If Santa Were a Cowboy

by Melissa Cutler

  The days had passed in a blur of jingle bells, crying babies, and sleepless nights in Paul’s arms. Being with Paul, photographing kids whose eyes were filled with hope, the infectious joy of the season turned out to be the balm Kelly had needed. There were days that she completely forgot about the hardships waiting at home for her to face in the not-too-distant future, which made steering her conversations with Paul away from the hard truths about the disaster her life had become even easier.

  But all that blissful forgetfulness came crashing down an hour later while Paul was out letting Sadie run around and she stayed behind to watch her photo gear.

  “Hello, Ms. Sawyer. This is Greg from Affinity Debt Recovery. Your credit-card account has been transferred to my company for collection. We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for quite some time. If we don’t hear from you soon, legal action will be taken.”

  Kelly’s stomach lurched. She’d run up a huge debt that year trying to accomplish all her yeses, and a few other yeses that her boyfriend Rob had put her up to, including the one that had lost her the job at the college. She still couldn’t believe she agreed to his idea to develop those explicit photographs of the two of them in her classroom’s dark room—or get it on right then and there while those photographs developed. She might never shake the shame she’d felt that day when they’d been caught.

  And once Rob had left her, not too long after she’d been fired, she’d had to use credit cards three different months to pay the rent on the house they’d leased together. She’d tried to get out of the year lease, but no dice. She’d tried to get new jobs, but she was either over qualified or under qualified for all of them. Every single one of her roommate ads went unanswered.

  Everything she’d done and every attempt to save herself had turned into a no—with one exception. At least her parachute had opened during her and Rob’s skydiving adventure. Of course, maybe it would have been for the better if it hadn’t because with that little escapade, her credit-card debt had soared.

  Four days until her first paycheck from the resort. Would it go to appeasing the creditors or her landlord? Did it even matter at this point? This weekend, she’d resume her job search again. As if anyone would hire around the holidays. But she had to try.

  “You okay, Kelly?”

  She whirled around to see Paul. She’d been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she hadn’t registered his trumpet-heralded grand re-entrance astride his horse, Prancer.

  She blacked out the screen on her smart phone and stuffed it in her pocket. “Yeah, fine. I must have been lost in my thoughts.”

  He stepped up onto the photography platform. “And did those thoughts happen to be about the way I turned you into my very own ice cream sundae last night?”

  She mustered a smile. “You know it.” That had been a pretty damn remarkable night, even if she wasn’t sure if she’d ever get all the chocolate sauce out of her navel.

  “I’m right here, guys,” Brent said, waving his clipboard. “And, ya know, fifty kids are just on the other side of those ropes.”

  “Relax. They’re too far away to hear Santa talking dirty to his elf.”

  With a groan, Brent consulted his clipboard. “Next up, Princess Roxy.”

  Princess Roxy turned out to be a little toy poodle in a green sweater with a preening, elderly owner trailing behind her. Every day, they greeted at least a half-dozen fur babies, mostly dogs, much to Paul and Sadie’s delight. He plied them with doggie treats from the bag he kept tucked at his side. In fact, the only non-dog fur baby they’d seen so far was a cat who was not too pleased to find Sadie waiting to greet her in the sleigh. After much hissing and pedaling paws with the claws extended, the cat owner had agreed to scrap the idea of his precious baby sitting on Santa’s lap and settled for a photo with Santa standing awkwardly behind the cat’s owner—at a safe distance, of course.

  Princess Roxy zeroed in on Sadie immediately, barking all the way up the sleigh stairs and completely ignoring Paul, even after Paul plucked her up off the ground and sat her on his lap, holding tight to her leash. For her part, Sadie lifted her head, ears cocked, and gave a hopeful wag of her tail to her potential new friend.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to get a good shot,” Kelly said.

  “What?” Paul called over the incessant barking.

  Kelly cupped her hands around her mouth to project her voice over the din. “Can’t get a clear shot with her barking like that! You have to distract her or get Sadie out of there.”

