The Last Christmas Cowboy Read online

  Skin to skin.

  The memory made her throat dry and her already pounding heart throb and she pushed all that toward anger.

  He’d made everything strange and difficult. It was his fault. All of this was.

  She prowled to the machine shed, and then started making her way down the line of outbuildings.

  It wasn’t that she was looking for him.

  She was looking for something to do.

  And Iris’s suggestion kept on ringing in her ears.

  That Rose talk to Logan. So she should talk to him about this, too.

  “I don’t need to. I don’t need to. His opinion has been nothing but annoying. Nothing.”

  She saw his eyes again, not as they were when he was her friend, or even that moment when he’d come into the house the other night and everything had felt sideways.

  But the way he’d looked at her today.

  It had been different and she didn’t know how or why, but it had been.

  Some part of her needed to see him again.

  To know.

  She found herself pushing the door open to one of the barns they didn’t commonly use, the barn that housed the blacksmithing supplies. Somehow, she had a feeling he would be there. Maybe related to the reason they had gone to the meeting in the first place.

  It was hot in there, of course it was, because he had the forge fired up. The contrast between the air inside and outside was enough to take her breath away. At least, that’s what she told herself it was.

  Because there he was, standing at the anvil, hammering. And he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Of course not. Because it was hot.

  It was hot.

  That kept playing in her head, over and over again.

  So very hot.

  He lifted his arm, and every muscle in his torso flexed and stretched before he brought the hammer down on the blazing metal that rested on the anvil. Sparks flew, a few of them hitting him right in his broad chest. But he didn’t flinch.

  His jaw was clenched, his expression intense.

  He lifted the hammer again, and this time her eye was drawn to his biceps, his powerful shoulders. The way every part of his body seemed to move in service to this powerful explosion of strength.

  They couldn’t do a blacksmith demonstration at a Christmas parade. It was a family event. There would be children.

  This was not appropriate.

  It was...

  Logan.

  Her chest felt tight, her breath freezing. It hurt. It physically hurt. Her body, her lungs. Something about the way she had solidified there in her place, unable to move. Unable to breathe.

  “I have a bone to pick with you,” she said, the words rushing out of numb lips. She had no idea how she managed to say them. Especially because she had no breath.

  “I’m sorry, what?” He turned, giving her a full, broad view of his chest. Smudged with soot and ash and dirt, and chest hair. Each and every muscle perfectly defined. He lifted the arm that was still holding the hammer, muscles straining as he wiped sweat from his forehead.

  His eyes looked even brighter, surrounded by the dirt on his face, there in the dark.

  She pushed past it. Pushed past the tangle in her chest, in her lungs, and went right at him.

  “You heard me. You were... You were unfair, and you were mean to me. You keep treating me like a child. And it isn’t fair. I’m not a child. And I’m not somebody that you can just lecture all the time. You don’t think I know anything,” she said, getting a good rant all built up in her chest. Oh, yes. She was ready to fight. She was ready to scream. Good and loud, too. “I have worked with you on this ranch for years. I know just as much as you do about any of the work we do here. What makes you think I don’t know anything about life? I’ve caught calves and I’ve buried them. I lost my parents. I know what it feels like to lose things.” She felt her tongue about to tip her right over the edge of decency. She’d been pushing it all day, starting with Barbara, and she was going further, worse now, and she did it anyway. “I know what it feels like to grieve. Twice what you did. Don’t you dare treat me like I don’t know my feelings.”

  Sparks burned in the blue, and his anger was like a palpable force. Good. She’d wanted it.

  “Be careful, Rose,” he said, his voice a growl.

  She expected him to go on. To give her the fight she craved.

  He didn’t.

  He turned back to the anvil.

  “Don’t you dismiss me,” she said. “You don’t have the right to dismiss me.”

  He didn’t look back at her. She looked around, then she saw an empty soda can on the floor. She picked it up and hurled it at him. It hit him in the shoulder.

  “What the fuck, Rose?”

  “I said don’t dismiss me,” she said.

  “You’re acting like a child. You are quite literally throwing a tantrum here, while you tell me that you should be taken seriously. I think even you can appreciate how ridiculous that is.”

  “See? Even that. I’m the closest thing you have to a business partner, Logan. And suddenly you’re acting like I’m a thousand years younger than you.”

  “You are. A decade younger than me, Rose. And the only reason you think you know everything is because you don’t. You profoundly don’t. The difference between you and me is that I know all the things I don’t know.”

  “That’s a contradiction. You can’t know what you don’t know.”

  “You can. And I do.”

  “Just... I’ve had it with you,” she said. “I’m right about Elliott and Iris. Barbara Niedermayer needed to be put in her place. She has no right to treat us this way just because she’s resentful that Pansy has a position of power. And you know why she does it. The same reason that you’re a jerk to me. Because I’m a woman. Because I’m young.”

