Cowboy Christmas Blues Read online

  She had never had sex like that in her life. She had never been with a man that looked like him, had never had a man do...that to her. She had never, absolutely never, come twice in one...session.

  She was lucky if she got to come once.

  But now her fuzzy feelings were fading because Cooper was looking at her like he had just seen a ghost.

  “Annabelle,” he said.

  His tone was so confused, his expression so dumbfounded. She couldn’t make sense of it.

  But...oh, no. No.

  He had never once used her name. Not once tonight, until now.

  He hadn’t known who she was.

  There were no words for the horror. The humiliation. He didn’t want her. She’d thought...finally. And no. He’d just wanted sex. She’d trusted him with her body because she knew him. And she’d thought...he knew her, too. But he didn’t.

  Her stomach twisted, turning sour.

  She pushed his shoulder, scrambling to get out from beneath him. “Who did you think I was?”

  “Annabelle,” he said again, moving away from her.

  He was just staring at her, like she was a ghost still, but now possibly a ghost who had grown a second head. Which was not the look that you wanted from a man who had just banged you senseless.

  It was ludicrous. She was naked, pressed against her headboard, her breasts heaving with every breath she took, her thighs parted slightly, because she still hadn’t gotten control over everything.

  When she realized that she snapped her knees together, angling to the side.

  He was still naked, too, breathing hard, the muscles on his chest and stomach flexing, that very large, very masculine part of him looming in her vision, making it impossible for her to think straight.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Annabelle. But I thought you... I thought you knew.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  He sounded so disgusted, so horrified. She wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear from the situation completely.

  “So, you just thought you were having sex with a stranger? You didn’t even ask my name.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing,” he said.

  “I knew it was you,” she whispered. “That’s why I...”

  Oh, no. This was horrible. Worse than having the boyfriend who had so firmly felt like settling tell her one day, after five years, that he’d been wasting his time with her.

  Cooper Mason didn’t finally see her as a woman.

  Cooper Mason did not want her. Cooper Mason the opposite of wanted her, if his reaction to the entire situation was anything to go by. He was clearly disgusted unto his soul that he had ever touched her.

  Except... He had been into it when they’d done it. He had been.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand,” Annabelle said. “I thought that we... I thought you... You didn’t know who I was.”

  “No,” he said, holding his hands up, “I swear to God. If I had I never would’ve touched you.”

  “Well, that’s...horrible. And humiliating. And you are a gigantic tool,” she said, grabbing a pillow and holding it across her breasts. He was not allowed to look at them if he was going to cast aspersions on her.

  “Annabelle, I have known you since you were three years old. I would not have slept with you if I’d...” He stared at her harder. “You look different.”

  “I hope so, since I’m not seventeen anymore.” She sniffed. “Also, I lost a little weight.”

  He shook his head, getting out of the bed and hunting for his clothes. “You’re just not...not a woman to me.”

  “Clearly I am,” she said.

  “Not...not you. The person that I thought you were.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  He took a step back. “I have to go.”

  “Cooper,” she said, scrambling out of bed.

  “This was not what I wanted,” he returned. “It was a bad idea.”

  “Why does it change anything?”

  “Because I’m not here for an entanglement. And I’m certainly not here to start something with a hometown girl who, when last I saw her, wasn’t old enough to drink.”

  “I don’t want to start anything with you,” she said. “I wanted to have sex with you. I wanted to...”

  She couldn’t go on; it was too humiliating. Because she had fulfilled her lifelong fantasy of jumping Cooper Mason’s bones and he was actively disgusted that he had jumped hers.

  She couldn’t admit it. Not to him. Not now.

  Couldn’t confess that she had a crush on him as deep and enduring as the Tioga River when he looked like he would rather take a stick in the eye than even think about having sex with her again.

  “I’m not a one-night-stand kind of girl,” she continued stiffly. “But I’m in a space where I thought I would have one, because I just got out of a long-term relationship.” She was only partly lying. A year was recent enough when the relationship was as long as hers and Parker’s had been. “I figured since we kind of knew each other it made it less sordid.”

  “Not for me,” he said, his tone hard.

  “This doesn’t have to change anything,” she said.

  “But it does,” he responded.

  “Well, now it does,” she said. “Because you changed it.”

  He pulled on his underwear, his pants, covering up that gorgeous body of his. “Don’t tell anyone this happened,” he said.

  “Oh, you don’t want me to tell anyone,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even. “How will I ever keep it a secret that I had sex with Cooper Mason and then he ran away when he discovered it was me because he was so disgusted?” She flung her arms wide. “I’m dying to tell the world.”

  “Annabelle... I come back to town two times a year at most. I don’t want complications. And I sure as hell don’t want more ties to Gold Valley. There’s a reason that I left. There’s a reason I stay gone. I only come back for my mother, for my father. I figured you and I were just going to have a little anonymous fun.”

