Daddy Christmas

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “No.” Gretchen watched as he fastened his belt. “But I can imagine what he’d be like.”

  Matt paused, his hands on the steering wheel. “And that is...?”

  “Someone about my age. Someone looking for a wife.”

  Matt checked the rearview mirror, then carefully shifted the Jeep into drive. “But you’re not interested,” he guessed, as he eased out onto the road.

  “No way.” Gretchen tensed and pulled the blanket up around her as Matt eased the Jeep into the center of the snow-covered highway. “I’ve done my time in matrimonial prison.”

  Matt grinned but didn’t look at her. “That’s an interesting way to put it,” he remarked.

  Gretchen thought she’d been tactful, under the circumstances. She took another deep draft of hot coffee. “You ever been married?”

  “Once,” he replied casually.

  “But you’re not still married,” she continued, turning to look at him directly. At least, she hoped he wasn’t.

  Glancing at her, Matt grinned. “I broke out of jail, too,” he said gently.

  She smiled and took another sip of the steaming coffee. “Your choice or hers?” she asked, admiring the way he controlled the Jeep on the slippery pavement.

  “Initially hers, although now that we’re divorced I’m not sorry that we are,” Matt said calmly as he slanted her another glance. “What about you?”

  “I was dumped by my spouse, too,” she said wryly.

  “Sorry,” he said sympathetically.

  “Don’t be,” she replied breezily, meaning it. She set the thermos cap down in the built-in cup holder between the bucket seats. “It worked out for the best in the end.”

  “Yet you’re reluctant to move forward, at least in your personal life,” Matt noted.

  “Look, just because I don’t want to have anything to do with this mystery man the Stewarts have set me up with doesn’t mean I’m afraid to have another relationship,” she said hotly.

  “How do you know the mystery man is all wrong for you?” he challenged with a grin.

  Gretchen closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest. “For starters, he’s probably a physician.”

  “That’s not surprising, since the Stewarts are both physicians,” Matt remarked.

  “I know, but I’ve got my reasons for staying away from doctors.” Feeling restless again, Gretchen straightened and peered at the snow still coming down. She still felt as though she were trapped in a snow globe, only now the scene was pleasant and Christmasy.

  Matt arched a brow at her remark, but kept his eyes on the road. “Physician phobia?”

  She gave him a droll look. “Very funny.”

  “I thought so.” He arrowed a thumb at his chest.

  “Anyway,” Gretchen added, sighing, “it just never would’ve worked with said mystery man and we are now both spared the agony of having to try to make it work one on one.”

  Matt braked as they approached a single black mailbox beside the road. A wrought-iron sign emblazoned with the words Rocking S hung above the snow-covered lane. Five acres or so behind that, a rambling two-story, log-cabin-style ranch house with a wraparound front porch sat majestically among the pines. A weathered gray barn and stable stood just behind that. All were blanketed in snow. Gretchen leaned forward and, stunned by the sheer beauty of what she saw, peered out the windshield. “So,” she breathed at last, “this is the Stewarts’ place.”

  Matt nodded as he turned slowly into the lane and drove beneath the arched entryway to the ranch. “You’ve never been out here, I gather?”

  “No. We were never able to get our schedules to coincide and I didn’t want to come up unless they were going to be here, too.” Eager to explore the place, Gretchen was already inching on her gloves again. “But I’ve heard a lot about it over the years. I know Cal Stewart grew up here and inherited the place after his dad died. Now the Stewarts use it mainly as a retreat. What about you?” Gretchen asked as he parked next to the house. She climbed down from the Jeep and met him at the cargo area. “When was your first visit out here?”

  His gaze contemplative, Matt opened up the back of the vehicle. “It was probably about thirty years ago. I worked on the ranch as a hired hand the summer I turned fifteen, and have come back occasionally to help out or just visit with the Stewarts ever since.”

  Which meant he was forty-five, Gretchen thought, exactly ten years older than she. Yet she didn’t feel the age difference between them at all.

