Cowboy Christmas Redemption

by Maisey Yates

  She was about to say something about going slow. About being gentle with her, because it had been a thousand years since she’d had a man inside her. But the words were lost when the thick head of his arousal met the entrance to her body, and he began to lower her slowly onto his length.

  She gripped his shoulders and he held her hips, and with one last thrust that took her breath away, Caleb Dalton pushed himself fully inside her.

  And she couldn’t breathe.

  Her throat closed, a knot in it, an ache that made it feel like her chest was being crushed. Tears filled her eyes, a heavy, dull pain radiating through her body that threatened to overshadow the pleasure that she felt over being filled by him.

  She didn’t know what was happening to her. Nothing like this had ever happened to her.

  And Caleb wouldn’t look away. He wouldn’t smile. He wouldn’t make a joke. And so it all just built. And built and built and built, while he sat there with him inside her, unmoving.

  She trembled, her bottom lip quivering, her internal muscles pulsing around him. And she was sure that she was going to come. Just from sitting there, with him inside her. And maybe cry, and do it again. Again and again. Because there might be no end to this. It was like a fathomless ocean that she couldn’t see the bottom of.

  She was going to drown.

  Thank God she knew those hands. Knew those hands could take a broken thing and fix it, whatever it was.

  Just as she had the thought, he pressed his thumb between them right there, stroking the source of her need as he flexed his hips, and then withdrew from her, thrusting back in, and lights burst behind her eyelids. She clung to him, wave after wave of need pulsing through her body as she came and came, in an endless wave of pleasure.

  She clung to him, because she didn’t know what else to do.

  Clung to him, because if she didn’t, there would be nothing at all to hold her together. Nothing at all.

  But he wasn’t done with her.

  He wrapped his arms around her, and lowered them both to the floor, the wood rough and cold against her back. And then he thrust into her, harder this time. His movements animal, lacking any kind of rhythm as he drove her to a place that was somewhere past pleasure. In the realm of desperation and fantasy, where she was afraid she might be sliced in half as easily as she found release.

  And she couldn’t look away from him. Couldn’t find a way to breathe. Because it was Caleb, pounding into her like his life depended on it. It was Caleb who made a guttural sound and clenched his teeth, lowering his head and then biting her neck as he found his own release, as it triggered hers.

  Every muscle in her body went tight, and she arched up into him, clinging to his shoulders, aware of every pulse of her body, and every answering pulse in his.

  She had known pleasure. She had known orgasms. But this was something else. This was like an invasion. And when it was over, she didn’t feel better. She didn’t feel like it was finished. And she didn’t feel like everything would be okay.

  And Caleb... Caleb looked like fury.

  Fury in the form of a beautiful man who had just ridden her to ecstasy, and now looked like he might destroy them both with the force of his rage.

  He rolled away from her, and she cried out when he withdrew from her body.

  “Ellie,” he said, his voice jagged.

  “I...” A tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Dammit,” he ground out. “I told you it wasn’t time yet.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I don’t know what... I don’t know... It was time, obviously, because it happened.” She finished it lamely, unable to find any more eloquent words, because she was naked, and because her body was still on fire, and because she wanted to curl up in a ball and weep because she didn’t know who she was anymore, and even worse, she didn’t know who her best friend was anymore.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” he said.

  “How was it supposed to happen?” She felt thickheaded and sad. And she wanted to go lay her head down on the couch and weep, but she didn’t want to do it in front of him, either. One tear was all she would forfeit. The rest were going to have to stay put.

  “Are you telling me that was an accident? You bringing me dinner and taking your clothes off?”

  She felt so exposed. She had given herself to him. She’d taken a risk. She’d given him sex—damned amazing sex—and he was mad at her now. Afterward, of course. Because he’d been all in when he’d been...well, all in.

  How fair was that?

  She’d stripped herself. Bared herself in more than one way. And he was angry?

  That wasn’t fair.

  And that conviction heated her sadness until it had boiled over into something much more dangerous.

  “Are you honestly going to complain about it?” she yelled.

  “I told you...”

  “I don’t give a damn, Caleb. I don’t give a damn what you want. Or what you told me. This was about what I wanted. I got it. I got it, and you couldn’t control yourself, so don’t be a little bitch at me about it.”

  He looked like he’d transitioned back into a mountain. “Fine. I guess you got what you came for. I hope it felt good.”

  “Oh, just the best,” she said, getting up and stomping over to where her clothes were. “Just the best. What a great time.” She forced out a laugh.

  “Is that what you wanted? You wanted a good time?”

  “Yeah. Why not. That’s what sex is. It’s supposed to be fun. And this isn’t fun. And I don’t know.”

  She looked at him, at the fury on his face, and stood there in the pit of her own making for just a moment. The despair that was growing in her chest, weighing her down like an anchor. And for the first time since all this began, she didn’t know if they were going to be okay.