  Paul shook his head, looking slightly offended. “Sadie stays. That’s the rule.” He snapped his fingers, and Sadie joined him on the bench. Princess Roxy’s barks turned so forceful that she nearly levitated out of Paul’s arms.

  Paul waved to Princess Roxy’s owner. “Is it okay if I give her a biscuit?” he called, gesturing with his hand to his mouth in case the owner couldn’t hear him.

  Whatever the owner said in response, Kelly couldn’t hear, and anyway, it hardly mattered because Sadie leaned down and gave Princess Roxy a slurping wet doggie kiss across her whole face. Kelly managed to capture the moment with a shot.

  Princess Roxy stopped barking immediately and stared up at Sadie, blinking and stunned. Kelly got that shot, too. She gave a thumb’s up to Paul.

  “Ho, Ho, Ho!” he said triumphantly, holding Princess Roxy up like a trophy. “Princess Roxy, you are quite the diva, and I know just what to get you for Christmas.”

  A muzzle? Kelly thought.

  He cuddled her close to his chin and scratched her fur. “You need a brother or sister dog to keep you company.”

  Ah.

  Princess Roxy’s owner put her hands on her hips, grinning from ear to ear. “How did you know we were thinking of getting another dog for Christmas?”

  Paul stood and handed Princess Roxy back to her mom with a rueful smile and a wink. “They don’t call me Santa Claus for nothin’.”

  * * *

  It hadn’t taken long for Paul to start to craving more alone time with Kelly. So much so that he started inviting her to join Sadie and him on their morning hikes. That was a huge step for him, as he relished the solitude on the trail and had come to think of his daily hikes as his own personal church, a place for stillness and reflection. But he could no longer deny the driving force inside him that wanted to open up his whole world to Kelly and invite her in.

  So, each day, he surprised her with a different trail along tree-lined creeks and through rugged canyons, though at her insistence, they steered clear of narrow ledges along the hilltops, even when Paul tried to convince her that the harrowing climb would be worth it for the view.

  For the most part, Sadie stayed near them, sniffing the trail and the trees they passed, but whenever they lingered, she lost interest fast. Soon enough, she’d catch a scent of something and would bound ahead of them on the trail.

  After one such scent had caught Sadie’s attention and she took off, Kelly asked, “Are you ever worried she won’t come back?”

  “I might be, if she weren’t so well-trained. Coonhounds are notorious for taking off after a scent and getting so focused that they forget themselves. Every now and then she gets that way, but she knows when she hears my whistle that it’s time to come home. Even so, as a back-up plan I put a GPS locator on her collar.”

  “Ever have to use it?” she asked.

  “A couple times a year, maybe. And I’m convinced that even if I didn’t go after her when that happened, she’d find her way back to me sooner rather than later. She knows that she and I are a team.”

  Kelly watched her shoes as they walked, and Paul got the idea that she might want to say something, like maybe she wanted to be part of their team, too. Paul had been thinking a lot about her and about how much it sucked that she had a great job waiting for her in Cranston after the holidays. He wasn’t ready to give her up, but neither was he ready to give up his life and move back to the stiflingly small town of his youth. He’d evolved too much to regress like
that.

  At a loss for answers, he took her hand. “You’re a part of our team this month, too, ya know.”

  “I honestly don’t know what I would have done without you and this job. It’s been a tough year.”

  “Your breakup was that bad?” he said.

  “Yes and no. It hurt, but he wasn’t good for me, so I’m glad he left. But it’s not just him. This whole year sucked.”

  “Even your job at the college?”

  She huffed out a laugh. “Yeah. All of it.”

  He swung their joined hands. “Then I’m doubly glad you found your way to Briscoe Ranch.” And to me.

  But he couldn’t get those last three words out. It was too soon, and he still didn’t have a handle on what he wanted from his relationship with Kelly in the long term. In the meantime, it was just nice to hold her hand and talk under the canopy of trees in the hilly countryside of his favorite place in the world.

