A True Cowboy Christmas

by Caitlin Crews

  “Do you not normally decorate for Christmas?”

  Abby and her grandmother had always spent Thanksgiving weekend putting up the tree, placing garlands everywhere, and getting the stockings tidy and ready over the fireplace. Some years they wrapped the posts on the front porch in lights, and there’d been a few years when they’d put lit-up reindeer in the yard.

  This year, she’d stopped by a few days later and done it with Grandma one afternoon.

  She felt the same pang she always did when she remembered all the things she took for granted about her life were different now. Abby figured it was up to her to decide these changes were all good, no matter the odd growing pains that went along with them.

  “Well, no,” Becca said, and her voice was less dreamy. More … reserved. “My grandfather didn’t like Christmas decorations. He called them ‘blackmail.’ And I don’t know that my dad ever cared either way because I don’t think he likes Christmas.”

  Abby felt Christmas spirit surge within her like a glittery, tinsel-festooned tidal wave. “That’s going to have to change. I like my Christmas decorations. And I love Christmas.”

  She didn’t know what pleased her more, the prospect of decorating a new house and bringing the magic of Christmas to her brand new family, or the pleased smile on Becca’s face.

  Her stepdaughter, Becca. Abby allowed herself a pleased moment of pride in the fact that so far, at least, she was handling the whole step thing well. Or not wickedly, anyway. If the prospect of a few Christmas lights could make a teenager smile like that, she was determined to make the Everett ranch house a winter wonderland. Tonight, if at all possible.

  She made it down the icy mountain into the sprawl of snowy fields without letting her mind wander again, and it was funny to drive down the county road she knew so well but not turn down toward the Douglas farmhouse the way she had for so many years. It didn’t feel wrong necessarily. Just different.

  Abby still wasn’t used to it. The other night she’d paid no attention to what she was doing, driving home from her shift at the coffeehouse on autopilot while she relived a few of her favorite scenes from that night in the Grand Hotel. Becca had been catching a later ride from a friend, so she hadn’t had any stepmothering to attend to. She’d found herself halfway down the farmhouse’s drive before she realized it. At which point she’d stopped the car, surprised herself with a rush of emotion, and had continued on to say hello to Grandma as if she’d meant to stop by all the while.

  Tonight, however, she continued on toward Cold River Ranch. Five miles farther along that county road, then a mile into the fields, down another old dirt road that had been there about as long as there’d been dirt.

  She saw Gray’s truck in the yard as she pulled up and felt the same familiar catch in her chest. And lower, these days. Her head spun at how quickly the world could change, but it turned out she could settle into a routine no matter how strange and new everything was.

  Abby loved a routine.

  Gray had come back in from the fields and the winter pastures already. That was why the lights were blazing in the house. He came in and turned them on before he headed back to the barn to do his evening rounds, and Abby liked to consider that a token of his affection, whether he meant it that way or not.

  Abby and Becca got out of the car and went inside, and Abby didn’t even look around to see if she could catch a glance of Gray. Progress, as far as she was concerned. Because she was a rancher’s wife now, and there was a routine, and her part definitely did not involve mooning after the man when he was working.

  Not in front of his daughter, anyway.

  Becca slung her school bag onto the dining room table, stamped her feet into a pair of old boots she kept in the mudroom, and then headed out to her own nightly chores that Gray insisted were part and parcel of life on a ranch.

  While Abby got to play house the way she’d always wanted to, deep in her heart. It wasn’t any different from what she had done at the farmhouse when she’d come home in the evening, and yet it still felt charged. There was something about making food for her husband, for the man who would eat what she made and then crawl into the same bed with her at night. It gave her a deep sort of satisfaction that made her feel … settled. Warm, inside and out. She was conscious of it as she moved around the kitchen, pulling things together. It added a kind of extra layer of meaning to the familiar ritual of making a meal. By the time Gray and Becca came inside, knocking the snow and mud from their feet and then heading off to wash up, Abby was putting dinner out on the table.

  She’d always enjoyed cooking, but there was something about preparing a hot meal for a man who spent the day outside that pleased her. Deeply.

  Or maybe she wasn’t the happy homemaker she imagined herself. Maybe, she thought as Gray walked into the kitchen, fresh from the quick shower he took at the end of his work day, it was just Gray.

  Her husband.

  She still couldn’t get over that

  Though if she was honest, she was adapting to the married part. It was the sex that kept making her feel … giddy.

  Even now.

  Because it was nighttime again, and nighttime meant that soon—never soon enough—Gray would head up to bed ahead of his early morning, Abby would go with him, and he would proceed to turn her inside out.

  His dark green gaze touched hers as he took his seat at the kitchen table, and Abby turned red the way she always did. Instantly and completely.

  Her reward was that curve in the corner of his mouth.

  “No Ty tonight?” Abby asked as she sat down.

  Ty was like a ghost. Abby sometimes caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, but he flickered there and then disappeared, leaving nothing but that lazy smile of his and leftover plates in her sink to indicate he’d been digging around in the refrigerator in the middle of the night.

