by Cara Colter
“Hey. Little fella. Jamey.”
“Papa,” Jamey crooned, leaned into the jacket without letting go, and plopped his thumb in his mouth.
“Why does he think I’m his papa, for heaven’s sake?”
“Don’t take it personally. He calls every man that.”
“Why? Where is his papa?”
Ty looked at her then, and his gaze seemed uncomfortably all-seeing.
“Are you running from something?” he asked softly.
She actually shivered from the fierce look that crossed his face. She told herself not to take it personally. He would just be one of those men with a very traditional set of values, thinking women and children—much as he disliked the latter—were in need of his extremely masculine self for protection.
Amy hated that the old-fashioned notion actually filled her with the oddest sense of comfort.
“What would make you think I’m running from something?” she hedged, because of course that was uncomfortably close to the truth.
“Less than a week before Christmas, and you’re looking for a new home?”
“It’s just the timing,” she said. “The McFinleys wanted to be in Australia by Christmas.”
He did not look convinced, but he did not look as if he cared to pursue it, either.
“Where’s his papa?” he asked again, patting Jamey—who was showing absolutely no sign of losing interest in him—with surprising gentleness, on the head.
“I’m a widow,” she said quietly. “Jamey’s father was killed in an accident three months after he was born. It’s nearly nine months ago now.”
Some shadow passed over his face and through the depths of those amazing sapphire eyes. She felt as if Ty Halliday could clearly see the broken place in her.
She could feel his awkwardness. It was obvious from his house that he was a man alone in the world, and had been for a long time. There was not a single feminine touch in this place. It was also obvious he was a man allergic to attachments. There were no pictures, no family photographs. There was no ring on his finger.
On arriving, she had thought the McFinleys had taken their personal touches down so that she could put up her own and feel more at home. But she had not even asked herself about the unlocked door, the lack of curtains, or throw rugs or little lace dollies. She had not asked herself about the dresser still filled with neatly folded clothes.
Now, feeling his eyes on her, Amy knew it was way beyond this solitary cowboy’s skill level to know what to say to her. She was touched when he tried.
“That seems to fall squarely into the life-is-unfair department,” he said gently.
She lifted her chin. “I stopped expecting life to be fair a long time ago.”
He frowned. “No, you didn’t.”
“Pardon me?”
“That sounds like something I would say. And you’re not like me.”
“And what are you like?”
“Cynical. World-weary.”
“That’s me exactly!” she protested.
A small smile teased the devastating curve of his lips. “No, it’s not,” he said. “You just wish it was. It’s evident from looking at you, you are nothing of the sort.”
“You can’t possibly know that about me on such a short acquaintance.”
“Yes, I can.”
“How?” she demanded, folding her arms over her chest, some defense against what he was seeing. No, what he thought he was seeing.
She was not the naive girl she had once been, so reliant on the approval of others, begging for love, so desperate for a place to call home that it had made her overlook things she should have seen. Amy Mitchell was on a new path now.
She was going to be fully independent. She was not going to rely on anyone else to make a home for her and her baby.
Looking after the McFinley house, venturing so far from the familiar, expanding her website, Baby Bytes, into a viable business from there, were all part of her new vision for her life.
She hated it that a complete stranger thought he could see through it.
She hated it even more that her first day of her new life was turning into something of a fiasco.
Thankfully, no one but Ty Halliday ever needed to know.
She had called her in-laws as soon as she stepped in the door to let them know she had arrived safely.
She had heard her mother-in-law’s disapproval, so like her son’s had been.
“For heaven’s sake, Amy, give up this harebrained scheme. John and I are delighted to look after you and Jamey. Delighted.”
Delighted to control and criticize her, just like their son had done. Delighted to keep her dependent on them. She shivered. Wouldn’t they love to see the predicament she was in now?
But they never had to know. In a little while she would be where she was supposed to be, none the worse for the wear, no one to question her competence.
“By the way,” she said, “before I forget, I owe you money for a phone call. My cell phone wouldn’t work here. Now, how can you know so much about me?”
“No one with a truly jaded soul would offer me money for a phone call I wouldn’t even know you made for a month. And no one truly fed up with life arrives at a new home and makes it their first priority to put up a Christmas tree,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I don’t even know where you found this stuff. The tree is obviously too big to have arrived in your shrimpy little car.”
That shrimpy little car was the first major purchase she had ever made on her own. Her mother-in-law, not aware that Baby Nap had just signed up to be a sponsor on the website, had not thought it was a sensible use of funds.
“I prefer to think of it as sporty,” Amy said proudly. The car was part of the new independent her!
“Sporty. Shrimpy. There is no way a Christmas tree arrived in the trunk of it.”
“The tree was in your basement.”