  A tuft of green on the path caught his eye. Bingo. “Hey! Here it is! Quillwort, the plant I was telling you about, the main reason I took you on this route.” He got down on his belly, keenly aware that he sounded like a kid on Christmas morning. And with good reason because quillwort was an uncommon plant, indeed. “It’s a rare lycopod, and hill country is one of the only places you can find it.”

  To his surprise, Kelly lowered to her belly next to him and gazed respectfully at the short, green quill-like leaves. “Cute. They look like little alien heads.”

  He’d never thought about it that way, but yeah. They kind of did. “Quillwort as a species wasn’t recognized for a lot of years. Not until scientists figured out something called interspecific hybridization, which was a major watershed moment in understanding—” Damn, he sounded nerdy. So much for his grand plan of insisting he and Kelly live and work together so he could prove to her—and to himself—how much he’d changed since boyhood. “You know what? Never mind. Little alien heads, it is.”

  He stood, then offered her a hand up. She came up and eyed him contemplatively.

  “What?” he said. “You’ve been holding back all morning, but you don’t have to with me. What’s on your mind?”

  “Sorry. My thoughts have been really scattered this week. Just now I was thinking about how you were always the smartest boy in our grade. How I knew you’d grow up to be a scientist one day.”

  But he hadn’t been the smartest guy in their grade. That honor belonged to Delvar Jackson, who’d been their valedictorian. Not that she noticed. Sitting beside Paul at graduation, she’d been too busy mugging for photographs and chatting with her friends to notice some nerd giving a speech.

  There he went, getting bent out of shape over something she meant as a compliment. He was not that guy she took for granted anymore, and he didn’t need to get defensive. He knew who he was, and he knew he meant more to her than a friend of convenience—didn’t he?

  Seeking out an old friend at her time of need didn’t mean she was using him. It also didn’t mean she’d cast their relationship aside when it was no longer convenient for her.

  He refused to believe that. He cleared his throat to help clear the toxic thoughts from his mind, then said, “You say that like you weren’t a heavyweight in the brains department.”

  “And ruin my reputation?”

  Good point. She’d tried to downplay her intelligence at every turn. He used to get so pissed at her for acting dumber than she was. She could have been the queen nerd if she hadn’t had been so attached to her queen-bee status.

  “You thought I didn’t notice?” he said.

  “No. I knew you did. You always saw past my image in a way that no one else did.”

  She said it with a measure of sadness, loneliness.

  He turned, blocking the trail as he tried to look into her eyes, but she kept her gaze averted. Still, there was no denying the sorrow he saw in her eyes.

  “I know who you are, Kelly. Always have. Which reminds me that I have an important question to ask you.” He spun her by the hand to face him.

  “You do?” she asked.

  He took both her hands in his. “Kelly Sawyer, will you go to prom with me? And by prom, I mean next Saturday’s Christmas Ball at the resort?”

  Her eyes twinkled with delight, even as she said, “We have to go to that, anyway. We’re working it.”

  True. But this was the best he’d come up with as a way to re-create their ill-fated prom experience, something he’d been pondering since their seven minutes in heaven the week before. “We’re only working the first half. Then, we can change out of our costumes and spend the rest of the night dancing.”

  “Are you sure that all you want to do for the rest of that night is dance?”

  He released her hands and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her close. “Okay, maybe just an hour or so, and then we can do what most kids do on prom night when they leave the dance.”

  With her fingers she traced his collarbones and arched an eyebrow at him. “Smoke pot and drink wine coolers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “In that case, I would love to go to prom with you.”

  Then it hit him—for the first time since moving away after high school, he felt like his old self again, except that now, he didn’t mind it. All the fight was gone from him because there was nothing to resist. Kelly had been right; all they’d needed to do was rewrite the script, this time around with the two of them together, like they should have been all along.

  So what if he still geeked out over trees and sported an Elder Scrolls tattoo? So what if he was still in love with the same girl after all these years? Because this time around, he got his dream girl, and even though he couldn’t figure out how to keep them together beyond Christmas, he already knew that he wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. He tipped her chin up, then lowered his lips onto hers to seal his vow with a kiss.

