Then he saw the suitcases open on the bed.
For just a moment, his heart actually stopped beating.
“What are you doing?”
She looked up, and he saw the wet streaks on her cheeks, evidence of the tears she’d recently shed. His heart, beating once again but in a slow, painful rhythm now, twisted inside his chest, because he knew that he was responsible. He’d hurt her and made her cry, and he’d never wanted to do that.
“This is your house,” she said to him. “Instead of you always making excuses to run off, I figured it made more sense for me to go.”
“Go,” he echoed numbly, not wanting to believe it. He’d rushed home to tell her that he loved her—and she was leaving him? He felt as if she’d reached inside his chest and ripped his heart out.
And yet, there was a part of him that wasn’t really surprised, that understood he’d been on tenterhooks since their wedding in anticipation of this exact moment. But expecting it didn’t mean that he was prepared for it—especially not now. Not when he’d finally accepted how much she meant to him.
“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please, don’t go.”
She folded a sweater and placed it in the suitcase. “I can’t live like this.”
“I know we have some things to figure out, but we can’t do that if you’re not here.”
“I’m not the one who rushed out of here this morning,” she pointed out to him.
“I told you where I was going.”
“I know,” she admitted. “And the fact that you’d rather spend time with a horse than me says everything that needs to be said.”
“That’s not true,” he denied.
“Isn’t it?”
“No,” he insisted.
But she continued to pack.
“If you won’t stay for me, please stay for our baby.”
“I’m not going to keep you from our baby,” she assured him.
“You don’t have to—the twelve hundred miles between here and Los Angeles will do it for you.”
“I’m not going back to LA.”
“You’re not?”
“My job and my life are here now. I have no intention of leaving town. I’m just going to Nina’s apartment over the store until I can find something else.”
He was torn between relief and confusion. “Why would you stay in Rust Creek Falls if you’re not staying with me?”
“I’m staying in Rust Creek Falls because I made a promise to Ben Dalton when he hired me, and I don’t renege on my promises.”
“Really?” he challenged. “What about the promise you made to me when we exchanged wedding vows?”
She zipped up the first suitcase, and when she looked up at him, the tears that shone in her eyes were like another dagger to his heart. “I would have been happy to love, honor and cherish you for the rest of my life,” she said softly, “if I thought there was any chance you might someday feel the same way.”
“Wait a minute.” He pried her fingers off the handle of her suitcase, linked them with his. “Are you saying that you love me?”
“I would never have married you if I didn’t.” She kept her gaze riveted on the suitcase as she responded. “But I can’t live with someone who doesn’t feel the same way.”
“But I do,” he told her. “I was just too stubborn and stupid to admit—even to myself—how I felt.” He nudged her down onto the edge of the mattress, then sat beside her. “I fell for you, hard and fast, even before we were officially introduced. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. And when you shook my hand—it was like something inside of me just clicked.”
She eyed him warily, as if she didn’t trust what he was saying. “I thought it was just me.”
“And I thought it was just me—until you kissed me.”
That first kiss was tame compared to the intimacies they’d shared since then, but her cheeks colored at the memory.
“I think I fell in love with you that night,” he told her. “The next morning, I was so happy, certain it was only the first night of many. Then I found out that you were going back to LA that same day.
“And yes, I wondered if our relationship would end the same way my relationship with Shaelyn did. But when you promised to come back, I believed you. I wanted to believe you.”
“And then I kept making excuses as to why I couldn’t,” she realized.
He nodded. “And I thought you were brushing me off. I figured you’d gone back to LA and realized you couldn’t consider giving up your glamorous life in the city to settle down with a quiet cowboy.”
“You barely got a glimpse of my life in LA,” she said. “Or you would have known that it wasn’t very glamorous.”
“But you had palm trees and temperatures that rarely ever dip below freezing.”
She managed a small smile. “There is that.”
“My point is that I was so worried that you wouldn’t want to stay here, with me, that I acted like an idiot in an unsuccessful attempt to protect my heart.”
“Are you done acting like an idiot?”
“Probably not completely,” he warned. “But I’m done pretending that I don’t love you with my whole heart, because I do. And if you can forgive me for being such an idiot, I promise that I will never give you reason to doubt my feelings for you ever again.”
“I can forgive you.”
He leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers. “I love you, Maggie.”
“Show me,” she said.
He shoved the suitcases aside, onto the floor, and complied with her request.