He turned and scanned her face, looking for a lie. “This tree was in my basement?”
“Along with all the decorations and lights and such.”
“No kidding.” He whistled, long and low. “Who would buy an artificial tree when there are a million real ones two steps out the back door?”
“So you usually have a real tree?” she asked.
He snorted. “We’ve never had a tree up in this house.”
“But why?” she whispered, horrified by his revelation.
He looked at her and shook his head. “You want me to believe you’re cynical when you cannot imagine a world with no Christmas tree, a world without fluffy white kittens, a world without fresh baked chocolate chip cookies?”
“Is it for religious reasons?” she asked solemnly.
He threw back his head and laughed then, but it was not a nice laugh.
“Religion is as foreign to this house as Christmas trees. And now, Miss Cynical, you look like you took a wrong turn and ended up in the devil’s den.”
At least he had dropped the Mrs.
Amy was aware she should let it go. And couldn’t. “I just can’t believe you never had a Christmas tree. Why?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. My mom left when I was about the same age as your little guy. It was just me and my dad. Christmas was just another day, filled with hard work and the demands of the ranch.”
She felt appalled, and it must have shown on her face.
“Don’t get me wrong. The neighbors always had us for dinner.”
That did not make her feel any less appalled. “Your mom left you?” She knew she shouldn’t have asked, but she couldn’t help it. She thought of what it would take to make her leave Jamey.
And the only answer she could come up with was death.
He was irritated by her que
stion, and it was clear he had no intention of answering her. He rolled his shoulders, and she could tell he hated that he had said anything about himself that might be construed as inviting sympathy. She offered it nonetheless.
“I guess I’m not the only one life has been unfair to,” she said softly into his silence.
He wouldn’t look at her. He shook free of Jamey, again and moved over, looked in one of the boxes. He shuffled through some old ornaments and a Christmas tree star.
And then he took his hand out and stared at it.
He was holding a packet of letters, yellow with age, tied with a blue ribbon. He swore, his voice a low, animal growl of pain.
Amy froze, stared at him wide-eyed.
“Sorry,” he muttered, and rubbed his brow with a tired hand. “Sorry.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, and she knew instantly, from the way his expression closed, that he couldn’t bear it that she could see something was wrong.
He shoved the letters into a deep pocket on his jacket.
“I’ve just come home from a real devil of a day to find my house invaded by a lamp-wielding stranger with a baby who wants to call me Papa. What’s wrong? Why, nothing!”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said. “I really am. I’m leaving as fast as I can.”
And she meant it.
There was something about him that was so alone it made her ache. It made her want to lay her hand on the thickness of that powerful wrist and say to him, Tell me.
But if he did, if he ever confided in her, she knew instinctively it would change something irrevocably and forever.
Like her plan for a new life.
Still, looking into his closed face, she knew she was in no danger from his confidences.
He kept things to himself.
He did not lean.
He did not rely.
He was the last of a dying breed, a ruggedly independent man who was entirely self-sufficient, confident in his own strength to be enough to get him by in an unforgiving environment.
He was totally alone in the world, and he liked it that way.
She was leaving. She did not need to know one more single thing about him.
He moved to the window, away from Jamey’s relentless pursuit. He looked out and sighed.
“I don’t think life is quite done being unfair to either one of us,” he said, his voice deep, edged with gravel and gruffness.
“What do you mean?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
Amy moved beside him and was stunned to see that while she had been decorating the tree, oblivious, a storm had deepened outside the window. The snow was mounding on his driveway, like heaps of fresh whipped cream. Already the gravel road that twisted up to the house was barely discernible from the land around it.
His eyes still on the window, not looking at her, he said, “Mrs. Mitchell?”
“Amy.”
“Whatever. You won’t be going anywhere tonight.”
“Not going anywhere tonight?” Amy echoed. But she had to. She had to correct her mistake, hopefully before anyone else found out.
The urgency to do so felt as if it intensified the moment he said she wasn’t going anywhere.
If there was one thing Amy Mitchell was through with, it was being controlled. It was somebody telling her what to do. It was being treated as an inferior rather than an equal.
And she fully intended to make that clear to Mr. Ty Halliday. He wasn’t going to tell her what to do.
“I have to go,” she said.
“This isn’t the city. Going out in that isn’t quite the same as going to the corner store for a jug of milk. If you get in trouble—”
“And you think I will.”
“—and I think there’s a chance you might, it can turn deadly.”
She shivered at that.
“There’s not a lot of people out here waiting to rescue you if you go in the ditch or off the road, or get lost some more or run out of gas.”
“I’m a very good driver,” she said. “I’ve been driving in winter conditions my whole life.”
