A Cowboy for Christmas (Mills & Boon Love Inspired Historical) (Wyoming Legacy - Book 5)

by Lacy Williams

  Her words were sharp, quick. He could tell she was on her way to a full-blown panic.

  “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down for a second?” He motioned to the nook table behind her.

  She glanced over her shoulder, then back at him. She didn’t sit. “Uncle Ned and Beau fell asleep in front of the fire and Belinda and I—this was before she took sick—thought it was best to let them rest. She got sick so I sent her upstairs. A few minutes ago, Ned woke complaining of stomach pains and now both he and Beau have...”

  She trailed off, suddenly looking unsure. Maybe trying to be polite.

  “Vomited?” he asked. And smiled. “Seems like you and I are the only ones around to take care of this. Might as well not dance around the word for the sake of politeness. Besides, we did deliver those pups together...” He raised his brows at her.

  And that earned a smile—albeit a small one—from her. “What should we do?”

  “Probably let the illness run its course. If they aren’t better by morning, we’ll come up with another solution.”

  He helped her sort out pallets for Ned and Beau on the parlor floor—they were still racked with occasional shivers and he had no desire to drag them up to the barn loft, especially if they were going to be sick!

  Daisy seemed to calm with him by her side.

  Her reaction made him feel protective, as if he was her man.

  And that was dangerous. He had to protect her. From himself.

  Chapter Ten

  The morning dawned with Daisy exhausted. And no one was better. They were all worse—both family and hired help. They’d been unable to keep anything down, though Daisy and Ricky had spooned water into them throughout the night.

  Feverish, torn between sweat and chills. So weak they couldn’t move from their beds.

  Only Daisy and Ricky remained untouched by the illness.

  Just after sunup, Daisy put on a pot of coffee. She leaned against the work counter and propped her chin in her hand, her eyelids blinking heavily as the smell of the coffee brewing wafted through the room.

  Ricky ducked inside, shutting the back door with a snap, after running out to attend to what needed to be done in the barn. He took off his hat, and turned and smiled at her.

  Her companion sported a shadow of whiskers across his jaw, and his hair was endearingly rumpled. He looked rugged, nothing like the exhaustion she felt and was sure was evident in the droop of her entire body.

  “You still feeling all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, fine. Although cleaning up after them...at certain times I wanted to join them.”

  He laughed. “It’s a thankless job, that’s for certain. I’m thinking I should ride to town and fetch the doctor.”

  A pang of uncertainty shivered through her. If Ricky left, she’d be on her own, caring for seven people. Could she do it?

  She was exhausted and unsure. Those small successes of yesterday seemed so far away... And she still vibrantly remembered being out with him in the snow and being unable to put her own mitten on.

  He came close, and clasped her hand loosely in his. “Hey.”

  She couldn’t look up at him. If she did, he would see how afraid she was.

  He jiggled her hand lightly, until she lifted her chin. He stood close, at an angle to her, her shoulder at his chest.

  His eyes were kind, and she thought she read something deeper in their depths, too. Admiration...? Or something else? She didn’t know, but his steady presence gave her the strength to take a deep breath.

  “I’m sure we’ll be all right.” She said the words with a further lift of her chin and he responded with warmth filling his eyes and a squeeze of her hand.

  Friends. They were friends.

  Perhaps she shouldn’t depend on him quite so much, but for now...for now, she needed him.

  *

  When Ricky arrived in town, the streets were quieter than the usual weekday morning rush.

  But there were still folks standing outside the bank to scowl at him as he walked his horse down the snow-muddied main street. He tried to let their judgment roll off his back, tried to remember the reason he was here in the first place. Daisy and her family.

  It helped some, but he still found his teeth were gritted by the time he tied off his horse in front of the doctor’s office. The door was locked, and no one answered when he knocked. He’d heard the doctor lived in the small house behind the office, so that’s where he went next.

  The matronly woman who opened the door for him gave him the same look the folks on the boardwalk had.

  “Doc’s sick,” she said, and started to close the door in his face.

  He smacked his palm against the door to keep it from closing. She flinched a little, frowning at his rudeness.

  He cleared his throat. “Please.” In the face of her judgmental attitude, it was so hard to grit the word out, to make it sound polite. “Can you tell the doc that the Richards family is violently ill? Vomiting. They can’t keep anything down. They’re pretty bad off.”

  She hesitated and he made himself say, “Please,” again.

  She shut the door in his face. He heard her footsteps retreat into the house. Hopefully she would really tell the doctor.

  Still on the stoop, he took off his hat with one hand and ran his opposite hand through his hair. Well, that hadn’t gone well.

  In his past, he hadn’t cared how people looked at him, what they thought about the choices he’d made carousing, wasting money, getting drunk, womanizing. He always moved on before it mattered.

  But now it mattered. He didn’t want Daisy tarnished with their judgment—especially when she was just beginning to come out of her self-imposed isolation.

  He waited a long time. Maybe the doc’s wife thought he was going away, but he intended to get the help that the Richards family needed.

  When he was good and chilled, arms crossed and gloved hands stuffed under his armpits, she came back and cracked the door open.

