The Last Christmas Cowboy Read online

  “Who?” He sat down at the table next to her and passed her the beer.

  “Elliott.”

  “Rose, what did I say?”

  “When have I ever listened to you?”

  “Well, you should listen to me. You should listen to me now.”

  “What are you saying exactly?” she asked, her tone far too sweet.

  “To leave well enough alone.”

  “What are you two whispering about down there?” Pansy asked.

  Rose’s older sister was looking at them keenly.

  “Nothing,” Logan said.

  “Logan doesn’t approve of me,” Rose said.

  “Well,” Pansy said, “I should think that would be a goal of yours.”

  “Yes. I don’t really care about whether or not I am meeting with anyone’s approval. It has to be said.”

  That wasn’t strictly true, and he knew it. Rose wasn’t really a rebel, so much as she was...exuberant. She acted before she thought, and spoke even sooner than she acted.

  “I’m exhausted,” Sammy said. “Even though I really do want to stay and hear about what all Logan disapproves of.”

  Sammy was five months pregnant, and Logan knew that her desire to be in the middle of the fray often lost out over her current level of energy. He was happy for Ryder, that his friend was able to get over some of the trauma of his past and begin to make a new life for himself. A new family. It had been completely obvious to him that Ryder had been in love with Sammy for the last decade and a half. His friend had denied it, but Logan had known.

  And, it had turned out he was right.

  That made him feel slightly uncomfortable, given that he was currently judging Rose for trying to get involved in people’s love life. But he had not gotten involved in Ryder’s. Not without his asking for input.

  Anyway, in some ways he felt extra connected to Sammy. The two of them were the odd ones out. They weren’t genetically related to the Daniels clan, but had found themselves a part of Hope Springs Ranch, bonded together by the tragedies of life. For Logan, it had been the loss of his mother. For Sammy, the fact that her parents had been absolutely terrible. Her mother was still alive, but she wasn’t part of Sammy’s life.

  For all the good they’d done raising her, she might as well have lost them.

  “See you tomorrow,” Logan said.

  “Bye,” Rose said.

  “We’ll hang out for a while,” Pansy said.

  Though, he could tell by the way West was looking at his fiancée he was hoping to make it an early night, for pretty obvious reasons.

  Logan’s stomach tightened up. Because that would mean being alone with Rose. And he didn’t like that. Not one bit. He’d already played with fire when it came to late nights and a little bit of beer with her. And she had no idea how close she’d come to being burned.

  No. He’d never burn her. He wouldn’t. Never once had he thought seriously about acting on any of the feelings that he’d experienced for her over the last couple of years. But he’d been in situations where they had been closer to the surface than he wanted them.

  And he wasn’t about to put himself back there again.

  “I’m going to make a move,” Rose said, as Ryder and Sammy filed out of the saloon.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  And that was when the irrepressible brunette scampered across the saloon and approached Elliott Johns.

  He gritted his teeth and watched in horror as she began to talk to him, and Logan could see interest lighting up the other man’s face.

  He was also absolutely certain that Rose was over there being an ambassador for Iris, and only for that reason.

  Elliott clearly thought otherwise.

  Oh, Rose. You don’t know what you’re playing at.

  About thirty seconds later, they were crossing the bar, and she had brought him back to the table. “Logan, will you get another beer? Elliott is going to join us for the evening.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROSE FOUND ELLIOTT to be perfectly pleasant. He was friendly and polite. His hands were very clean. Rose thought this notable because often she was around men whose hands were not clean. Not that they didn’t wash their hands. But there was a sort of ingrained dirt in the hands of a cowboy. It got down underneath their nails so deep the nail would probably have to come off in order to get the grunge. She understood.

  She was a cowgirl. It wasn’t like her hands were much cleaner.

  Anyway. She noticed clean fingernails.

  Rose imagined that her sister Iris would, too. Iris was not a cowgirl.

  Iris was the soft, steady maternal figure in her life. She’d had Sammy too, who had moved in with them the same year their parents had died, and become friends with Ryder. A free-spirited earth-mother type. She infused the house with fun. Iris brought dependability. Made sure Rose’s hair was brushed for school, that her clothes had been neat and washed.

  She’d mended holes in socks and kept the first aid kit stocked.

  Sometimes she gave her sister a little bit of a hard time for being quite so staid and sensible. She was practical all the way down to her shoes. It was part of Iris’s charm. And for as long as Rose could remember Iris had been the soft touch in her life.

  After the loss of their parents, between Iris and Sammy they had all been very well cared for, for a ragtag group of orphans.

  Rose had been too young to give back.

  She had been reliant on Ryder and Logan to keep the ranch going, to keep income coming in. Colt and Jake helped with that later, often sending money back from the rodeo. She had been dependent on Sammy and Iris to cook for her.

  And of course Pansy had been... Well, she’d been younger too, but she had been Rose’s older sister. Someone she had looked up to. Pansy had taught her to take their hardships and make purpose out of it.

