The Last Christmas Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

The lie settled between them. She knew it was a lie. Because he had betrayed the way that wanting her tortured him. He had shown her. It was too late for him to take it back. She knew. And because she knew, he couldn’t pull this on her.

  But then, she supposed that went the other way, as well. He knew that she wanted him. And...there just wasn’t a whole lot of defense to be had there. They both knew each other just a bit too well.

  “Well, maybe if life is short I should start fucking you now and worry about the consequences later?”

  She stilled. He had said it to be mean. He had said it to push her.

  Except... Language aside, it didn’t sound so bad.

  Though, she didn’t really know what all went into fucking. Making love sounded a little bit more like something she could handle. A little more like something she could wrap her mind around. Because it seemed gauzy. The other sounded very physical. A little bit harsh. She was interested. But she had some concerns about whether or not she could withstand it.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he growled.

  “What? You were the one who said it.”

  “You’re supposed to get mad at me, dammit. That was disrespectful.”

  “Was it? Sounded like a promise to me. And now you’re telling me it’s a promise you had no intention of keeping.”

  “You couldn’t handle it.”

  “Let’s make a deal. I can’t meddle in your life, and I can’t tell you that you should have a relationship with your family—when you clearly should—maybe you don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t handle.”

  “But I know.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” she said. “You know an awful lot for an emotionally constipated dick who won’t even tell his half brother who he is.”

  “Great. So glad we had this talk.”

  “If I’ve figured it out, then he’s going to,” she said. “He’s marrying Pansy. If he doesn’t figure it out, she will. I’m not sure that I can keep it a secret from her.”

  He reached across the table and put his hand over hers. “Keep the secret.” Something burned in his blue eyes, and it wasn’t anger. It wasn’t superiority, or any other things that she could get easily mad about. That was annoying. Because she would really like to be able to go ahead and stay angry at him. To keep on fighting.

  But she couldn’t yell at sincerity.

  “I will,” she said. “But the original statement stands. He’s going to figure it out. Whether by himself or through Pansy, you know he will. I...I didn’t notice until we kissed. And then West walked into the police station. At first I thought it was you, and it felt like my stomach bottomed out. She’s going to see you. She has to.”

  “I imagine she knows him well enough to not get him mixed up with another man.”

  “It isn’t that you look like him. Your eyes are that same blue. And there’s more. It’s the way you hold yourself. The way you smile. It’s like it’s mixed in with your blood.”

  “It’s not like it is. It is.”

  “Logan, I wish so much that one of my parents was still out there. Yours is.”

  “Well, that’s just evidence of the cruelty of the world,” he said. “Because if Hank dropped dead tomorrow, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings any. In fact, I’d trade him to bring your daddy back in a second. Your father was like a father to me. He mattered. My mom mattered, your mom mattered. Hank Dalton doesn’t mean anything to me. Blood doesn’t mean anything to me. Not with him. Not now.”

  “West?”

  She could see that was a regret.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does. You might not want it to matter, Logan, but I know it does. It’s okay.”

  “You’re suddenly a safe space?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel very safe between us right now. But what it is... I don’t know what it is. I’m never going to let you do something that I think might hurt you. I trust it’s the same with you to me. We’ve got each other’s backs. Through anything, right?”

  “You know I’ve got your back.”

  “So maybe we can just trust each other there. Maybe we don’t agree. Things might not be safe. But they are as inevitable as the Christmas decorations on the street outside. And the mountains around the town. Things between us just are.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way.”

  “It’s just sex,” she said.

  “You don’t know what that means.”

  “Well, maybe I need to learn.”

  “I can’t keep track of this conversation. Did you want me to reconcile with a father who never wanted to know me? Or did you want me to take you to bed?”

  “Can’t I want both? Your emotional and physical well-being?”

  “Sadly, I don’t think you know enough to help me find either.”

  That stung. The rejection stung. And even though she was pretty sure that what he said was a lie, and he knew it, it still stung.

  “I’m going to go to the booth.” She kicked the chair back and stood, making her way out of the coffee shop. And he didn’t go after her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT WAS DIFFICULT for Logan, Rose and their mutual irritation to fit in the booth. But somehow they managed. They were both heating metal and hammering before the parade ended, getting things ready to go, the pounding of iron on iron a welcome ring in the air over the top of Rose’s highly unusual and blessed silence.

  He didn’t need her opinions on the way that he chose to handle the family that he decided not to think about. It was his choice, dammit.

  Rose didn’t have the right to say a damned thing. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t possibly. She had been a kid when their parents had died. So young that she didn’t have the kinds of memories that allowed guilt and blame to take hold. And anyway, she didn’t have the cause to. Not the way that he did.

  But the other thing she didn’t have was memories of how his mother’s life had been.

  He did. He remembered. He remembered, always, the wound his mother carried that his father had refused to involve himself in their lives. That she had never been able to get access to him after she had found out she was pregnant.