  “He ain’t up to travelin’,” she said. “He’s got the same thing. Half the folks in town are sick.”

  She started to close the door and he stepped up from the bottom step. “What should I be doing for them? To help them get better?”

  “I dunno,” she said, and closed the door with a decisive snap.

  Disappointed at the cold reception and frustrated with inaction, he returned to his horse. What was he supposed to do? Just ride back to the ranch and hope the illness ran its course?

  Then a thought struck him—but one that he most definitely did not want to act on.

  But...it was for Daisy. He’d promised her he would get help.

  Still undecided, he wandered down the boardwalk a ways, toward the post office, where the town’s only telephone was located.

  There was no help here in Pattonville. But there was back home in Bear Creek.

  Except he’d left Bear Creek behind. A clean break. No ties.

  A bucketload of regrets.

  Inside the post office, it was warm enough for him to take off his gloves. He stood looking at the contraption for several minutes, as if his pa could see through the telephone right to him.

  But he couldn’t let Daisy down.

  A glance over his shoulder showed the postmaster and an older woman standing at the counter, conversing in low tones and shooting glances at him.

  He turned his shoulder to them. Swallowed hard and picked up the handset. He had to clear his throat as he recited the direction for Bear Creek.

  It rang to the doc’s house, Maxwell’s father-in-law. But it was his brother’s wife, Hattie, who answered, her voice coming through the line clear as a bell.

  “Hello?”

  Hearing a voice from home, even one he didn’t know all that well, was like receiving a punch to the solar plexus. He could barely breathe.

  “Hattie? It’s...it’s Ricky.”

  There was a beat of silence. Then a hesitant, “Are you all right?”

  Heat
flared up his spine into his face. Family. She’d asked after him when he deserved so much less.

  “Yeah. I need to talk to Maxwell. Is he working at the office today?”

  “Yes, he is. I’ll walk over. Can you wait a few minutes?”

  It was less than a few minutes and Maxwell sounded winded when his voice came through the line. “Rick? You in trouble?”

  Had he run all the way from the doctor’s office to his residence?

  Ricky had to close his eyes against a sharp stinging sensation.

  “No. No trouble.” Other than what followed him around. He cleared his throat against the emotion. “Listen, I’m up in Pattonville, and we’ve got a town full of folks knocked off their feet by some sickness.”

  He explained the symptoms he’d seen to his brother and that even the doc was down with it.

  There was murmuring on Maxwell’s side of the line, as if Maxwell and Hattie were consulting over what Ricky had said.

  “I can’t give a true diagnosis without seeing the patients for myself,” Maxwell said. Hearing his usual calm, implacable tone reassured Ricky in a way that probably nothing else could’ve. “It could be a strain of influenza or some kind of stomach virus.”

  “A virus,” Ricky repeated, not really knowing what that meant.

  “It sounds like it’s pretty contagious. You’ll want to wash up real good to make sure you don’t catch it. Boil your water, cook your foods.”

  Ricky remembered similar instructions from when Maxwell and Hattie had treated many folks back in Bear Creek during a cholera outbreak.

  “Depending on how long it takes their bodies to fight through the sickness, they’re gonna get weak. Try giving them some milk—sometimes it’ll sit better on their stomach than plain water and stay down.”

  Milk. He could do that.

  “I’d come, but we’ve got a situation here at home...”

  Ricky coughed again. “I didn’t expect you to come. Thanks for your help.”

  And then he wasn’t sure what else to say.

  “Will you come home, after you get done nursing...whoever it is you’re helping?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He’d never planned to go back home. Jonas and Penny knew a little about his past, about his mother and him being out on his own. But not about the fire. Not even Davy knew about the fire.

  Don’t tell Pa where I am. He thought the words. Almost said them, but something made them catch behind his teeth.

  Jonas was busy raising a family and working his ranch. And it was almost Christmas. Ricky was fairly confident his pa wouldn’t come searching for him.

  He hung up the handset, stomach roiling—but not from sickness. From the contact with his family that he’d left behind. The family that he loved and that helped him out—as Maxwell had—even when he didn’t deserve it.

  He was crossing the street toward the doc’s office, where he’d left his horse, turning up the collar of his coat against the wind’s cold bite, when the mercantile owner hailed him from the boardwalk. “Young man! Your mail-order stuff arrived!”

  Ricky detoured inside. That same pair of old codgers was sitting at the checkers table and they still glared at him as he took off his gloves and stuffed them in one pocket. As if they wanted to check if he’d snitched something else to stuff in his pocket, too. Ricky tried to ignore it.

  The proprietor had been professional when Ricky had been in here before, and today was no different. He delivered Daisy’s packages, neatly wrapped in brown paper and tied off with twine, and thanked Ricky for his business.

  The professionalism compared to the cold reception made Ricky warm to the other man.

  So Ricky told him, “I just talked to my brother, a doctor down in Bear Creek. He said if you’ve got any loved ones ill to try giving ’em milk instead of water. And to boil all the water before you drink it.”

  When he turned to leave with the thick paper-wrapped packages, he nodded to the old codgers sitting there. “You’re welcome to the advice, too. My brother’s a good doctor.”

