Her Last Cowboy Christmas

by Liz Isaacson

  “She’s the last one in this enclosure,” Tricia said as the cat hissed.

  “Thanks,” Amber said, holding Sabrina the cat on her front side while Mariah got her blood. Several minutes later, the test came back negative, and Amber handed her to Kelsie with “Enclosure two,” again.

  “Lance is here,” Kelsie said, nodding out into the reception area of the cat enclosure. Every one had a full kitchen, as some of the cats had special diets, and Amber couldn’t see out into the other room.

  He was probably the one who’d called too. She sighed, though she was glad he’d stopped by. He’d probably heard about the cat flu and wanted to see how she was doing.

  She followed Kelsie and the yowling Sabrina out into the main room and said, “Hey,” to Lance while she went to wash her hands in the kitchen area.

  He didn’t respond, and he looked like one of the cats they’d been testing all morning. Caged. Angry. Ready to hiss.

  Amber stalled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can we talk privately?” he asked, his bright blue eyes shooting fire.

  “Sure,” she said more brightly than she felt. “Let me wash up first.”

  He nodded and then ducked back outside, leaving Amber to wonder what the big deal was. She hurried to wash her hands, and she joined him out in the heat. “What’s going on? How was your mother’s appointment this morning?” Maybe that had him upset.

  “She needs to have her gallbladder out,” he said. “Listen, she said you were going to Denver this weekend.” He looked at her with accusation in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I told you about it last night.”

  He frowned. “No…I don’t think so.”

  She stepped back to the door and grabbed her phone from the shelf inside. “Yes, I texted you while we were talking. I said Jewel asked me to go, because they haven’t found anyone else for the job yet, and they need someone who understands the organization.” She tapped and swiped, getting to their string of texts she and Lance had exchanged.

  “Here it is.” She turned her phone toward him so he could see the looong purple box where she’d typed it all out. “I thought it was kind of strange you didn’t even answer me.”

  “I did not get that text.” He pulled his phone out too, some of his anger leaking off of him. He tapped and swiped too, turning his screen toward her. The message wasn’t there.

  Amber didn’t know what to make of it. “I sent it.”

  “I can see that.” He exhaled and turned away from her. “My mother told me, and I may have freaked out a little bit.”

  “Why would you freak out?” Amber stepped around him, feeling very much in control—which was new for her. Usually the man was in control as she freaked out during hard conversations.

  She liked this change in herself too. “I’m not staying. I didn’t accept the job.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A week. I’ll be back in plenty of time for the wedding. I would never miss Karla’s wedding.”

  Lance ducked his head, his fingers darting over to brush hers. “So maybe I freaked out about nothing.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you freaked out about, and I’ll let you know?”

  “I thought maybe you’d decided to take the job. Leave me here. Move to Denver and start a new job.”

  Amber blinked, not liking his words one little bit. “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed. “I feel like…maybe this life isn’t exciting enough for you. Isn’t that one of the reasons you moved through boyfriends so fast?”

  Amber fell back a step, stunned now. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m worried I’m not going to be exciting enough for you.” Lance stuck his hands in his pockets, pressing his lips together like he’d said too much. He put his head down, and Amber couldn’t see his face.

  “Lance.” Frustration moved through her. “What makes you think I need an exciting life?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Mumbled, really.

  “Amber, Mariah needs you.” Kelsie left as fast as she’d opened the door.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I’m flying out in the morning. Come have coffee with me before I go.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

  “What time?” He lifted his head to meet her eyes.

  “Early, cowboy. As early as you can stand, I’ll already be up.” She smiled at him and ducked back into the cat enclosure to the sound of at least three cats harmonizing as they howled. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Kelsie pointed to the door. “Feline leukemia virus.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Amber’s heart pinged around in her chest. “That is not what we need right now.” She didn’t see how she was going to leave Last Chance Ranch in less than twenty-four hours. Not in the state it was currently in. But Jewel had promised her she’d send out a new volunteer coordinator for the week, and she’d insisted that she didn’t have anyone else to send to Denver.

  Amber hurried over to the door and stuck her head inside the makeshift exam room they’d been using. “What do you need from me?”

  “We need to close Feline Frenzy,” Mariah said. “Immediately. No more tours through here, and we need to contact anyone who’s adopted a cat in the past two weeks.”

  Amber felt the weight of her workload increase, but she nodded. “Are you two okay here for now?”

  “Yes,” Mariah said over another cat wail.

  “I’ll go pull the records and start making phone calls.”

  Amber woke the next morning, actually surprised she’d gotten any sleep at all. She’d been at the ranch until well past dark, and that was saying something for it being summer. She hadn’t packed yet, and not only that, the clothes she needed weren’t even clean. So she’d been up forever, waiting for the machines in her life to get the stains out of her blouses and skirts.

  By the time she’d fallen into bed, all she could think about was Lance, and if he really thought he wasn’t good enough for her. She wondered what she’d done to make him feel that way, and her mind had gone round and round and round….

