“How many pictures have you painted of this place?” Creed asked.
“Several?” she answered.
“You going to paint one of it for your new collection?”
She shook her head. The vision she’d been given that day didn’t have snow. The clouds had moved across the erosion on the side and Grandpa Presley was gone. Now it was Creed’s profile and the tip of his cowboy hat. And around the base of the formation the mesquite trees had the first bloom of springtime with their minty green leaves.
She didn’t even want to think about what that might mean.
* * *
Creed wondered if they were going to stand there all day staring at the huge formation. When he’d first laid eyes on the thing, he’d thought about what fun it would have been to have something like that in the part of the world where he grew up. He and his brothers, along with the O’Donnells and Slade Luckadeau, would have turned it into a castle or a fort or any number of things.
She pointed to a tree standing all alone about ten feet from them. “What about that tree?”
“It could work,” Creed said.
They walked around it, still hand in hand. She cocked her head to one side and then the other and they walked around it again.
“It is perfect,” she said.
He dropped her hand and pulled the small chain saw out of a canvas backpack he’d thrown over his shoulder. He fired it up and the noise bounced around in the still quietness of the snow-frosted canyon. The saw cut through the base of the tree, but it didn’t fall far when he yelled, “Timber!”
Her laughter was music echoing off the canyon walls and coming back to settle in his ears, his heart, and his soul. He picked up the six-foot tree and shouldered it. The limbs knocked his hat off and snow slipped down his collar, his body’s heat melting it into a cold trickle down his backbone.
He shivered. “That is some cold stuff when it gets next to bare skin.”
She picked up his hat and put it back on his head. “That should help.”
“You might have to warm me up when we get in the house.”
“Is that a come-on line?”
“Could be. I never used it before, so if it is, it’s original.”
Dolly, his mother, had told him for years that he was a romantic at heart. He thought that meant he was a sissy, and he fought hard against such a title. But that morning, walking in snow with a tree on his shoulder and Sage Presley at his side, he felt what his mother was saying.
He really was a romantic. He wanted a home and a wife and a whole yard full of kids to go with the kittens and the puppies. Sage had opened his eyes to that and he would always love her for it.
Love! I didn’t say I was in love with her. I said that I would love her for making me consider a family.
* * *
Sage held the kitchen door open so Creed could maneuver the tree into the house, around the kitchen table, and into the living room.
“That is one big tree.”
“Yes, it is. That first one you picked out wouldn’t have even made it through the door.”
Noel sniffed the tree then went back to her blanket. Angel peeked up over the edge of her basket and settled back down.
“I bet they think human beings are crazy,” Sage said.
“Just be glad they don’t have the sense to call 911 or they’d have us both committed. In their minds, cows belong outside. Trees belong outside. People and pets belong inside.”
Sage quickly moved her easel into the kitchen to make room for the tree. Creed had been right. Even though the tree looked like the smallest one in the whole canyon, anything bigger would have filled up the entire living room and edged over into the kitchen.
“There’s going to be a mess when this stuff starts to melt. I tried to shake the tree good before I brought it on the porch, but there will be puddles when the snow melts,” Creed said.
“It’ll only be melted water, and the floor is hardwood so it’ll mop right up. Now let’s go to the bunkhouse and bring up the decorations. The tree stand is in the box with the lights that go around the house and the barn. We’ll make sure we bring that box in first.”
“The barn?” Creed asked incredulously.
“It’s no big deal. We leave the clips around the outside edge of the front of the barn and across the fence between the house and the barn. It’s just a matter of putting them up.”
“Are you teasing?”
“I am not! That way there’s lights to be seen from every window in the house. When I was a little girl, I’d run into Grand’s room and jump on her bed. And lights would shine through the window.”
“Does each cow get jingle bells around her neck?” he asked.
Sage stared at his boots, which were dripping water onto the floor right along with the Christmas tree. “No, just the bulls. I’ve got a special string of red ones for you.”
Creed chuckled. “Do I get to choose where you hang them?”
Sage blushed crimson. “No, that’s my decision.”
“Some days a homely old cowboy just can’t win for losing.” He sighed. “Let’s go fetch the box with the stand in it and get this tree standing upright.”
The decorations were stacked neatly in one of the three bedrooms in the bunkhouse. Back when Grandpa Presley was still alive they’d had all three bedrooms filled up and the hired hands did their own cooking. But one by one Grand had let them go through the following years, and by the time Sage was old enough to remember, the bunkhouse was used for storage. Later, after she’d come home from college, she’d used the big living room and kitchen combo for her spring, summer, and fall work space, but it had been years since the water and gas had been turned on to the place.
She wondered if Creed would bring the whole ranch back to its original status: five or six times as many head of cattle, hay fields, and much, much less mesquite dotting the land.
Creed read the writing on the masking tape stuck to the top of the blue plastic bin. “Tree stand. Outside lights. I pictured cardboard boxes.”