  “I am not a jerk to you because you’re young and a woman. I am a jerk to you because somebody has to be. Everybody else is a little bit overindulgent of you and your shenanigans. If I were Iris I would’ve told you where to shove it.”

  “Well, hopefully you’ll get an opportunity to after all the stuff with Elliott works out, because then I’ll get to set you up.”

  “You are not setting me up, little girl. Not happening.”

  “Why not? You don’t seem to be able to set yourself up.”

  “Did you ever think maybe I’m making a choice.”

  “A choice to be alone?”

  “A choice to be a better person than I damn well want to be.”

  The air crackled between them, hotter than the forge, louder than the pop of the sparks around them.

  She closed the space between them, and with an open palm pressed her hand against his chest and shoved him back. Her skin felt scalded, and she ignored it. “I deserve your respect.”

  “You want me to start treating you like an equal? You want me to treat you like a woman?”

  She took a step closer to him, something driving her that she couldn’t name. Something dangerous churning in her gut. That she couldn’t define it enraged her, because it fell into line with everything he had just said. That there was something out there, a great mystery that she wasn’t privy to. Something that he knew, that she never would.

  “You wouldn’t know how. You still look at me and see a kid who needs her shoes tied. But I’m a woman who can put on her own damn cowgirl boots, and I don’t need you to tell me how it is.”

  He took a step toward her, and another, those blue eyes never leaving hers. It was like that moment in the hallway had been a taste of this. The thunder in the distance. And now here it was, all around her. The storm.

  She took a step back, then another, until her shoulder blades hit the rough wood wall of the barn. And still he was coming. Six foot plus of large, angry man, who could wield a mallet with no effort, who cou
ld pick a calf up off the ground and effortlessly heft a bale of hay.

  And it didn’t scare her, having all that strength right there, not even with him full of rage.

  No, it was something else that twisted her insides now. Something else that made her stomach tight. And there was a big, panicked blank in her brain as she tried to figure out what it might be.

  “You don’t want that,” he said. “Trust me, you don’t.

  “And do you know why you need somebody to tell you what’s happening? It’s not because you’re stupid, Rose. It’s because you don’t want to see the damn world around you. And I can understand why. Because yeah, I do know the grief that you know. And more. I didn’t lose both my parents, but my dad is a son of a bitch. Make no mistake about that. You think he’s not in my life because I don’t know who he is? I choose not to acknowledge that asshole. He’s still walking around alive and my mother is dead. You want to talk about grief? That’s grief. Oh, I know all about not wanting to see the world for what it is, but you take denial to a whole new level. You think that you can believe something into existence. That if you say Elliott doesn’t want you and he wants your sister it will be true. But it’s not.”

  He was talking. Saying so many things and she couldn’t get them all straight. His father. But he was so close and she couldn’t breathe.

  “It...”

  “You don’t know what it means to have a man want you. And no, I don’t mean him. He’s got a little schoolboy crush on you because he doesn’t know what it means to want a woman any more than you know what it means to want a man. But I know, Rose. I know.”

  His stare was hard and hot and she felt like it was pinning her right to that wall. “I’m so confident you’re going to lose our bet, I could give you lesson one in chemistry right now.”

  She shivered, and he kept talking. “And if I were to teach you even half of what I know you would burn and bend like that metal I was just pounding. You wouldn’t survive it. So strong, little girl, until you get heated up. You don’t even know where that begins and ends.”

  He reached out then, and rough fingertips made contact with her cheek. She shivered as he traced a line down the side of her neck to her collarbone, where he dragged his thumb back and forth. Just like he had done on the dance floor.

  That touch.

  It wasn’t just a touch.

  There were layers to it. More to it than she had realized.

  And she felt it. She didn’t just feel it where he touched, but she felt it down deep. Felt it in her stomach. In her lungs, as she fought to drag in breath.

  Felt it between her legs.

  Logan’s touch.

  Chemistry.

  She gasped, and she pulled away from him, putting as much distance between the two of them as possible.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Why don’t you run along, and we can forget that this happened. You can go back to seeing life the way you want. But when you have to get reality checks, don’t you get mad at me. Don’t you get mad at me for telling you all the things that you refuse to see, Rose Daniels. Because you want it that way. You want to keep running. And sometimes I have to stop you from running off a cliff.”

  She did run. She ran like he was the very devil, chasing right after her. She ran like her life depended on it.

  She started walking when she approached the house, when she got to the porch. She walked up the steps slowly, and pushed the door open.

  Her whole family was in there. Dragging boxes out of the closet and unpacking Christmas decorations.

  The one good thing about Christmas was that it would ward Logan off like it was garlic and he was a vampire. But right now she didn’t feel like being in the middle of the circus, either.

  She couldn’t face this. Not now. Couldn’t deal with cheer, Christmas or otherwise. Couldn’t deal with her family, especially not en masse. Not while everything inside of her felt like it was bright with heat. Just like that horseshoe.

  Just like he’d said.

