A Cowboy for Christmas

by Lori Wilde

  Family loyalty. Why did it mean so much to him? Especially when it didn’t seem to mean anything to anyone else. Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s why family loyalty meant so much. He’d never really had it. He was searching for the glue that would finally make him stick.

  Don’t believe for one second that you’ll find it here.

  The next few minutes were not going to be easy. Nothing to do but get through it.

  Suppressing a sigh, Rafferty climbed from the truck and started up the steps, knowing in his heart that no matter what he did, there could be no mending the past.

  He paced the porch, gathering his courage. C’mon. Just do it. Finally, he raised his hand, rapped on the door.

  A long moment passed. The wait was killing him.

  He knocked again.

  From behind the door, he heard movement. He braced himself, but even so, he was not prepared for what he saw when the door opened.

  Because he found himself staring into the pretty green eyes of the woman from Searcy’s parking lot.

  Chapter Three

  A panicky sensation twined around Lissette.

  The cowboy she’d smashed into must have changed his mind about letting her off the hook over the fender bender because here he was on her front porch. Maybe he’d called his insurance company and they told him to hunt her down and hold her accountable. Beware of handsome cowboys making promises. She’d known his behavior had been too good to be true, but she couldn’t blame him. She’d been in the wrong. Nothing to do but offer to make installment payments for the damage to his truck. Another pothole slowing her down on her journey of building her business to provide for her son.

  Behind him, the clouds gathered darkly, smelling of rain. Thunder grumbled. A whisk of wind shook red leaves from the oaks in the front yard, sent them scraping across the porch. A cool draft rushed past her.

  The cowboy was still dressed in those snug-fitting Levi’s and scuffed cowboy boots and Stetson. His body was hard and lean. He worked outdoors, a real live cowboy, even though his license plates had identified him as being from California.

  He was taller than she remembered. Not as tall as Jake, but close. Shadows fell across his face, making his beard-stubbled jaw look as if it had been chiseled from stone. His cheekbones were high, sharp, and in this light, foreboding. A shiver passed through her, stirring the prickly awareness lighting up her nerve endings.

  A cowboy. Not another cowboy. Why did he have to be a cowboy?

  You live in cowboy country. What do you expect?

  Involuntarily, she took a step backward, then immediately regretted it. She didn’t want him to think that he held the upper hand, even if he did.

  His dark chocolate eyes narrowed. “You,” he said, sounding surprised. “It’s you.”

  “Me,” she confirmed, mildly amused. If he hadn’t expected to find her here, then he hadn’t come looking to make her pay for his dented pickup, but if he wasn’t here about the fender bender, why was he on her front porch?

  Silence stretched out long as a lonesome highway.

  Their eyes hitched up like a truck to a trailer and they studied each other warily.

  Lately, life had come at her in a hazy blur of pain. As a defense mechanism, she numbed herself against sensation, but right here, right now, everything dropped into distinct, pinpoint-focus. She could finally see again. What had before seemed unfathomable was now fraught with clarity and before he said another word, she suddenly knew exactly who he was.

  Finally, he glanced at a note clipped to the papers in his hand that were an identical copy of the government papers she had tucked into a drawer. “You’re Lissette Moncrief?”

  An icy blade that had nothing to do with impending rain, knifed her. The haunted expression on his face, the throbbing at the hollow of her neck, her husband’s insurance papers crumpled in his broad masculine fingers, the hairs rising on her forearm all fused into this crystal-clear moment.

  She brought a hand to her chest. Words jammed up. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Finally stuttered, “Y-yes.”

  In excruciating slow motion, he swept off his cowboy hat, held it over his heart like he was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. His thick, whiskey-colored hair, creased from the mold of his Stetson, curled up along his scalp. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple pumping up, and then slowly drifting down. “My name is Rafferty Jones.”

  Yes. Here he was at last. Jake’s illegitimate half brother showing up three months too late.

  Her hand grasped the side of the door and it was all she could do to keep from slamming it in his face. How screwed up was it that fate had sent her plowing into him in Searcy’s parking lot? The clarity cracked into a mosaic of confusion. Nothing in the world made sense.

  Ice slicked her from the inside out. A hundred unexpressed emotions locked up her throat, clicking closed a hundred tiny padlocks. She couldn’t speak. This was the same man who’d stolen her money.

  It wasn’t your money and he didn’t steal it. It was Jake’s life insurance and death gratuity to do with what he wished and apparently he wanted his brother to have it over you and Kyle. Honor that. Accept it. Move on. You don’t need Jake’s money. You can take care of yourself.

  “May I come in?” he asked, his eyes somber. “I came to pay my condolences.”

  “A bit late, don’t you think?” Okay, that was bitchy. She didn’t know anything about his circumstances or what was in his heart.

  His eyes never strayed from her face. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had studied her so intently. These days most people—at a loss for the right words or afraid that widowhood might be contagious—avoided catching her eye. It would only get worse once Kyle’s condition became general knowledge.

  It was refreshing, his unrelenting stare. She held his gaze. Didn’t waver.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t have come sooner,” he said. “I’ve been in Australia for three months on business, and it wasn’t until I got home last week that I found . . .” He tightened his grip on the papers. “This.”

