“And you’re not invincible,” Elise said quietly. “Jake, Cassie loves you. Her sister told me.”
“I know,” he muttered, gaze fixed on that twist of red and white peppermint as if it meant his life. “I know that.”
“I think you care for her, too,” his mother continued.
“Of course I care,” he told her hotly. “What am I, made of stone?”
“Have you bothered to tell her that?” She waited for him to say something and when he didn’t, she sighed again. “Of course you haven’t. Jake, I’m your mother and I love you. So I’m going to tell you that if you lose this chance at happiness, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
He dropped his hat onto Ben’s chair, scrubbed one hand across his face and wished he could just hang up. But ending the conversation wouldn’t stop any of the thoughts charging through his mind.
“Have you forgotten Lisa?”
She laughed. “That would be hard to do,” his mother said. “That woman caused more problems—wait a minute.” Her voice went low and hard. “Are you saying that’s why you’ve shut out your family and any chance at love? Because you made a mistake with Lisa?”
“Doesn’t that make sense?” he demanded, trying to defend himself and his actions. Though hearing his mother say it out loud made him sound profoundly stupid. “I married her, didn’t I? My mistake, and it was a big one.”
“Yes, it was.” Elise sighed a little and he heard the love in her voice when she said, “But you learn from a mistake and move on. Jake, Cassie isn’t Lisa, and you’re doing a disservice to both of you if you can’t see that. Cassie deserves better and frankly honey, so do you.”
Well, hell. Oh, he could admit that right from the beginning, he’d been waiting for Cassie to somehow morph into Lisa. To become demanding and complaining. But she hadn’t. She’d more than proven herself, yet apparently there was still some small part of him that didn’t believe.
“I know she’s not Lisa.” He did. Jake had seen that for himself during the first week she was here, and he’d seen it again after she showed up with Luke. Cassie had made a place for herself here. She had friends on the ranch. She knew how to work and wasn’t afraid to step in and do what needed doing.
Yes, he’d been waiting for her to fail. To prove to him that she couldn’t handle ranch life. But she hadn’t. Not once. She did what was needed and more. And she did it with a smile. Unlike Lisa, Cassie didn’t complain about the ranch being so far from “civilization.” Hell, she didn’t complain about much of anything.
Frowning, he did silent battle with his own feelings. Want fought against caution. Need scuffled with fear.
Fear?
Jake wasn’t a man who admitted to being afraid. Not on the battlefield. Not when he was caught in a blizzard. Nothing shook him—well, nothing had until Cassie.
“I knew if I threatened to take Luke from her, Cassie would go to you,” Elise was saying, and Jake struggled to focus. “I hoped that you two would find a way to work out what was keeping you apart.”
“It’s not that easy,” he whispered.
“It could be if you let it,” his mother argued. “Jake, I love you. But you’re a fool if you let this chance at the family you always wanted get away from you.”
When his mother hung up, Jake stayed right where he was, thinking. Surrounded by the scents and sights of Christmas, he pulled up mental images of Cassie and lost himself in them. Her, smiling up at him. Her, rising over him in the night, taking him into her body and holding him there. Cassie playing with Luke. Cassie working alongside the men to clear snowdrifts, and still finding the time to pack a few snowballs and get a war started to break up the tedium of the work.
Cassie laughing. Cassie sleeping beside him. Cassie sitting on the floor of the main room, pieces of long past Christmases scattered around her.
His heart ached and his head pounded. Misery settled on his shoulders and he couldn’t shake it off. Maybe he didn’t deserve to. Maybe Cassie was a gift and because he’d been too stupid to see it, he was destined to lose her and the family they might have made, leaving misery as his only companion.
And if what they had ended, it would be his fault.
Cassie hadn’t failed. He had. Through his own reluctance to try again.
And didn’t that make him a coward? Instinctively, he turned from that word, but it was, he told himself, the only one that fit.
He looked out the window again at the house across the yard. Draped in snow, blurred lamplight was the only thing he could see through the treated windows. His woman and his child were in that house.
Was he going to fail them?
Hell no.
* * *
“It’s not enough, Claudia.” Cass sat on the window seat in Jake’s bedroom. He was out on the ranch somewhere and Luke was downstairs with Anna. They’d let her sleep in today and though she appreciated the thought, she hated sleeping away what little time she had left at the ranch.
“Cass,” her sister said quietly, “you’ve got to stop judging all men by Dad’s sterling example.”
“Easy to say,” Cass murmured, watching the guys plowing paths through the snow. The sky was blue, the wind was still, and she knew that if the weather held, she’d be leaving in a few days.
Her heart ached at the thought, but what choice did she have?
“You’ve only been there a week, Cass. Are you really ready to give up so easily? I thought you loved him.”
Stung, Cass frowned. “I do love him. And I’m not giving up, I’m just accepting reality rather than waiting around for it to bite me in the butt.”
“Right.” Claudia blew out a breath in exasperation. “You’ve spent most of my life telling me to stand up for myself. To acknowledge what I want and go after it. To not let anything get in my way.”
“Yes, so?”