  Stopped at the door by his wife. And then, again, years later when she had tried with some other women who had children by Hank to get what they were owed, they had all been stopped again.

  He knew that she was ashamed of that. Of the fact she had taken a payoff, because Hank Dalton’s wife had offered that if they would go quietly.

  He’d known she was ashamed she’d taken the money until the day she’d died. They’d needed that money, no question. Still, his mother had felt as if she had sold his relationship with his father for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver.

  He remembered her ducking into a supermarket aisle or a store when she saw Tammy Dalton coming.

  He’d overheard Ryder’s mom in the kitchen with his once. While his mother had cried.

  “The embarrassment would be worth it to me, if he wanted his son. It’s not fair he has those other boys that get to have a dad, and he doesn’t. He always sends his wife out to handle me. I haven’t even spoken to him since before Logan was born.”

  “It’s better for him to have us,” Linda Daniels had said. “All of us, than one stupid man who doesn’t know what he’s missing. He’s a sperm donor, that’s it. And Logan will always have us. And so will you.”

  Logan had known who mattered before then, but it had all been cemented in that moment.

  Logan had never cared about Hank. And he’d told her so. His mother had done everything she could to take care of him. And to take care of him well.

  It had been all he could do to stop himself from driving across town, going to that big, beautiful Dalton ranch and defacing their property.

  He’d been so angry when he was a teenager.

&nb
sp; And then his mother had died.

  The only anger he’d had left had been at himself.

  Past that, he realized that the best thing he could do was forget. Forget that the Daltons were anything to him.

  It was strange, the way that West had come into his life. Strange and wholly unexpected. But he realized that the likelihood that one of the women his mother had gone with was West’s. That there had been a connection between their mothers, and never with them hadn’t seemed strange until West had shown up in town, and ended up part of Logan’s day-to-day thanks to his relationship with Pansy.

  He’d never wondered about his half brothers before that. At least, he hadn’t much let himself. His mother had wanted to keep the more sordid details of her relationship with Hank, and Hank himself, away from Logan. And he’d respected that.

  After her death, he felt honor bound to not go make something that she couldn’t make in life.

  No. He had never wanted to go fling himself at Hank Dalton’s mercy. Tell him that his mother was dead and he didn’t have anybody.

  He couldn’t think of anything more pathetic.

  That was why he had forgotten.

  West made it harder to forget.

  He was used to ignoring Gabe, Jacob and Caleb Dalton. They’d grown up in the same town, gone to the same schools some years. He’d known. He suspected they didn’t. And if he had sometimes wanted them to know, had sometimes felt the mean and awful urge to tell them so that their happy family could be shattered—especially after his mother’s death—he’d ignored it.

  And if he’d felt something like grief when Caleb and Jacob’s best friend had been killed fighting fires alongside his half brothers, he’d pushed it down. If he had felt something like regret when he’d heard through the rumor mill that his half sister had come to town and found a place in the family, he ignored that.

  If he felt any kind of mystification over West showing up in Gold Valley and being welcomed by the Daltons in just the way McKenna had been, he just pushed it away.

  He’d made his decision years ago.

  Fact of the matter was, that bastard children were being accepted into the family left and right... Yeah, it made him question why when his mother had died Hank hadn’t come for him.

  He hadn’t appreciated Rose asking that question because it stabbed at a wound he didn’t like to acknowledge existed.

  Rose had brought out a whole lot of things he liked to pretend didn’t exist.

  And there she was, working and sweating, stripped down to a tank top, even out in the cold because the fire they had going from the forge was blazing hot. And he admired her strength. Her body. Lean muscle that was packed into every part of her frame. She was solid in places, soft in others. The epitome of feminine strength.

  And he found her sexy as hell.

  He couldn’t deny that. No matter how much he might want to. And he really, really wanted to deny it.

  It was impossible.

  Even after she had uncovered a secret he pretended he didn’t even have.

  Not even Sammy knew.

  And she was the one person he had come closest to confiding anything in over the years.

  Because she was someone who knew a piece of that pain.

  Still, they didn’t speak.

  Instead, they pounded iron, huffed around each other, and maneuvered past each other’s bodies like they might get a worse burn by touching each other than they would coming into contact with some of the molten metal they had around the booth.

  He had a feeling that was true enough. It was a hell of a thing.

  The parade ended, and people began filtering over to the booth. Somehow, he and Rose managed to talk about how a forge works, and a bit about how to fashion horseshoes. They managed to play off each other. Managed to somehow seem like they weren’t in a state of being appalled with one another. Difficult as that was to believe.

  It was when West and Pansy came over to the booth that things got hard. Because Rose all but arched her back like a pissed-off cat, and Pansy was still looking at him like he might debauch Rose over an anvil at any moment with the whole town acting as an audience.

  He had to admit that was a damn sight more appealing than he wished it were.

  But he was a sick bastard. He admitted it. There was nothing to do but admit it.

