Cowboy SEAL Christmas

by Nicole Helm

  It had been an especially weird one. A dead cow under the Christmas tree, a Christmas tree that had been decorated with pictures of Dex and dead cows. Monica hadn’t known what to make of it until Colin had mentioned the dead cow he’d helped the Revival Ranch men move.

  She hadn’t slept after that, even when Colin had finally dozed at her side. She was too furious. Far too furious to approach any of them. She needed time to cool down, but as she stood next to her truck the next morning, anger started to shred her usually normal reason and rationale.

  When Gabe stepped out of the bunkhouse, looking somehow as strong and rugged as all those peaks in the distance behind them, whatever small thread of control she’d had over her emotions broke.

  Her baby had been crying and scared, and this indestructible man had caused it.

  “Go inside, Colin,” Monica said, deadly calm.

  “Where are you going?” Colin asked, staring at her across the front of the truck.

  “I’m going to…” She didn’t like to lie to her kid, but she wasn’t about to tell him what she was really up to. “I wanted to check on some horse stuff before Becca and I have our meeting. You head on inside.”

  “If the guys are there, I want to—”

  Gabe was approaching, and Monica’s temper was at a rare boiling point she barely even recognized. “Go inside and stay there.”

  Colin frowned up at her. “Why?”

  “Because I am your mother and I said so. If you’re not up on that porch in five seconds, you will deeply regret it.”

  Colin complained, loudly, but he also scurried toward the house. It gave Monica minimum satisfaction that he did.

  “Morning,” Gabe greeted as he approached. He tipped his hat and offered one of his meaningless, charming grins.

  “Is there some place private and warm we could talk?” she asked through gritted teeth.

  His eyebrows lifted, but he didn’t question her. He gestured toward the bunkhouse. “That do?”

  She nodded sharply and started marching toward it. It hadn’t snowed again last night, but the subzero temperatures had made what snow there was slick and hard. Every time her boots crunched through it, she felt a little more righteously furious.

  This man, this man in particular, had been the cause of her child’s nightmares. She ignored the tiny little voice in her head that reminded her Alex and Jack had been there too, and she’d probably be able to handle her temper a little better around men who were her patients.

  She was protecting her baby. Her life. Anger and fury were right, and certainly Gabe the big, strong Navy SEAL who thought he was so smart and that her child should wield an ax and help with removing a dead cow could handle a little of her very fair anger.

  She pushed into the bunkhouse, Gabe following at a much more leisurely pace. He affected that don’t care about anything attitude, and nothing could have riled her more, because if Gabe was going to be taking Colin places and encouraging him to do things, then he needed to care so deeply it hurt. Hurt just like this.

  Slowly, Gabe closed the door, then leaned against it. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw as if contemplating it. “Depends on who you ask, I suppose. I happen to think I’m quite the prize.”

  “Colin is ten years old. Axes and saws were one thing, but disposing of a dead animal?”

  All that easy, fake charm melted off his face until only the bitterness was left. It felt like a triumph to get under his mask.

  “It’s ranch work. He’s part of a ranch now.”

  “He’s ten. Helping you guys means riding in the UTV and petting horses, maybe shoveling some poop or helping to mend a fence. It does not mean you get to force him to face death. He has had to face that enough.”

  “Yeah, so have we all. But it’s a part of life.”

  “I am well aware how much a part of life.”

  “Then I don’t know why you’re up my ass. Because he was the one who spotted the dead cow, and he had the option to help or not. He chose to help, because he’s not afraid to stand up and do what he should.”

  “What he should? Were you clearing out dead animals when you were his age?”

  There was a heavy beat of silence where he gave her one of those looks she’d learned from her time in therapy never led anywhere good. Unexpected, awful.

  Then he blinked, and it was gone. “So, what? Keep my distance? Never even look in your kid’s direction?”

  It deflated her, because it was the second time he’d made this gigantic jump to what she hadn’t even considered. “Why do you always assume the worst?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it’s all the being screeched at in private.”

  “I am not screeching,” she said. “But I am about to be violent.”

  His mouth curved at that. “Try me, sweetheart.”

  “This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous.” He’d somehow taken all the anger out of her and all she had left was that soft spot of hurt. “You can’t know what it’s like to watch your kid struggle with a nightmare. To not be able to do anything about it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  There were a million things left unsaid there, and she was tempted to slap her hands over her mouth so the questions piling up in her head didn’t escape. She’d already fallen into therapist questions a little too easily with him, and he’d made clear again and again that he didn’t appreciate it.

  So she wouldn’t say anything about nightmares or war or PTSD. This wasn’t about him after all. It was about Colin. Her child.

  “Something on your mind, Doc?” Gabe asked with that fake laziness that only ever sounded like a hard-edged bitterness to her ears.

  “Nope.”

  He leaned forward, so close she could count the dark eyelashes framing his dark eyes, count the whiskers he’d missed when he’d apparently shaved this morning. She could feel his breath against her cheek as he spoke.

  “Ask it.”

