The Cowboy's Christmas Surprise

by Marie Ferrarella

  Martha frowned, wheeling herself over to her daughter. “Bend down,” she ordered.

  Holly had no idea what her mother was up to. “Mom, I—”

  “I said bend down,” Martha repeated even as the doorbell pealed again. When Holly did as she was instructed, her mother leaned forward in her chair and employed the classic mother’s thermometer: she brushed her lips lightly across her daughter’s forehead. “Cool as a cucumber,” she pronounced, motioning for her to straighten up again. “No fever present.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re going. No argument.”

  With that, Martha wheeled herself out of the room as the doorbell rang a third time.

  Holly sighed. Okay, she silently argued with herself, searching for the pros in this. After all, how humiliating could this be? She was going out with a bunch of girls from the diner, and while they weren’t bosom buddies, she did know them, at least to varying degrees. They’d go to Murphy’s, have a couple of beers—or, in her case, a single sangria—eat a few oversalted peanuts and listen to this band that Laurie had gone on about for the past two days.

  If guys came by and asked the other girls to dance, leaving her alone at the bar, she knew Brett Murphy—the bartender who was most likely on duty tonight—well enough to have a conversation with him while she waited for her friends to come back.

  She didn’t consider what she’d do if someone asked her to dance, because she was more than fairly certain that no one would. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t think of herself as the type to attract the attention of anybody, except maybe someone who desperately didn’t want to leave alone at closing time. And when it came to fending off someone like that, well, she could handle herself in those sorts of situations. Just before he’d left home, Will had gotten interested in martial arts and he’d taught her a few self-defense moves that would come in handy in dicey situations.

  Okay, enough thinking, time for dressing, she silently ordered herself.

  Hurrying into the blue-gray dress, she had to admit she liked the feel of the material as it glided passed her hips, stopping several inches above her knee—quite a bit shorter than the navy dress.

  She wasn’t accustomed to wearing anything this short—or this clingy, she thought, looking herself over in the narrow full-length mirror that hung on the back of her door.

  The fabric looked almost shimmery, she thought, staring at her image as she turned first in one direction then the other.

  Holly didn’t realize she was smiling until she caught her reflection.

  Running a comb through her hair, she decided to leave it down. After all, she wasn’t trying to attract any undue attention, and the dress looked as if it could do more than that on its own.

  For a second, she debated taking it off again and slipping on her faithful old navy dress, but she had a strong suspicion that Miss Joan had eyes everywhere, and if she wore her navy dress to Murphy’s, Miss Joan would know and get on her case about that.

  Besides, this had to have cost the woman a pretty penny, she thought as she lovingly glided her hand along her hip.

  Holly took a deep breath. “Okay, ready or not, here I come.”

  Grabbing her hoop earrings from the top of her bureau—a gift from her mother on her graduation day—she put them on as she walked toward the front of the house. The earrings were the one good piece of jewelry she had besides the small gold cross her father had given her on the first day of school.

  She heard voices coming from the living room.

  As she drew closer, Holly cocked her head, listening intently.

  She could make out her mother’s voice, but the voice that was answering her mother didn’t sound anything like Laurie—or any other female she knew, except possibly Miss Joan. But even Miss Joan’s voice wasn’t this deep.

  If she didn’t know any better, she would have said that the voice she heard belonged to—

  Holly’s heart began to pound the way it always did whenever she first heard his voice and realized he was somewhere close by.

  “Ray?” she asked as she walked into the small living room.

  Ray shifted his brown eyes toward her a beat after he uttered a preoccupied, “Hi.” But once he actually focused on her, the greeting was immediately followed by an awestruck, “Wow,” and then a joking request for some sort of proof of identity.

  “Doll, is that really you?” Ray asked, staring at her and cocking his head as if that could somehow help him clear his vision, or at least allow him to make a better identification of the shimmering fairy princess entering the room. He took a step toward her, staring so hard his eyes all but burned into her. “Wow,” he said again. “You clean up really well,” he told her, appreciation all but vibrating in his voice.

  “Doesn’t she, though?” Martha said, pride brimming over in her voice as she, too, turned around to face Holly.

  A warm, pleased feeling swept through her, but she told herself that Ray was just being nice. After all, they were friends and they’d known each other since they were children.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him. Holly glanced around, expecting to see Laurie somewhere in the room, but there was no indication that he’d come with anyone.

  What was going on here?

  “Well, this afternoon I happened to mention to Laurie’s brother that I was going to see if Liam could play half as well as he thinks he can, and I guess Laurie overheard me because next thing I know, she’s asking me for a favor, saying that she and her friends were going to Murphy’s tonight, too. Her problem was that she didn’t have enough room in her car for everyone. She thought that since you and I are friends, maybe I wouldn’t mind picking you up and taking you with me.” He shrugged casually. “I said sure, why not. Why didn’t you tell me you were going tonight?” he asked. “You know that I would have taken you—like I am now.”

  Her shrug matched his, except that hers was tinged with self-consciousness. “It kind of just came up as a spur-of-the-moment, last-minute thing,” she told him, deliberately avoiding his gaze.