  It was a bit much to deal with his half brother, the sister of the woman he wanted, and the woman he both wanted to kiss and throttle all at once, with an audience present, however.

  “How’s it going?” West asked, his arm wrapped tightly around Pansy’s waist.

  “Good,” Rose said, not looking at him. Not even a little.

  “A little warm back there?” Pansy asked, referencing Rose’s tank top.

  It was then Logan realized he was still in a coat. Possibly because he wasn’t in a space where he wanted to strip off any layer of clothing in tight quarters with Rose.

  He’d tried. He’d damn well tried.

  To keep away from the Daltons. To honor his mother’s memory.

  He’d tried to keep away from Rose.

  He was failing at both and he didn’t know if he had the strength to keep on with the trying in full view of the fact that there was almost no use.

  Maybe Rose was right.

  Maybe there was no going back.

  Because if there were, then he never would have kissed her in the first place.

  Because if he really had the self-control he’d need to never touch her again it would have had to be strong enough to keep him from kissing her at all.

  “Just a bit,” Rose said, wiping the back of her hand over her forehead and leaving a trail of soot and ash behind.

  He felt the impact of that in his gut. Down lower.

  What was it about her? Wearing dirt, wearing ash, wiping her damned nose, that appealed to him? It was a question he hadn’t much asked himself because he’d been so busy trying to pretend that none of it was happening.

  That if he ignored it, it might go away.

  And all the while, all these last months he’d given Ryder advice on how to deal with Sammy. Had walked around like he had some kind of expertise on the subject of feelings. And how wanting the wrong woman could be just fine.

  When he didn’t think that was true for himself, and he didn’t see how he ever could.

  “You?” Pansy asked, the question pointed right between his eyes.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  She narrowed her mouth into a skeptical line. “Are you?”

  “Just dandy,” he shot back.

  “Be sure you stay that way,” she said, a very clear warning.

  Rose bristled beside him. He could practically see her hackles go up. Feral little wildcat.

  “Don’t you have some citizens to check on?” Rose asked.

  “I’m doing my part to make sure no one does anything stupid,” Pansy said.

  “Best get off to police some kids, then,” Rose said, waving a hand. “No one here needs your intervention.”

  “I hope not.” Pansy directed that last part at Logan.

  For his part, West looked vaguely apologetic as the two of them walked off into the crowd.

  “She’s impossible,” Rose muttered, replacing her angry look with a grin when a group of people walked by. They didn’t stop, and her smile immediately flatlined, then turned down. “She has to stop thinking she’s police chief of me personally.”

  “I mean, you’re a citizen of the town so I think technically she is.”

  “Fine. So, if I graffitied Sugar Cup or...or carved my name on the wall in the bathroom of the Gold Valley Saloon...”

  “You know why they do that, right?” In spite of himself, he asked the question.

  She turned wide eyes to him. “No. There’s a rea
son?”

  He laughed, but it came out more of a cough. “Um. Yes. You do it if you’ve hooked up in there.”

  “No.”

  The awkwardness between the two of them lifted for a moment while he could see Rose taking a mental catalog of names she remembered seeing there. “Olivia Hollister...”

  “I mean, I’m sure her husband is to blame for that.”

  “She just seems too...too prim.”

  “But he isn’t.”

  Rose frowned. “So that’s how it is then. This sex thing. It makes you crazy. Makes you carve your name in bathrooms. Makes you...do that in bathrooms.”

  “Since the dawn of time, basically,” Logan said. “Which is why I told you, you don’t really know. You think you do. It’s not a lack of respecting you that has me turning you down. But to my mind it would be like letting a driver without a license behind the wheel of a car. Or letting someone with no experience on one of the stallions we have on the ranch.”

  Her lips twitched. “Are you calling yourself a stallion?”

  He snorted. “I’m not a gelding, that’s for damn sure.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “All right, say your analogy holds. If someone wanted to get on the back of a stallion, let’s say, with no experience, wouldn’t you rather be right there to...instruct?”

  “I’m lost now.”

  “I’m going to do it someday,” she said. “And I think I’m a little too...”

  Suddenly, her eyes went glassy. If she’d been any other woman he’d have thought they were tears. But Rose didn’t cry.

  “Everything feels a little messed up right now. And I don’t know if it’s everyone pairing off or if it’s Christmas or...or kissing you. Maybe it’s everything. But I thought about what you said to me. Why I was meddling in everyone else’s business and not my own. It’s because I don’t like thinking about my own feelings.”

  He huffed. “Join the club.”

  He turned back to the forge and made a study of stoking the fire.

  “Well, I really don’t like it. But I’ve been wallowing in them the past week. I hate it, Logan. I feel guilty about Elliott. I’m angry that you were right. That I didn’t recognize what was going on. That I didn’t even have the... I’m twenty-three, I’m not a kid. I should recognize it. I shouldn’t have gotten my first kiss in my brother’s kitchen years after I had my first beer. And well, come to think of it you gave me my first beer so it makes even more sense.”