  Because this didn’t feel finished. It felt broken. She felt broken. And maybe she had been broken too many times to be fixed again.

  “I’m leaving. I need to go home.”

  And she wasn’t even going to go get Amelia. Vanessa could keep her. It was for the best.

  “Ellie... You don’t have to go.”

  “I want to go.”

  And without another word, she got dressed. “You can keep the casserole.”

  Then she walked out of the house, and it wasn’t until she was in the car that she let herself dissolve completely into tears.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CALEB’S WORLD WAS rocked on its axis. Ellie had done that. And then she had left.

  She had come into his house and subverted his control. Everything that he wanted to believe about himself, and she had shown him that he was exactly what he had always feared he was.

  A breath away from betraying everything and everyone that he cared about if Ellie ever once acted like she’d wanted to taste him as badly as he wanted to taste her.

  He could still feel her hair, soft and sifting through his fingers, could still feel her bare breasts pressed against his chest. Could still feel the tight, wet clasp of her body around him.

  Like home.

  Like heaven.

  Like hell.

  But she was gone.

  She was running.

  And maybe she should run. He wasn’t the man for her. If he had been...well, he would have been. At some point over the years.

  She’d had the best man.

  And he wasn’t that.

  She didn’t even know the half of it.

  But the sex had been...

  Yeah. That had been the best. He knew it had been, for her, too. From the way she had clung to him, dug her fingernails into his shoulders, cried out her pleasure. From the shocked, frightened expression on her face when she had gathered her clothes.

  This had terrified her. And he understood why.
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br />   He’d had a lot of sex. Well, more to the point, he’d had a lot of sexual partners. A whole lot more than Ellie had had—that much he knew. And he could say, without a doubt, that chemistry like that wasn’t common, wasn’t accidental.

  He’d never felt anything like that before.

  And as soon as it was finished, he craved more.

  But she was gone. She was just gone, and it wasn’t acceptable.

  She had done this. She had done this to them both. That night out in front of the bar, when she had said that it should be him. She had done it.

  And a better man would let her walk away. He knew that.

  But he wasn’t a better man. Maybe it was time that he accepted that.

  He couldn’t be. He was never going to measure up to the ideal of anyone else. Not his brothers, not Clint.

  That was something that his father already knew.

  After Hank had offered Clint the money for college and Caleb had...well, he’d acted out of spite, was what he’d done.

  Stolen Hank’s antique rifles and stashed them in Clint’s truck.

  When the missing guns had turned up, Clint hadn’t known how to explain their presence, and Caleb hadn’t said a word.

  The next day Clint told him he’d refused his father’s offer, not because of the situation with the guns but because he knew that Hank hadn’t offered the same to Caleb.

  And Caleb still hadn’t said a damn thing about those guns.

  And Hank had tried to believe Clint when he said he hadn’t known where they came from. But things hadn’t been the same.

  Caleb had done what he’d set out to do. He’d put a rift between Clint and his parents, one that was forgotten in the fullness of time, and with Clint passed on from the world.

  But the guilt had eaten at Caleb ever since. It had gotten corrosive when Ellie had come on the scene, and mixed up in his desire for her had always been the question of if he just wanted what his friend had.

  Since then, he had tried.

  He had tried. Tried to be the best man he could be. And a lot of that had hinged on the kind of friend that he’d been. To Clint. And since then to Ellie.

  Well, tonight he hadn’t exactly been the best friend.

  But he’d been the best lover. And he wasn’t sure he could go back to being the friend.

  Which meant they had to go full steam ahead. At least, that was what he figured.

  Because she was playing games. Back and forth, hot and cold. She thought that she could come to his house and take what she wanted, exactly how she wanted. No matter how many times he told her that he wasn’t her toy, she wasn’t seeming to understand what that meant.

  He’d told her that she wasn’t ready, and he hadn’t realized how true that had been, but she didn’t know that.

  For all she knew, he was a damn psychic.

  In reality, he hadn’t been ready. Not for this.

  But it was too late, and that was her fault.

  He grabbed his keys and put his cowboy hat on his head, still buckling his belt as he got into his truck and began to drive in the direction toward her house.

  It was possible that she was going to pick Amelia up, and then he was going to have to be very careful about the content of their conversation.

  But no, Ellie had been upset. She had an evening of babysitting. Plus, going over to Vanessa and Jacob’s house would necessitate telling them exactly what had happened.

  Though he had a feeling that Vanessa was privy to what was going on, all things considered. Ellie probably would still avoid going back and explaining herself, especially considering how upset she was.

  It was a strange realization that he knew that. That he knew it down to his bones, and didn’t even question it as he continued on the winding road that would take him to her little farmhouse.

  He had never known a woman he was sleeping with to this degree.

  He had never wanted to. Not since her.

  A pang shot through him, reverberated in his teeth, and he clenched his jaw shut. He didn’t like that. Didn’t like that all this stuff seemed to exist just below the surface.

