Cowboy Christmas Redemption

by Maisey Yates

  Dyslexia. He knew the answer to that.

  But no one had cared about learning disabilities in a small town all that many years ago, and Hank Dalton certainly hadn’t ever considered it.

  He was seen as lazy. Disrespectful.

  Stupid.

  When he’d been trying his hardest. Trying his damnedest.

  He felt like he was drowning, and he resented it.

  It had only gotten worse as he’d gotten older. Physically, he was strong, and he knew that when it came to hanging out in a group, making conversation, he could do it as well as anyone else.

  He could take apart a car engine and put it back together. Could do the same to a tractor. Put something real in front of him, something physical, and he could make it work, make it not work, make it into something shaped like a chicken. Hell, whatever anyone needed.

  But sitting down and reading out loud in a room full of people? Hell no.

  And so he’d found his way. He found his group. His friends.

  His career.

  One that required brute strength and brilliance on a physical level, and not all that stagnant book learning that threatened to give him a migraine every time he attempted it.

  And the only person he had ever tried to improve that for was Ellie.

  Hell, he knew his motivation was tainted during those interactions by the sheer fact that he hadn’t done it in the first place. Because nothing else had ever made him want to fix it.

  Of course, having a name for what he was, for what it meant that the letters looked all kinds of funny, and tended to move on a page, had meant something, too.

  Ellie had known. Of course.

  Because as little as he could wrap his brain around anything like that, it was what she did. She didn’t just understand all that; she could teach it to other people.

  She had even managed to make inroads teaching him.

  And given the amount of teachers he’d had over the course of his life who hadn’t been able to do that at all, he knew what a damned miracle it was. What it meant to be a good teacher.

  And how it was a gift and a calling more than it was anything else.

  Ellie was that.

  Ellie was also a thorn in his side.

  Ellie was also the reason he’d kept his dyslexia a secret. At first it had been innocent enough. He hadn’t known what to make of having a name for his struggles. He hadn’t been comfortable with it. Hadn’t liked it.

  And slowly it had become something secret, shared with the one woman he craved intimacy with. It might not have been physical intimacy, but it was an intimacy and he’d found some kind of satisfaction in that.

  And after that...well, even after he’d put a stop to the lessons, he’d held on to the secret.

  It was tangled up in her. In his guilt.

  There was a knock on his front door.

  Which was weird, because he had only lived here for about twenty-four hours. The only people who really knew it were his family. Of course, it could be a roving band of Jehovah’s Witnesses on rotation. That was entirely possible.

  He took the wooden stairs two at a time and crossed into the entryway, beer bottle still in hand. He jerked the door open and froze.

  Because Ellie was standing there, carrying a very large casserole dish.

  Now, normally the casserole dish would not be the first thing he noticed, but she was holding it in a way that covered her breasts, and it was held so high aloft it was right in his face, and she was gazing at him with a strange kind of hopefulness that he couldn’t quite figure out.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he responded.

  “I brought you dinner.” She held the casserole up yet more insistently. It was covered with tinfoil, so he didn’t know what it was.

  “What did you bring?”

  She blinked, and then looked up at him like that owl in his tree. “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah,” he responded.

  “Because you have something better in your fridge?”

  He flashed back to the fridge full of beer and nothing else.

  “No.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Just let me in.”

  He stepped aside and she breezed past him. For a second there, the interaction had felt almost normal. The way they had been before the kiss. Before the... Yeah, before the much more than kissing.

  She went into the kitchen and started hunting around.

  “Can I help you find something, Ellie?” he asked, leaning in the doorway and watching her flutter around officiously.

  “A serving spoon.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chicken and stuffing,” she responded, making a sound of triumph when she opened the drawer and found a large flat silver spoon. Then she rooted around in the cupboards, taking down a couple of plates. She peeled back the tinfoil, and his stomach started to growl.

  “Good thing I came,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”

  She dished him a heaping helping and handed the plate to him. Then she squinted as she looked around. “Do you really not have a dining table?”

  He lifted a shoulder, following her gaze to the barren dining spot in the kitchen. “One is coming.”

  “And what were you going to do until then?”

  “Eat on the couch. Which frankly is what I’m going to do most of the time anyway.”

  “Well, then, I guess we should go eat on the couch.”

  Ellie availed herself of her own beer, and handed him the bottle, which he took care of scalping before he handed it back to her.

  Then the two of them went into the living room. The floors were bare, and for some reason, when Ellie crossed them, her feet loud on the wood planks, he had the thought that he needed a rug. Something to make it a little bit more comfortable.

  She sat down in the armchair, her feet tucked up under her, and he took a place on the couch. They ate in silence, barely looking at each other.

  “Where’s Amelia?” he asked.

  “With Vanessa and Jacob,” she responded. “I thought it might be good practice for them.”

