A Cold Creek Noel (The Cowboys of Cold Creek)

by Thayne, RaeAnne

“Do you know my dog?” Maya asked him earnestly. “His name is Lucky.”

  Grateful for the diversion, he shifted his gaze from Caidy to her very adorable stepniece. “I don’t think I’ve met Lucky yet. That’s a very nice name for a dog.”

  “He is nice,” Maya declared. “He licks my nose. It tickles.”

  “We have a dog named Tri,” Jack announced.

  “My dog’s name is Grunt,” Gabi said. “Trace says he’s ugly but I think he’s the most beautiful dog in the world.”

  “Lucky’s beautiful too,” Alex said. “He has superlong ears.”

  “Tri only has three legs,” Jack said, as if that little fact trumped everything else.

  “Cool!” Gabi said. “How does he get around?”

  “He hops,” Ava, who usually only barely tolerated the dog, piped in. “It’s really kind of cute. He walks on his front two and then hops on the one back leg he’s got. It takes forever to go on a walk with him, but I don’t mind. Maya, you drank all your root beer. Do you want some more?”

  Maya nodded and Ben smiled at his daughter as she poured a small amount of soda for the girl. All the children treated Maya with sweet consideration and it touched him, especially coming from Ava. Though she could be self-absorbed sometimes, like most children, she had these moments of kindness that heartened him.

  “Here’s pizza number two!” Caidy sang out to cheers from the children. While they had been talking about dogs, he had missed her pulling his pepperoni-and-olive creation out of the oven. Now she set it on the middle of the table and expertly sliced it. As before, the children each grabbed a slice. He nabbed a small one but noticed Caidy didn’t take one.

  “Want me to save you a piece? You’d better move fast.”

  She sat down on the one remaining chair at the table, which happened to be on his other side. “I’m saving my appetite for the barbecue chicken.”

  “It’s all delicious. Especially this one, if I do say so myself.” He gave a modest shrug.

  “You’re a pro.” She smiled and he felt that connection between them tug a little harder.

  “I love pizza. It’s my favorite,” Maya declared.

  “Me too!” Alex said. “I could eat pizza every single day.”

  “It’s my triple favorite,” Jack, not to be outdone, announced. “I could eat it every day and every night.”

  Ava rolled her eyes. “You’re such a dork.”

  The kids appeared to be done after finishing most of the second pizza.

  “Can we go finish the show now?” Destry asked.

  Caidy glanced at him. “As long as Dr. Caldwell doesn’t mind sticking around a little longer.”

  He should leave. This kitchen—and the soft, beautiful woman in it—were just too appealing. A little fuel had helped push away some of the exhaustion, but he still worried his defenses were slipping around Caidy.

  However, that barbecue chicken pizza currently baking was filling the kitchen with delicious, smoky smells. She had gone to all the effort to make it. He might as well stay to taste it.

  “How much time is left on the show?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Not that much, I’m sure,” Destry said, rather artfully, he thought.

  Caidy looked doubtful but she didn’t argue with her niece.

  “We can stay awhile more,” he finally said. “If it goes on too much longer, we might have to leave before the show ends.”

  Despite the warning, his ruling was met with cheers from all the children.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Ava said, gifting him with one of her rare smiles. “We’re having too much fun to go yet.”

  “I love this show,” Jack said. “It’s hilarious.”

  A new word in kindergarten apparently. He smiled, feeling rather heroic to give his children something they wanted. As soon as all the kids hurried out to start the show again, he realized his mistake. He was alone again with Caidy, surrounded by delicious smells and this dangerous connection shivering between them.

  She rose quickly, ostensibly to check on the pizza, but he sensed she was also aware of it. As she slid the third pizza onto the peel and then out of the oven, he racked his brain to come up with a topic of polite conversation.

  He could only come up with one. “What happened to your parents?”

  The words came out more bluntly than he intended. Apparently, they startled her too. She nearly dropped the paddle, pizza and all, but recovered enough to carry it with both hands to the table, where she set it down between them.

  “Wow. That was out of the blue.”

  He was an idiot who had no business being let out around anything with less than four feet. Or three, in Tri’s case.

  “It’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me. I’ve been wondering, that’s all. Sorry.”

  She sighed as she picked up the pizza slicer and jerked it across the pie. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing. Only what you’ve said, which isn’t much. I’ve gathered it was something tragic. A car accident?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment, busy with slicing the pizza and lifting a piece to a plate for him and then for herself. He was very sorry he had said anything, especially when it obviously caused her so much sadness.

  “It wasn’t a car accident,” she finally said. “Sometimes I wish it were something as straightforward as that. It might have been easier.”

  He took a bite of his pizza. The robust flavors melted on his tongue but he hardly noticed them as he waited for her to continue.