  He’d showed up for dinner exactly once since Abby had moved in and had kept them all entertained with bull-riding war stories throughout the meal, so it hadn’t been until afterward that Abby realized he hadn’t actually said a single thing that could be considered personal.

  “You can depend on my brothers for one thing,” Gray said now, without any particular inflection, though his eyes were glittering harder than usual. “And that’s to be undependable. I wouldn’t count on either one of them to do anything else.”

  That sounded harsh, but what did Abby know? She’d grown up an only child with only adults around. Both Hope and Rae had spent the bulk of their lives complaining endlessly about their siblings one minute and then dropping everything to support them the next. Gray viewed both of his brothers with flat-out suspicion, but Abby couldn’t say they didn’t deserve it. If there was one thing she knew all about, it was navigating life with a family member who could turn on the charm to outsiders whenever she felt like it while acting like a monster in private.

  She knew too much about it, in fact. Lily had left after the wedding—with threats to return for Christmas, according to Grandma—but her insults lived on, burrowing beneath Abby’s skin and setting up camp the way they always did.

  Abby was hungry. She wanted to pile her plate high with the dinner she’d made, but Lily’s arch comment about “stick-to-your-ribs farm dinners” echoed around inside her head, and she restricted herself to salad.

  “Abby says we can decorate the house,” Becca announced, filling her plate with mashed potatoes and the chicken Abby had left simmering in the slow cooker all day, because she wasn’t plodding.

  “Decorate the house?” Gray asked, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. Or maybe Becca was speaking in tongues. “What house?”

  “This house,” Becca said, with something much sharper than usual in her voice. “For Christmas.”

  Abby’s ever-present swirl of body issues faded away at that because everything was suddenly very tense around the bright red, barn-door table. The sixth sense that always told her when her mother was going to strike shook itself into
sudden awareness, and she didn’t know what to do with it. Not here, in Gray’s house, when Lily wasn’t even present.

  “You know we don’t really do Christmas,” Gray said in that stern way of his. Shot through with warning and finality all at once.

  But Becca didn’t appear to hear that warning. “Abby said we could.”

  Abby froze where she sat as both Gray and Becca turned to stare at her.

  Becca’s gaze was imploring. Gray’s, on the other hand, was unreadable. And Abby’s throat was entirely too dry.

  “We don’t do a big thing for Christmas,” Gray said.

  As if the subject was closed.

  “What does that mean?” Abby asked, very carefully, because her stomach was twisting into some kind of pretzel.

  Gray’s gaze was steady on Abby’s. “We like it simple.”

  Across the table, Becca made a scoffing sound. “You might like it simple, but I don’t. I never have. Because ‘simple’ to you means ignoring the fact it’s even Christmas!”

  “Enough, Becca.”

  Gray returned his attention to his plate as if that was all the conversation the topic required.

  Abby and Becca stared at each other across the table. Becca widened her eyes, silently encouraging Abby to say something. Abby didn’t understand why there appeared to be a hand around her throat, preventing her from speaking. She felt speechless and furious, the way she did whenever Lily started in with her snide commentary.

  You understand, a voice inside argued. You understand perfectly.

  It nagged at her while she did the dishes after dinner, having waved off Becca’s halfhearted offer of help and having assured Gray that she was happy to do the dishes while he tended to the ranch paperwork he could never seem to get on top of. “Happy” might have been a strong word, but she didn’t mind washing dishes. She found a kind of peace in the running water, the scrubbing, the careful loading of the dishwasher. In a clean kitchen with the surfaces wiped clean, the coffee ready to brew at four thirty the next morning, and the following day’s meals plotted out in her head. In a job well done and well-executed, as her grandmother had taught her.

  Or she usually found peace in it.

  They’d been married such a short while. Slightly over one week. And it was nice to have a routine and a relief to feel things falling into place—but that didn’t mean this felt like home. None of this was hers. She’d taken over what duties and chores she could, to prove how committed she was and what a great choice he’d made, but she still felt as if she were auditioning. He touched her body at night, up in that big bed of his where she wasn’t sure she’d yet had a good night sleep, no matter how he made her shake and cry into her pillow, so riled up was she at the notion that she was sharing a bed with Gray Everett. And that she would be doing so for the rest of their lives.

  Maybe if she lost herself in routines and schedules and all the domestic things that fell under the banner of rancher’s wife that she’d signed up for, then she’d start to feel like Gray’s wife. Instead of an imposter on a trial run who could be dismissed at any moment.

  Becca wasn’t her daughter. She had no right to interfere with the way Gray parented her. Or to complain about the way he ran this house, for that matter. He had been nothing but kind to her, but he’d never promised her an equal partnership. He’d promised her a very specific role, and she’d chosen to dive into it because, quite apart from imagining she could make herself useful, she loved him. She’d always loved him. And because she loved him, she’d been sure she could push the boundaries of that role into something that more closely resembled her grandparents’ relationship. The kind of relationship she read about in her books.

  Gray hadn’t volunteered for any of that. She couldn’t fool herself into thinking otherwise, no matter how his hands moved over her and in her in that wide bed upstairs.

