I hadn’t known Haley was coming, so I’d gotten her a gift card online. As promised, she gave me a pair of pajamas to match hers, and once I put them on, they were so warm and cozy I abandoned all plans for getting dressed that day. Lidia had brought me a box of homemade toffee, and I’d gotten her a nice planner, so she could schedule her visits and stop showing up unannounced. Of course I didn’t tell her that part. I felt bad that no one but Lidia had gotten Cody anything, but I figured we’d given him what he wanted most of all—a second chance.
He cleared his throat when a lull in the conversation fell. “I wouldn’t exactly call this a Christmas gift,” he said, leaning over to pull a folded envelope from the back pocket of his Wranglers. “But it seemed like the right time to give it to y’all.”
No one moved. Even Haley stopped talking, sensing the importance even if she knew even less about it than we did. I gulped as I stared at the plain white, creased envelope. Was it a letter from Maria? If it was, would the guys want to read it? Would I want them to, to get closure, or would it make them miss her all over again?
“What’s that?” Waylon asked at last.
“It’s money,” Cody said, lifting his hat and running his hand through his short, dark hair.
“Dad’s money?” Sawyer asked. “Because I know you’ve been staying with him in New York for the past year, and we already said no to his money. What he wanted for it was more than we could give.”
I knew what they’d given up to have me here. Their father had offered them a loan if they’d take care of me for a couple months. When I’d refused to leave after those three months, he’d tried to give the guys the money so they’d kick me to the curb. The guys had chosen me over the money, risking their very home. I’d worked my ass off to make up for what they had given up, but the ranch still hung in the balance. I wondered how much money was in that envelope.
When no one reached for the envelope, Cody set his hat on his knee and sighed. “It’s not from Dad,” he said. “It’s from me. I made a lot of mistakes leaving here like I did, but I always knew I’d come back to Coyote Ranch one day. This is my home. But the fact is, I left it, and y’all took care of it while I was gone. You kept the cabins nice, ran the ranch. I know how much that costs, and I wasn’t paying my share for those four years. It wouldn’t be right for me to come back here and not offer you something for your troubles. It’s not a lot, but I hope it’ll help.”
Still, no one moved. At last, I couldn’t stand it. I snatched the envelope off the coffee table and jumped onto the couch between Sawyer and Holden. “Well, if you’re going to pitch in now, I don’t see why we can’t take it,” I said, turning from one of my stepbrothers to the next. “Right?”
Sawyer shrugged and Holden nodded. Lidia clasped her hands together and smiled all teary-eyed like she was a game show contestant about to have her prize revealed.
“Come on, Waylon,” I said. “We’ll open it together.”
With a vicious glare at Cody, Waylon rose from his armchair and joined us, perching on the edge of the sofa. His tanned hand landed on my knee, and my body shivered with anticipation. Even after a year, he still made the butterflies swarm in my belly.
“Open it,” he said.
I ripped open the envelope, my heart pounding. Even if Cody could wrangle some more out of what we made selling cattle, it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit right now. But when I pulled the check out, my heart nearly stopped beating.
Holden sucked in a breath, Sawyer swore quietly, and I just blinked, sure I was adding an extra zero to the number. Even Waylon’s hand gave an involuntary twitch on my knee as we sat there staring at it.
“Forty thousand dollars?” I asked. “Is this check real? How do you have that much money laying around?”
Cody shifted and gave me a small smile. “I’m a hard-working man,” he said. “There’s more where that came from. I figured ten grand a year was a fair price for taking care of things while I had my head too far up my ass to help out around here.”
More where this came from. My head was spinning. I’d expected five hundred dollars, maybe a thousand. When I’d seen the four, I’d thought four grand would help out so much. But forty thousand? Compared to the way we’d been living, Cody was rich.
“Oh, this is so nice,” Lidia said, tears pooling in her eyes as she held her hands clasped like a prayer in front of her. “Having my boys all together on Christmas day…” A tear spilled down her cheek, and she laughed, brushing it away.
Cody shrugged. “I live simply, and since the divorce, I haven’t had a reason to spend much money.”
Not since that bitch Maria took off and stopped spending it for him. I realized then that I had one more jaded cowboy on my hands. He hadn’t just run off with her—he’d been left by her, the same as the others. He’d married her and been with her even longer than Waylon. Shit. He might hate women even more than Waylon. What was I getting myself into?
But just when I started to panic, Sawyer shot to his feet, grabbed Cody’s hand, and yanked him up. He threw his arms around his brother in a tight hug. That’s what I was getting myself into. A family full of big hearts with big hurts resting heavy on them. A family full of fighting and forgiveness, togetherness and trust that needed to be mended. I was going to be something that bound them together even further. That wouldn’t happen if I left one person out, treating him as less than the others. And I refused to come between any of them. Except in the way I had the night before. There would be lots more coming involved with an extra cowboy in the bedroom.
Holden embraced Cody for a long minute, too, giving him a few extra claps on the back. “Thank you,” he said.