  “Well, it’s not fun anymore, so get your tight ass out of here,” she said, feeling humiliated and indignant and past the point of caring that her breasts were out and swaying all over the place with the force of her indignation.

  “Annabelle, trust me,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head, “this is to protect you.”

  “Bull.”

  “You’re the last person in the world I want to hurt. And I don’t have anything to offer you. I’m sorry, but I think it would be best if I left.” He turned and began walking out of her room.

  “Yeah?” she shouted. “Well, I didn’t want anything from you but an orgasm, and I got two of those!” She heard the front door slam shut.

  She sat down on the bed again, then flopped backward, too shocked to move. There was a deep, serious pain stabbing through her chest, but she felt too shell-shocked to cry.

  She had just had the best sex of her life with Cooper Mason, and then he had walked out on her.

  “Merry Christmas to me.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I HOPE YOU don’t mind running some errands with me today,” Connie Mason said, interrupting Cooper’s particularly dark train of thought.

  “No,” he said. He could tell his mother was trying to keep her tone light, but he could also sense underlying anxiety there.

  His mother had problems going out sometimes, among other things, and he could understand why. It was a small town and she always ran into people she knew. She didn’t always like being asked how she was doing, particularly this time of year.

  Sometimes going by herself, without a buffer, was impossible.

  Not that she would ever want to ad
mit that.

  “I’m going to drop off my jewelry down at Gunslinger and pick up the money from the sales I’ve made over the last month.”

  His mother had gotten heavy into jewelry-making over the course of Lindsay’s illness. Lindsay had been sick from the time she was sixteen, and her family had spent a fair amount of time in hospitals. Connie had gone even heavier into it after Lindsay’s death.

  “Great,” he said. “We can grab some lunch.”

  He was distracted, and his mom didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of that. But everything in him was still reeling from last night’s shock. He had come home and had sex with Annabelle. As soon as he’d realized who she was, he had been unable to get the image of her as a kid out of his head. Of her as a round, sweet-faced teenager, giving him a hug at his sister’s funeral, which had been the last place he’d seen her.

  This damned town. It was like a tangled-up ball of yarn, and every time you thought you were grabbing hold of a new thread, you weren’t. It was just more of the same damned tangle. Everyone, everything, every place, seemed connected. Every memory. There was no escaping it.

  The worst part was he wasn’t turned off now that he knew who she was. The sex had been so hot he felt permanently singed by it, but the fact that his partner had turned out to be little Annabelle Preston should have served as a metaphorical bucket of ice water. It should have made his memories less of a turn-on, not more of one.

  He gritted his teeth. “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “Almost,” his mother responded.

  She spent some time gathering up her jewelry, getting things together in that methodical way that she did everything. His mother was one of the biggest control freaks on the planet. Organized. Never anything out of place. But she hadn’t been able to control the one thing she would have wanted to control the most.

  He swallowed hard, hating the fact that his thoughts were so consumed with the past. But it was impossible to be consumed by anything else when he was in this place. Except for those few short hours he had been in Annabelle’s arms.

  Then he had been consumed with her. Utterly. Completely.

  He pushed the images to the back of his mind and headed out of the simple farmhouse with his mom, helping her into his truck before getting into the driver’s side and starting the engine.

  His family home was on the outskirts of town, on a three-acre plot of land perfect for the kind of small operation his parents had. His parents had always kept a couple of cows, chickens and goats. Theirs wasn’t a ranch that made a heavy profit, but something that provided the family with food and also earned a little bit on the side selling some of what the animals produced, and trading with the neighbors.

  There were good memories here. The man he had become owed his roots to this place, his love of ranching cemented by his upbringing. He loved his parents. And part of him felt guilty that he didn’t spend more time at home. Especially since he was their only remaining child.

  But sometimes he thought his absence was good for them, too. Gave his dad a chance to take enough time for himself. To tie flies and go fishing. For his mother to make her earrings and spend time with her friends.

  They got together at prescribed times of the year and dealt with the heavier things, but they got time away from it, too.

  When they arrived on the town’s main street he parked his truck against the curb, and his mother waited in her seat until he rounded to her side to open the door and help her out of the tall vehicle.

  They wandered along the uneven sidewalk, lined with redbrick buildings that had been built in the eighteen hundreds. Gold Valley was a town that had sprung up around the gold rush, people headed to California, stopping in Oregon along the way and mining what they could there. It had a classic, Old West feel to it, carefully maintained by the city council and various ordinances that ensured the main street would never be too modernized.

  There was exactly one neon sign in town, an old one from the 1950s that was officially the only lit sign allowed to exist in all of Gold Valley. The facades of the buildings might have remained the same for decades, but the businesses had changed. More coffee shops, more boutique clothing and a couple of fancier restaurants.