“Urban winter conditions,” he guessed, and made no effort to hide his scorn. “I don’t think that’s a chance you want to take with your baby.”
“You’re probably overstating it.”
“Why would I do that?” he asked, and his eyebrows shot up in genuine bewilderment.
Yes, why would he? He had made it plain her and Jamey’s being here was an imposition on him. The possibility startled her that he wasn’t trying to control her, that he was only being practical.
“The native people have lived in this country longer than both of us,” he continued quietly. “When they see this kind of weather, they just stop wherever they are and make the best of it. They don’t think about where they want to be or what time they should be there and who might be waiting for them. They stay in the moment and its reality and that’s why they don’t end up dead the way somebody who is married to their agenda might.”
Amy saw, reluctantly, how right he was. This was the kind of situation that had made her husband, Edwin, mental. And her in-laws. Delayed flights. Dinner late. Any wrench in their carefully laid plans sent them off the deep end.
This was her new life. If she just applied the same old rules—if she rigidly adhered to her plan—wasn’t she going to get the same old thing? Feeling uptight and harried and like she had somehow failed to be perfect?
What if instead she saw this as an opportunity to try something new, a different approach to life? What if she relaxed into what life had given her rather than trying to force it to meet her vision and expectation?
What if she acted as if she was free? What if she just made the best of whatever came?
Her desire to protest, to have her own way, suddenly seemed silly and maybe even dangerous, so she let it dissipate.
And when it was gone, she looked at Ty Halliday, standing in the window, his coat drawn around him, his handsome face remote, and she was not sure she had ever seen anyone so alone.
At any time of year, that probably would have struck her as poignant.
But at Christmas?
What did it mean that he had never put up a Christmas tree, not even when he was a child? That seemed unbearably sad to her, and intensified that sense she had of him being terribly and absolutely alone in the world.
What if she used these altered circumstances to make the best of it? What if she made the best of it by giving him an unexpected gift? What if she overcame her own hurt, the unfairness of her own life, and gave this stranger a gift?
A humble gift. A decorated tree.
Wasn’t that really what Christmas was all about? When she had left the safety of her old world behind her this morning, she hadn’t been running away from something, as he had guessed.
No, she hoped she was running toward something. Hadn’t she hoped she was moving toward something she had lost? Some truth about who she really was? Or maybe about who she wanted to be? About the kind of life she wanted to give her baby?
She did not want to be so wrapped up in her own grievances she could not be moved by the absolute aloneness of another human being.
She took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said, “I guess I could stay. Just for the night.”
He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lifted, as if amused she thought she had a choice.
“In the morning,” he said with the annoying and quiet confidence of a man who was accustomed to being deferred to, “I’ll see that you get where you’re going.”
I’ll look after you.
Maybe it was the fury of the storm that made that seem attractive. Or maybe, Amy thought, she had an inherent weakness in her character that made her want to be loo
ked after!
“I can clearly see it makes sense to avoid going out in the storm tonight, but no thank you to your offer to show me the way in the morning. I am quite capable of looking after myself.”
The wind gusted so strongly that it rattled the glass of the window, hurled snow against it. Nature, in its unpredictable wrath, was reminding her that some things were going to be out of her control.
But not, she reminded herself, how she handled those things. And so she would be a better person and finish decorating this tree, her gift to a stranger, before she left here tomorrow and never looked back. It would not matter to her if he didn’t show appreciation.
Somewhere in his heart he would feel the warmth of the tree and the gesture, and be moved by it.
She slid him another glance, and saw the man was dead on his feet. And that he was soaked from the top of his dripping cowboy hat to his wet socks. He hadn’t driven up in a vehicle.
“You were out in that,” she said, and was ashamed by how thoroughly she had made it all about her.
He glanced at her and seemed to find her concern amusing. “That’s my world,” he said with a touch of wryness. “Besides, it wasn’t that bad then.”
“You’re starving,” she guessed. “And frozen.”
He said nothing, a man accustomed to discomfort, to pitting his strength against whatever the world brought him, and expecting to win. Ty Halliday was obviously a man entirely used to looking after himself.
So, since she was stuck here anyway, she would make the best of it, and this would become part of her gift to him.
“I’ve got a chicken potpie in the oven. I’ll make a salad while you go shower. Everything should be ready in twenty minutes.”
Her take-charge tone of voice was probably spoiled somewhat by the fire she felt creep up her cheeks after she mentioned the shower.
The very thought of him in the shower, steam rising off a body that she could tell was hard-muscled and powerful, made something hot and sweet and wildly uncomfortable unfold inside of her.
He regarded her for a moment too long. She suspected he wanted to refuse even this tiniest offer to enter his world. But then he sniffed the air like a hungry wolf and surrendered to the fact she was already in his world. He turned away.