“It’s just a little bit that might help the ranch go a long way,” Cody said.
“Yeah, it will,” I said, jumping up to throw my arms around his neck. Without thinking, I pressed my lips to his. A sharp intake of breath met my kiss. His hands fluttered against my waist, as if he were afraid to touch me. I stepped closer, pressing my body to his. A tremor rocked through him so hard I could feel it, and he pulled away with a look of such hunger and anguish on his face that I thought he might cry.
His eyes searched mine, but instead of speaking, he pinched his lips together and shook his head as if to clear it. Waylon stood up, his hand landing on my hip. He reached past me to shake Cody’s hand. Neither of them said a word, but I knew this was a huge step in patching up what was still broken between them. The front of Waylon’s jeans brushed across my butt, and my thighs clenched with the memory of last night. As if sensing my need, Waylon’s hand tightened on my hip like a dangerous promise. He drew me back against him even as his other hand remained clasped in Cody’s.
Cody’s eyes flickered to my hip for just a fleeting moment, and he licked his lips and stepped back, replacing his hat on his head. “Well,” he said, his voice gruff. “I reckon that’ll do.”
“Amber, want to walk outside with me?” Waylon said quietly. “I got something to talk to you about.”
“Um…okay.”
We bundled up in silence, but the wheels in my head kept spinning. Forty grand…we could do so much with that. It would keep us afloat you’re a few years, giving us just the bit of extra we needed to get on top of things. Waylon hadn’t refused it, but now he was being too weird.
I followed him out, my heart beating hard. I wasn’t sure what he was up to, or if he was mad that I’d kissed Cody.
“I got something for you,” he said, wading through the snow. Drifts had blown up as high as my waist, the wind blowing it into soft peaks like whipped cream around us. The whole ranch was buried in the fine white powder. It lined every twig on every tree branch and coated the roof of the lodge, the cabins, and the barn. Everything was as pure white and untouched as a fresh start.
“Is this a Christmas present?” I asked, my breath coming in little huffs of fog as we walked.
“Yeah,” Waylon said, stopping and turning to me. “I guess you could say that.” He took off his h
at and rubbed his dark hair just the exact same way that Cody did. I’d bet anything he didn’t know they shared that habit.
“My curiosity is piqued,” I said. “Don’t hold out on me now.”
“All right,” he said. “I hope you know I… I care about you. I didn’t just say that the other day because we were fucking.”
I gulped as my heart did a belly flop in my chest. “I love you, too.”
I knew he loved me, even if he never said it when the others did. It was still nice to hear it aloud, though.
“I’m not a smooth talker like Cody,” Waylon said. “I can’t say the right things when you need to hear them. And whatever happened the other day… well, I’ve never been the first one a woman wanted around when she was crying.”
“You did fine,” I said, slipping my hand into his. I peeked up at him through my lashes, afraid he’d pull away and be all gruff. But he let me hold his hand as we walked past the barn. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was actually insecure about something and that I was reassuring him right now.
“All right, then,” he said after a minute. “I appreciate you letting me do that for you. It meant a lot to me, even if I didn’t show it the right way.”
“I know you’ll be there when I need you,” I said. “Even if I have to get a little bossy to make it happen.”
He snorted. “You can say that again.”
“Thin ice,” I warned. “And besides, just because you’re not a smooth-talking romantic doesn’t mean you can’t be trained. That’s what I’m here for.”
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“Hmm, I seem to remember you saying I needed to be trained to not be such a virgin when I showed up.”
“I don’t think I said it like that.”
I shrugged as he ushered me into the shop, his hand on the small of my back. “If you made me something pretty, then you don’t need training,” I said. “You’re already a big mushy romantic at heart.”
“I didn’t,” Waylon growled. “And you’re making me rethink the gift.”
“You better not. I like pretty things, especially if you made it yourself.” I laughed and followed him to the back of the shop.
“More like rebuilt,” he said.
We stopped and looked at each other a minute. “Well?” I asked. “What’s the gift?”
He gestured at his T-Bird. “That’s the gift.”
“It’s in the car?” I asked, knowing he couldn’t mean what I thought he meant.
“It is the car.”
Okay, so he did mean what I thought he meant. I thought my knees would give out and I’d faint dead away on the concrete floor.
“Waylon…” I said. “I don’t…I can’t…I don’t even know how to drive. And you can’t just give me your car. I mean, you can. It’s your car. Obviously. Of course, you already know it’s your car, that’s why you’re giving it to me. Actually I don’t know why you’re giving it to me. You’ve met me, right? I can’t make it to the end of the cow field without having some kind of catastrophe befall me. What am I going to do in a car?”
“I’ll teach you to drive,” Waylon said. “I told you I would.”
“You do know that I got your side-by-side stuck in the cow pasture the other day, right?”
“You were also talking about being lonely,” he said. “Needing friends.”
“So, I’m supposed to name the car and sit in her when I’m lonely?”