  He carried her suitcases in, and Gretchen ferried a load of groceries. With a quick call, Gretchen notified the highway patrol and auto club about the wreck. Several trips to the Jeep and some quick work later, they had all the groceries put away in the spacious ranch-house kitchen. While he went back for her presents, Gretchen took a moment and toured the downstairs, which consisted of three large wood-floored rooms that flowed effortlessly one into another. The kitchen was huge and open, with a long, rectangular center work space and state-of-the-art appliances meant to serve a crowd. The adjacent dining room featured an enormous pine table with trestle seats, beneath a rustic wagon-wheel chandelier.

  One whole wall of the high-ceilinged living room was glass, with a panoramic vista of the mountains beyond. A huge fieldstone fireplace with a massive hearth encompassed the second wall. Overstuffed sofas and chairs in a striking Navaho print were grouped conversationally around the large room.

  Gretchen was deciding where Marissa and Cal would put the tree, when Matt came in, a load of firewood in his arms. Kneeling before the fireplace, he spread out the dying embers of last night’s fire.

  “So what are you going to do when this mystery man arrives?”

  Gretchen watched as Matt arranged two logs perpendicularly on the ashes. “I figure as long as I don’t have to be alone with him that I can manage.”

  He paused to shrug off his shearling coat. Muscles flexing beneath his shirt, he tossed the coat on the floor beside him. “But it bothers you anyway—this business of being fixed up?”

  Aware it was quite cold inside the house, she edged closer to the fireplace and sighed. “So much so that I almost canceled my vacation to avoid this umpteenth fix-up,” she admitted. He was very good at building a fire, she noted. But then, so was she.

  “Why do the Stewarts want to fix you up?” he asked, curious, laying a third log slant-wise across the other two.

  Gretchen knelt beside him and rolled up newspaper from the stack in the bin. She stuffed it between the logs, then added another cylinder of paper and another. “That they didn’t say precisely, but most likely they feel sorry for me, now that it’s the holidays.” And, Gretchen acknowledged, she had reason to feel down this Christmas.

  “Sure you’re not feeling sorry for yourself?” he asked.

  It was almost as if he’d been there himself and knew the signs, she thought.

  The challenge in his silver eyes had her lifting her chin a notch. “What have I got to feel sorry about?” she asked lightly, swiveling slightly to face him. Their knees bumped in the process, but she refused to move away. She had plenty to feel good about this Christmas, he might as well know that. “I’m a single woman, about to fulfill my lifelong dream of finishing college and becoming a teacher.” And she had wanted this for so long! Only now did she have the courage and the wherewithal to go after it.

  “So you’re about to graduate, then?” Matt asked, his glance roving first to their touching knees and then her upturned face.

  Gretchen flushed self-consciously and moved back a bit. “In three and a half years, give or take a semester or two,” she explained, watching as he lit the end of a newspaper and stuffed it in among the others. “And in the meantime,” she continued with determined cheerfulness as the fire crackled noisily and began to take hold, “I’m free as a bird.” With no one to account to or please except myself.

  “And all alone for the Christmas holidays,” Matt added. Satisfied the fire was started, he stood.

  �
��I’m not alone. After all, you’re here,” she stated, irritated he had seen through her so easily. Nevertheless, she accepted the hand he offered her and moved to her feet.

  “True,” Matt agreed, as their fingers meshed and held and then just as naturally drew apart.

  “And the Stewarts, all fifteen of them, will be here in a few hours,” Gretchen said over the pounding of her heart. “Soon we’ll be tripping over people right and left and it will be gloriously fun and exciting.”

  Matt grinned at her prediction but didn’t discount it. Which meant, Gretchen thought, as she slid her still-tingling hand into the pocket of her wool slacks, that he expected and looked forward to the same. She sighed. Sometimes it was easier to be with a crowd than to be alone, or worse, be with someone who wanted to know everything about you, past, present and future. She had the feeling much time spent with Matt would have her examining much about herself, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. Not this Christmas anyway.