  He chuckled. “A four-year-old is hardly practice for a newborn baby.”

  “Hey, their kid will be four eventually. They’ll be able to look back on this couple of hours and draw inspiration from it.”

  “I bet she already has Jacob dressed up in a tutu.”

  A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and he felt an answering tug in his gut. “She’s very persuasive that way.”

  That was true. The little thing was a petite blonde bulldozer. Just like her mother.

  Which made Ellie’s appearance slightly suspicious.

  Ellie was the kind of woman who went right for what she wanted. She’d done it as a young woman, getting into college like she had. She’d done it when she’d established the school at the Dalton family ranch.

  She didn’t do anything without a plan, and she didn’t do anything without a huge amount of strength.

  Including making casseroles.

  He looked up at her just as she took a bite, and she treated him to a closed-lip grin, which looked as suspicious as about everything else in the moment did.

  “When are you going to open up the tree lots?” she asked, her tone a shade too sweet and interested.

  It was damned suspicious.

  “Well,” he said. “We’re going to start cutting trees this weekend. I’m going to commission some of the boys from the school. Do you have any thoughts on who might need to get involved in that?”

  She nodded slowly. “I’ll send over a list. And I’ll offer it to some of them as extra credit.”

  Caleb’s heart felt a little bit tangled up, because it reminded him so much of how he’d gotten through school. What he’d just been t
hinking about.

  “It’s nice to be able to use the strengths you’ve got,” he commented.

  “Well,” she said. “I certainly think so. But then, I also like to think that, in general, the size of the school and all of that, that it lends itself to playing to their different strengths. To help them see that they have them.”

  Caleb nodded and took a bite of stuffing. “It’s good to have someone give you those chances. Regular school for someone whose brain doesn’t work...regular. Well, that isn’t any fun.”

  “I’d like to say that things are set up a little bit better now across the board,” Ellie said softly. “The kids don’t suffer the way that you did. But it’s only ever as good as the administration allows it to be. It’s only ever as good as the education on the funding that the schools receive. And sometimes it’s only ever as good as the teacher. So a lot of these boys have been hurt. And sometimes it’s because they are their own worst enemy. But the fact remains that it means they need to learn a different way of experiencing school. A different way of interacting with authority. And cutting Christmas trees will probably be good.”

  “Yeah, and then after that they can work the lot. See it through.” He took a breath. “You know, I understand the way that some people view manual labor. With a kind of sneer, looking down your nose at it, like it’s less. But I’ve never found anything more satisfying than going out and making a change with my own two hands. Seeing a project through from start to finish, knowing that what I did...that it changed something. The shape of an object, the landscape. When you’re fighting fires, that your hands helped put up the blockade that preserved the wilderness. That you dug those trenches, ran those fire lines that saved houses, trees, animals. Lives. There’s no shame in it.”

  “I’ve never thought there was,” she said softly. “It’s the kind of thing I admire, really and truly.”

  Ellie set her plate to the side and scooted to the edge of the chair, planting her feet on the floor. Then she looked at him, a note of determination in her eyes, and stood.

  “Ellie,” he said, his voice a warning.

  Then she sighed heavily, dropped her hands to her sides before gripping the hem of her top and pulling it up over her head, bra and all, leaving her standing there showing off the most perfect, beautiful pair of breasts he’d ever seen.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I brought dessert.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ELLIE THOUGHT THAT she might die.

  In the space between that moment she decided to remove her shirt, and when it actually came off, her brain had gone entirely blank. And then she was standing there with her boobs out, looking at her best friend’s face, which was going through so many shifts and changes she couldn’t even get a read on one.

  She took a breath, and she took a step toward him. And tension was strung tight inside her like a live wire.

  Because the man had given her an orgasm. Only the second man to ever do it. And she was straight-up obsessed with getting near him again. Getting his hands on her, and she didn’t know how to function like that. Not even a little bit.

  She was thinking about it constantly, and sometimes when she thought about it, it was like a heavy weight that threatened to crush her. Honestly, sexual frustration was the absolute best that it could be.

  She had bantered about it with Vanessa yesterday, she had flirted with Caleb in the days in between and all of that... All of that had helped push the larger, heavier something away.

  But she couldn’t outrun it. Not anymore. So she just needed it finished. Needed it done.

  He opened his mouth like he was going to say something but she didn’t give him a chance to. Instead, she wiggled herself out of her jeans and her panties before she could think better of it, and watched as the color drained from his face.

  He leaned back in his chair, his large hands pressed to his thighs. And she made the decision to just keep going.

  She braced herself on the back of the chair, leaning in, the heat from his body radiating from his large frame. And then she put one knee on the chair beside him, the other on the other side, and scooted herself in close, her legs parted, her breasts right at his eye level, and every part of her feeling so exposed it was a miracle that she wasn’t shaking like a Chihuahua.