  Except, right about now she didn’t feel like she was going to bend. She felt like she was going to break.

  “Rose,” Iris said. “We’re getting Christmas decorations out.”

  “I was thinking tomorrow we could go up to Caleb Dalton’s place and cut down our own Christmas tree.” That suggestion came from Pansy.

  “I... Sure,” she said. She ducked her head, and moved through the room. “I just have to... Bathroom.”

  She ran upstairs as quickly as she could, her breath coming in harsh, uneven bursts. She flung the door open to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.

  Horror twisted her stomach.

  There was a dark smudge on her cheek, a trail down her neck, to her collarbone.

  She leaned in closer, drawing her shirt down, examining the path that his touch had taken. She started to breathe hard, and she felt dizzy.

  She wasn’t afraid of Logan. This wasn’t fear. It couldn’t be. He was the closest thing to...

  Not a brother.

  No. He wasn’t.

  He wasn’t now, and he never could be.

  He was...

  She wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t fear that had her breath coming in the short, harsh gasps. It wasn’t fear that made her heart race like this.

  It certainly wasn’t fear that made her pulse echo between her thighs.

  Wasn’t fear that had stopped her in the doorway and kept her staring at his muscles, either.

  Logan Heath had turned her on.

  It was like a flash bomb had gone off in her stomach, decimating everything, and lighting it up at the same time. She had never been turned on by a man in practice. In theory, sure. Handsome men who graced movie screens and country artists who sang the sort of songs that spoke of dark nights and intimacy she didn’t quite understand.

  This was personal. It was real. He had been close enough to touch, and he had touched her. They had been sharing the same air. And his eyes... His eyes.

  Why had no other men ever gotten to her? Now it seemed important to know, and she couldn’t sort it out. Were there really no men around that seemed attractive to her or was it something to do with him?

  The thought made her stomach pitch.

  Nothing about him felt familiar right now.

  Nothing about herself felt familiar.

  She had to forget that happened. She had to. He’d been proving a point. Teaching her a lesson, and he’d said so. He’d been trying to scare her, like he’d been trying to do the other day when they’d been having sandwiches and he’d said all those things about intimacy. It hadn’t been...to make her feel this.

  No. Not for this. It couldn’t have been.

  She turned on the sink, ran cold water over her wrists. Then she looked at the smudge on her cheek, and took her wet fingers, scrubbing at it. Then at her neck. Her collarbone. Until it was gone. The evidence of all that had happened.

  Except even as she left the bathroom, no longer bearing evidence of his touch she felt like it was still there, sunk down deep beneath her skin.

  Like it still burned.

  She did her best to smile. Her best to join her family in looking at Christmas decorations.

  Go right back to ignoring the world.

  Except she couldn’t.

  Because the things she ignored, she had been unaware of. The thing she ignored, she really hadn’t known about.

  She hadn’t known what she hadn’t known.

  And now, because of his hands, because of that thumb, she did.

  And she didn’t see how she was ever going to be okay again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THAT HAD BEEN a mistake. A huge damn mistake. He had never intended for it to go that far. He had never intended to put himself in that kind of position. Not ever. Not with her.

  He’d
always seen her as someone to be protected, and then something about yesterday...

  She’d made a mistake.

  And somehow that made her more touchable. Made it seem like she was more in his reach instead of up in the stars, protected by virtue of the fact she was Rose. A sort of otherworldly being to him.

  And no, he didn’t think she was a kid. He knew she was a woman.

  He damn well knew it.

  But he had put her on a pedestal. Put her out of reach.

  Now that she’d fallen to earth with him...

  He’d touched her. He’d touched her and she’d been as soft as he’d let himself fantasize she might be.

  There wasn’t an amount of physical labor to burn that out of him. He had continued to pound iron, but it had just reminded him of her. Of what he’d promised. Of how the heat between them would light her up. Ignite her. Ignite them both.

  Hell, getting close to her like that, touching her the way that he had...

  It had been damn near innocent. Compared to the way he had touched women in the past. She had been fully clothed. He had put his hand on her cheek, on her neck, on her collarbone.

  And he burned. All the way down. He was burned all the way to his soul. Little Rose Daniels was going to be the death of him. She had already become the death of everything potentially good or honorable inside of him.

  Hell, if Ryder had any idea what he had wanted to do in that moment...

  What he’d wanted to do in the moment was bad enough. Because he was supposed to protect her. He felt protective of her. Like she’d said, they knew the same grief. And he had known her since she was a child grappling with it. But the problem was, he wasn’t confused about the fact that she was a woman. Because he did see her as a business partner. Because they worked together day in and day out. Because he had watched her grow from a child into an adolescent, into a smart-ass teenager, into a strong woman. Because he didn’t doubt for one moment that she had the kind of maturity and passion to burn them both to the ground.

  But she was avoiding it.

  That he was right about. There was a reason she was fixating on doing things for Iris. On worrying about his loneliness.