  His eyes swept over her as the corners of his mouth curved in a smile that could only be described as wicked.

  “That dress certainly doesn’t look like a spur-of-the-moment thing,” he told her.

  In all the time that he’d known Holly, he’d never seen her looking this good, this, well, sexy for lack of a better word. Did she even know that? That she looked really hot? He had a feeling that, this being Holly, she didn’t.

  He had a full agenda planned for tonight, but it looked as if he might have to add chaperone to that list. As her friend, he didn’t want to see guys hit on her if that made her uncomfortable.

  Seeing that Holly was momentarily stuck for a response to Ray’s assessment of the dress that adorned her body, Martha came to her daughter’s rescue.

  “That was a birthday present I gave her last year. You know how Holly is, she saves things until the very last minute—even leaves the tags on until she wears the item for the first time,” she added, seeing that there was one telltale tag hanging from the back of the stunning dress. Shifting her wheelchair so that she was behind her daughter, Martha drew close enough to remove the tag with one well-executed yank.

  “I knew it would look good on you,” she told her daughter, playing her part to the hilt.

  “Good?” Ray echoed incredulously. “Doll, you’re downright beautiful in that.”

  “She’s downright beautiful without it, too,” Martha told him. The way she saw it, Holly enhanced the clothing she wore, not the other way around.

  “Mom!” Holly cried, mortified at the implication of the words.

  “No, she’s right,” Ray cut in. “You’re a beautiful person, especially on the inside, Doll. I’ve always said that.” He had a feeling it was getting late. “Okay, you ready to go?” he asked, glancing at his watch. He’d
expected to be there by now, looking over the crop of women the band had attracted. “The first set is at eight and I want to get there before that, look over the crowd and all that good stuff,” he told her.

  She felt her heart go back to its regular measured beat. She knew what he meant by “good stuff.” How could she forget? If Ray was going to Murphy’s, it was because he wanted to see if the promise of a band had drawn any new faces from the neighboring towns and places farther south.

  “Well, we wouldn’t want you to be late,” she told him glibly.

  “You two have fun, now,” Martha told them as she followed in their wake to the front door. “Don’t worry about Molly—or anything else, either,” she instructed Holly. “Just for one night, please act your age and not mine.”

  “Good advice, Mrs. Johnson. I’ll see that she follows it,” Ray promised the woman with a bright smile. “Okay, milady, your chariot awaits,” he told Holly grandly, bowing from the waist and gesturing toward the truck that he always drove.

  “I see that your ‘chariot’s’ been freshly washed,” she teased as she opened the passenger-side door and got in.

  “Can’t make a good impression in a dirty chariot, now, can I?” he asked with a laugh, getting in on his side.

  Holly made no reply.

  She knew that the good impression he was talking about referred to whatever woman he set his sights on tonight, but just for the moment, she pretended that he’d actually done this for her and that he was her date, not just a friend doing another friend a favor.

  Chapter Four

  “Seriously, Doll,” Ray said to her as he pulled away from the single-story house she called home. “You could have given me a call, told me you wanted to go hear Liam play tonight. I would have been more than happy to swing by and pick you up.”

  He eased his foot off the gas pedal of his Super Duty pickup truck and glanced in Holly’s direction.

  Damn, but she looked different tonight. He’d been spending too much time looking through her that he hadn’t realized just how really pretty his best friend was.

  Really pretty.

  He found it difficult to pull his eyes away.

  When she made no answer to his comment, Ray went on talking. “Don’t mind saying that I was kind of surprised when I heard that you were actually stepping out for a change.”

  He flashed Holly a wide grin, the one that the girls he’d been out with referred to as his killer grin, except that with Holly, he wasn’t trying to prove anything or charm her the way he did when he was out on a date. Since this was Holly, the grin he flashed at her was completely genuine.

  “Good for you,” he congratulated her heartily, still on the subject of her finally stepping out on Friday night. “I guess you’re really not the stick-in-the-mud that you pretend to be.”

  Holly squared her shoulders, taking offense at the careless assessment he’d just tossed at her. “First, I don’t ‘pretend’ to be anything—I never do. And second, I am not, nor have I ever been, a stick-in-the-mud, Ray Rodriguez,” she retorted with feeling.

  “Okay,” Ray allowed expansively. “Exactly what would you call doing nothing but working 24/7?” he asked.

  Holly sniffed as she lifted her chin defensively. “Being responsible.”

  “A responsible stick-in-the-mud,” he qualified, underscoring the descriptive phrase he’d just used. Then, seeing that his teasing was apparently getting under Holly’s skin, he shrugged, dismissing the semantics they were butting heads over. “Hey, it’s just good to see you going out, Doll.” He inclined his head in her direction, as if that would help him hear her response better as he drove. “Got your sights set on anybody in particular?” he asked curiously.

  Yes, the lunkhead sitting next to me. “Nobody,” she told him firmly. “I just want to hear the band play, see if they’re any good.”

  Since this was Holly and they told each other everything—even though the dress she had on clearly negated the seemingly innocent reason behind her going out tonight—he took her at her word.