* * *
Afterward, while their bodies were still joined together and sated from lovemaking, he held her as if he would never let her go. Maggie, her head cushioned on his shoulder, exhaled a soft, contented sigh.
Jesse stroked a hand over her hair, down her back. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Missing out on almost two weeks of mornings just like this because I was an idiot.”
“I thought we moved past that part.”
“I guess it’s easier for you than for me.”
She pulled back, just far enough to prop herself up on an elbow so she could see his face. “Well, stop beating up on the man I love.”
He lifted a hand to cradle her cheek. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
“You loved me,” she said simply.
“I do,” he told her. “You are everything to me—my wife, the mother of my children, my partner in life and the woman I love, for now and forever.”
“And you are everything to me,” she replied. “My husband, the father of—” Her breath caught as she felt a little flutter low in her belly. “Oh.”
His brows lifted. “Oh?”
The flutter happened again, and she took his hand and placed it over the curve of her belly. “Can you feel that?”
“What?” And then he felt it, too. His eyes went wide, his lips curved. “Is that...our baby?”
She nodded. “I think she’s happy that her mommy and daddy are finally, truly together.”
“And always will be,” Jesse promised.
Epilogue
“Thanks for helping me out with this,” Nina said to Maggie and Jesse. “The Tree of Hope was a big success last year and I wanted to do it again, but decorating with a baby underfoot turned out to be more difficult than I imagined.”
The newlyweds, who had stopped in at Crawford’s just to pick up a few staples before Nina conscripted them into service, were happy to help.
“This time next year, we’ll have a little one of our own to interfere with our decorating,” Maggie said to her husband, already anticipating that day.
Jesse grinned. “An eight-month-old baby whose mother graduated s
umma cum laude from Stanford Law will probably be directing our every move.”
“Unless she takes after her father,” his sister teased.
Maggie hooked another ornament over a branch and turned to her sister-in-law. “She?”
“You’ve slipped up and used the feminine pronoun a few times,” Nina told her. “But if the baby’s gender is supposed to be a secret, I won’t tell.”
“I don’t know that we’d planned to keep it a secret,” Maggie admitted. “But I didn’t realize I’d given it away so quickly.”
“We only found out at Maggie’s ultrasound appointment last week,” Jesse told his sister.
Since then—and since his wife’s move across the hall had happily turned “his” bedroom into “their” bedroom—they’d started to set up the nursery in anticipation of their daughter’s arrival. Maggie had picked out new paint for the walls and ordered curtains from an online home decor warehouse, and the cradle Jesse had made was already set up in the middle of the room with a big pink bow tied around it.
“Well, I’m thrilled,” Nina said. “Because I know Noelle will love having a female cousin to hang out with.”
“Does that mean you’ve given up on the idea of giving her a little sister?”
“No, I still want another baby,” Nina confided. “And I think my husband is on board with the plan, but all of the evidence would suggest that Dallas begets boys.”
“At least you know Noelle will always have three big brothers to look out for her.”
“And I’m sure they’ll look out for their little cousin, too,” Nina said.
The bell at the front of the store jingled as the door opened and Winona Cobbs entered.
The renowned psychic was a regular customer, usually stopping into the store a couple of times a week to pick up a few things. But this time she chose a cart instead of a basket and moved purposefully through the aisles, filling it with items. Toilet paper, bottled water, canned goods.
“Anticipating a long winter?” Nina asked her.
“There’s a storm coming,” Winona said.
“Considering it’s nearly December in Montana, I’d say you’re probably right,” Jesse noted drily.
The older woman sent him a dark look as she pushed her cart toward the checkout. “A storm isn’t always connected to the weather.”
“That was...odd,” Maggie said.
“Winona’s odd,” Nina said, as if that explained everything. “But she wouldn’t have the reputation she does if her predictions weren’t accurate at least once in a while.”
“Even a broken clock can tell time twice a day,” Jesse noted.
“You don’t believe she has a gift?” Maggie asked him.
“I’m more concerned about finishing this tree so the deserving kids in the community will have gifts,” he said, resuming his task.
After the tree was done, Jesse and Maggie headed toward home—just as big fluffy flakes started to fall from the sky, adding to the white blanket that already covered everything in sight.
“It looks like our first Christmas together is definitely going to be a white one,” Maggie commented.
“I feel like we’ve already had Christmas, because I got the greatest gift ever when you became my wife.” He gave her a slow, sexy smile that made her knees weak. “And the best part is that you’re a gift that can be unwrapped again and again.”
She lifted a brow. “Is that a promise?”
“Absolutely,” he assured her.
