by Cara Colter
“Stop it. I’ll do that.”
For a moment, she looked as if she was going to protest, but then she looked at the baby, and his head-to-toe covering of chicken potpie.
“Are you sure you don’t mind? I could pop him in the bath before bed. You don’t mind if I put him in your tub?”
“Of course not. Thank you for the dinner. It was the best thing I’ve had in a long time.”
“You’re welcome. Come on, Jamey, bath time.”
After he’d cleared the dishes, he took a quick look through the open door of the bathroom and said good-night to them both. Ty was done, physically finished, and worried his exhaustion might get him blabbing again. He did not want a quiet moment alone with her once the baby was in bed.
Jamey, wet and pink, was now as covered with bubbles as he had been with chicken potpie. He leaned forward, arms upstretched, making loud smacking noises.
“He wants a kiss.”
“He might as well learn now that what he wants and what he gets are two different things.”
“Did you learn that from the ranch hands?” she shot back at him.
“Yeah. I did. The cowboy way. And it has stood me in good stead, too.”
“I can clearly see you radiate happiness,” she said sweetly.
He gave her a sour look and went into his bedroom, away from that look in her eyes, knowing and sympathetic. Well, he had no one to blame but himself, blabbing his life history to her.
From behind his closed bedroom door, Ty slipped off his jeans and rolled into bed. He could hear the bath noises. Someone was obviously radiating happiness.
The baby’s bath time was imbued with the same level of enthusiasm and joy as eating had been. There was gleeful chortles, splashing, motorboat noises, gurgles, clapping and games.
Ty tried putting his pillow over his head.
All it did was muffle the happiness that had invaded his house.
And then the invaders were in the bedroom beside his. Ty had moved Amy’s suitcase off his bed and in there. He only had two bedrooms, so she was going to have to share the space she had set up for the baby. There was a twin bed, she had a playpen set up with a little nest of pale blue blankets and stuffed toys in its confines for the baby to sleep in.
Ty realized how thin the walls were. He gave up on the pillow. She didn’t ever have to know he was eavesdropping on story time.
She read three stories, and Ty found himself hanging on every word. He recognized the stories, ones he had begged the kindergarten teacher to lend him, in love with stories from the first encounter. That teacher had been a kind woman, and lent the little motherless boy all the books he could haul home.
He had shown his father the books hopefully, but his dad had looked baffled by them. He’d flipped through them impatiently, looking at the pictures of little creatures dressed in human clothes and living in human houses with amazed dismay. Then he’d shoved the precious books back at Ty.
“I don’t have time for make-believe,” he’d said gruffly.
And so, carefully, greedily, looking at pictures and sounding out the words to Curious George and others by himself in his bed at night, long after his exhausted father had gone to sleep, he would read by flashlight.
Only years later did Ty figure out his father’s reading skills were only rudimentary. His father had always known Halliday Creek Ranch would be his life, just as it had been his father’s before that. He had not seen a use for education, and school had been a painful experience for him, one he could not wait to leave behind.
Now, listening to the stories, Ty wondered if his father had wanted to read to him. He dismissed the thought as quickly as it came.
Amy finished the bedtime stories with a tale Ty had not heard, called Love You Forever, and Ty felt the emotionally evocative words pull on someplace in him like a gathering storm.
He could hear her putting the baby in the playpen, imagined her covering him with a blanket. There was not a single protest.
And then he knew why.
She had saved the best for last.
She began to sing Jamey lullabies. Her voice was clear and true, shining like stars coming out in an evening sky.
And suddenly Ty’s heart was heavy, and his eyes were heavy, and her soft voice was soaring in his ears. A yearning was sitting on his chest like a weight. It was for a wish unrealized. It was for all the things that had never been.
And that he had long since accepted would never be.
He slept when the songs were done, instantly and deeply, the sleep of an exhausted man.
When he awoke in the morning, he was aware of two things. First, it had snowed through the night, and probably hard. The house had that quiet to it, outside sounds of cattle and birds and horses muffled by a layer of snow on the ground and on the roof.
Second, he was intensely and instantly aware he was not in the house by himself. He was not sure why that awareness was so sharp. The child and the woman were making no sound, almost certainly still asleep in these predawn hours that he habitually woke in.
So, how did he know? The smells from last night’s dinner, the chicken potpie scorched on the burner and the baby’s bath lingering in the air?
No, those smells seemed to be gone, replaced by more tempting ones. Ty was sure he could faintly smell popcorn, and something else. Surely she hadn’t got to baking after she’d put the baby to bed?
But more than smells, he knew it was being a man alone that had made him sensitive to the presence of others in his house. He could feel it tickling along his skin, almost as if the notes from her song had left something shivering in the air long after her voice had died away and both he and the baby had slept.
Ty rose quickly, dressed quietly and went on silent feet from his room.