  Groaning, she got out of bed and into the shower. Dressed and ready, she padded down the hall to the kitchen to put the coffee on. No sooner had she flipped the switch did someone knock on her front door.

  Hurrying, she crossed through the house to pull open the door. Lance stood there, looking devilishly handsome at such an hour. “Hello, cowboy.”

  “Hello, yourself.” He smiled at her, all of the suppressed anger and frustration from yesterday gone. “Early enough?” He let his gaze drip down her. “You’re already ready to go.”

  “I have to leave for the airport in forty-five minutes,” she said, stepping back to let him in. “So you’re right on time.”

  “I brought doughnuts,” he said. “Let me grab them from the truck.” He jogged back out to his vehicle, and brought in a small box that only held six doughnuts. A sense of warmth filled Amber, and she held him tight for a moment before busying herself by getting out mugs, and sugar, and cream.

  They sat down at the counter together, the silence between them comfortable. “Listen,” he said. “I just wanted to apologize about yesterday. I—don’t know what.”

  “Freaked out,” she said, lifting her maple bar to her lips. She tried to smile around the mouthful of dough and frosting, but it was impossible.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, maybe a little. It’s just bad news usually comes in threes, and when I heard you were leaving town, that sort of felt like the third thing.”

  “What were the other two?” she asked. “Your mom, obviously.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I got a call yesterday morning that someone wanted to adopt Rufus.”

  “Oh.”

  “They have a big ranch, and he’d be happy there.”

  “Lance, if you don’t want to let him go, don’t let him go,” she said. “You could adopt him or just keep him in the Club.”

&n
bsp; “He loves to run with the cross-country kids.”

  “He can still do that.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Amber sipped her coffee. “So when you heard I was going to Denver, you thought that was bad news number three.”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “I did. I thought you’d grown tired of me and wanted to break up.” He hid behind his own coffee mug, finally lowering it so she could see his eyes.

  “Why would you think I was tired of you?”

  He shrugged, a ruddiness entering his cheeks. “I guess I feel like we’ve…stalled.”

  “Stalled?” Amber’s eyebrows went up. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we took so many steps in the beginning, and now it just feels like, I don’t know. We’re dating, and then what?”

  “You want to get engaged.” She wasn’t asking, and she watched as several emotions ran across his expression. Fear, hope, embarrassment.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not going to ask you,” she said. “I’m more traditional in that regard.” She couldn’t even imagine being engaged. She’d never taken that step. Ever. Her heart started beating frantically, as if he were down on one knee right now.

  “Would you say yes if I asked you?”

  Her alarm went off, signaling it was time to get loaded up and get to the airport. She picked up her coffee mug as she stood, drained the last swallow of coffee, and plucked another doughnut from the box. “I’m taking one of these with me.”

  “Amber,” he said, following her over to the dishwasher. “Would you?”

  “Guess you’ll have to ask to find out.” She grinned at him, tipped up on her toes to kiss him, and then added, “Now go on, cowboy. I can’t miss my flight.”

  The facility in Denver was going to be amazing. Downright fantastic. With every sketch and concept she saw, Amber found herself wanting to be there for all of it. She’d spent the first five years of her post-ballet career on the corporate side of secretarial work, where her business organization degree worked well in departments like human resources and accounting. She’d moved from company to company every year or so, learning different things and different policies.

  She’d moved over to Forever Friends eleven years ago, stemming from the love she had for animals—and a Strut Your Mutt event she’d attended in Portland while she was there visiting an old college roommate.

  She didn’t remember what she and Cleo had done. But she remembered those volunteers. Those dogs and cats on leashes. The general positivity she felt at the event, despite the drizzling rain.

  It took her another six months to get hired on, and she’d been working with them ever since. She’d been all over California at various positions and placements, but never out of the state. She didn’t remember checking that little box on her employment forms that said she was willing to relocate.

  “So we’d have an office building—house—for each area,” Orion said. He was the lead construction manager, as well as the consultant for Forever Friends on the physical properties side of the company. “What do we need to staff that, Amber?”

  “Well.” She examined the blueprints, another of her loves coming to life. She could look at building plans for hours and never get bored. “If each house is going to run their own adoptions, you at least need a volunteer coordinator like me. The bigger animals don’t have nearly the volume of volunteers or people willing to adopt a lame horse or a pig with a health condition. You could probably assign one person over a couple of animals in those areas.”

  “What do you wish your volunteer house had?”

  “Outdoor signups,” she said quickly. “Though here in Colorado, you’ll be dealing with snow sometimes. But it would be nice for those people who’ve been to the facility before to be able to simply sign in, pick the job they’ve done before, and go. There’s too much paperwork for repeat volunteers.”

  “That sounds like an organizational issue,” Roman said. “I’ll note it for Jewel though. We’re anticipating twice the volume of volunteers here than you have at Last Chance Ranch.”

