He was sure he would have muddled through some kind of dinner with the children, but the fact that she had thought far enough ahead to help touched something deep inside him.
I just want to help lift your burden a little, she had said earlier in the evening. He couldn’t remember anybody ever spontaneously offering such a thing to him. Mrs. Michaels helped him tremendously but he paid her well for it. This was pure generosity on Caidy’s part and he was stunned by it.
“Shall we get started with wrapping?”
He wasn’t sure he trusted himself right now to spend five minutes with her, but because she had come all this way—and brought Christmas dinner to boot—he didn’t know how to kick her out into the snow.
“I’ve brought everything down, including all the wrapping paper I could find.”
“Perfect.”
She took in the pile of presents with a slight smile dancing across that expressive mouth. “Looks like the children will have a great Christmas.”
He hurried to disabuse her of the notion that he ought to win any Father of the Year awards. “Mrs. Michaels did a lot of the shopping, though I did buy a few things online. So where do we start?”
“I guess we just dive in. You know, I can handle this, if you have something else to do.”
Did she want him to leave? For an instant, he was unbelievably tempted to do just that, escape into another room and leave her to it. But not only would that be rude, it would be cowardly too, especially when she had gone to all this trouble to walk down in the snow—and carrying a sumptuous meal too.
“No. Let’s do this. With both of us working together, it shouldn’t take long. You might have to babysit me a little.”
“Surely you’ve wrapped a present before.”
He racked his brain and vaguely remembered wrapping a gift for his grandparents that first Christmas after they had taken him in, a macaroni-covered pencil holder he had worked hard on in school. His grandfather hadn’t even opened it, had made some excuse about saving it for later. Christmas night when he had taken out a bag of discarded wrapping paper, he had seen it out in the trash can, still wrapped.
“I probably did when I was a kid. I doubt my skills have improved since then.”
“How can a man reach thirtysomething without learning how to wrap a present?”
“I rely on two really cool inventions. You may have heard of them. Store gift-wrapping and the very handy and ubiquitous gift bag.”
She laughed, and the sound of it in the quiet kitchen entranced him. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take care of all the oddly shaped gifts and you can handle the easy things. The books and the DVDs and other basic shapes. It’s a piece of cake. Let me show you.”
For the next few moments, he endured the sheer torture of having her stand at his side, her soft curves just a breath away as she leaned over the table beside him.
“The real trick to a beautifully wrapped present is to make sure you measure the paper correctly. Too big and you’ve got unsightly extra paper to deal with. Too small and the package underneath shows through.”
“Makes sense,” he mumbled. He was almost painfully aware of her, but beneath his desire was something deeper, a tenderness that terrified him. He meant his words to her earlier in the evening. She was an amazing person and he didn’t know how much longer he could continue to ignore this inexorable bond between them.
“Okay, after you’ve measured your paper, leaving an extra inch or two on all sides, you bring the sides up, one over the other, and tape the seam. Great. Now fold the top and bottom edges of the end on the diagonal like this—” she demonstrated “—and then tape those down. Small pieces of tape are better. Can you see that?”
Right now, he would agree to anything she said. She smelled delicious and he wanted to pull her onto his lap and just nuzzle her neck for a few hours. “Okay. Sure.”
“After that, you can use ribbon to wrap around it or just stick on a bow. Doesn’t it look great? Do you think you can do it now on your own?”
He looked down blankly at the present. “Not really,” he admitted.
She frowned, so close to him he could see the shimmery gold flecks in her eyes. “What part didn’t you get? I thought that was a great demonstration.”
He sighed. “It probably was. I only heard about half of it. I was too busy remembering how your mouth tastes like strawberries.”
She stared at him for a long charged moment and then she quickly moved to the chair across the table from him.
“Please stop,” she said, her voice low and her color high.
“I’d like to. Believe me.”
“I’m serious. I can’t handle this back-and-forth thing. It’s not fair. You flirt with me one minute and then push me away the next. Please. Make up your mind, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I don’t either,” he admitted. He was an ass. She was absolutely right. “I think that’s the problem. I keep telling myself I can’t handle anything but friendship right now. Then you show up and you smell delicious and you’re so sweet to bring dinner for us. To top it all off, you’re so damned beautiful, all I can think about is kissing you again, holding you in my arms.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide. He saw awareness there and something else, something fragile.
He wanted her fiercely. Because she trembled whenever he touched her, he suspected she shared his hunger. He could kiss her—and possibly do more—now, but at what cost?
She was a vulnerable woman. He was no armchair psychologist, but he guessed she was hiding herself away here on this ranch because she saw only weakness and fear in herself. She saw the sixteen-year-old girl who had cowered from her parents’ killers. She didn’t see herself as the strong, powerful, desirable woman he did.