  Oblivious to her thoughts, and still smiling in anticipation of the coming holiday, he looked past her out the window. Gretchen followed his gaze. The sky had turned from a pearly gray to nearly white.

  “It’s really coming down,” Gretchen said softly. The footprints they’d left as they’d approached the ranch house were already covered over.

  “Yeah, it is.” Matt grimaced at the worsening weather and grabbed his coat. He settled his Stetson on his head. “I better get down to the stable and see to the horses before it gets any worse.”

  Gretchen hastened to catch up, and fell into step beside him as he reached the back door. “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Suit yourself.” He tugged his collar up against the blowing wind and snow.

  “So how come you’re here for the holidays?” she asked, keeping her head bent and staying close to his side as they trudged a snowy path from the house to the stable. “Don’t you have family to see, too?”

  Matt brushed against her as he slid open the stable door, let her through, then slammed it shut. “My three kids are with my ex-wife, Vivian, and her new husband in Aspen.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Matt shrugged as he went down the stalls, measuring out feed. “It’s only fair. I had them with me last Christmas. Besides, I’ll see them on the twenty-sixth. I’m driving down to ski with them a bit, before New Year’s.”

  Finished with the horses, he led her back to the house. The phone was ringing when they entered.

  Gretchen went to answer it, while Matt brought in more wood.

  “Oh, good, you’re there!” Marissa Stewart told Gretchen, in lieu of a greeting.

  Gretchen shrugged out of her parka with one hand and cradled the phone with the other. “Where are you?”

  “In Denver. We managed to land, but the roads are too bad to travel, so we’ve opted to stay in a hotel here overnight.”

  Gretchen was silent as the implications of that sank in. Deciding she would just have to make the best of it and ignore the simmering attraction she felt to the Stewarts’ hired hand, she said, figuring she could tell them about the wreck tomorrow, “Not to worry, Marissa.” She started to say “Matt,” then worried it sounded too familiar. “Mr. Roper is here.”

  Marissa sputtered in amazement. “Mr. Roper is in Idaho.”

  But that couldn’t be! “Then who was the man driving the ranch Jeep? The man who carried my luggage in?” Gretchen demanded, perplexed.

  There was a pause on the other end, interrupted only by the static on the long-distance line. “I presume we’re talking tall, dark and handsome in the Marlboro Man extreme?” Marissa drawled.

  Heat started in Gretchen’s chest and crept up into her neck as she thought about the way she had tingled at his touch and admired his broad shoulders and rock-hard thighs. “Yes.”

  “You must’ve met Matt Hale. He’s our guest, Gretchen.”

  “But he was feeding the horses,” Gretchen protested weakly, as heat flooded her face.

  “Right. But he doesn’t work for us. Surely he said as much.”

  Gretchen closed her eyes in abject misery. She could just die, thinking of all the things she had confessed to him in the past hour and a half.

  “Gretchen?” Marissa pressed. “Are you still there?”

  “He mentioned he wasn’t an employee,” she mumbled. More like a friend of the family, he had said. But he sure let me go on thinking he was an employee, she thought, furious.

  “Listen, Gretchen, I’ve got to go—Cal needs to call the hospital to check on one of his patients. But I’ll phone you as soon as there is any change in the roads to let you know our estimated arrival time.”

  “Thanks, Marissa.” They said goodbye and hung up. Just as Gretchen put down the receiver, the front door blew open. She turned to see Matt Hale framed in the doorway. A load of firewood in his arms, snow dusting his broad shoulders and the brim of his hat, his cheeks red from the cold, he looked very strong and at ease.

  Matt zeroed in on her expression. “Problem?” he asked mildly.

  Gretchen glared at him, her temper flaring. “You bet there is.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS GOING to be hell to pay, judging by the fire in Gretchen’s blue eyes. But then, Matt thought as he set the load of firewood down in the bucket next to the grate, he had known that all along. “Who was on the phone just now?” he asked casually.

  “Marissa Stewart.”

  Oh, hell.