“So, you want the cowboy!” Claudia’s voice went sharp. “And you’re not willing to stay and fight for him.”
“How can I?” Cass lowered her voice and leaned her forehead against the cold glass pane. Looking down into the yard, she watched the cowboys, all bundled up in their hats and coats, and searched for Jake. She didn’t see him out there and she frowned in disappointment.
Even knowing that she was leaving, he clung to the taciturn, stoic cowboy image rather than show her the man he kept locked away. Why wouldn’t he let her in before it was too late? And how was she going to live without him in her life?
“Unless he loves me, there’s no guarantee he won’t one day just walk away.”
“There’s no guarantee anyway,” Claudia pointed out.
“Good pep talk. Thanks.”
Claudia laughed a little. “Who knew love could be such a gigantic pain?”
“Wait until it’s your turn,” Cass warned.
“Please. I’m nineteen. Talk to me when I’m thirty.”
“Fine.” Cass leaned back against the wall, keeping her gaze on the wide sweep of blue sky and the snow-tipped evergreens standing around the edge of the lake far below. “Look, I just wanted to let you know that once the road clears, I’ll be coming home.”
“Uh-huh.” Claudia huffed out a breath. “Cass, you said Jake wants you to marry him. To stay there on that ranch you told us about so often you bored us to tears. He wants you to be pregnant again.”
That all sounded great in the abstract, Cass thought, wishing her sister could understand. But maybe that was impossible. Claudia had been only ten when their father walked out on them. And because Cass and Dave had been there for her, her life really hadn’t been interrupted. It was Cass who remembered the devastation left in her father’s wake.
“But he won’t—”
“Cass, sweetie,” Claudia cut in, “you do realize that you’re the one walking away, right?”
&nbs
p; That one quiet sentence slammed home like a thunderclap. She sat straight up as if jerked into place by invisible strings. Was that what she was doing? Was she running first to keep from being left behind? Had she so little faith that the only way to protect herself was to leave before Jake could?
“Oh my God. You’re right.”
“That just never gets old,” Claudia murmured on a heartfelt sigh.
Cass hardly heard her. Thoughts racing, heart pounding, stomach spinning, she inched off the window seat and started pacing. “Funny, I never saw it like that, Claud. I just want to make sure Luke’s protected. Safe.”
And me, too, she thought but didn’t say aloud. I want me to be safe, too. She couldn’t bear it if Jake walked away from her. If he turned his back on her and their children. So what had she done instead? She’d given up to avoid being hurt.
“Of course you want to protect Luke,” Claudia agreed. “But maybe you could give his father more of a chance to figure this out? I mean, you’ve had Luke and the knowledge of him for nearly a year and a half. Jake’s had what? A week or so?”
“True.” Cass looked out the window and still didn’t see Jake. Where was he? She had to talk to him. “I’ve gotta go find Jake, Claud. I’ll call you later.”
She dropped the cell phone onto the bed and hurried out of the room and down the long second-story hallway. She didn’t notice the rugs on the bamboo flooring or the family photos and paintings dotting the walls. Taking the stairs quickly, she made a turn to go to the kitchen and ask Anna to watch Luke for a little longer, but something in the great room caught her eye and dragged her to a stop.
A Christmas tree.
The biggest, most beautiful tree she’d ever seen sat square in front of the windows, lights bursting from every branch. Heart in her throat, Cass walked hesitantly into the room and then stopped dead again when Jake, with Luke perched on one arm, stepped out from behind the tree and smiled at her.
* * *
Jake was nervous.
Hell, he hadn’t been nervous since the night he left for boot camp. But he had the warm, solid weight of his son on his arm and the scent of Christmas filling his lungs, so he fought past that flutter of nerves and started talking.
He’d have felt better if Cassie would smile at him, but she looked so dumbfounded, he figured that wasn’t going to happen.
“I went out and got us a tree.”
Nodding, she whispered, “I see that. It’s beautiful.”
They were talking like strangers and it was his fault, Jake told himself silently. He’d spent so much damn time keeping her out, that now she wasn’t even trying to get in anymore.
But screw that, it couldn’t be too late.
“Luke and I decorated it,” he said and grinned as his son patted his cheek.
“Nice job. Jake...”
“I went out this morning to get the tree.” He glanced at it now, saw its beauty, and wondered why he had avoided this season and the miracle of it for so long. Shifting his gaze back to her, he said, “I cut myself off from a lot of things over the years and it took you and Luke to remind me of all I’ve been missing.”
“Why, Jake?” Her gaze locked with his. “Can you tell me why you stopped celebrating Christmas?”
He hitched Luke a little higher, smoothed one hand over the baby’s soft hair and took a breath. It wouldn’t be easy, but he was through holding back. It was time to take a chance. He told her about that long-ago Christmas Eve on a battlefield and as he did, he relived it himself. The smells, the sounds, the awful silence when the attack was over and his friends lay broken in the sand.
When he looked at her again, he saw tears shining in her eyes, and had to force words past the knot in his throat. “When those guys died, I think something in me did, too.”
“Oh Jake, I’m so sorry.”