He could hurt her—and that was the last thing he wanted to do.
“Sorry. Forget I said that. We’d better get these presents wrapped so you can go home and get some sleep.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide and impossibly green. Finally she nodded. “Yes. I would hate to be down here wrapping gifts if one of the children woke up and came down for a drink of water or something.”
She turned her attention to the task at hand. He fumbled through wrapping a book for Ava and did an okay job but nothing as polished as Caidy’s presents. After a few more awkward moments with only the sound of rustling paper and ripping tape, he decided he needed something as a buffer between them.
He rose from the table and headed for Mrs. Michaels’s radio/CD player in the corner. When he turned it on, jazzy Christmas music filled the empty spaces. She didn’t like holiday songs, he remembered, but she didn’t seem to object so he left the station tuned there.
The pile dwindled between them, and at some point she started talking to him again, asking little questions about the gifts he and Mrs. Michaels had purchased, about the children’s interests, about their early Christmases.
When he left to look for one more roll of paper in Mrs. Michaels’s room, he returned to find her humming softly under her breath to “Angels We Have Heard on High,” her voice soft and melodious.
He stood just on the other side of the doorway, wondering what it might take for her to sing again. She stopped abruptly when she sensed his presence and returned to taping up a box containing yet another outfit for Ava’s American Girl doll.
“You found more paper. Oh, good. That should help us finish up.”
; He sat back down and started wrapping a DVD for Jack.
“Tell me about Christmas when you were a kid,” she said after a moment.
That question came out of left field and he fumbled for an answer. “Fine. Nothing memorable.”
“Everybody has some fond memory of Christmas. Making Christmas cookies, delivering gifts to neighbors. What were your traditions?”
He tried to think back and couldn’t come up with much. “We usually had a nice tree. My grandmother’s decorator would spend the whole day on it. It was really beautiful.” He didn’t add that he and Susie weren’t allowed to go near it because of the thousands of dollars in glass ornaments adorning the branches.
“Your grandmother?”
Had he said that? “Yeah. My grandparents raised my sister and me from the time I was about eight until I left for college.”
“Why?”
He could feel her gaze on him as he tried to come up with the words to answer her. He wanted to ignore it but couldn’t figure out a way to do that politely. And suddenly, for a reason he couldn’t have explained, he wanted to tell her, just like in his office earlier in the week when he had told her about Brooke.
“My childhood wasn’t very happy, I guess, but I feel stupid complaining about it. I don’t know who my father is. My mother was a drug addict who dumped my half sister and me on her parents and disappeared without a word. She died of an overdose about three months later.”
Her eyes darkened with sympathy. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. What a blessing that you had your grandparents to help you through it.”
He gave a rough laugh. “My grandparents were extremely wealthy and important people in Chicago social circles but they didn’t want to be saddled with the obligation of raising the children of an out-of-control daughter they had cut off years earlier. They probably would have chucked us into the foster care system if they weren’t afraid of how it would look to their acquaintances. Sometimes I wish they had done just that. They didn’t have the patience for two small children.”
“Then it’s even more wonderful that you work so hard to give your children such a great Christmas,” she said promptly. “You’ve become the father you never had.”
Her faith in him was humbling. At her words, he felt this shifting and settling inside his heart.
This wasn’t simply attraction. He was in love with her. The realization settled over him like autumn leaves falling to earth, like that snow drifting against the windows.
How had that happened?
Perhaps during that sleigh ride, when he had seen her holding her sweet niece Maya on her lap, or when she had come to the door the other night, flour on her cheek from making three pizzas for a houseful of children. Or maybe that first night at the clinic, when she had knelt beside her injured dog and hummed away the animal’s anxiety.
Oblivious to his sudden staggering epiphany, she tied an elaborate bow on the gift she was wrapping and snipped the ends. “There. That should be the last one.”
Through his dazed shock, he managed to turn his attention to the pile of presents. Somehow he, Mrs. Michaels and Caidy had managed to pull off another Christmas.
She was right. He was a good father—not because he could provide them a pile of gifts but because he loved them, because he was doing his best to provide a safe, friendly place for them to grow, because he treated them with patience and respect instead of cold tolerance.
“Thank you.” The words seemed inadequate for all she had done for him this holiday season.
She smiled and rose from the kitchen table. She stretched her arms over her head to work all the kinks out from being huddled over a table for nearly an hour, and it took all his strength not to leap across the table and devour her.
“Just imagining their faces on Christmas morning is enough thanks for me. You’ve got a couple of really adorable kids there, Ben.”