  He was frozen, his hands still gripping his own thighs, and if it hadn’t been for the slight rise and fall of his chest with each jagged breath he took, she might have thought he was made of stone.

  “I’m ready,” she whispered, her lips right near his. “And you don’t get to tell me that I’m not.”

  And suddenly, he moved, his big hands gripping her hips, hot and rough and calloused, jerking her down hard onto his lap, the most tender place on her body coming into contact with the hardest part of his.

  It was a whole litany of sensation. The rough denim, his erection, hard as steel. Heat and strength, the roughness of his hands.

  He just stared at her, those blue eyes never wavering.

  Her lips burned, but he didn’t make a move to kiss them.

  So she did.

  She kissed the edge of his mouth, right at the corner, and the growl that rumbled in his chest reminded her of a lion.

  And then his hands were in her hair, holding her steady as he consumed her.

  This had all the passion of their previous encounters, but there was an edge to it. He didn’t seem to have control of himself. Didn’t seem to have control of anything. He was shaking. Shaking like a damn leaf as he plundered her mouth, his blunt fingertips digging into her hips. His hold might leave a bruise, and she didn’t even mind.

  He arched his hips upward and she gasped. The intensity of the pleasure, of the need inside her, shocked her completely.

  She had thought that maybe... Maybe what had happened by the fire was a little bit of a fluke. Because it had been so long since she’d been with a man, so long since she’d been touched, that perhaps it led to the intensity that she’d felt. But this was even more intense. Even more overwhelming.

  Sex, in her experience, was light and fun. Pleasurable, companionable. She had kissed more smiles off her husband’s face than she could count.

  But nobody was smiling here.

  This felt feral and angry, desperate and on the verge of madness. He let his hands slide up, his thumbs curving around the underside of her breasts as he leaned her back slightly and lowered his head, taking one nipple into his mouth and sucking hard.

  It sent an arrow of pleasure down between her thighs, made her cry out. And maybe it would’ve been embarrassing if she had the access to those kinds of feelings, but she didn’t. She was a creature made entirely of fire and desire, and there was no space for embarrassment within that.

  It had all been burned away.

  His whiskers scraped against her tender skin as he licked and sucked a path over her body, as he teased and tormented her, holding her still on his entirely clothed lap.

  “I want to see you,” she whispered, fumbling as she pushed her hands beneath his T-shirt and made contact with the muscles there.

  She jerked it up over his head, her movements clumsy as she did so.

  And then he wrapped his arms around her, crushing her breasts to his bare chest, the heat, the intensity of being so close to him, skin to skin... She didn’t think she could survive it.

  She didn’t know what this was.

  She had thought she knew all about sex. She’d thought she’d known what desire was. Because hadn’t she felt it hundreds of times?

  But it wasn’t this. Nothing had ever been this before.

  But maybe it was because she’d never been this before.

  She was a woman who had gone through the fire and, like metal, had been tortured and forged into something else, something harder, sharper, and as a result...

  The need was harder. Sharper.

 
Darker.

  Something that belonged to a stranger.

  And when she looked up and met her best friend’s eyes, he was a stranger, too. Because this wasn’t the man that she had known for all these years.

  This man was...

  Dangerous.

  Just like he’d said.

  She was never as safe as she’d believed. Because this had existed beneath the surface all that time.

  If she hadn’t known.

  You didn’t even know what was in you. How could you have ever known it was in him?

  But then all thought was eradicated when he consumed her mouth yet again, using his free hand to undo the buckle on his jeans.

  “Wait,” she whispered, the word sounding slurred, thick and drunken. “Just wait a moment.”

  Because she’d come prepared. She’d come prepared for this.

  She scrambled off his lap and went back into the kitchen, totally naked, pulling through her purse and retrieving a couple of condoms. Then she returned, and when she did he had shucked his jeans partway down his thighs.

  And there he was.

  She squeezed her thighs together, pleasure striking her like an arrow. She felt hollow, desperate with need.

  He was huge.

  And beautiful.

  She could honestly say she’d never thought about that body part as being beautiful. But he was. All of him. The bit of his muscular, glorious thighs that she could see, that flat, rippling stomach with just the right amount of hair covering it. Up to that magnificently furred chest, well-defined and absolutely delicious.

  She tore the condom open and made her way to where he sat. Then she got down on her knees in front of him, wrapping her hand around his body and leaning in.

  “What the hell?” he growled, grabbing hold of her hair and jerking her face backward.

  “I was pondering a blow job,” she said. “I have it on good authority that men enjoy those.”

  “Later,” he growled, pulling her up onto his lap.

  “Later?”

  “I need to be in you,” he gritted out. Looking purposefully at the condom.

  She grabbed it, rolling it down over his hard, thick length. She moaned as she did, biting her lip.