  She took a small bite of hers and then a sip of the root beer before she spoke again. “It wasn’t any kind of accident,” she said. “They were murdered.”

  He hadn’t expected that one, not here in quiet Pine Gulch. He stared at the tightness of her mouth that could be so lush and delicious. “Murdered? Seriously?”

  She nodded. “I know. It still doesn’t seem real to me either. It’s been eleven years now and I don’t know if any of us has ever really gotten over it.”

  “You must have been just a girl.”

  “Sixteen.” She spoke the word softly and he felt a pang of regret for a girl who had lost her father and mother at such a tender age.

  “Was it someone they knew?”

  “We don’t know who killed them. That’s one of the toughest aspects of the whole thing. It’s still unsolved. We do know it was two men. One dark-haired, one blond, in their late twenties.”

  Her mouth tightened more and she sipped at her root beer. He wanted to kick himself for bringing up this obviously painful topic.

  “They were both strangers to Pine Gulch,” she went on. “That much we know. But they didn’t leave any fingerprints or other clues. Only, uh, one shaky eyewitness identification.”

  “What was the motive?”

  “Oh, robbery. The whole thing was motivated by greed. My parents had an extensive art collection. I know you saw the painting in the dining room the other day and probably figured out our mother was a brilliant artist. She also had many close friends in the art community who gave her gifts of their work or sold them to her at a steep discount.”

  A brazen art theft here in quiet Pine Gulch. Of all the things he might have guessed, that was just about last on the list.

  “It was a few days before Christmas. Eleven years ago tomorrow, actually. None of the boys lived at home then, only me. Ridge was working up in Montana, Trace was in the military and Taft had an apartment in town. No one was supposed to be
here that night. I had a Christmas concert that night at the high school but I...I was ill. Or said I was anyway.”

  “You weren’t?”

  She set her fork down next to her mostly uneaten pizza and he felt guilty again for interrupting her meal with this tragic topic. He wanted to tell her not to finish, that he didn’t need to know, but he was afraid that sounded even more stupid—and besides that, he sensed some part of her needed to tell him.

  “It’s so stupid. I was a stupid, selfish, silly sixteen-year-old girl. My boyfriend, Cody Spencer—the asshole—had just broken up with me that morning in homeroom. He wanted to go out with my best friend, if you can believe that cliché. And Sarah Beth had wanted him ever since we started going out and decided dating the captain of the football team and president of the performance choir was more important than friendship. I was quite certain, as only a sixteen-year-old girl can be, that my heart had broken in a million little pieces.”

  He tried to picture her at sixteen and couldn’t form a good picture. Was it because that pivotal event had changed her so drastically?

  “The worst part was, Cody and I were supposed to sing a duet together at the choir concert—‘Merry Christmas, Darling.’ I couldn’t go through with it. I just...couldn’t. So I told my parents I thought I must have food poisoning. I don’t think they believed me for a minute, but what else could they do when I told them I would throw up if I had to go onstage that night? They agreed to stay home with me. None of us knew it would be a fatal mistake.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “I know that intellectually, but it’s still easy to blame myself.”

  “Easy, maybe, but not fair to a sixteen-year-old girl with a broken heart.”

  She gave him a surprised look, as if she hadn’t expected him to demonstrate any sort of understanding. Did she think him as much an asshole as Cody Spencer?

  “I know. It wasn’t my fault. It just...feels that way sometimes. It happened right here, you know. In the kitchen. They disarmed the security system and broke in through the back door over there. My mom and I were in here when we heard them outside. I caught a quick glimpse of their faces through the window before my mother shoved me into the pantry and ordered me to stay put. I thought she was coming in after me so I hid under the bottom shelf to make room for her, but...she went back out again, calling for my father.”

  She was silent and he didn’t know what to say, what to do, to ease the torment in her eyes. Finally, he settled for resting a hand over hers on the table. She gave him another of those surprised looks, then turned her hand over so they were palm against palm and twisted her fingers in his.

  “The men ordered her to the ground and...I could hear them arguing. With her, with themselves. One wanted to leave but the other one said it was too late, she had seen them. And then my father came in. He must have had one of his hunting rifles trained on them. I couldn’t see from inside the pantry, but the next thing I knew, two shots rang out. The police said my dad and one of the men must have fired at each other at the same moment. The other guy was hit and injured. My dad...died instantly.”

  “Oh, Caidy.”

  “After that, it was crazy. My mom was screaming at them. She grabbed a knife out of the kitchen and went after them and the...the bastard shot her too. She...took a while to die. I could hear her breathing while the men hurried through the house taking the art they wanted. They must have made about four or five trips outside before they finally left. And I stayed inside that pantry, doing nothing. I tried to help my mother once but she made me go back inside. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Outside the kitchen he could hear laughter from the children at something on the show they were watching. Caidy’s fingers trembled slightly, her skin cool now, and he tightened his hand around hers.