  “You didn’t know Jake was dead?”

  He shook his head. “Not until I opened this letter from the army upon my return home. Who around here would tell me?”

  Lissette fingered her bottom lip. “The army didn’t call? E-mail?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  His shoulders lifted. “I dunno. Must have slipped between the cracks. Government bureaucracy at its finest. My phone number is unlisted and I’d gotten a new e-mail address. Whatever the snafu, they simply sent this letter, a copy of Jake’s papers, and the check.”

  A doleful expression flickered across Rafferty’s face so briefly she wondered if she’d imagined it.

  It occurred to her then that his loss was fresher than hers. She had already come to terms with Jake’s demise. Honestly, she’d been alone so much of their marriage that she scarcely missed him during the course of her day-to-day life. While she had mourned her husband and the tragedy of his passing, their marriage had been crippled for a long time, and it was only with his death that she’d begun to realize the extent of it.

  But Rafferty was still adjusting to the news. Then again, how well had he even known Jake? Her husband had never mentioned his half brother to her. Claudia claimed never to have heard of him. If the brothers had any kind of a real bond, why hadn’t Jake ever told her about Rafferty?

  “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “That’s a terrible way to find out.”

  Neither Rafferty nor Lissette spoke. They stood breathing in the heaviness of the moment, more cloying than New Orleans humidity in August.

  What to do? She could rise to the occasion, invite him in, and discover what he wanted, or she could give him some excuse and send him on his way. She twisted the doorknob in her hand. The urge to swing it closed was strong, but she could see the pain on his face, even as he struggled to hide it.

  “Come in,” she said finally, stepping aside and wondering all t
he while what she was letting herself in for.

  The stranger conscientiously grated his boots against the scraper before stepping inside.

  “Please, come into the kitchen. Bad news goes down better with coffee and crumb cake,” Lissette called over her shoulder as she led the way.

  Stetson still clutched in his hand, he followed her. “Where’s your boy?”

  “I put him down for a nap.”

  Rafferty moved with the lanky, loose-limbed gait of a natural cowboy, as if he was more comfortable on horseback than on foot. His dark eyes scanned the room, the tight, masculine lines of his mouth at once both comforting and unnerving. A mouth that seemed to say, I’m a man you can count on. Trust me.

  Lissette blinked, seeing the room through a stranger’s eyes. The kitchen housed commercial-grade appliances, two large convection ovens, a state-of-the-art refrigerator, and dishwasher. Stainless steel glistened and everything smelled of organic cleaning products. Three wooden bar stools were tucked up to the backside of the marble-slab cooking island.

  Her parents had paid for her kitchen renovations as a lavish Christmas present the previous year when Texas laws had changed to allow cottage-industry bakers to operate from their homes as long as certain conditions were met. Before the law passed, Lissette had been forced to lease space from a commercial bakery in the nearby town of Twilight, to make the wedding cakes she sold through Mariah’s wedding planning business. The renovations were another reason she was reluctant to ask her parents for money. They were still paying off the loan for the project.

  “Have a seat,” she invited.

  Rafferty pulled out a bar stool. The wooden legs scraped against the terrazzo floor. He settled his cowboy hat on the seat of a second stool.

  Lissette turned to grind coffee beans. Soon the rich smell of freshly crushed French roast filled the room and the only sound between them was the gurgle of the coffeemaker.

  Rafferty perched awkwardly on the stool, as if he were just waiting for an excuse to fly away. He tilted his head, studied her hands.

  Feeling self-conscious, she tucked her arms behind her back. “So,” she began, searching for something to say. “You’re Jake’s half brother. I never knew about you.”

  He nodded as if that did not surprise him. Strong, silent type. The cowboy type. Someone she should stay away from.

  “But you knew about me?” she asked.

  “Not much,” he admitted. “Just your name. Jake sent me your wedding announcement.”

  “But not an invitation?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you find that strange?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “I’m the skeleton in the closet.”

  “You’re younger than Jake.”

  “By four years.”

  “That makes you twenty-nine.”

  Another nod.

  “Me too,” she said for no reason. “I’ll be thirty in January.”

  “You look much younger.” He spread his palms out on the island, the backs of his tanned hands startling against the white marble. His nails were clean and clipped short but his knuckles were crisscrossed with small nicks and scars.

  Her face heated at his straightforward comment. “It’s not just Jake. No one around here has ever talked about you. That fact in and of itself is quite odd in a small town where even the brand of laundry soap that people use is up for public discussion.”

  Slowly, he drummed his fingers against the marble, producing the simple duple meter of a funeral march. The beat sent a shiver over her. He shrugged again, circumspect. Nothing at all like Jake.

  She felt like a cotton shirt twisted dry by the old-fashioned wringer that decorated her mother-in-law’s screened sun porch in retro country chic. Knotted up. Tense. “When did you learn who your real father was?”

  “I always knew. My mother didn’t hide the fact that my father was married with a family in Texas and he wanted nothing to do with us.” He kept up the drumming. “Who knows? Maybe that’s why I became a cowboy. To impress him.”