  Rose wasn’t sure what she’d done for anyone. At least beyond being a little bit of a burden. Not that she blamed herself. Not really. She had been six years old when her parents had died.

  But she could make up for it now. She worked Hope Springs Ranch along with Ryder and Logan, with the occasional help of their cousins Jake and Colt.

  She was invested in the happiness of her family. Makeshift and otherwise.

  Granted, she had been wrong about Logan and Sammy. She grimaced, remembering that just five short months ago she had been advocating for the two of them to get together. But it had honestly never occurred to her that Sammy would hook up with Rose’s older brother. The two of them had been best friends for so long that Rose had figured they saw each other as brother and sister.

  They clearly did not.

  Still, she had a feeling about this. She had a feeling about Elliott. Elliott and his clean hands, and his very nice manners. After she had invited him to come sit down at the table he had offered to buy her the next beer that she had.

  “So,” she said, “tell me more about water filtration systems.”

  She could feel West and Pansy looking at her with great skepticism, and she could feel Logan next to her. He was vibrating with some kind of repressed energy that she couldn’t name.

  “Well,” he said, “the things they’re doing with whole house filtration systems now are very interesting.”

  It was not interesting.

  But he was very competent and knowledgeable about the subject, and on some level she supposed she had to respect that. Even though she was citing football statistics in her head, and thinking about... Literally anything but what he was saying. Like picking dirt out of a horse’s hooves. Cleaning out her own fingernails. The current market price of hay...

  “I noticed that the new bakery closed,” Pansy said.

  “What?” Rose asked, running over Elliott’s water filtration monologue.

  “Yeah,” she said,
sounding tragic. “I really enjoyed it.”

  “Me, too,” Rose said. In her opinion, there was no such thing as a dessert that was too sweet, and everything there had been akin to a sugar bomb. She had loved it. “Of course, Iris made much better baked goods.” She thought it was a great opportunity to introduce the topic of her sister. “You know who Iris is, right?” she asked Elliott.

  “Yes,” he responded.

  “She makes amazing food.”

  “The problem with businesses around here is that they try to open up and they don’t have any consistent hours. Because one person is always running the place,” Pansy said. Changing the subject back to the bakery, which Rose found annoying because she’d just figured out how to get talking about Iris. “I can’t count on a place that is randomly closed on a Monday or Tuesday, and then a Thursday next week.”

  “Well, when it comes to business startups, you really need to be committed to losing money for the first five years. But that was one of the bonuses of becoming an independent contractor for Clearwater.”

  And Elliott was off again, talking about water. She understood that water was important. Honestly, one of the more important things in life. Certainly more important than cupcakes. But when it came right down to it, she would rather talk about cupcakes. But Iris... Iris would probably appreciate it. Iris was practical. Elliott was practical.

  Boring though it was to listen to him talk about water, she felt bolstered by it. And more and more convinced that she was on the right track when it came to him and her sister.

  “Well,” Pansy said, “we have to go. You know, Emmett is at home.”

  Emmett was West’s younger brother, and Pansy and West were his guardians. Though, the kid was sixteen, not six. Still, she had a feeling that they were making up excuses so they could leave.

  “Okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” West asked.

  “You know, because we are all meeting here tomorrow,” Rose said, suddenly struck with inspiration.

  Pansy cast her some side-eye. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning,” she said.

  Logan shifted beside her, and she felt that shift in the air.

  He was that kind of guy. Big and solid and exactly the kind of partner that you wanted working out on the ranch. Logan could lift his own weight and then some. And at the same time, he never made her feel like she might not be doing her share just because she was a woman, and smaller than him.

  Now, he had other ways of making her feel small and silly. And she had a feeling he was gearing up for one.

  She looked over at him. His face was set in stone. And he didn’t look like he was planning to say anything at all. That was almost worse somehow.

  “We’re meeting tomorrow,” she said, deciding not to give any space to Logan at all. He could keep his disapproving shifts to himself. “The group of us. You should come,” she said to Elliott. “Give me your phone number, that way I can get in touch if anything changes. But we should all be here around eight.”

  “Okay,” he said, looking happy about that.

  “Yeah. We’ll all be here. Ryder, his wife, Sammy. Our other sister, Iris. Maybe she can bring some of her baked goods.”

  “Great,” he said.

  She took her phone out, and he gave her his number, which she programmed into it easily. “Excellent. Well, we better get going. You know. Ranch work. Very early rising.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” he said. “Water filtration systems won’t install themselves.”

  “No,” Rose said, forcing a smile. “I don’t imagine they will. And my cows won’t... Well, they won’t castrate themselves. Bastards. No thumbs.”

  Somehow she could feel a groan come from Logan without him actually making any noises. She didn’t know how he managed that. Total silent disapproval that somehow rumbled within her.

  Elliott, for his part, laughed. A little bit too hard, Rose thought.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said.