The house was still, as he had known it would be, the guest room door slightly ajar.
He tiptoed through to the kitchen, put on coffee. He would take a travel mug with him, go outside and do chores without awakening his visitors. When he got back they would be up, and he could help her pack her stuff in her little car and wave at her as she went down the driveway.
She’d probably ask for an email address so she could keep in touch. And he didn’t have one, so that would be the end of that.
He turned to the back porch, but a flicker of light drew his attention to the living room.
He froze, stared, moved forward.
Last night, when he had gone to bed, the tree had been at the same stage as when he had walked in the evening before. The lights had been on it, but nothing else.
Now, as if Santa’s elves had appeared in the night, it had been transformed into a glorious thing. The lights had been left plugged in and winked with bright cheer. The star shone like a beacon from the top of it.
Astoundingly, the tree had been completely decorated.
Ty could barely see the offensive artificial branches there was so much stuff on the tree. He was sure those few scant boxes of decorations could not have filled the branches like this.
Almost against his will, he was drawn closer.
He had smelled popcorn. Strings of it were looped around the tree. And he had smelled baking. Because she had made up for the lack of ornaments by hanging cookies. He stepped closer again. The cookies were shaped like round ornaments, and like trees, and like Christmas parcels, all decorated with different colors of icing and sprinkles of candy.
It occurred to Ty that Amy must have arrived with all the things needed to make such intricate cookies stuffed into her little car, intent on making the perfect Christmas for her little boy.
And then, sometime yesterday, her intention had shifted.
She hadn’t done this for Jamey.
They were leaving. They were leaving today.
No, she must have be
en up half the night doing this for him. Why? Ty thought he had made it clear that he did not invest in the sentiment of it all.
And that was probably why. She had been driven to show him what he was missing.
Great. He had managed to invoke her pity.
He tried to harden his heart to it, but it didn’t work. Ty was shocked by how the gift of it wiggled by his customary cynicism, and made him feel a deep sense of humility.
Ty reached out, pulled one of the cookies off the tree, bit into it. It was delicious. He allowed a small smile. Perfect for him. An edible tree.
The chores needed doing, and he turned to leave all this magic behind him. He needed space around him—his space—to clear his head. And then he saw her.
Amy Mitchell was not in the guest room. She had fallen asleep in the big easy chair, curled up, her legs underneath her, her chin down on her neck. Her curls were flat in places and standing straight up in others. Her shirt was gaping open at the throat. The book he’d been reading and had left on a side table was spread out, open across her chest.
Had his choice of books told her something about him? He’d never been to university, but last year he had come across a reading list and was making his way through it. He moved Homer’s The Iliad gently from her breast.
There was a blanket in a basket beside the chair and he hesitated. And then he took it and unfolded it, tucked it around her with a tenderness that astounded him. He fought off an impulse to touch those crazy curls.
He was glad she would be gone soon.
There was nothing in him that knew anything about being with a woman like this. She had seen his world was a hard place, with no soft edges, and made him the gift of the tree. Trying to show him something, or save him from something.
It didn’t really matter which, because there was nothing in him that knew about the sensitivity and softness that would be required to appreciate a woman like this.
She represented everything he could not have.
And everything he had convinced himself he did not want, until he had heard her voice singing to the baby last night, woken up to the remarkably gentle gift of the tree. And he suspected that was her intention.
To let him have a glimpse at a softer world. To make him know he was missing something.
He turned his back on her swiftly. The thing about what she was offering him—once a man tasted that, he could start craving it. Craving was weakness.
He yanked on his boots, hat and coat, out of sorts now as he went out the back door. There he paused, stunned by what he saw. He had known from the muffled sounds this morning that it had snowed.
Nothing could have prepared him for how much.
The accumulated snow, when he stepped off his back stair, was nearly at his knee. In his lifetime, he had not seen so much snow in one dump. And the dump wasn’t over. Though no snow was falling at the moment, the sky was leaden, the mountains obscured by thick, ominous cloud. He sniffed the air and could smell the threat. There was more snow coming.
He plowed a path with his boots, around the side of his house, to the front. He surveyed his driveway, though he had already known what he would see.
Her car was somewhere under a mound of snow that was precisely the same size and shape as an igloo.
It would take a hard day of plowing with his tractor to make his driveway reappear from under a stretch of snow that rolled clear to the mountains. And with more snow coming, was there any point in tackling that task?
Besides, beyond his driveway would the roads be open? Possibly. He would be able to turn on the radio and find out.
But what if the roads were open? A big truck with four-wheel drive and a driver with more guts than brains could get through on them.
But Ty felt as if it would border on criminal to allow her and the baby to leave in these conditions.
These conditions. The reality hit him.
Snowed in.