  But on the other hand, she certainly hadn’t agreed to whatever “a simple Christmas” was.

  When she found herself wiping down the kitchen counters for the third time, because she was obviously stalling, Abby pulled herself together.

  Fretting is the same as standing still, Grandma always said. And worry never did solve a single problem.

  Maybe this was the benefit of the kind of marriage Abby had chosen. She didn’t have to worry if something she did might ruin Gray’s love for her, or make him think less of her, or any of the things she imagined people in more romantic relationships might feel.

  All she had promised him was practicality.

  She rubbed absently at her chest as she started down the small hallway that led to the ground floor bedroom that had been Amos’s and was now the guest room where Brady like to make himself at home on the weekends. And farther still, the room Gray used as his office.

  Her heart beat faster as she padded silently to the open door and stood there a moment.

  She kept telling herself this wasn’t a romance, that there was nothing romantic about the life they’d both agreed to live together and that was fine, but there was no stopping that seesaw of longing and hope and need that rattled around inside of her when she looked at him.

  Every time she looked at him.

  Gray was bent over his desk, frowning at a stack of papers and raking one hand through his dark hair, and Abby could have lost herself forever in the sheer perfection of his profile.

  She wondered how long it would take before she stopped marveling at the fact that she’d tasted him now. That she’d kissed him. Repeatedly. She’d given him her virginity, and he’d given her a whole lot more in return.

  He’d showed her a whole lot of other things in that hotel room, leaving them both gritty-eyed and smiling the next morning. Abby should have felt self-conscious about wearing her wedding dress that following morning, especially when she’d gone in to the coffeehouse as a customer, but she hadn’t. Not with Gray there beside her, quiet and solid, the foundation holding up everything her life had been missing all this time.

  She’d sat in his truck with her hands cupped hard around her favorite coffee drink, taking careful sips as he steered them home.

  Home, she’d marveled.

  The home they would make together.

  The fields had looked different as they’d made their way down the other side of the mountain. And not only because the snow was falling, sweet little flurries that promised not to stick.

  When they’d arrived at the ranch, she’d wondered if he would repeat what he’d done at the hotel and carry her over the threshold—

  Abby had wanted to kick herself for the stab of disappointment she’d felt when he didn’t.

  Gray had immediately turned all business. He’d showed her the way to their room—their room, which she still couldn’t get her head around—and had nodded at the boxes that were stacked there beneath the window, and out into the hall.

  “Feel free to settle in however you like,” he’d said. “I’ll call when I’m headed in for the night.”

  And that had been that. She’d been a newlywed, newly deflowered as well as newly a bride, and she felt so many things she didn’t know how to name a single one of them as she stood there in a bedroom that hadn’t felt the least bit like hers.

  But she hadn’t cried. Because she had nothing to cry about.

  He had never promised her anything emotional.

  Abby’s great-grandmother hadn’t had the benefit of knowing her husband-to-be when she’d ventured out west. Abby was lucky, or so she lectured herself that first day as she set herself to her boxes, unpacking things and putting them away as best she could while not wanting to take up too much of his space. She was lucky that she’d known Gray all these years. She was lucky that he’d showed her all the deliriously exciting things he’d showed her the night before. She didn’t need romance when she had sex and certainty, surely.

  Abby hadn’t shed a single tear. Not even when she stood in his shower, then sunk down into the bath for longer than she’d usually allow herself, because her body f
elt like someone else’s. Tender and fragile when she had never felt anything but strong and sure.

  But maybe that was a gift for a girl who’d always considered herself plodding, like a Clydesdale surrounded by show ponies.

  She’d lectured herself extensively on how she needed to behave and what she needed to do to hold up her part of the bargain. When dark began to creep in, it made sense to start dinner because that’s what she would have done at home.

  Your former home, she’d snapped at herself in the ranch house’s kitchen, scowling at the big, red table with all its marks and scars that made it look better, not worse. Like a monument to all the Everetts that had come before her and had sat around it, weaving the bonds of land and family tight together.

  She’d traced what looked like words carved into the table’s surface and told herself she needed to make this her home. She needed to make herself a good wife.

  The only example Abby had of a good wife was Grandma, who had never let Grandpa walk into the house at the end of a day without a hot meal waiting. Cooking for her new husband didn’t only make Abby feel like a wife, it made her feel connected to her grandmother. And less homesick for that quiet, easy life she’d given up for this still-alien one that felt so strange all around her.

  When Gray finally came in, he’d stopped in the back door with an arrested look on his face, not even finished with stamping off his boots in the mudroom.

  “Is that dinner I smell?”

  “I made a roast,” she told him, nerves leaping around inside her. “I hope you don’t mind that I helped myself to the meat in the freezer. If it was being saved—”

  But the smile that cracked over Gray’s face told her everything she needed to know. And better yet, made her feel that warm, settled thing inside her again. As if this was all meant to be. As if it was right.

  He’d helped her with the dishes afterward in an easy, matter-of-fact way that told her it was a task he was well used to doing. Then he’d disappeared into his office for a few hours, which Abby had gathered meant she was left to her own devices for the evening.