  She stood and swept out of the saloon, Logan on her heels.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked, once they were headed toward the truck.

  “A setup,” she said.

  “He thinks you like him.”

  The idea was so ridiculous Rose dismissed it immediately.

  “He doesn’t,” she said. “I’m too young for him.”

  Logan stopped walking. She could feel him staring at the side of her face.

  “What?”

  “How old do you think he is?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty-two?”

  Logan huffed. “I’m thirty-three.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Anyway. He’s going to meet Iris. He’s going to love Iris.”

  “Do you hate Iris?”

  “No,” Rose said emphatically. “I love Iris and I want her to be happy. He’s practical. He owns his own business.”

  “I think he’s a subcontractor.”

  “He’s still a business owner,” she insisted. “And it’s doing something stable and profitable. It’s exactly the kind of stability that Iris would admire.”

  “He talked about water filtration for twenty-five minutes.”

  “And we could talk about cows for longer than that.”

  “Yeah, but cows are interesting.”

  “My point,” she said, “is that we all find different things interesting. It isn’t that he’s uninteresting, it’s just that we are uneducated about the topic.”

  “I’m educated now,” he said. “About a thousand times more educated than I ever wanted to be. And I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “I’m not. We’re going to go out tomorrow night and Iris is going to meet him, and everything is going to be great.”

  “Why do you feel like you need to do this?”

  “It’s not that I need to. It’s just that... Think about it, Logan. There’s all these things in the world, all these people. And life is fragile. It’s precious. What if people miss out on their chance to make these connections because they’re busy working? Or just because... Someone needed to intervene.”

  “And you think that someone has to be you?”

  “If Iris ends up alone it might be because of me,” she said, the words bursting from her before she could stop them. Logan’s blue eyes went far too sharp, and she didn’t like it. It made her feel strange and exposed and it pushed her to keep on talking. “Iris has taken care of me all of her life basically. She didn’t go to school dances, she didn’t date. She was home cooking for us. For me. I was a kid the longest. I was the one who... She’s the last single one.”

  “Except for you,” he pointed out.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “How isn’t it the same?”

  “I mean... Logan, I’m twenty-three. I’m not remotely ready to settle down or anything like that. I love my life.”

  “Maybe Iris loves her life.”

  That made her pause. She thought of her sweet sister, who only ever showed how funny and bright she was in a room surrounded by her family. Who liked to bake and knit and spend her evenings at home. And she just couldn’t get past the fact that she wondered if Iris had made the best of the box she’d been pushed into. Maybe it would have been who she was...eventually. But not as a young woman.

  Maybe if she hadn’t had to raise Rose she would have dated.

  Maybe she’d be settled at home knitting with a husband and children of her own and not...in a house that was, well, it was different now. Ryder and Sammy were married and it was Sammy’s house too now.

  They’d be having a baby soon.

  Even Ryder, who had devoted all that he was to taking care of them after their parents’ deaths, had found someone. Was moving on.

  Iris remained.

  And how could Rose ever...how could she ever move on if
Iris didn’t? Knowing she might be the cause of her sister’s current situation?

  “And so much of what she does is because she had to settle into that role too soon. She’s basically a spinster aunt and she’s only thirty-one.”

  “Please say this to Iris, because I have a feeling it would go over really well.”

  “I have said it to Iris,” Rose said. Okay, not in those terms. She didn’t want to hurt her sister’s feelings.

  Logan shook his head and jerked his truck door open, and Rose climbed into the passenger seat beside him. “I’m telling you,” he said. “This is not a great idea.”

  “I’m sorry, Logan, if this were a matter of cows, I might listen to you, but this is a matter of people.”

  “And you think you have superior experience with people than me?”

  “I think that you deliberately don’t have a lot of experience with people. You ranch, you drink, you sleep.”

  “I do other things,” he said, his tone exceedingly dry.

  “What things?”

  He was driving, so he didn’t look at her, but again, she could feel what he was thinking. She didn’t know how he managed that. To make his feelings so clear to her that she could feel them inside her own chest sometimes.

  She shifted uncomfortably, because she had a feeling that he was thinking of... Well, things she didn’t want to think about concerning Logan. He was her friend. Her coworker. She didn’t need to go thinking of him as a...as a man. Doing things men did.

  “Never mind,” she muttered.

  “Well, don’t ask if you don’t want to have a conversation.”

  “I’ll bet you that they hit it off,” she continued, happy to step away from the more disconcerting part of the conversation.

  “Fine,” he said. “You’re on.”

  “If I win... If I win I get to set you up.”

  “Not a damn chance.”

  “So you’re afraid that I’ll win.”

  He said nothing.

  “You are,” she said. “You’re afraid that I’ll win.”

  “Fine,” he said. “If you successfully hook the two of them up, you have my permission to seek out someone for me.”

  She felt immediately flat. Because the fact that he agreed likely did mean that he didn’t believe that she was right about this. But she did. She didn’t need for his vote of confidence to be sincere.