  “I should have helped her. Maybe I could have done something.”

  “You would have been shot if they’d known you were here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No ‘maybe’ about it. Do you think they would have hesitated for a moment?” He couldn’t bear thinking about the horrific possibility.

  “I don’t know. I... When I finally heard them drive away, I waited several more minutes to make sure they weren’t coming back, then went out to call nine-one-one. By then, it was too late for my mother. She was barely hanging on when Taft and the rest of the paramedics arrived. Maybe if I had called earlier, she wouldn’t have lost so much blood.”

  Everything made so much sense now. The close bond between the siblings masked a deep pain. He had sensed it and now he knew the root of it.

  Did that explain why she was still here at the River Bow all these years later, why she hadn’t finished veterinary school? Did guilt keep her here, still figuratively hiding in the pantry?

  Was this the reason she didn’t sing anymore?

  He curled her fingers in his, wishing he had some other way to ease her burden. “It wasn’t your fault. What a horrible thing to happen to anyone, let alone a young girl.”

  “I guess you understand now why I don’t like Christmas much. I try, for Destry’s sake. She wasn’t even born then. It doesn’t seem fair to make her miss out on all the holiday fun because of grief for people she doesn’t know.”

  “I can see that.”

  Much to his disappointment, she slid her hand out from underneath his and rose to take her plate to the sink. Though he sensed she was trying to create distance between them again, he cleared his own dishes and carried them to the sink after her.

  She looked surprised. “Oh, thanks. You didn’t have to do that. You’re a guest.”

  “A guest who owes you far more the few moments it takes to bus a few dishes,” he countered before returning to the table to clean up the mess of plates and napkins and glasses the children had left behind.

  She smiled her thanks when he carried the things to the sink and he wanted to think some of the grimness had left her expression. She still hadn’t eaten much pizza but he decided it wasn’t his place to nag her about that.

  He grabbed a dish towel and started to dry the few dishes in the drainer by the sink. Though she looked as if she wanted to argue, she said nothing and for a few moments they worked in companionable silence.

  “My mom really loved the holidays,” she said when the last few dishes were nearly finished. “Both of my parents did, really. I think that’s what makes it harder. Mom would decorate the house even before Thanksgiving and she would spend the whole month baking. I think Dad was more excited than us kids. He used to sing Christmas songs at the top of his lungs. All through December—after we were done with chores and dinner and homework—he would gather us around the big grand piano in the other room to sing with him. Whatever musical talent I had came from him.”

  “I’d like to hear you sing,” he said.

  She gave him a sidelong look and shook her head. “I told you, I don’t sing anymore.”

  “You think your parents would approve of that particular stance?”

  She sighed and hung the dish towel on the handle of the big six-burner stove. “I know. I tell myself that every year. My dad, in particular, would be very disappointed in me. He would look at me underneath those bushy eyebrows of his and tell me music is the medicine of a broken heart. That was one of his favorite sayings. Or he would quote Nietzsche: ‘without music, life is a mistake.’ I know that intellectually, but sometimes what we know in our head doesn’t always translate very well to our heart.
”

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered.

  She gave him a curious look, leaning a hip against the work island.

  He knew he should keep his mouth shut but somehow the words spilled out, like a song he didn’t realize he knew. “My head is telling me it’s a completely ridiculous idea to kiss you again.”

  She gazed at him for a long, silent moment, her eyes huge and her lips slightly parted. He saw her give a long, slow inhale. “And does your heart have other ideas? I hope so.”

  “The kids—” he said, rather ridiculously.

  “—are busy watching a show and paying absolutely no mind to us in here,” she finished.

  He took a step forward, almost against his will. “This thing between us is crazy.”

  “Completely insane,” she agreed.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Probably the same thing that’s wrong with me,” she murmured, her voice husky and low. She also took a step forward, until she was only a breath away, until he was intoxicated by the scent of her, fresh and clean and lovely.

  He had to kiss her. It seemed as inevitable as the sunrise over the mountains. He covered the space between them and brushed his mouth against hers once, twice, a third time. He might have found the willpower to stop there but she sighed his name and gripped the front of his shirt with both hands, leaning in for more, and he was lost.

  She tasted of root beer—vanilla and mint. Delicious. He couldn’t seem to get enough. He forgot everything when she was in his arms—his exhaustion, the music she didn’t sing, the children in the other room.

  All he could think about was Caidy, sweet and warm and lovely.

  There was something intensely right about being here with her. He couldn’t have explained it, other than he felt as if with every passing moment, some dark, empty corner inside him was being filled with soothing light.

  * * *

  She thought their first kiss that night at the clinic had been fantastic. This surpassed that one. The physical reaction was the same, instant heat and hunger, this wild surge of desire for more and more.