourteen

  He couldn't take it in. The woman he had come to…His mind shied away from the word he wanted to use and replaced in his head. The woman he had come to care about shared blood with the man he despised.

  "Apparently." Though her features looked distressed, she spoke calmly. "I don't have any real proof, but that's what my mother said and she would have no reason to lie. She was in Jackson Hole on a tour with some girlfriends and met him at a bar. He swept her off her feet. Wined and dined her for a week, never mentioning his wife or his three sons who lived just on the other side of the mountains."

  Three sons. Wade, Jake and Seth Dalton were her half brothers.

  Suddenly everything made a twisted kind of sense. Her tension every time Wade Dalton came around, her strange reaction to Wade and Jake at the McRavens' party.

  She'd come here to meet them. That was the reason she had picked Hope Springs to spend Christmas, because of its proximity to the Cold Creek Land & Cattle Company.

  An accident of geography. Not fate, not destiny. He was an idiot not to have figured it all out.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" His voice sounded harsh, strangled.

  Tiny lines furrowed between her eyebrows. "I did. The other night I told you I only recently found out my mother was pregnant with me several months before she married Stephen Kendall."

  "You didn't tell me you were a damn Dalton."

  She swayed a little and her features looked pale suddenly above the bright red of her scarf. "I would appreciate it if you would keep this information to yourself," she said after a moment. "I've decided nothing will be gained by disrupting the lives of the Daltons. They don't need to know their father was unfaithful to their mother."

  He gave a harsh laugh at that, then couldn't contain another and another. He sounded like a damn hyena, but he couldn't seem to stop. The whole town knew Hank Dalton was a lying, cheating son of a bitch. His sons had to know that better than anyone.

  "I don't think it's going to come as much of a shock to anybody," he finally said. "You remember me telling you about the neighboring rancher my mother had an affair with? The man who ruined her life and cheated her out of land and money?"

  She stared at him and her blue eyes—Dalton eyes, he realized now—looked huge in her pale features.

  "Yep. Dear old dad. Your mother wasn't the first or the last and neither was mine."

  She looked stricken, suddenly, and he didn't miss the way her hands trembled as she reached to take the photograph he finally handed out to her.

  He was sorry suddenly that he had been so harsh. It wasn't her fault her father was Hank Dalton, the man he hated above all others.

  "I guess it's a good thing I'm leaving today, then," she murmured.

  "Yeah."

  "Will you…Can you tell the girls I changed my mind about seeing Noël? Tell them I wasn't feeling good or something. It's not really a lie."

  "You're not going to tell them goodbye yourself before you leave?"

  She looked as if she would rather just slip away, but she finally nodded. "I'll find you all before I go."

  He nodded and opened the door, wondering when he had ever felt so completely wrecked.

  "Where's Emery?" Tallie immediately asked when he reached the barn a few moments later without her.

  He offered the half-truth she had given him. "She wasn't feeling well. But I'm sure you'll see her later."

  They both look disappointed and he screwed his eyes shut. They were going to be devastated when she left. Their whole Christmas would be ruined.

  This was exactly what he had feared, the very reason he had wanted to keep her from them. Now they were going to have to suffer one more loss in their lives, a woman they had both come to love.

  A woman they had all come to love.

  He gazed at the tiny foal in the hay nuzzling up to her mother, their little Christmas miracle. The scene blurred in front of him and he blinked hard as the truth washed over him like a sandstorm.

  He was in love with Emery.

  Hopelessly, fiercely, irrevocably.

  He drew in a ragged breath as all those well-reasoned arguments he'd been full of the night before crowded through his head. She was smart and sophisticated and beautiful. Nothing had changed. He still had nothing to offer her but a struggling ranch and a couple of orphaned girls who loved her.

  So she was Hank Dalton's daughter. He couldn't blame her for her parentage anymore than he had any right to place the blame for their father's actions on the man's sons. Lord knows, his own mother wouldn't have exactly taken
any prizes in the parenting department.

  Tallie slipped a hand through his and he looked down to find her watching him with concern in her dark eyes.

  "Are you okay, Uncle Nate?"

  Far from it. He wanted to cry, for the first time since he was ten years old at his father's funeral.

  "Yeah," he said, his voice gruff.

  "I always get a little sad on Christmas day," Tallie confided in him.

  "Why's that?"

  "Because it's all almost over and we have to get back to real life. But don't worry, we can have an even better Christmas next year. We'll make tamales again and decorate the Christmas tree and maybe we'll even have two foals then."

  He gazed at the motes of dust floating in a sunbeam like gold flakes from a glittery garland, a lump in his throat. Tallie was wrong. Next year wouldn't be better. Without Emery, nothing would be. The thought of life on the ranch without her smiles and her gentleness and her kisses stretched out ahead of him, long and empty and miserable.

  He straightened from the pen railing, his pulse pounding and determination uncoiling in his gut.

  He couldn't let her go. At least not without trying to convince her to stay.

  * * *

  She refused to cry.

  Though the emotions swelled up inside her in a hot, angry rush, Emery choked them all back, focusing only on gathering up the last of her belongings and stuffing them into the suitcase. She didn't care that she was wrinkling everything as she wadded and shoved and crammed.

  She had to get out of here. Everywhere she looked were memories. Waking up the night of the blizzard to find Nate at her door. The tree where she and the girls had snipped evergreen boughs to decorate the house. The other cabin she could see through the window, where she had shared secrets and wrapped presents and kissed him until she couldn't hold two thoughts together.

  And the girls. How was she ever going to get through saying goodbye to the girls? Just the thought of it had her fighting down a sob. She could hold it together for a few more moments, she told herself. She would be warm and casual with them and promise she would e-mail them after she returned to Warrenton.