  Lissette tried to imagine what that was like. Knowing that your father wanted nothing to do with you. A rush of sympathy washed over her for the little kid that he’d been, growing up without a dad. It killed her soul to realize that her son would never know his father either. It wasn’t fair. For Rafferty or Kyle.

  “Did you ever meet your father?” she asked.

  Rafferty shook his head.

  “I never met him either.” She moved to pour up the coffee in matching blue earthenware mugs. “Gordon died before Jake and I met. Everyone says he was a die-hard cutting horse cowboy. Real alpha male.”

  “So my mother tells me. I guess that’s why she fell for him.”

  “And the wedding ring on his finger didn’t stop her?” She slid a mug in front of Rafferty, stepped back to lean against the kitchen counter, putting distance between them. “Sugar? Cream?”

  He placed a hand over his cup, indicating black coffee was fine with him. Lissette stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into her mug.

  “My mother is what she is,” he said evenly, no judgment in his voice.

  “Why didn’t she demand Gordon provide for you? She could have forced him to pay child support.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Perplexed by his calmness, Lissette pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “Didn’t she ever think about what she was doing to you?”

  “Good coffee,” Rafferty mused, and took a long sip.

  To hell with the coffee. She settled her hands on her hips, unexpected fury digging into her. “I don’t understand why your mother would do that to you.”

  He shifted, said nothing for so long that she thought that he wasn’t going to answer. It had been rude of her to ask. It was none of her business. She stared out the window, saw a sparrow perch on the rooster weathervane Jake had installed, and wished she could take the question back, because she understood all at once that her anger had nothing to do with Rafferty or his mother.

  Finally, he said, “I love my mother, but she’s bipolar. She’s much better now, with the right medication, but when I was a kid . . .” He let his words trail off. His eyes stayed impassive, unreadable, giving no clue as to how he felt.

  “I . . .” She swallowed, traced an index finger over the countertop. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through because I know how wearing other people’s pity can be. But you’ve done well for yourself in spite of your childhood.”

  “I’ve done well because of it,” he corrected. “If my mother had been strong, I wouldn’t have had to be. She made me who I am.”

  How could he not be filled with rage and pain? How did a person get to such lofty acceptance? She bit down on her thumbnail. Why couldn’t peace come in a powder that you could stir in your coffee like sugar and drink it up?

  “So how and when did you first make contact with Jake?”

  His unflinching gaze met hers. That head-on look told her that this man did not shy away from trouble, but neither did he go searching for it as Jake had. “Jake came to California looking for me after Gordon died. It was the summer he turned twenty.”

  “That would have made you sixteen.”

  “Yep. To me, Jake was superhero. Larger than life. Over the top. He did everything in a big way.”

  “That’s Jake,” she said. Stopped. Corrected. “Was.”

  She saw it, the first glimpse of raw emotion on his face. Loss. Regret. But then it disappeared like smoke up a chimney. “What was that like? Meeting your half brother for the first time?”

  “I was excited,” he said. “It felt good to have someone looking out after me for a change.”

  “How long did he visit you?”

  “The entire summer.”

  “Your mother didn’t mind that he stayed so long?”

  “He paid room and board. She liked that. Jake kept trying to talk my mother into moving. The neighborhood was so rough that gun
fire woke us up more nights than not. Finally, before Jake left, he rented an affordable apartment in a safer part of town and moved us all in. He paid up the rent for two months, but of course, after that, Amelia couldn’t make the payments and we ended up back where we’d started.”

  Lissette didn’t know what to say, so she just opened the lid of the cake plate, cut off two slices of crumb cake. “What were you doing in Australia?”

  “Making a film.”

  “You’re an actor?” That surprised her. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good-looking enough to be an actor, because he certainly was. He just seemed too down-to-earth for such a quixotic career. Then again, what did she know of him?

  “I train horses for the movies. I have to be on set every day.”

  “Is there a lot of money in that?”

  “I wouldn’t say a lot, but I do all right. I work on three or four movies a year. It covers the bills.”

  A low rumble of thunder crackled overhead. She glanced out the window again. A black cat ran across the backyard in a fine-mist drizzle. Another long silence stretched between them. They looked everywhere but at each other. The red light on the coffeemaker glowed. The kitchen clock ticked loudly. The crumb cake dissolved into sweet moistness on her tongue, but she barely tasted it.

  “Jake called me from Kandahar,” Rafferty murmured.

  “What?” she asked, not certain that she’d heard him correctly. “When?”

  “It was just days before he was killed. He hadn’t called me in five years.”

  Distressed, Lissette inhaled audibly. Jake had called Rafferty from Afghanistan, but he had not called her? She hadn’t even gotten more than a couple of e-mails from him during the three weeks after his arrival in Kandahar for his tour of duty until the time the death notification officers had shown up on the Fourth of July to break the tragic news.

  At the time, she’d thought Jake’s silence was nothing more than a symptom of their deteriorating marriage. Now, with what Rafferty was telling her, she couldn’t help wondering what else had been going on in Jake’s head.

  “What . . .” She moistened her lips, braced herself. “What did he say?”