  Chapter Ten

  The morning of the Christmas Ball, Kelly was awoken with a kiss and cuddle. Paul stretched out on one side of her and Sadie on the other. Being a Friday, the Santa Meet & Greet didn’t start until the afternoon. The world was quiet. Morning sun filtered through the red curtains, casting the room in a faint pink glow.

  This is what people were talking about when they talked about domestic bliss, she thought.

  If only this particular domestic bliss hadn’t been built on a house of cards. It gave her a knot in her stomach every time her nagging conscience reminded her she was lying to him. So many times she’d almost confessed, but then he’d look into her eyes and all she’d see was love. Not for her, but for Kelly Sawyer, dream girl. Not the Kelly who was drowning in debt, on the cusp of being evicted from her house—a paragon of terrible choices. If she came clean, she’d ruin everything, including the peace she’d found in his home and in his arms.

  But Paul deserved the truth. If she really wanted to atone for the shabby way she’d treated him when they were young, then she needed to come clean.

  She drew a fortifying breath. “Paul . . .”

  “Tonight’s our prom,” he said at the same time, cuddling closer. “I can’t wait to see you in that dress Carina loaned you and take you in my arms on the dance floor. I’ve been waiting a lot of years to dance with you.” He kissed her shoulder. “And I have a surprise for you, too. I wrangled a room for us at the resort tonight. That way, we can change out of our costumes there. And then after the ball, we won’t have far to go for our private after party. They were sold out, but they can’t say no to Santa.”

  “Oh wow. You really are incredible.”

  “It’s all for you, Kelly. You’ve made me a happy man, happy in a way I didn’t even know was missing until you showed up.”

  “I only wish it hadn’t taken me so long to find my way back to you.”

  He lowered his lips to hers for a kiss that was full of love and promise.

  “Were you about to say something?” he asked when the kiss was done.

  The knot in her stomach turned to le
ad. What had she been thinking, dropping a bomb like that on him on the day of the ball? The truth could wait one more day. “I was about to say, it’s not even Christmas yet, but I feel like I’ve already gotten the best present, being here with you. Santa really does deliver on his promise.”

  “You know what the song says . . .” His hand roved up her belly and lingered on her breast. His erection jutted against her hip.

  His rolled her hardening nipples between his thumbs and forefingers until a shot of pleasure made her hiss and arch. Sadie raised her head, gave the two humans a disappointed look, then slunk out of the room, as she usually did when the mood turned sensual.

  “What song?” Kelly breathed.

  He nudged her knees apart, then settled between her legs. “He knows when you are sleeping.” He encircled her wrists and pressed her arms above her head until they touched the headboard, then he thrust his hips just enough to press the hard length of him against her inner thighs. “He knows when you’re awake.”

  Something soft as a feather, tickled her right hand. Her fuzzy, red handcuffs. Oh, she liked this game. She liked it a lot. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good,” she said, holding her hands still as the right cuff locked with a snap, then the left.

  Paul smiled down at her, looking pleased at his. “So be bad for goodness sake.”

  She strained playfully against the cuffs, testing their hold and relishing the sensation of unyielding metal restraining her, leaving her at Paul’s mercy. “I don’t think that’s how the song goes. But I like this one better.”

  “Me too,” he murmured against the swell of her breast. His tongue darted out to flick her nipple, driving her crazy. “And speaking of Christmas gifts, I know what I want. And I think it’s time to open it right now.” He kissed a path down her body, between her breasts, over her belly. She spread her legs wider as his mouth burrowed in her curls, surrendering everything she was and everything she wanted to be to this incredible man who’d become her whole world.

  She’d come to Briscoe Ranch to fix her Karma and regroup after a year from hell. She never expected that all the doors that had closed in her life had actually been paving the way for something grander than any dream she’d had for herself. She’d never expected to fall again for the boy who’d been her first love. And yet, with each passing day that brought them closer to the end of their time together, the more she longed to linger with Paul in this magical place in the Texas hills, just as they were now, forever.