  “Well, Liam’s brothers seem to think so,” Ray told her. “They think he’s got real potential. Brett even had a small area cleared off to serve as a dance floor. The way I see it, the music has to be good in order for people to dance.”

  She smiled, thinking of something Laurie had said to her about the band. “Not really,” she interjected. “It just has to be good and loud.”

  He laughed, remembering what he’d overheard her friend saying as he talked to Laurie’s brother. “Laurie just wants to give Neil Parsons an excuse to put his arms around her,” Ray said.

  “Neil Parsons?” Holly echoed. “Are you sure?”

  This was the first she’d heard anything about Laurie wanting to get close to Neil. When Laurie had talked to her about coming tonight, she’d made it sound as if she was trying to talk her into a girls’ night out, an occasion where they and a couple of the other girls who worked at Miss Joan’s diner would get loud and just have some fun listening to Liam trying to hit all the right notes. Laurie hadn’t said a word about wanting to get close to Neil.

  Deliberately?

  “I’m sure,” Ray said casually, completely ignorant of the way what he’d just said had thrown Holly for a loop. “That’s what she told her brother. She also said that Cyndy Adams was hoping to catch Ty Smith’s eye, as well. Come to think of it, Laurie mentioned Reta Wells, too, but I didn’t hear the name of the guy that Reta was looking to corner.”

  “So they’re all looking to get partnered up?” Holly asked.

  She was doing her best to hide the distressed feeling that was growing in the pit of her stomach. Why hadn’t Laurie leveled with her?

  Because she knew you’d never agree to come if she mentioned being interested in catching some guy’s eye. You know that.

  “It sounded like that to me,” Ray told her. And then he shrugged. “But, hey, I could be wrong. And even if I’m right, this just might be a fishing expedition on their parts. I think that if this was a done deal, they would have all gotten paired off before they ever got to Murphy’s. So, if this is just in the works, it’s all going to be casual,” he assured her. Ray slanted a look in her direction. “You sure there’s nobody you’re looking to cut out of the herd?” he asked her.

  “I’m sure,” she answered firmly. She’d known this was a bad idea. Holly glanced over her shoulder at the road they’d just traveled. “Look, maybe you’d better take me back home.”

  Ray just kept driving the way he’d been going, heading toward Murphy’s.

  “Sorry, Doll, I told you I don’t want to be late for Liam’s first number. I’m really curious to see how he does. Besides, if I take you back now, that knock-’em-dead dress’ll go to waste, since I’d be the only one who’s seen it on you,” he maintained.

  You’re the only one who counts.

  Why did he have to be so thickheaded when it came to this? Holly wondered in frustration.

  Out loud she merely said, “I can always save it for another time.”

  “C’mon, Doll, where’s your sense of adventure? Let your hair down,” he prompted.

  “Maybe you need an eye exam,” she told him with a touch of sarcasm. “My hair is down.”

  “See?” he asked with that same disarming grin. “Halfway there.”

  Holly sighed and, for the moment, gave up as she slouched back in her seat.

  The trip was all but over.

  Murphy’s looked as if it had been infused with a community of fireflies; it was so lit up that it was visible from a few blocks away.

  “I guess word must have gotten around about Liam and his band,” she speculated.

  Ray laughed. “He’d better be good. If he’s not, he’s going to fall flat on his face in front of a packed house.”

  She c
aught herself having performance jitters for the middle Murphy brother. “I think they’re probably more than ready to meet him halfway,” she said. At least she hoped so, for the sake of Liam’s pride.

  Everyone in Forever knew everyone else. That meant that, by and large, they pretty much had each others’ backs. While some occasional petty jealousies might surface between the inhabitants of Forever and the people who lived on the surrounding ranches, for the most part, everyone wished everyone else well.

  Ray pulled up in front of the saloon. Then, seeing that there was no space to park his truck, he circled around to a larger lot in the back. Usually there were plenty of spaces to be had there. Tonight Ray found that he had to drive up one lane and down another before he finally found a space where he could park his truck. He pulled it in between two 4x4s of almost identical color—battleship gray.

  “Sure hope this means he’s selling beer to all these car owners,” he commented, looking around the lot.

  The offhanded comment caught her attention. She looked at Ray sharply. “Why? Is Brett having trouble staying in the black?”

  Brett Murphy wasn’t the kind who talked about money problems except in the most casual way, making it sound as if there was no problem at all.

  “Mike heard him say something about having a note come due on Murphy’s next month,” Ray answered.

  He and his siblings certainly knew what it was like to have their backs up against a wall and the bank breathing down their necks, Ray thought. They’d almost lost the ranch after their mother had died. Pulling together as a family had been the only thing that had saved them from foreclosure. Even though he was the youngest, the experience had made him hypersensitive to other people’s problems when it came to needing money for payments due.

  “I think that’s the reason behind Brett agreeing to have Liam get his friends together and play tonight. Having a packed house never hurts,” Ray told her as he pocketed the keys to his truck.

  Holly looked out at all the cars parked outside the saloon. It looked as if everyone in town had shown up, not to mention that there appeared to be vehicles from some of the neighboring towns, as well.