“If you’re living in Wyoming, you need to know how to drive,” he said. “We don’t have cabs around here. And you’ve mentioned before that you don’t like being stuck here on the ranch, not able to go anywhere without one of us driving you. I should have taught you a long time ago. I guess I kept waiting for…”
I put my hands on my hips. “If you say you were waiting for me to run off, so help me God, I will hurt you, Waylon Westling.”
“Then I won’t say it.”
“Waylon…” I stepped forward and grabbed his big dumb head in both hands. “I’m never going to leave you, you complete idiot. I gave you my word, and my body, and my heart, and my soul. What else do you need to be sure?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his hands circled my waist. “It’s enough,” he said. “It’s more than enough. It’s more than I deserve.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “It’s exactly what you deserve.”
He smiled a little, brushing his thumb across my lips. “Happy Christmas, Amber.”
“Thanks, but…I can’t accept this. You’ve been working on it for ages. It’s too much.”
“It’s not too much,” he said gruffly. “You’ve given me more.”
“Well, shit, if I’d known my ass was worth a car, I would have given it up a long time ago,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
“You didn’t just give me that,” Waylon said. “You gave me—you gave us—something we’d been missing for a long time.”
“Hope that not all women are scum?”
“Happiness,” he said. “You brighten up the place.”
“You make me sound like a curtain.”
Waylon shrugged. “Besides, we got transportation already. You might as well have a vehicle of your own.”
“That’s so romantic,” I said, grinning at him as I opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. I repressed the urge to make a vrooming noise. Now I knew why kids did that. It was kind of fun sitting there, imagining driving. I wasn’t sure I was ready to have a few tons of metal under my control, but sitting there, I knew that I’d get there. It might take a while, but he was right. He’d been watching, listening, the way he always did. He’d known what I needed before I did.
“Get in here, you big tough cowboy,” I said, nodding at the passenger seat. Waylon slid in, pulling the door closed behind him.
“You look good behind the wheel,” he said. “Real good.”
I turned and linked my hands behind his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. “Thank you,” I whispered. “You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met. Or at least one of the three most amazing men. What you did yesterday… bringing Haley here to surprise me, and the car, and everything you’ve done. You deserve to be happy. You deserve a woman you can trust, and a good relationship with all your brothers. And you most definitely deserve my love, or I wouldn’t have given it to you.”
He dropped his hat on the floorboard and leaned forward, pressing his forehead to mine and closing his eyes. He fit his nose beside mine and inhaled, then pressed forward, his warm lips gentle as they took the kiss. “You’re welcome,” he said, pulling back and picking up his hat.
He paused and then slipped it onto my head and settled it low. And even though he didn’t say a word, I knew from Sawyer how much it meant when a man let a woman wear his hat. I’d never had one put it on me before. I felt like I’d just been officially initiated into the cowgirl clan.
“We better go inside before you make me cry,” I said.
“You’re telling me,” Waylon said.
Leaving me gaping in shock at the thought of making Waylon cry, he got out and came around the car, opening the door and holding out a hand to me.
“Look at you, opening doors for me,” I said, taking his hand and letting him pull me to my feet.
“I didn’t want you to hurt the car,” he said, closing the door behind me. But I knew better. I knew that his mama had raised him a certain way, and all the grumpiness in the world couldn’t overwrite his programming. I stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek before we went inside. I could almost swear he went a tiny bit pink.
We waded back through the snow, the white world of our home. The snow muffled everything, the world silent and still as it was white. It couldn’t have been more different from the rush of New York, the bustle of people and the dirtiness of winter. And I couldn’t have been happier to be here. Inside, the others were all sitting around the fire eating toffee and talking, their presents strewn around them as if forgotten. Enjoying each other’s
company was more interesting than anything money could buy. The tree twinkled merrily in the background, and a rush of warmth filled my chest. I was home, surrounded by a family that loved and accepted me. I hadn’t been born into it, but this was even better. I had made it myself.
When I’d been disowned by my own family, I hadn’t broken. Thanks to the love of these strong men and women around me, I’d found an even better one. They may not have been my flesh and blood, but I had chosen them. I had surrounded myself with the people I loved, and now I let their presence warm me. Having them around me on Christmas was the best gift in the whole world.
The End.
From the Author
Thank you for reading the conclusion to Amber and the Westling boys’ story. I swear, this is really the last one! I just have so much fun writing these characters that I want to keep coming back to them. Must…move…on…
Look for more reverse harem books by Alexa B. James in the near future. I am planning several paranormal romance series and at least one dark contemporary romance. Join the B-Team to make sure you never miss a new release. Click here to join*.
*If you join, please know that you WILL NOT be hearing about other author’s books. You’re signing up to hear about my stuff, so that’s what you’ll get!
Or follow me on Amazon. Again, thanks for reading. I hope this was a satisfying ending and that you enjoyed the series. If so, please consider leaving a review! Even one line means so much you have no idea!
Save a horse, ride a cowboy!
<3 Alexa B.
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