  He stowed the packages in his saddlebags and set off for home, and the gal waiting on him.

  It was strange to think of her waiting on him... He found himself nudging his horse into a careful gallop over the still-drifted snow. Anticipating seeing her.

  That was a dangerous thought, imagining her welcoming smile, that she would be happy to see him.

  But it didn’t stop him from urging the horse along.

  *

  She was asleep, her arm stretched across the nook table and pillowing her head, when he gently pushed open the back door. She must’ve perched in one of the kitchen chairs and now her head rested on her arm, face slackened and expression peaceful.

  He set the packages in the work space beneath the work counter and when he straightened up, couldn’t help taking the moment to lean against the surface and look at her.

  She was so beautiful.

  Strands of her auburn curls clung to her temples. Her cheeks were pink, the slash of her eyelashes against her cheeks dark. Her lips parted slightly, and he remembered being close to her in the barn, wanting that kiss...

  He shouldn’t be thinking like that. He’d told her he wanted to be friends, and that’s all it could be.

  He slipped out of the room and went upstairs, making the rounds to check on their patients. They were all asleep, flushed and, he guessed, feverish. Downstairs, Ned was stirring on the pallet they’d made him and grunted when Ricky told him he’d be back in a little while with some milk.

  Beau didn’t rouse, curled on his own pallet with one arm wrapped around his midsection.

  On his way back out, he found Daisy awake when he reached the kitchen.

  “You’re back,” she said with a warm, open, sleepy smile.

  He froze, mouth going completely dry. When was the last time someone had looked at him like that—as if he was the only one they wanted to see? As if he was welcome?

  An answering emotion rose in him, a desire to reach out for her, to close her in his arms.

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes with her hand, looking down self-consciously as she tried to tuck the hair back into the braid. The strands fell over her shoulder again; it was a lost cause. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  He shrugged, face flaring with heat and the strength of his emotion. He couldn’t let her see. He turned his face toward the door.

  “Would you help me with my hair again?”

  He hesitated, remembering when he’d helped her braid her hair in the barn, remembering his visceral reaction to her then.

  She looked down, her hair falling in a curtain and blocking his view of her face. “It’s all right. Maybe I can tie it back myself.”

  But the slump of her shoulders very clearly showed it was not all right.

  “Sure, I can help.” He affected an easy tone he didn’t feel. “Ya got a brush?”

  She took one out of her dress pocket, which meant she’d obviously thought about this before she’d asked him.

  Again, his fingers tangled in the silky strands as he worked the brush through her hair.

  He cleared his throat. “I just checked on everyone, most of ’em are resting. Ned’s up.”

  She shifted in the chair and his grip slipped. He could see the side of her face and there was a soft flush on her cheek, a delicate pink. Had she seen his discomfort with being this close to him?

  He struggled to find something else to say. “Half the town is down with the same thing we’re dealing with here. Including the doc. He was so bad off his wife wouldn’t let me talk to him.”

  Talking helped distract him from the intense awareness of her as a woman and he rushed on, “I used the telephone in town and called my brother. The doctor.”

  The lilt in her voice revealed her surprise. “You did?”

  “Yes’m. He says we need to give them milk. I was just headed out to visit the cow—didn’t get around to milking her before I left this morning wit
h everything going on—she’s probably miserable by now.”

  He finished with her braid and tied it off with shaking hands. He was quick to step away, stuff his hat back on his head. “I’ll head out.”

  She nodded slowly. “All right. Thank you for...this.” She flipped up the end of the braid.

  He started for the door, but she asked, “Are you hungry? You’ve been gone all morning.” And his feet dragged.

  His stomach rumbled in response to her question and he smiled sheepishly. He hadn’t eaten before he’d left, in a hurry to get to town and get help.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll pull something together while you’re out.”

  The intensity with which he wanted to stay in with her staggered him. He forced himself to shrug his coat on. “Sounds fine.”

  And he rushed out into the cold.

  *

  Daisy watched through the kitchen window as Ricky all but ran out to the barn.

  Had she said something wrong? She didn’t think so.

  She leaned to one side, finding a reflection in the window glass. He’d pulled her hair back from her face. She looked tired, a little droopy beneath her eyes.

  She was certain she’d felt him pull away after he’d finished her braid.

  Had he sensed that her feelings for him were beginning to change? That his closeness affected her?

  She’d started to move beyond the pain of losing her arm, the crippling focus on that one fact. Because she’d had no choice. With Belinda and Audra incapacitated by this violent illness, the duty for caring for everyone had fallen to her and Ricky.

  Friends. He wanted to be friends.

  But as she unwrapped one of the fragrant loaves of bread Belinda had put in the oven—and Ricky had taken out, after everyone had started falling sick—she couldn’t help remembering the shadows in his eyes after he’d told her he’d called home.

  She anchored the loaf awkwardly against her hip and almost cut herself angling the knife toward her body instead of away, but it was the only way she could gain enough friction to cut through it.

  She did the same with the hunk of cheese from the cold box, looking up when Ricky banged in the back door, bringing a brisk puff of wind before he kicked the door closed behind him. His hands carried two pails of milk.