  She knew he was trying to be threatening. Trying to prove a point. Trying to intimidate her so she didn’t ask again. But she hadn’t asked. He was the one putting words and questions into her mouth, so she lifted her chin and ignored the fact the last thing her body felt was intimidated. “Do you have nightmares?” she asked flatly, dispassionately, with none of the therapist care she usually infused into those type of questions.

  He looked her right in the eye, far too close for comfort. “No,” he said, enunciating it with relish.

  Chapter 6

  Some tiny voice somewhere in Gabe’s brain was encouraging him to back off and calm down, but Monica had stormed into his place and started laying accusations at his feet, and then she’d had that patented shrink reaction.

  Maybe she’d kept her mouth shut, but Gabe had known what her considering look meant.

  What he didn’t know was why something sharp felt like it had been lodged in his gut. Something like betrayal, but that was damn stupid, and he wasn’t stupid. So it had to be something else.

  “Okay, no nightmares,” she said, that blue gaze of hers calm and never leaving his. “Good to know. Anything else you want to demand I ask you?”

  Why the hell do you think I want to hurt your kid? But he wasn’t about to admit that hurt his feelings. So much so he wasn’t even going to throw the fact she’d asked him to push things when she wanted to be overprotective in her face.

  Hell, she hadn’t just asked him—she’d thanked him for it.

  “I gave him a choice. And we kept him away from the composting. I thought it’d be a good experience if he’s spending the next eight years or so on a ranch.” Why was he explaining himself to this woman so bound and determined to chew him out? But the thought of Colin having nightmares over it…

  Well, maybe that’s where the sha
rp, horrible pain in his stomach stemmed from.

  All of the anger that had propelled her to stomp over here, then throw verbal darts at him, it had leaked out of her. Instead of looking like some kind of angel warrior, she looked shaken and hurt.

  “I…” She sucked in a breath and let it out, all dramatic like. “I apologize.”

  It was too easy. Gabe didn’t trust it. “Do you now?” he drawled, and he didn’t move away from crowding her, no matter that there were new thoughts in his head about how she smelled like soap and syrup.

  How was he supposed to keep his thoughts straight when a woman smelled like maple syrup?

  “I let my anger get the best of me. I knew I shouldn’t, but…” She sucked in another breath, slowly letting it out. “Well, it did anyway. This is no excuse, but I was up in the middle of the night with a crying child,” she continued in that maddeningly calm voice. How Jack and Alex talked to her as a therapist, Gabe didn’t understand. He wanted to shake her until he saw that fire again.

  “I wanted something to blame that nightmare on, that pain, and the horrible feeling I couldn’t do anything to protect him from it. That wasn’t fair. Especially coming from me.” She kept eye contact the whole time. It wasn’t that he doubted the sincerity of her apology. It was that he didn’t understand her.

  “They teach that in shrink—”

  “Would you stop saying ‘shrink’ all the time?” she snapped, and it was wrong that he was glad to see some of that color back in her cheeks. “I’m a therapist. Trained and licensed and damn good at my job. I have helped both your friends deal with their problems, and at some point, you’re going to have to respect that, even if you don’t want it for yourself.”

  Fair enough. “I do.” He watched the shock register and rolled his eyes. “I respect that you’ve helped my friends. I don’t need it for myself.”

  She took that in without getting huffy about it, which was something of a surprise. Even more surprising was her expression going soft, almost imploring. “I’m not out to get you,” she said quietly, with shiny, emotive blue eyes.

  “And I’m not out to hurt your kid,” he replied, more than irritated his voice sounded rusty when it should have been hard and uncompromising with no sign of weakness.

  You never let the enemy see your weakness, even if they didn’t feel like an enemy half the time.

  She rubbed a hand over her face—that was new. He’d seen a flicker of it Thanksgiving night when she’d talked about her dead husband’s accident, but she’d had that layer of therapist calm over it. This was all… Well, he recognized it. Because he’d seen it on Jack’s and Alex’s faces in those first few months here.

  A complete lack of understanding at how the world could spin so completely out of your control.

  It was where Gabe had the leg up because he’d never had any control over his life.

  “I never thought you were trying to hurt Colin,” she finally said. “Not on purpose. I tend to think other people can be careless because they’re not as careful as me.”

  “A Navy SEAL is never careless.”

  He almost got a laugh out of her with that, and it eased some of this obnoxious pressure in his chest he didn’t know what to do with.

  “I suppose not. But Colin isn’t a Navy SEAL. Maybe it’s warped, but he’s all I have of Dex. Sometimes it feels like he’s all I have of me.” She shook her head. “You don’t need to hear about all my hang-ups.”

  “No,” he affirmed.

  This time he got a real smile, even if it was rueful. “I am sorry for barging in here and letting my temper loose on you.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “You certainly have the broad shoulders to carry it.”

  He raised an eyebrow. The throwaway comment was interesting enough, but the blush that crept over her cheeks at his response was very interesting.

  “You know, everyone seems to think we have…” He trailed off, stepping a little closer, watching her face intently. She met his gaze with a timidity he never would have associated with her.