  Gretchen advanced on him like a gunslinger stepping into the street. “I want to know why you let me think you were Mr. Roper.”

  Matt shrugged and, not bothering to take off either his jacket or his hat, braced both hands on his waist. “I told you my name was Matt. You’re the one who assumed the ‘Roper.’”

  “You could have corrected my mistaken impression just by giving me your full name, Matt Hale!”

  Matt moved forward until they were standing toe to toe. “And missed the way you were pouring out your resentment about being scheduled to spend time with me, said mystery man? Not a chance.”

  “You’re in on this matchmaking scheme, too, aren’t you?” Gretchen accused, whirling away from him. “You changed your travel plans just so you could intercept me.”

  Matt watched the silk of her hair swirl about her face before settling on her shoulders once again. She walked toward him, her full breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath the soft knit of her ski sweater.

  “I am here early for one reason only—because my flexible work schedule allowed me to help out the Stewarts,” he explained as tranquilly as he could.

  “As well as romance me,” Gretchen added.

  Matt recalled all the erroneous assumptions she’d made about him and grinned. “As delightfully troublesome as that experience might prove to be, no, you are not the reason I changed my travel plans.” He arrowed a finger at her heart. “You are, however, the reason I didn’t mind arriving early and missing the long, prearranged, fixed-up drive out with you.”

  “You’re saying you wanted to avoid me, too?” Gretchen demanded, feeling unaccountably hurt as she drew herself up to her full five feet six inches.

  “You’re damn right I wanted to avoid you,” Matt shot back, deciding it was high time they set the record straight about his participation in this fiasco. “What do you think? That I need or want to be fixed up with a potential love interest any more than you do? But I—unlike you, my spoiled Gretchen—was prepared to grit my teeth and do my duty and be polite to you in exchange for the Stewarts’ kindness to me over the Christmas holidays.”

  She folded her arms in front of her and fumed. “So you came early to do just that.”

  “No, I came early because Mr. Roper’s mother fell ill and had to be hospitalized. He went to Idaho to be with her yesterday morning. I flew in and got here by nightfall yesterday to take care of the horses in his absence.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. Furthermore, I think if I could bring it upon myself to do my duty and drive
out to the ranch with you, you could have done yours and followed the original travel plans the Stewarts set out for you.”

  She flushed with guilt. He was pleased to see she had a conscience.

  “Why does it matter to you what I do?” she demanded in a chilly voice.

  “Because it’s winter in Colorado. And because your foolhardiness could have easily cost you your life had that wreck been any worse or had I not come along to get you out when I did.”

  “But that wreck wasn’t any worse, and you did come along to save me,” Gretchen retorted.

  “And someone still needed to teach you a lesson,” Matt responded equably, unable to tear his eyes from her face. “I figured it might as well be me.”

  Her eyes widened in astonishment and fury. “By making me eat my words where you’re concerned?”

  Matt shrugged. He knew he’d misbehaved—he hadn’t been able to help it—there was something about her that pushed all his buttons, something about her that drew him in the way no other woman did. “I never would have done it if you hadn’t started talking ill about me first,” he replied casually. Because she still looked furious, he stepped closer and playfully wound a finger in the silky ends of her hair. “Admit it. You got your tail feathers trimmed.” Satisfied he had her full attention and had made his point, he dropped his hand from her hair, offered another shrug and stepped back. “And now the lesson is over.”

  She pressed her lips together grimly. “Like hell it is.”

  He quirked a brow. “Meaning?”

  “I am not staying here with you,” she announced loftily, already going for her coat and gloves.

  He clamped a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back to his side. “You have no choice. In case you haven’t noticed—” Matt nodded at the darkening sky outside their window “—it’s almost nightfall and there’s a blizzard blowing out there.”

  “I don’t care.” Gretchen wrenched herself from his grip. “I want you to take me to a hotel.”

  “If you want to go in the morning, fine. Until then,” he warned grimly, not about to let her have another car accident, “you and I are staying put.”