And when they got home, he proved it.
Again and again.
* * * * *
Look for the next installment of the new
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MONTANA MAVERICKS:
20 YEARS IN THE SADDLE!
Julie Smith never talks about her past—because she has no memory of anything that happened before she awoke in a small New England hospital four years ago.
Perhaps a very special cowboy can help bring her
back to her roots...just in time for the holidays!
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A VERY MAVERICK CHRISTMAS
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Chapter One
Brighton Valley, Texas, was the last place in the world Joe Wilcox had ever expected to step foot in again.
Well, not when it came to the good ol’ U.S.A. He sure as hell wouldn’t look forward to another deployment to Afghanistan. But he’d made a promise to deliver a letter for a friend, and if there was one thing that could be said about Joe—he always kept his word.
So he’d packed a few belongings, rented a car just outside of Camp Pendleton and left California. He’d stopped in El Paso long enough to spend the night with Red Conway, a retired marine he’d met on a bus ten years ago. Red had taken Joe in when he’d been a down-and-out teenage runaway, hell-bent on leaving everyone and everything he’d once known behind.
The two men had shared a couple of beers, a pizza and a few stories. The next day, Joe had continued on for another nine hundred miles, finally arriving in Brighton Valley exhausted and hungry.
The first thing Joe did after checking in to a cheap but clean room at the Night Owl, a motor lodge that catered to travelers who were low on funds and just passing through, was to shove his duffle bags under the bed. There was a closet he could have used, but that had never felt like a safe place when he’d been a kid determined to protect his valuables from an uncle who might not have enough cash to buy a pack of cigarettes and a pint of Jack Daniels.
He probably should have shaken the habit years ago, but being back in town brought back all kinds of weird memories, leaving him a bit unbalanced.
Next he took a long, hot shower, slipped into a comfortable pair of worn jeans and a black sweatshirt and hoofed it across the highway to the Stagecoach Inn.
In spite of the seasonal chill in the air, a cold beer would really hit the spot right about now, but he wasn’t looking for a drink or any entertainment. He was on a mission. He had a letter to deliver to a blonde cocktail waitress named Chloe Dawson.
Once he found the coldhearted woman who’d broken Dave Cummings’s heart, he’d give her the letter Dave had asked him to deliver.
Now, as he stood on the side of the busy highway, waiting for a lull in the traffic so he could cross, he pulled out Chloe’s photograph, the one Dave had always carried. He studied the photo in the flickering streetlight overhead. The snapshot was a little grainy, so her facial features weren’t especially clear, but it was easy to see that the platinum blonde had long, wavy hair and a dynamite shape.
To be honest, when he and Dave had been stationed in Afghanistan, all Dave could talk about was the woman he’d placed on a pedestal and the dreams he’d had for them. Joe had been a little envious. He’d never had a family—well, not one he’d wanted to claim—so he’d never dared to consider a white
-picket-fence dream. But his buddy had grown up as an only child, adored by his parents. So why wouldn’t he expect to have that same life for himself?
Joe had to admit that he’d wondered what such an attractive woman had seen in Dave. Not that his friend wasn’t a good person. He was kind and generous to a fault, but he’d been so sheltered by his doting parents that he tended to be naive about life and other things.
Dave had been more sensitive than guys like Joe, who’d learned early on to get tough in order to survive, and as a result, he’d been hit hard by his father’s unexpected death. Then, when his mom had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer nine months later, he’d been devastated.
Obviously Chloe had seen how broken up and vulnerable Dave had been and used it against him when she’d set her gold-digging plan in motion.
From what Joe had gathered, she’d rented a room from Dave’s widowed mother, and when Dave had gone home on leave last summer, he’d fallen hard for her. And, sadly, he’d been too caught up in grief and lust and starry-eyed wonder to see the writing on the wall.
After Mrs. Cummings’s funeral, Chloe had promised to take care of the ranch and to wait for him until he returned from war. Dave, of course, had bought her line of bull and had promised her the moon.
The dream that they’d get married as soon as he got back from deployment and eventually raise “a passel of kids” on the family ranch had been the only thing that kept him going.
Dave might have joined the Marines, hoping to man up and become independent, but he hadn’t been cut out for a life of combat, especially when his idea of happy ever after was in Texas.
Not that life in a war zone had been a cakewalk for Joe, either, but growing up with an abusive drunk uncle and then ending up in the foster care system had made him both street-smart and strong. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but in a lot of ways his crappy childhood had been a blessing.
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