Ty remembered “snow” days from when he was a kid. Days the school bus couldn’t get through on the roads. And since then, every few years there would be a day or two when he didn’t get to the driveway with the plow and was stuck on the place.
It was never a big deal. He always had a freezer full of beef, a pantry stocked with tinned goods.
But now he had unexpected guests. And if felt like a very big deal, indeed. How long was she going to be here?
With a sinking heart, he realized it was going to be another day, at the very least.
He reminded himself the native people, so in tune with this land and the larger picture, would say just to make the best of it.
But when he thought of her singing to the baby, and that tree in his house, her gentle gift to him, and when he thought of how he felt tucking the blanket around her, he knew how easy it would be to feel attached to them.
That had really been his unspoken motto through much of his life: No Attachments.
He refused even to own a dog, the most pragmatic of men, he didn’t see a cute little puppy. He saw how it was going to end.
Amy was stuck here. He was stuck with her. It was his job now to make sure they all got out of it with no one getting hurt.
He had to be indifferent to her. He had to. Not for his sake, but for hers. A long time ago, when he’d run wild on the rodeo circuit, a girl had told him, tearfully, Cowboy, you are the kind of guy who breaks hearts. Because you don’t have one.
So he just had to be himself, which was a heartless bastard. That shouldn’t be too difficult for him. When he was able to get the driveway clear, Amy Mitchell would be so glad to get gone, that little car would go down the road as if it had been shot from a catapult.
As he was finishing up his chores, the snow had started again. The flakes were huge and wet, nearly obliterating his house from his view.
He came in the back door, knowing he had to tell her the bad news quick and get it over with. He glanced up from the porch and saw Amy sitting at the kitchen table. She looked pale, and her eyes smarted with tears.
At first he thought she must have already figured out she wasn’t going anywhere. But then something about her stillness, and the look on her face, made him take the stairs two at time.
The frying pan was on the stove, turned off, half-cooked bacon in it.
“What happened?”
Mutely, she held one hand toward him, the fingers of her other hand circling a wrist that was as tiny, her bones as fragile as a sparrow’s.
“I—I—I never used that kind of pan before. I didn’t realize the handle would get so hot.”
“What the—” he glanced at the hundred-year-old cast-iron frying pan, and then looked at her hand.
Across the palm was a welt, angry-looking and puckered, the imprint of the pan handle scorched into her skin like a brand.
He went on his knees in front of her, but when he reached out to take her hand, to get a better look, she yanked it away.
“I might have to go to the hospital,” she said, her effort at bravery diminished somewhat by the fact her whole body was trembling.
“Let me look.”
She didn’t want to trust him. Smart girl. But there was no one else, and so he captured her hand, held it firm, studied the burn. Bad, but not hospital bad, which given the condition of the roads was a good thing.
“Stupid of me,” she said in a wooden voice.
He looked up from her hand.
“Just like coming here by accident. Dumb. It’s what they all expect, and they’re all right.”
It occurred to him it wasn’t because she hadn’t trusted him that she hadn’t wanted to show him her hand.
It was because she was afraid of being judged. Found stupid.
For a guy who didn’t have a heart, he was surprised by where he felt that.
“Who
?” he said quietly.
And then she was crying, big fat tears slithering down her cheeks.
“Everybody. My husband, his parents, my parents. Everybody treats me like I can’t ever do anything right. Can’t be trusted to make good decisions.”
Considering how he had dreaded the thought of her crying when it had almost happened yesterday, considering he had a fully formulated plan that had heartless bastard at its core, Ty surprised himself by not bolting for the door.
Instead, inwardly, calmly, he acknowledged it would take a stronger man than he was to be indifferent to her.
Her palm still lay across his hand. He lifted it to his lips and blew gently on the burn. She went very still, and he looked up at her.
“Hey,” he said, “it’s going to be okay.”
“It hurts so bad.”
He wasn’t quite sure if she meant the burn, or everyone’s low expectations of her. He remembered seeing something in her face when she had said she was a widow, a torment of some kind. He’d thought it was because of her loss. Now he wondered if it wasn’t a loss of a different sort instead.
“I’ll fix it.”
And he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, either. The burn, or the wounded place in her that was so much deeper than the burn.
The burn would be easy.
And surely Ty had enough self-knowledge to know he could not be trusted with the other?
And then, even though his jacket was cold and wet with melting flakes of snow, she put her arms around his neck.
He felt her uninjured hand, warm and soft, trace the coldness of the exposed skin on the back of his neck. The other she held away from him. She leaned forward and put her forehead against his, drew in a deep trembling breath. He stiffened.
For a moment he froze, uncertain what to do with all this pain and all this trust.
And then the certainty came. As naturally as breathing, he put his arms around her and pulled her close into him, so close that he could feel her heart beating against the oilskin of the jacket. So close that her tears slithered down his neck along with melting snow.