  All these feelings.

  But maybe it was just because there was no escaping the history.

  That moment when he’d first seen her, that had felt a lot like love at first sight. The slow-growing death of that hope, until he finally had to kill it off completely.

  The mistake he’d made letting himself get close to it, tricking himself into believing that emotional intimacy wasn’t as bad as physical intimacy. That it wasn’t moving into territory with his friend’s wife that he had no business being in at all.

  When he pulled into the house, her car was already there, the light on in the front window of the farmhouse. Yeah. She was home.

  He parked and stomped up the porch, and it took every ounce of his self-control not to simply barge in.

  But he still had some civility, and he was going to go ahead and employ that. For now.

  He knocked.

  And he waited.

  She knew who it was. He had no doubt about that. It was why it took her so long to come to the door. But she did. Eventually, it cracked slightly, and her wary blue eye appeared through the crack.

  “I thought it was you,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to open the door,” he said.

  “That would be childish.”

  “Storming out of my house wasn’t childish?”

  “We had a fight,” she said, opening the front door wide and standing to the side.

  He pushed in past her, his boots heavy on the wood floor. “We had sex,” he said. “And you ran away.”

  “Because you were mean,” she said.

  “Because I already told you that I wasn’t going to be used by you, and that’s exactly what you did.”

  “No,” she said, flinging her hands wide. “I wasn’t...using you. It’s just that I...”

  “You weren’t using me? Really? So you didn’t get what you wanted then have a fit because you couldn’t control the entire thing? Every feeling? You didn’t come in and seduce me when you knew full well...”

  “Oh, shut up. It’s not like you don’t have any self-control. You didn’t have to let me seduce you. You wanted it.”

  “Maybe I did,” he said. “But I also knew that it would be a disaster, and I tried to warn you.”

  “Well, I’m not the keeper of the sex. You engaged,” she pointed out. “Enthusiastically, I might add.”

  “And then you got upset.”

  “I don’t know what to do with this,” she said, shaking her hands. “I don’t know what to do with these feelings. This is not sex to me.”

  “You came, Ellie. That much I know.”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes widening. “I did. And I... It made me want to cry. It did make me cry. I don’t feel normal anymore. I feel like I’ve been hollowed out, and I just want to be filled. By you. And I don’t even mean that in a physical, dirty way. Except, I kind of do. And I don’t know what to do with any of this. Because this isn’t something that I... I didn’t want this.”

  “What is this exactly that you didn’t want?”

  “I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to draw comparisons. Because it’s not fair. To anyone. Not to you, not to Clint, not to me.”

  Well, he didn’t want her to do it, either, but he couldn’t stop her from talking. Because he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. And then she went on.

  “But I was a different person than I am now when I met him.” She looked up at him, her expression bleak. Sad. “All I knew about relationships was people chasing other people. My mother chasing men, me chasing my mother. She wasn’t enough for them. I wasn’t enough for her. And I was sick of it. Sick of it as a daughter and determined to never, ever be that as a woman.�
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  She shook her head. “I didn’t know how to smile. I didn’t know how to laugh. I’d never been on a date because I didn’t want to get derailed from my life. I didn’t want to fall in love and get married. But he made me laugh. And kissing him made me smile. And he made me want to do things with a man that I’d never wanted to do before. And he made them fun. He made me laugh even when we were naked, and that was a shock to me. I didn’t think anything about love could be fun, but he made it fun. And that’s what I thought...that’s what I thought sex was. I thought for me, it could just be fun. That’s what he showed me, that relationships didn’t have to...”

  “Are you saying that wasn’t fun?” Fun really was a bad word for it. Nearly getting your head blown off couldn’t be described as fun.

  “Am I laughing?” she asked.

  “No. But it felt good.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It did. I’ve never felt anything like that. Sex has never been... It’s certainly never been all-consuming for me. Not like that. I don’t know if I like it.”

  “Why?” Even though he couldn’t deny what she was saying. It was true. What they’d experienced together wasn’t like anything else he’d experienced before.

  But he wanted it. He craved it. He had been trying to be a stand-in for her all this time. And he had just now become conscious of it. Trying to hang back and be the best man. Trying to take care of her, be solicitous and gentle and caring, and everything that Clint had been for her.

  But that had been who Clint was.

  And Ellie had needed him. She had made that abundantly clear. Clint had been the man that she had needed in order to fall in love.

  But if she wanted to have screaming orgasms and get sweaty in bed, maybe he was the man that she needed.

  And maybe she wouldn’t end up laughing when they were in bed together, but she would sure as hell come.

  “I’m not Clint,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “That is basically the thesis of the conversation.”

  “I never have been. But I’ve been trying. I’ve been trying to be what I thought you might need, because he was my best friend and I know that he would have wanted you to continue to be taken care of in the way that he did it. But I can’t. But I can give you this. I’m not a particularly good man, but I am very good in bed.”