  Amber nodded and flipped the page on the plans. “What’s this area here?” She pointed to a separate building that looked very much like—

  “A cabin for the coordinator,” Orion said, barely glancing at the plans. “All of our coordinators in Denver will live on-site for free. It’s part of their compensation.”

  A surge of jealousy hit Amber, very much like the ones she’d experienced while shopping with her sister for her wedding or tasting all the divine way a professional chef could make cake delicious.

  “Wow,” Amber said. “Amazing.” As she continued her meeting and went out to the location of the ranch in the beautiful hills of the Rocky Mountains, Amber couldn’t help feeling like she needed to be here, in Colorado.

  Not at Last Chance Ranch.

  Chapter 19

  Lance sat on his front steps, his eyes on his fingers on the neck of the guitar he held. He would not look down the road again. He would not.

  Amber had extended her time in Colorado by a week, and then another, and she’d promised she’d be back for the wedding.

  He didn’t think he’d miss one of her best friend’s weddings, which was tomorrow afternoon, and she’d texted him to say she was on the plane a few hours ago. She should be pulling in any minute—but Lance would not look again.

  He would not.

  He plucked chords by watching his fingers as if he’d never played the guitar before. His heart had been shrinking since Amber had left, and until that morning, Lance had started to doubt she’d ever come back to Last Chance Ranch.

  The crunch of tires against the gravel brought his head up. The music coming from the instrument stalled as Amber’s car came closer and closer. His heart pounded so fast and so loud, and he forced himself to move slowly as he stood and balanced his guitar against the post.

  He went down the steps as she pulled into his driveway. A squeal filled the air as she got out of the car and ran around the front of it, not even bothering to close her door.

  “Lance.” She laughed his name out as she flung her arms around him, and Lance couldn’t help chuckling as he wrapped his arms around Amber and held on tight. She smelled like lemons and mint, and he drew in a deep breath of her, so glad she’d come home.

  “I missed you so much,” she said, pulling back and stretching up to kiss him. Lance’s fears fled with her lips against his, and he couldn’t believe he’d ever doubted her.

  She sighed and fell back, glancing around the ranch as if she’d never been there before. “Ah, I missed this place.”

  Lance didn’t like that she’d been gone so long, but all of their conversations via text and phone had told her that. He hadn’t been shy about his disappointment when she hadn’t come back when she’d said she would. After that, he’d kept their conversations light and easy.

  She knew how he felt about her, and she’d had the ball solidly in her court for a while now. Lance didn’t mind the dating. She needed time to know how she felt about him. No problem. The time apart, the distance between them, it all proved to him how fond of her he still was.

  How much he wanted her in his life permanently.

  “So….” she said, a sexy little smile on her face. “Do you want to take me to lunch?”

  He’d eaten a couple of hours ago, but he said, “Yes,” anyway. He just wanted to spend time with her, and she’d been gone for eighteen days.

  “Jump in, cowboy.” She walked back toward her side of the car, and Lance folded himself into the front seat of her sedan.

  “The facility in Denver is amazing,” Amber said, her voice full of joy. “It’s so big, and everything is brand new.”

  “I didn’t think they were building it yet,” Lance said.

  “Yeah, sure they are,” she said, cutting him a look out of the corner of her eye. “It opens in six months. Well, seven. So the main barns are going in, the stables, all the roads, the voluntee
r houses, the cabins….” She kept detailing all the plans that were happening at this new rescue ranch.

  Lance tried to listen, but he had a hard time picturing the things she was talking about. Honestly, it sounded like a great place, but he knew it wouldn’t have the spirit of Last Chance Ranch.

  “Will anyone live on it?” he asked. “Like a real ranch?”

  “I think there will be a few people who live on-site full-time,” she said. “But Forever Friends owns the facility. It’s not really a ranch.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Triple F Ranch,” she said as if that were the most clever name in the world. “It stands for Forever Friends Facility.”

  “Not super original,” he said with a smile.

  “I mean, it has a certain ring to it.” Amber pulled into the fast-casual Mexican place and looked up at the doors. “They look busy, but this is exactly what I want. I’ve eaten so many steaks and hamburgers in Denver.”

  “Really?” he asked. “They don’t have Mexican food there?”

  “I’m sure they do, but every time the team went out, it seemed to be beef-centric.”

  “Cache would like that.”

  “How’s everything going for the wedding?” she asked as they walked in.

  Lance was surprised she’d even remembered there was a wedding. She hadn’t been able to talk about anything but the facility or Denver in days.

  “Well, seeing as how it’s in twenty-four hours, I guess everything is going great,” he said. “My mother’s been helping with the tutus for the cows. I’m supposed to go help dress the bovines in the morning.”

  “And they’re really wearing tutus?”

  “It’s what Karla wants,” Lance said with a smile. “And Karla is getting everything Karla wants.”

  “I’ll bet she is,” Amber said.

  Lance grinned as he stepped up to order his burrito plate. She ordered too, and they moved down the line. Once they had their food, he led them to a booth in the corner, and as he sat across from her, he couldn’t help feeling like the part of him that had been missing had been found.