  “Sparks?” she supplied, and her voice was cool and calm. That smooth, in-control thing she used like a weapon.

  Her eyes were a different story. Her mouth was a different story.

  He smiled. He couldn’t help it. “One way of putting it.”

  She blinked once, and then her gaze was darting anywhere but at him. “Silly, isn’t it? When I was in a relationship, I wasn’t quite so eager to pair my friends off as Becca and Rose are.” Her voice was a little high, a lot breathless.

  It made it impossible to back off even though he knew he should. He tilted his head, just a hair, so his mouth was inexcusably close to her ear. “Is that all it is, you think?”

  “W-what else could it be?” She let out an awkward, forced laugh.

  “Well, you stuttered. You tell me.”

  There was a beat of silence, as though he’d caught her completely and utterly off guard. Then she sidestepped him, putting some space between their bodies. Her arm gestures were wide and nervous. “You’re…nice looking and all, but…” She cleared her throat. “We don’t have much in common.”

  “No, nothing at all,” he replied dryly.

  “I mean, well, sure we have some things in common. Revival. Friends. But I meant personality wise. We’re different.”

  He crossed his arms, watched her eyes drift to his broad shoulders, then dart away. “That doesn’t usually have much to do with… How did you put it? Sparks?”

  She blinked, as if taken aback. Then she edged toward the door. “Well, anyway, I have a meeting with Becca and some horses. I am sorry for…this. I mean, not this. That. Before. The…yelling.”

  “Sure.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her, and it seemed to center her, all those outward appearances of nerves and being flustered disappearing. “I want you to understand that I may, on occasion, take issue with how my son is handled here,” she said in her usual, annoyingly calm tone. “I’ll do my best not to speak in anger, but if I do, it has no bearing on… Well, you’d have to do something truly cruel for me to want to make sure Colin was never around you, and I don’t think you have that kind of cruelty in you, Gabe.”

  “You’d be surprised what kind of cruelty people can have in them.”

  She stepped forward then. He wanted to look away. He wanted to fidget. When she gently placed her hand on his forearm, he wanted to scurry away.

  But he didn’t.

  “This isn’t war here. It’s just life. Which means if I express a concern, even angrily, don’t assume I’m out to burn it all down. I will try harder not to let my inability to keep my son Bubble-Wrapped from every horrible thing turn into anger against someone else.”

  Her hand just rested there on his sleeve, warm and capable, a light pressure of some kind of earnest truth he didn’t want to accept.

  “That more shrink talk?”

  She didn’t take her hand away from his arm. She didn’t look away. She didn’t even scowl.

  “No, Gabe, that’s people talk.” She lifted her hand, patted his arm twice, then headed for the door.

  Gabe stood where he was, very afraid those words would haunt him for a very long time.

  This isn’t war here. It’s just life.

  * * *

  Monica was so irritated with herself. She’d acted like an idiot. And she had zero good reasons for acting like a silly schoolgirl.

  She’d heard herself. How breathless and high-pitched she’d sounded. The horrible stuttering, and he’d just grinned at her as if he were in charge and the center of every female fantasy.

  Well, she’d turned things around. She’d definitely caught him off guard there at the end. As much as she knew that wasn’t going to convince him therapy was a good idea, it felt like a personal triumph.

  She shou
ld chastise herself for valuing a personal triumph over reaching out to help someone, except when was the last time she’d had any kind of personal triumph? Her life was Colin and being a therapist. If there’d ever been a strictly personal Monica aspect of her life, it had died with Dex.

  And, wow, that was sad. Maybe when Colin went to stay with her parents for that week, she’d focus on herself. On finding some piece of the world that could be for her as a person, not as a mom or a therapist.

  Like what?

  Broad shoulders came to mind, and she firmly pushed that idea away as she stepped into the stables. Becca was already there.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “No worries. Colin said you were talking to Gabe.” Becca slid her a glance that had Monica affecting her best no-nonsense, let’s-get-to-work expression.

  “Yes, I had some things to discuss with him.”

  “Ah. Some things.”

  “Yes, a few…things. Nothing important.”

  Becca made a considering noise, but she went to Pal’s stall and began to lead the pretty horse into the center of the stables. This past summer, they’d worked on Becca’s riding hours to get her certified to lead therapeutic horsemanship, and they were close. She’d be applying for certification by January, when they brought on their first two men.

  In the winter weather, they practiced the other aspect of therapeutic horsemanship in the stables—taking care of the horses, which was good for the men, cathartic.

  It was good for her, Monica could admit.

  On top of that, working with someone like Becca, who needed none of Monica’s actual therapy help, was a new experience. Truth be told, Monica had a bad feeling she’d lost sight of how to interact with anyone without a therapist or mom bent.

  “Do you think I talk down to you?” she asked Becca.

  Becca stopped what she was doing with Pal. “Huh?”

  “Do I always try to make it about being a therapist or tell you what to do like I’m your mother?”

  “No one tells me what to do like my mother,” Becca replied wryly. “What brought this question on?”