He blew out a breath, looked at the tree, then looked to her again. “I used that night as an excuse to pull back. Just like I used Lisa to keep you at bay. Didn’t really see that clearly enough until today. But I see it now. I know what’s important. Who’s important.”
Walking toward her, he kept his gaze fixed on hers and kept a tight grip on their son, until Luke leaned out and reached for his mother. As Cassie folded Luke into her arms, Jake stared at the two of them for a long minute. “You two are everything to me, Cassie. You are everything to me.”
Shaking her head and blinking back tears, she said, “I can’t believe you went out in chest-high drifts of snow to get a Christmas tree.”
“Yeah, well,” he said with a quick grin and a shrug, “you wanted one and Luke deserves one. And me?” He shot a look at the tree over his shoulder and felt years of pain and loneliness and misery slide from him in the soft glow of way too many lights. Looking back at Cassie, he said, “I wanted this tree because this is our first Christmas together. As a family.”
“Oh, Jake...”
He reached out and pulled her and Luke into the center of his arms. “And I need you to know that I don’t want this to be our last Christmas together.” Bending his head, he kissed her gently, then dropped a kiss on Luke’s forehead.
“I want it all, Cassie,” he said, his gaze moving over her features like a caress. “I want kids and dogs and noise and chaos. I want that life we could build together. Marry me, Cassie. Marry me because I love you. Because I’m no damn good without you.”
She gasped in a breath and a solitary tear fell and tracked down her cheek.
“Marry me because we deserve to be happy. And we will be. I swear it to you.” He looked into fog-gray eyes and saw a future shining there that he never would have believed possible until he’d met her. “Marry me and I swear, every day will be Christmas.”
She laughed a little, choking on the tears clogging her throat. How was it possible, Cassie wondered, to be so sad and lonely one minute and have the world offered to you in the next?
Her gaze slid to the massive Christmas tree and she thought about him riding out in the aftermath of the storm just so she wouldn’t be disappointed. Just to make her happy. To prove he loved her.
Staring up into his eyes, Cassie knew this man would never walk away from his family. He would always be there for her. He would always come through—even if it meant pushing through eight feet of snow. He was a better man than her father had ever been, and she would never doubt him again.
“You haven’t said yes yet,” Jake told her, draping one arm around her shoulders and steering her toward their first Christmas tree. “So let me give you your present.”
“Present?” Cassie laughed. The man was full of surprises.
Scooping Luke into his arms, Jake handed Cassie a small hand-carved box from under the tree. When she opened it, her heart melted. Nestled inside was an antique ring. Gold with several tiny diamonds and one opal in the center, it was lovely. “Oh, Jake.”
“It was my grandmother’s,” he said, lifting the ring from its nest to slide onto her left ring finger.
“But I can’t—”
He kissed her quick and light, then gave her a smile that lit up all the old shadows in his eyes, shattering them forever. “I want you to have it. So does Pop. This ring has a history of a lot of love,” he told her. “I want to build on that love with you.”
Outside was snow and cold. Inside was firelight, Christmas lights and more warmth than Cassie had ever felt before.
Jake cupped her cheek in his palm. “Tell me you still love me and that the answer is yes. Marry me, Cassie. Don’t leave me alone on the mountain.”
Her heart was so full it was hard to breathe, and Cassie simply didn’t care. If she could freeze this one moment in time she would, because it was perfect and she wanted it to last forever. Yet even as she thought it, she knew their future was going to be just as wonderful and she couldn’t wait to get started
on it.
“Yes, Jake, always yes. I love you so much.”
“Thank God,” he whispered, kissing her again before pulling her against him.
And in the soft glow of Christmas, fresh promises were born.
Epilogue
One year later
“Me do it, Daddy!” Luke jumped up and down until his father picked him up and held him high enough that he could put the little fire engine ornament as close to the star at the top of the tree as possible. When he was finished, the little boy turned a wide grin on his father. “Fire truck onna tree!”
“You bet.” Jake laughed, gave his son a hug, then set him down to race through the house with Boston—probably headed for the kitchen.
“Oh, Jake, that baby is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen,” his mother said, coming down the stairs from the nursery.
“You mean since me, of course,” Jake teased.
“She means, since me,” his sister interrupted from her spot curled up on the couch. Beth, her husband and kids were here for Christmas along with Cassie’s sister Claudia and her brother Dave and his family.
It was a full house and Jake was enjoying every minute of it. What a difference a year made, he told himself as he smiled at his grandfather, sitting in a chair by the fire, reading to Beth’s youngest.
Not only did Jake have Cassie and two amazing kids, but he had his own family back in his life as well. The mountain wasn’t as lonely as it used to be, and he thanked heaven for it every night.
“Cassie asked me to send you upstairs,” his mother said as she went up on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Everything all right?” Instant worry shot through him and he knew that it would always be like that. When a man had a lot in his life—he had a lot to lose.
“Fine, worrier. She’s out of baby wipes and she wants you to bring her some from the storage room in the basement.”
“Okay. That I can do.” He turned toward his mission, but his mother stopped him with one hand on his arm.
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