“I do.” His voice sounded strangled and she gave him an odd look but shrugged into her coat. He knew he should help her, but right now he didn’t trust himself to be that close to her.
“Good night.”
As she started for the door, he came to his senses. “I forgot you walked down here. Let me grab my coat and I’ll walk you back to your house.”
“That’s not necessary.”
It was to him. In answer, he pulled his coat down from the hook and drew it on while she watched him with a disgruntled expression.
“I’ve been walking this lane my whole life. I’m fine. You shouldn’t leave the children.”
“I’ll be gone five minutes, with the house in view the whole time.”
She sighed. “You’re a stubborn man, Dr. Caldwell.”
He could be. He supposed it was stubbornness that had kept him from admitting the truth to himself—that he was falling for her. As they walked out into the light snow, Tri hopping along ahead of them, he was struck again by the peace that seemed to enfold him when he was with her.
She smiled at the little dog’s valiant efforts to stay in front as leader of the pack, then lifted her face to let snowflakes kiss her cheeks. Tenderness, sweet and healing, seemed to wash through him. He wanted to protect her, to make her smile—to, as she had said earlier, lift her burdens if she would let him.
His marriage hadn’t quite been that way. He had loved Brooke but as he walked beside Caidy, he couldn’t help thinking that in many ways it had been an immature sort of love. They had met when he had been in veterinary school and she had been doing undergraduate work in public relations.
For some reason he still didn’t quite comprehend, she had immediately decided she wanted him, in that determined way she had, and he hadn’t done much to change the course she set out for both of them.
He had come to love her, of course, though his love had been intertwined with gratitude that she would take a lonely, solitary man and give him a family and a place to belong.
He thought he would never fall in love again. When Brooke died, he thought his world was over. It had taken all these months and years for him to feel as though he could even think about moving forward with his life.
Here he was, though, crazy in love with Caidy Bowman and it scared the hell out of him. Could he risk his heart, his soul, all over again?
And why was he even thinking about this? Yes, Caidy responded to his kisses, but she had spent her adult life pushing away any relationship beyond her family. She might not even be interested in anything more with him. Why would she be? He didn’t have that much to offer in the relationship department. He was surly and impatient, with a couple of energetic kids to boot.
“I wonder if I can ask you a favor,” she said after they were nearly to the barn. “If you have time this week, could you take a look at my Sadie? I’m worried about her. She’s not been acting like herself.”
He pictured her old border collie, thirteen years old and moving with slow, measured movements. “Sure. I can come over tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s urgent. After Christmas would probably be fine.”
“All right. First thing Wednesday. Or if the kids and I feel like taking a walk after they open presents, maybe I’ll stop up at the house to take a look.”
“Thank you. You should probably go back. You left a fire in the fireplace, don’t forget.”
“Yes.” He wanted to kiss her, here in the wintry cold. He wanted to tuck her against him and hold her close and keep her safe from any more sorrow.
He didn’t have that right, he reminded himself. Not now. Maybe after the holidays, after he and the children moved into the new house and Mrs. Michaels came back, he could ask her to dinner, see where things might progress.
“Thank you again for your help with the gifts.”
“You’re welcome. If I don’t see you again, merry Christmas.”
“Same to you.”
She gave that half smile again. Against his better judgment, he stepped forward and brushed a soft kiss on her rosy cheek, then turned around, scooped up his little dog and walked swiftly away through the snow—while he still could.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hang on. Just a few more moments. There’s my sweet girl. Hang on.”
Icy fear pulsed through Caidy as she drove her truck through the wintry Christmas Eve in a grim repeat of a scene she had already played a few weeks earlier with Luke. She was much more terrified this time than she had been with the younger dog, and the quarter mile to the foreman’s cottage seemed to stretch on forever.
Sadie couldn’t die. She just couldn’t. But from the instant she had walked into the barn just moments earlier and found her beloved dog lying motionless in the straw of one of the stalls, all her vague concerns about the dog’s health over the past few days had coalesced into this harsh, grinding terror.
Sadie, her dearest friend, was fading. She knew it in her heart and almost couldn’t breathe around the pain. She couldn’t seem to think straight either. Only one thought managed to pierce her panic.
Ben would know what to do.
She had picked up the dog, shoved her into the bed of the nearest vehicle, Ridge’s pickup, pulled the spare key out of the tackroom and drove like hell to Ben’s place.
Now that she approached the house nestled in the pines, reality returned. It was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve. The children would be sound asleep. She couldn’t rush in banging on the door to wake them up, tonight of all nights, when they would never be able to go back to sleep.
A Cold Creek Noel (The Cowboys of Cold Creek) Page 18