“That’s the right one to start with. We used to keep them in cardboard boxes, but the mice kept getting in them so we replaced the boxes with bins.”
“Okay, let’s go get it upright so it can drip on the floor while we string the barn lights. Then we’ll mop up the mess and start decorating,” he said.
She picked up a second box marked tree lights. “Mr. Organization.”
“It takes a fair amount of that to run a ranch.”
They were almost to the house when they stopped at exactly the same time and turned their ear toward the highway.
“Snowplows!” she said excitedly. “That means the electricity will be back on before long and I can do laundry.”
“Me too! I’m almost out of clean socks and there’s a whole basket full of dirty clothes in my room. I dreaded washing by hand,” he said.
His room! Grand’s room!
The whole concept was so tangled up that it made Sage’s head hurt, so she pushed it away. Today she was decorating the tree and putting up lights. When it was all done, she intended to send pictures to Grand. And when she saw the pictures, it would make her so homesick that she would come home, maybe even before Christmas Eve. She could bring Essie with her and Sage would look after both of them. Hell, she’d give Essie her bedroom and clean up the bunkhouse to live in. She liked to go there to paint in the spring and fall anyway, and with very little work, it could be a nice big comfortable house just for her.
“What’s on your mind, Sage?” Creed asked when they reached the back porch.
“Decorating,” she said.
“You’ve been pretty quiet all morning. Something happened out there at the rock formation. What did you see?”
“What is probably a glimpse of the future.”
“And that makes you mad?�
�
“Why mad?” she asked.
“Because it did not make you happy or you would have reacted differently.”
“Not mad, but sad. I don’t adapt well to change. I like my rut. I love it, as a matter-of-fact. It is my stability, my rock, and I know what’s happening next.”
“That’s not life, darlin’.”
“I know, but I don’t have to like it.”
* * *
Creed fastened the tree stand onto the trunk of the tree and stood it upright in front of the window. And like the sun coming out after days and days of dreary rain, Sage’s mood turned from dark to sunny instantly. She clapped her hands and kissed him on the cheek in her excitement.
“It’s beautiful. It’s the best one ever and I mean it. Look how perfect the limbs are and it’s just the right height for the angel. She won’t even hit her head on the ceiling, and we don’t have to trim anything off. I wish the snow wouldn’t melt off.”
Creed laughed. “Darlin’, you can’t have fire and ice both. Now let’s go get that barn and fence ready to light up before we take off our coveralls.”
Putting the lights around the barn wasn’t an easy feat in the snow, but by noon they had them in place and the cord taped down to the barn floor all the way into the tack room. Sage held her breath and plugged them in. They were old and that meant if one was shot none of them would light up. Then the painstaking job of unscrewing one bulb after another began until they found the one that was the dirty culprit with the blown filament.
She stuck it in the socket and hurried outside.
“Well, shit!” she yelled and shook her fist at the lights around the barn.
Creed was busy twining the next roll around the top string of barbed wire on the fence.
“Problem?” he asked.
“We’ve got a blown bulb somewhere. I’ll get a good one from the bin.”
“Why?”
“Because these are those old lights and if one is blown none of them work. And you have to replace them one at a time to see which one is bad.”
“Sage, there is no electricity.”
She popped her palm against her forehead. “Duh!”
“Don’t beat yourself up. I still turn the light on in the bathroom every time I go in there and the oil lamp is right there to remind me.”
“Crazy, ain’t it? If you are finished, let’s go get two boxes of decorations and start on the tree.”
They had barely shut the door to the bunkhouse when a rat came out of nowhere, ran across the toes of Creed’s boots, kept moving until it hit Sage’s leg, climbed up one side of her jeans, scooted across her butt, and hurried back down the other side.
Like a contortionist she tried to turn her upper body around on the lower. She slapped at her butt without touching it, screamed, and did a fancy dance.
Creed’s grin went to a chuckle which quickly turned into a belly laugh.
“It’s not funny!” she said.
“That was one fast rat.”
“I hate those things. They get in the barn and stare at me with their little beady eyes, and you can stop laughing at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you, darlin’. I’m laughing at the way that crazy rat turned you into a pretzel. Your pretty long legs and cute little butt were pretty close to break dancing. I hadn’t ever seen a real person do that kind of dance. Don’t worry about them pesky rats. Angel will take care of them for you. We’ll put her and the kittens out in the barn and believe me, there won’t be a rat problem.”
“We can’t put them in the cold. Maybe when they are older.”
Creed crossed the floor and hugged her tightly to his chest. “It startled me too when it dashed across my boots.”
She looked up. A kiss would go a hell of a long way to settling her nerves.
If you think that, you’ve lost your mind. Every time that cowboy kisses you, every nerve in your body starts wiggling and whining for more than kisses.
His eyes closed and his mouth settled over hers. His hands were suddenly under her shirt and on her bare back. This time she felt the hooks of her bra coming undone and his fingertips massaging from bra level to her neck. The rat was completely forgotten.