  They made their way down to Gunslinger, which was housed in a narrow building wedged between the Happy Cow ice cream shop and the Gold Valley Inn, the premier date restaurant in town. Cooper pushed the door open, letting his mom go in first, and then followed behind, looking up and taking in the store. He’d been in it many times before, but it had been years, and it was laid out completely differently now, racks of stylish clothing in the center of the room, jewelry artfully showcased beneath a display case and a selection of specialty wool blankets against the wall.

  But it was the movement behind the counter that caught his eye. And then he stopped.

  Annabelle. Of course it was Annabelle.

  Instantly, his mind was filled with X-rated images from last night, not that they had been far from his consciousness before he had walked in. Before he had seen her. But now it was all he could think about. With his mother right next to him.

  This just got better and better.

  She looked up, and her eyes collided with his, going wide. Then she looked at his mother, the expression on her face deliberately blank. “Connie,” she said. “I have your envelope.”

  “Good,” his mother said. “I have more jewelry for you, too.”

  “Good,” Annabelle parroted. “We need more. Your pieces are always popular.”

  She looked back at him, then looked away just as quickly, twisting her hands nervously, something he had seen her do last night in her living room, just before they had...

  Well, he really didn’t need to finish that thought.

  Annabelle very pointedly didn’t engage with him and he took that as his cue to busy himself. He really wasn’t about to draw attention to the fact that there was any sort of connection between Annabelle and himself.

  He moved away from them, pretending to look at the blankets on display while Annabelle continued to talk about the pieces that his mother had brought in. He needed to get himself under control, because everything in him wanted to reach behind the counter, grab hold of Annabelle and draw her up against him again. Kiss her again.

  It was almost impossible for him to understand how he hadn’t recognized her last night. Today, he would have. Today she looked more like the woman he remembered from all those years ago. Her brown hair was pulled back partway with a clip, the style looking carefree and natural. She looked softer, her makeup much less heavy, no lipstick on those full, pretty lips.

  Last night, she had been all smoky eyes and crimson mouth. Definitely not things he associated with little Annabelle Preston.

  And, frankly, she had been nothing but a fine set of curves to him at first. His focus had been on her amazing body, and her face—while lovely—had definitely been a secondary thought.

  Today, though, all of it was melting together. Who she was, the fact that she was still beautiful and the fact that her rack was still spectacular.

  Coupled with the fact that he also knew exactly what her body looked like uncovered. And that it held up to the promise.

  That was the trouble. She was soft all over. Soft and smooth, and he itched to touch her again. To be inside her again.

  It was enough to get him hard just thinking about it. Except he was in a cutesy Western shop standing next to his mother, and he was thirty-two years old. That was enough to keep him under control.

  “Cooper,” his mom said. “You remember Annabelle Preston, don’t you? She owns the store now.”

  Cooper paused and turned toward them. His eyes clashed with Annabelle’s and her cheeks suffused with color. “Yeah,” he responded. “I remember Annabelle.”

  He hadn’t realized she owned the store. Which
he supposed was another sign she was a grown woman. And accomplished at that.

  He tried not to think of all the other ways he’d found her accomplished last night.

  “She’s so grown-up now,” his mom said, not a trace of irony in her voice. “The last time you saw her she must have been a girl.”

  He really didn’t need his mother to supply him with this kind of information. He was well aware that Annabelle was no longer a girl.

  Was intimately acquainted with the fact that she was a woman.

  “She is indeed,” he responded, and the color in Annabelle’s cheeks grew deeper.

  His mom looked up and out the window, and her expression changed. “Oh, it’s Opal,” she said. “Hang on just a second, Annabelle. I have to go talk to her about a gift I’m making for her daughter-in-law.”

  With that, Connie rushed out of the store, intercepting an older woman on the streets, the two of them greeting each other as if it had been months since they had encountered one another, rather than the couple of days Cooper suspected it had been.

  And that left him alone in the store with Annabelle.

  “Cooper,” she said, her tone icy. “Nice to see you.”

  “We both know you don’t mean that.”

  “Well, I was going to try to be polite, but if you want honesty instead, no, I don’t mean it.” She sniffed. “Because you’re an asshole who abandoned me last night after having sex with me.”

  Guilt punched a hole in his gut. “It was a lot to wrap my head around.”

  And if he had stayed he would have wanted her to wrap her hand back around him, and he was trying to be chivalrous. Something he had damned little experience with.

  Annabelle looked like she might be considering bludgeoning him with one of the wrought-iron lamps sitting on the counter to her left. He had to wonder which she’d choose. The elk or the bison. The bison looked weightier, but the elk antlers were probably sharp.

  “It wasn’t a lot to wrap your head around when you thought I was a stranger,” she said crisply, clearly deciding to talk rather than murder him with home decor. “It didn’t take you any time to decide to go home with me in that case. As long as I was just disembodied female organs it was fine.”