“Hey, anybody home? Sage, where are you?” a voice singsonged between the house and the bunkhouse.
She stepped back, quickly redid her bra, and adjusted her breasts into the cups. “It’s April,” she said.
“Didn’t sound like one of my brothers.” Creed grinned.
The door burst open. “You in here?”
* * *
Another ten minutes and they would have damned the torpedoes and rats and it would have been full speed ahead right there on the old worn-out sofa in the bunkhouse. If it wasn’t for bad luck, Creed wouldn’t have a lick of luck at all.
April looked from one to the other. “Hey, I figured y’all were decorating when I saw the lights around the barn. Got electricity yet?”
“Not yet. Y’all got any over on the Canyon Rose?” Sage left Creed’s side and hugged April.
The woman reminded him of Macy, his old flame. She was short, blond, and built on a small frame. Her face had those delicate features that took a man’s breath away and made him want to protect her forever.
Creed looked from one to the other. How could he have ever been attracted to someone like April? It was Sage, with her dark hair, chocolate-colored eyes, and long legs that threw extra beats into his chest.
“Have you met Creed Riley?” Sage asked.
April removed her stocking hat and shook out her blond hair. “No, I haven’t, but Daddy says that Grand said good things about him when he took her to the airport.”
“Well then, Creed meet April Pierce. And April, meet Creed. Since you are here, you can carry a box of decorations to the house and have dinner with us,” Sage said.
“I’ll help carry, but then I have to go back home. Hilda is bakin’ a ham and she’ll skin me alive if I’m not there for dinner. I was going stir-crazy in the house with all this snow and no electricity. Daddy called the power company. They said they’d have ours up and going by Monday or Tuesday. Lord, I didn’t realize how much I depended on a hair dryer and a curling iron until they weren’t available. How y’all been handling it over here?”
Sage handed April a box and led the way outside. “Not too bad, but we need to do laundry, so we’ll be glad to have the electricity back. It’s been early bedtimes with nothing but lamps.”
April giggled.
“Get your mind out of the gutter,” Sage whispered.
“With that hunky cowboy, there’s not a chance of that happening,” April whispered back.
Even though they were whispered, Creed heard every word. He wouldn’t have minded a trip to the gutter that morning. No, ma’am, not one bit!
Chapter 9
Sage and April set their boxes on the kitchen table. Noel didn’t growl, but her tail didn’t wag in acceptance of the new human either.
April pointed. “What is that?”
“That’s my new dog. Her name is Noel and she’s going to have puppies.”
“I don’t believe it,” April whispered. “You got a dog and a pregnant one at that. That is even more amazing that Grand selling the ranch. And it’s ugly, Sage. Grand would have bought you any kind of dog out there on the market and you buy that thing?”
Creed kicked the door shut with his boot. “She didn’t get the dog. The dog got her. Someone must have dumped her and the cat on the road just before the blizzard. They found their way here.”
He put the box he’d carried in on the table, hung his coat on the back of a chair, and went straight to the pantry for a mop and bucket. “I’ll get the water mopped up before it gets into Angel’s basket and she moves the kittens.”
April peeled out of her heavy coat and hung it on the coat
rack before she slouched down into a chair. “You’re kidding me.”
Sage removed her work coveralls, set a pot of coffee to perking on a back burner, and joined Angel at the table. “No, Angel is the cat. We think she got tossed out at the same time Noel did. We found her and the newborn kittens in the barn the next morning and it was evident that Noel knew her. I’ll make a small pot of coffee. You can take time for a warm-up before you go back home. It’s not dinnertime yet.”
“A dog. A cat. A hunky cowboy that mops the floor. What happened over here?” April whispered.
“Crazy, ain’t it?”
Creed finished mopping up and emptied the water into the sink, used some dish soap to wash out the bucket and the mop, and carried them back to the pantry. “I’m going out after those next two boxes. Be back in a minute.”
“And he has the sense to get out and let us talk,” April said. “If you don’t want him, kick him over the fence onto the Canyon Rose. I won’t let him get away.”
“I’m mixed up about this whole thing. He’s a good man but…”
“Ain’t no buts involved except the way he fills out those jeans. I can see where you’d be in a tizzy though, girl. It would break my heart if Daddy sold the Canyon Rose even if he did hand me a cowboy like that one on a silver platter,” April said. “Is he good in bed?”
“April!”
“Well, that ought to have some bearing. And I can see the way he looks at you and he mops, for God’s sake, Sage.”
Sage pushed her chair back, poured two mugs full, set one in front of April, and shoved the sugar bowl across to her.
“Well, we aren’t going to solve my problems, so let’s work on yours.” Sage turned the subject around.
April flicked her wrist. “My problems aren’t ever going to be solved. Momma wants me to finish college and go on to vet school, and I want to learn to run the ranch that I’ll inherit. Momma says that Daddy is still young enough to produce another baby or two and that the new wife will insist that the new kids wind up with the ranch, especially if the new wife gives Daddy a son.”
Christmas at Home Page 13
